56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

32 Days Ago

After the warm glow of Sunday night, Monday feels like the cold, sharp shock of the real start.

Ciara opens her eyes to darkness but, after a few seconds, finds the weak gray light forcing its way around the edges of the window blind. Oliver is, as ever, turned away from her on the other side of the bed. He’s still deeply asleep, snoring lightly. Last night, she made sure to leave clothes folded on the floor right by what is apparently her side of the bed now: a pair of polka-dot pajama bottoms and an old, bleach-splatteredT-shirt that has been relegated to sleepwear. She picks them up and tiptoes out of the room, closing the door softly behind her, and pulls them on in the gloom of the living room.

The snazzy coffee machine is about as quiet as a tractor engine, so Ciara boils the kettle instead, flipping the switch to OFF before the bubbling and hissing really gets going, and stirs in a spoon of instant coffee granules swiped from their Doomsday Prepper stock.

She doesn’t really care what it tastes like; it’s mostly the smell she finds she needs in the morning.

The door that leads to the little railed-in terrace unlocks with a gentle click, but makes a louder whooshing noise when she slides it back. The table still has the checked tablecloth on it from last night and the lights are still twisted around the railing; she feels silly when she recalls her suspicions that he had something more sinister hidden in the backpack.

What did she seriously think was in there?

She pictures Oliver’s face just after the reveal, when he was apologizing for having to scavenge his romantic-meal materials from Tesco. The hint of heat on his cheeks, the nervous smile, the way he dips his head when he’s embarrassed so it’s as if he’s looking up at you, despite his height . . .

Ciara smiles at the memory.

She chooses the chair that gives her a better view of the courtyard and, around it, the other apartments, and holds her coffee with two hands.

The sky is growing brighter by the minute. It is striking how quiet it is. But it’s a disquiet. The city has been winding down for, what? Two weeks now? But over the weekend, it’s come to a stop. The absence of traffic noise—of engines and horns and tires on tarmac—is the biggest change, and the most disconcerting one of all. She is a ten-minute walk from the heart of the half of the city that sits on the south side of the river, and there is no sound at all save for distant birds and the rustle of a light breeze through the courtyard’s trees.

She thinks, I could be the last person on earth and not know it.

And then that she could be the last person on earth and no one would ever have even known she was here.

Movement.

Ciara sees the bright-pink thighs first and for a split second is confused about how the legs they belong to seem to disappear at the knee, but then she blinks and realizes what she’s looking at: not a woman levitating in the air but one wearing leggings that are gray from the knee down, doing yoga stretches on her balcony.

Oliver told her there’s a gym in the building, but it preemptively closed last week and now, under this de facto lockdown, it’ll have to stay that way for the foreseeable future. He’d said he was going to start running again; she’d said, “Off with you,” and told him about her rule of only running if she was being chased, if it was running away. She likes the idea of going for walks, though. It’s nice around here—it’s leafy, and there’s the canal—and some of the city is still within their two kilometers. It’ll be interesting to see it as it must be now, all emptied out. And walking will give her a chance to think.

She takes another sip of her coffee.

Yoga Woman is lunging now. She’s blond and lithe. Even from this distance—the woman is on the other side of the complex and one floor up—Ciara can see how the material clings to the woman’s skin and how that skin clings to her body. She supposes that’s why this woman has the confidence to do this on her balcony, to a potential audience of all her neighbors. She wonders if the woman wants people to watch, if it’s the yoga that makes this woman feel good in the mornings, or the attention.

As if she can hear Ciara’s thoughts, the woman straightens up, comes to the glass railing and rests her hands on top of it.

And turns her head to look directly Ciara’s way.

That’s what it feels like, anyway. It’s hard to tell from so far away and there’s the leaves of a courtyard tree equidistant between them, but Ciara feels her skin prickle with the sense of being watched.

