The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  The O’Tooles were the first with a fence—curtain-twitching Mrs. O’Toole and her hysterical dog were the vanguard of the neighborhood. An eight-foot vinyl number in a damp, fungal shade of gray. Lauren thought Dad might cry. But you saw more of the gray vinyl fences after the burglaries, as well as the cloying white-picket varieties, along with more security-system signs on front lawns. The Reillys, true to their rustic aesthetic, put up a low-slung row of farm fencing—you could imagine a heifer daintily slinging her legs over it to take her nighttime constitutional. Even where fencing did not consume physical space, the idea of it invisibly inscribed the neighborhood, which became less of a commons and more of a grid. One bee-buzzing August afternoon, Lauren was cutting through the yard with the overground pool, nodding hello at the house’s new owner as he fiddled with the pool’s cover, when the man put up a preemptive hand, asking what are you doing, why are you here. She started to reply—that she was walking to her friend Paula’s house to ask if she wanted to go to a movie, and that ordinarily she would have called first, but Paula’s phone kept ringing busy, which meant she was using the modem, parsing the latest on rec.arts.x-files or alt.music.nirvana—but instead she ducked her head and retreated wordlessly into the as-yet-fenceless yard next door.

  Lauren smiled apologetically at Elise.

  Dr. Rosen was my doctor once, she thought.

  This wasn’t the right answer, either, because the story was quotidian, forgettable. A single, uncomplicated appointment, less than thirty minutes of an ordinary day for him. A sting, a surprising pressure, some cramping. Nothing that could be described as pain. A couple of Tylenol, an okay to go to school the next day. He was tall, politely stooped, dark barrel-vault eyes under drugstore glasses, a glossy dark beard. A voice that traveled from somewhere near his sternum, as if the striated muscles within his chest curved around themselves in the manner of a contrabassoon, the grave quiet effort at speech producing a sub-bass frequency that Lauren could feel through her feet even as she leaned in to hear him better. Lanky like Stitch, nothing of Stitch in his face. But in the first of those thirty minutes, the stage of introductions and pleasantries, Lauren grasped where Stitch had derived his glassy stoicism, his somehow coexisting openness and impenetrability: permeable as the yards had once been, unselfconscious as the children who once walked through them. Stitch had been accustomed all his life to being gazed at like this, by this man, with unembarrassed and profound intellectual curiosity, like Stitch was a living text: open to interpretation, and even gentle molding, but belonging wholly to itself. Himself, herself. To be looked at like this was to reflect back the light that beckoned the world closer, and also to absorb the light that acted as a sealant on the self. After the appointment was done, he murmured something in subwoofer Hebrew to the receptionist, whom Lauren dully recognized as Stitch’s mother, and she felt the same stupid recognition that she did that autumn morning coming home from the sleepover at Abby’s: that hers was a half life, that she apprehended the world with a half mind.

  This was the gift of an English major at an elite university, Lauren supposed, the ability to generate endless pages of close-reading on misremembered lines, to whip up a false and sentimental frenzy of meaning through sleight of hand and punny metaphor—a woodwind instrument, the woods of her youth—for the delectation of her mother’s friends, on the subject of a now famously dead man to whom she could claim some tenuous connection. She could inhabit the spirit of Margie Dale, power-walking into this hushed house of grief to pluck a few shares of sorrow off the Tops deli plate, maybe wrap a couple more in a napkin to take home for later.

  We used to wave through the window.

  “I only really met him one time,” Lauren finally told Elise. “Could you excuse me? I need to say hello to my friend.”

  Elise smiled and switched the baby from one hip to the other. “Of course. It was so nice to see you, Lauren.”

  “If I don’t catch you again—do call my mom,” Lauren said. “I bet it would mean a lot to her.”

  “Lauren, hey,” Stitch was saying, and her face was in his starched white collar. He didn’t smell like the woods at all.

  This embracing joy of belonging. This branching, respiring system of affinities, loyalties. She’d wanted to tell the older couple at the newsstand that this was her town, this was where she was from, but she wasn’t from anywhere.

