Chapter Text
Dad.
I know you probably hate me. I think you do, anyway.
But I don’t know where else to go.
She
I don’t have anyone now. It’s just me, like you said it’d be.
You were right.
I don’t know where else to go. I have no-one to go to. Only you.
I’m in a small town in Maine called Silent Hill.
I’ll be here for as long as I can. I only have a little bit of money left, though. As long as that lasts, I guess. Two weeks, I think.
Please. Come get me.
I just want to go home.
Your daughter, Zoey.
He stared at her chair for a long time. He always did, every night.
He’d stare at her vacant place at the table, and let his microwavable pasta go long cold. He’d wind up dumping most of it in the trash, then slip up to bed and sleep till work, and work over his usual hours so he could avoid the house for as long as possible, and then return and microwave his dinner. Most times pasta, sometimes lasagna, noodles on occasion. He’d sit at the table, and do the same thing he did every night. He’d stare at her chair.
But now there was a piece of paper on the table between him and that empty seat. It was ripped from a lined notepad, crinkled up something terrible, and it looked up at him as if it had eyes. It was just a piece of paper, with some words written in blue ink. But it inflicted upon him a great... emptiness.
A clock ticked somewhere else in the house. And it was a big house, really, with lots of empty spaces and shadows. Sometimes he let the shadows fill those empty spaces entirely, just so he could sit in the dark and think about his Elizabeth. Gone fifteen years. What would she have done differently?
Everything, his mind would whisper. He wouldn’t argue. He’d want to argue - that natural inclination building up from within - but he’d stamp it down. Because it was true that Liz would’ve been better. She would never have let Zoey go. Wouldn’t have done what he’d done.
Jesus, she was five states over. How did he let that happen?
But really, he knew how. And he thought he knew why for the longest time, but the chair to his left, with all its loneliness, made him think otherwise.
He took a deep breath. The letter didn’t seem to do the same. There was no mutual uncertainty.
He was Theodore Webb. 52-years-old. Everyone called him ‘Teddy’. His joints popped when he walked, and his vision was on its way out. He refused to buy glasses, and in his stubbornness on the matter couldn’t drive far lest he tempt a crash. Just up to the job site, then back home; the store on occasion, maybe, for a resupply of microwavable meals. He had gray flecks in his formerly black beard, and he frequently found strands of white at his temples that told all of his years long lived.
It was a sheet of paper. Some written words.
Yet it still made him feel like his lungs were being squeezed, and he couldn’t quite catch his breath. The emptiness from before was gone, replaced with… that.
Could he do it?
Teddy looked away from the note. Returned his gaze to the cold meal in front of him. It was pasta night. It wasn’t appetizing on the best of days. Today was far from the best of days.
Ohio to Maine. Had to be around a sixteen hour drive straight through. Fourteen hours if he was lucky.
The phone trilled out in the hall, and Teddy startled. He waited for the third ring and finally stood. His footsteps seemed louder beneath him as he walked out into the dark hall lit only by the slight light spilling over from the dining room.
The phone was an old rotary one. It sat on the small table with the bowl that once upon a time housed three sets of keys. Nowadays it only held the one.
Teddy lifted the receiver from the phone on ring six.
“Theodore! I haven’t woken you, have I?”
For a moment, Teddy couldn’t put a finger on the voice. They all seemed to blur together most days.
“Who is this?” Teddy asked.
“What? It’s Nellie! From work! Kevin’s assistant,” Nellie said. It sounded like she was smiling.
“Oh.”
“I suppose I did wake you up after all. Sorry about that! But my car’s not working - I’ve had a real day of it today, but anyway, I was hoping you could pick me up in the morning and take me to work? We could even do that date after like we talked about a few months back?”
He’d forgotten that conversation. That idea. After Elizabeth, he dated a few women here and there, but he was never very good at romance to begin with, and he really never put much effort into them. It was always Zoey who reminded him to go out and do something like that, and after…
After, he didn’t bother at all.
“Theodore?”
Teddy blinked out of his stupor. He looked over his shoulder. The dining room. The chair. The letter.
“I’m taking a day off tomorrow,” He said abruptly.
“Oh no! Are you sick?”
“No, no. I’ve, uh..."
Another pause. He looked down at the bowl. One set of keys.
"I’ve got to pick up my daughter.”