Chapter Text
Even if you can't see it, everything is fragile at my feet
There is glass inside me
Every time it shines it brushes against my skin
And when it all shatters, I carry it within
CEREMONY OF THE OSCARS. March 2018, Los Angeles.
I can't do this.
The words echo in her head with every step she takes through the streets of Los Angeles. That city that should be shining brighter than ever tonight, but which gives Joyce back nothing but the hum of traffic and neon lights sinking into the wet asphalt. Because for some reason it was raining, in early March. As if the sky had also decided that tonight had to be perfect and had gotten it wrong anyway.
I can't. I can't do this. I can't.
The dress doesn't keep her warm. Of course it doesn't; nobody designs ceremony gowns for walking alone through Hollywood at midnight. The fabric clings to her legs with every step and the heels ring out against the pavement with a precision she finds unbearable, like a metronome marking something she doesn't want to count.
She turns one corner. Then another. The flashes are behind her now but she has them burned into her retinas, that white burst that follows her even when she closes her eyes.
That's when she finds a park, narrow and poorly lit, with a fountain in the center that keeps running in spite of everything. There's a low stone wall that runs along the water. Joyce reaches it and stops. Her lungs refuse to keep the rhythm her body is asking for.
Not yet.
But she can't go back either. Not to the Dolby Theatre, and certainly not to the phone she's had switched off since she slipped out through the side door without saying a word to anyone. Not to the cameras looking for her, or to the speech tucked inside the small purse she left behind in the dressing room, or to the table where they're waiting for her with the weight of three statuettes that tonight bear her name.
Even so, her mind does go back to the three words that keep glowing, now only in her memory, her phone died a while ago: Where the hell are you?
The March wind moves her hair and her fringe falls across her face, half undone after she pulled out half a dozen pins on the way to the parking lot. It doesn't matter. She's not seeing anything anyway. Not the city, not the water, not the low orange sky of Los Angeles. Just those three words. The reflection of neon in the fountain. The sound of her own breathing turning uneven.
"Hey. Are you okay?"
The voice pulls her out of her thoughts.
Joyce frowns. Her first instinct is to say yes, of course, I'm fine, that phrase she's been perfecting in front of cameras for years, but it's stuck in her throat and all she manages is a small shrug, without quite turning around.
When she looks at him, she sees a man in his late thirties, broad-shouldered, in a rumpled suit with a jacket over his arm. He's not holding a glass, he has a plastic cup of water. Behind him, at some distance, a group of colleagues talk loudly with that clumsy energy of people who've been on shift too many hours and need to unwind. He, on the other hand, is alert even when he's off duty and has come over to see if she needed something. Or maybe he just needed some air and is simply there to breathe, Joyce figures. Same as her.
"You're shaking," he says, plainly.
And it's true. Joyce hadn't noticed, but she is. The navy silk dress does nothing against the damp cold of this absurd night. She's shaking, with her makeup smudged at the corners and her feet destroyed inside the small, narrow shoes someone chose because they have a nice shape.
He doesn't know who she is. That's what hits her square in the chest. He has no idea that less than two hours ago the presenter said her name and the entire theatre got to its feet. She can see it in his face, in the way he looks at her directly, without that film of recognition everyone else wears when they see her. He's looking at her. Just at her. At the woman shaking alone beside a fountain at midnight.
And that makes her feel more exposed than all the spotlights of the Dolby Theatre put together.
She becomes aware then of what she's wearing. The ten-thousand-dollar dress, the undone hair, the jewellery that weighs too much. Out of context it looks like a costume, she thinks. It looks exactly like what it is.
The man holds out the jacket he has over his arm and extends it toward her without saying anything more.
"For me?"
He nods, without quite insisting.
From further away, his colleagues call out to him, and the man disappears without another word, leaving the heavy jacket in Joyce's hands.
She stays still. The fabric is rough and smells of coffee and cigarettes. She puts it on anyway and welcomes the brief warmth it gives her. Though she gave them up years ago when all this fame started, the smell makes her want a cigarette.
She dispels the craving by thinking about his blue eyes. He didn't recognise her, but he did look at her. Not the way cameras look at her, or the audience, or the journalists who've spent weeks calling her the favourite, the undisputed one, the consecration of a career. But in a different way. In a way that lodges itself inside her and sets her on fire.
