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Eddie’s sitting in a garage, waiting for the guy to tell him how much the repairs are going to set him back, when he gets another call from an unknown number.
He glances around the shop, leaky paint cans stacked high on shelves and sheets of tarpaulin thrown haphazardly on the ground, and then back to the mechanic who’s currently appraising the damage to his eighty thousand dollar tank of a car. It doesn’t look great; Eddie’s already had a look himself and he's always been decent with cars. There's a sizeable dent in the passenger side door, which wouldn't be so bad if he didn't already have a rough idea of how much the cost of replacing the door will be. He's lucky the impact came from the side and not head-on; the car's sheer mass might absorb some of the impact, but it's not impenetrable. He knows the repairs are going to cost him. Hell, it'll be pocket change compared to the cab he practically totalled. Still, it's better than claiming it off his insurance and losing the no-claims bonus he and Myra have been building for the past six years.
On the bright side, the vehicle’s fortress-like design means that his body was cushioned against the worst of the impact. He’ll take mechanic’s bills over hospital bills any day. At least this way he doesn’t have to worry about Myra fussing over him, pestering doctors about his treatment when he’s told her a hundred times that the doctors know what they’re doing, it was only a minor thing, Marty, don’t make a big deal out of it.
She probably wouldn’t have let him get in a vehicle for months after that if he'd actually needed medical attention. He couldn’t be trusted to take care of himself behind the wheel, even though he's been driving since he was sixteen and he's never had an accident before today.
He stands up, knees cracking from sitting hunched over in the same plastic chair for so long, and makes his way outside. His phone keeps ringing, the bright glare of the screen insistent. He looks down at the number. He doesn’t recognise it, which he knew already, but the lettering underneath insists that the call’s coming from Chicago. Eddie isn’t expecting any calls from Chicago, but his day has been strange enough. Why shouldn’t an unknown caller be trying to reach him from Chicago? He almost hopes it’s a scam call, just so he can let out some of the pent up energy he’s been feeling all evening, since he’d taken a call from Maine and heard the words, It’s me, Mike.
He steels himself and then hits answer, morphing his face into the forced pleasant smile he puts on every time he picks up the phone.
“Edward Kaspbrak speaking.”
There’s a brief pause in which Eddie considers hanging up. His hope for a scammer or an aggressive telemarketer feels suddenly juvenile and the silence on the other end just makes him tense. He stretches out his hand, one finger over the end call button. Then he hears a small exhale and the person on the line starts speaking.
“Eddie. Hey,” the voice on the other end says. It’s soft. Fond, even. Eddie’s sure he’s never heard it before in his life.
It disarms him, this strange intimacy that radiates off the stranger on the phone from just two words. He’s thrown off enough that the retort he had stacked at the tip of his tongue, it’s Edward to you, actually, fizzles out and dies. He feels as though, maybe, this person is allowed to call him Eddie, and that thought makes his skin prickle uncomfortably.
“Who’s this?” he asks.
“It’s, uh, Richie,” the stranger replies, and then, as though considering that a first name alone might not be quite enough information to place him amidst the throngs of Richies out there – Eddie’s pretty sure he’s never met a Richie – he adds, “Tozier. I don’t know if you remember me, or…”
Eddie pauses for a moment as he trails off. The name sounds familiar, though he can’t think why. Visions of long summers come to him, unbidden. Bicycle wheels spin; long grass shivers in the breeze.
“Like the comedian?”
There’s a laugh on the other end, followed by some shuffling, as though the stranger - Richie, his name is Richie - has taken the phone away from his face, reluctant to let his mirth show openly. Despite this, his voice sounds more subdued when he speaks again. “Yeah, man, like the comedian.”
If Eddie didn’t know any better, he’d say Richie sounds disappointed somehow. But he doesn’t know any better; he doesn’t know this guy at all, so there’s no point in assigning feelings to small gestures.
He also doesn't know why Richie Tozier, the comedian, would be calling him, unless it's just some jackass randomising numbers for a quick laugh, but that doesn't seem right either because he's seen clips of Tozier's material before and the voice is a little too close to the real thing now that he has a name to go alongside it. He wonders if Punk'd is still running. It's been that kind of day. He may as well be the lucky recipient of a celebrity prank call.
“Look, man, I spoke to Mike. He said he called you, too?” Richie says, cutting through Eddie's thoughts. His statement sounds more like a question when he says it out loud, but he keeps going before Eddie can pass comment. “Anyway, I guess you don’t remember me, which is… which is fine. I mean, I only remembered Mike like an hour ago and that was after I made him describe himself for, like, five minutes."
