56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

56 Days Ago

“Go ahead,” are the first words he ever says to her.

They are both on the cusp of joining the line for the self-service checkouts in Tesco. It’s Friday lunchtime and her fifth time this week coming in for yet another unimaginative meal deal: a colorless sandwich, a plastic bag of apple slices, and a bottle of water, which she’s just noticed is the type with the sickly-sweet fruit flavor added. This realization has stopped her in her tracks, paused by a stack of Easter eggs (Easter? Already?), and wondering if she can be bothered to go back and change it when she almost certainly won’t drink it anyway.

That’s when she looks up and sees him, politely waiting for her to make her move, leaving a space for her to join the line ahead of him.

He’s taller than her by some margin. Looks about the same age. Neither muscular nor soft, but solid. His dark hair is thick and messy, but she has no doubt it took forever to pomade into submission, to perfect. He wears a blue suit with a navy tie and a light-blue shirt underneath, but the sleeves of the jacket are creased with strain, the shoulders bunched, and the back of the tie hangs longer than the front. The top button of his shirt is open, the collar slightly askew, the tie pulled off-center. He looks a little red in the face, his cheeks pink above patchy stubble.

And he’s so attractive that she knows instantly the world he lives in is not the same one in which she does, that he can’t possibly experience it the same way. A face like that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of preapproval. But you don’t know it, don’t realize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day.

She wonders what that does to a person.

There’s an intensity to him, too, something simmering just beneath the surface. She imagines for him a whole life. He’s a man who works hard and plays harder. Who has a circle of friends he calls exclusively by inexplicable nicknames while they sit around a table in the pub necking pints and watching The Game. Who runs purely to run off bad calories. Who has someone somewhere that knows a completely different version of him, someone he is unexpectedly and devotedly tender to, who he only ever looks at with kind eyes.

“It’s okay,” she says, waving the bottle of water, starting to move away. “I’ve just realized I’ve got the wrong one.” She turns and heads back toward the fridges, feeling his eyes on her as she walks away.

And the beat of her own heart, pulsing with promise.

The second thing he says to her is, “Nice bag.”

She has just come out of the supermarket, onto the street, and doesn’t know who’s talking or if they’re talking to her.

When she turns toward the voice, she sees him standing in the next doorway, looking right at her. The sandwich he’s just bought is tucked under his arm, getting squished by the pressure. There’s the hint of a grin on his face, tinged with something else she can’t readily identify.

She stops. “My . . . ?”

“Your bag,” he says, pointing.

He means the little canvas tote she’s put her purchases in. He must, because her handbag is across her body and resting on her other hip, the one he can’t see from where he’s standing.

The tote is blue and has a space shuttle on it, piggybacking on an airplane as it flies over the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

She lifts the bag and looks at it, then back at him.

“Thanks,” she says. “It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—”

“New York,” he finishes. “The one on the aircraft carrier, right?” He says this not with smug knowingness but endearing enthusiasm. “Have you been?”

“Yeah.” She doesn’t want to sound like she’s too impressed with herself, so she adds, “Once.”

“Was it good?”

She hesitates, because this is it. This is where she makes her choice.

People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.

Her options:

Say something short and flippant, move on, end this now.

Or say something that prolongs this, stay longer, invite more, open a door.

She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most. Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s fear she struggles with. She thinks courage might be choosing between what you want now and what you want the most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the door. To retreat. To stay in the place where she feels safe and secure.

But what she wants the most is to be able to live a full life, even if the expansion comes with pain and risk and fear, even if it means crossing a minefield first.

Thisone, maybe.

Ciara grips the handles of the tote and imagines her future self standing behind her, pressing her hands into her back, pushing, whispering, Do it. Go for it. Make this happen. She ignores the heat rising inside of her, her body’s alarm. She reminds herself that this isn’t a big deal, that this is just a conversation, that men and women do this all day, every day, all over the world.

“Yeah,” she says. “But not as good as Kennedy Space Center.”

He blinks in surprise.

He straightens up and steps closer.

Moving aside so a woman pushing a double stroller can get past, she takes a step closer to him, too.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve never met someone who can name all five space shuttles.”

“And I still haven’t met someone who knows there are six.”

She bites her lip as every blood cell in her body makes a mad dash for her cheeks. What the hell did she have to go and say that for? What was she thinking?

“Six?” he says.

She’s already ruined it.

So she might as well make sure she has.

