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Will knew he had been the one to put the boxes away in October. Three of them, sealed with brown packing tape and stacked in the back of the closet in the spare room. He didn't open that closet often, and it was intentional.
It was April now, 1993. Almost six months since October.
The spare room had stopped being a spare room not long after he and Mike moved in together. One wall was covered in sketches taped edge-to-edge, another crowded with finished illustrations with stolen milk crates full of records and cassette tapes stacked against it. There were reused jars full of brushes and half-used paint tubes on every available surface of Will’s desk. Mike's own desk was pushed into the corner next to his, four feet between them, close enough to talk without raising their voices.
In the closet, shoved behind extra bedding and cleaning supplies, were three boxes labeled Joyce's things in his mother's handwriting.
There was a mug of coffee quickly going cold in his hand as their heater had been less reliable every day (it seemed like that was maybe normal for living in New York City, you had to choose a few things that you were able to tolerate in order to find a good place to live). It was actually why he was here, he’d come in for an extra blanket, that was the plan. He hadn’t made it there yet.
He opened the closet door and felt like someone took a shovel to his chest, digging into it in a way that was almost familiar now.
Joyce’s things
It was written in thick, black marker, the same handwriting that had been on grocery lists and birthday cards his whole life. She’d labeled it herself, before. The words she used often were “just in case” like she was mentioning off-handedly that it was going to rain. Like it was something happening to someone else and not to her, not to them.
Will hadn’t known about the boxes until after. Until he was standing in her apartment in Hawkins trying to decide what to keep, what to pack, what to throw away without feeling like he was throwing part of her away with it. He had seen the handwriting and ended up sitting on the floor of her closet for nearly an hour with one of her sweaters pressed against his face.
For a second the apartment around him disappeared. He could see the closet in Hawkins so clearly it made him dizzy. It was all he could think about when Mike’s voice came down the hall.
"Hey, baby - you get lost?"
"No,” his voice was thick and strange, it felt like he had mud in his throat.
Footsteps. Mike came and stood beside him - still in the gray sweatpants he'd slept in, his hair mussed in every direction. He was holding his coffee in both hands the way he did when he'd just made it, like he was trying to transfer the warmth directly into his palms. He looked at Will, and then looked at the closet door.
"Will, hey," he said gently.
"I came in for a blanket."
Mike nodded once. "Do you still want it?"
Will looked at the boxes.
"Not really."
Mike stepped fully into the room and his shoulder pressed lightly against Will's, warm through the thin sleeve of his shirt. He didn't try to close the closet door or steer Will away from it. He just stood there beside him for a moment.
Above them, they both could hear the sound of their upstairs neighbor dragging something heavy across the floor. Will focused on that noise to ground him. On Mike beside him.
Eventually Mike bumped his shoulder gently against Will's.
"You wanna sit down?"
Will nodded before he could think too hard about it. Mike took the coffee mug from his hand first, and then pulled him down onto the ancient loveseat pushed into a corner of the room. Will curled into his side the same way he had done a thousand times, trying to settle something inside of him. Mike’s arm came around him, and the boxes stayed untouched.
. . .
i. things to know about pancreatic cancer
It was quiet. It was the kind of quiet that had been there long before anyone thought to look - invisibility lurking beneath the surface.
By the time you found it you were already somewhere in the middle of a story that had started without your permission. The survival statistics were not the kind that you found encouraging, and treatment was not easy.
The oncologist at the Hawkins hospital was a kind woman named Dr. Jacobs who spoke very carefully and handed them pamphlets. She did not pretend that the news was easy, and Will would spend a long time afterward being thankful for this because they were not given any kind of false hope, even if at the time it felt like being hit by a large, moving car that did not stop to check if they were okay.
His mother had been diagnosed fourteen months before she died.
Will had been twenty-two and eating cereal over the sink - they hadn't thought about dinner, neither of them ever thought about dinner - when Jonathan called on a Wednesday and said his name in a voice he didn’t recognize. Will had put the bowl down very carefully on the counter like that mattered.
(He'd been living in this apartment for seven months by then. Him and Mike. It had felt like arriving somewhere, finally, after years of being lost. He'd been so happy. He'd just been so stupidly happy.)
He told Mike after he hung up. Still in the kitchen and clutching the phone in his hand. Mike had come out of the bedroom and taken one look at him and said "what happened?” and Will had said it out loud for the first time.
Pancreatic. Stage three.
Mike had gone completely still. Then he'd crossed the kitchen and put both arms around Will, and Will had stood there and let him, and thought very clearly -
I don't know how to do this. I have never had to do anything like this.
Neither had Mike - they were so young. Nobody told you how to do this when you were so young.
. . .
Joyce Byers had survived the Upside Down. Not metaphorically - literally. She had gone up against things that came from somewhere that shouldn't exist, things with no name in any language, and she had won. Every single time. She had found Will when he was gone, refusing to stop looking when everyone else had. She had strung Christmas lights up on the wall of their living room and talked to him through them.
(Will knew this story through bits and pieces, he had his own garbled memory to comb through. Over time, his friends gave him additional details, Jonathan giving him even more. His mother on her knees, talking to a son she couldn't see.
Are you alive?
Are you safe?
I need to know where to find you.
Joyce didn’t talk about it a lot, but he could tell when she was thinking about it because he would catch her staring at him with some sort of distant look in her eyes.)
It was all nonsensical, and she survived despite that. And then she didn’t go to the doctor for three years because there was always something more urgent, someone else who needed something more.
That was the thing Will couldn't stop turning over in some acrid part of his brain. Not just that it happened, but that she was the one it happened to. And none of the rest of it mattered at all.
He'd said this to Mike the first night, on the floor of the bathroom in the apartment. Their backs against the bathtub, knees up, not looking at each other and not turning the lights on, just occupying the same space in the dark.
"She fought actual monsters," Will said. "Real ones - things that came from somewhere that shouldn't exist. And she won, every time she won."
Mike scrubbed both hands over his face. "It's bullshit."
Will made a small, broken sound. "Mike -"
"No, seriously. That's bullshit." He shook his head once in the dark. "After everything?"
"That's not - It doesn’t make -"
"I know," Mike said quietly.
Will had put his head back against the edge of the tub and stared at the water stain on the ceiling (it had been there since they moved in, and Mike had said on the first day that it was shaped like Jabba the Hut, so they’ve been referring to it as such since then).
He felt the immensity of his new reality settling over him, and he had let himself start to feel it because Mike was there and it was safe to let himself.
Mike Wheeler was safe. Not uncomplicated - he was many things, complicated was definitely among them - but safe. Safe in a way that still caught Will off guard sometimes.
