Chapter Text
Down a shabby street in Boston, Massachusetts, there was a condo. And inside the condo, on the fourth floor, there was an apartment. Now, you couldn't reach said apartment via elevator, as an elevator had been provided only a couple of decades after the condo had been built, and, because it had been installed outside of the house, piercing holes through the walls of the available landings, it only stopped by the first and second floor. It wasn't ideal, but both inhabitants of the little apartment on the fourth floor were rather young, so they just treated their daily climb as some heavy jogging.
Inside, there were two bedrooms, a blue-tiled bathroom, a minuscule living room, and a fairly stocked kitchen. Laundry baskets, clean and dirty, sorted by colour and type, lay waiting by the bathtub. Piles of dishes were stacked neatly on the counter, dying to be placed back inside their cabinets. Pastel-tinged walls hosted photos spanning a little over a decade, along with painting prints and magazine cut-outs. One of the two bedrooms was crammed with bookshelves and journals, magazines and newspapers were scattered all around it, cluttering in between books and bedsheets. The other one had rock band posters all over the walls, shoes lingering in the corners, and a concerning amount of cassettes piled over every available surface.
On the wall right behind the couch in the living room, there hung a frame. Crowned by bronzed edges, a richly embossed sheet of paper certified that Nancy Wheeler had, by the authority granted to Emerson College by the State of Massachusetts, graduated with Honors from her Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism.
“Are you sure we need to bring your skateboard?”
Max rolled her eyes. “For the millionth time, yes.”
“We’re only going to be away two weeks.”
“Duh?” Max said in her what-are-you-even-on-about voice, “Two weeks in a three streets town where I’ll bore myself to death. You should be thankful I didn’t pack my cassettes.”
Nancy opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. “You know what? That’s fair, I can’t even blame you,” she grabbed her keys, turned off the lights, and opened the door. “After you, m’lady. But if it doesn’t fit in the trunk, it’ll ride shotgun beside me and you’ll go in the trunk, missy.”
Max beamed. She grabbed her skateboard and hopped out of the door and to the staircase. “Deal!” she exclaimed, throwing herself down to the lobby skipping steps three at a time.
Nancy shook her head, smiling. That kid. Happy to follow her to hell, even if hell meant Hawkins, Indiana.
She locked the door behind her and followed her downstairs. Max was already there, waiting eagerly by the car. “See? It fit in the trunk! Now I don’t have to ride like a dog,” she patted the car and hopped onto the passenger’s seat. “Come on, the sooner we get there, the sooner we get back here.”
“You know,” Nancy said, walking to the other side of the cheap car she’d managed to string back together (after a generous amount of coaxing, both from her and the mechanic) “You may even end up enjoying yourself.”
“In a town full of people I’ve never met?” Max arched a very dubious highbrow. “People who, may I remind you, you have eloquently and frequently described as hateful, ignorant and—what was the other one? Oh, right, annoying.”
“You’re meeting your grandparents and family, I’m hardly ruining your life.”
Max threw her hands up in the air. “Hey, I was excited for the trip before you made it out to be Dante’s Ptolemea.”
Nancy laughed. “I knew I should not have read you the Comedy when you were teething. Never got it out of that head of yours.”
Max slouched back against the seat and smiled. “You know,” she said, “I’m actually kind of buzzed to meet your parents. And your brother and sister.”
“I mean, Holly’ll be around three by now, so I wouldn’t expect to get much conversation out of her. And Mike is…he was three when I left.”
Nancy quietened. The familiar pang of guilt thrummed against her ribs, and a set of questions she knew all too well rode forth in her mind. After all, even now, pushing thirty, she still was the kid who graduated high school with a baby on her hip, and who got the fuck out as soon as she could, paid for her own college tuition and never, ever went back to her hometown in the past seven years. She was the estranged daughter, the forgotten elder sister, the childhood friend her peers would define as “someone I knew in high school”. And that had been her choice. No one else’s.
And when she looked at Max, with her eyes full of life and her head full of smartness, Nancy knew she'd made the right call, all those years back. Still, she couldn't help but tug, sometimes, at the dozens strings she had left untied. She hadn't spoken to her parents in months, when they had last arranged for her long-awaited visit during the course of their yearly Christmas phone call. Mike was still a toddler in her memory, and she knew Holly only through pictures, just as she was sure that to Holly she was no more than a plastered image in old family portraits, dusty and forgotten on the living room mantelpiece.