She looks down into her coffee cup, exaggerating the movement, so the woman gets the message that she isn’t staring back at her.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

Ciara jumps at the sound of Oliver’s voice right behind her, inadvertently sloshing coffee over the rim of her cup and splashing a few drops onto her thighs. She turns to see him standing in the open door, holding two cups, one of them out to her.

“Give me that,” he says. “And take this.”

“What is it?”

“Coffee,” he says. “Which I know is not what you’re drinking, I saw the jar on the counter. That’s for, like, when we get to The Road stage of the apocalypse. No need to punish yourself with it until then.”

Ciara rolls her eyes good-naturedly, dutifully puts the cup she has down on the table and reaches for its replacement.

“Why didn’t you use the machine?”

“I forgot how,” she lies. She takes a sip of her new, proper coffee. It does taste better. That machine must be quieter than she thought.

“Thank you,” she says. “And good morning.”

“Good morning to you, too.” He steps outside now, bare feet on the cement, and bends down to kiss the top of her head. Then he sits into the other chair, a careful action designed to keep all his coffee in his cup. “So, do you always get up this early on a school day?”

“Is it early?”

“Just gone seven.”

“Well, then . . . yeah. I suppose. This is about my normal time.”

Oliver looks around the courtyard. “God,” he says, “it’s so quiet.”

“No traffic. I think that’s the big change today.”

“No anything. So—what’s the plan?”

“Well, I need to log into our system by nine,” Ciara says. “Do you mind if I take the spare bedroom after lunch? I have to take a couple of calls then, so . . .” Over the weekend, they dragged the dining table into the spare bedroom to serve as a desk. The deal is that one of them will take the makeshift office in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Whoever doesn’t have it gets to lie on the couch, use the coffee table, or sit at the breakfast bar—or even work from bed, if they like. “I’m just going to tackle emails this morning. I can do that from the couch.”

“Fine by me.”

“And I think I’ll go for a walk around noon. I might even try to do that every day and I’m telling you this so I actually do do it. Accountability, and all that jazz.”

“Then here’s what we’ll do,” Oliver says, leaning forward. “I’ll take the bedroom for the first half of the day, you have the couch. When you go for your walk, I’ll make lunch. Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll go for a run around five, and you can do dinner?”

She makes a face.

“Okay,” he says. “Start dinner. Like, preheat the oven.”

“I can do that. Although you might have to show me how to work the oven.”

“And then tonight, I thought we could start on From the Earth to the Moon?”

It’s some show about the moon landings he’s been on about.

She smiles. “Sounds like a plan.”

Oliver settles back into his chair, satisfied.

She’s noticed this about him: he needs a plan in place and will build it if there isn’t one already. He has to know what’s happening now and next and after that, and what’s happening has to have some kind of structure to it. She saw the logic in this for their empty Saturdays or lazy Sundays, but it seems like overkill for a weekday that’s mostly going to be spent on work.

Still, she supposes having some structure to their days in lockdown can’t be a bad thing.

Ciara risks a look at Yoga Woman’s balcony.

It’s empty.

She’s gone.

When Ciara reaches the end of Harcourt Street, she sees that the gates at the corner of Stephen’s Green are closed. She isn’t able to read the text on the neon-yellow signs cable-tied to the railings until she’s crossed the road and is standing in front of them, but the branding is familiar by now and she’s already guessed what they say: due to COVID-19, they’ve closed the park.

This doesn’t make any sense—it’s a park?—but there’s no one to complain to. She starts walking around the perimeter railing instead, catching glimpses here and there of the perfectly empty green, leafy spaces beyond. It looks peaceful but doesn’t sound it; there’s a cacophony of incessant squawking coming from inside. Apparently the seagulls that usually terrorize Grafton Street shoppers have already commandeered the park for themselves.

A Luas tram slinks past carrying just three passengers. Two uniformed Gardaí pass on bicycles, barely going faster than her own two feet, weaving figure eights on the road and chatting casually to each other like they’re out for a Sunday spin. She’s one of only a handful of pedestrians.

