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"Dust in the Wind"

I close my eyes

Only for a moment, and the moment's gone

All my dreams

Pass before my eyes, a curiosity

- Kansas

Lonnie and Joyce were still sitting together on the couch, reminiscing about old times, the vodka bottle nearly empty, when Jonathan came in.

"Hey, kid."

Jonathan glared at his father. "What's going on?"

"Your dad's gonna stay here tonight," Joyce said, hastening to add, "on the couch."

"I'm here as long as you need me, okay?"

Lonnie sounded reassuring to Joyce, but Jonathan wasn't hearing it the same way. When it came to Lonnie, he never had.

"How you holdin' up?" Lonnie asked, but Jonathan was crossing the living room to lift the tarp that covered the hole in the wall, and he ignored his father's question.

"What happened?"

"Don't worry about that," Lonnie told him.

Continuing to ignore his father, Jonathan stepped toward Joyce. "Mom. That thing you saw, before— Did it come back?"

Joyce wasn't sure what to answer. It was easier now to believe she had imagined it all, that she had chopped a hole in the wall for no reason.

"Jonathan," Lonnie said sharply. "That's enough."

Finally, Jonathan looked at his father, the two of them staring at each other in one of those silent battles of wills that was so exhausting. Joyce could feel her eyes closing. Maybe she could sleep now, maybe … if they would just be quiet for a minute.

Jonathan and Lonnie stepped into Jonathan's room. She didn't want to listen, so she didn't.

She was barely aware of Lonnie helping her to her feet and leading her to the bedroom, or of Jonathan coming in later to touch her hair and make sure she was covered. All this time that Will had been gone, she had avoided sleep, wanting to be awake if he needed her, but now she reached for it desperately, for the blackness that could make her forget all of this had ever happened.

In the morning, nothing felt any better. Even the sleep hadn't helped, so dark and dreamless. Joyce felt like she was moving through cotton, everything dulled and far away. She let Jonathan make her breakfast and dutifully ate it, she let Lonnie pick out her clothes and she put them on, but none of it felt like her. None of it felt real.

Dimly in the back of her mind she thought that Will, yesterday, in the lights and in the wall, that had felt real. This felt like a nightmare.

But she pushed the thought away. She had made that up. That kind of thing was for books, and movies, not real life.

Sitting on Will's bed, she wanted to stay here, where everything was familiar and seemed like him. She didn't want to go to some funeral preached by a man she barely knew. That wouldn't seem like Will. But she took Lonnie's hand anyway, and she went.

She greeted everyone as they arrived. Most seemed to assume she needed space, and made their murmurs brief before moving away to wait for the start of the ceremony.

The cold pinched the edges of the fog, and she could hear bits and pieces of the smarmy claptrap Pastor Charles was spouting. That wasn't Will. That didn't have anything to do with Will. Talk about Will!, she wanted to shout at him. But she didn't want him to talk about Will, because this wasn't Will.

Except that it was, she reminded herself. It had to be. Little boys didn't disappear into the walls and the lights.

When the pastor's droning finally stopped, she got up and followed Jonathan and Lonnie to the grave, dropping a rose on top of the casket. This still felt less real, less like her boy, than yesterday. When would this start to feel like her life? she wondered wearily.

Standing there, she heard the Wheelers come up and hug Lonnie, shaking his hand, expressing their condolences. Since when were the Wheelers such great friends with Lonnie? Joyce wondered. Ted had never come over to drink a beer when Lonnie lived there; Karen had never invited the Byerses to one of her fondue parties.

But that didn't matter, either. What mattered was trying to wrap her head around the idea that this was her Will being buried here.

She would never make him another peanut butter sandwich.

She would never buy him another box of crayons.

She would never hear another tale of Will the Wise.

She would never make him laugh again.

She would never do anything Will's mother had done again.

With that thought, she finally mustered the strength to move away from the gravesite.

Hopper awoke with a jolt, his heart pounding. He was covered in sweat, lying here on the couch—his couch. In his own place.

What the hell?

Then it all came flooding back. The fake body, Hawkins Lab, that freaky hole in the wall … everything.

Next to him, the table looked like he had had the party to end all parties. Empty beer cans and pills were strewn across it. Well, they knew their shit, he'd give them that. Some mornings, his table really did look like that.

He grabbed his gun off the table and ran for the door, but there was no one out there. Nothing.

Inside, he looked carefully at his neck in the mirror, remembering the sharp, stabbing pain. Yeah, there was a red mark where they had tranked him. So they'd tranked him, they'd brought him home, they'd probably tossed the place looking to see what he knew, and … they'd bugged it. Of course they had.

Frantically he started searching for the bug. Every lightbulb, wall socket, picture frame, cabinet, utensil, battery holder, under the table, in the phone. He broke the phone apart to look inside the plastic casing, ripped open his couch cushions, took apart his stereo—and finally he found it. Inside the overhead light, the most amateur place he could think of. He hadn't even looked there first because he didn't think anyone was that obvious anymore.

He dropped the bug on a table and crushed it with an ashtray, making a good job of it. Taking pleasure in it.

A pounding on the door nearly made him jump out of his socks. He grabbed for the gun—and nearly shot poor Phil in the face.

"Jesus, Chief, you all right?" Powell asked him.

"What are you doing here?"

"We tried callin', but, uh …"

"Yeah, the phone's dead." And it was going to stay that way.

"So, Bev Mooney came in this morning all upset, said that Dale and Henry went hunting yesterday, and they didn't come back home."

Powell added, "She thought they were on another binger, but—she's not so sure now."

"I think this whole Will Byers thing has everybody on edge."

Dale and Henry? Missing? Same as Will? If there was a big hole into ... somewhere at the bottom of Hawkins Lab, who knew what might have happened. "Where was this?"

"It was at the station."

"No, where did Henry and Dale go hunting?" Some days, he missed working with real cops.

"Oh. Uh … out near Curley."

"Mirkwood," Hopper muttered.

"What?"

He ignored the way they were both looking at him, as though maybe he wasn't quite all there. If this was how Joyce had felt, he owed her an apology. Hell, he owed her one anyway. "Okay. You go back to the station, I'll take care of this. All right?"

"You sure?"

"Yeah. Leave it."

"Oh," Phil added. "They found Barbara's car."

"What?"

"Barbara Holland's car?" Powell reminded him.

He remembered now. Red-headed girl, gone missing after a party. Missing. Another one.

Powell added, "Seems she ran away after all. Staties found it late last night at a bus station."

Staties found it? Then she was … wherever Will was. Wherever that hole led. Had to be. What the hell was going on here?

Phil said, "Funny, right. They keep doin' our job for us."

"Yeah. That's funny," he said. Funny was a word for it, all right.

He shut the door in their faces. There was work to do.

Joyce suffered through the potluck, quietly in her seat sipping truly terrible coffee while Lonnie buttered up all the attendees. Very few people spoke to her beyond a strained smile and a careful pronouncing of her name, but Lonnie was all over the room, talking to everyone, his face just the right kind of sad.

In the light of day, she remembered what he was like, all the manipulations, all the fake charm. What was he doing now? He didn't even live here—why was he talking to all of these people like they were still neighbors?

Probably it was nothing, but in the face of having to think about Will, either in the wall or in the ground, thinking about Lonnie was familiar, easy, and annoyed Joyce just enough to start blowing away the fog that had surrounded her all day. Maybe she might even start feeling like herself again if she could just focus on how annoyed she was at him long enough.