The Fourth Child Read online

  Epigraph

  He mooned restlessly about, and daydreamed; then came to Harriet to touch her, or climb on her lap like a smaller child, never appeased or at rest or content. He had not had a mother at the proper time, and that was the trouble, and they all knew it.

  Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Jane

  Lauren

  Jane

  Lauren

  Jane

  Lauren

  Jane

  Lauren

  Jane

  Lauren

  Mirela

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jessica Winter

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Jane

  She didn’t trust easy. If she tried to account for the substance of her life, and of the lives of other people she picked up along the way—other people she made—she might start there.

  “Anything that’s easy isn’t worth doing,” her father used to say, and her brothers would snort and snicker. Jane used to think they were laughing only at their father, always aboard his creaky carousel of platitudes. Later she knew they were also laughing at the shape anything took on in their minds: the mute curves of a compliant girl. A girl who might be easy; a thing who might be worth doing. This girl had a discernible figure—or pieces of one—but not a face. A swinging ponytail on the Bethune High School basketball court. A tender stripe of flesh above a waistband. Jane herself could be this girl, conceivably, to boys who were not her brothers.

  Jane earned three dollars per hour to put the Vine kids to bed and stay in their house until Dr. and Mrs. Vine returned from their Saturday-night bridge game at two or three in the morning. Dr. Vine was an emergency room physician in a perpetual state of convivial jet lag. Mrs. Vine read novels and took naps and crafted delicate silver jewelry in their basement. Sometimes Mrs. Vine would press a trinket into Jane’s hand along with the wad of bills at the end of a night. Tiny earrings with the face of a smug cat, or a necklace strung with an ambiguous locket—a pear, a teardrop, a heart. The Vines were lean and tawny, with matching chestnut hair; each stood the same height as the other in their stocking feet. They spoke in low murmuring tones and touched each other frequently and were the first adults Jane ever imagined having sex.

  The Vines could not be long for the village of Williamsville, for the suburb of Amherst, for the city of Buffalo, a place that you left if you could, or so Jane’s mother always said. “He can’t be such hot S-H-I-T if he could only get a job in Buffalo,” her mother replied when Jane said something admiring about Dr. Vine. The Vines were shaping their time in Buffalo as a droll anecdote well before the story was finished. On Saturdays, sleepy and elated with drink, they wandered into their own living room—fly-spotted skylight, floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, cherry shag carpet that they never vacuumed—to the sight of Jane awake on their harvest-gold sofa, back straight, eyes red and round, a book to her face. A ghost in their house, swaying like a naked bulb.

  “We don’t stay awake all night when we’re with our kids, and we don’t expect you to, either,” Dr. Vine said, kindly, the first time Jane babysat for them.

  “If you’re going to keep watch for predators all night, would you like a rifle?” he asked the second time, also kindly. After that, he stopped mentioning it. The Vines weren’t the sort of people to keep guns in their house anyway.

  “You don’t have to call him Dr. Vine if he’s not your doctor,” Jane’s mother said.

  The Vines’ bookshelves provided Jane with the tools of maintaining a silent yet bustling vigilance into the night. Guided by the photographs in a biography of Martha Graham, Jane choreographed tiptoeing dance routines, unidentified grit from the cherry shag accumulating on the balls of her feet. She stood at the older Vine girl’s easel, gripping the crayon that mapped out the constellation of radial lines from the cover of Be Here Now. She willed herself not to check the cuckoo clock above the fireplace, and when her resolve disintegrated and she finally looked over to see 1:49 a.m., she took a book that felt to her forbidden—a Bukowski, an Anaïs Nin, a Helter Skelter—turned to page 149, read that page aloud to herself in a fierce whisper, then attempted to walk across the first floor of the Vines’ house, northeast corner to southwest corner, in exactly 149 steps.

  She trusted hard. Staying awake was hard. So she did it, she trusted it, Saturday night after Saturday night.

