The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

The block capital letters on the tabloid stacked outside News Haven on Sunday morning didn’t make sense, and that’s why she stopped to stare. It wasn’t because she thought it had anything to do with her.

  abort doc slain. Her eyes completed doc as documentary because of her seminar on cinéma vérité. Slain translated to Sláinte, the Irish toast she’d picked up in her class on twentieth-century Irish literature. She once tried to explain to Gwen, her roommate for senior year of college, that her grades were what they were not because she worked so hard or was so smart but because her classes stood in for a well-developed inner life. “It’s all just programmable circuitry,” she explained. “There is brain but no mind.” She intended it to be self-deprecating, but it came out as false modesty.

  A broadsheet stacked next to the tabloid. abortion doctor shot dead in his home. Sniper-style. Anti-abortion activists. Williamsville. Rosen.

  An older couple, silver and slender, brushing past Lauren apologetically. Picking up their Sunday papers to read over coffee and muffins down the block at Atticus Cafe, she thought. They looked like emeritus Yale professors, like they’d have a big rambling house in East Rock filled with hanging plants and folk art and first editions. I know him, Lauren wanted to tell them, jabbing a finger on the broadsheet headline. My friend’s dad. That’s my town. That’s where I’m from.

  Oh, how terrible, the woman would say. I’m so sorry. And that would be it. What could she say? What could these strangers do with this information? It was a useless story.

  The morning before, Mom had left a message on the answering machine in Gwen and Lauren’s apartment. “Hi, girls, it’s Mom—Lauren’s mom—Lauren, honey, can you please—”

  That was all Lauren heard before she pressed the stop button, smiling at the urgency in Mom’s voice, skipping over the nervous oddness of “Lauren’s mom.” Sunday mornings, not Saturdays, were Mom’s official phone time; Lauren was strict about it. Whatever it was—Sean scored two touchdowns in Friday night’s game, Mirela got through her new modern-dance class without a meltdown—could wait. Gwen and her newish boyfriend, Stu, had recently started having sex, and Stu still lived in the dorms, and so Saturday was a big day for the two of them, obviously, there in the apartment. Lauren could go to the gym, the library, Atticus Cafe. Plenty of reasons for her to be out of the house.

  On Sunday mornings, somebody was always up in Harkness Tower trying to play the main theme from The Piano, fighting to gain mastery of its imperious whorl of arpeggios; this person never improved, and his or her clumsy Sunday tradition over many weeks had become endearing. The sky was an impossible cerulean, a blue that Buffalo never knew. Lauren let herself into the apartment and was relieved to see that the door to Gwen’s room was open. In the kitchen, Stu was fixing pancakes, and Gwen, hair wet from the shower, wearing a too-big Choate sweatshirt that must have been Stu’s, was sipping tea at the table, piles of newspapers and journals and textbooks fanned under her elbows. The answering machine was flashing 4.

  “Hi, sweetie, all of those messages are your mom,” Gwen said.

  “Yuh killin’ yuh poor muth-a, Low-wren,” Stu said. Some kind of Italian-mother shtick. Last weekend, Stu blurted out to a bunch of their friends that Lauren was “virginal, like a little white lamb”—he didn’t mean it literally, but rather as a dumb compliment about her straight-arrow studiousness, her spotless transcript and impossible extracurriculars, and she didn’t care, but Gwen got mad at him, and he’d been overcompensating with Lauren in the days since, trying to lather up a fraternal rapport.

  “Did you know this guy who got killed, from Buffalo?” Gwen asked, pushing a section of the New York Times across the table. “Rosen?”

  “I only really met him once,” Lauren said. “Is it okay if I use the phone for a while?”

  They killed Stitch’s dad on Friday night. He’d just come home from services. A single rifle shot through the kitchen window that faced onto their backyard. He was microwaving a bowl of soup, or a muffin—reports differed. Stitch’s little brother, Joey, standing right there. Stitch’s mom in the next room. He didn’t die right away.

  “Mom, please, enough,” Lauren said over the phone. “You don’t need to go into all of it.”

  The memorial was set for Monday morning. Mom always said that Jewish families dealt with their dead properly—they didn’t paint the corpse and prop it up for show, they didn’t leave the body to bloat in a parlor while middle-aged children fussed over the floral arrangements.

