Abby never did things like this. She was orderly, rational. She didn’t keep other people waiting.
“Lauren,” Abby said. “Please. Tell me what is going on.”
Abby stayed there so long the light started to change. When she finally got up and left the room, with a parting squeeze of Lauren’s shoulder, Abby crossed in front of one of the halogen lamps and Lauren felt her friend’s shadow alight briefly on her skin and lift again, and she closed her eyes against this bleak triumph, that she had not only outlasted her friend, exhausted her sympathy, but she had outlasted the whole day, she had starved and killed it, she had forced the earth to turn away from the sun. She didn’t feel happy, but she did feel like she’d won.
When she thinks back to that night, her skin ripples and hardens into scales, ticklish and tender. Moths and dragonflies beating their wings inside her rib cage. Open her mouth and a wasp would fly out. She felt a queasy excitement, an exhilaration in destruction, to realize again the earthquake that swallows up and spits out your whole life could be ecstatic, could have ever been anything other than ecstatic. Like seeing the blood on the floor and realizing the blood was her. As if the four walls of the redbrick house had fallen down to reveal a theater-in-the-round, an audience in semi-darkness, and Lauren in her tight skirt and satin Pink Ladies windbreaker and hair that Abby had teased big with hot irons and hairspray, standing head-to-head with Stitch, in his painted-on jeans and black leather jacket and sparkling-wet swirly pompadour, and he snapped his next line through a big wad of gum—“Whaddya tryin’ to do, Rizzo?”—and she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say.
Stitch snapped his fingers. “Whaddya tryin’ to do, there, Rizzo?” he asked again.
She could only remember what she wasn’t supposed to say, so she said it.
“I feel like a broken typewriter,” she said.
Stitch’s mouth dropped open. He might have been startled, or letting himself in on Lauren’s joke, or preparing to speak his next line. Lauren would never know. Such was the charisma of Stitch.
“You know, like a broken typewriter—because I skipped a period,” Lauren said, enunciating, smacking the pee, eyes sliding meaningfully toward the audience, and then Stitch said something about Rizzo always flapping her gums and Andy said his next line and Lauren felt herself altered, bewitched, the abracadabra of the forbidden line unlocking all her dialogue and marks and dance steps, which she could perform as if remote-controlled.
When she came offstage, she felt him before she could see him. Not physical touch but the weight and pressure of his body shifting the air near her. Grunting through gritted teeth. Then he grabbed her roughly by the arm, and she wanted to laugh it felt so good.
“Lauren, how could you do this. How could you do this to me.”
Matter changing states in the wrong space. The person from the wood-paneled living room colliding with the person from school. Ardor then anger, anger substituted for ardor.
Andy stepping forward, his body poised to come between them, ready to launch into gangly action. Andy Figueroa, Lauren’s mind typed out, not so bad after all. Claire and Stitch round-eyed, staring, but not at Lauren.
Changing states into an animal. What kind? Barking, snarling, foaming. All instincts and reflexes and endocrine receptors. Nothing to argue with. She wasn’t an animal, and so she must have been the one who made him do it. She decided to. And she was glad. When she smiled, she bared her teeth, too.
“Ted,” Andy was saying, “let go of her.”
“Let go of her!” everyone was shouting, and still Lauren bared her teeth.
The funny thing was that nobody in the audience seemed to have caught on. Even a few people in the play, like Brendan, had no idea, although Brendan was an idiot. Mr. Smith left during curtain call, and after the players left the stage, some of them changing out of their costumes and storing them for the next night’s performance, none of them gathered in Tedquarters as they normally would. As if by mutual unspoken agreement, they filtered out down the hall from the auditorium toward the front entryway, their parents and siblings gathering in the sunken cafeteria. The faces of their families were shining and unconflicted; their arms were open. Mrs. Figueroa scooped Andy off his feet and swung him around, and he looked so happy. They spoke to each other in Spanish. Qué maravilloso, qué estupendo.
“Vee yo so!” Mirela told Stitch, then wrapped her arms around Mrs. Kornbluth’s legs.