****
Saturday, March 1st, 2018. 1 WEEK BEFORE THE OSCARS.
On the first day of March, one of the most recognised actresses in the country steps out of the dry, blinding heat of Los Angeles and into a neighbourhood café in Silver Lake, far from the circuit of restaurants where the industry sees and is seen. If there were anything more than the quiet hum of a jazz playlist coming through a cheap speaker, the silence would be less uncomfortable. Instead, the customers who at eleven in the morning are having their breakfast before heading back to work go still and focused, as if a rare animal had walked in from the street and nobody wants to startle it.
That's Joyce Byers, someone at the counter murmurs. Here.
The actress is asked what she'd like, and in a voice that makes no effort toward stardom, she orders a black coffee.
Joyce, at thirty-nine, is wearing dark jeans and an unironed linen shirt. No earrings. She's slight, and her way of moving, quick and a little restless, like someone always on the verge of remembering something they've left behind, is entirely incompatible with the assured, decisive image she projects on screen.
That composure that has made her the defining actress of her generation, that capacity to stay absolutely still while the world around her falls apart, isn't here this morning. Here it's just her.
We settle into a corner at the back. Around us, conversations slow down, customers pretend to keep talking while they sharpen their ears for anything she might say.
I ask her about the surreal quality of all this. About what it means that the whole world believes it knows her. Because with Joyce Byers the matter has a particular texture: unlike other figures of her standing, whose private lives are protected with something close to military logistics, hers has always been public property. A famous husband. Children caught by cameras since their birth in the hospital. An origin story the industry has spent years turning into a fable. And yet, instead of being in one of those West Hollywood restaurants where tables cost what they cost, why has she asked to meet here, where the wood is scratched and the coffee comes in cups without pretension?
Joyce tilts her head. There are others like her in the industry, she says, people with success who have managed not to lose the thread of who they are. "I think there are still people with fame who are genuinely authentic. When you meet someone successful and they turn out to be an asshole, you think: what's your excuse? Because I've met extraordinary people too."
We talk a little about whether personal chaos and artistic brilliance necessarily go hand in hand. Joyce, who has just finished shooting her third consecutive film with a nomination attached and who this week begins international promotion, hopes they don't.
"I don't think you have to be a horrible person to do good work. But of course, there are plenty of brilliant actors who are. More than I ever imagined."
We're interrupted by a young girl who approaches with her phone already unlocked, the universal gesture of someone who wants a photo but hasn't quite finished deciding. Joyce looks at her for a moment. Says yes. Watches carefully as the girl puts her phone away before going back to her coffee. She's someone who catches a camera on the fly, even when the flash is flickering from across the street.
I notice her phone then, resting on the table in front of her. Plain case, black, no adornments. I find myself wondering what someone would find inside it.
Because with Joyce Byers the public's curiosity runs in two perfectly distinct and perfectly parallel tracks: the work, which is vast, consistent and has redefined what's expected of an actress her age, and the life, which is known in full but somehow keeps generating questions. Lonnie Byers is an institution. Critic, essayist, one of those names whose opinion can sink a premiere or turn it into a cult object. They've been together since before Joyce was anyone, and it was him, so the story goes, repeated until it wears itself out, who took her to her first audition.
Joyce doesn't deny the story, but she doesn't tell it with much enthusiasm either.
"Lonnie opened a door for me," she says, measuring the words. "But nobody walks through a door and that's it. There's a lot of corridor after."
But beyond the marriage and the career, Joyce is an enigma with far more faces than she shows when playing her characters. All of them surprising and, in their way, complementary. Talking to her in a relaxed way turns out to be as charming as it is disorienting.
"I get bored with everything very quickly," she says at one point. And if you look closely at her daily life, you understand perfectly what she means. Drama actress, comedy actress when she feels like it, emerging producer, and a long list of projects that sometimes confuse those who expect an actress of her stature to stay put where she is. Not all her facets will be revealed today, though; there are aspects of her life that, fortunately, will remain her own.
