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“Keep making faces like that,” Jonathan’s mother used to tell him. “And one day it’ll freeze that way.”
“I wasn’t making faces,” Jonathan lied.
He was.
In fact, this was his most sour face yet as his mother was making him snap wax-beans. It was both his least favorite chore and most hated food, all rolled into one. Only the dog, Chester, liked pickled wax-beans, which had to tell him something.
“But why do we need so many?” he groaned, flicking off the green cap of the bean into the bowl on the kitchen table. “It’s just the three of us.”
“Because you know how expensive vegetables are in the winter,” his mother gently reminded him. “And I can’t have my two favorite little munchkins getting scurvy,” she added with a grin.
Then, she reached out and grabbed a too thin cheek, pulling it tight.
“Smile, Jonathan, or you’ll end up looking like your father.”
The bite of her words had lessened with time, laughed out. His father had become synonymous with the word 'scapegoat'. It tied them together, binding them under the spell of collective hardship caused by the man, and it felt good to talk about him, even if it was in a collectively accusatory way.
Lonnie Byers—absentee for nearly a year now—was now a phantom figure in their household, referenced only in passing. The dryer was on the fritz again? Must have been Lonnie’s fault for not fixing it before he left. The shingles on the roof on the shed were peeling? Lonnie never got around to changing them. Dinner was burnt? Lonnie never bothered to fix the heating coil on the stove.
Still, Jonathan’s frown deepened into a thick scowl. The only faces he made were those he had learned from his mother, who by Jonathan’s estimation frowned a fair deal more than he did. For instance, the face she made while scrubbing around the toilet—a face that said, “I do this even though it’s awful!”—was the exact face Jonathan insisted he wasn’t making now. Snapping wax-beans was terrible, and he hated having to pick up all the little green leafy caps that had missed the bowl. But! He was a Byers, and a Byers never complained: no, they simply stewed.
The radio cut in and out, fuzzing as the wind picked up.
“And once we’re finished here, we can start boiling the brine,” his mother told him brightly, speaking over the static.
Jonathan’s face would definitely freeze that way - he was sure of it. But his mother assured him that he’d thank her someday. He’d thank her for growing up skilled and strong, and for keeping all his teeth (unlike Mr. Adams two doors down who wore dentures). He’d thank her for the silly yellow apron she bought him for his tenth birthday, and for teaching him how to cook. He’d thank her for making him clean the house and for helping Will with his homework, even math (which he hated), and for leaving them on their own so often. He’d be independent, his mother told him. He’d be able to look after himself on his own one day.
“But why do you have to work so much?” Jonathan often asked, sighing as he watched his mother slip into her work smock as the porridge bubbled on the stove. Will wasn’t even up yet—that was Jonathan’s job—and the sun had barely begun to peak over the horizon.
“Well, Jonathan,” his mother had said, grabbing for her car keys and planting a quick kiss on his cheek. “Money is one of those necessary evils. Once upon a time, we were all farmers.”
“We were not,” Jonathan refuted testily.
“Well, this was a long time ago, sweetie,” his mother smiled. “Before things such as utility bills and sewer taxes, of course.” Then, Joyce had laughed, grabbing her car keys, and took one final sip of her morning coffee. “Your father should have never sold our last chicken all those years ago.”
Her grin was wicked, but there had never been any chickens, nor a farm. The dog, Chester, would have killed them long ago.
“Then are we poor?” Jonathan had wanted to know. And was that the reason why he was stuck pickling beans all of yesterday instead of riding bikes with the other neighbourhood kids?
“Of course not,” his mother had insisted, tilting her head in a way that made everything seem more than true. “Though I wouldn’t say we’re rich—we just always have everything we need. No more, no less.”