Eddie's spiralling comes to an abrupt stop. Mike. Of all the things he wasn't expecting from this call, a casual mention of Mike Hanlon, the same Mike Hanlon Eddie had forgotten about until an hour ago, might just top the list.
"How the hell do you know Mike?" He snaps. "What the fuck is going on here?"
His outburst is met with a sigh.
"Okay, yeah, I probably could've done this a little better, but I've just spent the last twenty minutes throwing up in a parking lot, so bear with me here. I– He said you might not remember and that's fine, it really is–" He sounds like it really isn't, but Eddie's so far past the point of confusion now that he doesn't question it. He can feel a headache coming on, pressing down behind his eyeballs, but his Advil is in the glove compartment of his car and he isn't going back inside to get it when he still hasn't figured out what the hell is going on. "–But I wanted to call you, anyway. Just in case. You can hang up now, if you want. I guess we'll be seeing each other soon enough."
That really should be it. Eddie should hang up now and be done with it, chalk it up to just one more weird experience in an already weird day. Except…
"Wait," Eddie says before Richie can hang up first. He's not sure why he says it; it's clear the conversation isn't doing anything for either of them. The pressure in Eddie's skull is growing every second he stays on the line and Richie sounds more deflated with every word he speaks.
The headache begins to give way to half formed images again. Four bicycles, this time. A high-pitched yelp of laughter. Pine trees. The Pine Tree State. Maine. He grew up in Maine, didn't he? He didn't remember that until Mike's call.
He wonders what else he's missing, whether Richie knows something he doesn't. It's an absurd thought, that Richie Tozier of all people, the stand up comic his less civilised colleagues like to riff on in the office, might know anything about Eddie's childhood. But he knows Mike, somehow, and Eddie feels like he's been given a handful of misshapen puzzle pieces to slot together.
"Just… Start from the beginning. You said Mike called you?"
"Yeah, he did. He didn't say much. Actually, he was pretty fucking cryptic. Just said something was going down in Derry and how soon can I get down there? And I just tanked my last show, like… We're talking bad, Eds, you probably shouldn't Google that shit– except now you're definitely going to because you're obsessive like that, Jesus."
Eddie feels a shiver run down his spine that has nothing to do with the unseasonable weather in the city this week. He knows Richie can't literally see him right now, but he feels weirdly exposed. Somehow, Richie knows his idiosyncrasies and Eddie can't even place his face. He calls him Eds, for Chrissake. No one's ever called him Eds. And yet it feels familiar all the same.
Then there's Derry, and Eddie almost swallows his tongue when Richie says it. It feels like a bolt of lightning flashing through his body. Derry, Maine. If you lived here, you'd be home by now.
He breathes in deeply through his nose. He needs to hear the story in order, no diversions; every new piece of information adds a little more confusion to the pile and his brain doesn't know what to do with it. He knows if he hears much more without the context to back it up, he'll just start getting angry because he still can't channel his feelings into rational thought like a regular, well-adjusted adult.
"Okay, why don't we start with Derry? How do you know about Derry?"
"I grew up there. Lived there till my late teens," Richie replies.
Well, that's new. He doesn't keep up with celebrity bios, or even third rate comedian bios, but he's never heard even whispers of Maine from those in Tozier's camp. Gun to his head, Eddie would've said the guy was a Chicagoan through and through. Admittedly, though, Richie Tozier wouldn't be his first choice of specialist subject. But here they are, two New Englanders on a long-distance phonecall. A risk analyst and a comedian walk into a bar...
"I… Me too, I think," Eddie says, and then because it seems the logical thread to follow: "Did we… know each other?"
There's a hitch in Richie's breath before he starts speaking again. Eddie wonders if he imagined it – it's a pretty innocuous question – but Richie's voice comes out sounding strained and sad. "Yeah, Eds. We knew each other."
That's certainly something. Eddie wants to doubt him; he's sure he'd remember growing up with a guy who gets slots on Saturday night TV, but there's something so genuine in his voice, and Eddie realises with a growing sense of dread that he can't remember anything about his childhood.
"Alright," he says, breathing deeply through his nose again to stave off the asthma attack he's sure is coming on. His hands reach for something, an inhaler he thinks, which is strange because he doesn't have asthma and yet he can feel its phantom weight in his hand all the same. "Tell me something about you. Something I would remember."
Another silence. He supposes Richie must be thinking. It's probably a weird request for him. He already remembers Eddie, so why can't Eddie remember him? Why can't Eddie remember anything?