Everybody else was a vague memory. Shadow-like figures that sometimes lingered in her dreams but that she generally thought of as distant enough to be classified as something more intangible than imagination. Jonathan Byers, for one. Steve Harrington, for another. Barb’s grave. And, of course, Robin Buckley.
“Mom? You okay?”
“What? Yes, yes, I’m okay.”
Nancy shook herself out of her trance. Well, that had been a nice, pleasant, totally not unwanted trip down memory lane. It made her wince to think about the fact it would be reality once again, in a few hours.
She glimpsed at her reflection in the rearview. Short hair, a light brown blazer thrown over tight, tense shoulders, and lines that were just starting to show at the sides of her pursed mouth. She relaxed her lips and tried to unknit her eyebrows. Nancy was about the be twenty-eight. She was far too old to be scared of going back to her hometown.
“Well,” she said. “Hawkins, Indiana. Off we go. Map?”
Max grinned. She opened a huge street map that was taller than her, and slammed a finger right in the middle. “First a left, then a right,” she said. “Then…I’m not sure. But we’ll figure it out when we get there.”
#
Nancy was eighteen the last time she saw her parents. Max was two. They had both already rejected the name Maxine, something that Ted had insisted upon under the pretences of honouring his mother, whom Nancy knew for a fact he hadn't visited in years; in truth, he just wanted to exercise some form of control over the daughter he could hardly understand and that he knew was slipping out of his grasp with every passing second.
The first act of rebellious bonding between mother and daughter had been Nancy calling the baby Max, something boyish and rugged that she knew would send Ted into psychosis if he had known.
God, seven years since she saw him last.
Nancy couldn't say she was sorry about the lost time.
Mike had written lengthy letters since he learned how to hold a pen. Nancy read them carefully, replied to them with equal verbose eagerness, and stacked them into a pile in her drawer, before it got too filled with those thickly inked sheets of paper and she had to move them into a box under her desk. Mike was twelve, just a year older than Max, and he had still not outgrown the idolising his older sister phase. Nancy suspected it had something to do with distance. It engorged affection and hatred all the same.
Mike had actually visited her once. He had been shipped off by Karen and Ted three years ago, when Karen had to stay at the hospital for a week after Holly’s troublesome birth, and he had shown at her doorstep with a toothy grin and a big suitcase. Nancy had looked at him startled when she found him on her doorstep, a bundle of nerves with her own sharp features and inquiring eyes.
Coincidentally, Max had been away at summer camp.
And Nancy remembered being so nervous, maybe even more than Mike, because even if she was raising a kid his age on her own, she had no idea of how she was supposed to behave around her stranger little brother. He made himself quiet and scarce for the first two days, before he opened up and revealed himself for the chatter box he was. Nancy couldn't help but love him. She caved after days of undefeated insistence, and spent a whole afternoon, evening and night listening to him explain the rules to his board game, which he had stuffed into his backpack before he left home. Nancy had been devastated when it was time for him to catch the train back home.
It was luck, indeed, that Max was at that summer camp: Nancy allowed herself to wallow for a whole of four days, limp on the couch eating crap from boxes and watching crap on TV.
And now, before her there laid a road she had only driven across once, eight years ago. Except now she didn't have a whining infant strapped to a baby seat next to her, but a prepubescent girl with fire red hair and a smart mouth. Nancy had to restrict herself from looking over at Max, because the waves of pride that surged through her at the sight of her daughter distracted her from the road.
“You know,” she said. Then she stopped. The words clogged her throat in a way that was almost like crying. Feeling stupid beyond measure, Nancy shut her mouth, hoping that the sounds of the car covered it up. But Max, of course, had heard. She lifted her brows in that perpetually questioning way of hers. “Hm?”
Nancy shook her head. “Nothing, I just—” Her knuckles were pale for how hard she was squeezing the wheel. Her heart was thumping. Her stupid throat was still closed up.
“Mom, are you okay? Do you need to pull over?”
Stupid, Nancy fired at herself. Get your shit together.
