The Fourth Child

A Novel

Jessica Winter

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062971579
• Print ISBN:
  9780062971562
• Subtopic: Drama

“A beautifully observed and thrillingly honest novel about the dark corners of family life and the long, complicated search for understanding and grace.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather

“The Fourth Child is keen and beautiful and heartbreaking—an exploration of private guilt and unexpected obligation, of the intimate losses of power embedded in female adolescence, and of the fraught moments of glancing divinity that come with shouldering the burden of love.” —Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror

“A remarkable family saga . . . The Fourth Child is a balm—a reminder that it is possible for art to provide a nuanced exploration of life itself.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Rich and Pretty

The author of Break in Case of Emergency follows up her “extraordinary debut” (The Guardian) with a moving novel about motherhood and marriage, adolescence and bodily autonomy, family and love, religion and sexuality, and the delicate balance between the purity of faith and the messy reality of life.

Book-smart, devoutly Catholic, and painfully unsure of herself, Jane becomes pregnant in high school; by her early twenties, she is raising three children in the suburbs of western New York State. In the fall of 1991, as her children are growing older and more independent, Jane is overcome by a spiritual and intellectual restlessness that leads her to become involved with a local pro-life group. Following the tenets of her beliefs, she also adopts a little girl from Eastern Europe. But Mirela is a difficult child. Deprived of a loving caregiver in infancy, she remains unattached to her new parents, no matter how much love Jane shows her. As Jane becomes consumed with chasing therapies that might help Mirela, her relationships with her family, especially her older daughter, Lauren, begin to fray. 

Feeling estranged from her mother and unsettled in her new high school, Lauren begins to discover the power of her own burgeoning creativity and sexuality—a journey that both echoes and departs from her mother’s own adolescent experiences. But when Lauren is confronted with the limits of her youth and independence, Jane is thrown into an emotional crisis, forced to reconcile her principles and faith with her determination to keep her daughters safe. The Fourth Child is a piercing love story and a haunting portrayal of how love can shatter—or strengthen—our beliefs.

Lauren

Right before everything changed, events arranged themselves in neat lines. Each of them pulsed with meaning. Right before everything changed, she already wanted to be someone else.

Mom asked many times if Lauren was excited or nervous about starting at Bethune High, about her classes and her new friends, and Lauren didn’t bother answering because Mom would ask again the next day, like they hadn’t just done this conversation. The town or the village or somebody in charge had redrawn the school zones, and most of Lauren’s friends from middle school were branching off to different high schools. Mom worried that Lauren would feel a little lost at Bethune, but the main sensation Lauren felt was relief. When she knew everyone, like she did in middle school, she could rank everyone, including herself, and she had to keep track of which girls were in or out, who was “mad at” or “ignoring” or “in a fight with” or “had a bone to pick with” who, whether it was better to pick sides or stay neutral, how much power Lauren had in the middle of these conflicts, how she should use that power when she had it, and how she could get it back when she didn’t. It was a relief to escape all this, and for it to be out of her control. She was excused until further notice from entering a classroom to a row of heads turning slowly toward her, each pair of eyes dark and knowing and mad at you. First she would have to figure out why (but “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you”) and then she would have to make up for it somehow (but “If you were really sorry you wouldn’t have done it in the first place”). And she was also excused until further notice from being one of the swiveling heads, moving in sync toward their target.

For the most part, Lauren was either the swiveling head or the neutral bystander, not the target. People sometimes told her she was pretty, and maybe that was part of why. She got “heart-shaped face” a lot. Adults said, “You look just like your mother.”

“People say certain things to mothers about their daughters, almost out of habit,” Mom said. “You look like your dad.”

People think you are what you look like. Back in seventh grade, Lauren couldn’t figure out what was going on with Renée Zeitler and Kelly Kavanaugh from swim team, who had to be fake friends because their mothers were best friends. Renée was always bursting into tears when she had to spend too much time with Kelly, and Kelly went back and forth between jumping up and down for Renée’s approval and totally ignoring her. It was strange. There was something behind it that everyone knew was there but no one could see. But then, coming back from a meet in Batavia, Lauren got a ride with Kelly in the back of Kelly’s dad’s station wagon, and Lauren thought maybe she had figured it out.

Kelly suggested, whispering, that they “do practice-kissing.” “I just trust you,” Kelly told Lauren, “and if we practice with each other, that means we’ll be really good at it when we do it with boys.”

“We have to lie down flat,” Kelly added, “so my dad doesn’t see us.” The small of Lauren’s back ached in the gap between the reverse-facing seats. Kelly’s hand under Lauren’s clothes and on her breasts was clumsy but confident. Kelly opened her mouth as wide as it would go and set in motion the suctioning hydraulics of her tongue for the duration of Roxette’s “Listen to Your Heart.”

