Chapter Text
1979
This was the second time it had happened this month.
Joyce had been looking forward to today all week, because it was the one day her shift ended early, the one day she’d be home in time for dinner, just her and her boys. She’d bought all the ingredients for a real meal, and yesterday she’d even brought carnations home from work for the center of the table. After much digging around the back of the hall closet, one of her mother’s old vases was proudly unearthed, dusted off, shined up and everything, for the honor.
She’d planned the day carefully, optimistically, around the prospect of driving the boys to school and picking them back up afterwards. Drop off Will first at the elementary school, and then Jonathan at Hawkins Middle. Work the afternoon shift. Take her paycheck quickly to the bank. Drive home, picking them up in reverse. She’d have just enough time to squeeze it all in.
All week, she’d looked forward to it being a nice surprise for them in the morning, this announcement that she’d be driving them to school. Genuine enthusiasm was perhaps too romantic a notion—they were two young boys, after all, who probably didn’t put very much stock into every small ounce of extra time spent together, like she did—but she certainly didn’t think they’d be displeased. It was late November, and the weather was starting to turn.
Besides, it was more for her sake than theirs. The pair of them biking to school all the time, especially in the sleet and cold, made her wary. The only other option was to keep asking Karen Wheeler—who was always willing, but still, it was out of her way—to take them. That was even worse than the bikes. It was the sort of favor that made Joyce’s whole body itch embarrassingly, skin prickling in a way she couldn’t scratch to relieve.
The point was, Joyce had been planning to have a very good day, start to finish. But as soon as she’d woken up, she’d known right away that that sort of luck just wasn’t in the cards.
Everything felt wrong, off, from the moment she blinked open her eyes. The bedsheets, her body wrapped up in them, the dawn light poking in from behind her bedroom curtains, too bright. It had taken everything in her, every ounce of willpower she could muster up, to get out of bed and out to work. Even then, the whole day was a horrible daze—customers talking at her and the clock on the wall barely moving and that damn phone ringing, ringing. Even now that she was home, in the quiet of her bedroom once more, alone, she could still hear that damn phone ringing.
It all felt terrible.
She was terrible.
Joyce Byers was a terrible, awful mother, who couldn’t even muster up the energy to make dinner for her children. Just as dysfunctional as her ex-husband had always accused her of being.
She knew it, she couldn’t stop thinking about it, and yet she still couldn’t find it in her to do a damn thing to change it. It was like her brain had an off switch, and hers was currently jammed somewhere between off and on, stuck permanently in the realm of just not fucking working properly; enough to keep her mind reeling but certainly not enough to signal to her limbs that they needed to move, to trudge out of bed and into the kitchen. To function like a capable adult, a decent mother. No matter how hard she tried to force it, any kind of action, nothing would budge.
Lonnie had other words for her, too. He called her psychotic. He’d told her once, before he left, that she should be locked up in an institution, like her crazy Aunt Gladys. He came right out and called her crazy. Crazy bitch, he said. Deranged.
Things were a lot worse when he was still here. If her mind gave out on her back then, she had to sit with the fact that she’d left the boys alone out there with him on the other side of the door, which made her feel like she’d taken her babies and chucked them into a pit of vipers.
Sometimes she wondered—like a phantom outside of her own body, just an observer—if she’d even notice if he did do something to them, out where she couldn’t see it happening. And if he did, and she heard it, would her brain start up again? Would her limbs be able to move to stop him? To protect her children? Or would she just sit there, cut off from them all? Inert. Frozen. Absolutely useless.
The thought terrified her. It made her wonder if Lonnie might be right. Sometimes, she did feel crazy.
It was horrible being like this. Whatever this feeling was that she got—it overtook her no matter how much she tried to push it down, or shoulder her way past it. This was something all-consuming, inescapable. Worse, she never knew when it was going to sweep over her, or how bad it wasn’t going to get when it did. This wasn’t the sort of monster you could predict, or avoid. You had to always be ready to face it.
Explaining that to her children in any way that might make sense to them felt entirely outside of the scope of her parenting abilities. When she’d sat Jonathan down and tried to, the last time this had happened, the clinical language her doctor had used clammed up in her throat and got stuck there.
Jonathan sat still and as patient as ever, a tiny frown on his face, just observing her. At last, she decided to borrow the words from Will’s science book. His class was learning about invasive species, and he’d been all too eager to pass on this newfound knowledge to the rest of his family.
“It’s like…I’m Australia,” she told Jonathan carefully, swallowing each word. “And sometimes when I wake up, or even sometimes in the middle of the day, it’s hard to know when it’s going to come on… Just…sometimes. I look down and I’m covered head-to-toe in rabbits. And I don’t know how they got there, or how to get them to go away. Do you…do you see what I’m getting at, sweetie?” She searched her son’s face for any sign that he understood this, despite how insane she knew it sounded.
Jonathan, bless him, nodded solemnly. He understood her. Of course he did, because he spent more time with Will than she did. Or maybe because he’d just seen it happen too many times before.
“It’s disruptive to the environment,” Will’s tiny voice had chirped the Monday prior, overemphasizing the syllables in every word, “because the rabbits don’t really belong there.”
Disruptive to the environment. Didn’t belong. Yeah, that sounded about right.
Jonathan took her hand and assured her everything would be okay, as though he was the parent and she the child. This is still better than when your father was here, she thought, desperate to believe that was true. A not-so-small part of her wanted to ask him, but seeking reassurance from her 13-year-old that she wasn’t a complete failure didn’t seem like something the parenting manuals would recommend.
Just like an invasive species, whatever it was that had taken up residence inside of her head wasn’t leaving her anytime soon. In fact, in wake of Lonnie’s departure, it was now reproducing in alarmingly quantities. These…episodes…they were happening more frequently. Too often. She couldn’t stop it from happening, though, couldn’t even slow it down, because the rabbits had already built up their home and made themselves comfortable in it. She was the one who needed to learn to adapt.
So far, that part wasn’t exactly going well.
