The Night Jane Came Home

Content Warning: While the content is not graphic and is handled with restraint, this story contains themes of trauma and implied sexual assault involving a minor.

I remember that I’d been half asleep in my bed. Thirteen years old. I’d heard the beeping of the keypad on the front door as my sister, Jane, made her gentle entry. Fifteen years old.

I had glanced at the clock on my nightstand, barely making out the time beneath the candy wrappers and soda cans. It was almost exactly nine on the dot, which was technically her curfew, but it didn’t matter. So long as Jane was home before our parents arose for their early morning coffee, they wouldn’t have known the difference.

She hadn’t gone straight to her room. I could hear her in the bathroom then, even over the fan she’d turned on, as she plopped down on the cold tile floor with a thud and began to weep. Violently. Like she was going to be sick.

It was difficult to make out through the sound of the bath she’d started running, but I’d known then that she had gotten sick. A few times, honestly. Then she’d been quiet, almost too quiet, as she seemingly waited for the tub to fill before she cut the water off.

I’d knocked softly on the door like a whisper.

“Yeah?”

Jane had glanced up at me as I entered like she was seeing me for the first time, like she’d just remembered I existed. Her blue eyes were glowing behind their bloodshot state, and her makeup was running down her cheeks in strangely symmetrical patterns.

It was not a nice bath. The water was clear and still, steaming, and she was sitting with her legs tucked against her chest, her chin resting on her knees.

“What’s wrong?” I’d asked her, unsure of what else to say.

She had wiped her face, then stared at the paint covering her fingers. Through a cracking voice, she’d stated, “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.” As a matter of fact, she’d looked like she was dying, with her limbs all nestled against one another with a weak grasp on herself.

“I’m fine, Summer.”

I’d moved to sit on the toilet, but it was open. The rotting contents of her stomach were still in there: buttered popcorn and cherry slushie. “That’s gross,” I’d told her.

“I wasn’t expecting company.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

She’d shaken her head. I flushed the toilet and watched it all slip away, into the pipes that led somewhere far and irrelevant. “Are you sick?”

“Yeah,” she’d whispered. “I guess I must be.”

“Maybe you ate too much popcorn,” I’d suggested. But when I looked up at her, Jane was staring ahead at the faucet as it dripped. Her eyes were empty, numb, tired. As if she didn’t have a thought in her head besides the noise that rang through our pale yellow bathroom each time a drop fell into her pool.

“Do you remember when we were little, and I used to write stories?” She’d asked suddenly.

I’d considered this. “Yeah, I remember.”

“And I used to make you act them out with me with our dolls or whatever? Or in the backyard? And we’d play dress up with all our old dance clothes if we were princesses, or squeeze into our Halloween costumes to be pirates?”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “You’d get mad at me when I changed the endings or said the wrong line.”

“Yes. I’d written them the way I’d wanted them to go.”

Then she’d paused long enough for three drips.

“I was good at that, I think.”

I’d gotten lost in a memory then of us sitting on the carpeted floor of our bedroom beside our unmade bunk beds, each of our little plastic figurines a character that Jane had created in her mind. We’d fight over who got to play who. I was funny and good at doing voices, but there had been something fantastical at work within her and between us that often left us giggling in little balls on the floor.

“Do you think I’m smart?” Her face looked pale then. Paler than it should’ve looked, considering the lateness into spring.

“Sure. Something like that.”

She’d flicked some water from her bath at me, but when she turned her head I could see that she was crying again. Each tear fell from her eyes and ran its course down her cheek onto the bare skin of her leg, then along the bone of her shin until it became another minuscule speck in the waterline.

“Jane,” I’d begun. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” I’d wanted to know. I’d thought I needed to know. I’d needed her to tell me who was bad and who was good.

But she hadn’t told me. She’d grabbed her coconut bodywash from the corner of the tub and her baby blue loofa and started scrubbing her skin as she cried. She’d started gently, around her wrists and elbows, but before long she was rubbing vigorously until her arms and chest were red and raw. It was as if she didn’t want to be wearing her own skin anymore.

“Did something happen?”

“Summer.” She dropped the loofa as she looked at me angrily. We both watched it float away from her, like a big boat trapped in a little pond. “Please stop.”

“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“I don’t need your help,” she’d shot at me. “I don’t need your help, I don’t need anyone’s help. This is just the way things are. It’s the way things are going to be, now. I used to be really brilliant, you know? And none of that matters anymore.”

I’d let a little silence hang. “What are you now?”

“What?”

“If you aren’t brilliant anymore. What are you now?”

She’d leaned forward and unplugged the drain, and the sound of all the water emptying into the pipes of our home churned through the air.

“I’m a woman.”

The way she’d said it made it sound like a curse word. Jane had stood up and walked, soaking wet, to the closet, grabbed a dark grey towel and wrapped it tightly around herself.

“You’re not a woman yet. You’re only fifteen.”

“Yeah, well.” She looked into the mirror, still bright red from the hot water and her violent washing. “Rites of passage, or whatever.”

Then she’d left. Her hair swung as she walked, the wet tips from being dipped in the water weighing down the rest of it.

I remember that I’d sat there for a while, until the tub was vacant of the dirty water and the sister it had once held. I remember expecting to hear Jane crying again from the solitude of her bedroom. I remember hoping that maybe she’d call one of her friends on the phone to tell them the story so I could hear it, too. I remember being angry that she hadn’t told me herself, that she hadn’t trusted me, or thought I couldn’t handle it. I remember thinking that I could’ve handled it.

None of those things happened, though. Jane had been ghastly in her silence, as if she’d just gone straight to bed. The bubbly residue of her soap lingered along the chipping acrylic even after the water was gone, and I’d shut the light off and stormed off to my room, right across from hers.