Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 102
Robert knew that no matter how bad he felt, he had to hold on to his job. It was the only way he could make any kind of life for Tyler. And so today, like every other day, he sat at his cubicle and worked without stopping, trying to empty his mind of everything but the task in front of him. He stopped at noon and took out a sandwich, eating it so mindlessly that once he finished it, he couldn’t even have identified what kind of sandwich it had been. He walked to the bathroom, then to the water cooler. He was refilling his water bottle when a voice behind him said, “Hey.”
He jumped as though startled that he wasn’t the only person in the building. He turned around to see Jess, the nice, bespectacled copy editor and self-confessed “grammar nerd” who had been hired at the same time he was. She and he used to chat a bit before Anna died. Before he was broken.
“Hey, Jess,” he said, moving away to let her have a turn at the water cooler and, he hoped, to go back to his desk without being disturbed further. He turned to walk away.
“Hold up a sec,” Jess said.
“Me?” Robert said, even though it was clearly him she was talking to. Reluctantly, he turned around.
“I was just noticing you eating your sad little sandwich at your desk.” Jess filled up one of those weird paper cones with water from the cooler. Who had decided that those were adequate drinking vessels? She grinned at him. “Well, maybe it was a delicious sandwich, but it looked sad to me. And I was thinking … I know you can’t go out after work because you’ve got a kiddo to fetch, but a lot of us go out for half-price sushi on Wednesdays at lunch. Maybe you could go with us sometime?”
Sushi had been Robert and Anna’s favorite food. They had learned to love it in college and had also learned to use chopsticks together, picking up sushi rolls, dunking them in soy sauce, and popping them into each other’s mouths. While a lot of couples went out for steaks or seafood or Italian for special occasions, for them it was always sushi.
How could going out for half-price sushi with a bunch of random people from work live up to all those romantic sushi dinners with Anna? The answer was simple: it couldn’t.
It would only bring back memories to make him sadder.
Still, Jess was nice for asking him. For taking pity on him.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll join you sometime,” Robert said, not even trying to sound convincing. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Okay,” Jess said, sounding surprisingly disappointed. “Robert?”
“Yeah?” He didn’t know where this was going but already knew he didn’t like it. Wasn’t this a workplace? Shouldn’t they be working?
She looked down for a minute like she was collecting her thoughts. “You know,” she began, “before things changed so much for you, you and I used to be friends. We used to talk. If you ever want to talk again, I’m here.”
Robert knew he was in danger of his emotions bubbling up to the surface, which couldn’t happen. He couldn’t be a basket case at work. He had to get out of this conversation and get back to his desk. “That’s very kind—”
Jess rolled her eyes. “I’m not being ‘kind,’ you goof! I like you. I’ve always enjoyed your company. And I’m a single parent, too. Not for the same reason you are, maybe, but I bet we still go through a lot of the same stuff. Talking about some of it might be good for our sanity. What’s left of it.”
Robert felt himself smile a little. Against his will, he was remembering why he had liked Jess. “I’m down to crumbs myself,” he said. It was a joke, but like a lot of jokes, it contained the truth.
“I hear you. And who knows? Maybe our kids could hang out. We could take turns watching each other’s rug rats so we could maybe have an evening out every once in while.”
“Don’t make any promises. You haven’t met my kid yet,” Robert said. Had he just made two jokes in a row?
“He’s two, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe I should give it a year or two before I offer my babysitting services.” She smiled at him, a warm, genuine smile. “Listen, I’m giving you a free pass this week, but next Wednesday, you’re going out for half-price sushi with us. No more sad little sandwiches for you.”
Robert gave her a little wave. “I will consider your invitation. Thank you.” He turned to go back to his cubicle.
“It’s not an invitation!” Jess called behind him. “It’s mandatory! Mandatory sushi! Which would be a great name for a band, by the way!”