"Do you, uh, do you remember when Classic X-Men came out and I went into every store looking for it, even though my dad said it was all reprints from shit that came out before we were even born? And you were so desperate to read it, but your mom wouldn't let you spend money on comic books until you were, like, sixteen, so I let you borrow the first issue from me and then you spent half the summer trying to read the rest over my shoulder because you wouldn't just wait until I'd finished them first?"
Eddie feels a sharp pang of nausea. It starts in his stomach and creeps further up his throat as Richie speaks, until he's fighting back bile while Richie finishes his sentence, oblivious. He swallows and his mouth tastes like acid. He does remember that, vaguely. He remembers asking his mom for a dollar to buy the first issue, only to get a lecture about the sort of behaviour those sorts of books encouraged and how he doesn't get an allowance, remember? His mom buys him everything he needs and he doesn't need a silly comic book. He remembers gritting his teeth until they hurt and then nodding, saying yes, Mommy, because his mom always knew what was best for him in the end, no matter how much he felt like maybe, just this once, she was wrong.
He remembers sharing custody of the first issue with a boy he can't quite place and being glad he didn't buy it for himself after all because Storm's costume left little to the imagination and he knew his mother would have a heart attack on the spot if she saw it. He doesn't remember lingering on that image, though it seems like an obvious outlet for his budding sexuality – he was thirteen, after all, just sitting on the cusp of puberty. Instead, he thinks of Colossus, who wore these silly little pants, almost briefs, and dwarfed everyone else on the team. He still doesn't know what the top half of his costume was meant to be, with its weird pointy shoulders and the way it dipped into his waistline without covering the sides of his body at all, but he can picture the rippling muscle underneath, painstakingly drawn. He doesn't know why that image, above all, sticks with him. He thought Wolverine was the coolest of the X-Men, but his gaze always seemed drawn to Colossus.
He feels his cheeks growing warm and he tries to shake those thoughts from his head. He wants to focus on the boy who bought the comic, the boy who, apparently, was Richie Tozier at thirteen.
There's a hammock in his memory, suspended in midair because he can't recall where exactly it was in life, and the boy with the comics has been hogging it for what feels like forever. The Eddie of his memory itches with frustration: does he want the hammock or the comic? Eddie isn't sure. He thinks it might be both – they had an agreement, though he doesn't know what that agreement was anymore. He looks back at the boy reading, who seems utterly unbothered by this Eddie's ire. His dark hair falls over his face so Eddie can't make out the features, but one thing sticks out to him.
"I think I remember you," he says after a long silence. He feels a bead of sweat prickling at his forehead. It's normal to forget your youth when you get older, he tells himself. It's all part of growing up. "You wore glasses right?"
There's a beat where Richie is quiet before letting out a loud huff of laughter. The sound tickles at the back of Eddie's mind, begging to slot itself into one of the memories that have been locked tightly in a vault since he left Maine. It's so distracting that he almost forgets to be annoyed at Richie for laughing at his fledgling attempts at recollection.
"Sorry, that was rude. It's just kind of unfair to ask me that when you've already admitted you know who I am. You've seen me all grown up, dude, you know I wear glasses."
Now Eddie's definitely annoyed. He can conjure a vague image of Richie Tozier, the comedian, but it's not like he's ever sat down to watch the guy. He knows his face in the same way he knows what the woman who hosted Club MTV in the late nineties looked like. He could probably pick them out of a lineup, but he's not going to make great strides in describing them on his own. But the picture in his mind right now, fuzzy though it is, feels more real than any face on a screen.
"Shut up, dickhead, that's not what I'm talking about. You had these big, stupid, square glasses that made your eyes look massive. And you were, there was–" He has to stop to take a break because his mouth is moving quicker than his brain can keep up with right now. He wills the image of Richie – a skinny, lanky boy in his early teens, but Eddie feels strongly that he's right, this is Richie – to come into focus. "You always had these dumb, too-big Hawaiian shirts on. You'd never even been to Hawaii."
He's not embarrassed about calling a total stranger a dickhead, even though he should be. He feels like maybe he knows this guy, just barely, but the insult slips through as though by instinct. This time when Richie laughs, Eddie's pretty sure it's genuine. It's a full sounding laugh. Hearty. It makes Eddie feel warm inside, despite the weather, for reasons he still can't place.
"Yeah, okay, you do remember me after all. Y'know I still haven't been to Hawaii. I don't wear the shirts so much these days, though. Well… I button them, at least."
"You always hogged the hammock," Eddie says, with no explanation for Richie to follow his thought process. "Why wouldn't you let me have it?"
It's not the hammock that matters; he doesn't think he ever cared about the hammock, deep down. Eddie isn't even sure why he's asking now, but it feels important somehow. The hammock is a tie he has to Richie, a tie he has to the past and all the memories that linger just out of reach. He's afraid of unlocking them all at once, a Pandora's jar of all the forgotten moments from his own life. He wants to start with the hammock.
