56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
35 Days Ago
Fresh out of the shower, Oliver sits on the couch in a towel to watch the Taoiseach’s speech live.
With effect from midnight tonight, Leo’s steady, even voice blares from the TV—probably from all the TVs, everywhere, throughout the country, for a two-week period until Easter Sunday, April 12, everybody must stay at home in all circumstances except for the following situations: To travel to and from work, for the purposes of work, only where the work is an essential health, social care, or other essential service that cannot be done from home. To shop for food or household goods, or to collect a meal. To attend medical appointments or to collect medicines and other health products. For vital family reasons such as providing care to children, elderly, or vulnerable people. To take brief, individual exercise within two kilometers of your home. All public and private gatherings of any number of people, outside a single household or living unit, are prohibited. All public transport will be restricted to essential workers. Outside of the activities I’ve listed, there should be no travel outside of a two-kilometer radius of your home for any reason.
The Taoiseach doesn’t use the word lockdown, but it’s clear that that’s exactly what it is. Basically: everyone has to stay at home for the next two weeks.
In their own home.
They can’t meet anyone, indoors or out, who doesn’t live with them.
Oliver stares at the TV screen, shaking his head in disbelief.
This is so perfect for him, it’s bordering on ridiculous. If he had had the opportunity to design a set of circumstances, he couldn’t have come up with anything better than this.
He’ll ask Ciara to move in with him.
Or to come stay with him for the next couple of weeks. Let’s put it like that, he tells himself, so as not to scare her off.
According to the rules, that’s the only way they’ll be able to keep seeing each other. If they remain as they are now, living separately as two individual households, they won’t be able to see each other at all.
It’s unclear to him if this is a legal stance or just advice, but Oliver has no intention of breaking any rules. He wouldn’t do anything that would prompt a member of An Garda Síochána to so much as look his way, but there are other, worse punishments. He’s already seen plenty of pictures and videos shared online of people who other people suspected of contravening restrictions, and in many of them the people were clearly identifiable. He can’t risk that.
He’ll tell her he can’t risk it because of his—nonexistent—asthma; that the rules are there for a reason and he wants to abide by them.
He doesn’t know why she’d say no when she’s effectively living in his apartment anyway; she only goes back to her place to work. He hasn’t been there yet, but he’s going tonight. Based on what she’s told him about it and what he found when he googled current rental listings for the complex, his place is twice the size—and he doesn’t think she has any balcony or private outside space.
Unless, of course, she doesn’t want to come stay with him. There’s always the possibility that he’s read her all wrong, that whatever he thinks is happening here actually isn’t, that she doesn’t feel at all the way her actions imply she does.
But he doubts it.
So theoretically, for the next two weeks, they could be together all the time.
Alonetogether.
Not seeing anyone else. No colleagues, no friends, no family. Because they can’t see any of them. He’s felt relatively safe since she’s just moved to Dublin and, as she’d said herself, didn’t even get a chance to get to know any of her coworkers before they were all told to go and work from home, but this would be an entirely different level of security.
Not only can she not introduce him to anybody, but she can’t expect him to introduce her to anybody either. It won’t be at all suspicious that she’s not meeting his friends, or colleagues, or family, or anyone else who knows him.
And he’s already established that she doesn’t use social media, so there’s no threat of her Geotagging pictures taken in his apartment or anything like that.
Maybe there’s even an opportunity here to encourage her not to tell anyone about this, to keep it a secret. Because it’s a bit crazy to move in with a guy you’ve only just met, isn’t it?
And, really, she’s just coming to stay for a couple of weeks, to ride out the lockdown. No need to say anything to anybody, when you think about it.
This could be his chance. The one he’s been waiting for.
We are not prisoners of fate, Varadkar booms from the TV screen. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
He thinks the leader of the country might have just quoted a line from the Terminator movies while announcing grave new measures needed to stop the spread of a deadly virus—is that wise?—but that aside, Oliver finds himself agreeing with this sentiment for the first time in his entire life.
He might not have to be a prisoner of his fate anymore. A global emergency might just be about to release him from it.
What happens next is up to each and every one of us.
Two weeks, Oliver thinks. If he can convince Ciara that this is a good idea, he has two whole weeks.
When no one else can contradict anything he says.
When he can be with her all the time and be anyone he wants to be while he does it. Be the man she wants to be with, the Oliver she thinks she knows.
He can become him, fully, finally, and leave all his other selves—with their other names, their dark mistakes—far, far behind.