* * *
Robert sat back down at his cubicle. He was pretty sure that his conversation with Jess was the longest conversation he had had with a nonfamily member in months. Like someone who hasn’t exercised in years and suddenly finds himself back on the treadmill, he was exhausted. No more chitchat today. He stayed at his desk, where he worked nonstop until five. When it was time to leave, he felt no sense of relief. He was simply moving from one series of tasks in one location to another series of tasks in another. Off went the graphic designer hat, on went the dad hat.
Robert pulled into the parking lot of Tiny Tot Academy and went into the cheerful, red-roofed building to fetch his son. He entered the room with the big red number two on the door. The walls were peppered with construction paper cutouts and unintentionally abstract crayon-scribble drawings. Robert found Tyler’s bubbly young teacher, Miss Lauren, surrounded by toddlers playing with the brightly colored toys that cluttered the floor. While being outnumbered by volatile little people seemed terrifying to Robert, Miss Lauren looked perfectly at home and greeted Robert with a smile. She stood up to get closer to Robert’s eye level. “He was a happy boy for most of today,” she said, “though there is one little thing I should tell you about.”
Robert braced himself for bad news. He hoped Tyler hadn’t hit some other kid. Or bitten somebody. It seemed like every day care had one kid who was the biter. Nobody wanted to be the biter’s parent.
Miss Lauren smiled again. “Don’t worry. He didn’t attack anybody or anything.”
Robert let himself breathe a little.
Miss Lauren pushed back her curly brown hair behind her ears. “It was just that today I asked the kids to draw pictures of their families and talk about them. Being two, most of them just drew blobs or scribbles, but then we sat in a circle and everybody talked about their families and who was in their pictures. Tyler’s friend Noah noticed Tyler didn’t have a mom in his picture and asked him about it. Tyler got a little upset, I think mostly because someone pointed out his family was different.”
Robert hated to think of Tyler being singled out because of his loss. Did that kind of behavior have to start so early?
“Aren’t these kids a little young to even notice that kind of thing?” he asked. He looked around at the toddlers in the room, playing with blocks or trucks or dolls. They were babies, really.
Miss Lauren smiled again. “Oh, you’d be surprised what they notice. They don’t miss much, believe me. I told Noah and the rest of the class that not all kids have a mommy and a daddy, that there are all different kinds of families, and I talked about what some of those families might look like. I said the only thing you need to have to make a family is people and love. So I guess you could say it turned into a teachable moment.”
Robert stiffened. He hated the thought of his and Tyler’s broken little family being used as a “teachable moment,” and for what? So the other kids could feel sorry for Tyler instead of just making fun of him? He didn’t want his son to be the object of ridicule, but he didn’t want him to be an object of pity, either.
But there was no point in saying anything negative to Miss Lauren. She was so young and bright-eyed and idealistic that criticizing her would be like kicking a friendly puppy. He finally heard himself say, “Thank you for letting me know.” It sounded stiffer and more formal than necessary, but at least it was polite.
“You’re welcome,” Miss Lauren said. “I just thought I should say something in case, you know, you wanted to talk about it with Tyler at home.”
“Right,” Robert said. He didn’t want to talk about it, not at home with his son and definitely not here with a near stranger. “You ready to go, buddy?” he called to Tyler from across the brightly decorated room.
Tyler looked up from the plastic dump truck he was rolling back and forth and said, “Daddy!” He grinned, jumped up, and ran to Robert, his arms outstretched.
“See?” Miss Lauren said. “A happy boy.”
Robert had a hard time taking comfort in this statement. If Tyler was a happy boy, it was only because he didn’t yet understand what he was missing.
* * *
Robert didn’t really want to stop for groceries on the way home, but he didn’t see any way around it. Robert didn’t care much about eating, but he knew that if nothing else, he had to make sure his kid’s basic needs were met. Once he got Tyler safely strapped into his car seat, he said, “We need to stop at the store on the way home, buddy. We’re out of milk and juice.” Toddlers ran on milk and juice the way cars ran on gasoline. They had to have it, and they burned their way through it at an alarming and expensive rate.
“Milk! Doos!” Tyler said.
“That’s right. We’ll buy some at the store. You can pick what kind of juice you want.”
