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you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,
nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow traveler
- Margaret Atwood, Is/Not
New Year’s, 1988. Hawkins celebrates in fits and starts, a fractured town still afraid of its own shadow. No fireworks. No funeral for a girl who never existed. No answer to the most burning questions.
Eventually—if time’s any guide—these questions, like so much else, will smolder to ash. As snow falls now, ash once fell from the sky; a volcanic spew of mystery gunk that may or may not be shortening Steve’s lifespan by years… or decades, for all that he’s breathed it in.
But Steve is pretty used to the idea that he’ll die young. He’s shaken the possibility (or been shaken by it) like a Magic 8 ball many times, and the answers go Signs Point to Yes… As I See It, Yes… Better Not Tell You Now, punctuated by his chest aching and his head aching and his old scars twinging under the slash of phantom teeth.
Teeth like needles, those demobats had, and tails like whipcords. Little bastards.
He wrenched his shoulder pretty good on the radio tower; a tendon stretched too far. Or a ligament? He doesn’t know the difference. Just knows that it still hurts.
There’s an empty space left by the closed gate, by the so-called victory. As far as Hawkins is concerned, there’s no thank you for saving the world, no parade of heroes. Not that Steve wants these things. Only a handful of people understand what was saved, what was lost. That handful of people—closer to family than anything Steve ever experienced, almost needs a different word to describe it by—
That handful of people doesn’t have so much in common, anymore. New year, old separations.
Even Robin is leaving, college fanning the wind beneath her wings.
I wanted it more than I realized, you know? To get out.
But what if there’s no getting out?
There is no answer to the most burning questions. Steve takes a step back from his center of gravity, then another. He celebrates and mourns alongside the others only when he’s invited, which isn’t as often as it used to be. No shocking blow; just a bruise. There’s no more work to be done. Steve holds no grudges, holds no hope.
After all, the only option, when the love of your life has turned you down once, twice, and in absentia, is to let her go.
At least Steve is pretty used to the only option. The only option, when you get the heart kicked out of your chest, is to go and find it, stuff it back in, keep trudging on to the next best thing. This has happened a couple times; he really has gotten good at no way out but through.
Nancy is leaving on the fifteenth of January, driving the station wagon to Emerson. Steve learns of this through Robin. He lets go of expecting a goodbye.
Then Nancy shows up at his door.
He wasn’t expecting his parents so soon; they had expressed no interest in leaving Chicago immediately. He would have joined them there for Christmas, under other circumstances. It seemed like the right thing to do, except that everyone in Hawkins was still considered a kind of flight risk. Certainly, everyone involved in frontally assaulting a dubiously authorized military zone has been advised that they should lay low until further notice.
NDAs and we look the other way if you do, too, only go so far.
So he opens the front door of his old house, without even bothering to slip on his boots, expecting Dustin or Robin (though it feels like, in six weeks, he hasn’t seen much of them either—) and tries to pick up his jaw in the usual way.
It never gets easier with Nancy. He does the damn thing—lets go, moves on, never in the cards, jaw picked up, heart stuffed back into his chest—but it never gets easier.
“Hi,” he says. “I thought—”
“That I was gone?” Her hair is pulled back from her face, a few tired curls escaping anyway. Steve traces the faint punctuation of one against her throat, swallows hard himself.
“Yeah,” he says. Standing there, he can already feel snowmelt creeping into his wool socks. “I thought you were gone.”
“And you just…” She trails off, but her eyes hold him fast. She slides one hand flat out in front of her, gliding over an invisible plane. “Just kept going on, huh?”
What do you want me to say?
He shrugs. “I figured you were busy.”
“Busy is thirty-seven crawls to plan in eighteen months,” she reproaches him, showing a flash of the grim commander he knew (loved) in the underground lair of the station. Sitting with his feet propped up, but listening like his life depended on it (someone’s did), taking her commands like shots of whiskey, warm and heady and just painful enough to always come back for more.
What died in him?
What died?
“Busy,” Nancy continues, “is not two whole weeks of January. You’ve been here. I’ve been here.”
It’s so goddamn unfair.
“If you wanted to see me,” he says, “you just had to call. That’s the way it’s always been, Nance.” That Nance wasn’t meant to slip out; he’s trying to be pissed at her.
“Well, here I am,” she says. Measuring him. Not quite cold—though Nancy can burn cold—but sharp.
“Here you are,” he says blandly. Try some humility, Steve. Like what got him through with Dustin, with Jonathan.
I probably could've saved you a little bit of time…
She seems to make a decision: chin down, eyebrows up. “Ok. Right. Good talk.” And she’s going to turn away—he knows that stiffening of her shoulders.
So he doesn’t let her.
“I hope you love it,” he says. “Emerson, I mean.” Why’d his voice have to crack like a teenager’s on the word love? “It’s what you’ve wanted for so long, and it sucks that you had to wait for it.”
It sucks to wait. That’s why he’s stopped waiting. He has.
Nancy relents. Just an inch. Just enough to kick his heart down the road a few paces more. Stolen yards, stolen time, and all that. The life you can’t get back, standing at your door.
“It’s like a dream,” she says. “This whole thing. And I can see it, and Mike can see it… what happened, I mean, but we don’t see it the same way. Like two people on opposite sides of the window. Wouldn’t you say they’re looking at the same thing?” She flushes. To have ever loved someone, to have held their face in your hands, is to know their blushes: color and warmth.
