Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Oh baby
Lean into me
There’s always a side door
Into the dark
— LCD Soundsystem, “Oh Baby”

Before we start, I should tell you: the story you are about to hear is a ghost story. It is a story about the things that haunt us, a story about the hurt things inside us, that prick us with their jagged, broken edges and keep us awake at night, frightened of the dark. It is a story about horror and pain and regret.

But, perhaps more importantly, this is also a story about devotion.

In the aftermath of it all, the five of them giddy but shell-shocked and not quite comprehending what was going to come next — hiding a body, getting stories straight, and lying, Eddie thought, just a whole bunch of lying, what the fuck, what the fuck — he found himself in Richie’s room, unable to get past the threshold of the doorway. His bag was torn open on the bed, shirts everywhere, and Eddie could see a pool of blood on the bathroom floor, beginning to creep towards where shitty linoleum met ugly carpet. Numb but beginning to shake, the adrenaline of the last few days finally beginning to slip away, he’d walked to the side of the bed, fingers brushing against the t-shirt at the top of it, for a band he’d never heard of, before Bill was calling his name, telling him to head toward Ben’s room for a group meeting. Eddie had zipped the duffle shut, put it over his shoulder, and gone to meet the others. 

It was only much later, sitting on the bed in the Roxy Hotel suite he was going to be calling home while the divorce lawyers figured everything out, did Eddie realize he had the duffle with him still, tucked in with the rest of his luggage in the corner. He sat on the floor with it, opening it up to inventory the contents one by one, unfolding and refolding the tees from shitty bands, the horrible button-downs, a single pair of dark-wash jeans, a sport’s coat. He laid out in neat rows on the fine wooden floor boards: the loose toothbrush, a spare pair of glasses, old ticket stubs and boarding passes, the cracked leather wallet and a set of keys on a talking Bob Ross keychain — lines of little stupid things, useless things — the only parts of Richie that Eddie had been able to save from Maine. 

He stared at the keys in his hand, pressing buttons and listening to Bob Ross tinnily tell him about happy little trees, and he felt like his lungs were frozen, unable to catch a breath. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, took an Ativan, and stared at his reflection in the mirror. He kept expecting to see Bowers over his shoulder, grinning.

Fucking, he thought, and didn’t know what he meant, hands trembling against the proceline sink. He stared at the bottles of pills lining the sink like little soldiers. He wanted to dump them down the toilet. He wanted to sweep them off the edges and forget about them. He wanted to take another Ativan.

He’d gotten the ball rolling on his divorce back at the New Hampshire border, on speakerphone with a colleague who’d been through a messy divorce a few years ago and asking for the name of the woman who’d repped him. He’d told the guy, George, that a childhood friend had died and he’d gone back to the funeral — which the office all knew — and added that another friend had gone missing while they were there.

George had said, “Oh, shit, Eddie. Maine, you said? Was that — Richard Tozier? The comedian? There was a thing on Seth Meyers about his disappearance.”

“Yeah,” Eddie had said. “Yeah, and I guess it all got me thinking, about, fucking — you know. Everything. My whole fucking life.”

“Yeah, man, I know,” said George, who really didn’t given that his divorce was precipitated by a series of increasingly brazen affairs, not an exsistential crisis and supernatural fucking clown but Eddie wasn’t going to mention it. “Listen, I’ll talk to Herb. You’ve got a lot of PTO, and you haven’t scheduled anything else for the year, so you take the time you need, to get things settled with Myra and, you know, yourself.”

“Thanks,” he’d said, and George had said you're welcome and they’d hung up.

But in the hotel, staring at himself in the mirror, looking over his shoulder’s reflection to Richie’s house keys, set away from everything else on the floor, he didn’t think he knew what he’d meant on the phone. What did he want? What had he ever wanted?

Myra hadn’t even put up a fight when the papers were served, Eddie already set up in his hotel. His lawyer, a petite woman named Denise with a razor sharp bob and who always had a very large Starbucks in her hand, had said this would be an impressively straightforward divorce. Myra would take the majority of the physical assets, and Eddie would take the majority of what was liquid, as equal a division as could be. “Practically bloodless,” she’d said at their first meeting, watching him stare out her office window, and told him to give her compliments to whomever had drawn up his prenup

“I’d be curious, though,” she had said at the end of that meeting, stacking her papers up and going to shake his hand, “as to why? Most of my clients are much more, well, messy, compared to you, Mr. Kaspbrak. If there’s something around the corner, it would be best I know.”

It was what Myra wanted to know too. She asked it, in the one meeting they had with the lawyers, three days after Eddie lined up Richie’s life on his hotel floor and couldn’t bring himself to pack it back up, sitting across the table from each other, wanting to know why he would do this — if there was someone else.

