Apocalypse
Benjamin Safford

The first time the world was going to end, Evan thought it was an adventure. His mother pulled him and his sister Sarah out of school and within a week had sold the house and most of their possessions. When everything unnecessary was gone, his mother gave her tiny Toyota to a friend and they bought a big blue minivan, new with leather seats and a TV. They drove three days from Los Angeles to Wyoming. Evan was eight and Sarah was ten.
Evan remembered the wide, yellow plains and the sky. He remembered how the mountains looked blue against the thunder-clouds. He remembered the ugly Dairy Queens and Denny’s, where they ate hamburgers and french-fries and milkshakes for every meal—except for breakfast, because Motel Six had free continental breakfast: muffins and oranges. Sarah told him it was called continental because they were in the middle of the continent.
On the day the world was going to end, his mother took them to a lonely hill a few miles off the interstate. Evan and Sarah wanted to watch Aladdin in the minivan, but their mother made them come outside with their toys and books. Sarah suggested a safari, and they were warned half-heartedly not to wander too far. Just after noon, she called them back and they ate peanut-butter and banana sandwiches and Cheetos. They lay down under a tree, where in the heat of the afternoon sun Sarah and Evan fell asleep to the sound of their mother praying. When they woke up, the sun was low on the horizon and she was leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.

They arrived in a small town on the Puget Sound right outside of Seattle late in the afternoon four days later. His mother had grown up there in a large house on the water where her parents still lived. Evan watched from inside the minivan as she knocked on the door and then talked to his grandmother, who looked surprised and then relieved. His mother was crying and she hadn’t showered in days. Evan’s grandmother looked out at the minivan for a few moments before taking his mother inside.
His mother left them there the next morning and didn’t come back for six months.

The third time the world was going to end, Sarah stayed behind. They were living in Los Angeles, and she had a boyfriend and a job. She was seventeen, but Evan thought she might as well have been twenty five.
His mother announced one day after school that they would be leaving in two weeks because this time she was sure. “I know things haven’t always worked out like I said they would.” She paused to wait for Evan to protest or agree, but he said nothing. “When the government collapses, you’ll be glad you aren’t here in Los Angeles to be murdered.”
Evan nodded and went into his room to finish his homework.

When Sarah told her mother she wasn’t coming, she cried for a week and then kicked her out of the house. Sarah had already been planning to move in with her boyfriend. Her mother called her the next day meaning to apologize, but Sarah hung up after her mother said that Los Angeles would be consumed in fire and blood. In the end, there was nothing to be done, and they stopped trying.

Evan and Sarah said their goodbyes over chicken wings on Sarah’s lunch break.
“You don’t have to go with her, you know. You could stay with me and Paul.”
Evan shrugged. “School is boring, and I hate Paul.”
Sarah frowned.
“Besides, she’ll be lonely.”
Sarah nodded and bit into a chicken wing. They talked about Paul until Sarah had to go back to work.
“Call me when you get to Idaho or Alberta or wherever.”
“I will.”
“You’ll be back in a month or less, anyway.”
“Yeah.”
They hugged and Evan left.

The next day, Evan and his mother went east into the desert. She had planned ahead—she told him that she had known for a couple of months, this time—and had made reservations at the most isolated motel she could find in the state of New Mexico.
The car ride was long, but Evan loved the open sky during the day and the blackness of the desert nights. When they crossed the border from Arizona to New Mexico, Evan looked up from the back seat to see his mother crying as she sang along to a Hank Williams song that he didn’t recognize. He paused his iPod and stared out the window.
He couldn’t tell if his mother thought he believed her. He thought about how when he was eleven, she convinced him to warn his classmates to run away because China was going to bomb the West Coast. His math teacher sent him to the principal’s office after another boy gave him a black eye. They left town the next day.
When they arrived at their motel, Evan disabled the smoke detector as his mother set up a propane stove to cook pancakes and bacon. She let him have a beer, and he tried his best to be casual about it.
When they finished their meal, she turned on the radio and they sat listening to the first act of a broadcast version of Twelfth Night. His mother set down the scarf she was knitting. “So, how’s school going this semester?”
“Fine.”
“Oh, good. Is math still your favorite subject?”
“It never was.”
“Oh.” She picked up the scarf, inspecting the last row.
Later that night, after Evan had pretended to fall asleep, his mother quietly put on a jacket and slipped out into the night. He opened the curtains and watched her walk out to the parking lot. She took out a cigarette and looked up into the sky, her eyes full of tears. When she finished her cigarette, she lit another and lay down on the asphalt. Evan watched her for a few minutes and went back to bed.
When he woke up again just after midnight, she was sleeping and the curtains were closed.
The next morning, Evan sat by the too-green pool and began to work his way through a stack of paperback science fiction novels. His mother sat in the shade of the building, pausing her knitting every few minutes to check her watch. At two in the afternoon, seventeen minutes before the end of the world, she climbed up a wall onto the roof and stood with her arms stretched to the heavens. Evan put down his novel and watched her, waiting for the hotel manager to call the cops, but he didn’t even come out of the office.
At two thirty, she had come down from the roof and was already taking a sleeping pill in the motel room. Evan went to have lunch at Denny’s and by the time he came back, she was asleep. He turned down the air conditioner, and went back outside to call Sarah.