“No, no, I’m all right. Thanks, hon. I just—” She took a deep breath in. Deep breath out. Max’s gaze boring into the side of her head was not helping at all, but at the same time it propelled her to stagger out of her sudden idiocy. “I need you to know that I love you, before we arrive.”
Max gave a confused laugh. “Okay? I mean, I kinda figured.”
“No, I—it’s because…before we get to Hawkins, I want you to know that you come first to me. Like, top priority, absolute first thing listed in the list of important things. Number one.” Nancy cringed at herself. Her verbose journalist self had managed not only to say ‘list’ twice in the span of a single sentence, but also to sound like an idiot teenager stammering their way into exhaustion.
“I love you, too, Mom. But you’re kind of scaring me,” Max said. She looked at Nancy. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“This is coming out wrong,” Nancy sighed. She risked a little glance off the road and on to Max. “Listen, what I mean to say is that my parents can be…cruel, when they want to. And it’s not like they mean it, but they are just so pissed at me for running like I did that they say things, and they don’t realise they’re hurting others, because they are hurt themselves. And so, what I’m trying to say here, is that they will say a lot of shit when we get there, and none of it will matter, okay? You know you’re a great kid, and we know we are happy, and our life is great.”
Max looked worried now. “Mom, are you sure you want to make this trip? Because we can turn back now and watch two weeks of TV straight. And eat junk.”
Nancy laughed. “Yeah, I know. But I figured it’s better to rip the Band-Aid off, right? It’s only two weeks. And then,” she wiggled her eyebrows at Max, “Then we have our trip.”
A huge grin spread on Max’s face. “Right. Calvary before Heaven.”
“Well, I don’t know if Disneyland counts as heaven, but my parents’ house definitely counts as calvary.”
Max laughed.
At the end of the day, that was all Nancy held dear.
Max put on a cassette, something from a band Nancy couldn't have named even if held at gunpoint, and rolled down the window. Summer heat flowed into the car, messing up Max’s unruly curls and Nancy’s coiffed hair. Nancy felt a tinge of guilt for stripping Max of two weeks of summer break to bring her into the shithole that was Hawkins, Indiana, but after a moment her mind travelled forward to the three days she had managed to book at Disneyland.
Nancy had worked her ass off to afford it – being a journalist was her lifelong dream, and she loved doing what she did. The Boston Globe paid well, if you could make it to the top, and Nancy was at a good point on her ascent there. But she was not there yet, which meant that in order to afford the vacation she had had to edit drafts and work extra shifts the whole spring. But it paid off, now.
It was a tradition of Max and hers to spend at least a couple of weeks of summer break on the road, driving through the endless paths of the States with no plan, no clue, and not a care in the world. But this year, Nancy wanted it to be special. And Max had been begging her so hard to go to Disney ever since a classmate of hers went, and wouldn't shut up about how great it was, that Nancy felt compelled to make it happened.
The perspective of scream-singing in the car, sleeping in crappy motels and hysterically laughing from delirious happiness and tiredness made her heart swell.
Yeah, she thought, this would be a great summer.
#
This was going to be a shit summer.
Nancy was sure of that. Frozen by the front door of her childhood home, Nancy could not, for the life of her, force her hand up to the doorbell. Why did she agree to this? Where, in the goodness of her heart, had she found so much charitable spirit to say yes to her mother beckoning her home? They had last called at Christmas. Nancy blamed the festive spirit entirely for the stupidest decision she had ever taken.
“So…” Max pulled a sarcastic face that meant ‘you do you, but’. “Are we going to ring the bell, or—”
“This was a bad idea.”
Max shrugged. “Yours, not mine.”
“We should get back.”
“I’m totally down.”
“We should go back in the car, hit the gas, and go straight home. Or to Disney. Would you like to spend a month at Disney?”
“Sure. I don’t know how we’d financially recover from it, though.”
“We’ll probably just move into our mailbox.”
“Sounds festive.”
Nancy swallowed hard. She shook her head, rolled her eyes at herself. Come on, Wheeler, don’t be such a coward. She clenched her fists. Inhaled. “Bullshit,” she whispered before striking the bell with her open palm.
She turned back to Max, a nervous grimace plastered all over her face. Max returned her smile, unimpressed. “That was so dramatic.”