I ask her the classic question: what would she have done if she weren't an actress? When her current husband took her to that first audition, Joyce was barely eighteen with her whole life ahead of her.
"If I hadn't been an actress, I'd probably have ended up in some shop, stacking shelves or something like that. Or maybe community theatre, something small, without all this apparatus around it. Although I think I would have found the theatre either way. I needed it without knowing I needed it."
Her life looks like a spiral of success built slowly, without the sudden explosion of someone who wakes up famous one day, but with the solidity of someone who has earned every inch of ground. But even with all the information circulating about her, do we really know Joyce Byers?
"People think they know me because they know the facts," she says. "But facts aren't the same as knowing someone. You can know how many children someone has and have no idea who that person actually is." A pause. "Though I understand why they think that. It's comfortable." From the start, she says, she's always felt loved but also subjected to a scrutiny that sometimes weighs on her. It's something she's handled badly at times. "This year I've learned to take it more calmly. It's not that I don't care what people say about me. But there are things that matter more."
On the subject of her children she made clear before sitting down that she won't elaborate, and I respect that. Jonathan is nineteen and distances himself entirely from the Byers name, from cinema and Hollywood, and he hasn't been seen publicly on any occasion. Will is eleven. When the topic brushes the surface, Joyce only says: "They're the most important thing. That says it all, doesn't it?" And yes. It does.
I also ask about something I've often wondered. The dynamic between her career and Lonnie's, two heavyweights in the same industry, seems, from the outside, twice as complicated as anyone else's. "Don't we all do that?" Joyce asks. "Get into things that seem relatively complicated from the start?" I point out that, unlike others, in her case all that complexity plays out in public, permanently. She shrugs, though the gesture isn't as carefree as she intends. "Yes. But what's actually happening, nobody sees. You simply don't find out."
Joyce isn't especially keen on talking about her personal life beyond what's already common knowledge, though, as with most questions, she finds something to laugh at in it. When I ask how she handles the fact that her every move is interpreted through the lens of her marriage, she lets out a short laugh.
"Look, at this point I don't fight it anymore. But I find it curious that people need everything to have a domestic explanation. As if a woman in her forties couldn't simply… be doing her job. Lonnie can look after my children while I work too."
And how is she, I ask, beyond the work?
"Very calm," she says. "Very at ease with what I have. I'm fairly easy to please, I just want my children to grow up happy, and we're sort of settled here in Los Angeles now, so good. That's more than I could say ten years ago."
Joyce mentions she's been reading more than usual. Novels, mostly, nothing from the industry or scripts. She's been watching documentaries and series that have nothing to do with her work, featuring new actors she doesn't know. Recently someone lent her an essay about time and memory that she couldn't put down. I sense in her a hunger for things unrelated to the industry, perhaps a desire to take up space in places where nobody is watching her. "I've definitely wanted to learn things, try things," she says. "All I need is for someone to tell me something is worth it, and I'll try it."
In our corner of the café, somehow we've spent a couple of hours in a conversation that has grown serious without either of us planning it.
Before Joyce leaves, because she has the rest of the day taken up with her children and a dinner she'd rather not have, we relax for a moment talking about films with no weight to them, about stupid things on the internet, about those topics that lead nowhere and are therefore a relief. She talks about the strange shape of her daily life: weeks of eighteen-hour days, shoots that consume everything, and then that sudden, disorienting free time in which Joyce can end up spending two hours wandering around Los Feliz to buy one single thing, congratulating herself afterwards: well, that was a full hour.
Before we part, Joyce picks up the phone from the table and runs her thumb across the screen. Lately, she says, when she picks it up without a particular reason, she ends up watching videos that people have sent her, things about Will, mostly. "It never gets old," she says, and for a moment the composure from the screen and the person sitting across from me are exactly the same thing.
Joyce also believes in luck, though she finds it hard to call it that. "There's a factor you can't control. Being born at the right moment, having someone see you when they need to see you. That exists. But luck alone doesn't do anything. What you do with it does."
A constant commitment she insists on: "I haven't stopped at any moment and I don't want to, because I love what I do. But it's hard to miss the vital stages of your children's lives, or not being able to go out and buy bread. Sometimes I get home and I wonder if I can keep going. And then I get up and the answer is always the same."
