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Harry feels like he’s going to throw up and pass out, and hopefully Cybil is lucid enough to make sure he doesn’t choke on his own vomit. All he has in his stomach right now is health drink and bile, and considering how awful it was going down he doesn’t have high hopes for it coming back up. He can actually feel his stomach churning in protest of the car’s wonky rumble, head swimming in the foggy light, and he’s about to tell Cybil he’s not sure he’ll make the drive back to Brahms in one piece when he remembers the baby.
He clamps his jaw shut. If he doesn’t talk, he should be fine. Brahms is just the next town over. The nightmare is ending. He needs to breathe.
“Are you alright, Harry? You look pale.” Cybil’s voice is muted, like she’s not in the seat next to him. It feels like he’s moving underwater, reaction timing not even remotely what it should be for driving, but he can’t exactly ask Cybil to take over with all of her wounds - and besides, this is his car. His daughter. His responsibility.
Harry counts backwards from five, swallowing a bubble of air. Wrong move; his body rages against the pocket making its way down to his stomach, threatening to heave up all the contents that have yet to settle. In through the nose, out through the mouth . Everything is fine. “I could ask you the same thing,” he says evenly. “Is there a hospital in Brahms? We have to get you checked out, make sure that thing didn’t do any lasting damage.”
“Me?” Cybil attempts to laugh, but it dissolves into a litany of coughs. Harry takes the chance to move his eyes from the road to Cybil, just to make sure she isn’t choking on him. She shifts the baby in her arms, wiping her mouth with her free hand. “Harry, you’re the one who’s been through the wringer. I’m trained for this sort of thing. What about you?”
“I’ll live,” he says, but he’s not actually sure that he will. He barely felt the words on his lips, and that’s never a good sign. Not like anything from the past several hours had been good, but this is a special layer of hell that Harry’s quite familiar with. Just under the thin layer of skin covering his hands he feels his muscles twitching, his molecules vibrating, begging to break free of their fleshy container. They need to get somewhere safe before the episode fully sets in, or Harry really won’t be safe to drive.
They’re both quiet for several minutes as the adrenaline wears off. Though his eyes are on the road, Harry’s mind is elsewhere, trying to process everything that’s happened in the last several hours. Maybe I’m dead , he thinks. It would explain a lot of things, like how he’s still upright and driving a crashed car. Like how he’s not freaking out about what he’s just been through. Like how he’s not giving into the mounting desire to run the car off the road, my god, my baby girl is gone .
Maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he wants to be.
“What are you gonna name her?” It takes a second for Harry to return to reality, chewing on his cheek as he thinks about how to answer Cybil. Truthfully, he hasn’t thought that far ahead, but now that she’s got him thinking, some bitter part of him wonders if he has to take the baby at all. What sort of fucked up consolation prize was handing a grieving father a new child to care for?
His fingers are wrapped so tight around the steering wheel that his hands are numb. He could drop this baby off at an orphanage on his way back home, and no one would ever know. He could go home and grieve, sell his house and move into a broken-down apartment and drink himself into oblivion, into obscurity. This could all be someone else’s problem. He has no obligations here.
But that’s not the kind of man he is. Harry knew plenty of other men like himself, met so many through support groups and therapy and watched them all make messes of themselves. He understood their pain, and as much as he tried to empathize he couldn’t help but feel an aching pity for them. A voice always told him to be thankful he had Cheryl, because most of these men had nothing and he would be damned if he became another statistic.
And now, he doesn’t even have Cheryl.
“I don’t know,” he finally answers.
The hospital wants to keep the baby overnight for observation. They want to keep everyone overnight for observation, particularly given what Cybil had described. The orderlies think they’re all crazy - Harry can tell. He’s been in this situation before, describing fantastical things he’s seen and experienced and met with so much dismissal. Only this time it isn’t a product of his mind working against him, which he can only say with certainty because it’s Cybil who’s doing the talking. Harry just holds onto that bundle in his arms, trying hard not to think about anything that’s happened over the last several hours.
They’re in the hospital two days before Cybil finally gives up on trying to convince anyone to listen to her. She is also, Harry gathers, placed on leave from the force. She doesn’t seem to mind as much as he’d expected her to, although that could be the antibiotics making her woozy. It won’t surprise him if she decides to launch her own investigation, though he hopes she won’t be so reckless as to go in alone.
She’s quiet on the drive back. Harry offered her a lift to her apartment, considering she didn’t seem too enthused about an escort from her fellow officers. He can’t say he blames her. He’s never enjoyed it, either. He’s about to insist he help her get situated inside when she stops him, hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t worry about me,” Cybil says, shaking her head. “You’ve got -” she looks pointedly at the baby, nestled in the car seat in the back, and then to Harry once more. Prompting him, he realizes, for a name he still hasn’t decided on. All he can think of is Cheryl.
“The baby,” he finishes. “Alright, a fair point. But you will let me know you’re okay?”
Cybil huffs with laughter, opening the door. “You’re a strange man, Harry. I’m a cop, I’ll be fine.” He only frowns at her, unamused by her response. She lets out a sigh that is half hiss of pain, rolling her shoulder as she turns to him. “Yeah, I’ll call you and let you know. And if I turn up anything in my investigation, you’ll be the first to hear of it.”
That’s truly not what he was angling for, but he appreciates it all the same. Cybil drags herself out of the car, limping around to the driver’s side window. “Now you - both of you - stay out of trouble, okay?”
