A/N - Just to repeat: this fic will shift to being posted on AO3 only when it goes fully explicit, but I realized there's a few more chapters to go before it gets there. So here's chapter 2, for any ff readers who haven't switched over to AO3 yet and still want to follow this fic. Hope you enjoy it!
Something was calling in the distance.
Something needed attention.
Something needed help.
It was gentle. Quiet, and subtle. But it was incessant. Like a small child tugging endlessly on one's sleeve. Or a soft tap on the shoulder, over and over. Or a puff of wind on one's cheek.
Or a whisper of a name from very far away.
But the name that was being whispered was not the one he was used to. It was not "Jimmy". It was...
It stopped. It was gone.
He could not remember the name he'd just heard.
And then, as he surfaced from his dream, halfway between sleep and waking, he could not recall the name he was used to, either. Or where he was. Or who he was. Or anything, really. He seemed just a speck of consciousness wedged into an unfamiliar body; he could feel sheets under his body, a comforter on top, a pillow under his head, but it all seemed bizarrely alien. Even his sense of direction, normally so impeccable, was adrift. Was he inside or outside? Where was the door? What was around him? Where was north, where was the sky, where was anything?
Where am I? What is my name?
He was just a scrap of driftwood bobbing in an unfamiliar sea. Nameless. Lost.
Something close to terror closed around him.
A phrase floated up in his mind: The most important thing is to make sure Claire is happy. He seized at it, latching on almost in desperation, hanging all his thoughts on it like an anchor. It repeated in his mind, like a mantra:
The most important thing is to make sure Claire is happy.
The most important thing is to make sure Claire is happy.
The most important thing is to make sure Claire is happy.
Claire needed to be kept happy. Because... oh, yes, because he was Claire's father. And his name was... (a hesitancy here, his mind stumbling over a weirdly bumpy obstacle)... Jimmy, that was it, his name was Jimmy. And he was lying on his bed in his little bedroom.
The house, and the whole world, seemed to click into focus around him. He knew now that when he opened his eyes he would find the door of the room on his right, and the hallway would be just outside, and Claire's room would be just down the hall. Outside the house would be a street, and parked on the street would be his car, and beyond the street would be the rest of the town of Missoula, Montana, where he lived now with his daughter Claire. It was February. It was Tuesday. It was morning. And Claire needed to go to school.
Jimmy Novak opened his eyes.
That was worse than usual, he thought. He sat up slowly, rubbed his temples for a moment. He rolled his shoulders too, twisting his head from side to side, trying to work the ache out of his shoulderblades.
Jimmy often woke disoriented like this. He'd never told Claire, for fear of worrying her, but it happened at least once a week. This had been a bad one, though. Fortunately, for some reason he always had the same sentence running through his head when he awoke— "The most important thing is to make sure Claire is happy"— and it always helped. It was like a little repeating loop in his mind, starting up every morning without fail, almost like his own personal internal alarm clock. It always helped him pull himself together and remember who he was, and what he was supposed to be doing.
Jimmy had wondered, sometimes, if it were normal to wake with this sort of thought running repeatedly through his mind, or if it was some consequence of the accident. He'd tried, a few months ago, to ask the school counselor about it. He'd said, a bit hesitantly, "Do people usually wake up feeling sort of... lost? But there's a sentence repeating in your mind to remind you what to do?"
He'd gotten only a puzzled look in return, and had dropped the topic.
But surely it must be normal?
Not that it bothered him, or anything. It was helpful, actually. It helped him pull himself together. And of course he did want Claire to be happy.
But sometimes it felt... unfamiliar.
Wrong.
Jimmy sighed. That's quite enough existential crisis for today, he thought at last, forcing himself to his feet. He pulled on his bathroom robe and padded to the bathroom, shivering in the chill.
A hot shower helped him wake up, and then some coffee helped him wake up more. By the time he set out Claire's cereal and milk, and her bowl and spoon, he'd almost forgotten the sensation that had originally awoken him: that dream of a faint and distant voice, calling an unfamiliar name.
Jimmy was slicing up an orange for his own breakfast with his silver kitchen knife when he realized Claire was late coming out of her room. She hadn't even taken her shower yet. He glanced at the clock; it was seven-forty-five. Claire was usually up by seven-forty or so.
Jimmy paused with the kitchen knife in his hand, about to put it down to go wake her up, when he started to hear her voice. She was up; she was talking on the phone. Presumably to one of her school friends.
He returned his attention to the orange and sliced it in half and then into neat quarters, using the tip of the long silver knife to flick a few seeds into the sink. And then he paused.
