Woolworth's Audrey Hepburn and the Boy with the Thousand Yard Stare:
A Stranger Things Prequel
Summary: A look at the time before the Upside Down. The Hoppers and the Fairley's live next door to each other in a town where nothing happens. Their lives are mutually dull. The return of Jonathan Fairley's wayward daughter shakes that dynamic, and brings Joyce into Jim's life.
Quick note: (To my readers) I do apologize to the readers hoping for an update to my story in the 'My Fair Lady' fandom. I was hit with a case of writer's block that I haven't been able to recover from.
Disclaimer: Not my characters, I'm just taking them out for a spin.
Hawkins, Indiana
1955
Jonathan Fairley had been waiting for that phone call for over five years. There had been many phone calls in the interim. Dead ends, false leads, his wife's diagnosis. The last bit had lent urgency to his waiting. They were running out of time, and he cursed himself for not involving the police. For laughing it off in the initial days, weeks and months. For lying to his friends.
Louisa is at school. You know we were having some difficulties with her behavior, and we felt that a private school was a good fit.
Oh, well, I hope it goes well for her. Louisa was such a beautiful child. So talented, too.
We're just glad she's not in any sort of trouble, Johnny.
Oh, she had been in trouble alright. The kind of trouble that tears through a parent's soul, rips it out and sets it aflame. The kind of trouble that made Jonathan careless with his words, with his actions. Actions that made his wife stop talking for a long while after Louisa fled.
Fourteen years old. A runaway. Pregnant to boot. Off with that filthy son of a bitch that he should've torn apart with his bare hands. His only child and he ran her off, instead of telling her that everything was going to be fine. That he and his wife would help her care for the baby. Or, if she liked they would take her to the city to "take care of it", abhorrent as the concept seemed to him. He was old-fashioned, but in hindsight, he didn't want his sensitive, spirited, brilliant girl to get stuck. In "hindsight", that would've been ideal; but decorated war photographer Jonathan Fairley couldn't have a runaway, pregnant-teen daughter. His pictures were in Life magazine! He was Hawkins's answer to Robert Goddamn Capa. He had a paper to run. A paper with more integrity than the Hawkins Press Gazette, thank you very much.
His chance to make good had finally arrived. She was found alive in San Francisco with a little girl, and no filthy son of a bitch in sight. The private detective said she was living in a flophouse, and telling anyone that would listen that her child's father was dead from a drug overdose, and Louisa was apparently chasing the same dragon.
Jonathan hung up the phone, a feat considering the numbing iciness thrumming through his arms. After a few moments of cavernous blankness, his mind began to race with plans. His wife had to be told. His daughter needed time to dry out. He had to be there with her every step of the way, because that was his punishment. That was the load he had to bear. He could take her to the house by the woods, his rustic escape from town, from life. She could heal there.
The girl. What did the detective say her name was? Jenny? Julia? … Joyce. Her name was Joyce. Where to keep her? Lilah was bedridden, hooked up to machines. She couldn't mind a five year old girl, and Jonathan couldn't take that little one along to witness… whatever he was going to witness.
Jonathan called Carl Hopper, his next door neighbor. Carl and his wife were an older couple, with a girl, Sarah, who was away at school and boy around Joyce's age, called Jimmy. The Hoppers and Jonathan's family were close. Barbecues and cocktail parties. Lilah had taught at the same school as Carl's wife, Mimi. Louisa had been friends with Sarah. She would have babysat for Jimmy, but he had been barely three months when the trouble started. Too small for a kid like Louisa to mind. Too small for a scared, pregnant kid like Louisa.
Carl was one of the few people that knew the truth about Louisa, and only recently. Jonathan had conducted the search for years with an almost expert secrecy, and had only confessed when Lilah's illness sent him into a drunken bender that had lasted for days, until Carl rescued him from it. Dried him out at the house by the woods. It had been a nightmare, but would probably pale in comparison to the fire that Louisa was about to walk through.
Carl assured Jonathan that he would be happy to take Joyce into the household.
"Just for a little while, mind. Just until Louisa is herself again. I don't want to burden you and Mimi."
No trouble. None at all. Mimi missed having a girl around, and Jimmy needed to make new friends. It wasn't healthy, him keeping to himself with no one to talk to but his old parents and their old friends. The door would be open the second they flew back in from San Francisco.
The flight, the taxi, the filthy conditions Louisa was living in barely registered to Jonathan. The whole ordeal went by in a haze, and was conducted with minimal resistance from Louisa. He barely looked at the little girl until they arrived back in Indiana. The Hoppers were waiting, Carl, Mimi, and their sullen little boy with his thousand yard stare.
As Jonathan handed Joyce off to Mimi's waiting arms, he finally got a good look. She was underfed, with a riotous snare of chestnut hair, and eyes far too large for her tiny oval face. Really just a reed with oversized, filthy clothes. She hadn't spoken once, not even so much as a whimper as she was carted from one life to another. She accepted Mimi's tearful embrace, and Carl's paternalistic ruffling of her hair.
Jonathan felt a queer sort of longing when they parted. His acknowledgement of her existence awoke a keen sense of attachment. She was his, more so than the emaciated, shuddering mass at his side. Louisa had looked through her daughter, rather than at her; Jonathan suspected that was their custom.
"Be good, Joyce!" He shouted to her retreating form. The girl paused, and looked back at him.
"Okay," she whispered back.
"You look after her, Jimmy," Jonathan added. The boy, to his surprise, took Joyce's hand, and nodded. Joyce smiled at the boy, with something akin to admiration shining in her overlarge eyes.
A week later, Louisa was back in her old bedroom, and Joyce was installed in the guest room. Both girls were able to sit with Lilah before she quietly slipped into a coma. Two weeks later, Lilah was dead.
Jonathan and Louisa did not speak of their time in the house by the woods, not ever. The experience had shaken the stoic, war-hardened Jonathan Fairley to his very core.
Joyce did not speak much at all. She did, however, spend a great deal of time outdoors, peering over the fence that separated the Fairley yard from the Hoppers. Her frame was so tiny that she had to scale it a bit. Then that boy would emerge from the house next door, cross over into the Fairley yard, and the two of them would wander about for hours, sharing their mutual love of silence.