  “Mom, okay, I get it,” Lauren said. Mom liked to show how open she was to what she called “other cultures.”

  Lauren could fly out and back and still make her Reconstruction & Redemption lecture on Tuesday morning. Mom said it was okay to put the flight on Dad’s credit card. She could finish the reading on the plane. Gwen and Stu would never notice. A friend of the family had died—that’s all she had to say to anyone who asked. Yeah, that abortion doctor; yeah, it’s crazy. No, not a close friend, just paying respects. Went to school with his kids. She didn’t need to go into all of it.

  “You’ve kept in touch with Stitch?” Mom asked on the phone. “He graduated?”

  “He’s in his first year of med school, in Boston. I see him on breaks and stuff,” Lauren said. “We email once in a while.” In truth, they had kept a cordial, loving distance after Grease. The distance was paradoxical and necessary: she now felt permanently connected to Stitch, and any greater proximity to him would have smothered her.

  When she was off the phone with Mom, she planned to walk over to the computer cluster at Connecticut Hall. She wouldn’t have to wait for a free computer this early on a Sunday morning.

  “They were always such nice boys. A nice family,” Mom said.

  No subject heading, Lauren decided. I’m so sorry, Stitch. My heart is breaking for you and your mother and brothers.

  “Mom,” Lauren said, “you don’t know anyone from before—from the protests—who could have done something like this, do you?” A ridiculous thought zoomed past, that Mom’s phone was tapped by investigators.

  “No,” Mom said. “I mean, so far as I remember. It’s been six years.”

  “Six and a half.”

  “There were people during the protests who liked to think they could be capable of it,” Mom said. “I just wonder if all that drama stirred something up that wasn’t there before. Planted a seed of some kind.”

  “It wasn’t anything, Mom. It was just a circus.”

  “There is blood on all of their hands. Mine, too.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “We told ourselves that words were actions, like prayer,” Mom said. “You dehumanize someone, you call them a monster—then look what happens.”

  “Do you want somebody to forgive you,” Lauren said dully. It wasn’t a question.

  “I feel a responsibility,” Mom said.

  “You always want to feel responsible for everything,” Lauren said.

  “And that’s so bad?”

  “It’s like—you want to feel guilty about it, like you’re being selfless, but you’re not, you’re just making it all about you.”

  “You want making it all about you, talk to Margie Dale,” Mom said. “Margie Dale was out power-walking with Ellie D’Amato on Friday night, and she’s swearing up and down to anyone who will listen that she heard the shot, she heard the shot. She calls me up: ‘Jane, I heard the shot.’ Who cares?”

  “She heard the shot—like it’s a trophy. Her souvenir of death.”

  The shot had come from just behind the Rosens’ weeping willow.

  “‘I heard the shot,’” Mom scoffed. “What are you, the FBI? Stick it up your ass.”

  Lauren closed her eyes. The phone hot and slick against her cheek.

  “Such a nice man,” Mom was saying. “Such a shame.”

  She was standing behind the sniper, gazing over his shoulder at Stitch’s dad in the window.

  “He was a nice man, Mom,” Lauren affirmed. “He w
as good to me. Kind and gentle.”

  She caught the sniper off guard, buckled his knees. She peeled the rifle off his person with liturgical solemnity, a ceremony in reverse. The same grass breathed her feet off the ground. The same darkness was milky and changeable, like you could move your finger through the air and write a useless story, a story that never even happened.

  The shiva was at Stitch’s uncle’s place, somewhere in Tonawanda, because Stitch’s house was still an active crime scene. PJ and Sean picked Lauren up from the airport in the dragon wagon, PJ’s Gumby-long limbs pressing his knees against the wheel, Sean in the passenger seat covered in a road map, his head likewise brushing the roof. The surge of androgens in their midteens had yanked them both skyward with a whiplash force that left them absurdly tall but also mellowed and frequently drowsy, especially in the mornings; PJ had scheduled all his fall-semester classes at UB for the afternoon.

  Lauren climbed into the back seat, overnight bag at her feet. Her brothers twisted awkwardly around in their places to kiss her hello without breaking the stream of their quarrel.