From her current position lying rigid atop her bedspread, she could hear the boys on the other side of her bedroom door. Will and all his questions, Jonathan’s hushed, patient responses. “Hey bud, why don’t you draw Mom a picture for when she feels better?”
Will’s response was too quiet for her to make out. That wasn’t unusual, exactly; both her boys were quiet souls. Something about it still made her worry. Maybe Jonathan had just told him to whisper. She hoped it was that. She hoped nothing bad had happened at school. If she were a better, more competent mother, someone like Karen Wheeler, she’d have already asked.
“Yeah, I know she’d like that,” Jonathan’s voice encouraged. A scuttle of retreating feet, and then both their voices became too distant for her to hear.
Joyce kept her eyes closed and hugged her elbows against her chest, hiccupping back a cry. Because she couldn’t find her keys, and had already been running ten minutes late to work, they’d had to take their bikes to school after all. By the time she came home, she was so bone-tired she wasn’t sure she’d even managed hello.
She didn’t want to think about the how upset Will had looked when she’d announced, distantly, that she needed to lie down for a while. Jonathan had had to jump to the rescue again, taking Will’s arm and pulling him towards the kitchen. She’d heard him whisper something about dinner as she went down the hall.
She wasn’t quite sure how much time had passed since she’d been in here resting. All the rest in the world couldn’t help with whatever was wrong with her, but at least being horizontal after spending the week on her feet was a small physical comfort. If only she could shut off her mind for the next half an hour or so, too, maybe then she’d still be able to salvage some semblance of an evening, for the boys. But it was easier said than done; her mind went on swirling.
The first of the month loomed over her like a perpetual dark cloud. At Melvald’s, she’d spent half her morning at the front register staring at the date on the calendar—glaring at it, more like, in the futile hope that would push it further out of view. She’d spent the other half restocking shelves while regretting buying those flowers, as if the $3.75 she could have saved was the very thing toppling the entire budget over the edge. They’d probably be wilted before she could even get out of bed long enough to enjoy them. The hideous vase would be shoved right back to the dark corner of the closet, from where it had come.
Rent, food, the electricity bill, the water bill. Joyce would scrounge up the money somehow, she always did. Still, she couldn’t help but let it sow the seeds of resentment already inside of her, that building anger that rose up whenever she remembered it was all up to her now to do everything by herself. To raise this family alone. That hadn’t been part of the deal, and the reality of what it meant was beginning to feel insurmountable. Before, Lonnie sure as hell couldn’t be counted on for a damn thing as a father, but he did contribute something to the bills. Whatever else, he’d kept the roof over their heads. How was she supposed to keep doing this without him?
It was a thought that made her even angrier, this time with herself for having thought it in the first place. She shouldn’t wonder for a single second whether she needed him. Lonnie was long gone, and they were better off without him. That was what she’d told her mother on the phone the day after he walked out on them, and she needed to keep believing it. The idea of begging him for help now that the bills were coming in was completely unthinkable. It’d be like an admission of defeat, a kind of forced surrender. Beyond that, it was exactly the sort of thing he was dying to hear from her, and Joyce refused, she absolutely refused to give him that. She would never allow him the satisfaction.
The man in question had called her up again last night. He seemed to pick up the frequency of his outreach at the end of each month, knowing it increased the likelihood of catching her off her guard. That alone made Joyce furious, but there was little she could do about it. If she demanded he call her less, he might stop calling her at all. She didn’t want to be the one to do that to her sons.
So they’d argued. It was well over thirty minutes before she finally hung up on him, and she’d had to speak in hushed tones that entire time because the boys were already asleep and it was late—after her shift kind of late—which was far too fucking late for a real conversation. That was the first thing she’d told Lonnie off for after answering the phone.
From there, the conversation carried on down a predictable road.
“Joyce,” he said to her, his voice sickly condescending down the line, “I can tell you’re freaking out again. If you need a break, a few days to get back on track, get some food back in the fridge, why don’t you do us both a favor and drop the boys off here with me, like I’ve been telling you?”
…
“Oh come on. You’re going to have to let me see them sometime. They’re my fucking kids, Joyce.”
…
…
“You can’t still be holding what happened last time against me. Seriously? Jesus Christ, you’re so goddamn dramatic…It was a fucking bruise! I told him to go ice it. How is it my fault the kid never listens? And where the hell do you think he gets that from? Anyway, waiting made it look much worse than it was. Gave it time to puff up. I’ve told you a hundred times he was barely even hurt.”
“For god’s sake, Joyce, don’t tell me he’s still crying about a tiny thing like that.”
Joyce swallowed down bile. It hadn’t been a tiny bruise at all, but the soft, pale, precious skin on the inside of Jonathan’s elbow all turned a splotchy muddle of violet and sickly yellow-green, extending down nearly the entire length of his forearm.
The bruise had taken weeks to fade. So long that even the school had noticed, and taken it upon themselves to reach out and question her about it. That principal, the one who made it abundantly clear every time she spoke to him that he thought she was a total nutcase, was the one who made the call. Now she was quite sure neglectful mother had made it onto his list of complaints against her, because when he’d pointedly suggested she come in with her husband to discuss the matter further—a little more rationally, were his exact words—Joyce had hung up on him, too.
As for Jonathan, he’d told her the same story as Lonnie when she’d pressed him. Lonnie was showing him how to do something or other on the car that he thought every thirteen-year-old boy should already know. Jonathan was clumsy. The prop rod slipped. He’d caught the edge of the hood in his elbow. Just an accident. He’d be more careful next time. He’d get it right.
The explanation sounded innocent enough, like it could maybe even be truthful. The problem was that Joyce had no way of knowing for sure. Of her sons, it was Will who was the terrible liar, and Will hadn’t been there for her to be able to beg and plead the truth out of him. Jonathan, on the other hand…Jonathan was trickier. He didn’t tell her as much as his brother did. He never had. So she couldn’t be sure.
The possibilities were driving her crazy.