  “Lauren, do you remember my mom?” Stitch was asking.

  She remembered how smug she used to feel in all they didn’t know about her, what they wanted to know. How she would stay in the room with them after her body had left it. But there was so little to leave behind, really. A man who disappeared. A child who never was. Nothing of herself.

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren was saying. “I’m so sorry.”

  Six years ago, six and a half. She had made nothing, shared nothing, given nothing. The only power she’d ever wielded was in what she had withheld.

  She was in his mother’s arms. Someday she would tell her. She would be the mother you could tell these things to. Everything she never said would then be put to use.

  Mirela

  Dad was upset. At breakfast he kept saying, “Well, he finally did it,” again and again. Mr. O’Toole, the neighbor who Dad hated, cut down the beech tree, the last tree left in the yard from back when the lots were still forest, no houses. Mr. O’Toole said it was on his property line—it was his as much as Dad’s. The stump he left behind was cracked and mangled. When Mr. O’Toole killed the tree he must have been angry, as angry as Dad was now.

  “Bastard did the same thing—”

  “Pat, watch your language,” Mom said.

  “—he did the same thing with the last chestnut,” Dad said, “on the other side of his property, on the line with the Stedmores. The very last chestnut tree for miles and miles. You know, a long time ago, Mirela, there were chestnut trees all over the place. Their flowers were white, and when they fell in the spring it was like a second snow. Now it’s just the cottonwoods, with the cobwebby kind of snow. You know those? Anyway, that imbecile went ahead and cut down that chestnut one day, needled and needled Bill Stedmore about it day after day, week after week, and Bill held firm, and even still, one day O’Toole went and goddamn did it.”

  “Pat, come on with the language,” Mom said.

  “He just went and did it. And then I guess it was my turn with the beech.”

  Mirela told Dad that he should call the police on Mr. O’Toole. Mom and Dad laughed quietly like it was a funny secret.

  “I should call the police, Mirela,” Dad said, “but I want to go easy on the guy.”

  “You should call the police,” Mirela said, “and then they’ll send Mr. O’Toole to Colorado.”

  And then Dad was looking at Mom like the light from his eyes could explode her and Mom was talking in a high, pulling voice about how heavy the cottonwood snow had been this past year and Mirela started laughing like they had been just a moment before, making noise to fill the dizzy space that had opened up between them.

  She doesn’t remember much of Colorado anymore. Maybe she dreamed it. In the memory or the dream, they hold her down. The good thing about being held down was that it meant the day was close to finished—it was what they did when they were almost done with her. The last day of all was different because they started with holding her down. That was how she knew it would be a short day.

  Now the beech was something that was destroyed and still lived. A beech needs a lot of space to grow, and maybe this one did not have enough space to die. The tree had ended, and then there were the beginnings of the same tree. Splinters and shards from the top of the stump had scattered, pushing outward into a crooked semicircle, like voles or stoats had begun stacking the fragments as cords of firewood. One corner of the stump was hollowed out like a cave, with crags of bark hanging down like stalactites and strung with lichens. Moss bloomed on the bark, and toadstools lined the entrances to a pair of rabbit warrens, dug in the soft earth. A teeter
ing mushroom stalk shot up nearly to Mirela’s knee. A half-dozen green vertical shoots grew even taller, fanned with wide green leaves. These were the root suckers, like baby versions of the tree, copies, made out of a knot of tissue from the base of what had been the tree. You could almost kill the tree—basically kill it—and it would start itself over from almost nothing. You didn’t need a seed or a flower.

  It was Dad who explained all of these things to her. His company was clearing some woods near Klein Road to build new houses, and some mornings, Mirela drove with him to the site in the red pickup truck. If they got up before anyone else in the house, arrived at the site by sunrise, they could usually see deer. Where their house is now used to be woods, too. You can tell which trees are the oldest because they are taller than the rest, and their branches start higher up, because they had to compete with so many other trees for space, reaching toward the sunlight and rain.

