"Oh." Todd took a bite, grimacing at the thin milk. "I probably won't."
Alan joined him with a bowl of his own. Todd was unusually quiet for breakfast. Normally Brenda had to tell him to stop talking and finish eating so he could catch his school bus on time. Alan supposed that since neither Brenda nor Allie were here, there really wasn't much to say. Todd didn't talk to him like he talked to them.
The boy stopped eating and looked at him. "What if we never find Mommy and Allie?"
Alan had just taken in a mouthful of cereal, of course. He held up a finger as he crunched through it. It bought him a minute to think, but it also exposed him to the dangerous gleam of his son's eyes. They were earnest. Desperate. Whatever Todd needed, Alan didn't have it.
"What do you mean?" he finally said.
"Well... I've been looking everywhere we go, and they're just gone." He furrowed his brow, concentrating. "It's like their bodies are gone. And I think... I mean, I wonder if..." He chewed his lip. "You can't live without your body."
"Yeah." It was a heavy word. "I've been thinking about that, too." Alan's instinct was to withdraw from the question. It was too big; it would be too easy to screw it up. But he also wanted to talk about it, to air some of the ideas that had been running through his head.
You don't owe him anything, Alan's dad said, and that's what decided him. He went on. "But what happened was so weird. Really powerful. Maybe whatever did it, if it was that powerful, maybe it didn't have to kill them. Maybe it, like... teleported them, or something."
"Teleported them where?"
To the mother ship, he mused, or to the middle of space. He thought of the blue star, but didn't mention it. "I don't know." The boy was already scared; he had horrible ideas enough without listening to his father's.
"Maybe it teleported them to a big building somewhere," Todd said, "like a jail, and they're all there, and we can find them."
"Maybe," Alan said. If that were true, if there were survivors, they should be looking for them. Right? If every human being on Earth—
Not the whole Earth, it couldn't have hit the whole planet
—were holed up in one giant building somewhere, it had to be possible to find it. Maybe even save them.
But if it weren't true, the search would be fruitless. Travel was dangerous; they'd seen enough wildfires and twisted metal to know that. The idea of roaming aimlessly, searching for something that wasn't even there, left a hollow in his chest.
And even if that is what happened, and we did find them, then what? We're still talking about a force stronger than the combined total of every defense the entire human species had. It would see us and just throw us in with the others. Again, he couldn't say it. Why had he started talking about this in the first place?
"But I still don't think that's it," Todd said.
"Why not?"
"Because if I was a monster, I wouldn't want to capture all the people. I'd want to get rid of them, so they couldn't hurt me or fight me."
"You think a monster did it?"
"Yeah." That musing look had gone out of his eye; now he looked scared. "I do."
It was the part where Alan was supposed to reassure him that there were no monsters, that there was a rational explanation for everything, that he didn't have to worry.
Either way, he realized, teleported or killed, we're still alone. It slammed into him like a wrecking ball. Brenda wasn't on a business trip. Allie wasn't at Grandma's. It almost didn't matter what had happened to them. They were gone, and they weren't coming back. It was time to face it.
"I miss them," Todd said. "I don't... I don't think we're gonna find them."
"No." The word was horrible, malignant. "We're not."
"I wish this never happened."
"Yeah." He couldn't protect his son from this. He couldn't bring anyone back. All he had was himself. He scooted his chair closer, put an awkward arm around his son's shoulders.
Todd was staring out the window, at the empty street. "Allie would've really liked Pinky Wing. I know she would've."
"Is that the pony we got yesterday?"
He nodded.
"You're right. I think she would've loved it." He took a deep breath, screwing up his courage for what he had to say next. "I think maybe we should have a funeral for Mom and Allie." The words burned on his tongue. They awoke some kind of violent, thrashing denial deep in his skull. No! it screamed, whining like a tantrum. No! No! NO!
"What's that?"
Alan blinked. "What's... a funeral?"
"Yeah. It's like a birthday party, kind of?"