“Bapple!” Tyler sang. For some reason, when he said the word apple, it came out with a b at the beginning.
“You want apple juice?” Robert said. This was the way the toddler owner’s manual said to handle kids’ mispronunciations—not to call attention to them, but to make sure you repeated the word correctly.
“Yeah! Bapple doos!” Tyler cheered.
“You got it, buddy.” Robert turned into the All Mart parking lot and prepared himself for the ordeal of shopping.
* * *
Tyler owned one T-shirt with Freddy Fazbear on it, but Robert had never thought of his son as a Freddy fanatic. He was too little, for one thing. As he pushed Tyler in the shopping cart past the toy aisles, though, Tyler pointed his index finger and yelled, “Fweddy!” at the top of his tiny lungs.
“What was that, buddy?” Robert asked, looking around to see what Tyler was seeing. For a second he thought Freddy was a kid Tyler recognized from day care.
“Fweddy! Fweddy!” Tyler yelled, his eyes wide with excitement.
Robert followed the line of his son’s pointing finger to a display of identical plush brown bears with wide smiles, thick black eyebrows, and black top hats. The packaging proclaimed that what Tyler was looking at was a toy called Tag-Along Freddy. But how did Tyler know that?
With a surge of guilt, Robert realized how Tyler most likely knew. When Robert was especially exhausted or too sad to cope—and this happened more often than he would like to admit—he would plop Tyler down in front of the TV. He only let him watch age-appropriate programming, and the cartoons, while they were no doubt eye candy with bright colors and rapidly shifting images, did at least make a pretense of having some educational value.
But then there were the commercials. The terrible, terrible commercials designed by board rooms of cynical suits on Madison Avenue to make children desire technicolor sugar blobs masquerading as cereal, high-fructose-corn-syrup suspensions masquerading as “juice drinks,” and the latest toys based on the most popular of pop culture trends.
“You want to look at one of the Freddys?” Robert asked.
Tyler nodded and held out his hands.
Robert placed the toy in Tyler’s hands, and Tyler’s mouth spread into a beautiful smile that conjured the ghost of his mother. Even though the bear was encased in cardboard packaging, he drew it to him in a hug. “Wuv,” he said.
Well, shoot, Robert thought. It was hard to argue with wuv.
“Now, you be careful with that bear,” Robert said. “We haven’t decided if we’re going to buy it.” When he looked at the price sticker, he was surprised how expensive it was. “Yikes,” he muttered.
“Buy?” Tyler asked, still clutching the toy to his chest. “Mine?”
“Well, let me read the packaging and see if it’s even safe for kids your age,” Robert said. He pulled another bear off the shelf and turned it over. The pictures on the back of the box showed laughing toddlers playing with Tag-Along Freddy and, interestingly, a woman dressed like she worked in an office, looking at her wristwatch and smiling like all was well in the world. Robert read the text on the back of the package:
TAG-ALONG FREDDY IS A KID’S AND A PARENT’S BEST PAL. FREDDY GOES WHERE YOUR LITTLE ONE GOES AND SENDS YOU LIVE UPDATES ON YOUR TAG-ALONG TIME WRISTWATCH (WRISTWATCH INCLUDED) SO YOU’LL KNOW YOUR LITTLE ONE IS HAPPY AND SAFE. YOU MAY HAVE TO BE OUT OF SIGHT SOMETIMES, BUT TAG-ALONG FREDDY IS THE BEAR WHO IS ALWAYS THERE!
Robert thought of all the times he had to tend to something in the kitchen or take an important phone call and leave Tyler unattended. It was amazing what could go wrong in just a few seconds. He recalled once when he left the living room long enough to stir a pot on the stove and returned to find Tyler scaling the bookcase like King Kong climbing the Empire State Building. He could see how this Tag-Along Freddy could come in handy, especially for a single parent like him.
When you took into account that it was a toy that was also a safety device, the price didn’t seem too outrageous.
“Tyler,” he said, “would you like to take Freddy home with you?”