“I’m not stopping you from seeing them,” Joyce had barked back at her ex-husband. “I told you to come here for a visit. Will wants to see you, you know. It’s been months.” This declaration was met with silence. Joyce pressed harder, “He must have asked where you were about half a dozen times on Thanksgiving. Or have you forgotten you’ve got two sons?” Fucking asshole.
All the accusation served to do was to start a different, but equally familiar argument. When the excuses began, that was when Joyce finally had enough. She couldn’t stay quiet, keep calm, if she had to keep listening to that man spin everything she said into a million webs. So instead she’d gone to bed, and woken up with all the same problems this morning.
This was killing her.
Whatever she did, she couldn’t stop thinking about Lonnie and the bills, and Jonathan and that bruise, and Will coming home crying from school last week because some of the kids had taken to calling him a fairy, and now it was spreading throughout his grade. She’d need to take as many double shifts as Donald would allow in order to make rent this month, and even then they’d have to stretch what was left in the pantry. Today had been her one chance to spend time with her kids, and she couldn’t even have that. She was so tired.
Joyce’s stomach churned unpleasantly with each rotation of an already well-turned thought. That was the crux of it: she just didn’t know how to stop thinking. For a moment, however brief, she wished she could just sink right through her mattress and disappear altogether.
The soft knock on the door brought her back to her senses. Joyce hadn’t realized the house had gotten so quiet until what little noise the knock generated tore through her careful silence like an atom bomb. Jonathan didn’t wait for her to reply, he let himself slip into her room, making no comment on the fact that all the lights were out and the shades were closed even though it was barely 6:30 p.m.. He pulled the door carefully shut behind him and padded to her bed in his socks, propping himself on the edge of her mattress. Then her scanned her quickly up and down, as if he needed to reassure himself she was still in one piece.
Joyce hastily made to lift herself up from the pillows, trying to make it easier for him. “Jonathan, baby—”
“Can I bring you dinner?” he interrupted, before she could say more.
“Dinner?” She blinked, confused. “Did you already eat something? I was going to make—” She tried to remember what it was she’d bought all those ingredients for. The recipe was somewhere in the basket on the counter from when she’d written out the grocery list….
“It’s okay, Mom. It’s almost 8 o’clock.” Eight? That hardly seemed right. How long had she been in here? “I made Will and I mac-and-cheese. Do you want me to bring you some?” He was staring at her with big eyes, so serious and determined they seemed almost out of place on his young face. She could picture him outside, mentally rehearsing these questions, and swiped frantically at her eyes to stop another wave of tears. “You should eat something,” he pressed her.
Joyce frowned. “No. I’m sorry sweetheart, I’m just not feeling very well right now.” She reached out to take his hand in her own clammy one. “Thank you for feeding your brother. I’ll make it up to you both soon.”
They both knew that was an empty promise, and it clearly wasn’t the preferred answer, judging by the way his shoulders slumped and his expression fell. “Okay. Do you want me to bring you some medicine?”
Joyce’s mind went to the bottle of pills behind the mirror in the bathroom. She only took them when it scared her more not to. They made her tired and unfocused and apart from herself like a ghoul. Like she wasn’t even living her own life. She shook her head again, not quite able to meet her son’s eyes.
“Okay,” Jonathan echoed softly. He’d been sure to keep his voice low this whole time, but his voice still seemed to reverberate around her skull. Her chest was pounding. “Is there anything I can do?”
Joyce forced her eyes up. She’d braced herself to face his sadness, or his confusion. Instead he looked…hopeful. Considering, but not judgmental. Jonathan was taking his responsibility of checking on her very seriously. He was such a good kid. She loved him so much it felt like her heart was cracking into pieces with how much it hurt to let him down.
She couldn’t disappoint him again. “Tell me something good that happened today?” she settled for asking. It was the only tangible thing she could think to grasp on to.
There was a pause. Jonathan’s mouth pursed in quiet, concentrated thought. “Well,” he began, features brightening, “Will was partnered up with Lucas for his science project.” His smile widened to a more natural one as he continued to talk all about his brother, and Lucas, and their ideas for this project. Will felt bad because Mike had been assigned someone else, someone not nearly as good as Lucas, so he wasn’t letting himself be as excited as he otherwise might have been. But Mike was being pretty magnanimous about the whole thing. In the end they’d decided they’d all just help one another, even if it meant doing the work for two projects instead of one.
Joyce let Jonathan’s voice wash over her until her heart didn’t feel quite so much like it was about to race right out of her chest. After that, she began actually listening to the words.
It’s nice that Will has such good friends, she thought distantly. She hadn’t been able to grasp onto every detail, but from the sound of it she could tell that this was the intended main takeaway to Jonathan’s story. Lucas and Mike were just as interested as Will was in things like invasive species. It was important to have friends like that.
She reached out to squeeze Jonathan’s hand. “Thank you,” she whispered. To her own surprise she did feel marginally better, especially when this gesture earned her a small, proud smile in return. Jonathan squeezed her hand back. When he came back with a bowl of mac-and-cheese, she did her best to eat it.
...
In all the times that followed, all the times she asked that same question of her oldest son, he never once answered with something about himself. Tell me something good, she’d say, and Jonathan’s reply was centered on Will. Will’s perfect mark on his reading quiz, the new drawing Will had done at the kitchen table after school (“and I think we should get him new crayons for Christmas, Mom. When he drew you he had to make your skin green.”), the new friend Will had made at school—a boy named Dustin—whose presence in the group evened out their numbers and made it so that nobody would have to be left out anymore when they partnered up for science projects.
Will, Will, Will.
Jonathan was so proud of him, and Joyce was proud of Jonathan for caring so much, for being such a good big brother. How many thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds paid that much attention?
It didn’t occur to her what that meant for Jonathan, not until much later. By then it was 1983, and Will was missing, and Joyce was staring at a whole pile of photographs—good ones, really good—spread out all over their coffee table, feeling totally numb. And she realized she’d missed not one page, but a whole chapter. That it had been too long since she’d asked him the question, and even if she did…without Will, well, he was no longer likely to answer her at all.
