The Fourth Child Jessica Winter (i love reading .txt) 📖

in a bathing suit,draining and refilling the water when it went cold, pouring more bubble bath from the bottle, trying to coax Mirela into thesuds with her. Mirela’s screams recoiled off the tiles. She kicked the locked bathroom door. The scene would repeat itselflater in the evening in Sean’s—now Mirela’s—room. Lauren sat in bed listening to Mom soothing Mirela, pleading with her togo to sleep, at least lie down, at least come close to her bed. Mom had replaced Sean’s Buffalo Bills sheets with pink princesslinens. Finally a silence.

“She’s probably never had a doll of her own before, a bed of her own,” Mom said. “She’s never had American food. God knowswhat kinds of baths she’s had. Everything is scary to her.”

“But why does she have to scream all the time?” Sean asked. “It just makes everything scarier.” Sean still refused to share a room with PJ. At night he took a sleeping bag to the basement.

“Maybe screaming was the only way she could be heard before,” Mom said. “It’s how she expresses herself. It’s not like sheonly screams when she is upset.”

“That’s even worse, though!” Sean said.

“But it’s our job to show her a better way to say what’s on her mind. We just have to be patient. God will show us how. Whatshe needs most is love.”

“Her eyes are far apart,” PJ said.

“Lauren’s eyes are wide-set, too,” Mom said, looking at Lauren. “Like Jackie Kennedy.”

“Lolo!” Mirela said, pointing at Lauren. Her smile was electrocuted.

“Lauren and Mirela could be sisters,” Dad said.

“They are sisters,” Mom said.

I have a sister, Lauren thought, and felt a feral nothing, a gust of wind, present and unseen.

 

Abby said they could find Claire’s and Lauren’s All My Sons costumes at the Salvation Army on Transit Road. Abby drove them there in her Volvo one afternoon. It was in the low sixties,unseasonably warm, and the sky and the air had a blush to them. Deepa Singh, who edited the literary magazine with Claire,came along for something to do. She sat in the back with Claire, and Lauren sat up front with Abby. This was new, drivingplaces where no one wrestled or cried over who got the front passenger seat. Deepa wore her long hair differently every day:in two twisty buns, in four slim braids that started at the nape of her neck. She could twist it behind her head and sticka pencil in it while carrying on a conversation and it would just stay that way.

Abby smoked a Marlboro Light out the window. She had a tape in the deck of the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and turned up the volume almost as high as it would go. The music was ruined, screeching, but it also sounded right—there was no way to fix it. The songs sounded like they were recorded in a black and white world, everyone’s bodies flattened into lines and circles, illuminated skeletons, and it was the music that pulled the lines of limbs around, yanking an arm out of its socket and reattaching it hand-to-shoulder, and the bodies howled in pain but they were happy, too, because what the bodies felt was new and interesting, and when it was all over the bodies would be different and better than they were before.

Abby singing along with every word granted Lauren permission to love the music the way Abby did; Claire and Deepa in the backseat, shouting over the music about submissions to the literary magazine, granted Lauren permission to just tolerate the musicthe way they did, for their friend whom they loved. Whatever happened in Abby’s car, whatever Abby and Claire and Deepa talkedabout, was more complex and more real than anything else Lauren had known before, because they were capable of finding thismusic and understanding it well enough to enjoy it, and that understanding could vouch for anything else they were interestedin and any other opinions they might hold.

Stitch, too. Lauren imagined him here in the car with them and chewed on her thumbnail.

This was Lauren’s first trip to a Salvation Army. She wanted to ask the other girls if they got all their clothes there, butdidn’t in case it was a dumb question. Abby wore Converse and a hoodie and jeans, every single day. Deepa wore Converse andcomplicated layers of plaid flannels and jeans with colorful patches on them. Claire wore clogs and long, fuzzy cardigansover dresses and skirts that never rose above the knee, and Abby called it “frump chic” and Deepa called it “librarian chic,”and both of these phrases were compliments.

At the Salvation Army, Claire came into Lauren’s dressing room without asking, a brownish bundle over her arm, just as Lauren was stepping out of her jeans. “You have a lovely figure,” Claire said, “and your costume sort of has to hide that, because Kate is lovely in her way but not like you are lovely.” Lauren pulled the dress over her head and pushed the curtain open on the dressing room, stepping in front of the cloudy three-way mirror. Beneath her bare feet, the linoleum floor seemed covered with a layer of almost-dry nail polish. The dress smelled decayed, like a piece of clothing could die and rot. It was cotton, with a cinched waist, flared skirt, and a big brown-and-white floral print, spotted with mildew at the hips.

Abby and Claire nodded their approval of the dress. Abby ripped off the $5.99 tag before she bought it with petty cash fromthe Drama Club fund. The rule at Salvation Army, Abby explained, was if an item of clothing for sale was missing a tag, itwas automatically priced at $2.99.

“What about Claire’s costume?” Lauren asked.

“Oh,” Claire said, tapping a finger on her chin. Like something small and amusing had slipped her mind. “I have mine already.”She smiled and rubbed Lauren’s arm. “I’ll show it to you when we get back to Tedquarters. I hope you like it.”

Tedquarters had wall-to-wall carpeting the color of creamed corn, a couple of halogen standing lamps, two sagging maroon couchespushed against perpendicular walls, a long