They lived with his grandparents again for a year. Evan took classes at the junior college instead of going back to high school and worked in his grandfather’s sporting goods store in the afternoons, stocking merchandise and setting up displays.

Evan called Sarah the day his mother decided she was ready to get back to work. Sarah was quiet for a moment—deciding whether to let him know how skeptical she felt, he thought—but finally asked, “Where are you guys going to live?”
“Jennifer and Trisha found us an apartment in their building.”
“Oh, good.” She paused again. “You know, Evan, if you wanted to stay with grandmom and pop, I’m sure they’d let you.”
“I know,” he said.
“I could even come visit you this summer, if you wanted-“
“No, it’s okay. I’m coming back.”
Sarah didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, I have to go pack. I’ll call you when we leave.”
“Okay. Be careful.”

Four months after they moved back to Los Angeles, his mother disappeared. Evan called the diner where she had been working as a cook, but they said she hadn’t been in for two weeks. He called everyone he could think of, but no one had seen her. On the second day, Sarah took a bus down from Reno, where she had moved with her girlfriend Rhonda two months earlier. They went together to the police station to file a missing persons report.

Three days after, the phone rang while Evan was searching through his mother’s room. Sarah was out checking the local hospitals again.
“Evan, it’s your mother.”
“Are you okay? Where are you?”
“What? Of course I’m okay. I’m in Montana with-” Evan hung up the phone.
When Sarah got home, they packed his clothes. The next day, Evan quit his job and left two months rent on the coffee table. They took the Greyhound back to Reno that night.

Evan was at work when his mother called and left a message.
“Evan? Evan? Hi, I hope you’re doing well. Did you get the card I sent you? And the fudge? I hope so. I miss you. Could you give me a call?”
Evan frowned, and dialed her number.
“Evan? Evan? Hi?”
“Hi Mom.”
“Oh, Evan! Hi. Happy birthday.”
“Thanks mom. How are you?”
“Oh. Oh, I’m fine, of course. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“Yeah.”
“Evan, I know that sometimes I might seem a bit...” She paused, waiting, but Evan was silent. “Anyway, it’s just that I was, uh, I need you to come here.”
Evan paused. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yes, I am.”
“Mom, I-”
“Please, Evan? I need you. Please.”

Evan got his shifts covered for the next few days, and drove down to Los Angeles. It was two in the morning when he arrived at his mother’s apartment building. He knocked on her door, and waited two minutes before trying the knob. The door was unlocked, and he let himself in.
“Mom? Mom? It’s Evan.”
Evan heard some muffled shuffling from behind the couch on the other side of the living room, and then his mother stood up from behind it. She was very thin. She had always been thin, but now she was all bone and skin. Her hair was wild, and she was dressed in a long red and white dress. She looked elemental. Regal.
“Mom, have you been eating?”
“Oh, Evan, I’m so glad you came!” She smiled broadly, and wrapped her arms around him and buried her face into his chest.
They sat on the couch and talked awkwardly. Evan thought that she was trying harder than usual to be interested, and he appreciated the effort.
“Evan.” She paused. “I know that I haven’t always been, um, I haven’t always been...” Her voice trembled and she looked into her lap. “I mean, I’m so worried about you and Sarah. I was so sure that you wouldn’t come, and that I would, um, that I would never see you again.” She looked up at him. “And I was hoping that maybe, even though I haven’t...I mean, I was hoping that, uh, that we could go for a drive.”
She asked him to drive to the beach. Their only hope, she said, was to wait there until sunrise, when they would be lifted up into sky. He drove slowly with the windows down, and they listened to her favorite album—a collection of Chopin’s nocturnes.
When they got to the beach, he parked the car on the street and they walked down past the lights of the parking lot and onto the sand. His mother stopped a few feet away from the surf and sat down. Evan sat down next to her, and pulled her towards him. She was shivering in the cold and crying. He held her like a fragile thing and wrapped her in his jacket. Eventually she grew still and fell asleep. Evan was afraid to move and wake her up, so he held her there until sunrise, listening to the waves.
When the sun rose behind him, it was a clear morning and he could see the fishing boats coming back to shore. Slowly, quietly, he lifted her and brought her to the car.

When she woke a few hours later, she was laying sideways on a row of chairs in the hospital waiting room.
“Evan where are we?”
“We’re at the hospital.”
“Are you sick?”
“No, Mom.”
She didn’t say anything else until he was sitting by her bed an hour later.
“Evan, will you come back?”
“Yes. I’ll be back tomorrow.”