Tyler’s whole face lit up in a beautiful smile. “Yeah, Daddy! Fank you!”
Miss Lauren at day care had told Robert they had been working on pleases and thank-yous, but this was the first time he had ever heard Tyler say, “Thank you,” without being prompted by a “What do we say?”
“You’re welcome, buddy. And I’m loving those good manners.”
* * *
Getting the bear and the wristwatch set up and working was mildly annoying but could’ve been worse. After about fifteen minutes of fussing with directions and batteries, Robert had everything in working order. He handed the bear over to Tyler and said, “Why don’t you play with Freddy while I get our supper started?”
“Fweddy!” Tyler said, giving the bear a hug.
In the kitchen, Robert put on a pot of water to boil and dumped the contents of a jar of spaghetti sauce into a pan. He was getting the lettuce, carrots, and cucumbers out of the fridge to start a salad when his Tag-Along Freddy Time wristwatch vibrated. The screen said, A message from Freddy. Robert tapped the screen, and a text appeared:
It’s all good. I’m playing with my best buddy!
Cute. Robert couldn’t help but smile.
Robert sliced carrots and cucumbers for the salad and put the pasta on to boil. When he went in the living room to tell Tyler it was time to eat, the little boy was holding Freddy on his lap and “reading” to him from one of his little board books, My First Book of Colors.
Every time Tyler did something this adorable, Robert wished Anna was here to see it. But who was he kidding? He always wished Anna was here.
“I Fweddy’s daddy!” Tyler said.
“You are, huh? That’s pretty cool,” Robert said. “Are you and Freddy ready for supper?”
Robert expected at least a small argument since Tyler was in the middle of “reading,” but he said, “Okay, Daddy,” tucked his bear under his arm, and followed Robert to the kitchen.
When he helped Tyler to his place at the table, Tyler set Freddy down in the chair next to him and said, “Fweddy plate!”
“You want Freddy to have a plate, too?” Robert asked.
“Uh-huh,” Tyler said, nodding like it was a very serious matter.
Feeling more than a little silly, Robert set a plate and a cup at the spot on the table in front of the toy bear. He set down a plate of spaghetti and a bowl of salad in front of Tyler along with a sippy cup of milk. “Now Freddy has to just eat pretend food, or he’ll get all messy,” Robert said. “He’ll eat pretend spaghetti.” And then, because he knew rhymes cracked Tyler up, he said, “Freddy spaghetti!”
Tyler giggled like his dad had just made the funniest joke in the world. “Fweddy sketti!” he yelled, then laughed some more, slapping the table in hilarity.
“He’s ready for Freddy spaghetti,” Robert said. He was milking the joke, but that’s what you did when you had a two-year-old audience. There was not much occasion for subtle wit.
Robert and Tyler ate spaghetti and salad and laughed a lot. Even Robert had to admit it was a fun time.
* * *
The downside to feeding a toddler spaghetti was that it made a bath necessary, pronto. Tyler’s face was so smeared with orange goo that when he smiled, he looked like a jack-o’-lantern. Somehow he had even managed to get noodles in his hair. “Okay, buddy,” Robert said, steeling himself in preparation for a tantrum. “We’re going to have to go straight to the bathtub after this.”
“Fweddy baff, too?” Tyler asked.
“Freddy can’t get wet, but he can come along,” Robert said.
“Okay, Daddy,” Tyler said, picking up his bear and walking toward the bathroom. Talking Tyler into a bath usually involved such elaborate negotiations Robert felt he should involve the United Nations. He couldn’t believe tonight’s routine was going so easy.
It was funny, though. As much as Tyler usually argued about bath time, once he was in the water he loved it. Robert threw Tyler’s collection of rubber duckies and toy boats in the water, and the boy was happy to splash and play. Robert set Freddy down on Tyler’s toddler step stool so he was at a safe distance from the splash zone but Tyler could still see him.
Tyler held up each of his tub toys to “show” to Freddy: “Fweddy, dis my blue boat. Fweddy, dis my yellow ducky.”