He told Myra and Denise the same thing, the thing he’d told George, the thing they’d all agreed on in that hotel room in Maine: A close childhood friend had died unexpectedly. A series of murders had started up again in their hometown. Then another friend had gone missing. And it had made him think about his life, and he’d realized things about himself that he had repressed for years.

He was thinking of Richie at the end, in the dark, below, as he told them, “I didn’t cheat. I wouldn’t have.”

He was thinking, I have to tell you — no it’s okay I’ll be right back — and of Ben’s hand on his shoulders, pulling; Bev’s soft voice — honey — as Myra asked, “So why?” 

He was thinking of the toothbrush on the hotel floor, the Bob Ross keychain in his pocket, of how there was never going to be a later for them — coming back later was always too late — of the letter that had been waiting for him with Stan’s name signed at the end when he said, “I’m gay.”

And, here, then, now: the lie, to all three of them, as he said, “There wasn’t anyone else,” before adding, “I just — I couldn’t be unhappy anymore, like this.” 

Denise had nodded, blunt edge of her hair moving like a knife. “Good for you.”

Myra said, “Oh,” and didn’t look at him again, her eyes on her fingers as they wound together, interlocking, tight. She wasn’t wearing her wedding band or engagement ring. Eddie wondered what she did with them. He couldn’t remember where his band was; he thought, as the meeting continued on around them, assets dividing, lives diverging, It doesn’t matter.

Eddie went back to his hotel room, looked at Richie’s things still on his floor, and called his boss.

He said, “I was thinking, do you know if they have any openings in the LA office?”

“You know,” said Herb, “I think they might.”

Eddie didn’t so much break into Richie’s house as he did just sort of let himself in. He had his keys after all, tucked into his pocket. He didn’t need his own anymore: he was still living out of hotels, the Roxy in Tribeca exchanged for the Ambrose in Santa Monica, and Myra had gotten the house. He’d sold his car and decided against a rental, taking Lyfts when he needed to get around. The new office was more laid back than New York, telling him to take his time to settle into Los Angeles, letting him telecommute in from his suite most days, occasionally coming into the office for a meeting here and there. The woman who ran the LA offices, a California native who kept a Peloton bike in her offices and occasionally took conference calls while riding it, had told him Herb had said such wonderful things about him.

“I trust Herb,” Laura said, with her wide, warm smile, on the first day they met. “And I looked over the accounts you handled over there — frankly, you keep up that level of work over here, you could come into the office once a month wearing Lululemon leggings and Crocs and I’d still let you have a corner office if you asked. Anyway, Eddie — have you found a place yet? Did you need a realtor? I have a great one. Let me get your Brian’s card.”

So for a month now, he spent his days looking over new accounts from the balcony of his hotel room, going into the office once a week to meet with new clients, and searching for an apartment with Laura’s recommended realtor.

He found himself on Richie’s doorstep after an afternoon of looking at West Hollywood apartments with Brian. They’d parted ways at the last place, Brian stepping into his car as Eddie told him he’d think about the places today and pulled out his phone to start calling a Lyft to pick him up, absently putting in an address. He hadn’t even realized he’d put in Richie’s house instead of his hotel until he was walking up the steps, pulling the keys out as he went.

Richie lived not especially far from Griffith Park, in a small house tucked off a winding curve that led further up into the Hills. Eddie wondered when he got it: the little he knew of Richie’s life before, gleaned from tabloids and Wikipedia after the fact, he’d moved to LA at eighteen, eschewing college in favor of the improv scene at Groundlings. He’d worked his way up, getting hired as a writer for SNL in his late twenties and moving to New York for a few years, before returning to LA and his stand up career and gigs writing for TV.

Eddie wondered if, in those few years, they’d ever crossed paths. He tried to imagine Richie on the subway, commuting from Brooklyn — because of course Richie would have lived in Brooklyn, he probably had been living in Bushwick before it was cool, rode the goddamn M — playing games on his phone, big legs tucked awkwardly against the seats, or maybe standing, leaning against the doors and ducking out of people’s way.

Eddie never rode the subway. He drove himself, or took cabs. He never liked the thought of being trapped underground, stuck down there in the dark —

He dug his nails into his palms.

Stop, he told himself.

He looked around Richie’s house.

His house was nice, terribly small and a little cramped, a narrow stretch of living room and kitchen that opened up to a long porch that overlooked a sunken yard below. But it was full of personality and warmth, photographs and framed playbills, endless movies in the media console and books piled haphazardly across all surfaces, in every room. Eddie ran his fingers along the spines, looking at the titles — sci-fi novels and historical fiction and biographies and books about writing, books about acting. Richie had always been so much smarter than he’d wanted people to believe, at the top of their classes back than without ever trying.