1987
It started with something Karen said to her in the kitchen.
Well, not really. It actually started a few weeks beforehand, when Joyce first confided in Hopper that she thought Jonathan was acting strangely. They were in the tunnels, testing the network out against the map of Hawkins they’d spent the past month and a half drafting. Hop came to a full stop. When he turned to meet her gaze, he looked almost amused. “Well yeah,” he said, fond in the way that meant he was humoring her, “All that pot he’s been smoking will do that to a kid. I gotta say Joyce, I'm a little surprised you let him—"
But Joyce didn't hear the rest of the sentence. Pot. The word seemed to land with a clunk on the floor of the tunnel, where it sat heavily between them, impossible to ignore.
Apparently, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to her, because about two seconds after seeing the expression on her face he followed it up with a frantic, “Shit…don’t tell me—you didn't know about that?”
She very much had not.
Her son had been getting high in California. In fact, this was pretty much the defining characteristic of his time in Lenora, per El’s recollection. When Hopper had asked her what she thought about having brothers, on one of their first nights back home in the cabin, she’d told him innocently enough that Jonathan spent most of his time smoking his funny, smelly plants. She’d conveniently left out the part where he’d instructed her not to tell Joyce, and she only added it in when Hopper circled back that night, at Joyce’s insistence, for a round of follow-up questioning.
It didn’t take much racking of her brain for Joyce to see the truth in it. Actually, she thought miserably, the whole thing shed a lot of clarity on their time in Lenora. She supposed she hadn’t been paying as much attention as she should have been, firstly because of her own grief on top of managing El’s, making sure the girl was back up on her feet enough to attend school, and then because of well, everything else. There’d been her new job, which paid decently for once but demanded more of her time and energy than ever. And of course the kids.
El struggled with her grades, with making friends, with being so far away from Mike. Then there was Will…detached, moody, more distant than ever. By comparison Jonathan seemed far better off. She knew he missed Nancy, of course, but he kept himself busy with school, with applying to college. He’d even made a friend. At the time, Joyce had felt relieved that at least one of her children was adjusting well to the move. Still, she had met Argyle. She should have known better. She shouldn’t have been so oblivious.
Later, lying with their legs tangled together in his bed, Hop tried to reassure her it wasn’t that big of a deal. Joyce thought he might just be saying that because this was the part of the evening where there were usually a lot less layers of fabric between them. Instead of savoring one of the few rare moments they actually had to themselves, he was stuck in an endless loop of talking about her children with her.
Lots of teenagers smoked weed. In Hawkins alone, Hop insisted, there were hordes of these pot-smoking teenagers running amok, gathering at places like Lovers Lake or Skull Rock to smoke, carefully keeping this all from their parents. He’d caught them at it while out on patrol. And because he was a generous man (well, usually) most of the time he just let them off with a firm warning. Not a big deal. Remember the sort of things they used to get up to when they were in high school? Typical teenage behavior.
Nothing about Jonathan screamed typical teenage behavior, Joyce pondered absently. But she kept that to herself, and chose to believe that Hopper was right and it really was nothing. She pushed down the small voice in the back of her mind screaming at her that this in fact was a very big deal. She tried not to think about Lonnie and his alcohol, or about the cigarettes in her own jacket pocket, and how many times Jonathan and Will had begged her to quit. Come to think of it, Jonathan hadn’t done that lately.
She tried not to think about El saying he’d been high all of the time.
She tried not to linger too much on how much she hated herself for not noticing.
Instead, she resolved to fix it. To pay closer attention, and confront him. Only, she hadn’t caught him smoking in Hawkins. Maybe he only cared to do it when Argyle was around, and now it no longer held any interest. That’d be good, right? I’d mean he was only having a bit of fun, messing around like Hop had said, not forming long-term habits. Harmless.
Whatever the reason he’d stopped, she wasn’t about to question it. It was easier to forget she’d ever found out. Let it go. Move on. Reassure herself that Jonathan was fine. He’d always been able to take care of himself.
That’s what she’d thought, anyway…until Karen.
They were standing side-by-side in the Wheeler kitchen, Joyce having stopped short at seeing Karen framed in the doorway, sipping something that almost definitely wasn’t water out of that flask she kept in the pocket of her frilly apron. She was staring at the mound of dishes in the sink from breakfast, just looking and drinking. Ted was nowhere in sight. He must’ve already left for work.
And look, Joyce was well aware that she wasn’t exactly the ideal houseguest. In the four months Karen and Ted had been letting her and the boys stay here, she could count on one hand the amount of times she’d stuck around to help with the dishes. She knew that was a dick move, obviously; she wasn’t that clueless. It was just that she’d decided that there were worse offenses than being a bad houseguest when you stepped back and looked at the bigger picture, and she was pretty sure that if Karen knew the truth, she’d agree with her.
Joyce needed to make it to Hop’s cabin every morning before the Squawk broadcast, so she’d know if there was going to be a crawl. So she could check in on her daughter.
But Karen didn’t know, and couldn’t know, the truth. The other woman thought it was work Joyce was always dashing off to. Probably, she excused a lot of Joyce’s rudeness under the assumption that Joyce was working so hard to reach the point where she would no longer have to impose on Karen’s household at all.
Joyce felt bad about that, too. She tried to make it up to her by bringing the Wheelers some of the things Murray snuck in for them—an extra dozen eggs to supplement what they could get on ration, the good wine that rarely appeared on the barren shelves of Hawkins’ couple of supermarkets. It wasn’t enough, but Karen seemed appreciative all the same. Joyce would make it up to her properly later, when this was over.
But this particular morning, something was different. Karen just looked so…done. Over it. Doing the dishes, cooking the breakfasts, taking care of two families. She looked she was ready to call quits on the whole operation. To throw in the fucking towel. And Joyce had had her fair share of those days, hadn’t she? She could hardly, in good conscious, walk away.