The conversation draws to a close.
We end up talking about the future, about legacy, about whether we'll still be talking about Joyce Byers in a decade the same way we talk about her now. The matter doesn't seem to unsettle her at all. "I'm not worried about not being remembered. I'm worried about living my life being unhappy. If people remember me, let them remember me as someone who did what she wanted to do, even when it wasn't always the most sensible thing. My priority is to be authentic."
In short: Joyce Byers knows how to prioritise what truly matters, and how to keep a life of her own behind everything the world thinks it already knows about her.
****
THE DAY AFTER THE OSCARS, March 2018
The door swings open before Joyce can even put down her bag.
Lonnie is wearing a stained tuxedo and that expression Joyce learned to read before she learned to fear it. Eyes wet and fixed, jaw tight, the calm of someone who's spent hours preparing what they're going to say. The calm of someone who has spent hours drinking without restraint.
"Quite a performance."
Joyce, who has spent half her life knowing that sometimes silence helps and sometimes it doesn't, says nothing.
"Three awards." Lonnie holds up three fingers, slowly, as if explaining it to someone who doesn't quite follow. "Three. And you walk out. Without a word to me. Without a word to anyone." He drops his hand. "Do you know how many calls I got? Do you know what it's like to sit there smiling while everyone asks where your wife is and you have no idea?"
"I needed air."
"Air." He repeats the word as if it amuses him, though his face makes no gesture that resembles amusement. "Of course. Air. The great Joyce Byers needed air on the most important night of her career."
"Lonnie, I'm tired."
"Oh, what a shame. You're tired?" The voice goes up one notch, controlled. "How convenient. How convenient that you're tired right now. Do you know what tiredness is, Joyce? Do you know what it is to smile in every photo, every red carpet, every event, keeping everything running so that you can be up there collecting your awards?"
"You didn't keep anything running. I did."
She says it before she can stop herself, and the moment the words leave her lips she knows exactly what she's just done.
Lonnie doesn't shout. That's what always throws her the most, that he doesn't shout. He goes very still for a moment, with that stillness of his that resembles calm in no way at all. His neck flushes even redder than it already was but he stays there in front of the door, making it impossible for her to escape.
"Say that again."
Joyce can only hold his gaze because she knows that if she looks away now it's worse.
"No, seriously." He takes a step toward her. "Say it again. Because I thought I heard you say that you, you alone, without anyone, built all of this." He's close enough now that she can smell the whisky clearly, and see the amber stain on his shirt. "That the name you have, the roles you have, the people who returned your calls when you were nobody, all of that was you."
"Stop."
"Stop?" He laughs, and it's the coldest sound Joyce has heard all day, and she's heard many. "Of course. I'll stop. I'll be quiet. Like always. Like I've been quiet for twenty years while you take all the credit for a life I built."
"You didn't build anything that I didn't ask you to destroy afterwards." Her own voice sounds strange to her. Too calm. "Everything you've touched you've broken, Lonnie. The house, the children, me. Everything."
The silence that follows is different from the ones before, though Joyce recognises it perfectly. Lonnie looks at her for a moment that stretches too long and she can see exactly the moment something in him decides that's enough, that this is it, that tonight is going to be one of those kinds of nights.
What Joyce remembers afterwards is not linear.
She remembers the edge of the door frame against her back. She remembers the dress, the fabric pulling tight, stumbling on the heels as she stepped back and how her back hit the wall because there was no more space. Lonnie's hand on her neck, fingers pressing slowly, with a precision he only has when he's drunk enough to lose the fear but not enough to lose his aim.
The hotel room ceiling, white and anonymous, and she keeps thinking about how absurd it is to be thinking about it while this is happening. She remembers the smell. Always the smell, whisky and event cologne, that combination she's spent years associating with learning to breathe very slowly and waiting for it to pass.
"You've spent your whole life thinking you're special," says Lonnie, releasing her. "Everyone thinks you're so interesting, so deep, so brave." There's a pause so dangerous that it makes Joyce close her eyes. "I know what you are."
When she says nothing, Lonnie's hand hits her across the cheek.