Eddie walked room from room, like a tourist, watching the spaces left empty for Richie that he would never fill again. The life that he had, that Eddie didn’t know or understand, so far removed from the type of world Eddie had created for himself. He would only be able to look at it as he was now, as if peering through a window.

It made something ache in him, looking through the bits of Richie he’d left behind in the house, reminders of the boy he was and the man that Eddie never knew, not really. It was messy and disastrous, unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, butter uncovered on the counter, a copy of Contact upturned next to it, like Richie stepped away in the middle of reading to go do something else and he would be right back.

They’d all lived out of each other’s pockets back then, that summer and after, until they’d splintered apart like dandelions in the breeze. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. That wasn’t what other children got, he thought. They were supposed to grow up with each other, but they were robbed and now Eddie was this person, without.

Stop, he told himself again.

In the living room, there was a cluster of photographs on the wall above the sofa. Some had Richie in them, at various ages, with people Eddie vaguely recognized and assumed must be famous. There was a great one of Richie, maybe in his mid-twenties, next to Bill Murray in a bar somewhere. Richie looked like he had ascended to another plane of being, he was so happy.

Eddie climbed onto the sofa and leaned against the back of it, to look closer at the photos of the people who got to share their lives with him.

Most of the more recent photos of Richie also had an objectively stunning blonde white woman, some ten years younger than Richie it looked like, in them. Depending on the location of the picture, she was alternatively loaded for bear or dressed like someone’s dirtbag ex-boyfriend, carefully messy hair and Weird Al style wire frame glasses. She looked like she was fun, always laughing with Richie about something or flipping him the bird, regardless if they were at some fancy party or not. The one Eddie liked best was of them playing video games on the very sofa Eddie was knelt on, screaming at each other. Occasionally, the pictures of Richie and the beautiful blonde were joined by an equally beautiful, olive skinned man who looked huge in comparison to them, tall and wild looking. 

Richie even had photos of the two of them by themselves, not on the wall but in small frames on the side table by the sofa: the woman getting her hair done and flipping off the cameraman; the man in a Winnipeg Jets hoodie, crouched behind metal letters that spelled out fight me, throwing up devil horns and grinning; the two of them smiling at each other like they were the only people in the world, her in a white sundress, him in a well-cut suit.

These people, he thought, must be Richie’s best friends, here, in LA. He wondered if Richie had told them where he was going; he wondered if they were worried for him.

There was a picture of Richie and his dad on the side table, near the photos with the beautiful strangers. They were both dressed in suits, him and his dad, Richie holding up an award of some kind, his arm slung over his father’s shoulder. Wentworth looked so much older, hair gone totally silver. He was still alive, Eddie thought, the only parent of their group who was — when Maggie had passed away when they were sixteen, Wentworth had packed his son up and moved them to Chicago. Eddie remembered, now, being on the porch of his old house, clinging to Rich and crying, begging him not to forget him.

He’d loved Richie, he thought with sudden bright clarity, with even more of himself, and for a lot longer, than he’d begun to scratch the surface of when they were in Derry and the memories had started to return. And Richie —

Eddie rang his fingers across the frame. Should he look for Wentworth’s number? Was he still in Chicago? How hard would it be to find it? But the police, he figured, were probably already in touch.

He pictured Wentworth as the picture showed him now, sitting on a sofa not unlike the one Eddie was on, his head in his hands, fingers gripping his silver hair, wondering when his son would come home.

Richie had been missing to the world for eight weeks and it wouldn’t be much longer before they pronounced him dead, Eddie knew. Derry PD had called the staties in, right after they’d given their statements and promised to make themselves available for further questioning, but there was enough blood from Bowers stabbing Richie in the bathroom and other circumstantial evidence that would lead them to conclude that Bowers had murdered Richie. And once they found Bowers at the mouth of the sewers, where they’d dragged him, once they had his body with the knife that stabbed Richie —

It would be over. Richie would be gone, truly gone, and Eddie would no longer be alone in his grief. The rest of the world would be right there with him.

Eddie wanted to press his face into a pillow and scream until his lungs gave out.

He ghosted around Richie’s house, the quality of light in the house shifting from bright day to dusk. He had to turn the lights on, here and there, as he moved, descending through the house, to a bottom level with a bedroom, a cluttered office, and an exceptionally small bathroom. He opened and closed cabinets, cataloging the contents mentally, running his fingers across the dust that was building up in the absence of a person.

Eventually, he found himself with only the bedroom left to explore, French doors there opening up to the sunken yard he glimpsed from the top.