“We can still make a run for it.”
“You’re so funny.”
Nancy pursed her lips. Max looked so much like her in that setting that used to be Nancy’s. Crossed arms, lazy stance, half-lidded eyes. The difference was that Max was actually happy, and just so happened to have inherited Nancy’s attitude. And now there she was, clad in a colourful striped top, denim shorts, all her freckles poking out under the hot summer sun. She was still a good deal shorter than Nancy, at least two heads, but her limbs were starting to get gangly, her face to lose the baby fat that made her cheeks chubby.
They heard steps behind the door.
Nancy had barely the time to process it.
The door swung open.
In front of her, there was no one. Nancy lowered her eyes. In front of her, there was now Mike. Taller than she remembered, but still short, with a mop of dark hair, even darker eyes, and that ever-bewildered expression. Once he had taken her in, his eyes grew twice the size. His mouth opened comically in a perfectly shaped O form.
“Mom!” he screamed, holding onto the doorhandle for dear life. “She’s here! Mom! Nancy’s here.”
And just like that, there was Karen Wheeler, throttling down the stairs. She marched to the door, resting a hand on Mike’s shoulder. He looked up at her excitedly.
Nancy stilled under her mother’s gaze, and for a moment, she was sixteen again. Scrutinized, nervous, scared. Karen’s mouth loosened into a smile. “Nancy,” she said, softly.
Nancy smiled awkwardly. “Hi, mom.”
Karen seemed to move. Then she stopped. Then she must have thought better of it, because she moved past Mike and threw her arms around Nancy who, on her part, produced a kind of humpfing, surprised noise. Her hands stuck limp mid-air until she found it in herself to hug her mother back. Karen held her tighter.
They separated, Karen clearing her throat in a sad attempt to cover up her misty eyes. Nancy staggered back, feeling dumb as hell, and she resolved on grabbing both of Max’s shoulders – eliciting an annoyed yelp – and parading her in front of herself.
Using your own daughter as a shield. Very fucking brave, Nancy Wheeler.
“Mom,” she said. “This is Max. Max, this is my mom. Your, uh, grandma, I suppose.”
“Nancy, I’ve met Max,” Karen reminded her – which, much to Nancy dismay, brought back memories of a led-lighted delivery room, and her crying, and Max crying, and Karen crying, all caught up in a messy hug made of tears and sorrow and happiness. Nonetheless, Karen bent down, hands on her knees, to get on Max’s eye level. “Hello, there. I believe you were about this tall the last time I saw you.”
Karen exemplified what she meant by making a vague gesture with both hands.
“Hi, ma’am,” Max replied.
“Oh, please, none of that. You’ll call me grandma.”
From the doorframe, Mike pulled a face. “Weird.”
“And you’ll,” Karen turned to glare at Mike, “you’ll be nice.”
“I’m always nice!”
A smile tugged at the corner of Nancy’s lips. “I somehow struggle to believe that.”
“Hey!”
Karen rolled her eyes. “You two are too alike for my own sake.”
Mike grunted, but Nancy was struck. She and Mike were…similar? Yet another thing she didn't know, another thing she had missed. For some reason, the idea of Mike being a little menace hidden underneath a nerdy appearance, just what Nancy had been, made her feel a quiet form of pride. And sadness. Sadness, mostly.
They followed Karen inside, and the familiar smell of home hit Nancy like a truck. She had grown so used to it as a teenager that she barely paid any attention to it, but it now seemed so strong, so persistent. Her heart skipped a beat. Calm the fuck down, Nancy thought to herself, you’re not in the trenches.
“I thought you guys could settle in Nancy’s old room,” Karen was saying, “I was going to propose the basement, but—”
“Mom! I need it for the Party!”
“—but Mike and his friends apparently cannot live without it for a couple of weeks.”
“It’s all right, mom,” Nancy said. She exchanged a confirmation glance with Max, who smiled up at her nodding. “Max and I are used to being a little bit tight. We’ll fit.”
Karen arched an eyebrow. “Tight? In what conditions is my granddaughter living, Nancy?”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “Oh, quit. She has her own bedroom, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just meant we don’t need a castle-sized room, that’s all.”
