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The End and What Came After
“Hey what’s up? I’m just picking up a few things at the store on the way home. Did you want anything?”
“Yeah, new pack of smokes.”
“I mean anything other than the usual, doofus.”
“Phht, okay. Oh, you know what I’m craving? See if they got those lil dinosaur chicken nuggets. Love those things.”
“I don’t think they have those at the 711 but I’ll swing by Walmart too I guess. Oh, and make sure Nickie’s not looking at our nudie mags again, I don’t know what that’d do to him but you know, probably not good for a seven year old.”
“Hey, that was one time! But, uh, fair enough. You won’t be long, right? It’s pretty dark out there for 3pm.”
“Hey, don’t be stupid, you know I drive better than you, numb nuts.”
“Alright, but if you die, I’m playing In The End at your funeral.”
“Oh my God Glenn you know I hate Linkin Park so fucking much.”
“That’s why I love you, babe. See you at home.”
“See you at home, babe.”
Glenn pressed the end call button on his cell phone and wandered into the living room where Nick was laid out on the sofa, staring dead-eyed at some animated robots shooting lasers at each other on the TV screen.
“Budge up, kid.” Glenn tickled the bottom of Nick’s feet until he grunted, giggled, and pulled them up to his chest so Glenn could sit beside him. He watched the screen for about a minute before picking up the remote. “Hey, how ‘bout we turn on the Disney Channel?”
“Nooooo,” Nick groaned even as Glenn was changing the channel.
“You’re seven, you don’t know what’s good, yet,” Glenn gave Nick a reassuring pat on the leg. “Look, they’re playing Emperor’s New Groove! Now this is the good stuff for seven-year-olds.”
Nick sighed dramatically, but returned to the same glassy-eyed stare willingly enough as Pacha and Kuzco fell over a huge waterfall.
Well, not exactly the reaction Glenn was hoping for, but he figured that Morgan should at least be satisfied they watched something age-appropriate when she got back from the store.
Though as the sky grew darker, the wind blew hard against the house. And Morgan never did come back.
*
Glenn had to put Nick to bed alone, his heart growing heavier and heavier every time his calls went to voice-mail. He got the call from the police at nearly midnight. Apparently it took a few hours for the cops to pull her body out of the car, run the plates and then call the number on file to come ID the corpse.
He twisted his wedding ring around his finger. Once. Twice. Three times. Four times. He lost count.
Morgan’s parents were out of the picture, and Glenn wasn’t about to call his own dad to watch Nick, so he had grit his teeth, made sure the doors were locked, and left the kid alone to sleep. He had thought about waking him, taking him with him but… looking at him there, in the second-hand twin bed his bandmate had given him with the Dollar-Store decal of Mickey Mouse stuck on the wall above him, Glenn couldn’t bare it. His heart was breaking, and he needed… he needed to make sure. No need to traumatize the kid if it wasn’t even Morgan, right? And if it was…
Nick deserved one more night without knowing. Glenn left. He went to the hospital. The police directed him to the morgue. They uncovered the body and he refused to look at her face, instead training his eyes on her ankle. The one with the Guns and Roses tattoo, the one she’s nearly broken Glenn’s fingers while she was getting it done. He had a matching one.
“It’s her,” he mumbled to his shoes. They covered the body again. There was talk of funeral arrangements, but Glenn didn’t see the point. He didn’t really have the money for much, even paying for cremation was going to be a huge hit to the savings account.
Eventually, Glenn would be given a small urn full of ash. He would put it in his bedroom. Sometimes he would think about good places to scatter them. Sometimes he would think of good songs to play while he did it.
He never scattered the ashes. He never took off his wedding ring.
*
As Glenn Close came home on the morning after the world ended, the last phone call still ringing in his ears, that tattoo still burning in the back of his eyelids, he found Nick staring at him wide-eyed from the kitchen table with toast in his mouth. He had brightened as soon as Glenn walked in the room.
“Hi dad! Where’s mom? Look, I made breakfast!”