He could say the worst thing he was thinking out loud and Mike wouldn’t look at him differently afterward. Wouldn’t leave, or pull away.
Mike would just stay.
. . .
ii. one year to live
Will felt like after Joyce’s diagnosis, he was always doing two things at once.
There would be normal days - riding the F train, arguing with Mike about the dishes, eating the cheapest option at the deli on the corner, feeling dizzy with the happiness of being twenty-two and somehow, impossibly, in love in New York City, a city that didn’t care about Hawkins or the Upside Down - and at the same time he was in a state of low-grade grief so constant it became a part of him. When he breathed, it was inside of him.
Will flew back to Hawkins four times in fourteen months. Mike had come twice when he could, and took the time off from his job as an assistant at a publishing company. He was trying to worm his way into being an editor, but it mostly consisted of running coffee orders and sending rejection letters right now.
When he wasn’t able to make the entire trip, he drove Will to LaGuardia in the beat-up Civic they’d bought together from a guy in Astoria for like 600 dollars. He stood at the departures with his hands in his jacket pockets and stood with his hands in his jacket pockets like he was physically restraining himself from reaching out. He made Will promise every time to call when he landed.
And Will always did. First thing off the plane, every time, he found a payphone and fed it a fistful of quarters.
"He's good," Will said on his third visit. They were sitting at the kitchen table long after dinner. "He's fighting with his boss because he wants to do more, but he’s so stubborn that I think he’ll convince them."
"He always had that in him." His mother smiled a little. "Even at twelve. That kind of righteous indignation thing."
They laughed together about it, Will agreeing wholeheartedly.
"He's good for you," she said, raising her eyebrows just slightly.
"Mom."
"I'm just saying." She looked at him across the table with the look. It was such a mom look, and sometimes it was scary, but whenever she wore it, she was always looking right through him. He'd been sixteen and sitting at that same table pretending to do homework when she'd first given him that look about Mike, and he hadn't had any words for it yet, and she hadn't pushed.
"You look like yourself - the version of yourself I always knew was in there. You just seem so comfortable in it now."
Will looked down at the table. "I'm the same as I always was."
"You're really not, sweetheart." She said it gently, like she wasn't trying to make a point, but was just telling him the truth. "You used to hide everything, you were so careful about everything."
Her expression softened. "You're not as careful now, but you’re still the same sweet boy.”
. . .
He'd been careful about Mike for years. How much he let himself want, how often he was allowed to look, how much room he let Mike take up in his head, which was maybe too much.
For most of their adolescence, there was Jane, and Mike was always, always in love with someone else because of it.
It had felt, for a long time, like a punishment Will didn't understand the reason for. Like the world had cruelly placed him in a lesson he didn’t learn fast enough. Here is the person you love, and here is how he looks at someone who isn't you, and you're going to stand in the same room and feel it and not say anything, because you are Will Byers and this is just how it goes for you.
He'd gotten used to it. That was the most embarrassing part. He'd gotten so used to it that when it changed - when Mike had shown up at Will's dorm room in their junior year of college at two in the morning with no explanation and kissed him in the doorway - Will's first thought had not been finally.
His first thought had instead been, he’s going to change his mind.
It had taken him months to stop waiting for his thoughts to change. A whole year of Mike being stubbornly and infuriatingly there before Will had started to believe it might be real. That their shared apartment was real. That he was allowed to have this.
And then after about a year, just when he started believing it for real this time, his mother got sick.
(He never said this out loud. It was too small and too selfish to say out loud. But there was a part of him, in the ugly dark parts of three in the morning, that thought of course. Of course - just when I stopped waiting for it to fall apart.)
. . .
iii. the last phone call
"Hi, baby." Her voice was tired, it was only seven in the morning, but he had picked up after the first ring. The phone stayed next to the bed now, not in the kitchen where it used to be. "Were you sleeping? I'll let you go."
"Mom." He sat up, rubbing one of his eyes to try to force himself to wake up quicker. "I'm awake, what's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong, sweetheart, I just wanted to hear your voice. I’ve been thinking."
Beside him, Mike stirred a little bit. Will could tell he was awake, but didn’t want to interrupt until he understood what Will needed. Will sat up against the wall, crossing his legs. The room was dark except for the streetlight through a gap in the curtain.
"What about?" Will asked.
"I've been thinking about you," she said. "When you were little. When you were - you were gone, that winter. Eighty-three." She paused. "Do you know how many times I almost stopped?"
"Mom -"
"I'm not saying it to be sad. I just - I need you to know that I didn't. I kept going because I knew you were still there. I could feel it." A soft exhale. "I know that probably sounds -"
"It doesn't sound like anything weird," Will said, speaking softly into the morning. "It sounds right, and I know it because I was there. And I remember reaching out to you.”
She was quiet for a moment and he could hear her breathing, a little labored.
"You're so happy," she said. "I see it every time I look at you, and I need you to know that I see it. Because I know you don't always see it yourself."
Will pressed the phone against his ear. Behind him, Mike's hand found his shoulder, and he felt a small squeeze.
"Mom -"
"I know you waited a long time, and I know it didn't feel fair. And I know you spent a lot of years thinking you weren't going to get to have it." When she spoke again, her voice was quieter. "But you have it, Will."
He couldn't say anything for a second. He pressed the phone tighter against his ear and took a breath that didn’t really help.
"Don't stop letting people in, whatever happens. You're so good at it now, I want you to stay good at it."
"I promise," he managed. "Mom, I promise, okay?”
"Good." She sounded settled. Like she'd said the thing she called to say. "I love you, Will. So much. More than I know how to tell you."
"I love you too." His throat tightened around the words. "I love you so much. I don't have - I don't have words big enough."
"You've always been my artist," she said, warm, a little amused. "You'll find them."
She said goodnight. He held the phone after she hung up and listened to the dial tone become nothing.
Then Mike was there, pulling him back into bed, and Will folded himself against him automatically. Mike held him tightly, one hand spread across his back.
"She okay?" Mike said quietly, into his hair.
"Yeah." Will closed his eyes and breathed into Mike’s neck, pressing his nose against the bottom of his jaw. "She called to tell me a few things."
"Good things?"
"Yeah," Will said. "Good things."
Four days later, Jonathan called early in the morning. Heart failure, in her sleep. She hadn't been alone, and she hadn't been in pain.
Will sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his hand and was nowhere. Was not in the room or the apartment or 1992 or his own body. He was somewhere else entirely, somewhere without his mom.
Mike got on the floor in front of him, both hands around both of Will's hands, looking up at him. He didn’t say it was going to be okay, because it wasn’t.
. . .
iv. hawkins
The apartment smelled just like her when he walked in.