He’d run to Derry directly from a tour, Eddie knew, but had still managed to leave behind this messy house. The bedroom was the same as the rest of it, his bed unmade, drawers open, closet door shut haphazardly, the sleeve of a button-down caught in it, reaching out.

He thought about Richie’s duffle bag, back at the hotel and still tucked between Eddie’s matching matte black Rimowa suitcases like their red-headed step-brother. He could bring it to the house, empty its insides into those half-empty drawers, could put back every last shitty band tee. Maybe if he brought it all back, maybe if he put it all back together again — maybe if putting back the t-shirts and the one pair of jeans and the sportcoat and the loose toothbrush meant filling all those holes he kept finding inside himself — maybe if he filled the drawers like he was filling all the parts of him that had always rattled like a ziploc bag full of pill bottles, wide and menacing and gaping —

Maybe then he’d put Richie to rest. 

Maybe then he’d be able to let him go.

Eddie shut the drawers of the dresser one by one and then he curled up in the center of Richie’s unmade bed, pushed his face into the soft mattress and breathed. It smelled cold and like linen and something herby, and a little like dust. Was this what Richie had smelled like? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t fucking remember.  

He rolled into his back. He reached down, grasped the edge of the duvet, and pulled it up, dragging blankets over his legs and chest and face until he was buried under them, in the dark, under the dust and the linen and the rosemary and thyme and the cold.

Stop, he told himself, but, again and again, he couldn’t.

Sometime around one am, Eddie got out of bed.

He should go back to his hotel. He should be looking at the pictures on his phone of the apartments he went to that afternoon. He should work.

Instead, he found himself digging around under the sink in Richie’s tiny bathroom, pulling out cleaning supplies as he waited for the UberEats he’d ordered to arrive.

Because Richie was a fucking parody of himself, Eddie thought, the only things in the kitchen besides a stack of well-worn take-out menus and the uncovered butter were approximately twelve hundred packets of ramen and three frozen pizzas, all passed expiration. He spent a solid minute actually considering the ramen until he realized that was insane, he wasn’t twenty-one anymore, and started rifling through the menus.

He pawed through the stack, each with writing and highlights here and there, and picked one at random, a diner nearby that was still open. He ordered one of the options Richie had highlighted at some point, “no huevos” rancheros, and he tried to think about what Richie had eaten at the Jade of the Orient that night. He thought , crab rangoons? but couldn’t be sure. Like with so many other things, he didn’t know, just had those quick glimpses that would have to do, would have to do fucking forever now — maybe Eddie had the crab rangoons, maybe Richie was a vegetarian, maybe he just liked tofu, maybe this was someone else’s favorite order entirely. He didn’t know. He tried to stop caring.

He ordered coffee too, and hash browns, and cleaned the kitchen while he waited for his food.

Eddie cleaned. First, the kitchen, scrubbing away until the oven was spotless and you could eat out of the sink. Then he went to the living room, the front hall, even the porch, wiping up black ash that had settled from brush fires over the years; and then he went down the stairs, into the lower levels, and cleaned there too.

He scrubbed away at the bathroom until his knuckles were raw from soap and hot water. He washed the laundry piled up in a basket in the corner of the bedroom, folded it while watching movies from Richie’s collection, shitty comedies and Criterion Collection alike. He tidied up the office in between answering work emails on his phone and reading new updates in the Losers’ group chat, the one that Bill had created with a sort of manic efficiency before they’d bailed out of Maine. Bill mainly used it as a platform to tell them he loved them and remembered, at least once a day, sometimes twice. Bev and Ben sent a lot of selfies together to it — Ben also sent a lot of emoji laden messages which Eddie sometimes had trouble deciphering — while Mike liked to send them pictures of his travels, usually a lot of beautiful vistas, sunsets and sunrises and oceans and palm trees, and tell them about interactions he had with locals.

MIKE 5.45am
Lovely sunsets but why did no one tell me how racist this place is???

BEN 6.05am
[grimace emoji] [gecko emoji] [palm tree emoji] [palm tree emoji] [palm tree emoji] [flower emoji]

BEN 6.05am
Sorry buddy! You just seemed so excited! We didn’t want to ruin it!

BEV 6.11am
lololololololol

BEV 6.11am
i’ll post your bond, just lemme know

BILL 6.45am
Yeah, sorry, Mike, it’s Trump country down there. You should come to LA next! 

BILL 6.46am
Eddie’s here! 

BILL 6.46am
And I’ll be back soon!!