Mike grunted. “Yours is the biggest bedroom in the house. I tried to take it, you know? But mom wouldn’t let me.”
“Why not?”
Karen pursed her lips, her gaze wandering away into the distance. “It’s just too much work to have it all painted again and the furniture rearranged. Plus, your room is huge, Michael, I don’t think you have any grounds on which to complain.”
Nancy went along with it, even if she privately thought that Karen was lying, to some degree. The Wheelers were well-off – rich, even, compared to Hawkins’s standard– and the house was huge, so there would have been no problem at all in making Mike sleep on a couch while they repainted her room. Still—
“Why repaint the walls?” Max asked, interrupting her flow of reasoning. “How bad can it be? Oh.”
Karen had opened the door to Nancy’s childhood room right in front of her. Suddenly, it was as if their vision had turned pink. Because everything was pink. From the flowery wallpaper to the bedsheets, to the little pillows and stuffed animals. Her books were still arranged by author, her school texts piled neatly on a shelf. On her desk, there lay a couple of notepads, her lamp. A generous number of flashcards was tucked into a jar set on the corner of her desk.
It was like she had never left.
It was like she had gotten up right there in the morning, made her bed with maniacal care, skidded out to meet with Barb, or Steve, or God knows who, and came back to find out that Karen had wiped the floors and cleaned the windows, relieving her from some boring chore she might have had to do in the afternoon.
Not a single speck of dust in sigh, not an item in a foreign place.
Nothing had changed, in Nancy Wheeler’s childhood home.
“Oh,” Max said, again. “Oh, wow.”
“Yeah,” Nancy breathed. “Wow.”
She had a feeling the reasons for their surprised differed greatly.
Max hopped inside the room, inspecting every inch of it and marvelling at every embarrassing reminder of Nancy’s teenage taste in décor, and giggling when Mike came up to show her his favourite things – complete with Nancy’s ballerina carillon and James Dean posters.
Nancy lingered by the door. Almost shoulder to shoulder with Karen, but not quite. “It looks like I died,” Nancy said. Oh, fuck. She only meant to think it. That was not a sentence Karen Wheeler was willing to come to terms with.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean,” Nancy bit the inside of her cheek, damning herself, “I mean, it’s just weird you kept everything as it was, like, even kept it clean. That’s what parents do when their children die. Or…”
“Run away,” Karen completed for her. “Have you considered maybe I just hoped you’d be back?”
“I’m sorry, mom, I…”
“No, you went straight to death, right? Maybe I wouldn’t have bothered to clean it, had I know it’d be seven years before I saw you again.”
Karen hadn't yelled. She hadn't scolded. Her voice was ice, leaden. Still, Nancy felt as if she had been screamed at. She hugged her torso and shrunk against the doorframe.
#
Dinner was a quiet affair. It often was, at the Wheelers. And God, it was like being sixteen all over again. Except, this time it was even weirder, because Mike wasn't a child, and he sat slumped and quiet on his meal, dragging his fork through mashed peas, and Holly was an uncharacteristically quiet toddler: on her high seat, she accepted Karen’s scoops of mash pliantly.
Nancy, straight and rigid on her chair, exchanged glances with Max, who kept looking back at her nervously. She wasn't used to this. Quiet eating. They always chatted about anything – Max’s days, Nancy douchebag colleagues, the sitcom they were watching – and Nancy had made sure to never make Max feel like her opinion was unwanted, or unnecessary. But that was how dinner at the Wheeler’s was.
Ted, who had barely said two words when he saw his estranged daughter and granddaughter, had the day’s newspaper open in front of him, to the point it covered his face up to the eyebrows. He ate methodically, mechanic, long gestures that denoted a sheer disinterest in anything that was going on at the table.
Max raised her eyebrows and shook her head, questioning. Nancy shrugged, replied with her best it-is-what-it-is look. Max’s eyes widened in disbelief. Nancy wasn't sure whether to feel sorry or vaguely amused. She was about to pull a face, just to see Max snort into her mashed peas, when something shifted.
Karen set down the spoon, letting Holly to feast on her corn, and turned to Max. Horror movie-like, in Nancy’s opinion.
“So, Max.”
Oh, Christ.
“Tell me about yourself. How’s life in Boston?”