He had been trying to mentally prepare himself for this moment, seeing his family and running through the logistics of a person dying without thinking too hard about what it all meant.
He didn’t know that he should’ve prepared for walking through the front door and the smell of the place hitting him like something physical. Cheap laundry detergent and cedar, and something with no name except her. Joyce Byers, still present in the walls and the carpet.
He stopped in the doorway abruptly. Jane put her hand on his back from her spot behind him.
"I know, it’s weird, isn’t it?” she asked, giving him a knowing look as she gently brought him through the threshold.
Hopper was in the kitchen. He was standing at the counter holding a dish towel, just standing there and looking into space. When Will came in, he looked up. He had been learning, through years of advice from Joyce, on how to express his emotions, and he still looked like he was holding back.
"Kid," he said gruffly.
"Hey, Hop."
Hopper came around the counter and hugged him tight for a moment longer than he’d ever hugged him before. Will hugged him back and felt the solidness of him, this man who had come back from the dead and been given a second chance at a life with her.
Who had gotten four years, and was going to be in this apartment alone now.
Will had to stop thinking about that, or he was going to be useless.
. . .
On his second day in town, he found Jonathan in their mother's bedroom.
Jonathan was sitting on the edge of the bed in complete silence, and when Will came in, he didn’t immediately move to talk.
Will sat next to him. They looked at the room together - at her nightstand which still held all of her things laid out messily. The stack of paperbacks she was making her way through while she was bedridden, a photograph of all three of them squinting in the sun.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"I keep thinking about the Bradford’s house," Jonathan said eventually.
Will knew exactly what he meant. The Bradford family down the street used to leave every summer for long periods of time. Jonathan had been thirteen, and their mom had been working double shifts, so they were alone most of the time. Every single afternoon, the two of them scaled their fence together to swim in the Bradford’s above-ground pool. Not once did they get caught.
"She never found out," Will huffed a small laugh.
"Oh come on, she definitely knew."
"You think?"
"Will, we came home with wet hair every day for like two months." Jonathan's mouth did something that was almost a smile. "She knew."
Will looked at the photograph on the nightstand. "She let us."
"She let us," Jonathan agreed.
Quiet again. Outside someone was doing something in the kitchen - Mike, probably. He was hopeless in the kitchen, but he’s been trying to make himself useful.
"It was just us for a long time," Jonathan said softly.
"Yeah." Will looked at his hands. "It was."
"I used to think about that a lot, " Jonathan started. "When I was in high school. How it was just the three of us, and how we didn't have anyone else. I'm glad it's not like that anymore. I'm really glad we got more people." He glanced at Will. "You know?"
Will thought about Mike in the kitchen. Jane in the living room with Hopper.
He thought about Dustin and Lucas and Max, who were coming into town tomorrow. Robin and Nancy and Steve, who had taken Jonathan out of the house every night just to get his mind off of things.
"Yeah," Will decided. "Me too."
Jonathan put his arm around Will's shoulders, the same way he had when they were little, and Will leaned into it for a second.
"She would've been so annoying about it," Jonathan said. "About all of us ending up okay."
"So annoying," Will agreed, and his voice cracked on it, and Jonathan's arm tightened.
They sat there a while longer. Just sitting in the room that smelled like her, two people who had been just the two of them for a long time, and now, were finally and luckily not alone anymore.
. . .
Dustin arrived first - of course he did, he was nothing if not on time. It was only eleven in the morning and he was carrying a warm casserole dish his mom had made, wrapped awkwardly in a kitchen towel. He set it down on the first available surface, looked at Will for a long moment, and then pulled him into a long hug.
"I talked' to her," he said, when he pulled back, his eyes were red. "Two weeks ago she called me out of nowhere, and just - asked about my radio telescope project, and she actually listened to the whole answer."
"She remembered stuff like that," Will said quietly. She always had, but it still did something to hear it out loud.
"I think I maybe mentioned it once and she remembered enough to ask." He shook his head. "She kept track of all of us, man. Like we were her kids."
Will nodded. He knew, he'd been watching her do it his whole life, and he was only now understanding the scale of it.
Lucas and Max arrived together at noon. Max was quiet, which was not surprising to him. She had her own long and complicated history with loss, and she understood it without needing to be told anything. All she did was hug him tightly before she walked further into the apartment.
Lucas hugged him next and said I'm so sorry and meant it. He then went and found Mike in the kitchen, the two of them talking about something else entirely as their own way of checking on one another.
Jane was already there, had been there since the first day even though she had her own place now. She was standing in doorways for long moments, and then collecting herself before doing something purposeful. Will found her in the afternoon on the couch, holding one of their mother's paperbacks in her hands.
"She was always reading," Jane said, when Will sat next to her.
"Always." He looked at the book - some thriller she'd checked out from the library weeks ago, which meant someone was going to have to return it. He'd deal with that later.
When he went to talk about her again, his throat closed around any additional words.
He tried again. "She -" He stopped again and looked down at his hands.
Jane was patient with him, letting him compose himself before he started again.
"She used to read in the bath for like two hours," he cleared his throat. "Jonathan and I used to fight over who had to knock on the door when we needed something."
Jane smiled, small and real. "She read to me, when I first came to live with her and Hopper. I didn't know a lot of words yet, and she would sit with me and read."
She leaned her head against his shoulder, and he leaned back. There were so many things that he wanted to say about his mother, but every time he started to, he never found himself able to finish.
"I keep thinking I should tell her things," Jane said quietly. "Something happens and I think - I want to tell mom. And then."
"Yeah," Will said. "Me too."
"Do you think it gets easier?" she asked. "Talking about her?”
Will thought about it. "I think it has to," he said. "Eventually, I think it has to get easier or you just - stop being able to talk about them at all. And I don't want that, I want to talk about her all the time."
. . .
They were all in the living room that night, and someone had ordered pizza. They were sitting in the scattered way of people who've run out of the energy for arrangement - sprawled on every available surface. There were Christmas lights hanging around the room, and Hopper had come in at some point and clicked the socket strip to turn them on.
Will looked at them. He thought about what they meant. She'd strung lights on the wall and refused, refused, refused to believe he was gone. They'd stayed up ever since - in every apartment, every house. Not because she was celebrating, but because she was remembering that she hadn't stopped.
He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth for a second. Why couldn’t he do the same? Why couldn’t he bring her back from wherever she was?
Mike, next to him on the floor, moved closer to him, though it was practically impossible since they were already touching.
Dustin was telling a story - the time she'd driven him home after D&D and they'd gotten a flat tire. Apparently, she'd kept him calm for forty-five minutes on the side of the dark road, making up games to play while they waited for help.
"I’ve never heard that one before,” Jonathan said. “But I’m not surprised.”