  One of these nights, exiting Dr. Vine’s car as it idled in her family’s driveway, her bones and muscles liquefying under the pressure of sleep deprivation and Delta of Venus, Jane slung her hips from side to side as she approached her front stoop. She didn’t know why she did it, and she was too tired even to relish the gratification of giving herself over to something perverse. Slinging her hips felt compelled, as compulsive as any of the games she’d played with numbers and words for the previous six hours. She didn’t know if Dr. Vine was watching from the car in the driveway. She didn’t know what shape she took in his mind. What kind of anything was she?

  Jane awoke a few hours later, Sunday, sweaty and jittery with shame and fatigue. A clammy heat inside her head, her brain rolled up in the Vines’ dirty rug. In springtime, her father and brothers, Brian and Mike and Joe, used to skip mass for baseball practice, and in other seasons they skipped mass for football practice or hockey practice or to get a beef on weck at Anderson’s Frozen Custard. Now her brothers were all either in or out of college and presumably could do whatever they wished on their Sundays. For Jane, there was no getting out of church. “God will see you,” their mother said, a warning, and it was tacitly understood that God on a Sunday would see her brothers at the batting cages differently than he would see Jane in bed with a 101-degree fever or vomiting into the bayberry outside the back entrance of Saint Benedict’s. Jane’s hair was in a ponytail, leaving both hands free to hold the flappy collar of her sailor blouse flat against her chest. Returning inside the church, she paused beside the stoup to dip her hand in the holy water, then ran her wet fingers along her lips and gums. She didn’t think anyone noticed, but God would have noticed. It didn’t matter whether or not Dr. Vine had watched Jane slinging her hips last night, because God had watched her, and sorrowed for her, she thought. She felt another tremor of shame, for the hubris of thinking she had the power to cause God sorrow.

  Saint Benedict’s was a bizarre sandstone fortress, no spire, no belfry, no front-facing windows, but it was the church closest to home. Today was April 29, feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena. Jane opened the photocopied pamphlet, tucked inside the Sunday missals, that summarized Catherine’s life. As a toddler, Catherine babbled to angels. At age six, she saw Jesus; at age seven, his apostles. She swore off marriage and children long before her beloved older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth. When Catherine’s parents urged her to marry Bonaventura’s widower, she protested: cutting off all her hair, willing her skin to erupt in a hideous rash, fasting. Her parents relented on the marriage. Her hair grew back; the rash, a full-body stigmata, faded. But Catherine’s fasting became a routine, or a pledge: an act of solidarity with the poor. She aspired to survive solely on the wafer and the sip of wine at daily mass.

  The pamphlet had an epigraph, a quotation from Catherine. It read: Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

  The edges of the pamphlet were wilting between Jane’s fingers. Her eyes were gritty and sore. Her mother nudged her to fall in with the voices surrounding them as they stood to recite the Nicene Creed. Jane’s lips parted, but the words didn’t come.

  Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

&nbs
p; Jane knew she had shamed herself the night before, sauntering away from Dr. Vine, because her mind had slipped outside its cell, and her body had swung free of her mind. Fatigue was no excuse—fatigue was to be trusted, not blamed. An underoccupied mind, a mind not pushed to its outer limits, was dangerous: its contents jostling around, causing contusions and swelling. The cell of the mind needed either to be completely full or completely empty. It needed either to be packed tight with problems to be solved, challenges to be met, or it needed to be blown out, scalded bare, by effort, exertion, exhaustion.

  A cell needed rules. Jane already had plenty of those. The rule for how many Acts of Contrition she had to silently say before she released her bladder or started a math test or, lying rigid in her bed at night, before she allowed herself to fall asleep. The rule for how many times she had to kneel and cross herself when she passed the little brass crucifix hanging outside her parents’ bedroom. The rule for how many times she had to chew each morsel of dinner before she permitted herself to swallow—the number was always a multiple of three, in honor of the Holy Trinity. She had no rules for breakfast, which could be safely skipped so long as Jane dawdled enough getting ready for school before the bus came. Lunch was a brown bag that could be thrown away, the sin of the waste subsumed by the virtue Jane felt in the act of stuffing it between the lips of the garbage can next to her locker, the ping of the lid closing shut as clear as the single bell rung at Eucharist.