Jimmy never wanted to eavesdrop; he truly didn't. But sometimes he couldn't help it. It was a very little house, and it was very quiet, and there was also the odd fact that Jimmy's hearing seemed to have gotten preternaturally sharp, somehow, while he'd been in the coma. He'd noticed several times that he seemed able to hear clear across the house with no effort at all. And right now, he simply couldn't help overhearing Claire's voice, all the way across the kitchen nook and the living room and through her door. Even though she was whispering.
"No, you can't come over. I told you not to call," she was saying.
Some would-be boyfriend, perhaps? (Though Claire had been very skittish around boys all year, to an extent that often worried Jimmy.) But she went on with, "You swore you wouldn't bother us. You agreed. You said you wouldn't even come anywhere near us— No, I don't trust you, and I really don't care if your fucking mark of whatever is gone—"
Jimmy frowned. He knew that tight, rough whisper. She's trying to act tough, he thought, but really she's scared.
"—What? Wait, what?" she was saying.
A pause.
"Fuck," she spat out, her voice cracking out of its whisper for a moment. She dropped back into the whisper to say, "Where?... Shit. No, we haven't seen anything. No, nobody's noticed us... Well, okay, if you have to. But just deal with it and then go."
This was sounding serious. Jimmy frowned and left the kitchen, padding over to her door in his stockinged feet.
"NO, you can't see him," she was saying as Jimmy drew closer to the door. Her voice was getting a little wavery. "At all. Look, you don't understand, he's... he's fragile."
"Claire?" Jimmy asked at last, knocking on her door. "Is everything all right?"
He heard one last quick worried whisper, "I gotta go. Just stay away." There was a scurry of activity inside, and then Claire was cracking the door open, peering out at him. She was still in her flannel pajamas, her long blond hair still uncombed and tangled around her shoulders. Her phone was nowhere in sight.
As soon as she got the door open, her eyes widened and she flinched back a little. "Dad? What are you doing?"
Jimmy glanced down and realized he had forgotten to put down the long silver kitchen knife. He'd carried it with him, for some reason, all the way to Claire's door, without even noticing that he had it. He was even holding it up a little, as if hearing her worried voice and somehow gotten him prepared to fight.
"What are you doing with that knife?" Claire said. "Dad?"
"Nothing..." said Jimmy, frowning at the knife. It still had an orange seed stuck to the tip. He made himself lower it. "I was... I was just cutting up an orange. Claire, who were you talking to?"
A very blank look slid over Claire's face. "Nobody."
"You were talking to someone. You sounded upset."
She hesitated only a split second before saying, "I was just rehearsing some lines for the play." Before Jimmy could ask about it further, she'd picked up a towel and was shoving past him (he had to jerk the knife away), muttering "I'm gonna be late for school," as she hurried to the bathroom.
Claire was very quiet as they got into the car. She was never at her best in the mornings, but usually she was either yawning, or grumpy. Today, though, she was both wide awake and weirdly quiet. Jimmy had to scrape a little ice off the windshield before they got going, and she sat very still the whole time, staring out the side of the car, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
Jimmy began to feel concerned.
The most important thing is to make sure Claire is happy.
"Claire, are you all right?" he said at last, once he got back into the car. "Is something worrying you?"
"I'm fine," she said.
"If there's ever anything worrying you, you can tell me. You know that, don't you?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Nothing's wrong. Can we go? I'm gonna be late."
Jimmy knew something was wrong, but sometimes when she was upset— well, most times, really— she just wouldn't tell him what was bothering her. He'd have to let it go for now.
But when he was about to put the car into gear, he realized she hadn't buckled in. An image flitted through his mind: A girl hurtling through the windshield, her body shattered.
"You'd better put your seatbelt on," he said. "Before I start driving."
She gave a little snort. "What if I don't want to? What if that wouldn't make me happy... Dad?" she said, glancing over at him, a twisted little smile on her face. She was teasing him, he knew, but there was an edge to her teasing sometimes.
"If we get in a crash and you're badly injured and end up in pain, you'd definitely be unhappy then," Jimmy pointed out. "You'd be extremely unhappy. And, given that the average human lifespan is over seventy years, sooner or later you probably will get into some kind of car crash, sometime in your life. So your lifetime average happiness will be higher if you get in the habit of putting your seatbelt on."
Claire rolled her eyes. "I should have known," she muttered, twisting around to grab for the seatbelt. "Short term versus long term happiness calculations... "
"What's that?"
"Nothing. Nothing. It's just..." She glanced at him, one hand on the seatbelt. "You're, like... trying to think it through. I mean... you really are trying."
