Chapter Text
Hawkins, Indiana
August 15th, 1976
Beth, I hear you calling
But I can’t come home right now
Me and the boys are playing
And we just can’t find the sound
Just a few more hours
And I’ll be right home to you
I think I hear them calling
Oh, Beth, what can I do?
Beth what can I do?
The air was thick, but blessedly dry. August was almost over, and there weren’t too many more muggy days ahead. She had taken advantage of the warm weather and climbed atop the trailer, Harmony guitar in hand, to get some practice in.
Her mother had been the musician in the family. Her voice was angelic and lyrical, notes seeming to effortlessly flow from her mouth and to Anna Beth’s ears. Eddie fell asleep so fast there was no point in trying to sing to him, but this was Anna Beth’s nightly lullaby. Sleep didn’t come easy to her. Something buzzy and slippery inside her demanded her conscious. But Donna had the magic key, the thing that let her fall out of the world and rest. Those had been the best nights…the nights her parents were still alive.
The thought of them is still painful, even two years later.
Two years to the day, she thinks bitterly.
She feels him before she sees him, his combat boots heavy on the rungs of the ladder hugging the side of the RV. He’s only eleven years old, and Anna Beth is 14, but the two years since their parents’ death has altered them both permanently. Both of them could just as easily be any other age. Grief has sharpened their jaws and stunted their bones all at the same time.
“How was school?” She asks, strumming absently now. He’s got his own guitar in hand, some cheapo from the pawn shop. He was saving up for an electric.
“Miserable. As always.” He plops himself down on one of the yellowing beach chairs, laying his guitar across his sternum and strumming a lazy chord.
“Oh, whaddya get when you cross together
A chronically high late term bedwetter
With a musical prodigy, a god on guitar?
You get me, don’t you see, Eddie the retar-“
“Hey!” She fights her laughter and struggles to stay stern. “We don’t use that word.”
His sigh is practically hot on her face. “Everyone else does.” He gripes through his teeth.
“Yeah, and everyone else calls you a freak and makes your life a living hell every day. I thought we didn’t listen to anyone but us.”
Tension makes a home inside him, shoulders raised and slanted like shingles on a roof. Something was wrong.
“Maybe everyone else is right and we’re the assholes.” He says finally, chewing on his nails, the black polish chipped from overuse. His big eyes are weighed down by the furrow of his brow, and somehow her little brother looks a lot less little. It unsettles her, so she clears the space between them and kicks him hard in the shin.
“What the fuck!?” He cries, grabbing at his leg to mitigate the pain. He stares up at her, anger and shock mixing interchangeably across his features.
“What the fuck me? What the fuck you!” Her hands rest on her hips.. “Since when do you say shit like that?”
He sputters, struggling to get the words out. “I- I don’t know! Since always? Maybe I’m just thinking about my future for once or something…”
A strand of hair, the same curly mousy brown as her little brother, sits errant across her forehead, and she blows it away, agitated. Eddie’s future was set in solid stone. He is deflecting, she just doesn’t know why.
“Did something happen?” Anna Beth insists. She crouches down to his level, where he is still sat clutching his leg. “Did someone hurt you?”
He flies off the chair, bad leg forgotten, begging for distance between them.
“No!” He cries. “Jesus Christ!”
She shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know Eddie! You’re talking like something happened.”
He faces away to the west, where the sun sets crimson on the horizon. Golden hour is upon them, casting deep dusty shadows across the trailer park. The city of Hawkins spreads before them like an oil painting, and she longs to run her thumb through the ink.
“I just wish….that I had gotten to know mom and dad a bit more. Ya know? Like, you got more time with them.” Only three years, she thinks hastily. But he was nine and she was twelve, and the distance between those ages ran farther than she realized. “Sometimes when people talk about their parents at school I just…feel like even more of a freak. Because our parents were fuck ups, and they died fuck ups, and I’m probably going to be one too.”
The sun has almost completely sunk behind the skyline now. One dying strip of light illuminates Eddie before her. He is this heavy, golden thing. He has weight.
She enters the strip of light and comes up behind him, her arms snaking tight around his middle. She is taller than him, so her face tucks neatly onto his shoulder.
“They were not fuck ups. They had issues, but they were not fuck ups. You know how I know?”
He shook his head no, not trusting his voice.
“I know because they had you.”
He kicks at her ankle, getting his revenge. She tilts for a second, recovering from the pain, and releases her hold on him.
“Fucking liar.” He says, and she curses under her breath.
“I am not!” Shit, he really got her. A spot of blood blooms on her sock. ”I was trying to be sweet, you little shit.”
He isn’t convinced. It’s not surprising given their family’s history. The words they exchange tend to be harder, dog-eared by time.
“You always talk like that, like I’m special. What the fuck is so special about me? You’re like, a genius or whatever. I can barely get through a year of middle school!”