BILL 6.47am
We’ve got acai bowls + 100% less humidity

Eddie rarely started conversations in the group himself, usually only just commenting on the others' pictures. He had, however, used it right at the beginning to tell them that he was gay, had divorced his wife, and was moving to California, all in one brisk text. Bev had replied to that one, and that’s that on that, which Eddie had appreciated. Mike had said he was proud of him, Bill offered his guest room, and Ben had sent along seven heart emojis and a fist bump.

But as he didn’t particularly want to get inundated with phone calls and direct messages as to his emotional state at this juncture in time — fucked, he thought, but at least he was self-aware about it — Eddie shot off a quick addition to the group — this time: LA is marginally less of a nightmare than Florida — and turned his attention to another cleaning project.

He didn’t leave the apartment. He couldn’t bring himself to, he supposed, finding himself existing peacefully alongside his trauma and ghosts. He could order food, Ubereats and Seamless alike, and worked easily from both his phone and Richie’s password-free computer ( because of fucking course, Richie, he would think whenever he booted it up) in between cleaning projects and Richie’s enourmous movie collection.

He wondered about the sickness inside himself, this pain, this sadness. He wondered if this is what his mother had wanted to keep him cloistered from: love that would become heartbreak, love that would never have a chance. He wondered if the sickness had taken root and he would never be cured. He wondered if grief was terminal, if he was still back there too, if perhaps he had never truly left and this, this was all just —

He wondered, lying on Richie’s couch, the flickering lights of a Wes Anderson movie illuminating the living room, when it would start counting as squatting.

As he slept in his bed, at odd hours and sometimes not for very long, Eddie dreamed of Richie: sometimes they were nightmares — the darkness, beneath, Richie’s blood on his hands, in his mouth, their eyes wide in the black.

But some, though — some were good: Richie’s hand in his as they walked the winding streets around the house, his laughter from another room, the warm-linen-herb smell of him first thing in the morning as he said, “You sleep in, I’m going to walk the dog.”

Sometimes, it was harder to wake up than it was to fall asleep.

On the fourth day, Eddie couldn’t fucking stand himself. He’d cleaned everything at least three times, was steadily making his way through the stack of take out menus, and, if he was being brutally honest, it was getting to Brokeback levels of bullshit at this point. Because if he was going to have a a tragic gay awakening at forty, he thought, in a voice that sounded not unlike Richie, he was going to do it right.

He’d been walking around in his briefs and a deeply ancient LL Bean flannel that Richie had left haphazardly tossed over the back of his office chair for the better part of the last three days, like a fucked up Miss Havershim. It still smelled of Richie’s fancy cologne, woodsage and sea salt, a bottle of Jo Malone that looked out of place on Richie’s messy dresser, that Eddie spent far too long staring at, trying to decide if it had been a gift he wore on occasion or if Richie was the kind of person who bought high-end colognes for himself but still shopped for soap at his local CVS. Trying to recall what lingered on the sheets, in his dreams. Trying to remember if that’s what he’d smelled like before, back there.

He thought about returning to his hotel room, but decided to head up to Bill’s instead. It was just up the street from Richie’s, a gentle ten minute walk, something which Bill had disclosed there at the end while they’d been deciding what story to tell the cops, huddled in Ben’s rooms at the townhouse. Bill had been holding Richie’s wallet, peering at his driver’s license and near tears, angry and confused because they had been so fucking close and still so far away. He was in Europe when Eddie had texted him to tell him he had gotten transferred to the LA office but he’d given Eddie clear instructions on how to find the hide-a-key to his house — it was in the rain gutter above the back porch, because what was it gonna do, Eddie? Rain and wash it away? It was Los Angeles — and directions to the guest bedroom that was Eddie’s as long as he wanted it. (Or until Audra got too weirded out by their codependent sadness, Eddie had wanted to say at the end of that particular conversation but did not.)

The guest bedroom was nice, impersonal and chic, like a hotel room. The walls were cream with black wainscoting, thick linen curtains that matched the walls blocking out the LA sun, and there were framed photos of Bill and Audra’s wedding day on a pale dresser; they looked happy but something about them reminded Eddie of stock photography. Almost immediately, he felt terrible for the thought: it wasn’t Bill’s fault that he had found the shape of the kind of happiness that Eddie had tried to force himself into for so long, like a square peg in a round hole, and that Bill still cared enough to find out a way to make it work.

Bill’s place had actual food, too, organic canned goods and dried pasta in the pantry. There were even loaves of organic bread in the freezer. He wondered, making himself some toast at three in the afternoon, if Bill had arranged to have someone come by and fill the cabinets, or if he and Audra were just the kind of people who always made sure they had on hand what they might possibly need.

Eddie ate his toast and then went back to the guest room, where he lay back on the impeccably made bed, curling into himself like a pill-bug.

