Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

It’s simple self-preservation.

She walks to the bathroom and hangs the dress from the door. She turns on the water in the tub, plugs the drain, watches the tub slowly fill up.

After a few minutes she slips out of her nightgown and steps into the water. She has about thirty minutes to soak before she needs to get ready for the funeral.

2

Barry parks a block from the house. He’s never before done what he’s about to do, but knows better than to park directly in front of the place he intends to burgle. Every neighborhood has at least one bored retiree more than happy to scribble down a license-plate number and call the police about this bald fellow seems to be snooping around and I don’t recognize him, and Barry would rather not get caught. It would almost certainly be the end of his career. He steps from his car and locks the door. He walks along the sidewalk toward the house. The sky is overcast today, gunmetal gray, and the air, while still warm, is beginning to cool. He expects rain is on the way, blowing in from somewhere, but it’s not here just yet. As he walks he listens to the hollow echo of his shoes against the pavement. It reminds him of his days in the army. The synchronized thudding of combat boots on hard-packed soil, the smell of well-oiled rifles, the sound of flags snapping in the wind.

The men didn’t respect him. Commissioned officers are often disliked by soldiers under their command, but this went beyond that. The men didn’t respect or like him personally. They wouldn’t willingly drink with him when the uniforms came off. He thinks now there was some reason for that. He was young and stupid and arrogant, an unpleasant combination. His father expected him to be a career military man as he had been, but instead he left after two years. He’d always loved the piano, had been getting lessons since he was ten, and thought he might have a career as a pianist, but in truth he wasn’t good enough. He could sit in a barroom and impress with clunky renditions of Chopin, but he simply didn’t have the skill to command a stage. Somehow life was missing from the music he clinked out. His fingers lacked grace. Fortunately, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office looked favorably upon his university education and his military record or he might be banging the ivories yet in some western bar with filthy spittoons on the floor. Or maybe not so fortunately. Right at this moment that life doesn’t sound so bad to him. Almost sounds romantic.

He’d at least be doing something he loved.

He arrives at the house, walks to the front door, knocks. Seymour told him the place would be empty, told him the occupants would be meeting with him fifteen miles away, but one must be cautious in moments like these.

No one answers his knock.

He turns away thinking he’ll walk around the house and find a window to crawl through, and wishing he hadn’t worn a suit for this job, but turns back only a moment later. He might as well try the knob. He has no hope for it, but should make sure before resorting to anything else.

He turns the knob and the door unlatches. He pushes and the door opens. He glances once over his shoulder and sees no one and nothing but empty street. He steps into the house and closes the door behind him.

He looks around the living room, a small room with white-painted pine floors. A couch sits in the middle of the room on a brown rug with tattered strings hanging from its edges. A small Philco television sits against the wall opposite the couch, an empty bottle of beer on top of it, resting directly in front of a coat-hanger antenna.

He walks deeper into the house, wondering where the compromising photographs might be hidden, still having no idea someone else is here with him.

3

Vivian stretches out her right leg, resting her foot on the protruding bathtub faucet, the dull gray metal hot against the arch of her foot. She soaps her leg up, covering it in a film of lavender-scented bubbles, and gets to work with one of Leland’s Gillette safety razors. She starts with her toes, scraping the small brown hairs from the knuckles, and then works her way up her leg, dragging the blade toward her knee, then over her knee and up her thigh. Occasionally she stops to rinse the blade in the tub, shaking it around in the water. Short nubs of hair, not much bigger than grains of sand, float on a scrim of soap which lines the water’s surface.

Her father forbade her to shave her legs while she lived under his roof, nor would he allow her to wear makeup. The only book he allowed in the house was a bible. This book contains everything worth knowing; you start lookin for answers outside the bible, what you’re really lookin for is trouble.

She went out and looked for trouble, anyway, and if she couldn’t do the things she wanted while living under his roof, she wouldn’t live there. She ran away at sixteen and never regretted it, not even during the hardest of times.

She pauses with the blade halfway up her leg, tilts her head to listen. She could have sworn she heard something, a knock at the front door maybe. All she hears now though is the water running.

She sets the razor down on the edge of the tub and turns the water off. Now all she hears is the drip. . drip. . drip of the faucet. If someone was at the door they must have left, for there isn’t a second knock. Not that she would answer the door if there were. She’s in the middle of a bath and isn’t about to run soaking wet to the front door just so she can tell a salesman she isn’t interested in his full set of stainless-steel cookware or his amazing bottle of stove cleaner, you’ll never have to scrub again.

She’s reaching forward to turn the water back on when she hears the floor creak.

Her first instinct is to call out to Leland, you home already? But she knows it isn’t him. He should just be arriving at his appointment. She sits perfectly still and listens. The floor creaks again. She gets to her feet, the splashing water sounding very loud in her ears, though she attempts silence. Water drips from her body. She steps from the tub, moving slowly. She dries herself with a towel.

Someone’s going through the dresser in the bedroom now. She can hear wood sliding against wood as drawers are opened and closed. She feels very naked. She walks to her nightgown and slips back into it. It clings to her still-damp body. The bathroom door is cracked. She walks to it and looks through the crack in the doorway. A man in a suit, a bald man in a suit, not your typical burglar, is digging through her dresser, pulling the clothes out and setting them aside before replacing them neatly. Her first thought is that he’s a pervert looking for panties to sniff while he plays with his thing, but that isn’t right. It isn’t panties he’s after. He’s searching for something else and isn’t finding it.

She turns back to the bathroom looking for a weapon of some kind. At first she sees nothing of use. A toothbrush. A tube of Pepsodent toothpaste. A yellow latex douche/ enema bag flung over the shower rod.

The shower rod.

She pulls it from the wall and walks once more toward the bathroom door. She pulls open the door and stands silently in the doorway a moment, watching the man now pulling open the bottom drawer of her dresser.

She opens her mouth but nothing comes out. She’s afraid to speak. Part of her thinks it might be best if she said nothing at all. She could step back into the bathroom and close the door, lock it, wait for him to leave. That might be the best thing to do. It might be the safest thing to do.

But she won’t simply allow this man to dig through her belongings. She can’t.

She grips the rod in her fists tightly, her knuckles going white. She swallows. Her hands feel cramped from the tension in them.