He walks away toward the minibar with that calm of his, pours something, drinks it, then smashes the bottle against the wall, leaving glass across the floor. He puts on the tuxedo jacket he'd left on the chair and before walking out the door he says:
"You're crazy," he whispers, not looking at her. The tone is almost bored, like someone stating something that's been true for years and no longer surprises them. "You've always been crazy. But tonight you've outdone yourself."
He takes the car keys from the bedside table.
Joyce is still leaning against the wall. Not because she can't move, but because she's still deciding whether she wants to. Maybe if she makes the smallest movement, he'll come back and finish the job and things will turn worse.
"If there are any journalists asking tomorrow," says Lonnie, already at the door, "you tell them you were indisposed."
The door closes slowly, with a soft, precise click. He has control even of that.
****
Joyce doesn't remember what time she fell asleep, but she knows that at some point she threw herself onto the bed without taking anything off and that the room kept spinning for a while after everything went quiet.
She wakes up past ten with a headache that takes up everything. The light comes in through the badly drawn curtains and hits her directly in the eyes. She stays still for a moment, taking stock of the damage.
When she touches her neck she notices how much it hurts, her head too. She decides it's not yet time to look, she couldn't stand to see blood with her stomach as weak as it is. She's always been sensitive to it, and although she's had to get used to her own wounds, it still takes something out of her.
Instead, without thinking too much about it, she reaches out and picks up the jacket from the floor, that dark blue, enormous jacket that still belongs to a stranger, and pulls it over the crumpled dress. It reaches almost to her knees. It's so large it wraps around her, and there's something in that excess of fabric, in that weight that doesn't belong to her but that this morning is exactly what she needs, that manages to bring her breathing down a little.
She puts her hands in the pockets to warm them and that's when she touches something.
A corner cuts her slightly. She pulls out whatever is in there and looks at it without quite focusing. It's a piece of paper. And something else, a small photograph, the size of the ones that go in documents.
A photocopy of a passport: James Hopper. Born July 4th in Indianapolis.
Joyce stares at the photo for a moment. The face of the man from the bridge, reduced to two square centimetres of paper, with that serious, slightly uncomfortable expression everyone makes in document photos, is oddly reassuring.
Maybe finding him could be a stupid reason to keep going.
But this morning it's the only one she has, and for now it's enough.
****
The first thing Joyce checks when the taxi drops her at the front door is that Lonnie isn't lying in wait. She breathes a little more easily and is still wearing the brown jacket over the clothes she fell asleep in a few hours ago at the hotel. Inside, his keys aren't in the bowl by the entrance and his tuxedo jacket isn't on the chair where he always leaves it. He's not here, and the whole house seems to breathe differently for it.
Joyce makes herself a coffee and drinks it standing in the kitchen, looking out through the garden window. You can't see the Hollywood sign from here, but you can from the living room, and there's something about that which feels strangely important to her this afternoon. She takes the coffee and goes to the living room.
The letters are there, white and enormous against the hill.
She's been living with that view for almost fifteen years but there are still moments when she looks at it and can't quite believe it.
She watches them until her phone buzzes on the sofa, finally charged and revived. She's been waiting for that moment since she walked through the door and now at last she'll be able to find him and thank him.
Wrapped in Jim's jacket, she slides her finger across the screen. She's spent days searching on Instagram but, among thousands of accounts, none of them answers to the name Jim Hopper. Her body feels heavy, though she hasn't done anything tiring. Her Monday afternoon has passed between the bed, the garden, and long hours on the sofa watching a series without paying much attention.
She runs through mentally what she's done since she woke up. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that would explain this exhaustion that wraps around her.
In truth, now that she has no production pending and spends more time shut inside the house, her life feels, common. More like a person's than a famous person's.
She sighs, setting aside any attempt to make sense of her tiredness. She lets herself fall onto the sofa once more and, without thinking too hard about it, puts on a romantic film. Just what she needs to switch off.
She falls asleep fifteen minutes in, owing to an inexplicable exhaustion. And at twenty minutes, the doorbell rings, repeatedly.
****
She falls asleep without realising it, with the phone on her chest and the jacket wrapped around her entirely.