Richie’s bed, he thought, was much more comfortable.

After making the call to stay there, he had resolved that staying at Bill’s would be a temporary thing  — Brian was a genuinely good realtor, after all, and Eddie knew he would eventually find him the perfect place. Hell, the last place he’d seen before he ended up haunting Richie’s house like a particularly pathetic ghost had been everything he wanted in a new place. 

He just couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger on anything, to make anything permanent, to make anything real, so instead he tucked his suitcases and Richie’s duffle bag into the back of the closet in Bill’s guestroom, and moved through each day into the next. Put one foot in front of the other, and thought, This is enough, this is fine.

Eventually, Bill and Audra got back to LA from their press tour. It was a Tuesday, around lunch time, ten weeks after Richie and Stan died. Eddie was sitting in their kitchen, filling out a spreadsheet on a new client, drinking the coffee he bought to replace the bag he’d finished a few days ago, when the front door opened and a woman said, “Bill, you cheap fucker, you need to tip him more than that!”

“No I don’t!” denied Bill. “He took way too long to get us back.”

“Bill,” said the woman, obviously Audra, “it’s LA. We’re going from LAX to the Hills. It takes one thousand years. It will always take one thousand years. That’s how this town works.”

There was a brief silence, and then Audra said, “If the phrase “surface road” comes out of your mouth right now —”

“I’m just saying, he should have done a different route,” he argued. “We did not need to take the 405 all the way. We should have done Sepulveda and —”

Eddie sipped his coffee and listened as they dragged their suitcase further through the house. He wondered if he should let them know he was here.

“Oh my God, I’ll kill you,” Audra was saying. “I will genuinely kill you if you make me have this argument any longer. Just tip him, give him four stars, and don’t negatively impact some poor man’s second job, you capitalist fucking hack. Hey, is Eddie here or is he at work?”

“Eddie!” Bill called. “Hey, man, you here? Or are you at work?”

Audra muttered something that he only vaguely heard  — “nailed it, asshole,” he thought — and Eddie snorted before shouting back, “Yeah, in the kitchen!”

A few seconds later, Bill walked into the kitchen and immediately grabbed Eddie around the shoulders from behind in a hug, not waiting for him to get up or even stop typing or put his goddamn coffee down, shaking him and his fucking chair back and forth as he held him.

“Bill, buddy, I love you, but I’ll fucking kill you if you make me spill this coffee on my laptop,” he said. “Let go of me, you idiot.”

“Aw, yes,” said Audra, bustling over to the fridge to get herself a glass of water. “Bill, it’s official. Every one of your childhood friends is dedicated to roasting you within an inch of your life, and I love it.”

Bill, to his credit, laughed as he said, “Everyone picks on me and is mean to me, even my beautiful wife, and I don’t like it.”

“From the bottom of my heart,” said Eddie, “you deserve this and I’m thrilled it’s happening. We were too nice to you as a child because you were sad and tragic so we have to make up for lost time.”

“Rude,” said Bill, finally letting go of him and dropping down into the chair across from Eddie. He was still smiling though, watching as Audra hopped up to sit on the kitchen counter. 

“Whatever,” he said. “How was your flight?”

“Fine,” Bill told him. “I mean, exhausting but fine. I miss peanuts. Peanuts were the only good thing about flying.”

“We flew first class and you had an omelette, and you said it was the best thing that ever happened to flying,” Audra said.

“You had airplane eggs?” demanded Eddie. “What, do you have nothing better to do than get food poisoning?

“Oh, God,” he said, putting his head down on the table as Audra laughed and Eddie launched into a food safety rant, for old time’s sake, he thought, if nothing else.

That night, they ordered from some fancy restaurant down in Little Armenia that Bill swore had the best chicken he’d ever had in his life, and Eddie and Audra talked smack about Bill for basically the entire evening, as Bill drank beer and got progressively redder in the face. As the evening went on, Eddie decided he liked Audra quite a bit, and felt bad about judging their relationship before: she was funny and warm and took absolutely zero shit from Bill, and Eddie was glad that Bill hadn’t used Derry and the past to implode his marriage like he could have — like Eddie had successfully done.

It was different, of course, so different, because of the things that Eddie found inside himself in Derry and the things he’d had to leave behind there too.

He dug his fingers into his palms.

Audra was getting up from the table, announcing that she had an audition tomorrow and wanted to go over the sides in the office before she went to bed. She walked over to Bill, who tilted his head back as she ran a hand through his hair, and she kissed his cheek.

“You guys should go out back,” she suggested. “It’s nice out.”

She said goodnight to them and retreated to the office.