"She called me, too," Jane added. "A week before, I think."
"Me too," said Jonathan.
Hopper was very quiet. He'd been quiet since they got here, and not in the way that he typically was. Will had been watching him when Hopper wasn’t looking. He was completely lost, lingering for too long, or sitting without saying anything or looking at anything in particular.
"She told me," Hopper said, his voice deep and resonating through the small room. "that it had been worth it coming back here from California. She said every day was worth it."
Will thought about Hopper in a Russian prison. Thought about the years everyone thought he was dead. Thought about his mother in Hawkins alone, in California alone, and then Hopper coming back and the two of them finally, finally getting to have it.
Four years - they'd gotten four years.
The lights on the wall were warm. The pizza boxes were open on the coffee table, everyone digging in at their own pace. It was all of them - every single person she'd loved, every single person she'd made room for - gathered in the light she'd left on.
. . .
A card from his biological dad arrived just before the funeral. It had a watercolor lily on the front and said with deepest sympathies during this difficult time in a font that was trying to look handwritten and wasn't. Inside, on the left, a printed verse about peace and remembrance that Lonnie had definitely not read. On the right, in his actual handwriting, just Lonnie.
Will stood at the kitchen counter in Hawkins holding it for a long time. He thought about his mother making excuses for this man for a long time. All those years of her covering for him, protecting them from the size of how little he cared. He thought about her doing it alone. The jobs, the bills, the two kids, the town that thought she was losing her mind. Doing all of it without him. And then dying without him. And getting a watercolor lily for it.
He couldn't throw it away. He didn't know why. It wasn't like he wanted it, like it meant anything. But throwing it away required making a decision and he didn't have any decisions left in him, so he just put it on the counter and walked away from it.
It sat next to the pile of mail that eventually needed to be sorted, and Will just left it there.
He never mentioned it to Mike, he didn't have to.
Sometime shortly after, he noticed it was gone. He didn't ask and Mike didn't say anything. It was just gone, Mike making certain things disappear when Will couldn't deal with them himself.
. . .
v. the funeral
Will stood in the bedroom of Hopper's apartment - their apartment, his mother's apartment - at seven in the morning on a Tuesday in November, holding two shirts, trying to decide. He didn't know why it mattered, knew it didn't matter at all. He stood there anyway, holding the shirts, because deciding felt impossible and also because as long as he was deciding about the shirts he didn't have to think about what the shirts were for.
Mike took them both from him eventually, gently, and put the dark one back in the bag and handed him the other. Will put it on. He looked in the mirror and his face looked like his face, which was strange, because it felt like his face should have changed.
He still just looked like Will.
"Okay?" Mike asked, behind him in the mirror.
Will looked at himself a second longer. “No.”
Hawkins Presbyterian Church, white clapboard, the one on the corner of Maple and Church Street that Will had ridden his bike past without ever thinking much about it. There was a sign out front with removable letters that said things like LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and PRAYER CHANGES THINGS.
This week it said BELOVED DAUGHTER MOTHER FRIEND JOYCE BYERS and Will saw it from the car as they pulled in.
The words didn’t land right. They felt too small, like they were trying to fit her into a shape she never lived in.
The church had been the only option. That was just how it worked in Hawkins - you were born, you were baptized, you were buried, and the same building presided over all of it whether you'd been inside it recently or not.
His mother had not been inside it recently. She'd had her own complicated relationship with God, but she was from here, and this was what here did, and so.
The church.
Will had not been inside it since he was a child and he couldn’t stop looking at the way the light through the stained glass was filtering what little sunshine there was into something dim and colored. Flowers were placed at the edge of the stage on top of her casket. Her casket. They were beautiful, but they didn’t matter.
Right beside, somebody had set up an easel with a photograph of her. Will didn't know who had chosen it and couldn't look at it directly.
The whole town was there. Of course they were. That was Hawkins - everybody showed up. Weddings, funerals, graduations, scandals. People filled chairs and brought food and said all of the correct things. Will recognized most of the faces and could name maybe half of them. People from Melvald's, school, the neighborhood. People whose connection to his mother he couldn't identify, people who had thought she was losing her mind in 1983 and were here now in their dark coats looking appropriately sad.
He wanted to feel something about that, but he couldn’t reach it. There wasn’t space for anything that large right now. Just the pew, just sitting upright.
Jonathan was on his left. Jane was on his right and she was already crying quietly, had been crying since they got in the car, in a way that made it seem like she was trying not to bother anything with it.
Mike was behind him, with the entire Wheeler family around him.
The pastor spoke about her for most of the service.
Pastor Gerald had known her when they were young, which Will hadn’t known - one of the many parts of her life that existed before him and that he would never fully understand. He had a kind face and a careful voice, and he said good things. Recognizably her things rather than general statements, which he appreciated.
He talked about her stubbornness, actually, said the word stubborn with obvious affection, said she was the most stubborn woman he'd ever had the privilege of knowing and that God had probably needed someone exactly that stubborn up there, which made people laugh.
Will was okay through that part.
He was okay through the music, which was something traditional and slightly mournful that he didn't know the name of.
He was okay through Jane's reading, which was beautiful and her voice only broke once.
He was okay through the memories, mostly. Through people standing up and speaking in voices that wavered at the edges.
And then Mrs. Calloway stood up.
Dorothy Calloway, three houses down, had watched Jonathan and him when Lonnie left and had never once asked any questions about it, which was why he was not going to hold this against her, which was why he was going to sit here and let her say whatever she was about to say.
"Joyce was such a quiet, sweet woman," Mrs. Calloway said, in a voice that was very sincere. "She kept to herself but she was always so kind."
Will looked at his hands.
Quiet. Sweet. Kept to herself.
He pressed his thumbnail into his palm, hard, and held it there. He thought about her laugh, which could be heard from the next room, the next house, probably the next street. Who had gone into a Russian prison, who had screamed at the universe. Who had been so loud, so relentlessly loud.
Quiet.
He pressed down harder, and tried to breathe.
Afterwards, the cemetery was at the edge of town. It had always felt distant in the way things do when you’re young and death hasn’t become real yet.
It was real now.
The sky had gone flat sometime after morning, the color of old dishwater. No wind, no change. Just bare trees against a gray that seemed to stretch too far in every direction. Hawkins in November had always looked like this, and somehow it felt appropriate now, like the town had been waiting for this moment.
Will stood at the graveside between Jonathan and Jane and watched the casket lower into the ground.
Later, Will would look back on this moment and scramble to remember any details. None came.
Someone had organized the reception of mourners in the church hall afterwards. One of the mysteries that happened without much thought from any of the immediate family. Some committee of women who knew what to do when someone died.