She's spent almost fifteen years in Los Angeles and had never felt homesick for Hawkins. At least not until now. She always believed she had everything she needed here, that life had given her more than she'd ever imagined possible. But now, with a stranger's jacket over her, her neck covered and her bare feet on the cold marble of the hallway, a thought hits her with a clarity that hurts: she has everything and at the same time she has nothing.
She has built a career she would never have allowed herself to even imagine from Hawkins. She has won awards, filled screens, made her name mean something in an industry that crushes most people before they can blink. And along the way she has lost everything else, the peace, the privacy, the possibility of someone looking at her without wanting something in return.
She shivers slightly, though it isn't cold. When she opens the door, her children are behind it.
Will comes in first, as always, like a weather event. He has his bag crooked, a sheet of paper in his hand, messy hair and a blue marker stain on his sleeve that has probably been there since this morning. He launches himself at Joyce before the door is fully open and she receives him with a firm hug, both hands. For a second she closes her eyes and thinks of nothing.
"Mum, I painted a dragon. It has four heads."
"And it's right to," says Joyce, her face still in his hair. "Your dragons can have as many heads as they want."
"Exactly." Will pulls back with the authority of someone who has just won an important argument, drops his bag on the hallway floor without looking at it and disappears toward the kitchen with the dragon still in his hand.
Jonathan comes in after, more slowly. It amazes Joyce that he's nineteen and already seems so adult, though it doesn't surprise her after everything he had to live through. When he looks at her he does his usual inventory, the jacket, the hair, the way she's holding the door frame, and Joyce sees exactly the moment he puts two and two together and doesn't like the result.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi, sweetheart. Were you two okay at your flat?"
"Yes. Will was fine and we had pizza while we watched the gala. Is Lonnie here?"
"No."
Jonathan nods slowly. He doesn't ask when he'll be back, or dare to ask where he is. He simply nods, with that way of his of storing things in silence, of swallowing them without making a sound. Joyce watches him and can't help thinking he's too young to have already learned to do that.
Things with Lonnie went wrong from the start, but they got worse the day the blows stopped being directed only at her. Jonathan understood then that he was never going to be the businessman his father expected. He didn't want to live off a surname, he wanted to make his own way, even if that meant facing everything head-on. Leaving the big house on the hill hadn't been easy. Leaving Will and his mother behind, knowing they were still under that man's hands, had cost him more than he would ever admit. But he had a plan. When he'd saved enough to keep them safe forever, he'd come back for them. And then he'd report Lonnie for everything, he didn't care that his name was one of the most powerful in that artificial industry.
"I'm staying tonight."
Joyce looks up, barely time to process it. "Jonathan, you have your flat, you don't need to…"
"I know," he cuts her off, shrugging slightly. "I just… feel like being with you two."
And he says it like that, simply, as if there's nothing more to explain. Then he goes inside without waiting for an answer, with a naturalness that makes clear the decision is already made.
From the kitchen comes Will's voice: "Mum! Where's Dad?"
Joyce closes her eyes for a moment. Breathes in. And does what she always does.
"Away on a trip, sweetheart."
"Oh," he answers, no more. "Is there orange juice?"
"In the fridge."
The door is heard opening, the sound of something being taken out, footsteps back. Will appears in the living room with the glass in one hand and the dragon in the other, looking at her with complete normality, as if nothing needs further consideration.
"Can we finish painting my dragon?"
Joyce looks at him, and for a second everything pauses. She wants nothing more than that: "Of course, love," she says finally.
They settle at the big dining room table, which is never actually used for eating but for this, for Will's projects, for his sheets and markers and constructions that take up more space than seems possible. Joyce finds him the cardboard she keeps in the bottom drawer, the one she knows is his favourite because it has a texture Will likes for backgrounds, and Will receives it with the gravity of an artist who has just been handed the right canvas.
Jonathan appears with something to eat and leaves a plate full of biscuits on the table without saying anything, sitting down next to his brother. Will explains the four-heads system to him with a precision that admits no interruption and Jonathan listens with the patience of someone who has listened to many such things and doesn't find them boring. He asks a question about the colours, Will considers it for a moment with great seriousness.
"Green for the scales," he says finally. "But a dark green. Not light green, that looks like a garden."
