Chapter Text
Eddie likes to listen to the radio on the drive home from work. Well, maybe not likes. He’s more so used to it at this point that it provides him comfort. Playing the radio let him avoid for so many years the choice of what to listen to, instead having someone else’s selections wash over him. But after Derry he’s slowly been trying to discover what he enjoyed. The worst part, he found out, was that most of his music taste had been lost along with the memories of his formative years because his music had always come from his friends. Hours spent listening to Richie’s mix-tapes and Bev’s cassettes in the club house all gone down the drain. Remembering songs and records had come back more slowly than the rest of his memories. He’d been a week out of Derry when he was finally hit with the recollection of driving down the road in Richie’s car, trees zipping by, belting out ‘Head Over Heels’. He’s never felt so free in his own vehicle.
Since getting back from Derry he’s changed his radio preferences. Previously it had been classical, smooth jazz, maybe an NPR special thrown in. Now it's hits from the ‘80s, early ‘90s rock. Some modern alternative because, loathe as he is to admit it, he wants to stay current. He’d missed out on too much already. He very subtly solicited music recommendations from the other Losers. Bev sent him Mitski, Bill sent Arcade Fire. Ben sent him New Kids on the Block, which Eddie is worried was the most recent music he had listened to. He didn’t ask Richie, but his search must have found its way back to him somehow, because every once in a while he would send him random songs out of the blue. Eddie never acknowledged them but listens to them covertly, almost ritualistically, while he walks to his car from the office.
He doesn't know what Myra would say to this new found interest in music. For most of their marriage they’d been united in the opinion that music provided background sound, ambiance, and nothing more. Neither of them sought out deeper meaning or feelings through songs, or through much of any art really.
He finds that there are more and more things he's hiding from his wife, both internal and external. She doesn't know about the calls he makes to Bev, perched on the toilet, whispering away from Myra’s attentive ears while she watched the local news at night. She certainly doesn't know that, when he said he was staying late at work, he's actually going out by himself. He’d realized coming back from Derry that he’d spent so much of his life in New York and knows it so little. So when he finishes work at 5:30 or so he would go the one of the bars around his office. Somewhere crowded, maybe even grimy. Being in spaces like that used to make Eddie tense as shit, but he's working through that. He isn't going to die from using a pub’s bathroom. He just needs a space that isn't work and isn't home, a third place where he can just exist.
Today, however, he's making his way straight home. Myra had offered to cook dinner, a gesture she rarely makes. He suspects she can feel him pulling away, becoming more distant, which only makes her dig in deeper. He doesn't mean to do it. It was almost like the center of gravity tying him to Myra has failed, and he's drifting slowly out to space. He doesn't know if he feels terrified or exhilarated by that.
“You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile,” the radio sings out, and he snorts a little. Descriptive, if nothing else.
The song stirs something faintly in him. He's sure he’s heard it before, somewhere in his murky teenage years, but he can’t quite pull it out. He wonders if all the songs he used to love will come back to him with time or if some of them are just lost forever.
“You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”
His skin itches. The voice coming out of the car speakers seems almost to be speaking directly to him. Although he wouldn’t describe his house in Queens as beautiful (and, as embarrassed as he is to acknowledge it, he wouldn’t refer to Myra that way either), he still has no idea how he’d come to have these things. Rather than making a choice he’d just kept moving in the direction he thought was forward, and it had led him exactly here. A place where he isn’t sure he wants to be.
He remembers the band’s name. The Talking Heads. Both Richie and Stan had been really into them when they were young. He remembers, suddenly, lying in the clubhouse hammock as Richie danced to ‘Road to Nowhere’. He kept trying to pull Stan in but he just stayed perched on the edge of his crate. Eddie had felt something-relieved? (jealous, his adult mind supplies)-as he watched Richie’s attention veer off of him. But at the same time he’d felt a warmth just watching Richie look so happy and so free.
“C’mon Stanny,” he said, tugging on the other boy’s hand. Stan stayed resolute, not even letting the corners of his mouth twitch up. “You know you wanna let loose, get that stick out of your ass.”
“You look ridiculous,” Stan replied.
Richie dropped to his knees in front of him. “‘Here we go, here we go,’” he crooned. ‘We’re on a ride to nowhere, come on inside.’” Richie waggled his eyebrows. Stan began to smile, just the faintest bit. Encouraged by that, Richie bolted to his feet, still holding both Stan’s hands and taking him with him. Stan, surprisingly, let him.
“Richie, knock it off,” he said without much conviction.
“‘I’m feeling okay this morning,’” Richie belted, beginning to dance, hands still intertwined with Stan’s. Stan didn’t dance along but he didn’t resist him either.
