The Bed Swap.
A Short Story by Jen Hutchison
The year Julia turned ten there was a burglar. A few months before, her sister Denise invented a game she called ‘Bed Swap’. Sometimes Denise wanted to switch around before lights out. Sometimes she was in Julia’s bed with her in the morning. Julia thought it was fun. Denise was twelve.
The year before, their father threw their big brother out. He was seventeen. Father and son didn’t get along but their mother told Julia to stop being nosy when she asked questions. Julia didn’t care much or for long. Denise was Ray’s favorite anyway.
Lights off. It was a ‘Bed Swap’ night. From Denise’s bed everything looked the same to Julia, only different, fantasy spun with reality. Julia wriggled down and looked towards her own bed, farthest from the door. Denise was a lump under the covers. The door was just beyond Julia’s feet, the double windows next to her head, parallel single beds against each sidewall.
The house creaked as the roof tightened in the cold. The wind buffeted the windowpane, making the tassel on the half drawn blind jiggle against the glass. The streetlamp cast a feathery shadow across the floor its yellowy light filtered through the branches of a tree. On ‘Bed Swap’ nights Denise toppled into sleep within seconds. On other nights she whispered from her own bed, rambled imaginings of a dream world. She was going to be an astronaut when she grew up, fly far away.
Julia heard the sprinkle of arriving rain. Her eyelids fluttered.
Long after, she exploded out of deep sleep. Her eyes gaped in the dark. She couldn’t move. Her blankets were pushed back. Her pajama pants were down past her bottom. She had wet myself. A big person blocked the light. She felt hot breath on her face. Pain, sharp and raw, rasped high up between her legs. Thick fingers drilled into her, rough and relentless. Her private skin had torn, creating a burn like acid and a smell like wet metal. Julia grasped for reality, slow to absorb the right way round in the room, the way things were supposed to be.
She knew she was awake. There was nightmare and there was this.
The grinding fingers paused, their owner stilled by her awareness. Rasping breath, too close to her face, slackened a little.
‘Who is it?’ She was a gurgle more than a voice.
Out of the dark came a whisper. The tone was supposed to make it ok.
‘It’s all right. It’s only me.’
The fingers probed again. Julia screamed, a feeble and cracked search for oxygen. She got control of her lungs. A real scream. The hand jerked away. The bedclothes were shoved up.
Within seconds, her mother flicked the light switch. She squinted from child to child, taking in the reversal of daughters – Julia in Denise’s bed, squealing, Denise in Julia’s bed, rigid, wide-eyed, silent. Arms encircled Julia’s shaking little body, hushing her insistence that a man had been there. She wiped teary tracks off Julia’s cheeks.
‘It’s a nightmare, that’s all.’
‘No, no.’ the child hiccupped and clung. ‘It was real.’
Julia’s mother shivered in a draft and left the room, following cold air to the back door. It was open wide. Muddy footprints tracked down the back steps. She called to her husband and went to the telephone. It was five am.
Julia looked across at her sister. Denise was so pale she looked luminous. She hadn’t moved and didn’t speak.
‘It’s too late now,’ their mother said when she returned. ‘The police will come in the morning’.
Denise had wet the bed too. Their mother’s clucking tongue oscillated between irritation and reassurance as she told them to don fresh pajamas while she fetched clean sheets. The little girls were returned to their own beds. Julia did not go back to sleep. She knew from her breathing that Denise slept.
The next morning, Saturday, a policeman arrived in time for morning tea. For Julia, shame had already created a screen around the crime. She had no name for what been done to her anyway and her subconscious had hijacked the identity of her attacker. Julia was aware though, of her dread of speaking out. She sensed her mother’s vanilla household would somehow implode if this secret were spoken aloud.
‘Yes, he touched me.’ Julia demonstrated, her fingers tracing tickly lines across her cheeks and throat. She created the untruth like an invisible tattoo she would wear for decades. Around sips of tea and mouthfuls of fruitcake, the constable jotted notes onto a form pinned to a clipboard. No, nothing was missing. No damage done. No, she didn’t recognize the voice. No, he hadn’t touched her anywhere else.
Julia’s mother watched her as she spoke. So did her sister. They oversaw her lies, closing the door on help. Julia wanted to believe her mother’s trivializing summary of Denise’s recent night games– swapping beds, nightmares, sleep walking. Julia was desperate to feel safe.
Her mother strolled the policeman to the front gate. A copy of his report lay on the kitchen table. It said ‘UNLAWFUL ENTRY BY PERSON UNKNOWN. TEN-YEAR OLD FEMALE DISTURBED. ACCESS AND EXIT VIA UNLOCKED BACK DOOR. NO ASSAULT. NOTHING REMOVED’. Her mother’s elegant cursive script had signed the truth away.
In the days and weeks afterwards, Julia’s paleness and quietness was brushed over. ‘She’s had a fright, is all,’ her mother said when Julia appeared to struggle to recover her sunny temperament.
Julia tried to leave the event buried. The phrase and the tone ‘it’s all right, it’s only me,’ haunted her for three decades. Until the threads unraveled Julia thought how lucky for Denise she had been in Denise’s bed that night. Poor withdrawn Denise, so shy, a shadow in her own life. How awful if that had happened to her.
Julia never played ‘Bed Swap’ again. Denise asked, but it wasn’t fun anymore.
Copyright 2012. Jen Hutchison.