Jimmy frowned. What was she talking about? "If you mean I'm trying to do the right thing for you, then that's a yes," he said. "That's what dads do, right?"
A faint smile flickered over her face. "Yeah," she said. "That's what dads do." She clicked her seatbelt on.
When they pulled up at the school Claire didn't get out immediately.
"Hey Dad," she said, looking down at her coat zipper now, pulling the metal tab up and down a few times. Zip, zip. "I was thinking. Maybe we could hang out tonight?" Zip, zip. "Like father-daughter night again? I could make dinner. We could watch another movie. We could rent something from Redbox? You'd like that, huh?" (They couldn't afford Netflix. Her phone bill took every penny of the extra income.)
Jimmy looked at her, a little startled. It was unlike her to ask to do a father-daughter night. Usually he was the one forcing it on her. The movies were really more his thing.
It was awfully appealing. It was sweet of her to ask. But—
"Don't you have band practice tonight?" he asked.
Zip... zzzzip. Claire's hand had slowed on the zipper. "I could skip it," she said brightly, looking up. "I don't really need to go every week. And... hey, what if I make that baked pasta? The one with the cheese on top? You like that one, don't you?"
That did sound good.
But— the most important thing...
... was to make sure Claire was happy.
Jimmy said, "Wouldn't you be happier at band practice? With your friends?"
She gave a tiny huff that was almost a laugh. "Sometimes it actually makes me happy to hang out with you," she said. "Believe it or not. So sue me."
Jimmy couldn't even hide his smile. "I wasn't going to sue you," said Jimmy. She did laugh then, and Jimmy said, "That would be very nice. Thank you, Claire. If you're sure you don't want to go to practice."
"I'm sure," she said, nodding rapidly. "So I'll do the pasta, then. Maybe after school, if you pick me up, we can go and get the pasta fixings and pick out a movie?"
Jimmy nodded. "And we better get lots of olives, too," he said. "Since you love them so much."
It was a risk: an attempt at a joke. It was a style of joke he'd learned over the past few months, after studying Claire's way of joking. The pattern seem to be: Say something opposite to what the person you were talking to was probably expecting, and exaggerate it.
It still always felt a little unfamiliar when he tried it, as if he were an anthropologist copying a peculiar ritual of an unfamiliar tribe. But he took some pleasure in trying to make Claire laugh. Half the time she laughed because he was apparently still bad at it ("such a doof" in her words), but even so, Jimmy counted it a success if he could get any kind of a laugh out of her at all. Even if the laugh was at his expense.
The olive joke worked. She laughed, and it seemed a genuine laugh, her face fully relaxing for the first time all morning. "You're such a doof," she said, predictably, but her tone wasn't unkind, and she even gave him a spontaneous goodbye hug. A quick, rushed hug, and safely out of view of her friends, but a hug nonetheless.
"See ya," she said, as she clambered out, slammed the door and walked away.
Claire seemed happy now; so Jimmy was happy.
During the morning, though, things began to feel a little odd again. Jimmy gradually became convinced he'd been missing calls on his phone.
At first he found himself checking his phone over and over. All during his morning shift at work (a shipping-and-receiving warehouse for an online retailer) he kept pulling his phone out and looking at it, convinced that the phone had just rung and that he hadn't picked it up in time.
Yet nobody had called.
The feeling persisted: a feeling that somebody was trying to call him; that he'd just missed a call. Perhaps the ringer was turned off? Or the battery had gone dead? He kept flicking the mute button off and on, to check that the ringer was working; he checked the battery, and charged the phone up a bit more, and even rebooted it a few times to be sure it was working right.
But nobody called.
Had he missed a meeting at work? Had his boss being trying to contact him? Had some mail been lost? He started checking his text messages, too. And his voicemail. And even his little slot in the office mailroom. He walked around and checked all the offices and meeting rooms, and even went to the front of the warehouse and looked around, wondering if someone had come to the front door asking for him.
There was nobody.
The sensation faded, eventually, but he felt unsettled for hours.
It seemed almost like there was a faint emotion floating through the air. Jimmy couldn't find quite the right word to describe it. Loneliness, perhaps? Regret? Sorrow?
All of those, yes, and something else as well.
"Longing," maybe, was a good word for it.
He only worked a half day on Tuesdays. When his shift ended and he went to pick up Claire from school, the nagging missed-call sensation began to eat at him again. As soon as he'd pulled up at the correct corner where he was supposed to pick up Claire (two blocks away from school, around a corner, safely out of view of her friends), he pulled out his phone, rechecked it for the twentieth time, and he checked his email, and his text messages.