“‘Here we go, here we go,’” Richie sang, spinning Stan. Stan twirled around, gaining momentum. As the lyrics swelled, he started smiling for real now, and even though he dropped Richie’s hands, he was dancing for now too.
“‘We’re on a road to nowhere,’” they shouted in unison. They danced together, hands waving above their heads, almost skipping around. “‘Take you there, take you there.’”
Eddie can’t remember many other times Stan had let loose like that, let himself be free. Richie can do that to people. Unlock the parts of themselves they keep hidden away. Let them dance without care of judgement.
When pressed later, Stan couldn’t quite explain why he liked the Talking Heads so much. Eddie had posed it in such an earnest way that Stan took a moment, head tilted to one side as he actually considered the question.
“They make me feel nostalgic, but like in reverse. Like I’m nostalgic for something I haven’t experienced yet.”
Eddie didn’t know what to say to that. Sometimes Stan shocked him with his depth, even though he’d possessed it since they were kids.
“And plus,” Stan continued, wrinkling his nose, “the rest of Richie’s taste is garbage.”
He misses Stan.
“And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife!”
The feeling of hotness across his skin is stronger. It has never been his beautiful house, not really. Myra had picked out the neighborhood and the building and all the furnishings. And has Myra ever really been his beautiful wife? He has no idea what a marriage was supposed to look like, but he’s been thinking more and more it sure as hell doesn't look like this.
“Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground.”
He knows the days of his life are slipping past. He’d been in a fog, a dream, before Derry, but now he's awake. So why is he moving through his life like he's still trapped in that dream? Time had let him go, twenty seven years of memory loss finally easing up on him. Why can’t he move on along with it? Stan had told him to be brave, and as angry as that letter had made him, he can’t help but see the truth in what he’d said. Eddie has survived so much, and now he can’t be brave when it matters.
He knows his life in New York isn’t everything it could be. He’d known that to some extent even before he’d left for Derry, but at that point it had just been a vague niggling at the back of his neck that this wasn’t right, that something wasn’t right. He can’t ignore that feeling anymore. With the Losers, he experienced again what it was to love and be loved. He’s been forced to reckon with the fact his house had never been as full of love as any room he was in with the Losers. Even having them clustered around his hospital bed as he recovered made him happier than Myra’s presence ever had.
Watching Bev divorce her piece of shit husband had filled him with a mixture of pride and shame. Pride, because she's stepping into the life she deserves, a life of happiness and support. Shame because he can’t do the same thing. He can’t justify leaving Myra because she's never hurt him the way Tom hurt Bev, and therefore he doesn’t have a right to hurt her. He isn’t capable of sacrificing her happiness so he can what, run off and have a midlife crisis?
“You may ask yourself, ‘Am I right? Am I wrong?’ And you may say to yourself ‘Back up! What have I done?"
The singer practically yells the last word and it shakes something loose in Eddie. What had he done? Seriously, what the fuck had he done?
He’d married Myra and bought a house and gone to work every morning. And he’s never considered if it was the right choice because it seemed like the only choice.
He remembers sitting in the car outside the airport with Richie right after he was released from the hospital. Eddie was going back to New York, back to Myra, who, despite increasingly frantic phone calls, felt incapable of coming to Maine herself. She thought it would be too much strain on her nerves. He thinks of Richie, who’d slept in the uncomfortable hospital chairs until Eddie had told him he smelled too bad to be allowed in anymore.
“You’re really going to do this?” Richie had asked him as he idled the convertible outside.
“What else would I do?” said Eddie, a little surprised.
Something flickered across Richie’s face that was gone almost too fast for him to clock. “I don’t know, doesn’t it seem a little anticlimactic? We kill an ancient evil space clown, you barely avoid getting kabobed by the evil space clown-”
“But I didn’t,” Eddie interjected. “Get kabobed, I mean.” Right after he’d thrown the fence post, when he’d been crouching triumphantly over Richie, he could have died. But Richie had pushed him out of the way, giving them enough distance that Pennywise’s claw just barely lanced Eddie’s side. It had still hurt like a bitch though.
“I didn’t die, and now my life has to continue. We don’t all get to be famous comedians who make our own schedules, coming and going as we please,” he joked weakly. Richie didn’t smile.
“Are you happy? Are you happy with your life?” he asked suddenly. This was more serious than he’d seen Richie maybe the whole time they were in Derry, and he felt like he had to answer Richie’s words honestly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t even know if I know what that means.”
Richie exhaled softly, hands still on the steering wheel. He was quiet for a breath.
“Come to LA with me,” he said suddenly. Eddie laughed, thinking it was a joke, but Richie didn’t join him.