  “You can’t bring two-buck chuck to a memorial service,” PJ was saying as he pulled away from Arrivals.

  “It’s what was in the pantry!” Sean said. “There’s no accounting for Mom and Dad’s taste!”

  “You might as well show up with a sack of potatoes and make some rotgut in the backyard,” PJ said. “Bring a personal touch to it.”

  “Wait,” Sean said, “is it even okay to bring wine to a shiva?”

  “Food is better. Mom and Dad aren’t coming?” She pulled herself to the edge of the back seat, propping up her elbows on either of her brothers’ headrests.

  “Mom said something about ‘out of respect for the family,’” Sean said, dropping the map to make air quotes with his fingers.

  “Listen, when I want to respect a grieving family I boycott their funerals—” PJ said.

  “It’s not a boycott,” Sean said. “It’s more like she’s covering her eyes with her hands and hoping that means nobody sees her.”

  “—and I don’t send a card, either,” PJ said. “And I bring moonshine in mason jars.”

  “Mom will send a card,” Sean said, “but she’ll leave it blank because she wouldn’t want to be presumptuous.”

  “I mean, I get it,” PJ said, sounding unconvinced. “Mom thinks that her whole history with the—you know—”

  “A moral residue,” Sean said, like he was picking the words out of his teeth. Lauren recognized the phrase as a favorite of Mrs. Bristol’s. Sean had her for English now, in his senior year of high school.

  “Mom just doesn’t want to cause any trouble—” PJ was saying, his voice strained at one end by sympathy and the other by sarcasm.

  “It’s not like anyone would turn her away, or even know who she was,” Lauren said. “What, because she went on a march six years ago?”

  “I mean, we don’t know—there could be people there who would be uncomfortable,” PJ said.

  “Nah,” Lauren said. “She’s just using that as an excuse not to go. But what about Dad?”

  Sean laughed. “Nana Dee could drop dead at morning doubles tomorrow and Dad would decide to replace the rain gutters before he showed up at her wake.”

  “That’s mean,” Lauren said.

  “That is mean,” PJ said. “He wouldn’t replace the rain gutters. He would build a little shed in the backyard to grieve in. Table for one.”

  “Dad’s always been a troubled loner, but Mom should know better,” Lauren said.

  “She should show up.”

  “Well, she’s got Mirela to think about, too,” PJ said. He had momentarily exhausted his resources for ragging on their mother.

  “Mirela can handle a shiva,” Lauren said.

  Sean puffed out his lips in a daunted way. “Sure she can.”

  “Mom shouldn’t hide behind a little kid,” Lauren said. She disliked the hectoring tone in her voice and sat back in the seat.

  “Man, do you guys remember all that time she used to spend at Dead Babies Club?” Sean asked after a moment. “Whatever happened to all those people?”

  “She told me that she knew people in Dead Babies Club who were capable of something like—like this,” Lauren said.

  “What?!” Sean exclaimed. “Like who?”

  Lauren felt an immediate, panicked remorse. “Or she said—she said they would have liked to think they could—”

  “Jesus Christ,” PJ said.

  “I mean, I doubt it,” Lauren said.

  They drove in silence, the air inside the dragon wagon clearer and thinner.

  “I think there’s a Tops coming up on Transit, on the left, before you get to North French,” Lauren said when the time came. “We can pick up a deli platter there.”

  The first familiar face inside the crowded foyer was Rajiv, who swept Lauren up in a silent, swaying hug. He’d developed an amnesiac courtliness toward her immediately after Grease that held firm throughout high school and beyond, and that now reminded her of Stu. Deeper into the house, still clutching the deli platter, the cling film starting to slip underneath her fingers, Lauren found Abby, who had a junior reporting gig at the Buffalo News and an internship at WGRZ.

  “We’ve got hundreds of hours of footage of the Spring of Life, both professional and amateur,” Abby was telling Lauren and Sean. “We’ve been watching all of it in shifts, trying to find even a single frame of a guy who might match the suspect’s description, the police sketch—they think it’s the same guy who’s been killing doctors in Canada.”

  “Right, yeah, we read about that,” Lauren said, Sean nodding beside her.