"No." Ah, gods. "No, it's—"
"I mean not exactly a birthday party."
His son's naiveté wrung him like a rag. "It's when you bury someone you've lost, and talk about how much you loved them, and try to..." Let them go. He couldn't say it. "Try to figure out how to deal with it. You celebrate the person, talk about your favorite things about them. Sometimes people play music or sing songs." Belatedly, he added, "We can do that if you want."
"But we can't bury them. They're gone."
"That's okay. You can have a funeral even without the body of the person. People do it all the time. And we don't have—" Their bodies. Again, he couldn't say the words. "I mean, they disappeared, but we have the clothes they were wearing. We could bury those." Part of him stood apart, aghast at his words, frozen with disbelief. What are you doing? it wanted to know. Are you giving up that easily? Just giving up?
But it had been three days, and they weren't coming back. No one was.
This was the right thing to do. Wasn't it?
"Okay," Todd said.
30
The shovel was too big for him, but Todd was dogged anyway, his face serious and his eyes grim. Alan had never seen him work so hard at anything. He was proud of him for coming to the backyard with him, for facing this.
Alan had never felt comfortable at funerals. He'd never known what to say or how to act, even when he'd been a believer. After his religion had dropped away, it had gotten even worse. Todd would be looking to him for answers today, and Alan didn't have them.
The digging gave him something to focus on: real, hard labor. Each thrust of the shovel was a statement, a declaration of love for his wife and daughter. He might have been middle-aged and fat and weak, but he would do this for them.
The end of the world wouldn't seem so bad if they were here. It was a dangerous fantasy, the kind of dream he wouldn't want to wake from, but he indulged it anyway. Yes, if the whole family had been spared, it still would've been terrible. The stuff of nightmares. But he would've had Brenda to talk to. They could've decided on a plan together. Todd would have had Allie.
They had always fought to make their home a refuge: a place safe from the world's madness, from its bullying fathers. They would still have had that. So what if the world outside disappeared? They'd spent half their time trying to ignore it anyway.
What's the difference between four people and two? he demanded of whatever blind fate had made the choice. You couldn't have just left those two more?
Even in his blackest depressions he had always been fiercely grateful for his family. Allie had brought joy to every room she entered; Brenda had been sharp and competent and beautiful.
The thought of Brenda arrested him. Sure, they'd fought. She'd handled family life with such easy competence that he'd felt inadequate, even threatened sometimes. But she'd made him aspire. She'd shown him that he could do better for his kids than his father had done for him. She'd believed in him.
He glanced at Todd and saw tears streaking the grime on his cheeks. Alan's heart lurched, throbbing with grief but suddenly burning with gratitude, too. I still have him. It could be worse. That was another old mantra he told himself when fighting to keep his head up, and even here, even now, things could be worse. He didn't know why or how, didn't know what cosmic accident had kept them together, but it had. They'd gotten lucky.
"Okay." He tried to keep his voice
level and blew it. He took a shaky breath and tried again. "I think that's enough."
Todd nodded and sniffed—not crying, but not fighting the tears, either. Alan wanted to say something profound to start their little ceremony, wanted to lift the clothes and perform some kind of ritual, but he had nothing. This was where religion might have helped. Death was such an awful emptiness that no words could stand up to it—it was as sprawling and impossible as the gaps between the stars—but religion at least provided a way to kill the time. Some traditions to lean on as you trudged through your grief, even if they were empty.
He picked up the clothes—flaking apart in the breeze, brittle as dry film—and laid them in the holes.
"We're here to remember Mommy and Allie," he said, because he had to say something. "I met your mom at work, when we were both working at Target a long time ago. I thought she was beautiful and smart, and she thought I was funny."
The words dried up as a memory of her laugh gripped him. His humor had always been dry and self-deprecating, and it had clicked with her. There was something divine, something powerful, in making the woman he loved laugh.
The moment he fell in love with her, she'd been laughing.