The families mingled in one loose embrace among the long tables with the chairs stacked atop them. The overhead fluorescent lights took on a fireside warmth.
Stitch in his pompadour moved beside Lauren, close enough that their arms were touching.
“If someone asks me,” Stitch mumbled, “what do you want me to say?”
“Nothing,” Lauren said.
“I’ll have to say something.”
“No, I mean there’s nothing I want you to say—say what you want.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
Lauren laughed. “Too late. Probably.”
“I think it will be okay.”
“Thank you for being nice,” she said. “Thank you for making me tapes.”
The warm pooling feeling in her chest, the pleasurable sadness. Stitch was standing close enough to her that she could smell his pomade and hairspray but also his twigs-and-burlap Stitch smell, the smell of a kid air-guitaring in a big cold pile of autumn leaves.
“No one seems to have noticed,” Stitch said, scanning the crowd. “Everyone looks happy.”
“He totally blew up at me,” Lauren said.
“Well, but I think that was a good thing,” said Andy, all at once in front of them.
“What do I care what you think?” she said to Andy.
“No—listen—” Andy said.
“We all saw what happened, right?” Stitch said to Andy, nodding, eyes big and meaningful.
“He can’t do that,” Andy said, nodding back. “He can’t act like that, no matter what.”
“Andy just means it’s good that everyone saw what he did,” Stitch said.
“Oh,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”
“It’s okay,” Andy said.
“Just say you were confused,” Abby was saying.
“You didn’t know what you were supposed to say,” Stitch said.
“You were nervous—” Abby was saying.
“—because Mr. Smith was acting so weird,” Andy finished.
“Everyone knows how weird he is,” Claire was saying.
“You did what he wanted,” Andy said.
“He made you do it,” Abby said. “It was his stupid joke and he should have known better. He’s the adult. Okay?”
Lauren felt conscious of herself as part of a branching, respiring system of affinities, loyalties, tribal urges. Breathing in time with it, assimilated. And she felt conscious, too, that she had been part of this system all along, although she struggled to dance in its formation or sing in its same key. An opinion or a set of beliefs could shape itself around the tiniest gesture of a single figure, the leading bird of an echelon nudging the vortex this way or that, according to the particular aerodynamics of that moment, the direction and speed of the wind. One arm swung forward and the other swung back, one voice began a sentence and another ended it, not out of coercion or conscious choice or preference, but because all the parts of the body needed to work together, according to their present circumstances.
“Okay,” Lauren said.
Her mother was standing in front of her. Mom looked stricken, stunned. Just like her to overcompensate, just like Mom to watch a crappy high school play and fake it afterward like everyone was about to win Oscars.
Mom’s arms were wrapped around her. Mom’s face was in her neck, breathing her in.
“I love you so much, baby,” Mom said.
Lauren was onstage again. She thought she could feel everybody watching, or trying not to watch. Crazy Mom again. This embrace was
too somber and melodramatic for a high school play. Lauren waited for Mirela to pop up beside them, pressing her skinny arms together in a sword to cleave them apart. “Cut da cheese!” she’d always say. Mirela hated it when they hugged or got anywhere near each other. Or maybe Mirela didn’t mind so much now—maybe the trip to Colorado had done some good. Lauren had meant to ask Mom how it went, but she hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
“Mom?” Lauren said.
“That’s me,” Mom said, her voice wet and snagged.
“Mom, where’s Mirela?”
Of course she’d run away. Running away had become Mirela’s job. She had played a runaway on local TV. Lauren understood why she did it. Mirela could find the aloneness she craved and at the same time remain the center of attention; she could have her cake and hoard it, too. Lauren found a bitter entertainment in watching a search party form on the spot in the cafeteria and fan out into all points of the radius: front lawn, soccer and football fields, auditorium, second floor. She’d seen it all before. She’d seen it on the news. It was as horrifying and tedious as those buffalo galloping off the cliff.