  Dad knows all the names of the trees and plants and flowers and tells them to Mirela. She only has to hear each name twice, maybe three times, and then she remembers it always. You can learn all the trees, and you can also look at a leaf on its own, and then look up around you, and you’ll know which tree the leaf belongs to, because this one has round, heart-shaped leaves, or that one has slender leaves edged with little spikes, like teeth.

  She likes kneeling in the soil in the morning, when it’s still dewy and her knees go cold. From the ground beneath the eastern white pine, Mirela gathers the pine cones and brings them home and glues them to construction paper, and she decorates them with paint and glitter. She gathers chestnuts and paints faces on them: smiling, sad, mad. Hickory trees have catkins, long droopy green flowers that look like caterpillars, and she brings those home, too. Same with the twigs of the eastern hemlock, which sprout blades of grass and look like tiny, doll-sized fans. They go in the big shoebox, the one that Mom’s winter boots came in, with the caterpillars and the pine cones.

  Mirela wanted the red buds from the dogwood, but none had fallen yet. You can’t just take what you want off a tree—the tree has to decide to shed it first. The female cottonwood trees first make red flowers, like a dogwood, and then seeds with a cotton covering. She didn’t mind the cobwebs of cotton that blew around in May and June—Mom and Dad didn’t like how the cotton clogs the drains and gets in between the bricks on the patio. Mirela uses handfuls of cotton to keep her caterpillars cozy at night.

  If you climb a tree, it will move with you—it shifts with your weight. If you slip on a tree, the branch will suddenly feel wider and denser than before; it will seem to sprout little knots and ridges, giving you more traction. It breathes with you and makes up for your mistakes. Your arms and legs start to feel a little harder, thicker, like you’re becoming a part of it. Sometimes she scrapes her hands and arms on the bark of trees, but it doesn’t hurt. The bark scrapes off like skin, and she doesn’t think it hurts the tree, either.

  You can call a tree all different things. A canoe birch is also called a paper birch and a white birch. You can also call a tree by its scientific name, which is in Latin, a language for trees and animals. She could say the names as many times as she wanted, as loud as she wanted, and usually Dad didn’t mind. The American beech is Fagus grandifolia. The American chestnut is Castanea dentata. The eastern hemlock is Tsuga canadensis. The eastern cottonwood is Populus deltoides. Nobody else in her family knew Latin. No one can take it from her or tell her she’s doing it wrong.

  When she was first learning her Latin tree names, PJ and Sean teased her about being a vampire from Transylvania. The names sounded to them like a curse in the Dracula movie they had on tape. There was a big orphanage in Transylvania, in Sighet, but that wasn’t where she came from—hers was Cighid, in Ghiorac, near the Hungarian border. Not Transylvania. She could prove it because she had it all on a map. And then there was another orphanage in Siret, in the northwest. Cighid, Sighet, Siret—in the ear of a silly American boy who had never been anywhere in the world, who never knew another language, maybe it all sounded the same. PJ and Sean had never even been to Colorado, and that’s in the same country. Mom sent away for the maps of Romania. Mirela learned the maps and tried to show them to PJ and Sean. “Cighid, not Sighet!” she said, but they didn’t know what she was talking about.

  The bitternut hickory is Carya cordiformis. Bitternut gets its name because it produces nuts that nobody will eat, not even a starving squirrel.

  Once, when they were looking at the maps together, Mom asked if she wanted to go back to Romania. A tantrum came over her because she thought Mom wanted to send her back to Cighid. And then Mom said she only meant to visit, but the only place they’d ever visited was Colorado, and she didn’t want to go back there, either. Finally she understood that Mom was asking if she wanted to go to Romania just for a few days—not now, and not to stay. She was still angry at Mom because she should have known how to ask this question right. When she was little, she had to look for words in two languages. Mom never had to do that, and so she doesn’t think as carefully as Mirela does about the right way to say things.