“You can’t be serious. What, I’m going to abandon my whole life just because it's not completely perfect and euphoric all the time, and run off to LA? I have a job and a wife and a car and-”
“You don’t have to do the same thing just because you’ve been doing it forever. You can do whatever you want.”
Something tight stretched across Eddie’s chest. He couldn’t bear thinking about the larger implications of what Richie was asking. Because it sounded almost like Richie was asking him to run away with him. It almost sounded like Richie was asking him to leave his wife. Was Richie asking him to leave his wife? More importantly, was he asking Eddie to leave his wife for him? The idea made him dizzy. Whatever he wanted. But what if he was just offering his place to be polite, to be nice, to help out an old friend. Because he pitied Eddie and the sad life he’d made for himself in New York. Richie wasn’t asking him to move in with him for any ulterior motives. Life had never been that easy, so why should it start now?
“Richie, I really appreciate the offer man, but I can’t just-”
Richie cut him off. “Yeah yeah we get it, New York couldn’t survive without you, who else would scream at cab drivers and chew out waiters for bringing over regular coke instead of diet?” And just like that, Richie’s walls were back up.
“I’m hardly the only one who screams at cab drivers,” Eddie responded.
Richie smiled. “But you do it better than anyone else. Who else has that much rage packed into such a tiny little body?”
“I’m not tiny, asshole,” Eddie muttered.
“I bet you tell yourself that right up to the moment they offer you the booster seat at the restaurant.”
Eddie had punched his shoulder, and Richie had laughed, and things were mostly back to normal. As Eddie got out of the car, Richie called out once more.
“Eds?”
Eddie turned around.
“Just know you always have a place to go,” Richie told him. He couldn’t meet his eye, and Eddie couldn’t be certain but it seemed he was blushing a little. He didn’t have it in him to tell him not to call him Eds.
“Thanks Rich,” he’d said and meant it.
Now sitting in the driver’s seat of a different car, he wonders what would have happened if he’d gone to LA with Richie. If he’d run away with Richie.
His heart constricts a little bit. He knows how he feels about Richie. Maybe he hadn’t known when they were kids, but the second Richie banged that gong and their eyes locked a lifetime of confusion made sense. ‘I’m gay,’ he’d thought to himself. ‘I’m gay and growing up I was in love with Richie. I’m gay and I think I’m still in love with Richie.’ But there was nothing to be done about it. Richie is straight and if Eddie ever fucked up their newly regained friendship he’d never forgive himself. Having Richie in his life makes it so much better as is. He can subsist off of their almost daily texts, the photos they send back and forth of funny dogs on the street. It's enough.
But what if he’d gone to LA? What if instead of texting each other photos, they showed them to each other over breakfast, eating bowls of cereal side by side? What if Eddie makes Richie his coffee in the morning just how he likes it? Maybe it isn’t two sugars and just a little cream like it was before but he could learn it again. He could learn everything about Richie again.
He’s sitting in the car outside his house at this point, just letting the music wash over him. He can’t go inside until he remembers how the song ends.
“Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us, time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us,” the singer chants.
Fuck.
Time isn’t holding him anymore. A shitty fucking clown isn’t keeping his life hidden from him. Time doesn’t have to bind him to a mediocrely lived existence; it could set him free. He’d lived, and this is how he’s spending his time?
Eddie breathes in deep. He’s never thought of himself as a particularly brave person, but when Richie told him he was he almost believed it. He knows Richie would say the same thing if he was sitting here now.
‘What are you fucking waiting for, Spaghetti,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t you know we’ve got a whole wide world to make our bitch?’
“Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.”
He gets to choose his life. His whole existence what he’s done has been prescribed to him by his mother, by Myra, by his own fear. But he doesn’t have to do that. He can pick what his life looks like, if he wants to.
Same as it ever was. He remembers the Losers, standing brave with bloody hands. Same as it ever was. He remembers Ben and Bev, holding each other in the quarry water, staring at each other like they’d found the sun. Same as it ever was. He remembers Richie. Richie. Richie.
“Letting the days go by, letting the days go by, once in a lifetime.”
If he doesn't do something now he never would.
The song comes to a triumphant conclusion, ringing out in one beautiful final note. Eddie turns off the radio and sits in silence for a moment. He looks at his beautiful house. He knows Myra is probably setting the table for dinner, some healthy, gluten free meal getting colder by the second in the kitchen. He knows they’ll talk about nothing, him briefly going over his day until he runs out of tidbits from around the office. Then he’d listen to her go on and on and she wouldn’t notice when he didn’t respond. And he would do this weekly until he died.
His resolve steeled, he gets out of the car. Time will no longer be holding him.