Although they didn’t have a colour television set. They had a black and white one with bent rabbit ears that got six stations at most, and that was on an especially clear day. Their furniture they owned was all used and slightly worn, not new like some of the nicer things he had seen at Steve Harrington’s house during that summer pool party the entire 7th and 8th grade classes had been invited to last summer. And instead of air conditioning, they had a single ancient-looking floor fan that would short out the circuit box when they ran it while the coffee pot was on (Jonathan was now an expert at flipping fuse switches). But no, they were not poor. In their small town, there was no such thing as poor, his mother told him. Not if one worked hard enough. In Hawkins, every house had that cheap, laminate siding and it was normal to have your windows specked black with soot from the iron mill.
Instead, they were lucky to have a house at all, his mother said. She told him that some people in town lived in their cars and in the winter they were so cold they couldn’t sleep at all, because if they did they might not wake up in the morning. And just you wait, she had told Jonathan—you’ll see! When you’re old enough, you’ll understand that the way we have things now are pretty good!
“Besides,” she had rhymed off easily, tugging on her run down sneakers. “A little discomfort is good for us.”
Outside the sun had finally just begun to burst over the stretching limbs of the forest, the fall air just a touch too chilly to be going outside without a coat on.
Jonathan waved his mother goodbye, listening to her stern reminder to do the dishes from their supper from the night before, finish his homework after school and to go to bed at a timely hour. She was working a double shift today, so she wouldn’t be back till well after 10.
Jonathan did as he was instructed.
He got Will up for school, served them his mother’s sludgy oatmeal and pulled his sleepy little brother out to the end of the driveway to catch the morning bus. After school, it was the same: herd his brother off the bus, reheat leftovers from the fridge for supper, do their homework together, do the dishes, watch TV, and off to bed. The next morning, he woke up to the sound of the fuzzing radio and a kitchen smelling of strong coffee. On the stove was a pot of oatmeal waiting for their breakfast, his mother perched absently at the kitchen table with her morning paper.
Jonathan smiled. Everything was as it should be. Outside, the fall leaves were just beginning to peak on the trees, golden and fragile, and the town mill was chugging quietly away, a black streak of smog cutting across the blue September sky.
His mother served him a bowl of the sludgy oatmeal and Jonathan slinked to the refrigerator, quietly grabbing a jug of milk. When he returned to the table, his mother was pouring herself another cup of coffee and puffing gently on a cigarette.
“Your father finally sent some money yesterday,” his mother told him. “I put a little of it into a savings fund for your schooling.” He was turning twelve in a week, and this was meant to be his birthday present.
Jonathan beamed and sat down, pouring the milk into his oatmeal, his eyes staring briefly at the backside of his mother’s newspaper. STATE OF INDIANA ENERGY DEPARTMENT RELOCATES TO HAWKINS read the headline. His mother flipped a page and the headline disappeared, swallowed up by an advertisement for the local general store instead. Jonathan blinked, sticking his spoon into his oatmeal.
Outside, the birds chirped and the sun continued to rise. The future, Jonathan thought, was a distant, fantastical idea.
—
He was fifteen when Will went missing. Frantic searching and crazed behavior from his mother speaking fervently to the household appliances followed for months, even after his brother’s body had long since been buried in the local cemetery. Then, one-day, his mother didn’t get up to go work.
She talked about Will existing in another world. Another dimension. He didn’t die. The body they buried wasn’t his. Jonathan didn’t listen to her. Instead, he reminded himself of the facts the medical coroner had typed out neatly on Will’s death certificate: he fell from the edge of the quarry cliff side, was shocked by the icy waters of the pit, developed hypothermia, and drowned.
His mother wouldn’t listen to any of it. It was all politicking, she said, and did Jonathan know what that meant? It meant everyone was lying to her.
She wouldn’t blame Jonathan for hating him, she said. I know I seem crazy, she said. But I’m not. I’m not crazy.
This mom didn't sleep. And when she did, she drank. This mom dropped things: cups and bottles and plates she was too wasted to clean. This mom slept well past noon, sometimes well past dark. Sometimes, Jonathan would come home from school and find his mother still sleeping on the couch. The lights no longer talked to her, she said. But if she kept them all on, then maybe, just maybe…
Day after day, Jonathan would come home to a bright but dirty house, no dinner, and a mess left for him to clean up. And his mom would just sigh and smile and ask him how his day was. Was he keeping up in school?