"Dark green," Jonathan repeats. "Got it."
Joyce watches them from her side of the table, a marker in her hand she hasn't used yet. There's something in this image, the two of them bent over the paper, that tightens something in her chest in a way that isn't entirely sad. It distracts her from how awful her night has been and she's grateful for it.
She draws a little. Not much, just shapeless lines, but Will notices anyway.
"Mum, that looks like a weird cloud."
"It is a weird cloud."
"Oh." He considers it, approving and loving everything his mother does. "That's fine. Weird clouds are cool."
Jonathan looks at her over his brother's head and for a second almost smiles.
They stay like this for a while, the three of them more or less in silence, with the sound of markers on cardboard and Will's voice narrating his own process out loud as if he were broadcasting live, until Joyce feels the weight of the whole day fall on her all at once. Last night's hair, last night's clothes, the neck she still hasn't looked at. She needs a shower. She needs to be alone for five minutes under the hot water and not think about anything.
It's a good moment because Will won't be left alone and at this hour, close to eight, there's no sign of Lonnie coming back. Maybe she can put on some music, light a candle or something, and spend more than twenty minutes under the water.
"I need a shower before I make dinner, give me a moment. I want the table set for when I come out, kids."
Will doesn't look up from the dragon but nods with a smile: "Okay."
Her older son also looks up and nods, a small gesture that means, go, I'll stay, everything's fine. Joyce looks at him for a second, wants to say something but doesn't know exactly what, so she simply puts a hand on his shoulder as she passes.
She goes up the stairs, closes the bathroom door and feels more nervous than ever before finally looking in the mirror. Come on Joyce, it's just your reflection, she tells herself with a fear that runs through her bones.
She manages it and tears gather in her eyes as she takes off the jacket and sees a pair of fingers printed clearly on her neck. She'll have to cover them with a lot of makeup if she doesn't want all the media attention to fix on that. When she turns on the tap she makes the water as hot as she can bear, and steps in without thinking, letting it burn her skin. From below comes Will's voice shouting up to ask if dragons can have wings as well as four heads.
Jonathan's answer comes a second later.
"They can have whatever they want."
Joyce presses her forehead against the tiles and lets the water fall over her body, washing clean the wounds she can't lick herself.
The question that circles her head when her thoughts go quiet frightens her: could she leave if the consequence were leaving them behind?
****
The water is still running hot when Joyce hears the front door open.
She goes still for a second under the stream. The sound of keys, footsteps in the hallway, the silence that comes after and is worse than any noise. She turns off the tap quickly, puts on the bathrobe and simply listens for whatever is going to happen downstairs. She's such a coward.
Almost immediately she hears Lonnie's voice, which for some reason makes her move faster. She's not going to let him touch her children, of course she's not. She never has and tonight won't be an exception.
She goes down the stairs without finishing drying her hair, the bathrobe badly tied, bare feet, and when she reaches the dining room she sees Will motionless in his chair with the markers still in his hand. Lonnie is standing in front of the table, looking at the dragon cardboard with that expression of his, someone who finds something out of place in his own house.
"What is all this?"
It isn't a question, it's simply a statement of how angry he is.
"It's mine," Will answers, in a very small voice.
Lonnie has that wet, fixed glint as always. Joyce calculates from the doorway how much he's drunk and in how little time, and the result isn't good.
"Yours." He repeats the word slowly. "I've told you a thousand times not to do these queer things, Will. Haven't I shown you enough news? They're going to kill you for…"
"He's been working on that all afternoon," Jonathan interrupts from the other side of the table. Firm, trying to stop Lonnie from finishing what he's trying to say. She's grateful that his gaze shifts toward him instead of toward his little brother, and Joyce feels like a coward for watching this from the stairs without stepping in.
"I beg your pardon?"
"He's been working on it all afternoon." Jonathan doesn't look away. "Leave him alone."
Lonnie picks up the cardboard and folds it in half with both hands, slowly, with that calm of his that is more violent than any shouting. Once. Again. The four-headed dragon is left torn on the table, just like all of Will's other drawings that Lonnie has found over the years. They've all ended the same way, in the bin, or even burned with his lighter.