Max glanced at Nancy, who nodded imperceptibly. She faced Karen with a nervous smile. “Oh, I mean. It’s cool,” she said.
Karen raised an eyebrow. “Cool?”
“Yeah, I mean, I love it. Mom’s got this new fancy job at the newspaper, so we bought this new giant TV, and I got a new skateboard,” Max beamed at Nancy.
“New fancy job?” Ted quipped, and this was definitely aimed at Nancy.
“Oh, Max loves to say it. It’s…nice. It’s getting me where I want to go.”
“All right, no business at the table,” Karen hushed him. Ted huffed and buried himself back into the newspaper. “Now, Maxine,” Max scowled, affronted, “I’m really glad to hear about your…television and skateboard. But how’s school? Are your grades good? Do you take any extra classes?”
“Oh, I like school,” Max nodded, brightly. “Mom read me so many books when I was little than I aced English Lit, top of the class without even trying. The rest of the classes are good, too. Well, I don’t really like Maths, but it’s okay. I don’t plan on getting a Maths degree in college.”
“Oh? Thinking of college already,” Karen seemed oh-so-pleased. “Well, what are your aspirations? Ivy Leagues, perhaps? I always hoped one of the family could go to one.”
“I mean, I don’t know about that,” Max laughed, “That’s, like, insane. The fees they have? Way out of proportion. But I’d like to study English literature, if I have the chance. Or Psychology. Something like that.”
Ted scoffed from behind the paper. Nancy knew that scoff. Nancy recognised that scoff. Ted Wheeler just so happened to think that his children – and grandchildren, now – would only be worthy if they decided to become doctors, or lawyers, or fucking astronauts.
“Oh!” Karen exclaimed, taken aback. “Well, that’s nice! I’m sure there’s an Ivy that offers something like that! You know, I always hoped Nancy would go to Yale, and now Michael—he’s so fond of science, he might just get into Princeton, or something…”
The bell rang.
Nancy whispered, “Thank fuck,” at exactly the same time as Mike’s, “Thank Christ.”
If Karen’s eyes could shoot fire. “Language!” she hissed.
Mike had already jumped off his chair and ran to the door. Nancy heard some commotion, little bodies hugging little bodies, and then a hustle of children stampeded into the living room. Mike, followed by three little boys.
“Guys,” he panted, “This is my sister, Nancy. And this is my…niece, Max. These are my friend. This is Dustin,” a gummy grin and a mess of curls, smiling up at Nancy as if stunned, “This is Lucas,” a grin and an awkward wave, “And this is Will!” an excited wave from the tiniest twelve-year-old Nancy had ever seen, with huge eyes and an absolutely endearing bowl cut. Also, eyes so big and curious that Nancy couldn't help but wonder…
“Byers?”
The child, Will, startled at the strength in Nancy’s voice. He nodded.
Of-fucking-course.
Nancy tried to played it cool. “Oh, all right. I know Jonathan. Well, knew Jonathan. Anyway. Nice to meet you, guys.”
“Yeah,” Will said meekly, half distrust and half curiosity in his voice, “Jonathan’s my brother.”
“Figured.”
“Hey,” one of the little boys – Lucas, Nancy recalled – said straight to Max. “We’re going to Mike’s basement to play some D&D. Wanna join?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, I can, right mom?”
Nancy smiled at her fondly. “You can. Have fun, hon.”
She watched the lot of them scurry off to the basement. When she turned back to the table, Karen had an expression of mild disappointment painted all over her face. “Well, there goes dinner with my granddaughter. Might as well call it a night.”
“Gee, mom, now I’m flattered,” Nancy retorted, voice flat and unimpressed.
Exhausted, tuning out Ted’s grumbles about dessert, she slouched back on her chair.
#
The boys were apparently just plotting, and not playing an actual campaign, because by ten-thirty they had all been summoned back to their respective homes, Mike had been commanded to bed by Karen, and Max had said she was sleepy and retreated back to Nancy’s very pink bedroom, with the promise to show the Party all her skateboard tricks in the morning.