"We spent five of the best years of our lives together, and then—"
Memories detonated in his head like landmines: Todd's first cry, Brenda breastfeeding, the weight of the child in his arms and the answering burden on his heart. Love so strong that he thought it would break him, and that horrible, automatic disdain that answered it, a gift from his own dad from which he'd never break free.
Don't coddle him, Alan's dad had instructed when he'd seen Todd for the first time. He'll turn out like you. The boy had been two months old.
Alan fought for control of his voice, wrestled down his emotions so he could keep talking. "And then it got even better, because we had you."
Confusion and astonishment warred on Todd's face. Was it really so strange for him to hear that Alan loved him? Had Alan really fucked it up that badly?
He pulled Todd to him, hugging his son in defiance of everything he'd learned growing up. Todd hugged him back awkwardly, his wiry frame hitching with little sobs. "You were everything we'd hoped for," Alan whispered. "Smart and funny, and... handsome and... and healthy. Your mom loved you, Todd, gods, she loved you so much."
He wiped his eyes and let his son go. Hoarsely, he finished: "She was everything to me, I loved her with everything I had, and I can't imagine life without her. It's like... it's like getting cut in half. And I know I can never replace her for you. I know she was better than me. I know you miss her." He started nodding, his chin agreeing so hard with the words that it began vibrating of its own accord. "But I'm gonna do my best, okay? I know you're probably scared, because she kept me straight, but I—I'm gonna do my best."
He looked at the hole with her clothes in it. "I love you, Brenda. I'm going to miss you really, really bad." It was completely inadequate; she deserved better. But his eulogy had left him drained. There was nothing left.
He wiped his eyes and looked at his son. "Do you want to say something about Mommy?"
Todd stared at the ground, his hands playing with a clump of dirt. Finally he nodded. His face was all twisted up, flashing from grimace to grimace. "I love you, Mommy." He looked at Alan. "Do you think she can hear me?"
No, Alan thought at once, but didn't say it. "I don't know, but I figured... you know, I'd talk to her anyway. Because maybe she can. Maybe she's listening right now, somehow."
"Okay," Todd said. "Well..." He stared at the hole, thunderclouds of anguish flickering behind his eyes. "Goodbye."
It might've been funny in any other context, but here it just spoke to the simplicity of children: their uncanny power to cut straight to the heart of anything.
"Do you want to say something to Allie?"
Todd nodded, shifting so he could look at the little green dress in the second hole. "You were the best sister ever," he said. "I'm—well—I'm sorry I didn't let you play Mario that one time. I should have let you play it. If you were here right now I would let you play it." He looked at Alan. "I would give up Mario forever if she... if it could..."
Alan put a hand on his shoulder. "Yeah. I know."
Todd looked away, shaking, so Alan took over.
"Allie, if you can hear me, Daddy loves you. I will always love you. You were my special light. It was like nothing—" He choked. Struggled to fight past it.
Allie was always smiling. He used to think she was just oblivious to the deeper tensions in the house, mostly caused by Alan himself, but as time went on he'd realized that wasn't it at all. She'd known. Even at six years old, she'd known—she'd just been unwilling to accept it. She was always trying to cheer everyone up, even him.
She deserved this.
"It was like nothing could bring you down," he finished in a hoarse whisper. "You made everything so wonderful."
It was far less than either of them deserved, but it was what they had. Alan forced himself to give Todd another hug. As he did, his eyes strayed into the neighbor's empty backyard, and across it to the next, and the one beyond.
We are two people, he thought, alone on the planet, talking to ourselves.
Then they started filling the holes.
31
After other funerals Alan had attended, there had been food or music. Social interaction. There was no one left to socialize with, but the gas station had pop and candy bars. It was a small thing, but they could have it.
As they walked, Todd said, "I'm scared of death," and Alan nodded. He'd known this was coming.