"Lonnie." It costs Joyce something to say his name, but she steps forward anyway from the hallway to the dining room, forcing herself to take each step with a resolve she doesn't entirely feel, reminding herself that she's a mother and that mothers protect, that she can't afford to freeze up again.
He doesn't even look at her. His eyes are on Jonathan, who has stood up and doesn't plan to sit back down until that man leaves. But Lonnie has already decided that tonight he'll claim another victim. After all, behind closed doors nobody knows what happens in a house and nobody would believe them if they said a word. He goes around the table, Jonathan doesn't step back and Joyce hears the impact before she sees it, a shove with both hands that sends her son against the wall with a blow that travels up her own spine as if she'd received it in her own body.
"Jonathan!"
She plants herself in front of Lonnie. In her badly tied bathrobe, dripping hair and bare feet, she should be afraid of what that man might do to her, but there isn't a trace of fear, only a rage that grows in her chest as she sees her son against the wall. Just like her, yesterday.
"Stop."
"You'd better move or you'll end up like last night, you bitch." Lonnie takes a step toward her.
"I said stop." Her voice doesn't waver, which surprises her. "That's enough, stop."
But Lonnie doesn't stop. His voice rises and fills the whole house, words Joyce no longer processes individually because they've spent so many years being the same ones that they've become a single sound, and his hand finds the door frame and then the wall, and there's a moment when Will makes a small sound from his chair.
"Will, come here." Joyce doesn't shout. She can't shout because if she shouts Will gets more frightened. "Jonathan, take him upstairs."
Her older son, somewhat stunned from the blow, takes the younger one by the hand before she finishes the sentence. She's left alone in the living room, where she takes a couple of blows and when Lonnie turns his back she manages to slip away to the bedroom.
It's not much different from other nights, the only thing different this time is that her children witnessed all of it, when they shouldn't have. Joyce enters the bedroom last, closes the door and turns the lock with that mechanical calm of someone who has rehearsed this movement too many times.
On the other side, Lonnie hits the door once. Twice. He says things Joyce decides not to hear. I'll kill you all, you're nothing without me, I'll take the children the moment you're gone.
Inside, the three of them go still: Joyce against the door and the children on the bed.
Will has the pieces of the dragon in his hand, all four pieces collected from the floor at some moment Joyce didn't see, pressed against his chest. Jonathan is standing against the wall with his breathing still rapid and his hand on his side where Lonnie hit him. Joyce has her back against the door and her hair dripping onto the bathrobe and her bare feet on the cold wood.
After Lonnie hits the door one more time, his footsteps move away down the hall.
They seem so shaken they can't say a word for a moment, and Joyce's gaze drifts to the window. She's such a hypocrite, she can't help thinking. She looks at the Hollywood sign on the hill reflected in a white, still light through the window, and Joyce thinks it's absurd, it's completely absurd that that view is still the same as always. That this situation is still the same as always. Those letters are mocking her, reminding her every time she looks at them that if she wants to keep doing what she loves, she'll have to keep enduring.
Will looks up at her, and she recognises shame in his eyes straight away. She scans him quickly and, apart from the broken dragon and those cutting words, his pyjama trousers are a little wet.
"Do you want a bath, love? You can both sleep in here with me tonight."
Will nods. And then, only then, his eyes fill with tears, and Joyce crosses the room and sits beside him and holds him without saying anything more because there is nothing more to say.
She bathes him in silence, with the water hot and no hurry, and Will lets her do it with that docility of his from when he's too tired to be brave. When he comes out of the bath in clean trousers he climbs straight under the duvet of the big bed and goes very still, with the pieces of the dragon on the bedside table, arranged neatly.
Jonathan is still in the same spot when Joyce comes out of the bathroom, now in pyjamas instead of a bathrobe. He studies his mother for a second, working out whether she's angry at him for defending her or too tired to talk. It's the second, when it's she who asks: "Are you okay?"
"Yes."
They both know it isn't entirely true and they both decide to let it go.
Downstairs, the television in the study turns on. The three of them get into the big bed they're lucky to have, Joyce turns off the light and can't stop thinking that they need a way out.
There has to be a way out of this much pain.