She did it like nothing happened, like everything was normal, and it made Jonathan want to scream. He couldn’t understand why she was acting like this: like—like a child. Like someone Jonathan’s age was supposed to act. This wasn't the way things were supposed to be, but the way things were. Without his real mother around, Jonathan was going to have to do everything. He was going to have to be the adult.
And he didn’t…
He didn’t want to be.
“Mom,” he would say, voice shaky and trembling, and it took every ounce of strength he had in him to say that word. Mom. “Mom, did you eat anything today?”
And it was like all the lights had come on into the room. Her eyes seemed to refocus and she really looked at Jonathan for the first time in a long time, and she sat up.
“No,” she would say. “Would you like something?”
They had take-out that night, which they almost never did, and ate it sitting out on the porch. Fireflies blinked in the shadows of the setting sun, and Chester pretended he was above chasing them, instead snapping at the bugs errantly with each flick of his tail. His mother didn’t say anything about looking for work again, and Jonathan didn’t ask. Things were too perfect in that moment, far too precipitously balanced, and to say anything would have upset that.
The next morning, his mother sat in the kitchen with her hands cupped around her coffee mug, like she did sometimes before heading out to work. Only there was no work, not for her. She hadn’t washed her hair, hadn’t changed, hadn’t taken off the same smoky, dirty house robe in weeks, and when Jonathan passed her in the kitchen on his quest to make breakfast, she looked surprised. Like, oh, Jonathan was still here?
Jonathan ignored her and instead, had turned to the refrigerator and took stock of what food they had left. They were out of milk and the butter had turned rancid. There was no real meat either, and the last of their condiments were getting low. The cupboards were bare—no pasta, no rice—although there were a few unopened bags of yellow split peas that Jonathan had no idea what to do with. There was also a lone can of flaked tuna, although if he remembered correctly, it had been sitting in the cupboard, untouched, since Will had passed.
“Mom, do you have any money?” Jonathan quietly asked. He regretted her offer of buying take-out from the night before and really wished they had put that money towards real food. “We need groceries.”
The radio near the stovetop hummed a quiet, wavy tune, crackling in and out with every sway of the old sycamore tree in the front yard. Chester was licking yesterday’s dinner out of an unwashed bowl near the kitchen sink, a soft metallic plink, plink, plink heard every few seconds. His mother didn’t answer.
Jonathan sighed and then picked up the clean-licked bowl, ignoring the dog’s long howl and set it in the sink. Then, wordlessly, he left to go to school.
The walk felt long and with each step up the crumbly gravel road, he thought about how at home he felt less like a son and more like a guest. A roommate. A housekeeper. A nurse who would wake up in the middle of the night and shake his mother awake, if only to make sure the woman was still breathing. And he wasn’t sure who belonged less: herself, or this person who somehow wore his mother around like a skin, distant and dirty and faded like an old, ratty tee-shirt. Logically, Jonathan knew this was somehow all his fault. It wasn’t his mother’s fault or the stupid alcohols fault, but his fault that he couldn’t make everything better again. He was the one who had left Will alone that night. He was the one who hadn’t been there when Will had disappeared.
It was his fault that instead of saying “goodbye”, or “I’ll be back”, or even “I love you”, Jonathan had said nothing that morning. He had hooked his thumb into the door latch, sucked in a breath and pulled. The moment he had walked outside, his chest instantly felt lighter and his breathing not so tight. His fault.
He had forgotten to think about his mother that day at school, simply too thankful that he could breathe again, and forgot to say, “I’m back”, when he came home. He had thrown pebbles at the old rusting Ford Pinto with its flat front tire on his way up the driveway. His fault. And when he had sucked in his breath again in dread upon reaching the front door, knowing that he would find new, empty bottles lying around the house, he knew that this was his fault too.