“Care for some help with those?” She broached, feigning cheerfulness as she stepped into the kitchen. Her eyes gravitated immediately towards the time blinking green on the stove’s small digital clock, and she did her best not to flinch in reaction. It was already ten minutes past the hour. This would be easier if she could just ask Karen to use the phone, call Hop and tell him she was going to be late. He always freaked when she was so much as five minutes outside of their schedule. It was honestly a bit annoying (Joyce wasn’t one to talk, she knew. But god that man kept her in good company when it came to his capacity to worry.)
She couldn’t ask, of course, and she couldn’t call. Karen didn’t even know Hop was still alive, and the phone at the cabin had been ripped clear out of the wall for everybody’s safety. So Joyce turned the tap and poured in some dish soap to fill the sink. The faster they got this started, the faster she could leave.
“Thank you, Joyce,” said Karen, her surprise unmistakable, “Are you sure you have the time? I wouldn’t want you to be late for work….”
Joyce grit her teeth and started scrubbing with an almost frenetic energy. It was difficult to talk to Karen these days, frankly, because of how the guilt kind of caught her on all sides. It wasn’t just that Karen didn’t know that there was no place of employment Joyce needed to urgently attend to; it was that Karen didn’t know a damn thing. She didn’t know her own kids were in mortal danger, and Joyce couldn’t tell her, let alone apologize for allowing it. What was she supposed to do with that except run from it?
“If Paul’s got a problem with it, he can shove it,” she bit out instead, with a bit too much angry gusto. Paul was her imaginary boss at her imaginary job. She worked at the supermarket on the far edge of town, ostensibly. That was how she got her hands on the extra eggs and bread and wine. “I’m sorry, Karen. I really should be helping you out more around here. It was so kind of you to let us stay.”
Karen shrugged. She plucked the soapy plate out of Joyce’s hands to rinse it. “Stop apologizing, Joyce. You and your kids are not an imposition.” (They most definitely were.) “You would have done the same for my family if we needed it.” (Thank god they never had.)
Joyce tried to imagine Ted Wheeler sitting at her old kitchen table with the fraying checkered tablecloth and her scratched-to-hell cutlery, eating off her mismatched serving dishes. She couldn’t do it. It was too outlandish. “Still…you shouldn’t have to do this all on your own, every single morning.”
Karen frowned. “I don’t. Actually, Jonathan usually sticks around to help, but I needed Nancy to take Holly to school today since Mike and Will went in early.”
Joyce stilled at the mention of her son. “Jonathan? He does?” She didn’t know that. She was always out the door as soon as breakfast was over, and she always assumed whatever kids were left in the house were sure to be right behind her. The only reason she’d even seen Karen standing there this morning was because she’d needed to run back upstairs to retrieve her other pair of shoes, since it was raining.
The guilt tugged her down again. Here she was, four months into this arrangement and it had only now occurred to her that she ought to be helping out more; meanwhile, Jonathan had been handling it all along. Again.
Shit.
“He’s a godsend, your son,” Karen continued, smiling fondly. “He’s always so helpful, so polite.” She lowered her voice a notch, even though no one else was home to hear, “I know I’m not supposed to have any opinions on my daughter’s dating life, she made that much very clear to me when back when she was dating that Steve Harrington. But for what it’s worth, I’m glad she and Jonathan were able to patch things up again after the whole college debacle. They’re good for one another.”
It was a though Karen had just overturned the sink full of sudsy warm water on top of Joyce’s head; she was that caught off guard. College? What was going on with college? Well, besides the fact they weren’t there right now, as they should be. That much couldn’t be avoided, though, in the current circumstances. It was certainly no cause for a debacle.
The alarm must’ve shown on her face, because Karen hastily added, “Sorry, I don’t mean to dredge it all up again now that we’ve finally moved on from it. Those few dinners…icy, to say the least.” She shuddered, taking another dish from Joyce’s hand and wiping it dry. “I told Nance, just because you’re not going to the same school together, it hardly means the world’s ending. You can still be together. But Nancy, you know, once she sets her mind on something…” She shook her head, thoughtfully. Then her eyes snapped down to Joyce, who was still frozen stiff. “Joyce? Are you all right?”
“Not going together? What do you mean?” Joyce replied dumbly, the words thick in her throat. Even if Jonathan’s acceptance letter was currently stuck in a California letterbox, he would apply again once this was all over. That was his plan. The plan that he’d told her, anyway.
Karen’s face morphed into a frown. She set down the bowl and wiped her hands on her apron. “Well,” she said, almost defensively, “I understood once I talked it over with him why Jonathan would want to stay here. But their situations are hardly the same, Joyce. Nancy needs to get out of Hawkins. It’s what best for her.” She crossed her arms, as if expecting Joyce to argue this point.
But Joyce could only blink back stupidly. Jonathan, stay here? Not likely. He’d been trying to leave this town ever since the Christmas he’d met Joyce’s cousin, Diane, who was briefly returned from New York City for the holidays. On their way home, he’d proudly announced to the car that he’d decided he was going to go to NYU when he was older, too. It was all he could talk about for weeks. Jonathan was six when that happened. Six years old. What six-year-old knew where they wanted to go to college? Her son, that’s who.
“Karen,” she said tightly, bracing herself for news she wasn’t likely to want to hear, “I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about.”
She kept going over it in her head.
It just didn’t make sense.
It especially didn’t make sense that Karen—fucking Karen Wheeler—seemed to know all about it, and she didn’t.
Jonathan, not go away to college? Jonathan choosing to stay in Hawkins? No chance. None. Karen must’ve been mistaken. Nancy must not have told it to her right. Or maybe it was Nancy who hadn’t understood Jonathan. Except that hardly made sense either. Nancy and Jonathan were practically glued at the hip. Or, they had been glued at the hip, the last time Joyce had thought to pay close attention. How long ago was that? She wasn’t really sure of anything at the moment.
“Joyce?” asked Hop, “Did you even hear me?”
She shook herself out of her thoughts and back to the present. Jim was beaming, his smile almost an exact mirror of El’s beside him. His hand was outstretched to show her the stopwatch. “She beat her last time by five whole seconds.”