  “They’re really all over this. I don’t think it’s going to take long to nail somebody. But I was wondering, like—sorry if this is awkward—but if we found anything—it might be helpful for your mom to take a look? See if it jogs her memory?” Abby asked.

  Lauren and Sean murmured yeahs and of courses and definitelys.

  It’s Paula you should ask, Lauren thought, waving across the room at Paula as she came through the front door. It was Paula who told her that Mr. Smith enrolled in law school; it was Paula who found out he was in the Bay Area, doing something low-paid and virtuous—indigent defendants, maybe, or civil liberties. Lauren told her she didn’t want to know more, not to mention him again.

  “I’ll give you my number,” Abby was saying. “It’s a cell phone—I know it’s obnoxious, I just need it for work.” Abby handed Sean her business card, eased the deli plate out of Lauren’s hands, and turned to carry it into the kitchen.

  “Excuse me—is your name Lauren?” another woman asked. She had a baby on her hip and was somehow unplaceable, older than Stitch’s friends but younger than their parents and teachers.

  “Yes, I’m Lauren, how do you do.”

  The woman beamed. “My goodness, you look exactly like your mother. I’m sorry—I’m Elise. I’m a friend of your mom’s from long ago.” She offered Lauren her left hand because her right was slung around the baby. “God, I—I knew you when you were tiny, brand-new. Before you were born, even.”

  “Oh, how about that,” Lauren said, smiling as they shook hands. “It’s nice to meet you.” She struggled to register Mom and Elise as peers. She couldn’t picture Mom with a baby now, or wearing this black suit, anonymous yet ineffably fancy, its supple lines and textures foreign to the T.J.Maxx racks that Mom relied on.

  “Your mom and I went to school together, kindergarten straight through high school. Is she here?”

  “It’s just me and my little brothers here today,” Lauren said. She gestured across the room at them. “Or not so little. My mom would have liked to come, but she’s got her hands full with my little sister.”

  “Oh, I see, too bad,” Elise said. “Wow, Jane has four kids now?”

  “You should give her a call,” Lauren said. “I bet she’d love to see an old friend. Same phone number we’ve had since I was a baby,” she added.
<
br />   “I will—I’m in town for a few days,” Elise said. An awkward, smiling lull. They broke the silence at the same time.

  “I’m just gonna go get a—” Lauren started.

  “Did you know the—oh, sorry, I was just going to ask how you knew Dr. Rosen.” Elise shook her head. “So awful. No words.”

  “Oh—” Lauren started.

  We used to wave through the window, she thought.

  This wasn’t the right answer, because it cast her as an ogler, an owl, a stickup artist. Placed her behind the scope of a rifle. And besides, back then she’d been waving from common land—backyards were more akin to trails than enclosures. The fences had started to go up her last year of high school, in the spring. The news had been dominated, perhaps more than usual, by men with violent grievances. The O. J. Simpson case had been going almost a year. (Dad was fixated for a while with the missing pockets of time surrounding the murders, as O.J. dashed through yards and alleys in his prowler’s knit cap. Dad even drew a map of the ground O.J. had had to cover and in how much time, hypothesizing different routes, tracking them in corresponding shades of Sharpie.) A Gulf War veteran used fertilizer and race-car fluid to blow up a building with a day care in it, in Oklahoma City, and the Buffalo News spent several days trying to determine what it meant, precisely, that the terrorist was from Lockport. Rajiv got a week’s detention for using the then-ubiquitous police sketch of the Unabomber on posters promoting his band’s upcoming show at Mohawk Place. Gary Wisniak’s dad accidentally shot him in the head in their living room—there was some scuffle; it was alleged that Gary had threatened his mom—and, shattered with remorse over his dead son, Mr. Wisniak immediately turned the gun on himself, fatally. But Gary was fine: the bullet only grazed him, enough to knock him cold and produce some blood, and he was back at school within two weeks, the white rectangle shaved into his hair crossed diagonally with a row of inflamed, bulging sutures. Gary came to Rajiv’s show at Mohawk Place, did a full hour in the mosh pit despite his head. A few weeks into summer break, he was arrested for burglarizing houses on Sycamore Run.