He decides to call her Heather. That was Cheryl’s middle name, and this child is still Cheryl, in some strange way. A part of her. A part of Alessa. A part of that nightmare town he never wants to think about again.
God, he wants a drink. He wants a drink every time he remembers, and he remembers more often than he’d like. Cybil, in her far too frequent calls, suggests he see a therapist. Well, he’s seen therapists before. As a teen, when the moods started. As a young man, when they found they couldn’t conceive. Again as an adult, after Jodie died. What could a therapist tell him now that he wouldn’t already know? He already knows his vices and bad habits, what makes the moods worse and what soothes them. He shows up a couple times a year to continue medication and tells them everything is fine. Yes, he’s suffered another loss. No, he doesn’t want to talk about it. What could he even say that wouldn’t land him in the psych ward?
Even so, he hasn’t decided what to do with the baby. With Heather. He keeps his mouth in a thin-lipped smile every time Cybil asks how they’re doing, as if she can see him through the phone. He tells her they’ll be moving to a new place, and she asks if it’s for their safety.
“I still haven’t tracked down the cult,” she says.
Harry doesn’t know what to say to that. It hadn’t occurred to him that the cult might even still be around - wasn’t Silent Hill abandoned? Who was left to populate it? Then again, he’d left from what he could only call an alternate reality version of the town. It wasn’t like that when they arrived, it’s totally possible it went back to whatever it was normally like when they left.
…Strange. He and Jodie had visited before, the year they found Cheryl, yet Harry can no longer remember what the town looked like as a resort. Surely that hadn’t been the only time they’d visited - and they’d spent at least a few days there, waiting for the adoption to go through. They were so eager for paperwork to be finished that all Harry can remember now is standing in the hotel room, staring at his clammy hands. Jodie was sitting at the edge of the bed, saying something about how they could make the trip out as a family when Cheryl got older. Then she was standing, putting a hand on his elbow, standing on the tips of her toes to kiss his cheek. Telling him he’d make a wonderful father.
Yeah, well, he doesn’t feel so wonderful now. At some point in time the conversation with Cybil must have ended, because there’s a dial tone buzzing in his ear, and he’s still standing in the kitchen, surrounded by boxes, staring at Cheryl’s old crib. Staring at Heather’s used crib. Wondering to himself,
how am I going to make this work?
The move is rough on them both. Harry’s never considered himself the restless type - he even did most of his writing from the office at home - but the change of scenery felt necessary. Everything about the house reminded him of someone he would never see again, and as much as he cherished the memories, it wouldn’t be fair to Cheryl to raise her where -
…Heather. It wouldn’t be fair to Heather to raise her in an environment where everything she did would fall under constant comparison to Cheryl.
Some nights, Harry lies awake, just repeating her name over and over, trying to ensure he doesn’t mess it up. A horrible voice in his head tells him that it wouldn’t matter. He could raise this baby as Cheryl, give her Cheryl’s old clothes, treat her just the same. Like a replacement goldfish. It’s not like she’d ever find out.
Then the baby starts crying, and guilt creeps throughout his body, rendering his body warm with shame for a moment before it crashes into the chilling ice of acknowledgement.
He rolls his legs out from under the covers, knees stiff when he stands. Boxes still line the hallway, half-emptied and jostling noisily when Harry runs into them. Heather must hear the toys topple to the floor and Harry trip over them, as her wails grow louder the closer he gets to her door. He grumbles a little under his breath, pushing her door the rest of the way open.
The shadows on the wall - Harry startles, tenses when he realizes he doesn’t have a weapon on him. All the while, Heather cries, sensing him so near. Harry forces his eyes shut, dots swimming behind his eyelids with the force of it. There’s nothing there , he tells himself, and you have a job to do . A job, like an irksome thing no one wants.
Enough of that . Harry makes himself step forward, hands reaching into the crib and putting your hands around her throat, ending the evil that took Ch - no, he won’t give into these thoughts. He closes his eyes again, jaw tight, breathing through his nose. Trying not to listen to Cheryl - Heather, Heather - cry.
God, but he’s terrible, isn’t he?
“I’m sorry,” he says aloud. He can feel tears clearing his cheeks, and ignores them. His hands find their way to Heather’s middle, lifting her up and bringing her chest to his. He supports her, perhaps too much, holding her tightly against him, feeling her wriggle in his arms. One of her little hands finds the hem of his shirt, gripping it.
Can she feel how fast his heart is beating? Or does she only know how stiff his body is as he holds her in the dark, wishing that none of this had ever happened?
“I’m sorry,” he says again, resolving to call someone in the morning and have her taken away.
Harry doesn’t remember falling back asleep, but he wakes the next morning with baby Heather next to him on the bed, fast asleep. The worst of his mood seems to have passed in the night, though he can still feel the dregs of the crash in the hollowness of his stomach. What did he eat last night? Did he even eat last night?
Softly so as not to wake her, Harry rests a hand on her stomach, feeling her breathe. He’s reminded of Cheryl as a baby, crying until he and Jodie cradled her between them. Was that what she wanted, too? To know she wasn’t alone?
His heart hurts. Isn’t that all Harry wants as well?
It would be selfish to keep her when he knows he can’t give all of his heart to her.
Heather’s eyes open slowly, staring up at Harry. Her hands reach out for him, and he leans down to kiss her forehead.
I really should call someone to pick her up.
But he doesn’t.