"I did let you have it," Richie says. His voice is gentle again, unspeakably fond. Eddie's mind still catches on the thought that the boy in the hammock and the man on the other end of the line are the same person. He was important to Eddie once. If his voice tells Eddie anything, Eddie was important to him too.
"But you didn't," Eddie protests, despite the uncomfortable pit he feels in his stomach. "You wouldn't get out."
"That's because I knew you'd just climb in beside me anyway. Then you'd probably steal my comic and slap me in the face for good measure, but I always let you."
And that's… It doesn't sound right. Eddie doesn't remember getting in the hammock and he doesn't know why he's so hung up on this when he's already acknowledged that it doesn't matter. He wants to know the truth. He's a prickly man, quick to anger and careless in his actions. He snaps at people when he should be understanding; he spits in the face of naivity. He doesn't have many friends now – he doesn't have any, actually, which is a sobering thought; it shakes him more than the impact of the crash – but he'd obviously had them once. Was he really the sort of person who could let others share his personal space without griping about it? Could he really be comfortable in silence without the need to say something mean like a compulsion he can never quell?
Eddie closes his eyes. He thinks he remembers a treehouse. No. An underground house? A bunker. Some kind of hideout. He remembers long limbs and knobbly knees pressed against his. Were those Richie's knees? He remembers soft hair, slightly greasy, beneath his fingertips – he can feel it now, the residue that, for some reason, he didn't immediately try to wash off.
There's flashes of something else, too. Crooked teeth in a grin that's much too close to be casual. A press of lips against his own, still pulled up at the corners so it's more of a smile than a kiss. Long fingers splayed across his cheek and curled tight against the back of his neck.
His breath catches in his throat, loud enough that Richie must be able to hear it on the other end. He's been quiet for too long, but he can't speak now. He doesn't think he could get his voice to cooperate with him even if he tried. A starburst of pain blooms along his temples, piercing where the pressure earlier had been dull.
"You were… I was…" he starts. He can't get the words out. He feels like he's going to be sick again. He'd been fine when Mike called – save for crashing his car: he told Myra these things were more likely if he was distracted by his phone, he told her – but now he feels like his head is on fire. He can’t suck air into his lungs quickly enough; he's suffocating.
"Hey, are you doing okay? You sound a bit… Do you still have your inhaler?"
No! He wants to scream. He doesn't have asthma! But he'd had an inhaler as a kid, hadn't he, his fingers always curled around it. Just another thing his mind forgot that his body clearly didn't. He presses his fingernails into his palm, feels the sharp pressure digging into the skin there. He's going to have little marks there, crescent moons on his pale skin. He has a scar on his left palm that he doesn't remember getting. He wants to throw his phone across the empty parking lot. He wants to hang up and block Richie's number.
"Okay, I'm gonna need you to breathe with me, buddy. In through your nose, come on. Out through your mouth, lemme hear that whoosh." Eddie tries to follow along as Richie counts. His ears are ringing, but Richie's voice cuts through the static. He guides him for about a minute, full of a patience that comes as a surprise to Eddie. "That's it, you're doing great. In and out, in and out, let's go."
That breaks through Eddie's haze in a single moment of clarity that makes him laugh. It's a little high pitched, bordering on hysterical, but it takes him out of his panic for a moment. It sounds like Richie's setting himself up for a joke. In and out, in and out. Eddie feels like, at some point in his life, he would've been the one to snatch the bait.
Richie seems to understand what he's laughing at, more in tune with Eddie's thoughts than he expected. "Yeah, I know, I really set myself up for that one. Good job on not kicking a man when he's down. You feeling any better?"
"A little," Eddie confesses. His chest still feels a little tight.
"You don't have to tell me what that was about. I get that this is all kind of a lot. It's a lot for me too. I told you I threw up when Mike called me, right?"
Eddie lets Richie’s voice wash over him, soothing him as the anxiety ebbs away. It was stupid to panic. He doesn't know if the memory was real or not, or where it slots into his life. He doesn't even know whether those snapshots fit together or whether they're unrelated events that simply chose to show themselves to him in sequence, no matter how far removed they were from each other in reality.
He’s filling in the gaps in these barely recovered memories with this half-a-stranger’s face, that's all. They’d known a girl back then, too, hadn’t they? She’s the one whose face should be coming to him now, but he can’t place her. Her name stays buried somewhere inside him and he can’t dredge it from the depths, no matter how hard he tries.
