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August 26th, 1989
The week after Will and Jonathan leave to set out on their new lives is the hardest for Jane. She sits in front of the TV, watching sitcoms and sports she doesn’t understand the concept of, or in front of the window, passing the time by watching the neighborhood kids ride their bikes and play ball in their yards.
Max promised to call her every Friday and Saturday night. She called last night to tell Jane all about how her roommate is horribly girly and speaks with the inflection of a mouse needing a tonsillectomy. Jane giggled, but that didn’t heal the empty hole in her chest.
Hopper notices first. That morning, after he catches Jane staring blankly at the TV, he nudges Joyce and pulls her aside in the kitchen. She’s been cleaning all morning, but even that isn’t too much, with their family shrinking from five to three quite literally overnight and the mess becoming just a few dishes in the sink and Jane’s sneakers strewn up and down the stairs.
“She won’t move from that same spot,” he tells Joyce.
“And I won’t stop scrubbing this same plate,” Joyce retorts, holding up a plate that has been stripped of its pattern by an egregious amount of Dawn soap and Joyce’s boredom. “We do what we have to do to keep busy.”
“It’s not the same and you know it,” Hopper says, throwing a look over his shoulder. Jane has moved ever so slightly, now sprawled out on the couch. “I think the kid is lonely. Will’s gone, Jonathan’s gone, Max is gone. The moment she saved the world, everyone had to start moving on. And now she’s lonely because she can’t keep up with them.”
Joyce takes off her yellow gloves and hangs them over the faucet, turning to Jim. She looks pitiful and somewhat stressed.
“You’re being painfully insightful right now,” she says. “I know this is hard for her. She’s…not like the other kids. She probably feels like an outsider, watching them grow up and move on with their lives. I don’t like it either, but I don’t know how to help her. The parenting books never mentioned what you should do when your superhuman kid loses her powers after saving the world from peril and now has to live in a shell of who she once was while her friends pursue things she can’t because she’s fallen behind while trying to rescue everyone around her.”
“Jesus, Joyce,” Jim visibly winces. “Just kick me in the crotch next time.”
Her eyes soften. “You know it’s true, Hop. It kills me every day. I hate seeing her this way, too. But I don’t know what to do. I hate that, too, because mothers are supposed to know what to do with their kids.”
“Dad.” Jane’s voice startles him. He turns around with Joyce. Jane is standing on the awkward boundary between the kitchen and living room, clutching the Uno card box in her hands. She holds it up to Hopper, eyes pleading. “Play Uno with me? I’m bored. Too many commercials.”
“Yeah. Yeah, kid, I’ll play with you,” he quickly says.
Her smile is soft and sad. Instead of excitedly running off to messily shuffle the deck and start dealing, she sidles out of the kitchen and disappears into the living room at an abnormally slow pace, her cards tucked to her chest and her head lowered.
Hopper sighs and looks at Joyce. “We’ll start here, I guess.”
They don’t really have much of a choice but to start here.
—
Sunday mornings are usually slow, but with only one kid—the kid who sleeps like a damn rock when she’s in the right conditions (in Hopper and Joyce’s bed, fan on low, under the blanket that smells of both her parents)—it’s slower than ever; agonizingly slow, even.
As per usual, Hopper finds himself waking up a little after eight with his daughter sprawled out beside him and his wife missing in action. Joyce loves her quiet time in the mornings and will force herself out of bed at an unreasonable hour in order to make that happen for herself, so he’s not at all surprised by the fact that it’s just him and Jane left behind.
He scrubs a hand over his face, watching the fan spin on low speed. He notices little star stickers on the blades, shimmering silver and purple in the sunlight every time they make a pass over his eyes.
Yeah, Jane is extremely bored.
For a minute he contemplates turning back over and going back to sleep. Joyce is probably enjoying her peace and quiet. There’s no need to disrupt that, especially when she’s been trying to adjust to not having to mother three kids all at once. He also knows that, once he’s up and moving, Jane won’t be far behind him, and he would rather her be unconscious than yearning for her friends’ attention.
He gives himself another ten minutes. The birds start singing outside his window, and now he’s up; not because he allows the birds to tell him when it’s time to get up, but because he can’t stand the sound of those little shits.
Now he’s up. Jane doesn’t move when he leaves the bed (he double-triple-quadruple checks), much to his relief. He moves quietly yet quickly out to the hallway, shutting the door behind him. He presses his ear up to the door, listening for movement, and when it doesn’t come, he sighs and stalks out to the living room. The first thing he does is swipe the remote off the end table and flick on the television because he can’t handle radio silence. And the next thing he does is stub his toe on the foot of a playpen.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” he howls.