“Oh. Wow!” Joyce did her best to sound as enthusiastic as she normally would have, “That’s great. So great. Amazing!” Okay, geez Joyce. Overkill. Definitely overkill. Their grins were already rapidly slipping from their faces.
“Um,” His eyes flittered over El’s, who shrugged back in shared confusion, “Why are you being so weird all of a sudden?”
“Sorry. It’s been a weird morning.” Joyce ignored his look of concern. She turned to their daughter. “Look, El, when we were in Lenora, did Jonathan ever say anything to you about college? About his Emerson application or…anything?”
El forehead scrunched up while as she thought it over. “He was waiting,” she told her. “Waiting for his letter.”
“Right! Exactly!” She nodded her head so aggressively it made her a little dizzy. Then, softer, more to herself than anything, “He applied. I know he applied. He told me he applied.”
But had he? Truthfully, she couldn't remember with any certainty. Maybe all along she'd just been remembering what she'd wanted to hear.
El and Hop were exchanging funny looks, saying something again. Finally, Hop’s hand reached out to graze her arm. The touch usually helped her focus.
“What’s going on, exactly?” he asked gently, pulling her slightly to the side. She peered at him, her beacon in the storm. The lines at the corners of his eyes were crinkled in concern, in the way that made her want to run her hands over his skin and soothe away all his worry. But he looked good. Safe. His hair was growing back in, the buzz lengthened enough for strands to brush the tops of his ear, and his cheeks looked fuller, too. His arms were firm when they wrapped around her, and his hands, though heavily calloused, were no longer cracked raw and bleeding. El wasn’t the only one whose training was paying off; he was getting stronger again, too.
It was reassuring to mentally check off these boxes on her imaginary list. Taking inventory of the man had become her own little daily ritual, proof that when she forced herself to leave him in the evenings, he’d still be intact for her tomorrow. Now it made her heart sink. Had she been spending too much time here? So focused on one half of her family that she wasn’t paying enough attention to the other half when they needed her?
“Nothing’s going on,” Joyce answered him finally, patting his hand in reassurance. She glanced at El, who was fixing her shoelaces for another run. She could only do one thing at a time, and right now, El’s life certainly mattered more than college. Whatever was going on with Jonathan, it would have to wait another day. “Let’s set it up again,” she said firmly. Then, to El, “Five seconds, did he say? You’re making this look too easy. We might have to go up a level after lunch.”
El grinned. “Add the second ladder?”
“After lunch,” Hop emphasized. “If you’re still up for it.” The worry was still written all over his face, but Joyce breathed a sigh of relief. He’d agreed to let it drop for the moment. “Well go on then, get your stretches done. We’ll run this through one time more.”
Joyce and Hopper walk back through the course, taking turns resetting each obstacle. Both of them were silent. When they returned to their watch post though, after Hop signaled to El that the timer was starting, his free hand came to rest on her back. It didn’t leave. Joyce let herself lean into it.
It was nearly a week before he brought it up again. They were sitting on the steps that led up to his cabin, passing a cigarette between them. El had pushed herself too hard on the second ladder, strained her ankle. She was inside resting with one of the few remedies Joyce actually felt equipped to provide for her: a simple ice pack.
It had been another long day.
“You’re still acting weird,” Hopper told her, taking another drag, more focused at staring at the smoke than at her. Or at least, that’s what he wanted her to believe. “Too quiet lately.” He was doing that thing again where he tried to act super casual in a poor attempt at masking the churning worry painted all over his features. She was no better. Every time she wished him an insufficient good luck or said come back safe before watching him disappear on another crawl, it felt like she’d been caught in a lie.
She frowned. “Quiet? I’m just thinking.”
“I’d believe that, except that you’re usually more of the think-out-loud type.” He leaned over, nudging her lightly with his shoulder. “This have to do with what you were quizzing El about the other day? Something to do with Jonathan, college…?”
“Something like that,” she admitted, taking back her cig. “I know you think it’s dumb, worrying about college right now. I get that we’ve got bigger problems.”
“You haven’t even told me what the deal is, yet,” Hop retorted defensively. “At least give me a chance, here!”
Joyce rolled her eyes at him. Shrugged. Here she was, dutifully playing her part. Carrying on like it wasn’t really a big deal, after all. She didn’t know why it was still so difficult to just admit that she was drowning over here, to Hop of all people. Something about this quarantine had her all stir-crazy, she guessed. If she gave in to crying about it now, she didn’t think she’d ever stop, and then what good would she be to anyone? “Karen, she told me the other morning that Jonathan never applied to Emerson.”
“Emerson? That’s that hoity-toity school in Boston, right? He was going with Nancy, to study journalism.”
Joyce’s chest did a little flip at the words. She would never have expected him to remember that. After all, she’d said it while dumping nearly a year’s worth of information on him about the kids, on their way back from Russia, when he was already exhausted and injured and seemed minute-by-minute even more on the verge of passing out entirely. She’d mostly kept on talking—about anything and everything she could think of, including Jonathan and Nancy’s college plans—to try and keep him from fading out of consciousness. She certainly hadn’t expected any of it to stick.
A little smile graced his face. She didn’t get to enjoy that enough, so she soaked it in while she had the chance. “See,” he said, raising a brow at her, “I do listen when you talk.”
“You’re learning then,” she smiled back. Her shoulder pressed fully against his, like he was a whole mountain she could lean into to not fall, and her head momentarily dipped down to rest on him. “It’s not about just about Emerson, though. Karen told me Jonathan’s planning to stay in Hawkins after the quarantine’s over. After this is over.”
Hopper didn’t say anything, but he did hand her back the cigarette. She took it gratefully, straightening back up enough to take a dreg.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she continued, the frustration seeping through her each word. “Jonathan has been running from this shithole ever since he first saw the ‘Leaving Hawkins’ sign and figured out there’s somewhere beyond it. He’s not…I don’t want him to stay here.”
“Well…does Jonathan know that?”
Joyce stared at him blankly.
“I just mean…Look, I don’t know him as well as you do, obviously; he’s your son. But I have gathered that he’s a lot like you.”