There’s also an ominous buzzing noise she can’t quite place—quiet at first, then steadily growing louder. She thinks an alarm has been set off somewhere until she sees the man standing twenty feet away, manipulating a set of handheld controls, looking upward. She follows his gaze and spies the drone, a tiny black object moving steadily across the midday sky, just above the rooftops, capturing bird’s-eye footage of a near-empty city.

Ciara had imagined getting a coffee and drinking it on a bench by the duck pond in the park, but now she sees how naive such a plan was: the park is locked and there is nowhere to get a coffee. Even the little convenience store at the top of Grafton Street, while still open as an essential business, has an Out of Order sign on its self-serve coffee machine.

She will have to think of something else to do each day, somewhere else to sit and think. Because she knows she needs it, the processing time. She’s not used to being with another person twenty-four hours a day, and everything has happened so fast.

Life has suddenly exploded on her, that’s what it feels like. She came to Dublin. She found Oliver. An unprecedented global emergency began. She and Oliver have moved in together.

And that’s just all in the last month.

Last night, after Oliver had fallen asleep and rolled away from her, she’d lain awake in the dark for a little while, unable to quiet her mind as her thoughts raced. It’s not that she doesn’t want to be where she is—on the contrary, she’s exactly where she wants to be. Things are working out for her here better than she’d even hoped—and quickly.

But the speed is the very problem. It feels as if some unseen force has a hold of both her elbows and is pulling her along, like those protestors you see on the news being dragged away—their toes barely touching the ground—by police in riot gear. It’s not that she’s being pulled toward a place she doesn’t want to go, it’s just that . . .

Everything is happening so, so fast.

She thinks if she can just have some time to herself, outside, each day, those hours will act as speed bumps and slow it all down.

Just enough to make her feel like she’s in control again.

For today, though, this will have to do.

Ciara does one loop around the railings of Stephen’s Green and then starts back toward the apartment.

She hears the voice before she’s even put her key in the front door.

It’s male and angry and has the amplified, disembodied quality of coming from a speaker. She can’t make out any words but she can instantly identify the emotion: frustration.

Anger, even. Maybe.

Ciara shakes the keys and closes the door behind her with a thump in an attempt to signal her presence, but the voice continues, uninterrupted.

Oliver must be on a video call in the spare bedroom, whose door she can see is standing open. He probably wasn’t expecting her back this soon. The other voice is older, and as she advances down the hall she hears it say, “I thought we’d agreed you wouldn’t hide things from me.”

She goes to the door of the room to pull it closed, to afford Oliver and this man some semblance of privacy. But Oliver is seemingly still unaware that she’s even come in. He’s sitting at their makeshift desk with his back to her. She can see that the screen of his laptop is filled with the face of a man with white-gray hair and a tanned, lined face, his webcam positioned at that awkward and always unflattering angle of just below the chin and straight up the nose.

The man is shaking his head as if in disbelief, and Oliver’s posture—shoulders slumped, head down—seems to be communicating some kind of shame or defeat.

“You can’t—” the man on-screen starts, then stops to frown at something over Oliver’s shoulder.

Her, Ciara realizes on a delay.

Oliver whips around, his face a question.

Sorry, she mouths at him, and swiftly pulls the door closed.

She doesn’t hear any more.

Oliver doesn’t come out for another fifteen minutes.

By then, Ciara has made an executive decision and started lunch, which, in keeping with her cooking ability, is chicken-and-cheese toasties ready to be shoved under the grill, served with the limp remains of a ready-made salad bowl that’s been sitting in the fridge since Friday. She has made an effort elsewhere, though, setting two places at the breakfast bar, complete with neatly folded squares of kitchen paper and glasses of iced water sitting on mismatched coasters she found in a drawer.

“Sorry about that,” Oliver says when he emerges. He looks sheepish.