Eddie and Bill grabbed their beers and followed her advice, sitting on the nice lounge chairs that were lined up on the porch, watching the sun slowly set behind the trees that hid Bill’s backyard from prying eyes.

“She knows everything,” Bill said, after a moment.

“What?”

“Audra,” he said.

Eddie glared. “Uh, of course, Audra, Bill, that’s not what I fucking meant.”

“I told her everything, Eddie,” he said. “How could I not? I just — I ran away in the middle of the fucking night, b-basically. Just fucking b-bailed. Didn’t say anything, didn’t call, didn’t text. I think she th-thought I was going to hurt m-myself or something. And I did such fucking st-stupid shit there. I could have — we lost Stan. We lost Rich. And I could have. So when I g-got back, I just. I told her everything.”

“How’d that go?” he asked.

“Poorly,” Bill laughed. “F-f-fucking shittily, man. The cops got called to our hotel in London, they th-thought we were having a domestic at one point. It was b-bad. She threatened to have me committed, she thought I’d really lost it. But I got Mike on the phone, and then Bev too, and eventually she just — I mean, she didn’t just, it took twelve hours but she eventually believed me. And I’m so lucky that she did. I mean, can’t exactly t-talk about this with a therapist, right?”

“Right,” said Eddie. “You’re lucky.”

“I mean.” His mouth twisted with a wry kind of smile. “I guess you could say that f-f-f-fucking clown saved my marriage.”

“That’s cool,” said Eddie. “It definitely ended mine.”

Bill snorted and immediately sobered. “How are you doing, Eddie? Down there —”

He didn’t let him finish. “I know. I’m — I’m divorced. And here. I’m here.”

“Yeah.” Bill reached out his hand and took the one that Eddie wasn’t holding his beer in. He squeezed Eddie’s fingers and held on, letting their clasped hands hang between them. “We’re here.”

Eddie woke up at six the next morning. He’d finally managed to get himself back on a normal schedule, or as normal as could be when he still found himself shaking awake every other night with alternating dreams of darkness and damp and impossible happiness, of Richie’s voice over and over again, grasping for pills he was refusing to let himself take.

He woke at six am during the week, would work out either by going for a run and testing the new found strength of his lungs or by doing body weight exercises in the bedroom, then answer emails and work until noon. Sometimes, after lunch, he would head into the office and work there. Most of the time he stayed at Bill and Audra’s, working in the kitchen or the living room or out back. He fought the urge to return to Richie’s. He suspected that if he did, he’d never leave again.

Audra was in the kitchen when Eddie went to grab a cup of coffee before his work out.

“Hey,” she said. “I thought you’d still be sleeping like Bill. You guys had a late one.”

“I’ve always been an early riser,” he told her. 

She nodded and handed him a cup of coffee from the pot she just brewed. “This is good, by the way. Thanks for getting it.”

“Well, I drank everything else. It was only polite.”

“Still,” she said. “Thanks anyway. Were you about to go for a run or something?”

Eddie looked down at his running shoes, his bare shins, and then looked back at Audra. She was also wearing sneakers and leggings. “Yeah. You too?”

“Yep,” she said. “Have you done any of the trails around here or do you just run on the street?”

“Street,” he said.

Audra downed her coffee. “C’mon. I’ll take you up to the park.”

He finished his mug too and found himself following her out of the house, walking up the street to the entrance of Griffith Park, where they took off together in silence, jogging up the path and deeper into the park.

An hour later, Audra led him out near where they’d started, pulling him by the hand towards a little building amongst the trees. Trails , a wooden sign with bright yellow writing said, pies, sodas, coffee. He’d seen the steps heading up towards it when they’d arrived, hadn’t been quite close enough to see what it said, and had thought maybe it was a public restroom.

“The sandwiches here are great,” Audra told him as they walked up. “Coffee’s good too.”

Eddie nodded.

A group of teenage girls at one of the park tables kept cutting their eyes to Audra, brows furrowed, as the two of them waited in line. Audra stared up at the board, deciding what to order, unaware, but Eddie felt their eyes on them, making something tighten between his shoulders.

“It’s fine,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

She elbowed him gently in the side. “They think I’m someone but they don’t know. They won’t come up to us. People always think I’m the chick from Glee, you know, the one teacher? So if they do come up, they’ll ask if I’m her, and I’ll say no, and they’ll leave. Don’t worry.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry?”

Audra laughed. “I mean, yeah, it’d be nice if they knew who I was. But who gives a shit?”

They ordered two coffees and sandwiches — the PB and J for Audra, and avocado on gluten-free bread for Eddie —  before heading to a set of chairs and a stump off to one side. They ate quietly for a little, people watching. Eddie glared at the teenagers once and they left shortly after. Audra snorted into her coffee.