She walked out the side entrance of Bethune, still in her Pink Ladies jacket and saddle shoes. The moon was full, clouded over by the lakes. It had been drizzling on and off all day, and now the air was misty and raindrops clung to the grass. She half expected to hear Stitch’s skateboard on the asphalt. She spotted him then, with his dad, already halfway across the football field in search of Mirela, Dr. Rosen’s hand on Stitch’s back.
Lauren’s eyes fell on the opening in the chain-link fence. It occurred to her, in an impossible flash, that Mirela had seen her go through the gap every day, had learned it from her. The gap in the fence was about as tall as Mirela. Lauren crouched to get her sight lines level with Mirela’s. If you were the size of a high school student, you had to squint at the overgrown grass and weeds that grew just past the school’s property line to find the gap in the fence. But at Mirela’s height, it would more likely present itself as a ragged doorway cut just for her.
Lauren walked toward the fence, her shoes squelch-squelching in the wet grass. She squeezed through the gap, the split end of one link catching on the pink satin of her jacket, and stood at the edge of the open lot on Fox Hollow. “Mirela?” she called.
A rustle of a squirrel, a bird. The crackle of twigs and branches beneath her shoes in the open lot. She reached the sidewalk and stood beneath a streetlight, looking up and down. Fox Hollow was so narrow, more like a wood path than a street. “Mirela?”
She crossed Fox Hollow and walked onto the Reillys’ property, compelled by some dream logic that Mirela had taken Lauren’s usual route home. Trying to be like her big sister. Lauren walked around the Reillys’ house into their backyard. “Mirela!” It was abruptly darker now, under the maples and pines.
She had done this. Lauren. She hadn’t thought enough about Mom. She was never home to help. She didn’t pay attention. Her stupid plays that she made them come to. Her stupid birthday party. “Mirela!” she screamed. “Mirela, please!”
“I’ve got her,” she could hear a man’s voice calling.
“Mirela! Someone please help me!”
“I’ve got her—follow the sound of my voice. We’re here. I’ll keep talking. Follow the sound.”
Lights were flicking on in the surrounding houses. Mr. and Mrs. Reilly appeared on their deck. Another figure, a tall redheaded woman, approaching from the other side of the Reillys’.
“Mirela! Help! Mirela, where are you!”
“Keep following my voice. Lauren, is that you?”
A large seated figure in the grass emerged from the darkness in its outlines and then its contours. It resolved into two distinct figures, one seated on top of the other, as Lauren grew closer.
“Lauren, it’s you. Don’t worry, I’ve got her.”
Measurements she had taken with her own hands now slotted into place. The dimensions of his silhouette, softened and imprecise beneath the diffuse moonlight and tree shade, but unmistakable: the distance from nose to upper lip, the degrees of the angle of his jawline, the coordinates of the slope of the shoulders. He was sitting cross-legged on the unadorned back lawn. Mirela was silent in his lap, turned away from him. His hands were wrapped around her. They rocked back and forth.
“I’m doing the squeeze,” Mr. Smith said, looking up at Lauren.
“Who’s out there?” Mrs. Reilly called. She was off the deck now, coming closer. “Can anyone tell me what’s going on?”
You could move your finger through the air and write a story.
“Does anyone need help?” the tall redheaded woman called out. “Is everyone okay?”
Yet another figure emerging now, from behind the hedgerow, someone from the fancier houses, the Rosens’ next-door neighbor, maybe, hands in pockets, head craning.
She remembered what he said. That the audience wants to be told what to see.
What she did next wasn’t a decision. It was the filling of the lungs, the contraction of the heart muscle. The wasp moved its stinger into the base of her throat. She could take no responsibility for what came next, could harbor no guilt, no second-guessing. Instinct, reflex, biological drive. One voice began a sentence and the other ended it. Maybe she was an animal after all.
“That’s my little sister!” she screamed. “Let go of her!”
She looked through the audience’s eyes. A man holding down a child in darkness and dirt. The child’s older sister—though just a girl herself—rescuing her, saving her.
“Lauren, everything’s okay. She’s okay—” he said.
“Lauren, honey, are you all right?” Mrs. Reilly asked, her voice coming closer.
“What’s going on?” the tall redheaded woman asked. “Whose child is this?”
