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It started pretty soon after Peter disappeared. He'd waited at the hospital after everyone else had left, been forced home, called the hospital just after dawn and the police soon after, without any kind of result. A thought occurred to him three days after his daughter's death- Peter might try to run to his old home that they'd had to put on the market in the last month of her illness. He still had a key. They hadn't managed to sell it yet: not enough interest in the area or the age of the thing. Peter knew that, knew that he could go back there; did Peter have a key? Gregg didn't know- he'd been too preoccupied with Meredith. As he sped there, he prayed to someone that Peter did.
He pulled into the driveway, took out his key and opened the door. There wasn't any sign of an entry, or Peter in any of the empty rooms. He tried the back door. Locked; Meredith had lost the key to it. Could Peter be in that undergrowth, hidden in the long grasses and overgrown flowers? He looked out of the window, scanning the garden desperately. Nothing. There were a couple of kids toys lying on the porch, but apart from that, his grandson had been washed from the property like he'd never been there at all.
*
A year later, there was a noise like someone hitting the door in the middle of the night. Gregg shot up in bed. Could it be...? After so long? It wasn't decades, though, was it, and Peter knew the place. The posters were still up around the neighbouring towns showing his face and Gregg's address- it was feasible that Peter, tired and sad, had wandered too far from the hospital, gotten lost, and only now found his way back. He'd have seen the posters and rushed to the house. He'd be there now, upset and sorry for causing all the worry, and Gregg would hug him tight. It was a happy fantasy, the same one he'd been thinking off for months- and now it could be true.
He paused in front of the door, and looked through the glass window set into its centre. He couldn't make anything out, but it was midnight after all, he chastised himself. He took a breath, and opened the door. A gust of wind rolled through the house. The pictures frames jumped and clattered.
It had been the wind, then.
Disappointment welling up within him, Gregg closed the door. The hitting sound came again. He wrenched it back open, only to see his dustbin lid rolling on its side, before finally coming to a noisy stop.
*
He started to pray. Every night, he'd kneel by the bed, asking anyone for a sign. His daughter, for her star to guide Peter home. To God, to protect him. For Peter's mysterious father to have found him, or to be looking over him from wherever he was. He would then stand by the window, and find the brightest star in the clearest patch of sky. It didn't have to be falling. Sometimes he even chose the moon. It didn't matter; he'd wish to it all the same.
*
He had been forced out of his home at the age of 70, after a heart attack. His younger daughter put him in a little home near to the house, on his request. “Just in case” he said. She didn't believe that Peter would ever return; his eyes turned to missing person locations, her to reports of young bodies being found in local woodland. She still humoured him, and helped him find a position in the 'rec room' that was between the television and the window, so that he could look at his only ways of finding his grandson. The police had stopped looking years ago; and the posters were faded, inaccurate and peeling off their lamp posts. Gregg was still looking, though. He felt as if he'd spent most of the last twenty or so years looking out of windows.
One Sunday, he had one eye on the house from his seat, and one on the television. The news report was full of aliens again- the world was one big B-movie nowadays. A child was playing on the house's step, hands full of earth and the weeds growing in front. He was glad someone was enjoying living in the house; he hadn't in decades. There were interviews with the so-called 'heroes' on the screen, a green-skinned girl and what looked like a Disney cartoon, but was a talking tree. The child was pulled from her muddy paradise by a young woman who looked to be her mother back through the front door. Gregg turned from the scene back to the screen.
There was a young man there, tall and physically fit, grinning wildly through a collection of dirt and blood on his face. He had the kind of eyes Gregg hadn't seen since Meredith. In disbelief, he edged closer to the screen. It couldn't possibly be, not after this many years. But on the bottom of the screen, the words 'Peter Quill' were printed indelibly. He almost fell to his knees from his armchair, eyes fixed to the screen.
The window had turned from glass to concrete. For Gregg, beyond the TV set, the world no longer existed past a memory of a little boy in 1988. His eyes felt wet. He felt a touch at his shoulder and looked up to see a nurse staring at him kindly.
“Do you need any help, Gregg?”
There was a pause, and then Gregg Quill's face lit up in the most blinding and tearful smile the young nurse had ever seen. He pointed to the man on the screen.
“That's my Grandson.”
The nurse smiled and left the old man sitting in front of the television, returning to her duties feeling inexplicably moved.