Sometimes Joyce sits up in the middle of the night, calling for Will.
Sometimes she even gets out of bed, stumbles through the dark and walks straight into the wall, because the door isn’t where she thought it would be.
At first, she panics. Her fingernails scrape at the wallpaper, trying to manifest a doorknob out of nothing. Her eyes dart around. She doesn’t let them settle, adjust to a solid image in the dark.
She feels wide awake but she can’t string together a sentence. Her questions and pleas leave in broken syllables, shallow puffs of air. Usually Will’s name is the only intelligible word.
And then a voice burrows in. A deep and gentle murmur. Slow. Familiar. It comes from the bed.
“Joyce,” he says. “Look at me.”
She does. Finally, she looks at something. She looks and sees the shape of his shoulders against the faint light of the window behind him. The slow blink of his eyes. He sits on the bed in a room she doesn’t know. Not yet. It always takes a moment.
“He’s safe, Joyce. He’s in his room.”
She leans back against the wall, the whole world tilting, taking on a slightly different shade of gray. Ah. Now she remembers. A heavy sigh tumbles through the dark as her mind heaves itself out of the corner it got lost in.
They don’t live in that house anymore.
They found Will. Back in 1983.
Sometimes, she slides down to the floor. It’s a lot to believe all at once. Always will be.
For Hopper, it’s the dogs.
When nightmares don’t leave him panting and thrashing in the bed, flinching from invisible fists and the butts of rifles, the dogs will almost always take him back.
Not if he sees them. Not if he watches from the window while the neighbor walks them on the leash across the road, two big labradors with dangling pink tongues and wagging tails.
But if he’s standing on the back porch, cigarette on his lips - or curled up with El watching reruns of their favorite shows - or skimming the newspaper over coffee, reading crossword hints to Joyce - and he hears the dogs -
He also hears the rattling of chains, the crunching of paws in the snow, the deep tolls of clashing metal like discordant funeral bells. The dogs bark from behind a fence on the other side of the road, but Hopper sees them lunging, snapping, white teeth aglow in cool wintry light. And everyone has to hold stone still, until enough time passes that he knows they’re not lashing out to strike - that he remembers who they even are.
Joyce wants to move again. But Hopper won’t make them. He wants them to feel like they’ve finally got a home. And everywhere, he knows, there is someone who’s got a dog.
So, he flattens the torn and crumpled newspaper against the table, watches it soak up brown splotches of the coffee he spilled. Joyce releases her grip on the refrigerator door. Set in motion again by the shift of light in his eyes, she comes close. She drapes gentle arms around his shoulders and uses gentle words.
“You’re home, Hop.” That’s usually all she says. Her chest rises and falls against the top of his back.
And he reaches for her hand, warmed by a coffee mug, soft and small and familiar. Then he tilts back his head in search of her face. She always smiles when their eyes meet.
Sometimes, he can smile back.