“Y-yeah, good job kid, high five!” Glenn held up a hand his son didn’t hesitate to smack.
He had to tell him. He had to tell Nick what happened.
“Hey, uh, how about you sit down?”
Nick looked confused, but sat back down at the table. Glenn pulled out a chair and sat on it as well, legs spread, hands on his knees as he just looked at his son. His son who didn’t know. He was going to cry. Shit, this was going to wreck him.
He… damn it, the kid even made his own toast. Glenn opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again.
“Hey uh, you’re mom’s…” Glenn swallowed, “Your mom’s not… here so…”
A smile forced it’s way over his face. “How about you ditch school for the day, and we go to Disneyland?!”
“Yeah! School sucks!” Nick said joyfully, chubby cheeks grinning, tiny fists in the air.
“Damn right it does, up top!” Glenn grinned as Nick high fived him again.
Jesus Christ, he was going to Disneyland the day after his wife died?
No… no Morgan would’ve wanted that. She loved Disney. They both did. It was… it was a good way to remember her. He kept telling himself that.
*
By the time they got parked and through the security at the park gates, Nick was already complaining he was hungry again. Fair enough, toast wasn’t going to do much to keep him full, especially for all the sick rides they were gonna sneak his short ass on, heh.
“Alright, let’s head over to good ol’ Chef Mickey’s!” Glenn said, pushing Nick along and through the park. He knew the way to the restaurant by heart, it was one of the best and those in the know knew that if you wanted a picture with The Big Four, you were gonna get it easier and faster at Chef Mickey’s than anywhere else, and a table for two would get sat pretty quick, especially on a school day.
As Glenn looked at Nick happily chattering about school as he waited for his Mickey waffles (a classic, Glenn wouldn’t give him anything less), he started to feel better about his decision to wait to tell Nick about… about what had happened. Even the few minutes Glenn had spent in the house without Morgan had felt stale and lifeless, drawing cobwebs over her memory with every moment.
Here, he could pretend nothing had changed. He was just having a day out with his son. And look how happy he was! No one could be sad in the Happiest Place on Earth, right?
Sometimes, Glenn did not have good trains of thought, and sometimes he would follow them in directions no reasonable person would think to.
In a second, the pistons in Glenn’s brain were firing up as he suddenly saw Nick’s incoming adverse feelings as a problem to solve. Morgan was gone, and Glenn… it was bad. He didn’t like that. But he could… he could deal with it, as long as he made sure Nick could handle it. And obviously finding out your mom was dead was… that was bad too. Worse, maybe. Glenn had felt… when his mom had died he…
But, well, they were at Disneyland. No one was sad at Disney, right? No kids, anyway. Unless they dropped their ice cream or something, but then a cast member could give them another, no big deal! So, so okay, maybe Nick would still be pretty upset but, if Glenn told him now, he could spent the rest of the day showing him things would still be alright! Like, they could do Splash Mountain, and ride the teacups till they puked.
And also, that way he would have gotten the truth off his chest where it had been burning every moment since he’d bailed on telling Nick at the breakfast table and gotten in the car.
The waitress hadn’t come back with the Mickey waffles, but once Glenn made a decision there was no stopping it from tumbling out of his mouth.
“Hey Nick, uh, so I have something important to tell you, okay?”
“And then he said- yeah?” Nick stopped mid-sentence of the story Glenn hadn’t really been listening to, looking at his dad with wide eyes. That ACDC t-shirt looked so big on him. He looked so damn young. No, he still had to hear it, Glenn couldn’t keep up the lie. He just had to figure out how to phrase it. He was at Disney. If he couldn’t be a parent at Disney, where else could he do it?
He took a deep breath. “So… your mom. Uh. Nick, you and me, we’re pals, right?”
“Right!”
“And we’ll always be together, right?”
“Right!”
“But uh, but sometimes… look, okay, here’s the thing. I need to tell you something heavy. And I need you to be a bro for me, okay? This is gonna be… it’s gonna be rough for a bit, with us. But I want you to know that I’ll be around to hang out with when you need it, okay? And no matter what I say here, we’ll still eat some waffles, and ride some rides, and still have a good day. So really, everything’s gonna be alright no matter what, okay?”
