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Karen Wheeler loves her children. After she strips everything else away, only that remains, and only that matters.
When she was a little girl, playing with dolls and wooden toy kitchen sets, she didn’t really understand what it meant to be a mother. She was always the mom when they played house at recess, but she couldn’t picture herself as one, even as she mechanically acted out the role.
When she was older, she had dreams that didn’t mesh with the reality of motherhood. She watched her friends settle down and have kids, and she watched Joyce, most of all.
Joyce Maldonado, with her nervous, busy-bee hands and pretty laugh, with her hair always a little wild, always cut just a little uneven. Joyce, who loved fiercely and visibly and without apology.
Joyce who blushed when Lonnie Byers flirted with her in the hall.
Karen admired her. That was the word she used, anyway.
Admiration explained the way her eyes followed Joyce across the room at school events. Admiration explained the warmth that settled in her chest when Joyce smiled at her, the way Karen felt oddly bereft when Joyce moved away from Hawkins for a few years, the way her life seemed to narrow when Joyce’s presence was gone.
Admiration was a safe word. A correct word.
Karen married Ted because that was what came next. Because he was kind enough, steady enough, and because she believed—truly—that love would grow if she did everything right.
She built a home. She learned the rhythms of grocery lists and carpool schedules and PTA meetings. She gave birth to Nancy, then Mike, then Holly, and something in her clicked into place that had nothing to do with romance at all.
This, she understood. This fierce, bone-deep need to protect. This joy that lived alongside constant fear. Motherhood stripped her down to something essential and immovable.
She didn’t question why she volunteered to help Joyce with anything she needed. Why she remembered every detail about Will and Jonathan, why she noticed the way Joyce’s hands shook when she was anxious, why she felt irrationally proud when Joyce leaned on her, trusted her.
There were moments—quiet ones, dangerous ones—when Karen wondered what her life might have looked like if she’d let herself ask different questions earlier. If she’d let herself want differently.
But there was love from the wrong side of the tracks, and then there was marrying yourself to the tracks themselves. She buried those dreams a long time ago.
(They still knock on her door at night.)
Mike has been difficult to read lately.
Not difficult in the way he was at sixteen, sharp edged and loud, or even in the way he was in his twenties, restless and unsure. This is something else. A tightening. Like he’s pulling himself inward, compressing around something fragile and volatile and refusing to let it show.
He still comes over for dinner. Still helps with the dishes. Still hugs her goodbye, quick and a little stiff. But there’s a blankness to him that makes her uneasy, like he’s somewhere else even when he’s sitting right across from her at the table.
And one day, when the invitation comes, it all starts to make sense. Slowly, horribly, that pit in her gut deepens.
It’s cream-colored, thick paper. Tasteful. Expensive. She sees it in Mike’s hand before he realizes she’s looking, his thumb worrying the edge like he’s afraid it might cut him.
“Who’s getting married?” she asks lightly.
She thinks it must be Lucas and Max. They’d been waiting far too long, in Karen’s opinion. They were sure about each other, that much anyone can see, so why wait so long?
Mike doesn’t answer right away. He just stares at it, and she watches his face go carefully empty, like a curtain dropping. Whatever reaction he had, he swallows it whole.
“Will,” he says finally. “Will Byers.”
Karen blinks. “Oh! Well—” She smiles automatically. “That’s wonderful. I didn’t know he was seeing someone seriously.”
Will was the politest and oldest of her son’s friends, and he had grown up to be a fine young man, no matter what Ted had to say about it. Karen was proud of how far he’d come.
He looked more and more like Joyce every time she saw him.
“Yeah,” Mike says.
He doesn’t smile.
“Oh, well,” she says lightly, reaching for the kettle, giving him time. “I’m sure Joyce must be thrilled.”
“Yeah,” he repeats, no inflection.
The dead look in his eyes makes her hands shake as she pours. A drop splashes over the side of her cup.
Over the next few weeks, Karen notices the invitation move around the house. On the counter. On the coffee table. Once, tucked into a book Mike isn’t actually reading. Every time she sees it, Mike is nearby, hovering, eyes flicking to it like it might disappear if he looks away too long.
The night before the wedding, she finds him standing in the kitchen at two in the morning, staring into the refrigerator.
“You okay, honey?” she asks softly.
He startles like he’s been caught doing something wrong. “Yeah. Just—couldn’t sleep.”
She almost asks more. Almost asks why his shoulders are so tight, why his hands shake when he closes the fridge, why he looks like he’s bracing for impact.
Instead, she says, “Big day tomorrow.”
Mike nods. “Yeah.”
He can’t look her in the eye.
The wedding is beautiful.
Karen can admit that, even as unease curls low in her stomach. Will looks happy—radiant, even. His husband is kind, attentive, everything you’d hope for. Joyce cries. Jonathan beams. The room is full of warmth and laughter and history.