He likes Singin’ in the Rain. He knows how to hotwire a car. He has music inside of him.
“You are good, Eddie. Like actually truly good. And that isn’t something that comes along every day.”
His laugh echoes across the park, bouncing from telephone pole to telephone pole. “Me? Good? Are you on crack?”
Good, she thinks, is not always its base definition. Sometimes good just means not like someone else. There are lots of people Eddie could have turned into. It's a miracle that he turned into himself.
“Just…trust me. You’re not a fuck up. You’re the coolest person I know.”
Uncertainty flicks across his face.
“You have to say that.”
Anna Beth shrugs. “When have I ever said anything I didn’t mean?”
He allows himself a tiny smile. Then he hugs her fiercely, and she is laughing and holding him tightly back as they stand in the darkness.
Like clockwork, rows and rows of lights came on. It’s seven pm. String lights from every trailer in the park illuminated the dusk, and gave shape to their smiling faces.
“Tell me the one about how they met!” Eddie barks, rushing to sit back in his chair. Anna Beth scrapes hers a bit closer to him and grabs her guitar from where she’d tossed it down.
“The Ballad of Donna and Alan Munson.” She plays an exciting chord, like something you’d hear in a Wild West story.
Realistically, Donna and Alan had met as plainly as anyone could meet - in a supermarket, reaching for the last box of spaghetti and touching hands innocently.
But in the Ballad of Donna and Alan Munson, the supermarket was a desert town overrun by enemy gunman. The last box of spaghetti was a sasparilla at the bar. And instead of an exchanging of phone numbers, Alan saved Donna from an epic shootout and she kissed him in the dying light of the sun.
Eddie may not have known their parents, but he’d know this - the silly way they told stories, and the fantasy world they liked to live in. Even with the drinking and the gambling, her mind has a hard time tainting their memory.
Eddie’s head had finds her lap, and they spend the rest of the night like that, talking about nothing and everything, and struggling to see in the dimness of the light.
Nashville, Tennesee
March 23rd, 1986
“Hello?”
Anna Beth glances over at the bed across from hers. Amanda is comically sprawled atop her bedsheets and not under them. She hated to sweat in the middle of the night. The practice horrified Anna Beth, who was a firm believer in the safety of blankets. Monsters couldn’t get you if you were tucked in tight.
The sound of the phone had almost had her tumbling over the side of the bed and onto the floor. She had always been a light sleeper. She’d been awake and her hand had been on the receiver before it had a chance to ring twice.
The line stays quiet. Her nail works at an itch on her thigh and she readjusts the phone to her shoulder so she can wipe the crust from her eyes.
“Hello? Who is it?”
Vanderbilt was a quiet campus. It always freaked her out when she was up late and noise didn’t filter through the walls. Growing up in the trailer park there had always been something - a door slamming, a domestic fight, old drunks gathered around a waning fire and sharing war stories over a couple of beers.
Even four years in the quiet still gave her a bit of the heebie jeebies. Her thoughts were too loud to not have some filler underneath them.
The phone remains silent. She sighs and just as she moves to hang up there’s a sound. It isn’t much of anything. An inhale, or maybe a sniffle. Just enough to know that there is in fact someone on the other end.
Her mind begins weaving thoughts together rapidly. It could be a prank call. Not many students on campus were the kind to play tricks, but there were partiers among them. One of them could have called to mess with Amanda and accidentally have gotten the weirdo instead. Or maybe they were drunk. Or high.
It might not even be someone on campus. Maybe a couple of kids were looking to mess around on a Friday night.
Her mind wanders into worst case scenario territory, too. For a second she can feel a wet tongue on her cheek. Maybe she is asleep, and there is a man with knives for fingers terrorizing her dreams. Or perhaps she is awake, and the person on the other end of the line is messing with her. When a stranger calls…
But something tells her whoever is on the other end isn’t a kid or a college student. Something instinctual, something that lives inside her gut tells her it’s someone she knows.
Wishful thinking has her considering it’s someone related to Tommy. Maybe his mother was reminiscing and grief had drawn her hand to the phone. One of his New York friends could have gotten her number from his parents.
Dewey’s mom had moved to the city. She hated Anna Beth, but she could be looking for some kind of sick sense of closure by hearing her voice. Maybe she was in her living room thinking of all the things she could say that would help her move on and she stayed silent because all the words were coming up short.
“I know you’re there….” She says.
She swears she hears the sound of a lighter. Its muffled, like maybe they covered the receiver with a hand or set it down, not realizing the action would be picked up. The quiet of the campus is an aid to her now. Her ears train harder to try and pick up something - some hint of who may be calling her well past 2am. There’s a light shuffle sort of sound. They probably picked the phone back up after lighting their cigarette or their joint, and now she can hear the unmistakable sound of breathing.