A baby—a real-life baby, not baby Michelle on TV—starts wailing. There’s a crash in the kitchen followed by rushing footsteps barreling into the living room. Joyce runs in, a piece of cloth, decorated with little pink hearts, thrown over her shoulder and a wet baby bottle in her hand.
“Hop! You scared the baby!” she scolds, wielding the bottle at him.
“Baby?!” he exclaims. Sure enough, there’s a little baby wiggling around and kicking in the playpen. It’s wearing a simple pink onesie and white socks. “What kind of Upside-Down shit is this? I was asleep for nine hours, not nine months, Joyce! And we’re too old to do this all over again!”
“Would you stop shouting before you wake up Jane?” Joyce grumbles as she scoops up the baby, who’s now reduced to just fat tears spilling from her dark brown eyes and little hiccups leaving her pink lips, and brings her to her chest. “This is Claire. The neighbor’s baby girl. Her parents had an emergency to deal with in Muncie. They asked if we could watch her until they get back in town tomorrow morning.”
“The neighbors…who we only know in passing…handed you their baby and said ‘see you tomorrow’?” he asks, genuinely perplexed. “Maybe I’m just not awake enough yet to wrap my head around this.”
“Maybe not, but she’s here, and we’re going to make do until they get back,” Joyce says, starting to bounce and sway, that dormant instinct being reborn as she looks at the curious little babe in her arms. “Aren’t we, cutie?”
Claire coos, nuzzling Joyce’s chest with her little button nose. Joyce smiles and presses a kiss to the fuzzy brown hair, taking a deep inhale like it’s cocaine.
“Oh, I’ve missed that baby smell so much,” she gushes. “Will had this powdery smell, no matter how long it had been since a change. It was faint but always there. I would just sniff him if I was ever sad, or when Lonnie was being an asshole. Gave me a little oxytocin boost.”
Hopper goes to say something witty, but if he’s being candid, he also yearns for the smell of a baby. Sara always smelled sweet and milky, both like soft baby powder and her mother’s milk that never seemed to spoil when it dribbled from the corners of Sara’s mouth as she fed. Diane kept her bathed and powdered, even if the amount of powder could have been considered too much. It was never too much for Hopper.
“You wanna hold her?” Joyce asks. She knows the answer, already coaxing the baby into Hopper’s arms.
He takes the wiggly little girl into his arms. She can’t quite support her own head yet, so he’s careful about nestling her neck in the crook of his elbow and keeping the other hand under her bottom. She blinks up at him, the same way Jane does when she’s wanting his attention, those eyes so full of wonder.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done this,” he admits, never looking up from the baby, in case she might vanish like Sara seemed to do. “I’m surprised I still remember.”
“Muscle memory,” Joyce says. “It’s like riding a bike; you might think you’ve forgotten, but the brain remembers.” She pauses, watching him rock on the spot. “I was afraid I’d forgotten, too. But then I held her and it all came back to me like I’d never left the postpartum stage. I just imagined my two babies and what it was like back then. And then it all fell into place.”
“Yeah,” Hopper agrees. He finally looks up. She’s staring with damp eyes. “It’s like holding Sara again. Except she was a little heavier at this age. The kid ate like a damn horse, and if you dared try to take her off the boob before she was finished, I swear she tried to bite.”
Joyce bursts into laughter, having to stifle it with the burp cloth so she won’t wake Jane.
It’s too late for that, though. Jane is already standing in the little nook between the hallway and the living room, staring in a very peculiar manner as she approaches her parents, who seem to be having fun without her.
“Is that a baby?” she asks.
“Yeah, it is,” Joyce says as she wraps an arm around Jane’s shoulders and guides her closer. “Her name is Claire. We’re going to take care of her until her parents get back in town.”
Jane leans into the baby’s face, close enough for Claire to get a whiff of morning breath. She inspects her like a cat with its kill, narrowing her eyes when Hopper nuzzles Claire’s soft spot. She turns to face Joyce, who’s looking awfully hopeful and excited that Jane now has something to hold her attention and maybe brighten her a little bit.
“When is she gonna go back home?” Jane asks, frowning.
The smile slides off Joyce’s face.
Well, there goes that idea.