“Is everything okay?”

“Not really, no.” He sees the layout on the breakfast bar. “What’s all this?”

“Day-one enthusiasm.”

He smiles weakly. “How long before we’re standing at the counter absently eating fistfuls of dry cornflakes straight from the box, do you think?”

“I’d guess Friday.”

She lifts the sandwiches onto a baking tray and slips them under the grill.

“How was your walk?”

“For some reason they’ve locked up Stephen’s Green, which is annoying.” She turns to face him, folds her arms. “What was all that about? Who was that guy?”

Oliver runs a hand through his hair.

“That was my boss,” he tells the kitchen floor. “And that was about . . .”

If Ciara had to guess what Oliver was about to say, it’d be something about a fuckup at work. He doesn’t talk much about it, but he has alluded once or twice to some big project near the Silicon Docks, which she thinks is all those modern glass buildings between the river and the entrance to the port tunnel where the more ostentatious American tech companies have their European HQs, all standing empty now because they’ve sent their thousands of workers home to work from there.

But what he says is, “Because of you.”

She can’t imagine what this means.

“Me?”

“Remember how I told you this place came with the job? Well, it’s employee accommodation. Not my own.” Slowly he raises his gaze, meets her eye. “So technically I’m the only one who’s supposed to be staying here.”

It takes her a beat to understand.

“And your boss just saw me,” she says, thinking aloud. “Here, during lockdown. So he knows I’m not just visiting.”

“He didn’t actually see you, but he knew someone was there. He asked and, well, I didn’t lie. I didn’t think I had to, but . . .” Oliver shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “He said that kind of thing wasn’t allowed, not even now. And then he made a point of telling me that this isn’t the only apartment the firm is renting in the complex. Turns out it’s one of two. And the other one has, apparently, one of the senior partners in it. And Kenneth made a point of telling me that wherever that one is, it has a view of my terrace. I’m so sorry, Ciara, but . . .”

She has two thoughts then.

The first is that he very rarely says her name and actually, come to think of it, how often does she say his? There’s something soothing about hearing it come out of his mouth, in his voice. It sends a bead of warmth rising up from deep within her chest.

Which is surprising.

The second is that she has to leave.

She has to leave.

And that thought floods her entire body with heat, the kind of heat that accompanies blind panic.

From somewhere behind her, a faint smell of bread burning begins to waft through the air.

“Should I go right now?” she says.

Oliver frowns.

“God, no. No. I didn’t mean . . .” He comes to her, takes both her hands in his. “You’re not going anywhere. They’re just being ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. All I’m saying is that I don’t think we can sit outside anymore, because whichever apartment that asshole is in, he has a clear view of our terrace. And I’ve told Kenneth you’ll go back to your own place today.”

“Oh.” Ciara’s shoulders drop, the tension dissipating, and now she’s embarrassed that she got it so wrong. She starts laughing. “Oh.”

Oliver laughs too. “You really went straight to doomsday scenario there, didn’t you?” He pulls her close, kisses her gently. “You’re not going anywhere. But youmight be about to set the fire alarm off.”

“Shit!”

The sandwiches are beyond saving, their tops burned to a crisp. Oliver thinks it’s hilarious and reminds her that he was supposed to make lunch today, and says that perhaps he should. After some half-hearted protesting, she lets him.

It’s only afterward, when she carries her laptop into the “office” for the afternoon stretch, that the thought occurs to her: the timeline doesn’t fit.

Oliver said that when she went to close the bedroom door, her boss saw that someone else was there and asked him if there was. That’s when the talk of employee accommodation and a senior partner in another apartment began.

But before Ciara had even advanced down the hall, before she’d got anywhere near the doorway, she’d heard the other man raise his voice.

I thought we’d agreed you wouldn’t hide things from me.

You can’t—

So what had that been about? What had Oliver been hiding from him?

And what was he hiding now, from her?