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"She's Not There"

Please don't bother trying to find her

She's not there

- Zombies

They took off in Joyce's car first thing in the morning, after the first restful night's sleep Hopper had gotten in who knew how long. Joyce's couch wasn't much more comfortable than his … but for the first time in years, he'd had something to think about other than Sara when he closed his eyes.

Joyce had tossed and turned, too excited to be on the way to finding Will and too worried about where he might be and if he had found somewhere safe to hide to rest … but she was used to fitful sleep, and morning found her up and dressed with the dawn.

Hopper drove. He always had, fast and confident, like he loved it. Joyce didn't love driving so much, so she was happy to let him. They stopped first at a pay phone. Joyce had replaced her second fried phone, but Hopper didn't trust the lines at her place not to be bugged, so he called his old friend Frank from a phone on the other side of town from Joyce's house, just to be safe, in order to get Terry Ives' address.

They drove mostly in silence, lost in thought. Hopper reached for the radio once, but the first song was too cheerful and the second was a sappy love song and he decided silence was golden, at least for now.

The house, when they found it, was deep in the woods, off by itself, and hadn't had a good handyman work on it in quite some time. Everything was neat as a pin, but older, shabby. Terry Ives must have spent all her money on lawsuits, Hopper speculated.

The woman who answered the door turned out to be Terry Ives' sister. Hopper's badge got her to stop looking like she was going to get a shotgun and run them off the property, but there was hostility in every line of her body.

At last she said, "Well, you can come in, but if you want Terry to tell you anything, you're about five years too late."

With that cryptic comment, she led them into a room where a woman who looked a lot like her sat watching The Price Is Right.

Joyce approached her, introducing herself and explaining the situation … but there was no response, unless you counted the way Terry Ives' eyes closed when Joyce said her daughter's name. It was the only change in her expression, her breathing, or anything about her.

Moving closer, Joyce unfolded the poster of Will, holding it up in front of Terry Ives' face. The eyes focused briefly on Will's picture, then blinked slowly as the head turned again toward the TV.

"What's wrong with her?" Hopper asked the sister.

"I told you, you're wasting your time." And then, in the neat but cluttered kitchen, she explained. "She was a part of some study in college."

"MK Ultra," Hopper supplied, remembering his reading.

"Yeah, that's the one. It was started in the '50s. By the time Terry got involved, it was supposed to be ramping down, but the drugs just got crazier. Messed her up good."

"This was the CIA that ran this?"

The sister looked at him with cynical amusement. "You and Terry would've gotten along. The Man, with a big capital M. They'd pay a couple hundred bucks to people like my sister, give 'em drugs, psychedelics, LSD, mostly, and then they'd strip her naked and put her in these isolation tanks."

"Isolation tanks?" Joyce asked.

"Yeah, they were these big bathtubs, basically, filled with saltwater so you can float around there. You lose any sense of, uh, sense and feel nothing, see nothing. They wanted to 'expand the boundaries of the mind'. Real hippie crap. I mean, it's not like they were forcing her to do any of this stuff. The thing is, though, is that she didn't know she was pregnant at the time."

"Jane." Joyce leaned across the table. "Do you have any pictures of her?"

There was a moment when the sister looked at them like they were both crazy. "I don't think you guys understand," she said at last. "Terry miscarried in the third trimester."

They looked at her and at each other in shock. Nothing in the articles had indicated that … and if there was no Jane Ives, who was the child who had lived in the lab? Who was the child at Benny's?

The sister took them to a nursery still completely fitted out, let them look around, explaining that Terry believed her daughter was still alive, and claimed she was 'special', born with abilities that the sister explained as being like something from Stephen King. She laughed at their expressions, their response to what she considered make believe.

Joyce might have thought of it as make believe, too, but she had seen Will through her wall, when it suddenly turned pink and began to pulse as though it was alive. If that was true … well, she felt for Terry Ives. If it was her, she would have kept the nursery together, too.

They thanked the sister for her time—or, Hopper did. Joyce stopped in the doorway, wanting to talk to Terry Ives, wanting to tell her that she believed her, that they would look for her Jane just as they looked for Joyce's Will. But the empty stare kept her from going any closer. Terry probably wouldn't hear her, anyway, and why raise her hopes?

She got in the car with Hopper feeling all the positive energy she had woken up with drained away, gone somewhere far away with Terry Ives' mind, barely able to hold herself together. Was that where she was destined, to be sitting in a rocking chair mindlessly watching TV while Will stayed missing forever? The tears she had hoped were gone threatened to overwhelm her.

"Hey," Hopper said.

"What?"

"We're gonna find him."

"Yeah, like Terry found her daughter?"

He closed his eyes briefly. He had felt the pain of that sad, frozen house and the two women who lived in it, too. "We're close," he assured her.

Joyce looked at him in disbelief. Close? "Twelve years," she reminded him. "Twelve years she's been looking for her!"

"Then she shows up at Benny's five nights ago, which means we've got a chance. You know what I would give? For a chance?" The pain in his voice was raw and fresh. "You know what I would give?"

She did know. Not just because she knew how hard she would hold on for Will—how hard she had held on already—but because the scars his loss had left on him had been so clear to her ever since he had come to town. She would have given almost anything for him to have that chance, too, just to see him be happy again.

Before she could say anything, the walkie-talkie on the dash crackled to life. "Hey, Chief, you there? Hey, Chief."

He picked it up, putting on his cop face with an obvious effort. "Yeah, go ahead."

"Yeah, fight broke out here and—"

"Powell, I don't have time for this!"

"It's Jonathan Byers. You haven't seen Joyce, have you?"

Jonathan! Joyce felt a rush of guilt—she hadn't even wondered where he spent last night or what he'd been doing, so caught up in the mess with Lonnie and with Hopper's story. Then it struck her. Jonathan? Fighting? Jonathan never fought. He hid, yes, but he didn't fight.

"Yeah, I'll—get her," Hopper said slowly. "We'll be there in an hour."

"Okay, Chief."

"Jonathan," Joyce said helplessly as Hopper put the walkie talkie back on the dashboard. "What on earth?"

"Let's go find out." He looked at her as he turned the key. "You all right?"

Resolutely, she put the empty gaze of Terry Ives out of her mind. "I'm all right."