  All Jane needed to keep her mind quiet was to know there was no end in sight. No end to the hunger, the fatigue, the kneeling, the crossing. No end to the nights at the Vines’. The end was the void, terrifying and purposeless.

  Build a cell inside your mind

  Behind the altar at Saint Benedict’s Church, thirty feet high and fifteen feet across, hung a crude wooden bas-relief of Christ on the cross, jagged mourners piled at his feet like kindling. So much of church was staring at a broken and bleeding man as he dies, in real time, week after week, right in front of you. Nobody doing anything about it. Jane didn’t know how Jesus had died, exactly—of suffocation or exposure or blood loss or what—and she wanted to ask her mother, but suspected that the question would anger her. She felt the boundaries between herself and the world dissolving. Perhaps Catherine of Siena had felt the same. The church’s overhead lights sparking and shorting behind Jane’s own eyes. Her dumb wooden hands grafting themselves onto the pews, hardening painfully into the knots and nodules of tree trunks. Her wooden head pitching forward, whirling with hunger and diving for sleep, the weight of it becoming Christ’s body atop her own, pinned beneath him on the cross. She gasped, pushing her lungs against the fallen bulk, struggling to free her arms so she could wrap them around him.

  “Jane,” her mother whispered through clenched teeth. The voice she would use if Jane ever asked her how, exactly, Jesus died. “What is wrong with you?”

  And Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.

  Jane volunteered at the Clearfield Library on Sunday afternoons. Usually she rode her bike there without eating breakfast or lunch. When she hit the downhill section of Klein Road, she stood up on the pedals and felt pleased by the tremble in her thighs. At the library, she sat on the floor toward the back stacks, the Military & War section, next to the cart of returned books she was supposed to be putting on shelves, and reread the authorless Stories of the Saints, a slender green hardback whose filigree of pen-and-ink illustrations, suitable for a children’s book, belied its graphic content. It was Catherine of Siena in Stories of the Saints who imagined herself married to Christ, his foreskin fashioned into her wedding ring. Jane clapped a hand over her mouth when she first read this, looked around to see if anyone was watching, shut the book, reshelved it, tried to forget it. According to legend—Stories of the Saints itself seemed half-convinced—Catherine also once sucked pus from a leper’s sores.

  There was a word in Stories of the Saints that was new to Jane: kenosis, or emptying out. To become a vessel for God’s will, blank and scrubbed, no sustenance, no desire. The saints were saints because they had the gift of imagining themselves onto the cross, into the suffering that was also salvation. The saints were good at this because the saints were insane. This was a blasphemous thought, but it was also true. Frances of Rome burned her genitals with pork grease before sharing a bed with her husband. Teresa of Avila renounced all her companions, choosing exclusive fellowship with her ecstatic visions. When she prayed, she asked other nuns at the convent to hold her down, to keep her from levitating. And all Jane had managed was to get the shakes on her ten-speed.

  “Jane?” Mrs. Bellamy, the head librarian, was standing over her. “We need you up front, checking people out.”

  Mrs. Bellamy’s tone was soft, amused. But Jane still felt herself to be in trouble, and worse, in a stupid, trivial trouble, not the important trouble you could get into if you stuck an onion ring from Anderson’s Frozen Custard on your finger and proclaimed it the foreskin of God.

  “Sorry,” Jane mumbled, getting to her feet.

  Once, Teresa’s prayers summoned an angel, a winsome curly-headed boy. He wielded a golden spear tipped with fire, and he stabbed Teresa again and again with it. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, or the splotchy black-and-white photograph of it reproduced in Stories of the Saints, depicted the scene. The fabric of Teresa’s dress fluttered like a funnel cloud above a mounted cross. A plume of smoke signaled that Teresa and the angel penetrating her were on the verge of disappearing before Jane’s eyes. Jane imagined the boy angel squealing with glee each time his blade plunged into Teresa’s flesh, in a rhythm.