The casseroles were extraordinary. Not in quality, but in quantity. Green bean casserole, tuna noodle casserole, something with chicken and cream of mushroom soup, broccoli cheese with crumbled crackers on top. On the other table, jello salads in colors that didn't occur in nature. A sheet cake with white frosting, his mother's name in blue buttercream cursive.
Will got a plate and stood with it for a long time, not ever eating anything. He talked to people and said thank you when they said they were sorry and said yes she was when they said she was wonderful and said yes it was when they said it was too soon.
He accepted a hug from someone whose name he couldn't remember and who held on for a long time and said God needed another angel up there.
After a while, something in him gave up on participating.
He handed his plate to Mike, who was right there, who had been right there all day. Will said "bathroom" which was not true, and Mike took the plate and nodded.
Will went out the side door.
The woods started where the parking lot ended, the boundary clearly marked by where the asphalt stopped and the dead grass started and then the tree line began.
Will crossed the parking lot and walked into the trees and kept walking. Just far enough that the noise of the reception hall faded to nothing. The trees absorbed it and he stopped walking when it was just him.
He’d been in these woods before, in another version of his life when everything had broken differently. He remembered running through them at eleven, the fear of not knowing where the edges were.
There was no signal she could send him. She was in the ground fifty yards away in the Hawkins cemetery under a November sky and she was not going to find him this time.
He pressed his hand flat against the nearest tree to feel the sting of the bark.
He heard footsteps behind him and Mike stopped next to him. Close enough that Will could feel the warmth of him in the cold air. He hadn't brought his coat from the reception hall and Will could tell by the sound of his breathing that he was already cold.
They stood there for a while. Behind them the town of Hawkins was eating dinner together, and he was terrified. He had no idea how to do this because this had no face, no teeth.
"She wasn't quiet," Will said. The words came out rough, the first words he'd said since the side door. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone who hadn't been using it right. "What Mrs. Calloway said. She was the loudest person I've ever known in my life."
Mike's hand found his and his fingers were freezing, but Will held them anyway.
They stood there for a while longer. Just the sound of the cold air around them, which was just silence.
Will turned his hand slightly in Mike’s grip, rubbing his thumb over his knuckles without thinking about it.
“You didn’t bring your coat.”
Mike shook his head, “nope.”
That got something small out of Will - not a laugh, just the ghost of one that didn’t quite make it out.
“You’re impossible,” he said.
Mike finally looked at him then. His expression was flat in the way it got when he was trying not to make things worse by saying the wrong thing.
"I'm not going to leave you alone in the woods at your mother's funeral, Will, I don't care how cold it is."
Will looked at him. Mike looked back, slightly blue around the lips.
"You're such an idiot," Will said, and his voice cracked on it, and he meant it in the way that it was also the thing he loved most about him.
"Yeah," Mike agreed.
"We should go back in."
"We should."
Neither of them moved for another few minutes. That was okay. Everything, for just a few more minutes, could wait.
Will stood in the woods where he had always eventually ended up, in the town where his mother had lived and died, holding Mike Wheeler’s hand.
He had learned that from her. How to keep people with you, even when they’re gone.
He was pretty sure he had learned almost everything from her.
. . .
vi. new york in december
They came home on a Sunday. Will put the boxes in the closet first, the task feeling almost urgent. He stood in the hallway looking at the closed door for a moment and then went and sat on the couch. Hours passed as he stared at the TV, no recollection of what was actually playing.
Mike ordered Chinese from the place on Seneca and they ate their favorite combo meal on the couch together. The TV was still on, and they didn't talk much. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it wasn’t right either.
Later, Will stood at the kitchen window looking at the street. Sundays were usually his favorite day of the week. Him and Mike always spent the mornings in bed, followed by a few small chores and a lot of quality time together. And at the end of the day, before the new week started, they always took a walk while the sun was setting. It was sacred.
The bodega across the street was still lit up, a couple going past with their hands in each other's pockets. The world just - continuing. Not caring that something enormous had been removed from it.
“I don’t know how to go back,” he said out loud, not looking at Mike, but he knew he was sitting at the table behind him, doing a terrible job pretending to read a fantasy book.
"To what?"
"Back to normal." He watched the couple disappear around the corner. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do tomorrow."
"You don't have to do anything tomorrow."
"I can't not go back to work forever."
"You can for a little while longer, baby."
"I don't know when I'll be ready."
"Then we figure it out when we get there." Mike put his book down. "Will - come here."
Will turned from the window. Mike was looking at him across the small kitchen, lamplight warm across his features.
Will crossed the kitchen to him and Mike made room. Will sat on the edge of the table, close enough that their arms were touching.
"She told me not to stop letting people in. On the phone that night that she called she said I was good at it now." He looked at his hands. "I don't always think that's true."
"I think it's true."
"I spent a long time being -“ He stopped and tried a different door. "I never thought I was going to get this, I want you to know that. I spent so long thinking it was never going to happen and then it did and I was so, so relieved, Mike. To have you. And then she got sick and part of me thought, of course. Of course just when I -" He stopped himself again before he went completely off course. "That's not fair to say."
"It's fair," Mike affirmed. "It's completely fair.”
"I just wanted to have it without something else happening. Just for a while." He laughed, once, without humor. "Apparently not."
“At least she got to see it,” Mike said. “She saw you happy. She saw us.”
He hesitated. “She told me something once. That summer she visited when you were still at school. She said there wasn’t a world where we didn’t end up together.”
Will looked up at him.
“I hadn’t told you that,” Mike said, a little softer now. "She kept looking at me like-“ He made a face. "Like she was approving of me. It was honestly a little scary."
"She absolutely approved of you."
"I know. It was just a lot at the time when I was so busy worrying about impressing my boyfriend’s mom who I had also known all of my life."
Will laughed, real this time. Small, but real. He felt the ache of it - the laugh living right next to everything else.
"I miss her," he whispered, biting down on his lip after he said it.
"I know." Mike's hand found his. "Me too. Not as much as you."
"No."
"But I miss her, too."
. . .
Shame started to creep in the longer they were home together, the more time that passed.
He was scared he was too much.
Not in the abstract either. The day-to-day burden of living with someone while you were grieving - he was scared he was too much for Mike.
Too heavy, too present in his sadness. Too likely to cry at random times for no reason at all. Tired all the time, and far away even when he was right there.
He'd come home from work three times this week and just sat down on the couch to stare at the hall. Mike had worked around him, quietly, the way you vacuumed around a piece of furniture. That couldn't be what Mike had signed up for. Mike was twenty-two - they were both twenty-two. This wasn't supposed to be what twenty-two felt like.