If Steve shuts his eyes, he’ll show too much.
Wouldn’t you say they’re looking at the same thing?
“I think I know what you mean.” Steve shifts from one foot to the other. He hasn’t shut the door at his back. He hasn’t invited her in. He stands, too cold, too endlessly hopeful, praying for the moment to stretch, for the pain to promise something—
“Yeah,” Nancy says, softer now. Her boots are rimed in frost; she’s hugging her old gray coat to her chest. Steve has no coat, as well as no boots, but she hasn’t noticed.
Or maybe she has, and it’s not her business, whether he’s warm or not.
“My point is—” she laughs a little—“if I even have a point… Nobody knows what they’re doing. My brother’s grieving, but he turns it into anger. My sister’s—she says she’s so happy, and she isn’t afraid. But how can she not be afraid? The fear will find its way back to her. That’s just how it works. That’s what I tell myself. But what if that’s just me? I’m not either of them. And I’m not Robin...”
(He’s surprised she doesn’t say Jonathan.)
“I’m not you,” Nancy says, looking up at him intently. She hasn’t taken a step towards him, but he feels the center of gravity pulling, pulling. Is it pulling him towards her, or the other way around?
Is it all in his head?
“Of course not,” he says. And here is where he says, you’re better, so much better, but he’s too tired for that. Too tired to hate himself (much), now that he’s being left all alone. Again.
A few years. A few decades. You won’t even feel it, with time, whether it heals cleanly or not.
“I miss how things were,” she says. An old Nancy smile, a kissable quirk in the corner of her mouth. “Is that crazy?”
“It depends,” Steve says, “on what you mean by crazy.”
She’s frustrated. Or scared. It’s so hard to tell, with Nancy: her fear is its own language. My brother’s grieving, but he turns it into anger. My sister—
“I mean,” she says, “you’re acting weird, and I’m leaving, and—”
I’m in love with you. And I can’t get over it, and I’ve tried, and you have never taken the hook out of my heart or stopped kicking it or whatever stupid metaphor I definitely won’t say out loud. Dustin would probably tell me I still don’t know what a metaphor is, but I do.
“And?” Steve says, giving her as close to nothing as he can manage.
“Damn it, Steve. Where did you go?”
“That’s not fair,” he says. “If we’re talking about us, that’s not fair. If we’re talking about… everybody else, I don’t know. Seemed like we all needed a break from each other.”
(Will Robin miss him, when she goes to Smith? Will the kids take the same interest in his job applications that they used to when that meant free scoops, bonus movie rentals, all that jazz?)
(Are any of them even kids anymore?)
Nancy tilts her head back, stares up at the snowflakes that have started, like clockwork, to dust down, down, down. Maybe she’s remembering the ash-fall, too.
“I’m talking about us,” she says, her voice small, eyes fixed on the sky.
“OK,” he says. Relents, on his own terms. “I’ll miss you, when you’re at Emerson.”
“I know.” She’s still not looking at him.
“But you won’t miss me,” he says. “Not in the same way. And that’s how things are, and I get it, and I’m not asking—”
Her eyes his.
“You stopped asking,” she whispers.
She’s always been a crack shot. “God, Nance. How many times is enough?”
At the door of his parents’ house, light streaming out, a girl gazing in. A party that wasn’t a party. A beginning that never ended properly. Not for him.
Not for them.
Wouldn’t you say they’re looking at the same thing?
Nancy takes a step forward. Shakes the crown of snowflakes from her hair. “I know it’s goodbye.”
(It always is.)
“It always is,” Steve says, not unkindly, but because he has to start somewhere.
She’s so close now. Sad-eyed, soft-lipped, the warrior submerged in the memory of a girl. And then, fighting-fierce, her arms close around his neck.
Steve surrenders. (The only option.) Bows his head so she can reach his lips with hers.
Nancy kisses him, hard.
It’s like senior year, except it isn’t. She still wants her hands in his hair, and he still lifts her up by the waist, the heavy soles of her boots digging into the tops of his feet. She’s still the one to nip at him a little, but he won’t do it back. And in the end, it’s his gentleness that makes her pull away, crying.
“I don’t know,” she says, wild and helpless. “I don’t know what to do.”
He holds her. Nancy laughs a little, a sound that trembles through them both, like a pulse they share.
“I’m standing on your feet.”
“Sure are,” he says in her ear. He’d stay like this forever, if they only had time. “It’s fine.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
She steps down, carefully. Gazes up at him, the tears still rising. Memorizing his face? He knows hers too well to ever forget it.
“I…”
“You have to go,” he says. “I know. I’ve always known, Nance.”
“I’ll come back,” she tells him, but the words are like a spell settling over her. A promise that weighs too heavily.
He shakes his head. “Too soon for that. This is just the beginning.”
Her face clears. She smiles, nods.
It’s the look he remembers. The one where she’s almost ready to say the words he’s so often said for her (if only to himself). Then—
“I’ll miss you,” Nancy tells him. “I miss you, now. And I’ll miss you the same.”
In a manner of speaking, Steve picks up his heart. It’ll do just fine in its old place.
It’ll do just fine.