Lauren didn’t want to be doing this, and she hadn’t really agreed to it, but she did find it interesting. She had never kissed anyone on the lips before, except once in a while Mom. She had definitely never kissed anyone with wetness, open lips, her senses of taste and sound involved, or had another person’s tongue inside her mouth, and when she did think about another person’s tongue inside her mouth it was a boy. She did mind that Kelly was doing this, but she didn’t mind enough to ask Kelly to stop, or do anything that might draw the attention of Kelly’s father up in the driver’s seat, and so she waited for it to be over the way she waited for her brothers to stop doing any number of things when she had to share the back seat with them—pinching, kicking, close-shouting, a spitty finger in her ear—while also thinking about how she might get back at them sometime later.

Kelly moaned a little, and it harmonized with the chorus of “Listen to Your Heart.”

The following day, during Technology & Business, which used to be called Shop, half the class—the boys—plugged in power sanders across the room from where the other half of the class—the girls—sat down to play Monopoly around a square wooden table riddled with splinters and gouge marks. Lauren stared at Renée, who was fidgeting with the dog player piece. She kept staring after Renée had noticed.

“Renée, it’s okay,” Lauren finally said. “We all know.”

The table fell silent. Eyes flicked around. Renée looked terrified. “What?”

“It’s okay,” Lauren said, looking away from Renée and swiveling toward Kelly. “You haven’t done anything wrong, Renée.”

Kelly bleated a laugh. She wanted it to sound confused, like she was laughing at a freak blabbering nonsense, but instead it was like she was admitting something. By the end of class, Renée was sobbing as Jamie and Shannon consoled her, Kelly was vomiting in the bathroom, and poor one-eyed Mr. Van Den Leek was hovering near the scene, hesitant to turn his back on the boys carving birdhouses, asking if anyone needed the nurse. Mr. Van Den Leek never knew what to do with the girls, and he never let any of them use the bandsaw.

It was all so easy, Lauren thought now. It was all too easy.

That was in the fall. There was another big one in the winter. On the bus home from the ski club’s weekly Saturday-night trip to Kissing Bridge, Lauren shared a seat with Danielle Sheridan. Danielle had gotten breasts and hips and several inches in height all at once. She had a doll’s face: perfect-circle eyes, and it was like her freckles were painted on, and her cheeks still had a toddler plumpness. Now her doll’s head was sewn on the wrong body. Danielle was turned around in her seat to face Jeff Leidecki and Evan Lewis, who were best friends. Jeff’s mini–boom box was playing N.W.A, which was what all the boys were listening to now, and Danielle was standing up on her knees, snaking her shoulders and whipping the yarn of her long doll’s hair more or less in time with the guitar sample looping over and over. Lauren turned halfway around in her seat, too, to observe Danielle, flinching away when Danielle’s gyrating head swung too close. Jeff and Evan were goading Danielle into saying something mean about Shannon, who was absent that week with the flu. Shannon ate only iceberg lettuce leaves at lunch and could make one stick of gum last the school day: she chewed half of the stick in the morning, the other half in the afternoon.

“C’mon, admit it, Danielle,” Jeff said. His googly eyes followed all her movements. “Shannon is not hot. She’s just a secret fat chick who diets.”

“It’s like she tricks people into thinking she’s hot,” Evan said. “Just say it, Danielle.”

“Why won’t you just say it,” Jeff said.

These boys hadn’t really talked to Danielle before, not like this. They were paying her lots of attention and tempting her with more attention if she would just bad-mouth her friend. They wanted to make a trade, a deal.

“Shannon’s ass is so loose,” Jeff said, “that when she farts there’s no sound, there’s no friction—”

“Because SO MUCH PIZZA!” Evan and Jeff finished together, and they fell all over each other in hysterics. Their science class had just done a unit on friction and how it is influenced by the three forces of SMP: surface, motion, and pressure. The mnemonic device that Mr. Philbin used to remember this trio was So Much Pizza.

Evan was wiping his eyes, trying to recover. “Oh God, so much fucking pizza,” he said.

They were losing interest in Danielle. Evan rewound the N.W.A song to the beginning and shouted along with every word. It was like they were playing a video game that seemed just dangerous enough to be exciting—what if their parents heard? Jeff shouted all the n-words in these songs, and Evan sort of gulped them down.

“I love this song!” Danielle said over the music. She wanted them to believe her. There was nowhere she could possibly have heard this song before. She bounced up and down on her knees like a much younger kid.

“Isn’t it so great when Shannon isn’t around?” Jeff asked Daniel...

Table of contents

• Epigraph
• Contents
• Jane
• Lauren
• Jane
• Lauren
• Jane
• Lauren
• Jane
• Lauren
• Jane
• Lauren
• Mirela
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Jessica Winter
• Copyright
• About the Publisher