Growing up, if he'd admitted something like that, his father would have browbeaten him until Alan either admitted that the idea of Heaven made everything better, or became sufficiently convinced that he was a sissy. Carefully, again using his own father's examples as a signpost of what to avoid, he said, "Me, too. What scares you about it?"
"Because you can't get away from it. No one can. And then when it happens you don't have your friends anymore, or any of your stuff. You don't even have yourself any more. It's like you don't have anything."
"Yeah." When Alan had drifted away from religion, he'd spent years trying to make sense of death. If he wasn't careful, it still had the power to suck him into the trap of thinking that nothing was worthwhile, because everything ended. When he was having an episode, it was a common theme.
It killed him to hear Todd wrestling with it.
The boy's birth had brought hope and light into Alan's life. It had seemed like a new chance to get everything right, to rewrite the mistakes made by his own parents. His love for his son had been so overpowering that he'd felt certain it would be enough.
Then Todd had gotten older. He'd get hyper, or loud, and Alan had heard himself snapping at him—not just every now and then, not just when he couldn't take it anymore, but automatically. It was his go-to response, his normal way of interacting with his own son: to tear him down, to rip him apart. He didn't choose it. It just happened.
He and Brenda had fought about it. She had threatened to leave him over it, which had enraged him, but also made him realize how seriously she viewed it. Instead of screwing Todd up or losing his wife, he had pulled back. Kept the boy at arm's length, for years.
And now Todd was scared of death. That innocence that had held such promise when Todd was a baby had almost completely vanished. Alan didn't begrudge his son for this—it was part of being human—but it tore at him all the same. It was hard, watching one of the only things he'd ever thought was pure slip away.
"Mommy said nothing ever ends," Todd went on. He was talking about the law of conservation of energy: Alan and Brenda's secular stand-in for an afterlife. "But it's not true."
"Well..." Alan's tongue was a knot. He'd talked about it with Allie, once, but this was still a conversation he'd have handed over to Brenda in a heartbeat. "Sure it's true."
"No it's not. Mommy and Allie ended. Grandma ended."
"Yeah
. They did. But there's more to everything than what we can see with our eyes. You know that, right?"
"Yeah." He sounded like he didn't know that at all.
"Like... me. When you look at me, you see your dad, right?"
"Yeah."
"But you don't see what I'm thinking. You don't see all the little cells in my body. You don't see my stomach digesting my breakfast, but that's all there, all happening."
"Okay."
"You also don't see all the energy that makes me up, but it's there. They've been able to prove it. Like, if you put a chair in a room and sealed the room all up, and then vaporized the chair." He winced inwardly; bad analogy, maybe. Or maybe the best analogy. "The chair disappears, but there are changes in the room. There might be some water left behind, and some gas. The temperature will go up because of all the energy that gets released. And even the water and the gas... when you look at those things really, really close you see that they're made up of energy. That's all anything is, really, is energy. Even your skin and bones—even the concrete."
Todd wasn't buying any of it. He was reaching for a father; Alan was giving him a scholar. "I know it's weird," Alan conceded.
But at the same time, Todd did seem to understand. He just didn't see why it mattered.
"My point is just that maybe getting turned back into energy is not so bad. We're all energy to start with, just in a particular form. I'm energy and you're energy, and Mommy and Allie are energy, too."
"So they're still here, kind of?"
"Yeah, I would say so." The thought was actually comforting, a little.
"But do they still... do they know that they're them?"
"Well..." No. How could they? "I don't know, man. I'd like to say yes. It would be nice to think so. But I just don't know for sure. No one does."
Todd chewed on this before going on. "Danny at school told me we're gonna go to Heaven when we die because we don't go to church."
"He said... Heaven? Or did he say Hell?"
"Oh. Maybe it was Hell." He shook his head. "I get them confused."
"Yeah." Alan felt a little wash of relief at hearing this. Both concepts had brought him constant strife when he'd been young. It was nice to know that he'd managed, at least, to spare his children the same. "Do you know what Heaven and Hell are supposed to be?"
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