Nick stared at him blankly, but Glenn decided to just assume the kid was following him.
“So your mom… well, uh, you know how she didn’t come home last night, right?” Nick nodded slowly, his nose wrinkling in concentration. Well, he had at least gotten that this was serious business anyway. “Well, yesterday when she was driving she uh, the weather was real bad, and the road was slippery, and her car uh, it flew off the road and it… it hit a telephone pole.”
Nick’s eyes widened. “Is mommy okay?” Glenn flinched. Nick rarely called Morgan ‘mommy’ these days, usually only when he was trying to weasel something out of her. Hearing it now was just…
“She uh… no. She-”
“Is she in the hospital? Like in the show you guys were watching? Is she in a comma?”
“In a wha-? Oh, coma. No she… no.” This was hard. Fuck, this was so hard. Morgan would have known what to do, but she wasn’t here, and she couldn’t help him with this and… no, no he wouldn’t cry. He was… this was fucking DISNEY he wasn’t gonna cry in front of his son at Disney just because… “Morgan… your mom died. She’s gone. She won’t- she can’t come home anymore.” He glanced at some wall décor and without thinking he added, “Like Mufasa.”
Glenn had never seen Nick crumple the way he did over the next minute. It started slow, his eyes flickering with the start of denial, but that faded fast. Glenn wouldn’t lie to him. He didn’t always say what he could, but he never lied to Nick. So once that possibility was taken and dismissed, the boy’s shoulder’s hunched inward and his head bowed. He started shaking, and it took a moment for Glenn to realise the low, throaty croaking was coming from the boy across from him as he began to sob in earnest. In that moment Glenn might’ve chalked every previous time he’d seen Nick cry up to crocodile tears in the face of this heart wrenching sound.
“Nick, buddy, I know. I know, but look, you’re gonna get waffles and-”
“I-I WANT MOM!” Nick screamed, looking up with his face awash in tears, snot dribbling from his nose. “I WANT TO GO HOME! I want mom, I want to go home, I don’t want to be here!”
Glenn waved away the frozen waitress who was standing by the table holding two breakfast plates. He tried to reach across the table to grab Nick’s shoulders but the kid squirmed back and away from him, hollering louder. He swore and glanced around them at the several diners that were looking his way. Hell, even fucking Donald Duck looked disappointed in him.
“Okay, you’re right, we’ll go. C-come on kid, we’ll go home.” Glenn had picked Nick up under the arms and practically dragged him out of the restaurant, ignoring the dirty looks. Nick hadn’t thrown a tantrum since he was three, but fuck it, he’d let him do it today. Glenn had fucked up. He should have told him the truth from the start. This was stupid. This was a fucking stupid idea.
So much for the Happiest Place on Earth. Maybe he’d leave Nick at home next time. Just ride Morgan’s favourite rides by himself. That might be easier on everyone.
On the drive home, things felt so silent and awkward Glenn could barely stand it. Nick had cried himself out, but he wouldn’t speak. He just stared out the window from his car seat in silence.
“Hey uh, how about I swing by Game Stop on the way back. You said you wanted the WiiU, right?”
Nick paused for a moment before finally glancing back in Glenn’s direction. “You said WiiU was a stupid add on to trick sheeple into buying the same system twice.”
“Yeah, uh, but it’s got some decent games, now! How about I buy you one and Smash Bros, and you can show me how to play, okay?”
There was a long silence, and Glenn was starting to think Nick wasn’t going to answer until finally, finally, there was a softly muttered, “Sure, dad.”
Well, chalk that up to another win for materialism.
“I promise Nick, things are going to be just fine. Even without… you know. I mean, we’ve still got each other, we’re still buds! We’ll hang out all the time now, I swear!”
Another silence stretched out and Glenn glanced back at his son again, but he was back to staring out the window with glazed eyes.