  Jane wanted to see the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in person. Her church was a doll’s house, but Rome was God’s home, where Elizabeth Seton had just been canonized as the first American saint, though Jane’s mother wasn’t impressed. She was “really just a snooty Anglican, stooping to our level,” she said. “Not a real Catholic.” She didn’t believe a word of those stories about Mother Seton curing a girl’s leukemia.

  That was the autumn that the red-haired little Manson girl tried to kill the president and the sun was always low in the sky. Jane’s mother warned them about glare—when Jane’s father took the car out in the morning, when Jane biked to the Vines’ house in the late afternoon. Saint Benedict’s subsidized an annual fall trip to Rome for high school seniors, and to pay her way, Jane had earned more than enough from babysitting, the cash stored in empty tins from Parkside Candy. Every birthday and Christmas, Jane’s mother gave out these tins, filled with fancy sweets. They made a satisfying small bwip sound when you squeezed and slid them open. Jane would hand over her sponge candy and saltwater taffy to Brian or Mike or Joe and keep the tins, which had old-fashioned pastel illustrations winding around them: a turn-of-the-century carousel, ladies in petticoats and big wavy hats dancing the maypole. The tins lived in a couple of hatboxes at the back of her closet that also held old birthday cards, her first pair of shoes, her christening dress, the thin garland of honeysuckle and baby’s breath she wore at her first communion. The objects inside the box, the box itself, were a chronology of her life that she could hold in her hands, and the antique veneer of the tins enhanced this sense of permanence, like they were heirlooms Jane was handing down to herself, the money inside them the stuff of her future. She felt the most tenderness for her mother when she sat cross-legged in front of this box to count her bills, only to find herself rereading each of the cards, studying the tiny hammocks of her mother’s cursive rs, the special swoop of the J in her Jane, pressing a finger to the dried garland. However careless or cruel her mother could be, this was her own squarish cursive, this was the garland she braided herself, and it was only for Jane, youngest of four, the girl she had waited for. Her mother drove to Parkside Candy and picked out the tins. Like Jane did, she put in the work.

  But when Jane brought her mother the stack of candy tins piled to their hinges with the ones and fives and occasional tens and a single, spectacular twenty, the money collected
from the Vines and the Goslanders and the Felmans and all the other neighborhood families whose children Jane had diapered and spoon-fed and bathed and sang to over years, Jane’s mother spent an afternoon in a pique of insult. She took no pride in her daughter’s thrift and work ethic; instead she was affronted by Jane’s secrecy and her presumption of something earned. Her mother litigated the case with Jane’s father.

  “Why do you think that money is yours?” her father, once fully briefed, asked Jane. He was wearing his glasses and sitting in his lounger behind a newspaper, like all the cartoon dads in the picture books Jane read to the kids she babysat. “You take my money for the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the bed you sleep in. When you have enough money to pay me back for seventeen years under my roof, whatever is left over, you can have it for your travels.”

  “Might be enough for a bus to Rochester,” Jane’s mother said.

  “I’ve worked hard for this,” Jane said. “I’ve been saving for a long time.”

  “No, but that’s the thing, Jane—the idea that you could save money is absurd.” He turned to the sports section. Jane could see the top of his head. “Be logical. Saved it from what? Saved it from going toward the mortgage for the house you live in? Saved it from going to pay our taxes?”

  “Now, if you could bring your brothers to Rome with you, that might be a different story,” her mother said.

  Her father cracked the spine of the sports section and folded it back. “Now,” he asked Jane brightly, “how about those Bills?”

  This was the line her father used to declare a conversation over, that it would be tawdry and dark-minded to continue it. The Bills had won their first four games of the season, and the division title was plausible, her father pointed out. O. J. Simpson had run eighty-eight yards in one go, in the game against Pittsburgh. The Juice. O.J. was something good, someone they could all agree on.