Nancy lay on the couch, a book in her lap, trying to coerce her brain into understanding what she was reading. But she had went over the same sentence over four times, and the words still failed to coagulate into coherent patterns. Her mind kept running off. To her room, perfectly kept, and to Max, enthusiastic about the Party, and to her mother, bitter and hurt. Nancy was sure, she was so sure that she had made the best choice for both her and her daughter in leaving. She knew it, she couldn't be riddled into feeling guilty about that. Still, she wondered. Had she been wrong in keeping Max away for so long? A visit once a year couldn't hurt, right?
Then, her brain tracked back to Ted’s eyes glued to the newspaper, to Karen’s obsession with grades and school, with Mike’s sad eyes when he looked at their parents and Holly’s quiet presence, despite her young age.
No, Nancy thought. Definitely not wrong.
The bell rung.
Nancy stretched her neck left and right, but the living room was empty. Ted had gone to bed, and Karen had muttered something about a bath after the children had been sent home. Groaning, Nancy pushed herself off the couch. Book still clipped between her fingers, she dragged herself to the door and swung it open.
In front of her, there stood Robin Buckley.
“Oh, fuck.”
Robin’s eyes grew thrice their usual size. “Nancy?”
Nancy gaped. The words had been shocked out of her system. Robin was…well, she was Robin. That in itself was off-putting enough. Except, she didn't look like Robin. The gangly, awkward teenager with choppy hair and a wide grin had turned into an adult, and that adult was beautiful. Her hair was longer now, wavy, honey-coloured. She was in overall, and underneath she wore a flowy white shirt, and she—Nancy forbade her brain from producing the word angelic, but it sure appeared somewhere in there. And, Nancy liked to think she had a way with words, really, because that was what she had built her career around, but now, standing three inches away from Robin Buckley, all she could really muster was, “Your hair.”
“Your hair!” Robin shot back.
Out if instinct, Nancy ran a hand through her own hair, short and coiffed. “Yeah. I guess.”
Lame.
Robin slipped inside. As soon as she closed the door behind her, she sagged against it and exhaled, incredulous. “I can’t believe it,” she said, “Nancy Wheeler. In the flesh. What are you doing here?”
“I should be asking you that,” Nancy retorted. “I mean, what are you doing at my house?”
“Oh, nice.”
Nancy winced. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right, blame the shock. I’m here on postman duty, by the way,” she raised a hand and Nancy noticed the tape she was clutching. “Steve borrowed it from Dustin, and he told me he’d be at your brother’s tonight, and I work nearby, so I thought I’d—yeah, I’m returning a movie. Is Dustin here?”
“You just missed him,” Nancy said. “Here, you want to sit down? There’s some chamomile, or coffee, or whiskey.”
Robin scoffed. “Can I have a combo? All in one cup, please.”
Nancy’s lips stretched, just a bit, a ghost causing them to tingle. She staggered back into the living room, and plopped down on the couch. Robin, stiff, took the armchair by the mantelpiece. Now, Nancy recognized her. In the way she shuffled to find a comfortable position, just to look uncomfortable as hell anyway, in her eyes darting all over the room, in her fingers nervously fidgeting with the cassette.
Tension crackled between them like static electricity. Nancy felt it in the buzz that seemed to emanate off Robin, and in the thrum of blood inside her own ears. Years spanned between them and filled the distance between their bodies. It felt almost wrong, unallowed, to have Robin Buckley back in her space, all out of sudden. Oneiric, even.
“So,” she said. “Nancy Wheeler, back in Hawkins. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“Can you…maybe stop saying my full name? It’s weird.”
“Ah.”
“I’m here with my daughter,” Nancy caved. “Mom wanted to see us, and I could not come up with an excuse for the eight year in a row, so. Here we are. We’ll be here a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will not hate me for wasting her summer break.”
“Summer break, wow. How old is she?”
It was impossible to decipher the look in Robin’s eyes, but Nancy knew, God, she knew, deep in her guts, that she was bluffing. Robin had Max’s birthday engraved in her brain, even if Nancy couldn't prove it.
“Eleven,” she said. “Just turned. Early May.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.”
“Right.”
Nancy lowered her eyes to her hands, clutched together and torturing the skin around her fingernails.
“You didn’t think to call?”
Robin blurted it out. Nancy could tell she had only meant to think the words by the way her entire face scrunched up in regret, and Robin sucked in her cheeks as if stopping herself from saying more. She hadn't changed, and Nancy could still read her.