The worst part was that Will knew, logically, that this fear was the same as the old fear he used to know. The one he'd carried since he was twelve years old and figured out what he felt for Mike Wheeler.
He'd gotten so good at making himself smaller that even now some part of him was still waiting for the moment when he was too much. When Mike looked at him and thought this isn't what I wanted.
He was thinking about this in January, sitting at his drafting table staring at an illustration he hadn't touched in an hour, when Mike came in from work.
Will heard the door, heard Mike's coat going on the hook, him moving around in the kitchen. He didn't turn around. He was trying so incredibly hard to just be normal for one night.
Mike appeared in the doorway of the spare room and looked first at Will before his eyes drifted over to the untouched illustration.
He didn’t say anything right away, just crossed the room, rested a hand briefly on the back of Will’s chair, and waited until Will finally exhaled.
“You’re still here.”
“I’m working.”
Mike slid the pencil out of his hand and set it down. He held out his hand, palm up, waiting. "Take a break, baby.”
Will was a weak man. He stared at Mike’s open hand and thought about all the times he'd wanted this. Twelve years old in Mike's basement, fifteen in the school hallway, seventeen watching Mike look at someone else across a room. All those years of wanting and not saying anything.
He took Mike's hand in his, feeling the soft warmth.
Mike pulled him up from the chair and led him to the couch in their living room. He sat down and pulled Will into his side and that was it. That was the whole plan, just being together in a new space, Mike’s arm around him. The radiator ticked in the background.
"I'm sorry," Will said, after a while.
"For what?”
"I'm not very fun right now."
Mike looked at him, his eyebrows furrowing. "I didn't get with you because you were fun."
"You know what I mean."
"I really don't." He said it simply. "I'm exactly where I want to be. Are you exactly where you want to be?"
Will looked at the room around him, everything that they’d built together here.
"Yeah," he agreed. "Yeah, I am."
"Okay then." Mike settled back. "Stop apologizing for being sad. It's starting to become its own thing and you gotta cut it out."
Will laughed a little, surprised. "That's not very sensitive."
"I'm very sensitive, I'm extremely sensitive actually. I'm also right."
"You're so annoying, Michael."
"You love me though, baby. Don’t you?"
"Unfortunately," Will said, and leaned into him, letting himself be held.
. . .
He'd thought, when he imagined it (and he had imagined it, what would finally crack him open, the moment when the grief would stop being a pressure behind his sternum and start being something he could actually feel) he'd thought it would be something significant. Something that arrived and flattened him, maybe a woman who looked like her he passed in the subway.
It was the Talking Heads.
They were doing dishes. Will washing, Mike drying, the radio on in the background, some station out of Manhattan that played whatever it felt like. The Talking Heads came on - This Must Be the Place. And Will's hands went still in the water.
The memory that came back to him was fuzzy. It was maybe his first year of high school, when his mom started insisting on driving him everywhere instead of letting him use his bike as often.
He was in the front seat of her car, and the song had started playing on the radio. He doesn’t even remember what she said. Maybe “oh, I like this one” or “do you know this song, Will?” or “this song sounds like something Jonathan would listen to.”
But all he could think about was the fact that his mom had known this song. Had heard it on the radio probably a dozen times.
A song playing in an apartment she'd never been to, that she was never going to be in.
"Will?" Mike asked, trying to get his attention.
"I'm okay." He wasn’t, and he was very clearly not. "I'm fine, sorry, babe."
"You don't have to be fine."
"I know."
"Will."
"I know, Mike, I -" His voice was doing something wrong. "I just - I keep - there's this thing where I can't get to it. Like I know it's there, but there's something between me and actually -" He pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum. "I feel like I'm watching it through a window. Like I can see it, but I can't -"
"Hey." Mike set the dish down. He came and stood in front of Will, close, and put both hands on Will's face - the same way Will's mother used to, the same gesture, and Will felt that similarity from somewhere very deep. "You're allowed to feel everything exactly how you need to. There’s no right way, my love, okay? Whatever it feels like is exactly what it needs to be. You’ve got to let yourself do that."
"I’m trying."
"You're so scared of, like, grieving wrong."
"I-“ He laughed, wet. "Yeah. Okay. Maybe a little."
"I've got you," Mike whispered, still holding him tightly against his chest. "I've got you. Okay?"
Something came loose.
Not a flood, but quieter than that, worse than that maybe. A seam giving way that had been under pressure for two months. He made a sound that he didn’t recognize, and Will's face pressed against his shoulder and he was crying. Really crying, the ugly kind, with no dignity.
He just wanted his mom. He wanted to call her and tell her he heard a song on the radio that reminded him of her. That he hoped she was having a nice night, and that he couldn’t wait to see her for Christmas. Oh yeah, Mike? He’s right here, he says hi.
He knew he was lucky to have had her for 22 years of his life, but it wasn’t enough. It would've never been enough time.
Mike held on. One hand in his hair, arms around him, heartbeat steady under Will's cheek.
Will cried until he was empty. And then he was just there, in Mike's arms, in the kitchen, with the radio still on and fading into something else he didn’t recognize.
They stayed there a while, neither of them moving. The apartment was warm and Will could feel his breathing coming back to normal.
"Hey," Mike said eventually, pulling back just enough to look at Will's face.
"Hi." Will's voice was completely wrecked. He probably looked terrible. "Sorry."
"Don't." Mike said it simply. "Don't be sorry for that. Ever."
Will looked at him. Twenty-two years old and standing in the apartment that they shared, that had pieces of Mike in every room. This person, who Will had navigated towards since they met on a playground on the first day of kindergarten. There was no part of Will’s life that did not include Mike in the memories he held. And though this new, scarier version of his life without his mother was hard, Mike was still here.
The person who had sat on the bathroom floor with him after he got the worst news of his life. Who had held him.
He was still here.
Will felt, all at once, the overwhelming need to kiss him. To feel his body pressed up against his, to have him close in the way he hadn’t let himself ask for recently.
"I want to feel something that isn't this," Will whispered to him, and it was so quiet. He felt nervous, initiating something for the first time in months, maybe. Asking for something that he didn’t even know if he was allowed to have.
What if something had changed? What if he was different now?
"I want to feel you. Can we -?”
There wasn’t a single moment of hesitation behind Mike’s answer.
"Yes.”
The bedroom was dark except for the streetlight through the curtain gap. Same orange light as always. It was so familiar the way the of them moved together inside of this room, like muscle memory.
Mike kissed him gently. Both hands still on his face, the same way he always had, which put him at ease.
Will put his hands in Mike's hair and kissed him back and felt something in him start, slowly, to open.
