The
Difference a Day Makes
They
just had to keep the secret another 24 hours, then it wouldn’t matter.
Maybe it didn’t matter now, maybe they were already dead. Maybe Marilyn
didn’t have a world to save. She definitely didn’t have much
else to do. She would try to keep it secret.
Zero hours,
zero minutes.
Marilyn was in the yard supervising Steve’s attempt to barbeque
and trying to be stealthy about it. Jan’s kids were chasing her
dog while she was on the phone with her lawyer. Jan did everything she
could to keep the kids out of that part of the divorce, but Malcolm was
making it so difficult. Marilyn and Steve felt a bit weird hearing such
intimate details of Jan’s trauma through it all, but they were helping
a friend. They liked to think that as they talked about divorce, it was
making their relationship stronger. A plane flew overhead.
Ten hours,
forty-three minutes.
The general had gone mad. He was ranting about his soldiers from when
they were in training, the ones Marilyn noticed outside the bunker with
their entrails acting as a fence. They wanted to be safe. Steve saw the
fence from afar and figured someone had to put it up. They should have
turned back when they saw what it was made from but they were so desperate
for some sort of haven. Even now, a pistol in her face, Marilyn still
prayed for some way for them to stay. When had everything gone so wrong?
Zero hours,
fifty-eight minutes.
She could almost see them. Joe lying on the front porch bench, his chest
blown out by something. The dog’s head bashed in. Little Jakey killed
in mid jump while practicing to be the next Kobe. Steve grabbed Marilyn
by the arm and made to leave, but Jan was still alive, she said. Jan hadn’t
wiped her children’s blood from her face yet. It’d been almost
an hour since it happened and she hadn’t moved. Jan was still alive,
she said. Steve couldn’t be so sure.
Twenty hours,
sixteen minutes.
If they weren’t dead, Steve certainly was. She’d seen him
fall. It wasn’t a lethal blow or anything dramatic, somebody just
nudged him. One tiny moment was all he took to make the jump to the window-cleaner’s
lift, and everything was fine. One little nudge and he fell the other
56 stories. People noticed then, when someone else screamed. Marilyn had
run out of screams so long ago. They noticed halfway through the fall
and didn’t know he was pushed. She saw him fall from the start of
the nudge to the end of the spatter. He fell forever. He died in the blink
of an eye.
Nineteen
hours, thirty-six minutes.
They knew now. They were the where of it, the when, but now they knew
the who, what, and why. None of it would matter until someone told the
world, Steve told her. None of it would matter unless she escaped, and
the only way that could happen was if he kept the rest busy. Marilyn had
almost given themselves up for dead by that point, but the hope of payback
was enough for her to listen. She knew they’d die anyway, she always
knew that, but she used to say that thinking forty years ahead. They were
supposed to be shitting themselves to amuse each other by the time death
was so close. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When she exited
the building, she lost herself in the crowd of people carrying on like
it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Twenty-four
hours.
She and the child held each other. They didn’t know what to do or
where to go. They couldn’t stand each other’s company for
one more second, but they would for 24 hours.
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