“Willing to throw away his dreams to work at Melvald’s for the next twenty years?” she snorted humorlessly. God, it sounded even bleaker when she said it out loud. She was not going to let that happen to her boy. She would not let him get stuck here.
“Protective,” Hopper corrected firmly. “And stubborn, too. And after what you three have gone through—what all of us have gone through—it’s no wonder.” They were silent again for a while, each lost in their own thoughts. Hop had that distant look in his eyes when he started talking again, the one that meant he was halfway with her and halfway somewhere else. “After the war some of the guys, when they got back, they found it hard to go back to regular life, you know? It’s like…there’s always this feeling you can’t shake, a dark cloud looming over everything telling you there’s something bad right around the corner, just waiting for you. Maybe he feels like that. Like it won’t actually be over when it’s over.”
Joyce shook her head forcefully, not because she thought this was a wrong assessment of Jonathan but because she was desperate to will that feeling out of her son, as if she could do it by the force of her determination alone. “No,” she said resolutely, “We’re going to end it for good this time. We have to.” There was no second option. It was now or never.
“Yeah, we’re going to.” He snuffed out the cigarette and took her hand, rubbing the back of it. “We’re fucking going to. Joyce, listen to me. I am going to do whatever it takes to keep you and your kids safe. And if I end up lucky enough to come out the other side of it, I swear to you I’ll work hard to get Jonathan to finally believe me when I say that. Maybe then it’ll be a little bit easier for him to go, okay?”
Joyce couldn’t help her wince. Karen had put it kindly, too. “I know how hard the last few years have been on you,” she’d said, laying her hand over Joyce’s in a comforting gesture. “With everything that’s happened with Will, it makes sense he’d want to stick close.” It all sounded the same to Joyce’s ears. It meant that she’d failed. She’d let Jonathan hold things together for long enough that he was now too afraid to leave them. What kind of mother let that happen? And it wasn’t just since they’d encountered the Upside Down. It wasn’t just about Will. This had started long before Will’s disappearance.
Once, he’d stepped in front of her. He couldn’t have been more than eight. She recalled it with a sick twist in her chest, the memory bobbing unhappily to the surface from the depths to which she’d long since shoved it. When Lonnie was sloshing around a beer bottle and had already given her a shove, there was Jonathan. Spindly legs, striped pajama bottoms a few inches too short because they couldn’t afford new ones until Lonnie cashed his next paycheck. He’d stepped in front of her.
Whatever Hopper said, his assurances, his presence, it wouldn’t make a difference. She appreciated the sentiment, truly, but it definitely wasn’t going to be that easy. Not with her oldest. She shook her head. Tried for some levity in her voice, “Well, I’m not sure….”
Hop played along. He laughed, bringing his free hand to his chest in feigned offense, “What? You don’t think he likes me?”
“He does like you,” Joyce insisted, unconvincing even to her own ears. As a matter of fact, both of her sons were currently giving Hopper a rather frosty welcome home. It was only the promise of seeing El that got them out to the cabin once a week for her enforced family dinners. Joyce supposed it was a lot of change for them at once. “He’s just…he’s Jonathan, you know.” He stepped in front of me once, she didn’t say.
“He doesn’t trust me. I get it, with that fucking jackass Lonnie as a—sorry,” Hop caught himself, shaking his head even though it was what they were both thinking, “Sorry, that’s not important right now. What I’m saying is, I’ll wait. I’ve waited this long to be a part of your family, I’m not giving it up now.”
Joyce’s heart skipped another beat at that. She loved this man, so very much. She’d never been so certain of anyone before. “Jim?” His fingers twitched against her palm. She waited for his head to tilt towards her. Joyce didn’t usually call him that, but she kept it handy in her arsenal to pull out when she needed it, just to elicit this response. It was every bit as good, every time; his whole frame caught off guard, that dopey little half-smile that lit his whole face. Screw it. She didn’t waste another second before leaning in to kiss him.
The kiss still felt new and a little surreal, mainly because she still struggled to wrap her mind around the fact that she could just do that now, after wanting to but holding back for so long, after grieving him. He responded to her with equal enthusiasm, pulling her closer, wrapping his thick arms around her torso and holding him against her. One of his hands brushed under her hemline and traced comforting circles directly against her skin, and she felt some of the pressure that had been building up the past couple of days melt right off of her. Thankfully, the tension didn’t come pouring back the second they separated, either. She got to go right on feeling lighter.
“I have to leave soon,” she whispered regretfully, still only inches from his lips. She wished she could stay, but it was nearly dinner time.
“You’ll be back tomorrow?” His eyes locked on hers, searching. The checklist, the inventory…she supposed it worked both ways.
“Always.”
He released her, letting her scooch away enough to straighten the crumpled front hem of her t-shirt. “Good. You should talk to Jonathan about this college thing. You’ll both feel better.”
Right. Jonathan. The unfinished college applications. Staying in Hawkins for her and Will. She shook her head. “He puts too much on his shoulders. But it’s not his responsibility to take care of me.”
“So tell him that,” Hop reiterated, giving her hand one last squeeze before releasing that, too. “You’re the one always telling me I need to be more honest with El about my feelings.”
“Yeah, but Jonathan’s different, he’s….”
“He’s Jonathan?” Hopper quoted back to her, looking amused.
“He’s a tough cookie to crack,” Joyce found herself saying, borrowing the words from another memory. It was Bob who’d said it to her first, that day the two of them were having their own conversation about her boys. It felt like that had happened several lifetimes ago.
(The thought of Bob no longer made her stomach lurch like it used to, and that wasn’t nothing.)
She stood up. “I brought you Karen’s leftover casserole. Chicken-and-rice something. Heat it up on 350° for twenty minutes.”
“You don’t have to keep doing that,” Hop assured her. “I can cook, you know.”
Joyce patted his shoulder placatingly. “Just trying to make sure El eats something other than waffles every now and again.” This was yet another bend to the truth, but a harmless one. El’s eating habits weren’t what concerned her. It had been four months since returning home, and the man was still far too skinny.