Still nothing.
He set his phone down with a sigh.
"Dad?" It was Claire's voice. "Are you okay?" Jimmy jerked his head up. He'd been sitting hunched over in the driver's seat, pinching the bridge of his nose of one hand, trying to focus on that faint "longing" sensation.
"I'm fine," he said. He tried to give her a reassuring smile. She was leaning over to peer at him through the passenger window. After one more sharp look at him, she pulled her door open and climbed into the passenger seat, still looking at him.
"What's wrong?" she said.
"Nothing. I just... " Jimmy glanced toward to the north. There was something to the north that kept drawing his attention. "Just... kept thinking I heard something. It's nothing."
He turned to Claire to find that she was looking at him with a very worried frown.
"Must just be the weather," she said. "Rain coming. Or something. We should go home."
"It feels stronger now and then," Jimmy said, peering outside. "It's..."
It was gone.
"It's stopped," said Jimmy, looking around.
"It's the weather," announced Claire firmly. "A lot of people were feeling that today. It's, like, the barometric pressure or something. It's the way the wind's blowing. Can we go home? Just grab the cheese and the pasta and a movie and we'll go home? "
Jimmy looked at her for a moment.
The most important thing...
... is to make sure Claire is happy.
Jimmy started the car.
Jimmy turned the gold-colored Continental toward one of Missoula's grocery stores, one that had a Redbox where they could pick up a movie for a dollar, and get the ingredients for Claire's pasta dish as well.
But as soon as they got going, Jimmy stiffened. That sensation of being "called" was much stronger now. And it seemed to be coming from a certain direction: the north again. Almost as if there were a spotlight over at that side of town, or an aurora glowing in the sky.
There was something over there. Something he had to check out.
He was supposed to turn left here to head to the grocery store. But he went straight, as if drawn along by an invisible magnetic field. He had to go straight.
Claire was tapping something out on her phone to a friend; she didn't notice.
And then Jimmy saw the black car.
Just like the one in his dreams. Long and low and shining.
It was in the parking lot of one of Missoula's many little parks, the ones that had hiking trails that headed up into the trees. Jimmy took a turn into the parking lot and pulled up to an empty spot, thinking only, I'll just see if they need any help.
They might need my help.
"Dad, where are we?" Claire said, looking up from her phone and peering out the windows. "This isn't the supermarket. Is there a Redbox around here?"
"Just— a moment—, " said Jimmy, unable to even verbalize why he was stopping the car. He cut the motor, and Claire turned to stare at him, as he swung the door open and stepped slowly out. Looking at the black car.
He heard her hiss "Fuck," behind him, and heard her scramble out of her door. She darted around the hood, looking up at him, whispering, "Dad? Dad?". But he couldn't even look at her.
He could only look at the two men.
The black car was parked about thirty feet away, and there were two men standing by it, facing away from them, talking to a woman. They were both wearing formal suits. One of the men was quite tall, with brown hair that was unusually long, almost shoulder length, tucked behind his ears. He seemed to be interviewing a woman, nodding and taking notes as she gestured up into the hills animatedly.
The other man was a bit shorter, his hair lighter-colored and short and a little spiky in front. Jimmy couldn't see his face; the man was facing away. He wasn't assisting his companion, but instead was leaning on the roof of the car, gazing out at the town of Missoula, his fingers tapping a little on the roof of the car.
"Oh, shit," Claire breathed, by his side. She inched around the hood to grab Jimmy's elbow. "Shit, they didn't tell me it was this park. Dad, c'mon, we gotta go, c'mon, please?" She started pulling at his arm, trying to drag Jimmy back to the driver's door. But Jimmy could not move; he felt his feet rooted in place, felt the ache across his shoulders burning, as he watched the two men. The tall man's gentle voice carried across the parking lot.
But it was the shorter man that Jimmy couldn't take his eyes off of.
The angle of the head. The breadth of the shoulders. The curve of the ear. The line of the jaw. The way his head was tipped down, as if he didn't quite have the energy to watch what his companion was doing; the way he turned his head now and then to gaze out over the town.
As if he'd felt Jimmy's gaze on the back of his neck, the man froze, and slowly turned, and his eyes met Jimmy's. The whole world stopped.
The most important thing... thought Jimmy.
His mind stuttered and stalled. And restarted.
The most important thing...
... is to make sure he's okay.
A/N - Chapters 3 and 4 will both also post here, and I think somewhere around Chapter 5-6 I'll switch the fic over to AO3 only.
If you had a favorite part or a bit of dialogue or an idea that you liked, please let me know. I love to hear from you. :)