Anna Beth is not a mother. She’s never really been interested in motherhood as a concept. The idea of bringing someone into the world and then being responsible for their well being was already hard enough. Add on the pressure of being a role model for them, of passing down to them the things that you know and have learned…
Anna Beth didn’t want to pass any of her traits along. Anything about her that was useful to anyone had run sour years ago. That’s what she felt like all the time. Spoiled milk.
But despite her lack of children, there was one person she could claim to have raised. And when you raise someone and love them as deeply and as much as Anna Beth had, you become attuned to them. And Anna Beth knew, just by the sound of the breathing, that the person on the phone was…
“Eddie?”
He said nothing. Just breathed and smoked. Just kept the line open.
Eddie didn’t really call her. It’s not that he didn’t want to talk to her - he always wanted to talk to her. But Anna Beth was at school, and Eddie was…matriculating… in every area of his life. And it went both ways - Anna Beth didn’t call Eddie, she called Wayne. They only called when they needed something they could only get from the other.
“Hey sis, Im in jail for the night because of a stupid prank….”
“Hey shithead my car won’t start again, can you talk me through a jumpstart?”
“Wayne forgot the light bill again Beth, can you tell me who to call?”
“Eddie, please tell me you saw the new police academy and you thought it was as shit as I did. I’m trying to settle a bet.”
And that’s what was so scary about this phone call. If he needed her, why wasn’t he saying anything?
“Whatever it is, I’ll help you, just tell me what happened.”
Her legs shift under the covers. He’s still silent. Amanda sleeps like the dead so there’s no need to keep her voice low.
“Look, it’s a four hour drive but I’ll come back. If you need me to…. I’ll come back.”
Where the hell was Wayne? And if it really was bad, wouldn’t he be better equipped to help her brother?
Her sweaty palms grind into the cotton of her pajama pants. She’s getting nervous.
“I’m sorry..”
Relief washes over her when he finally speaks. It’s confirmation that it really is him, that nasal whine she could pick out of a lineup.
“Don’t be sorry. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, man. I just had a few too many beers I think. I’m good. It’s..it’s nice to hear your voice.”
This territory is very much uncharted. They didn’t say meaningful shit to each other unless things were going sideways.
“It’s good to hear your voice too. And don’t…”
Don’t drink too much. Don’t drink at all. You know what happens to the Munsons when alcohol becomes involved.
But she can’t say that to him. Eddie knows better, and honestly his tolerance was better than hers. He’d never been drunk as far as she’d ever seen, and he always scrunched his nose when the 2am crowd stumbled out of MO’s.
They hadn’t talked since August. And that conversation….well, let’s just say his presence on the line wasnt just surprising, it meant something was going on. And after the last time they spoke, policing him wasn’t going to solve any of their problems.
“…don’t forget to brush your teeth.”
What a stupid thing to say. Her head falls onto her palm.
But Eddie laughs, though it sounds different than his normal laugh. It’s a little sad.
“Yes, mother.”
He’s joking, but she feels a little mollified when he says it.
The silence lays extra thick between them. Somehow even through a phone she understands him better than anyone. He’s probably stubbing out his cigarette, elbows perched on his knees and hair tucked between his teeth. He’s probably thinking about saying something stupid just to make her laugh. That or he’s going to tell her about whatever album he just listened to.
“I bought a tape the other day from the second hand place. Come on Down by Green River. You’d like it, it’s got a lot of kick.”
Predictable as always.
“What song was your favorite?”
“Tunnel of Love. The chorus is all drums. It’s killer.”
Anna Beth shifts so she’s laying down again, a yawn escaping from her mouth. Carefully she tugs her blanket so it’s covering her up to the shoulder.
“For a guitarist you’re kind of a slut for drums.”
He groans on the other end. She can hear him shifting too. Maybe he’s laying down somewhere, tucking himself into his own blanket. Or maybe this phone call is the blanket. Maybe somehow she’s protecting him from something. She just doesn’t know what.
“They keep the entire pace of the tune. Without drums every song would sound like screaming into the void.”
“Every song is screaming into the void. Just aesthetically.”
Eddie begins to explain exactly why he disagrees with that statement. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s music. She lets out another yawn, and this one must be picked up by the phone because he pauses mid-ramble.
“I’m keeping you awake.”
“No! You’re good, Eddie.”
She knows she’s losing him now. He’s too good of a person to keep her awake when he knows she’s tired. What does it say about her that if the roles were reversed she’d stay on the line all night?
“Get some rest. I’m sure you have some crazy lab or life changing experiment to do in the morning.”
She’s got a pharmaceutical exam, which is nothing crazy or life changing, but it is at 8am.
“You’re sure you’re ok?” She asks again. Something feels off, and she can’t shake the idea that maybe there’s something going on that he won’t tell her about.
“I’m good. Never better. I told you before…’86 baby. This is gonna be my year.”