“How are you?” she asked. “I mean, really?”

“I’m fine,” he said.

She looked at him.

“I’m not fine,” he said. “But I’m fine.”

“You know you can talk to me,” she said after a moment. “I know you know I know. About Derry. About — it. So you can talk to me. If you want. I’d be happy to listen for you too.”

“I really can’t,” Eddie said. He looked at his hands, in his lap. He was shredding his paper napkin into tiny, unrecognizable pieces. He thought about the dark. He could feel his heart in his throat again. No one knew what it was like. No one, not even the rest of them. This thing — it was Eddie’s alone to shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Audra said. She made a little abortive gesture with her hand, like she wanted to reach out to him but maybe thought better of it. “It’s okay. You all — you all went through hell, there. It’s okay.”

“It’s not. I can’t — Rich —”

He bit his lip so hard he thought he had maybe gone clean through it.

“Rich,” she echoed. “I wish I could have — he seemed like a great guy.”

He snorted. “He was a fucking asshole. But he was ours.”

“Bill said you guys are really close.”

Close isn’t the word for it , Eddie wanted to tell her. He didn’t know then, and maybe he didn’t quite even know now, not the right word for it at least, except: everything. Richie was everything.

“Yeah,” he said, instead. “We were really close.”

“You miss him,” she said. She hesitated, and then said, “Bill said he thought — you don’t have to but, with me, but Bill said maybe —”

He felt like he’d been slapped. Fucking Bill, he thought. Fucking Bill.

“I miss him,” he said, tight. “It’s fine.”

Audra stared at him, eyes wide. She said, “But not fine, right?”

“But not fine,” he agreed. He brushed the destroyed napkin onto the ground. He wanted to wash his hands. He wanted to clean something until his skin was raw. He wanted an inhaler. “Should we start heading back? You need to get ready, right?”

“Ugh,” she said. “Yeah. God, I wish I was famous enough not to have to audition anymore. I hate memorizing sides.”

They tossed their empty cups and walked back the way they had come that morning. A few times, Eddie could feel Audra’s eyes on him, heavy, sad. He ignored it.

Back at the house, Eddie started the coffee machine up while Audra went upstairs to get cleaned up. He answered a few emails and had had two more cups of coffee by the time she came back down, dressed and ready. They both pretended that the last few minutes of lunch didn’t happen.

“All right,” she said. “How do I look? Like someone’s shrew ex-girlfriend?”

Eddie looked her up and down. “Do you want to look like someone’s shrew ex-girlfriend?”

“That’s what I’m reading for,” she said.

“You look great,” he said.

“Thanks. Okay, I gotta go beat traffic. I should be back around the same time as Bill — he was saying something last night about getting In And Out maybe when he came to bed? He said you haven’t been yet.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. 

“Okay,” she said again. “If traffic’s not too shitty, we’ll go! I’ll see you later, Eddie.”

He waved her off and listened as Audra closed the front door, then to the faint sound of her turning on her little electric car and driving away. He got up, walked out of the kitchen and into the guest room — his room, at this point, he supposed — and sat down on the bed. He put his head in his hands.

Richie, he thought. Richie —

Why did you go when you did?

Back there, back there, in the darkness, Richie —

“I have to tell you,” he’d said.

“No,” Eddie had told him. “Save your breath. It’s okay. I’ll be right back. It’s okay.”

Fucking coward, he said to himself. You little fucking coward.

He pulled the pillow over, put it over his face, and screamed.

That night, he dreamed about Stan.

Eddie was at the end of a boardwalk, forearms pressed into wooden railings hard enough to hurt, leaning over and staring out into the horizon. He could feel the warmth of another body next to him, not touching but so, so close.

Dream logic told him he was at the Santa Monica Pier, though he’d never been, and dream logic told him the man at his side was Stan.

He turned to look at Stan, breath caught in his throat: he’d never seen grown-up Stan before, hadn’t been able to bring himself to Google his obit, couldn’t even call Patty like he knew Bev did sometimes. But in the dream, it was grown-up Stan all the same, looking out over the ocean too, the fine lines that splintered from the corners of his eyes, the light shadow of hair against the sharp cut of his jaw, his laugh lines, the wind moving his curly hair.

It’s you, he thought, his arms aching, his lungs. Grief and longing, like immense waves, crashed over him. He thought, Oh, oh, it’s you.

Stan turned from watching the horizon line, just his head, turning to make eye contact with Eddie. 

He smiled.

I miss you, Eddie wanted to say. I’m sorry and I miss you and I wished I’d known you and none of this, not any of it, has ever been fair.

He woke and stared at the ceiling until dawn, face growing tacky with tears.