—
Claire has a bottle right before noon, when Jane is sitting cross-legged on the couch with a paper plate that holds her lunch, which consists of a turkey sandwich, an apple cut into six slices, and a handful of potato chips. Joyce has been busy with the baby all day and let Jane handle her lunch on her own, but Jane doesn’t mind that. What she does mind, however, is the fact that her dad is in his recliner with Claire on his shoulder as he’s vigorously patting her back to get the burps out.
“Come on, kid, you gotta burp,” Hopper encourages, putting down the empty bottle. “You ate a lot. A whole six ounces. You’re gonna blow up, kid.”
Jane stuffs an apple slice into her mouth, glaring at the TV. She’s watching Jeopardy! and genuinely trying to beat the contestants to the answers, but all she can hear is the firm patting and Claire’s little baby noises and her dad making small talk with something that can’t even respond.
“Dad,” she says.
“Yeah?” Hopper asks, still trying to get at least one belch out of the baby. “What’s wrong?”
“Can you turn the volume up?” Jane asks, nodding to the remote that’s sitting next to the baby’s bottle. “Can’t hear.”
“I’m busy right now, kid,” he says, shifting Claire over to his other shoulder, in case the left has some magic in it. “You know where it is.”
Jane doesn’t know how to react to that. She sulks for a moment before getting up and putting her plate on the coffee table. She swipes the remote hard enough to accidentally tip the baby’s bottle over. It lands on the carpet but doesn’t shatter.
“Careful, Jane!” Hopper says, trying to balance Claire on his shoulder and reach down to grab the bottle. He’s not quite there. “Can you grab it for me? I need to wash it.”
“You know where it is,” she mumbles as she sinks back into the couch. “I’m busy right now.”
She turns up the volume a little; not loud enough to disturb anyone, but just enough that she can actually hear the clues. She doesn’t notice the bewildered look on Hopper’s face as he’s leaning back in the recliner, bottle forgotten.
Joyce comes in with a clean Pamper and a container of Baby Fresh wipes. She doesn’t seem to detect the plaintive look on her daughter’s face as she perches herself on the arm of the recliner.
“Once she’s burped, she needs to get changed, and then she needs her nap,” she tells Hopper.
“If she would burp, that is,” he mutters. “I’ve been at this for ten minutes.”
As if on cue, Claire belches loudly and out of her mouth comes a stream of spit-up that reeks of regurgitated Enfamil. Fortunately the burp cloth absorbs most of it, only a smidgen landing on Hopper’s shirt. He chuckles proudly and hands her off to Joyce.
“I knew I still had it,” he says, kicking back in his chair.
“Let’s get you cleaned up and ready for a nap, little miss,” Joyce coos as she grabs the diaper bag from the floor and makes her way to the bedroom with the baby tucked to her chest.
Joyce doesn’t re-emerge until twenty minutes later, sans baby. Jane relaxes a little. Maybe Claire got beamed up into space or something. That’s an interesting thought.
“She’s sound asleep,” Joyce says as she sets the baby monitor down on the coffee table, next to Jane’s half-eaten sandwich that’s gone soggy. “I forgot how cute babies are when they sleep.”
“They’re the cutest when they’re quiet,” Hopper chuckles.
Well, now Jane’s going to be quiet for the whole damn day.
—
Babies sleep a really long time, Jane thinks to herself at half past two in the afternoon.
She’s bored with the TV now. She didn’t finish her lunch, ended up tossing it all in the trash at the end of Jeopardy! when Joyce and Hopper went into the kitchen (with the baby monitor turned up loud and stuck between them both).
Now she’s standing on the back of the couch, putting star stickers on the blades of the ceiling fan. She runs out when she’s two short, so she climbs down and goes down the hallway to her parents’ bedroom, where she remembers leaving another sheet. The door is shut, which is unusual this time of day. She goes in anyway and finds Claire sleeping in the little divot between her mom and dad’s respective sides of the bed.
“That’s my spot,” she huffs.
Even if she’s pissed off about a stinky baby marinating her spot in the bed, she tries to get back on track. She recalls shoving the sticker sheet in Joyce’s nightstand when she heard Hopper coming down the hallway yesterday. She walks around the bed and wiggles open the drawer that definitely could use some fixing. She plucks her stickers out from between a pack of cigarettes and a weird silver packet and starts wiggling the drawer back into place. It refuses to move past the first inch, so she shoves it, and a picture frame that holds a Polaroid of her and her brothers tumbles off and crashes to the ground.
She holds her breath for three seconds, and then—
WAHHH!