“I—” Nancy, taken aback, stammered some incoherent noises. “I, well. I didn’t know if you’d want to know.”
Robin cocked her head. “Please.”
A rush of irritation clogged up Nancy’s throat. “And, pray tell, what was I supposed to say? Call someone I have not heard from in eight years just to tell her I was swinging by?”
“And who’s fault is that, Nancy? Why haven’t you heard from me in eight years?”
Oh, so they were diving straight in. Great. Nancy had only been awake since the crack of dawn. She was not tired at all. Peachy, in fact. Fucking thrilled.
“Don’t do that,” Nancy wasn't sure when things had escalated, nor how it happened so quickly, but there they were. There was fire in Robin’s eyes, poison in her voice. And it was so different from the Robin she knew, so uncharacteristic a look for her, that she struggled to pierce the two together. Robin and the anger. “For all I knew, you could’ve left Hawkins.”
“Yeah, because that’s so easy. We don’t all have daddy’s trust fund, Nancy, and you know it.”
“Oh, I know it all right,” Nancy snapped, suddenly furious. “Because I certainly don’t have it, and I have actually worked my ass off from the fucking second I left this town, so don’t throw that excuse at me, Buckley, it’s only making you look stupid.”
“Good for you, then!” Robin threw back at her, “The prodigious child, behold!”
“I’m sorry, why are you doing this? Why are you so pissed at me for not throwing a fucking party about me coming back? It’s only two weeks, Buckley, don’t get your hopes up.”
“Oh, wow,” Robin said, chuckling. “Wow, that was low. And also, not at all how I remember things going.”
“How do you remember things going, then?” Nancy shot out of her chair, every muscle in her body tense and sizzling with rage, “Please, enlighten me, because I have been wrecking my brain trying to understand.”
“I remember you telling you loved me, and then sleeping around with half of Hawkins! I remember you getting knocked up, and I remember you pretending I didn’t even exist! And I remember you fucking leaving the day after graduating and never coming back. And I remember you not saying a fucking goodbye!”
Robin was standing, too, and tears swelled at the corners of her lashes, and her face was all red. And at the sight of her, angry, destroyed, sad, Nancy hated herself with a burning passion. Because she did that. She was the great architect and the great destroyer, the goddamn demiurge who planned all of this, and made it happen. And now, Robin was a wreck, and she was, too.
She granted Robin the privilege of not being watched in a moment of weakness by turning to face the couch. Her blazer lay there, crumpled from the long drive and all the times Nancy had pulled it tighter around her frame. Behind her, she could hear Robin shuffling.
Realizing she was still holding her book, Nancy dropped it on the couch. It produced a soft thud.
Robin sniffled, not allowing her tears to fall, and she pointed a shaky finger at it. “Steinbeck, huh?”
“Never read it before. Figured it was better late than ever.”
“Never?”
“I was busy raising a child.”
Robin nodded. “Yeah. Well. Quite a pleasant night, I have to say. Will you…tell Mike I’ve got Dustin’s tape? Or…give it to him. I don’t know.”
“Give it to him sounds good,” Nancy agreed, suddenly eager to ease things into some sort of truce. A dull ache panged inside her ribcage. She ignored the raspiness of her own voice, and the way her eyes prickled with tears. She watched Robin set the tape on the coffee table. Nancy hated to be the reason why her hand was so tremulous. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The words stung on her tongue; the muscles of her cheeks ached to form them. But she would not. Her mouth felt full of cotton.
“Well, then I’m going to go…”
But before Robin could finish the sentence, a thunderous sound came from the stairs. Earthquake was Nancy’s first guess, before Max and Mike burst into the living room with all the grace of a dozen bulls. Max was still wearing her denim shorts underneath a pyjama top, and Mike clutched a walkie-talkie that looked huge in his spidery hands, half his face, really. They were both panting, and exuding a terrible, primal fear.
Nancy had a split second of thinking that maybe they had heard them fight, before Mike caught his breath and began shouting.
And from his tears and his yells, from Max’s helpful corrections, from the static noise crackling through the walkie that was in contact with Luke and Dustin’s places, Nancy managed to make out one single sentence.
“Will is missing.”