They'd been together for two years. Will still couldn't entirely believe it sometimes - he had thought for so long that it might be taken away, so he still felt himself bracing subconsciously. Mike's hands on him felt like evidence. Like something he could point to. This. This is real. This is mine. Mike wants me and he shows me.
He pulled back to look at Mike in the warm glow of the light. Mike looked back the way he always did - like Will was something worth looking at. Like he wasn't planning to stop.
"You’re so beautiful," Mike whispered into the quiet room, his thumb gently tracing Will’s cheekbone.
Shirts came off - an old The Cure shirt that lived in the ambiguous middle of their shared ownership, the soft Henley Mike had worn all day. Will pressed his face to the side of Mike's neck and breathed. Warm skin, familiar smell - heartbeat under Will's mouth, pulse at his throat.
You are here. This is real. This is yours.
Mike's hands moved over him slowly, with full attention. He'd always been like that - incapable of halfway. It had been a lot, at twelve. It was everything, now.
"Will," Mike breathed against his jaw, and Will understood it completely.
It wasn't separate from the grief - he felt that clearly, felt how it lived in the same place as everything else. The Talking Heads, his boyfriend, his mother’s voice on the phone a few days before she had died.
He’d thought that he had wanted to feel something other than grief, and instead what he felt was grief and this, grief and Mike’s hands on his body, grief and his own breathing. Grief being here. Being in a body that was warm and present and his.
Both things at once, both things in the same room.
When they were catching their breaths in the dark afterwards, Will whispered, “I’m going to be okay,” into the room because it was the first time he felt like it might actually be true.
. . .
vii. winter, then spring
She had always called at midnight.
That was her thing. No one else did it, but she'd been doing it since he was little. At exactly midnight on March 22nd, every single year, she would poke her head into his room and sing happy birthday to him. When he moved away, she had started to call him. Like she couldn't stand for even one minute of his birthday to go by without him knowing she was thinking about him.
He hadn't told Mike this, and he wasn't sure why. It felt too small to say out loud, but he couldn’t avoid it any longer on March 22nd five minutes to midnight when he was watching the clock on the nightstand.
Maybe because the grief kept embarrassing him in ways he hadn't expected.
The grief arrived in stupid places. The grocery store, seeing a mother walking their child to school. The smell of someone's coffee on the subway that wasn't right, but was close. A box of Tuna Helper in the prepared foods aisle that made him stop and breathe for a second in the middle of Key Food.
It was pathetic, really, how easily he crumbled when he saw anything that reminded him of her.
(He bought a box and all of the items needed to follow the instructions. Mike hated tuna casserole, he himself kind of hated tuna casserole. He bought it all anyway.)
And there was something else happening that he didn’t have words for when he saw these things. Not grief exactly, or not only grief. Something wider than that, something that was about the future as much as the past.
His mother was not going to be at his wedding, if he had one. She was not going to meet his children, if he had them. She was not going to see thirty, or forty, or any of the other versions of him that were still coming, still happening without her knowledge.
She had known the twenty-two-year-old version of Will Byers and that was the one she was going to keep forever.
Every year he aged, he would leave her a little further behind.
He had not understood, before, what it meant to be motherless. He'd thought he understood the shape of a loss, grief in the clinical sense. He had not understood that it was also a permanent present tense. Not just that she was gone but that she kept being gone, every day, in every new situation, in every moment that needed her and didn't get her.
Even in small ways he hadn't anticipated, he needed her, too. He needed someone to tell him that the fight he and Mike had last week was normal, that all couples had that fight.
He needed her on a random Wednesday in March when he was tired and nothing was wrong, but he just wanted to call someone who would ask how he was and mean it completely.
There was no one who would mean it the way she had. People loved him - Mike loved him, Jonathan loved him, his friends loved him - but no one was ever going to love him the way a mother loved a child. That was an irreplaceable thing and it was gone. It was going to stay gone for the rest of his life, which was going to be a long time to endure.
He was twenty-three years old and he was only just beginning to understand the size of what he'd lost.
He went back to his illustration job in January. Ate bodega sandwiches at his drafting table, met his deadlines. His hands kept moving. His mother had told him to keep making things, so he made things.
He drew her sometimes, without meaning to - not portraits, not anything he'd show anyone. Just shapes that came out of the pencil and changed into something else. Hands. A familiar posture. Once, in February, he realized he'd spent twenty minutes drawing the outline of apartment walls with lights strung along them, over and over, the swoop of the cord between each bulb. He put that page in the drawer and didn't throw it away.
He told Mike about some of the moments that flattened him, but there were too many to keep track of.
"I keep reaching for the phone," Will had said one night in February. They were on the couch, the TV on with the volume low, Mike's legs across Will's lap. "Like I'll think of something and I'll think that I should call her. And then I remember."
"What are you trying to tell her? When you reach for the phone."
Will had thought about it, but the answer wasn’t super clear. When his mom was alive, he didn’t need a reason to pick up the phone, it was just checking in and knowing she was there.
"Different things, I guess. Usually it's nothing. Just that I want to hear her voice."
Mike had been quiet for a moment.
"I think that's her," he'd said finally. "The reaching? I guess - I just, I think she's in that."
Will had looked at him.
"Like the wanting to call is where she is now. She's in the reflex." Mike had said it carefully, like he wasn't sure he was saying it right. "Does that make sense or is that a weird thing to say?"
"No," Will had said. "That makes sense."
He wasn't sure if he believed it yet. But he'd kept thinking about it, all through February and into March. He kept thinking about it every time he reached for the phone.
Eleven fifty-nine.
Midnight.
The phone didn't ring.
He knew it wasn't going to ring. He'd known all day that it wasn't going to ring.
Every year he was going to keep getting older and she was going to stay fifty-three forever and he was going to keep leaving her behind. Everyone tells you that it never gets better, only easier. He couldn’t see how this, how his mom dying, could ever get easier.
He pressed the heel of his hand to his mouth in the dark, a sob escaping before he could swallow it down.
Mike's voice, quiet and thick with sleep. He was awake, of course he was awake. "Hey, come here."
Will turned over. Mike was already reaching for him and Will went - tucked himself against Mike's chest, face against his shoulder, and Mike's arms came around him.
"She always called me at midnight," Will said softly. It was the first time he'd said it out loud. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to. "That was - she did that every year. Since I was little."
Mike didn't say anything, but his grip tightened.
"I knew it wasn't going to ring," Will said. "I knew. I still-"
"I know, baby," Mike whispered into his ear.
"It's stupid."
"It's not stupid."
"I'm too old for this, I shouldn't be-"
"Will." Mike pulled back just enough to look at him in the dark. "You're allowed to want your mom on your birthday. That's allowed at any age, that's allowed forever, actually."
Will looked at him. Mike looked back, sleepy and certain.