Claire’s flailing around and screaming, and in an instant, Hopper and Joyce are running in. Joyce scoops up the baby and immediately starts trying to soothe her with a pacifier, coaxing it into her mouth until she latches and starts suckling. She remains calm and collected despite the wailing that eventually dies down into soft, anxious snuffles against Joyce’s breast as Claire nurses on the latex nipple.
Hopper, on the other hand, isn’t at all calm and collected. He’s upset. Jane looks up at him, a guilty gleam in her eyes as she puts her hands behind her back and rocks back and forth on her heels.
“I needed something,” she says.
“The baby was asleep,” he grits. “Babies need their sleep.”
“I didn’t mean to wake her up,” Jane says, honestly. She pauses, thinking about what’s bothering her. “She was in my spot. That’s my spot.”
Hopper doesn’t know what to say to Jane that won’t end up coming out in yells and shouts. He doesn’t want to scream at his kid, but he’s just so angry that she would do this. He and Joyce worked tirelessly to get the baby down with a full, comfortable belly, and Jane just ruined it.
“Jane, go to your room, right now,” he eventually decides to say, because it’s better than GROW THE HELL UP!
Surprisingly, she doesn’t argue. She hangs her head and leaves the room, her stickers clutched tightly in a trembling hand. It takes ten seconds for a door upstairs to slam and shake a picture frame on the wall.
“Hop…” Joyce murmurs quietly, still rocking Claire with that maternal touch of hers.
“I know,” he says, just as quiet. “I’ll handle it. You take care of the baby.”
He doesn’t give her the time to retort. By the time she even thinks of something to say, he’s already following behind his daughter. He stalks up the old stairs and walks all the way down the narrow hallway to the last door on the left. The wood is covered in star stickers that are positioned in a way that make up the letter “J.”
It takes a lot of courage to knock, but he does. It’s muted and simple. He doesn’t get a response, so he sighs and closes his eyes.
“Jane, can I come in?” he asks. Nothing. “I promise I’m not mad anymore. I just wanna talk to you, kid.”
There’s some shuffling and then the door opens. Jane doesn’t say anything as she walks back to her bed and plops down on it, wrapping her arms insecurely around her middle like a kicked dog. Her sticker sheet is beside her, forgotten.
“What’s wrong?” he asks as he pulls up her desk chair beside the bed and takes a seat. “You look pretty sad there.”
“You’re mad at me,” she mumbles.
“Not anymore,” he says. “I mean, I was, a little, when I saw you woke the baby up. But not anymore.”
“I didn’t mean to.” Her face is so sad and her eyes are wet. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” he replies. “You haven’t been around a lot of babies, huh?”
Jane lifts her head. “Never. Not allowed to touch the babies in the lab. They cry and cry all night. But you cannot touch or look. They are hiding. You can only hear. You listen until they stop crying. Then, you go to sleep.”
Hopper’s heart twists. It’s new information, probably something that’s been laying dormant in this child’s head forever. If he could go back and kill Papa—Brenner— with his own hands, he would.
“You didn’t know,” Hopper says. “That she would wake up, I mean. You only see babies on TV. Those babies are actors; they are on camera, so they don’t cry a lot.”
Jane nods. “Didn’t know.” She sniffles. “You sleep even when there are loud noises. I thought…babies are the same.”
Babies haven’t been to hell and back or consider a hail of gunfire a lullaby, he thinks.
Jane’s shoulders stutter. “I’m sorry. I was…jealous. Of the baby. I was jealous of the baby.”
Hopper tilts his head. “Why?”
“Because…” She takes in a big breath, trying not to cry even harder. “Because I never had a mama or a real papa. Joyce loves the baby, and the baby has a mama and a papa, too. And Will and Jonathan got to be babies with a mama. I didn’t.” She wipes her face with the back of her arm. “And…you were ignoring me when I was talking to you, ‘cause you had the baby. You said you were busy.”
Hopper exhales the breath that’s been stuck inside him. Of course it all comes back to Brenner and Terry Ives. It all comes back to Jane’s creation and the torture she endured as a lab rat. And if Hopper could have raised her from the moment she came out of her mother, screaming her little lungs out but otherwise unscathed and perfectly healthy, he would have. But if he could really build a time machine, Terry would have been able to raise her daughter the way she was meant to. Hopper would have never met Jane, and that’s a scary thought, but it’s one he could make peace with if it meant that this little girl wouldn’t have been so abused and neglected until she fell into his trap.