  Mom didn’t want her to watch PJ and Sean’s Dracula movie because it was too grown-up, which didn’t make sense because PJ and Sean weren’t grown-up back then. They liked the bloody scenes and hated the kissing scenes, although some of the bloodiest scenes had kissing. Mirela did see a few minutes of the movie here and there. In one scene, hands in black gloves move over the fur of a white wolf. The thick white fur and the soft dark leather filled the whole screen, and a warm, deep cello played. She could feel herself going inside the fur, becoming another person, a movie-person. This other person could fall asleep in the dog’s fur, curl up inside a finger of the gloves, the cello making the sound that the gloves felt like, and no one could see her—she couldn’t see herself.

  She asked Mom for a dog that looked like a white wolf, like in the movie. Mom asked if she wanted to do research on dogs first, like the research she does with the weather and the trees and the maps of Romania. She does want to visit Romania someday, but she needs to learn everything about it before she goes. She remembers some words: elefante, girafa, tigru, urs. In Romania there is only urs. Not the tigru—the lynx. The chamois, which is a cross between a goat and an antelope. And lots of wolves, like in the Dracula movie. The movie did get that right. When a grown-up mother wolf goes out to find food and comes back with a full belly, the baby wolves stick their snouts inside her mouth, trying to make her throw up into them. The wolves live in the Carpathians, the mountains where Dracula built his castle. She wishes she was from there but she’s not.

  Lauren, PJ, and Sean are all from Buffalo, born at Children’s Hospital. There’s a picture of them in a fancy carved frame hanging in the den, of the last summer before Mirela came. They’re standing on green grass beneath a big blue sky, arms locked together, smiling into the sun. Long tan legs. They didn’t know anyone named Mirela. There are no pictures of her before age three. She watched herself mirrored in the glass, there beside her family.

  It’s hard to fall asleep at night because you’re waiting in the darkness until you fall inside it, and you don’t know what will happen to you in there. Mirela rocks at night to tire herself out, so she can forget what she’s waiting for. She sits up cross-legged, wraps her arms around herself, and goes forward and back, forward and back. The bedsprings squeak and the bed moves around on the floor. She bumps her head against the headboard—not enough to hurt herself, no matter what Mom thinks. It crowds out the thoughts, the turning in her head, nothing else coming in, no memories no pictures no shapes no shadows no-Mirela in the room alone thump thump thump no room for anything but thump thump thump.

  One morning at breakfast PJ said something bad about the sound of the rocking of the bed, something very grown-up, and Sean gasped and Mom went scary-quiet, and Dad raised his hand and Mom jumped up and caught Dad’s arm and PJ ran away, upstairs to his room. Then Dad threw his fork across the kitchen and it clanged against the dishwasher an
d he walked outside to his truck and Mirela went under the table. Ears ringing, room spinning, everything going fast fast fast too fast like she would break apart, and she wrapped her arms around her head to keep from flying off the floor. She rocked and hummed. She recited her tree names and the trees surrounded her. The alphabet letters in the names circled around her and she was safe inside them. The butternut tree is Juglans cinereal. The eastern white pine is Pinus strobus. The sweet birch is Betula lenta. Its caterpillar catkins are yellow, not green.

  Everyone was gone except Mom, under the table with Mirela, not touching her, just there.

  “I remember someone hit me,” she told Mom.

  “Who?” Mom asked. “Who hit you, my love?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  Mom’s voice was wobbly. “I’m sorry, Mirela. No one should hit anyone. No one will ever hit you.”

  “Dad was going to hit PJ.”

  “That was wrong. Dad should not have acted like that. Dad has never hit anyone in his life, and he never will.”

  “Why did Dad want to hit PJ?”

  “He didn’t want to—something came over him.”

  “Why did something come over him?”

  “PJ said bad words. It was mean, and PJ shouldn’t have said it. It made Dad angry. But it was no reason for Dad to act like that. Hitting is always wrong. Even wanting to hit is wrong.”

  “I hit you.”

  “No—you used to. You don’t anymore.”

  “Sometimes I want to hit you.”

  “I know. Something comes over you, like it came over Dad. But you fight it. You fight it and it makes you stronger until you’re so strong that you don’t ever feel that way anymore.”

  What did Mom know? How could she say that she knew? She wasn’t inside.

  “Can I give you a hug, Mirela?” Mom asks, and she knows she’s always supposed to say yes.