He had forgotten to buy the groceries that they needed that day. He couldn't afford them anyways. His fault. He was late getting home, having missed the bus, and had 15 minutes to get his work uniform on and drive back into town when he had paused. The house was just like he had left it that morning: still suffocating and still filthy and still making his skin crawl. But there wasn’t a single light on anywhere, but it was too much to hope that his mother had gone out. His fault.
Chester was nervous and whining and he stuck to his leg like he’d been static charged; no-one had fed him that day and he was clearly hungry. He’d been scratching desperately at the door to get out when Jonathan had arrived, but now he wouldn’t leave his side, not even when Jonathan held the door open for him. Instead, Chester just furrowed his face and milled about in circles, whining until he followed him to the kitchen. He remembered having rolled his eyes. He was pissed at having to feed the dog again. Pissed that nobody cared. Pissed that the kitchen was just as he’d left it that morning, messy and untouched.
His mother’s mug was still on the table, and her spoon, and her newspaper. And without wanting to, Jonathan felt a rush of anger, like hot bile, because the woman never, ever cleaned up. Ever! And Jonathan had to do everything and it was wrong—it was all so wrong. His mother was lying curled up in the middle of the floor, and that too was wrong. And Jonathan felt another rush of anger, and another, and he thought himself that she better just be sleeping! She better just be too drunk to find her bed and that maybe she had just passed out on the floor. The thoughts had filled his mind like venom. He didn’t know what he’d do otherwise…but she’d better just be asleep. But Chester was even more anxious, whining louder and practically yowling, and there was urine on the floor, and blood, and Jonathan knew that his mother wasn’t just sleeping.
His fault.
Jonathan had picked up the razor blade first, pulling it from her mother's cold hand and felt numb all over. He felt sick. He threw up a lot, and blubbered and tried not to listen to himself. He wasn’t a child anymore, so what good would crying do? He sent Chester outside, yelling at the dog to go away when he wouldn’t stop barking, ferociously glued to his leg. He scrubbed up as best he could and he stuffed it all down. He opened up the windows and dragged the blood-soaked mat near the kitchen sink outside and rolled it out into the driveway. He yelled at Chester again when he returned, the dog whining and tucking his tail between his legs. He didn’t want him going back into that house. He didn’t want anyone going in.
He found a note on the table next to the still half full coffee mug, but it explained nothing and Jonathan sobbed again, his chest heaving as though the bones in his ribcage had cracked and he wasn't able to get enough air into his already suffocating lungs. His entire body felt like it was on fire—his fault, his fault, his fault—and when he had finally calmed herself down enough to speak, he picked up the phone and called Chief Hopper.
He didn't call his dad.
“It’s alright,” Hopper had told him, but he sounded just as sick and as panicked as Jonathan was trying not to be. "Just...just tell me what happened.”
Jim Hopper, at home for the evening, eating supper and already halfway through a six pack of beer swore loudly and before hanging up on Jonathan, told him not to move.
Jonathan didn’t.
Instead, he sat on the porch step and waited, his eyes fastidiously glued to the damp, wet mat soaking thick red liquid into the gravel of the driveway. He barely even recognized the sound of wailing sirens as they arrived.
When he led the circus inside, the clear crisp light of the setting sun picked out every detail in the room, every mote of dust, every stain. Every hair on the dog’s coat. Every eye upon him. It was supposed to be a beautiful day. The kind of day perfect for riding bikes or snapping wax-beans. For canning beets while the radio struggled to pick up stations over the static emptiness of the hillsides. For covertly making faces at his mother’s singing. Never once thanking her.
“It’s alright,” Hopper said as he watched the paramedics lift his mother’s body into a black body bag. “It’s alright if you want to cry.”
Hopper patted him on the shoulder, blinking mutely, and Jonathan tried not to notice how the older man’s hand was shaking.
He wouldn’t though. Cry, that is. His face had finally frozen and no more tears would come.