“I did say that,” he admits, trying to shake the feeling of ants crawling up his neck. “The baby needed my attention right then, kid. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I could have been nicer, maybe. You didn’t understand why I said that. But I promise that I wasn’t trying to ignore you. Babies are a lot of work, and they need a lot of attention and care. It’s a lot more work than having a dog or a cat. At least with those, you can set out some food and water for the day and hope your carpet is still standing when you get back. You can’t do that with babies. You gotta take ‘em everywhere and change them when they start to stink.”
Jane smiles. “Like the trash?”
Hopper snorts. “Something like that.”
Jane falls quiet for a minute. Her smile is fading fast and Hopper starts to worry.
“You still love me?” she eventually asks, and it’s like he’s being gutted. “Even if I woke the baby up?”
He pulls her into his arms, unable to help himself. “Always, Jane. You could wake up a million babies and I would still love you. And although you never had a real mama or a papa when you were just a baby, I’m here, okay? Me and Joyce love you more than anything, kid. Always. I know Joyce didn’t give birth to you, and I know that I can’t go back in time and fix all the bad things that happened to you, but Jane, I love you more than anything. Joyce and I love you so much, it hurts some days. If I could build that time machine, kid, I swear I’d do it in a heartbeat. For you.”
She melts into his embrace, letting him scoop her up into his lap like she herself is a baby. She’s a little big for this, and it’s difficult to hold her when she’s fully grown and he’s in a teenager’s chair, but it’s only for a second, and then she slides out of his arms and wrinkles her nose.
“Dad. You smell like baby puke.”
—
Joyce is holding a plastic ring of fake keys above Claire, who’s stretched out on a colorful play mat on the floor, when Hopper brings Jane downstairs sometime later. She gauges the situation, trying to get a feel for Jane and Jim before she says anything. Much to her surprise, Jane sinks to the floor next to her mother and peers over the baby with her curious brown eyes.
“She likes you,” Joyce tells Jane. “Babies stare at everything, but they only smile when they like something.”
Claire is grinning, all gums, at Jane. She waves her little fist in the air. Jane catches it, her grip gentle and affectionate. Hopper sits in his recliner but remains on the edge of his seat, leaned in so he can watch his daughter play with a baby for the first time. It’s surreal. Jane is careful but active in attempting to entertain Claire with the keys that Joyce hands her.
“Get the keys, baby,” Jane encourages, shaking them in the air.
Claire squeals, batting at the keys. Jane leans in a little more, and Claire swipes at a chunk of her hair, tugging it from the root and pulling.
“Ow, ow!” Jane whines. “Mom! Make her stop!”
Helping Jane get her hair untangled from the iron fist of a baby, Joyce chuckles. “They like to do that, too.”
Finally free, Jane sits back, the keys discarded on the play mat. “Babies are mean.”
“She’s just curious,” Joyce says. She pauses, hesitant. “Maybe you would rather hold her? It might be harder for her to reach your hair that way.”
Jane considers it, thinking hard. “What if I break her?”
“You won’t,” Joyce promises as she lifts Claire into her arms. “Hold out your arms a little, with your elbows a little bent.” Jane does just that, nervous but willing. “Good, now I want you to keep her neck supported in the bend of your elbow…that’s it.” Now, Claire is fully transferred into Jane’s arms, with Joyce’s support. “And the other arm needs to support her bottom…very good, sweetie.” Joyce completely lets go. Jane’s holding Claire all by herself. “That’s just beautiful.”
Hopper feels himself getting misty-eyed. He plays it off as an itch, rubbing the feeling away.
Jane bounces a little, smiling at Claire. She leans into her ear. “You’re cute. But don’t forget, you’re going home tomorrow.”
—
At eight the next morning, the Weisses call the landline and tell Joyce that they will be home in the next hour, that they’ve stopped for gas and can’t wait to see Claire after a full day of being away, and they profusely thank Joyce for her last-minute help.
Joyce and Hopper start packing all the baby things away, and it’s bittersweet. Hopper stares longingly at the tiny knitted booties and the matching bonnet before he tucks them away in the diaper bag. Joyce is reminiscing, too, dragging her fingers along the embossed numbers and lines on the baby bottles that she hasn’t had the pleasure of washing or filling in some seventeen odd years.
They decide it’s best to just wrap up this trip down memory lane as quickly as they can. Once everything is packed up and the playpen has been dismantled, they go over to Claire, who’s been snoozing in her stroller after a morning bottle. Her pink, round cheeks are decorated with star stickers.
Joyce and Hopper share a look before stating in unison, “Jane.”