But Mike doesn’t look happy, Karen notices. He can’t even look up from the flower arrangements at their table. His eyes are glued to the forget me nots as sweat slowly drips down his temple.
And Karen doesn’t understand. She thought he’d be happy to see his friends again, that maybe it would bring him out of his depression to see so many familiar faces.
Mike looks up, at some point, during the ceremony, and the look on his face is so terrified and so resigned, Karen thinks it’s the expression a corpse might make, if it was aware of the soil being thrown over it’s coffin.
At the reception, he barely eats. He drinks too much water. He keeps glancing toward the exits.
Music drifts through the hall, something warm and sentimental. The lights dim just enough to soften the edges of everything. People laugh. Glasses clink. Someone calls for the couple.
“Do you need some air?” Karen asks at one point, leaning close so no one else can hear.
“I’m fine,” Mike says too quickly, already shaking his head. His smile flashes into place a second too late, brittle as glass. “Really. I’m okay.”
Then the first dance happens.
Someone taps a fork against a glass. Applause ripples through the room as Will and his husband step onto the dance floor. There’s a collective sigh—affectionate, indulgent. This is the part everyone’s been waiting for.
Karen looks at Will and feels a genuine swell of emotion. He looks happy. Grounded. Loved.
Will’s hand rests easily at the small of his husband’s back. They sway together, unhurried, as if the rest of the room has politely disappeared. Will laughs at something whispered in his ear, head tipping back, eyes bright.
Karen glances at Mike.
His face has gone blank again, worse than before. Not anger, not bitterness—something hollowed out, like the sudden absence of air. His fingers dig into the edge of the table, knuckles whitening. For a moment she thinks he might be sick.
Then the song swells. The couple turns. Will’s husband pulls him a little closer, forehead resting briefly against his temple.
Mike stands up so abruptly his chair scrapes loudly against the floor.
The sound cuts through the music, sharp and wrong. A few heads turn. Karen feels heat rush to her face.
“I—” Mike says, already backing away. “I’m sorry. I just—”
Karen barely has time to process the words before he’s gone, shoulders hunched as he pushes through the crowd, not looking back.
“Mike,” Karen calls, but he doesn’t hear her—or pretends not to.
For a second she stays seated, frozen between propriety and instinct. She catches Joyce’s eye across the room, sees the concern flicker there too, mirroring her own. Joyce starts to rise from her chair.
Karen shakes her head.
She finds him on the floor of the men’s bathroom.
The door is half-closed, the sign on the front a meaningless suggestion, but she doesn’t even hesitate for a moment before going in.
It’s empty, luckily, all except for the messy, folded figure of her little boy.
Mike is sitting on the floor in the far corner, back against the wall, knees pulled to his chest. His suit jacket is gone, discarded somewhere nearby. His hands are fisted in his hair like he’s trying to hold himself together by force alone.
He looks up when she approaches, eyes red, expression stripped bare now that there’s no one left to perform for. For a split second, he looks panicked—caught, exposed.
“Mom,” he says hoarsely. “You—you can’t be in here.”
Karen crosses the room in three quick steps and crouches in front of him.
She lowers herself onto the dirty bathroom tile without a thought for her dress, the cold seeping through the fabric. She takes his face in her hands before he can pull away, thumbs brushing beneath his eyes.
“Breathe,” she tells him. “With me.”
He tries. He really does. But the breath catches, turns jagged, collapses into something smaller and uglier. His shoulders shake. The sound that comes out of him is raw, stripped of any attempt at control.
“I didn’t mean to ruin anything,” he says hoarsely. “I’m fine, I promise, I’m—I’m sorry—”
She pulls him into her arms. He stills for a moment, and she lets out a soothing hum, like she used to do when he was a baby, and he crumples in her arms like wet paper.
“It makes me sick,” he sobs, face crumpling. He covers his mouth with a trembling hand, lowering his face as it burns. “I feel so fucking sick, Mom. I can’t go out there, I’m going to die—“
Karen holds him, her heart aching as tears of her own stream down her face. Her boy…her boy. It just wasn’t fair.
“I can’t go out there,” he repeats, swallowing hard as his stomach heaves with nausea. “I can’t do it, Mom, I can’t, I can’t—!”
She just barely manages to get him hunched over the toilet before he throws up, his whole body trembling. She smooths back his sweaty curls as he sobs and heaves, choking on it.
“Oh, baby. I’m sorry.” She doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry, baby.”
“I love—“ he breaks off, tears falling harder, unable to even say it. “I love—“
“I know, baby. I’m sorry.”
The music on the other side of the bathroom wall is muffled into a distant thrum. Somewhere behind them, Will laughs again, joy carrying through.
Mike never looked all that much like her, but here, like this, he has never looked more like Karen Wheeler’s son.