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The day that Morgan Grimes’ father left and never came back wasn’t a particularly significant one. Well, except for that.
It wasn’t a holiday, nor was it particularly cold or rainy. The air was calm with only a slight breeze, and easy clouds strewn across the sky far enough apart they didn’t obscure the sun. There was no rain, no crack of lightning breaking through a tense silence, no drama. It was a normal day.
Morgan told himself that perhaps if he had been home, he could have stopped his father at the door. Something more than Morgan carries the knowledge that such a scenario would be both unlikely and worse.
Regardless of anything that would become of that day, Morgan left his house. He left his house to go spend another day with Chuck. A weekend that would so easily be consumed by the silence left behind by Mary Bartowski. Morgan had held Chuck as he wept, but now he simply played video games and raised his voice to fill the void. As if he could be funny enough that the laughter and shouts could entirely replace the warmth of a mother. It couldn’t, but it helped, at least.
On the day that Morgan Grimes’ father left and never came back, Morgan spent the day at Chuck’s house. They played games—some of which Ellie also joined in on even if only a spectator—and ate junk food.
Mom would never let us drink this much soda Chuck had said, an almost empty 2-liter bottle sitting on the table punctuating it. Morgan had quickly responded by pouring the last crumbs from a bag of pretzels into his mouth and feigning shock and nausea at the sudden onslaught of salt. It made Chuck laugh, at least, believing Morgan hadn’t meant to do that.
Chuck didn’t comment about his mother the rest of the day. Morgan considered that a win.
On the day that Morgan Grimes’ father left and never came back, Morgan put on a backpack that was already too heavy for a child, and waved to Chuck as he walked down the driveway. It was a walk just a little longer than he liked to go on foot, but he still did it every day. With his hands gripping the straps on his shoulders, he put one foot in front of the other until they ached all the way up his calves, and then did it a few more times.
And it wasn’t raining. It wasn’t even cold. It was moderate. He didn’t sweat, but he didn’t shiver. He simply tilted his head back and enjoyed the cool air that softly went through the strands of his hair. Morgan’s mother had told him to get a haircut, but he enjoyed the feelings that came with hair his length. Just long enough to be blown in the breeze.
The sun made his arms feel warm as it burned on and on. It wasn’t uncomfortable, it just was.
On the day that Morgan Grimes’ father left and never came back, Morgan came home to an unlocked front door, and the acute awareness that the car was gone. He assured himself that someone was just out, but even then he knew that his parents should’ve both been home that hour.
He stepped into his house, the air feeling stiff and warmer than the freeing atmosphere outside, but Morgan still shut the door behind him. Shoes toed off, he crept on the balls of his feet, looking around. The TV wasn’t on. His father wasn’t watching it. And his mother wasn’t putting dishes on the table.
Nobody was yelling at Morgan for infractions of doubtful truth, and that felt the loudest. The house hummed its deafening silence, and Morgan felt the uneasy urge to cover his ears. It felt like foam had filled his mouth, fine and white and acrid in its taste. But there was nothing there.
Into his room, Morgan awaited the sudden snap back to reality, when his parents realized he had finally made his way back home, and his father had to shout at him while his mother watched on with an odd mixture of disappointment and sorrow that he never could decipher.
It never came. Things stayed so strangely askew. But only to Morgan.
Backpack deposited on the floor with a silent thud, Morgan couldn’t take the way static clung to the hairs on his arms. So, with footsteps that had long since been trained into silence, Morgan walked across the house along the walls, one hand never leaving contact with it, dragging along the cool drywall.
“Mom?” He had called into his parent’s room, creaking the door open on its aging hinges.
His mother turned from where she sat on the loveseat, locking eyes with him. For a long moment, it was disgustingly silent. Then, she parted her lips to let the sludge spill out and pool on the ceiling. “Hi, Morgan. Did you have fun at Chuck’s house?”
“What’s going on?” He spoke out of turn, too unnerved to fear the consequences. Still, he found that he couldn’t articulate anything beyond that.
Bolonia Grimes simply stared at him, expression static. “Dad’s left. There’s leftovers in the fridge.”
That was all there was.
On the day that Morgan Grimes' father left and never came back, it was reduced to a two-word mention alongside the discussion of dinner. So casual that Morgan didn’t fully grasp the meaning. Dad’s left. When would he be back? Where did he go? Did he go on another business trip?
None of those questions were answered, but Morgan would figure it out. He wasn’t stupid. After several hours of sitting alone in his room staring up at the ceiling, he could do the math.
On the day Morgan Grimes’ dad left and never came back, Morgan thought about calling chuck. The phone was in his hand, the plastic feeling cold even as it warmed from his hesitance.
On the day Morgan Grimes’ dad left and never came back, Morgan remembered how Chuck was smiling when Morgan left his place. He had done his job—made Chuck happy.
Morgan put the phone down not long after that.
He put on a heavy set of headphones and laid on his back, eyes half lidded as he found himself suddenly too tired to be awake but far too awake to sleep. The world turned a lot slower for a while, music surrounding and swallowing him up into something warm and invisible.
The days seemed slower, too. It made sense, he had thought at the time, that time was slower. Morgan felt that growing anticipation swell inside of him, anxiety pulsating in his brain as he waited for someone to come ranting and shrieking into his room. Maybe rip his headphones off his head, prove that Morgan wasn’t as indestructible as he tried to look.
In the days after Morgan Grimes’ dad left and never came back, he wished he was indestructible like that. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t indestructible, and he wasn’t happy. The phone rang a few times, crying out for attention that Morgan found himself unable to give. Happy people didn’t do that.
Morgan knew he was being fundamentally wrong, but he found he could do nothing about it. His mother called out that it was time for school one day. Morgan didn’t leave his room.
Part of him wanted Chuck—like Chuck would repay everything he did in the wake of Mary’s sudden vanishing unto Morgan. But it wasn’t fair. Morgan couldn’t do that. He was supposed to be the fun one—the always-doing-okay one. The happy one.
The happy ones were better than Morgan. They didn’t stay home from school and sleep entire days away. They didn’t desperately ignore the phone that was bleeding by counting the cracks in the ceiling.
Morgan wanted to be like that. Maybe he wouldn’t have to sit alone and know that his solitude was his own doing. Maybe then he’d have someone else who also knew there were 17 cracks in his ceiling.
But he couldn’t be that, and he wasn’t.
So, four days after the day that Morgan Grimes’ father left and never came back, Morgan went to school, smiling and saying he’d gotten a stomach bug as an explanation for his absence. And an indeterminate number of days later—they all really started to blend together for a few months there—Morgan would mention that his parents had decided to split. Chuck tried to comfort him, but he brushed it off. He didn’t need it.
The day that Morgan Grimes’ father left and never came back was an ordinary one, with nothing to truly distinguish it from the days before and after. It was simply a day placed between yesterday and tomorrow.
And on the day that Morgan Grimes’ father left and never came back, he had packed up some part of Morgan into a suitcase, or maybe a duffel bag, and took it with him. Wherever it was he went.