She did mean to talk to him, really. She was just waiting on the right opportunity, her angle. But Jonathan was elusive, and the moment never seemed to present itself. One thing led on to another.
Joyce had taken to watching him and Nancy at the breakfast table. All of them were furiously busy—running back and forth between the school and the radio station and the cabin, that breakfast was the one time a day she could count on to gather any data on the matter.
What she’d learned so far made her more concerned, not less. Karen had told her the kids moved past their rough patch, but it didn’t seem that way to her. Every sign—from the stunted half-answers they gave to one another to the matching morose looks they exchanged when so much as saying good morning—seemed to point in quite the opposite direction.
Joyce was working hard not to jump to conclusions. Still, she could remember the summer, a few years behind them now, that Nancy had spent practically living in Jonathan’s bedroom. Back then it had been quiet whispers behind a closed door that Joyce pretended not to notice, and lipstick on Jonathan’s cheek that she wiped away before he went out the door, and Nancy politely complimenting Joyce’s terrible attempt at chicken ziti while Jonathan and Will tried not to laugh behind fists pressed to lips.
Jonathan and Nancy had always been holding hands, and they’d practically melded together on the couch during movie nights, and they’d looked happy. That was what Joyce remembered most of all: that Jonathan had never seemed happier. That fact alone made her love Nancy immediately, even before she’d gotten to know the girl’s many other, equally commendable qualities.
Except, now neither one of them seemed particularly happy. If it was just generic unhappiness it might be understandable, given their situation. But this was more than that. There was no constant touching, no fingers finding one another under the table, certainly no laughter. In fact, they didn’t seem to be talking much in general, though their eyes still trailed in each other’s direction to exchange judgmental looks whenever Ted muttered something particularly clueless. Joyce supposed that was something.
Really, she just couldn’t believe it had taken that conversation with Karen for her to start noticing. And she certainly didn’t know how to bring it up with her son. For one thing, it was almost impossible to get him alone. The Wheeler house was never empty, not with two families sharing one space. During the day, while the kids were at school, Jonathan and Nancy were at the radio station, and she was at the cabin. In the evening, they were all stuck in the house together, and tension was high. She wanted to wait to corner him until she had a plan worked out to actually get through to him, but the right idea never came.
Time was acting funny again. The quarantine made the clock seem to tick agonizingly slowly, but the weeks passed by in a blur, and then the months. At first it was okay, when they were busy drawing maps and building transmitters. Then came the long stretch of nothingness… A full calendar year now, and with very little to show for it. Jane had gotten stronger. Hop had filled out again, thanks to the hearty provisions of Karen’s many casseroles and all the effort he was putting in to build back his muscle. But there was no sign of Vecna, which meant no chance to make any progress in their mission to kill him.
Somewhere along the way, Joyce’s unrelenting concern for Jonathan had ebbed to a dull but steady uneasiness, piled over by other, more pressing worries, until it was like a t-shirt she’d miss if only she could remember she owned it, buried as it were at the bottom of the never-ending pile of laundry she never seemed able to work all the way through.
El was over-extending herself, which was in turn straining things between Jane and Hop. Joyce never seemed to have enough time to help either one of them. She felt stretched thin between the two halves of her family—the cabin during the day and the boys at night. Each one demanded her attention, but there wasn’t enough of her to spread around to everyone who needed her. She couldn’t be everywhere at once, and it was killing her to keep on trying.
Will wasn’t doing well, either. Not in the slightest. This was perhaps the most pressing of her many anxieties. Joyce knew it from her morning observations. At first, she’d attributed the bags under Jonathan’s eyes and the exhausted bend to his shoulders to his growing tension with Nancy. Then she started noticing the look mirrored in Will, too. Will, who increasingly seemed ready to topple over at even the meekest gust of wind. Neither one of them had had a good night’s sleep in months, and Joyce knew what it had to mean.
No matter how many times her youngest assured that he hadn’t had that feeling lately, the one that meant Vecna was near, it was never enough to be reassuring. In fact, Joyce couldn’t stand to think about it for longer than five minutes without wanting to break down over what it could mean. Whether Will could feel Vecna or not, it felt bad either way. She couldn’t trust that he would be okay anymore. Not after everything that had happened.
We’re going to end this, Joyce, Hopper had told her, months and months ago. But when? Would it ever really be over?
It didn’t feel like it, lately. It felt like they might be stuck in this horrible cycle forever, and that she was helpless to do anything about it. She couldn’t even be there to help Will through the nightmares she knew he was having. At their old house, in Hawkins, or even when they’d moved to Lenora, they’d been impossible to miss. Her room was only a few doors down from her youngest son’s, thin walls all that separated her from her child who had a tendency to wake up screaming. She and El and Jonathan, they had all heard, every time. They had all shown up in Will’s doorway.
Things were different, now. Will was different. He no longer wanted all of them gathered around his doorway. And like his brother, she knew there were more and more things he wasn’t telling her, compared to the things he was.
When they’d first sorted out living with the Wheelers, Will had been absolutely adamant about sleeping in the basement, even after Mike offered to roll a cot into his bedroom so he could bunk in with him. It can be like a sleepover, extended indefinitely, Mike said, grinning. Will’s refusal had been so loud and adamant, before she or Karen could get half a word in for or against, that Joyce knew it wasn’t entirely to do with only his nightmares.
But he was definitely still having them. And now that they were separated not by walls but by floors, Joyce could no longer spring up to comfort him. Jonathan could handle it. He was handling it, of that she had no doubt. What she hated was that he was doing it alone. It made her feel like she was trapped in her bedroom again, motionless as the whole world swirled around her.
Neither of the boys ever told her when it happened. She had to conclude that it had been another sleepless night at breakfast, from the tired slump to their bodies and their detached responses to the conversation. Not knowing the extent of it made it worse for her. It added to the already insurmountable pile of worry-laundry. And she was powerless, absolutely powerless, to do anything to work through it.
All any of them could do was wait.