He's not… He doesn't feel that way about men. Even if he'd felt that way as a kid, the feeling would've followed him into adulthood. It's not the sort of thing he'd just forget, even without the rest of his memories for context. He wouldn't just forget who he is.
But you've already forgotten so much about yourself, a small voice inside himself says. What's one more thing?
No. No, he likes women. He's married to a woman, for God's sake! The glances he spares towards other guys in the gym don't count. It's not like he means it; he can't just keep his eyes trained on the handlebars of the exercise bike for an hour and there's always someone around for his gaze to snap onto. Sure, he doesn't find himself looking at women much, but that's just because he's not a creep: he doesn't want to make anyone uncomfortable. He's safe, he's harmless, he's married.
Fuck, Eddie's married.
His wife is back home waiting for him because he promised her he'd be home as soon as he finished up at the garage, and the mechanic is probably finished by now, probably has been for ages because Eddie hasn't stopped to check how long he's been on this call. All he knows that he feels like he'll die if he hangs up now. He could tell Richie he's busy because that's the truth and he could promise to call him back – they'll see each other soon anyway: Eddie's already told Mike he'll head for Maine first thing, and Richie's sworn the same – but he needs this right now. He knows the truth about himself, in spite of his reluctance.
He thinks about Richie calling him Eds earlier, the nickname tripping off his tongue like an old habit. The fondness in his voice when he speaks, like every moment he gets to speak to Eddie is a gift. Like he loves him.
He thinks he knows what he was waiting for, all those years ago. It wasn't the hammock or the comic book. It's the same thing he's waiting for now with bated breath, the same thing he didn't know he was waiting for.
"Rich?" He asks, his voice stronger than he thought it would be. It doesn't waver even once.
"Yeah, Eds?"
There's that warmth again. It spills from Richie's mouth, from the nickname to the timbre of his voice, untempered by the quality of the signal or the eight hundred miles between them.
"Back then, were we…?" He tapers off, unsure of the right words.
Richie seems to know them. He sounds tired. He sounds relieved. He sounds like he might be crying, just a little. "Yeah. We were."
There's a beat of silence. Eddie doesn't feel compelled to fill it like he usually does. His head still spins from the revelation. A dozen memories flash behind his eyes – stolen kisses in the woods; an arm slung around his waist in his childhood bedroom; a loud, bright laugh that always made his nose crinkle in amusement despite how much he claimed to hate it. It's unfair that he should remember this now when he's so far beyond the point where either of them could conceivably do anything about it. He's been given back a piece of himself that he didn't know was missing, but as with most things, it comes with a cost.
He doesn't tell Richie about Myra. They can have that conversation in person, if either of them feels like broaching it. Maybe what they've said over the phone will remain unspoken between them forever, the phone line a safe haven for things they'll never speak aloud to each other. They can meet up again and laugh like old friends and no one need ever know they once called each other more. He won't tell Myra about Richie. She won't believe him anyway.
He needs to head back inside. It's getting chilly now; it's cool tonight even though it's still summer and it doesn't usually get this crisp until October at least. The guy inside probably thinks he's lost his mind. That's okay. He has a little, he thinks.
"I have to go," he tells Richie reluctantly. The shock has caught up to him and he’s all too aware of the fact that he’s standing in a parking lot outside a mechanic’s shop on the Lower East Side, but he still doesn’t want to be the one to hang up. He can't believe there was a point during this call that his fingers had ever hovered over end call. "I'm glad you called. Well, actually, I kind of hate that you called because my head is a fucking mess right now and I'm not sure what to do with half the shit I just remembered, but… you know. I'm still glad. It's good to talk to you again."
Richie's smiling on the other end; Eddie can hear it in his voice. "Yeah, me too, buddy. You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice again. I don't really know where we go from here, either, so that makes two of us, but, hey, we'll figure it out."
"Yeah," Eddie says wistfully. He thinks of Myra and the wedding band that feels a little too heavy on his finger. There's no easy way out of the prison he's constructed for himself now that he can finally see the bars for what they are. He doesn't know how they're going to figure that out. He wants to try anyway. "I guess I'll see you in Derry."
"It'll be like we never left."
Eddie smiles then, too, against his better judgement. He still can't remember why he left Derry. He can't remember most of his life, despite the shockwaves he's been dealt tonight, but they can talk about that in person.
"Goodnight, Richie," he says and the name feels so right on his tongue.
"Goodnight, Eddie."
When he ends the call for real this time, Eddie puts his phone in his pocket and takes a deep breath of the night air. Tomorrow will be difficult, the days after even more so, but for the first time in a long time he feels anticipation that doesn't promptly give way to dread. He turns on his heel and walks back inside the garage.