The figure from behind the hedgerow was running toward Lauren now.
“Let go of her! What are you doing?! Let go of her!”
“Whose is she?”
“Joe, go back inside and call the police right now.”
“Where is this child’s mother?”
“Lauren, what are you doing—ma’am, no, please, this is a big misunderstanding—” he said.
“Whose is she?”
“SHE’S JUST A BABY!”
It was her. It was Lauren who was doing it. It was her voice she heard.
“LET GO OF HER! SHE’S JUST A BABY! SHE’S JUST A LITTLE GIRL!”
This must be what it’s like to be Mirela. She was screaming like she could shatter the glass of herself, like she could scream away the world.
Jane
There were not many mothers who were saints. Jutta of Prussia packed her kids off to monasteries so that she would have no distractions in her service to the poor. Saint Monica cried endlessly over her reprobate son Augustine. The venerable Gianna, who would soon be a saint, was pregnant with her fourth child when a doctor discovered a tumor on her uterus. An abortion was out of the question, of course, but church officials deemed that a hysterectomy would be permissible. In catechism class, Sister Tabitha used Gianna’s dilemma to illustrate the doctrine of double effect.
“‘Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention,’” the sister read from Thomas Aquinas. “‘Accordingly, the act of self-defense may have two effects: one, the saving of one’s life; the other, the slaying of the aggressor.’” A hysterectomy would be an act of self-defense, saving Gianna’s life and slaying her aggressor—the aggressor being the diseased uterus, which happened to have a baby inside it. Gianna’s case was a neat trade of cause and effect: substitute the cause of the baby’s death, which performed a moral cleansing of the identical effect.
This was the stuff of the sort of philosophical debate Jane had once imagined herself having with Father Steve, but he stopped convening Respect Life meetings after the Spring of Life. Following Sunday mass, he demurred on all but the most perfunctory small talk with a cordial sm
ile, a nod of businesslike blessedness. Father Steve would never come out and say what was true, that the whole mental exercise with Gianna and the uterine substitution was Catholic gobbledygook—even Jane’s mother would think so. Like how one of the Kennedy nephews sought to have his first marriage annulled so that he could remarry in the Church. “Would you imagine, pretending twenty years of marriage never happened, those beautiful boys, because Cousin Joe wants to take Communion!” Jane’s mother said. “That poor woman—the mother of his children!” She crossed herself. “I’m not questioning the Church, mind you—I’m questioning those who would take advantage.”
Gianna refused the hysterectomy. Of course she did. She knew double effect was a semantic shell game. She gave birth to a healthy girl and died a week later of sepsis, which was why the catechism students learned about her at all. No one would have sought out three documented miracles for a woman who decided to save her children’s mother.
Perhaps the doctrine of double effect was at work the night of the skipped period. For justice to be served, a smaller injustice needed to be committed. One sister had been substituted for another in order to achieve the identical effect. For the real crime to be punished, another one had to be fabricated.
The parents of Catherine of Siena attempted to substitute her for her sister, and that’s when she cut off all her hair and starved herself and broke into a rash. For the first time in her adult life, Jane had skipped going to mass on Catherine’s feast day, April 29, because she was with Mirela in Colorado. April 29 was the day Los Angeles went up in flames, and Jane missed that, too—didn’t even know about it until the fires were going out. She couldn’t keep count of all she’d missed, all she’d never even looked at.
She wasn’t looking for him when she saw him. Jane was mingling with the other parents in the Bethune cafeteria after the premiere of the musical, waiting for their performers to straggle out. She held Lauren’s Bells bouquet, smiling and nodding vacantly. She exchanged excruciating hello, how are yous and aren’t our kids so greats with the Rosens, one eye tracking Mirela as she clambered onto a table, not knowing if the Rosens knew who she was—or rather, there was no way they didn’t know, yet they feigned as if they didn’t, and so Jane could, too. And then over Mamie Figueroa’s shoulder she saw him, emerging from the hallway that led out of the auditorium and into the front hall of Bethune, right in front of the cafeteria pit.
The Fourth Child Page 31