"Happy birthday," Mike said quietly. "I love you."
Will closed his eyes.
"I love you too."
He tried to understand it. She had told him not to stop letting people in, and he figured that included the grief - that closing the door on it was the same as closing the door on her.
He missed her and he had to keep going, he thought that was probably what she would have wanted.
The phone didn't ring.
Mike held him until he fell back asleep.
. . .
viii. april, the closet
In April, six months after October, Will opened the closet.
Mike was there. That part was unplanned. Will had come in for a blanket and stood in front of the door and Mike had appeared behind him, coffee in hand. They were both here now, sitting together in the corner of the room. They were going to do this together.
"Okay," Will said, just to say it out loud. He used this as momentum to get out of the seat and walk towards the closet again.
He dug the boxes out that he had been avoiding.
Joyce's things, in black marker, just her handwriting on cardboard.
He looked at it for a second before he grabbed one and carried it into the living room. They ended up setting all three down on the floor in front of the TV. The room had the best light in their tiny apartment, the east-facing windows, the apartment's one genuine feature, that turned everything gold.
Will sat on the floor and Mike sat next to him.
The first box was full of miscellaneous kitchen things. Items that he had grabbed simply because he wanted to be able to use them in his day-to-day life. A mixing bowl he recognized from childhood. Two mugs, mismatched. A wooden spoon darkened with years of use.
He turned the spoon over in his hands. It was nothing - it was a wooden spoon - and it was also every kitchen she'd ever had, every meal.
The second box was full of books. Some of Will's from childhood, his name in the front in the handwriting of a small boy. A few of hers, separated out for him - she'd labeled them. One had a sticky note on the inside cover that he hadn’t known was there.
Will,
I think you'll love this.
Mom.
He sat with that.
The present tense of it. I think. Written for a future she'd expected to exist. Written like she'd be there when he read it, like she'd be ready to hear what he thought.
"Can I?" Mike asked.
Will handed it over. Mike read it and Will watched face move through several things without hiding any of them.
"She knew you.”
"Better than I knew myself sometimes." Will took the note back. He'd keep that too. Obviously. Maybe he would stick it on the fridge underneath one of their stupid, novelty magnets that they had started collecting.
The third box he saved for last. It was the one he had been trying to not think about the most.
"You want some space?" Mike asked gently.
"No, please stay."
He pulled the tape and the flaps opened.
The smell came first. Six months in cardboard had softened it, but not erased it. He pressed his hand flat on the top of the open box and breathed through it.
Mike put his hand over Will's, on the cardboard edge.
The cardigan lay on top. Gray, misshapen with washing. He'd seen her wear it a thousand times, usually in the mornings while she was rushing to make breakfast. He folded it carefully and put it aside.
The photographs were next. A collection of them stuffed in an envelope and in no particular order. Him at eight, squinting. Jonathan at sixteen with a camera. The Hawkins house in summer. And one he'd never seen - his mother as a young woman, early twenties, standing in front of a car he didn't recognize, laughing at something outside the frame.
Not knowing about the Upside Down or the cancer. She was beautiful, this version of her that he never got to know.
"She looks like you," Mike said, picking it up and holding it close to his face.
"She doesn't." He had always heard that he had looked like his mom, but it was one of those things that didn’t actually mean anything to him. His mom was beautiful, and seeing her in a picture where she is so young and carefree - he couldn’t see the resemblance to his own reflection.
"She totally does, especially in the way she’s laughing. Your faces are, like, identical. I’ve made you laugh like that."
Will took the photograph to examine it closer. He looked for whatever Mike was seeing, and found pieces of himself the harder he looked.
"Maybe a little.”
"Definitely a little."
There was a small locket next, silver with intricate filigree on the outside. He'd never seen her wear it before, but when he opened it he saw Hopper on one side. Will and Jonathan and Jane were on the other, cut carefully to fit.
He set that one down for a second.
And finally, a notebook - tucked at the side of the box, soft-covered, the one from her nightstand.
Running his thumb over the cover, he held it for a moment before he was able to flip through it. He turned past the grocery lists and the phone numbers and the emphatic note about calling the hospital back - she'd underlined it twice.
Towards the end, there was a section.
Things I want them to know:
Jonathan - You were the first thing I ever truly loved, and you will always be my first baby. I would do it all again without changing a single thing.
Jane - Baby. You found your way to me and I am still amazed every day. You are the bravest person I know. Don't be afraid to be soft.
Will - You are going to be so happy. You are so loved and you don't always see it, but I do. Mike sees it too. That boy loves you so much it's embarrassing actually.
Will laughed. A real one, small and helpless, welling up from somewhere below everything else. He laughed and his eyes went wet and he let both of those things happen at the same time.
"What?" Mike asked, trying to get a glance at the page.
Will handed him the notebook, open to the page.
Mike read all three entries. When he got to the last one he pressed his lips together for a second.
"That boy loves you so much it's embarrassing," he read, out loud, quietly.
"She was right.”
He looked down at the notebook again. "She wrote this for you to find?”
"She always thought ahead." Will took the notebook back, gently. "Even when things were falling apart she was always thinking about us.”
His mother had survived things that should have been unsurvivable. She had kept going and kept going and she had not gotten enough years and it was stupid and unfair and wrong and infuriating and devastating.
And she had left him things to find. She had been certain he would find them.
"I want to make tuna casserole tonight,” he looked up at Mike as he said it. “I know it’s mostly opening a lot of cans, but we can use the wooden spoon, maybe.”
Mike smiled at him, nose crinkling at the thought of eating it, but he would probably do anything for Will.
Will smiled back, helplessly, the way he always had around Mike Wheeler.
"I want to hang pictures and I want to get weird frames from the thrift place on Myrtle to put them in.”
Mike nodded at him, biting his lip slightly.
“And I’m going to wear her cardigan around the house.”
"Tonight?"
"Yeah.”
They ate at the table by the propped open window that night, the April evening coming in. The wooden spoon was resting somewhere on the stove, where it would live now.
After dinner Will went and got the extra blanket out of the closet finally, and they watched something on TV. Three channels clearly, two with static. They settled on a rerun of something neither of them could name.
Will had on the cardigan, slightly too large and exactly right. Mike had looked at him when he came back in wearing it and not said anything, which was the right call.
He sat with his feet up on the couch and Mike's arm around him and thought about his mother at twenty-something in front of a car he didn't know, laughing. Maybe she was even the same age as he was right now.
The TV murmured on low, and outside the city breathed. Will thought about reaching for the phone - the reflex, still there - and felt, in the reach, something settled.
The love in the reaching. Mike had said she was in that, whatever that meant. He was starting to believe it.