“There was Challenger,” she says to the crack in the pavement by her right foot, “lost January 28, 1986, during launch. Columbia, lost February 1, 2003, during reentry. Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery are all on display—Atlantis is the one in Kennedy Space Center. But there was also Enterprise, the test vehicle. It flew, although never in space. It didn’t have a heat shield or engines, but it was the first orbiter. Technically. Which is actually what people mean when they say ‘space shuttle,’ usually. They mean the orbiter itself. The rest are just rockets. And Enterprise is the one that’s at the Intrepid.”

A beat of excruciating silence passes.

She forces herself to lift her head and meet his eye, lips parting to mumble some lie about needing to get back to work, foot lifting in readiness for scurrying away from this absolute disaster, but then he says—

“I was going to go get a coffee. Can I buy you one, too?”

There are numerous coffee options on this street and the vast majority of them come served with a side of serious notions. There’s the café that roasts its own beans and makes you wait five minutes for a simple filter coffee that only comes in one size served lukewarm. It’s right next to the place that has spelled its name wrong and, inexplicably, with a forward slash: Kaph/A. The most popular spot seems to be a little vintage van in the service-station forecourt, the one with a hatch whose chalk-drawn menu lists not coffee blends but levels of depleted wakefulness: Fading, Sleepy, Snoring.

Ciara is relieved when he directs her past all of them and into the soulless outlet of a bland coffee chain instead.

“Is this okay?” he asks as he holds the door open for her.

“This is great.” She steps inside, turning to talk to him over her shoulder. “I like my coffee served in a bucket at a reasonable price, so . . .”

“I’ve passed the first test, is what you’re saying.”

He winks at her and she laughs, hoping it didn’t come out sounding like a nervous one, although she is nervous.

Because of the implication in the word first.

Because she has to pass this test too.

Because this is already the weight of one whole foot on the edge of the minefield and she has no idea how wide it is, how long it will take her to get all the way across, how long it will be before she feels safe and comfortable and secure.

In the minute it took to walk here, he has told her his name is Oliver and that he works for a firm of architects who have the top floor of the large office building across the street. He is not an architect, though, but something called an architectural technologist. He explained it by saying that architects design the buildings and then architectural technologists figure out how they’re going to actually build them. He tried to dissuade her of the idea that it’s any bit as interesting as it sounds, promising that, in reality, it’s mostly spreadsheets and emails. When she asked him if it’s what he always wanted to do, he said yes, once he’d come to terms with the fact that he was never going to be an astronaut.

Then he asked her what she does.

She explained that after her astronaut dreams fell by the wayside, she ended up working for a tech company that just happens to have one of their European hubs in a sprawling complex of glittering glass-and-steel office buildings a few minutes away from where they stand. She held up her bright-blue lanyard and he read her name off it and said, “Nice to meet you, Ciara,” and she said, “Nice to meet you, too.”

Now, at the counter in the coffee shop, she says she’ll have a cappuccino. He orders two of them, both large.

“To go?” he suggests. “We might snag a seat by the canal.”

“Sounds good to me.”

She tries not to look too pleased that he wants to prolong this, whatever this is, into drinking the coffees as well.

She goes to wait at the end of the counter and watches him pay at the till with a crisp ten-euro note. She sees the barista—a teenager; she can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen—steal glances at him whenever she thinks he’s looking at something else. She wonders if he’s aware of that and, if he is, what it feels like. (Approval or scrutiny?) She traces the lines of his body as suggested by his clothes and wonders what it would feel like to know the skin underneath, if she will know it, if this really is the start of something or just an anomaly.

She imagines those arms around her, the strength in them, how it would feel to be held by him.

Then she tries not to.

She doesn’t put sugar in her cappuccino, even though she normally does, and she thinks to herself, If this becomes something, I’ll never be able to put sugar in my coffee now.

The sun has been appearing and disappearing all day; when they go back outside, they’re met with mostly blue sky. The canal bank is busy with lunching office workers, but they find a spot on the wall by the service station, near the lock.

They settle down.

He prizes the lid off his cappuccino to take a sip. She resists the urge to tell him that this will make it go cold faster but lets him know when he’s managed to collect a crescent of foam on his upper lip.

“So,” he says, “Kennedy Space Center.”

“What about it?”

“Tell me things that will make me very jealous that you’ve been there.”

She describes the bus tour that takes you around the launch pads, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and the famous blue clock that you see counting down to launch on TV. Tells him about the IMAX cinema and the Rocket Garden. The “ride” where they make you feel like you’re on a launching space shuttle, how they tilt it straight up so you’re lying on your back and then forward a bit too much so you start to slide out of your seat in a clever approximation of zero-G. The Apollo Center where you get to see an actual Saturn V rocket, lying on its side at ceiling-height above the floor. The shuttle Atlantis, a spaceship that has actually been in space, on magnificent display.

“It’s revealed to you,” she says. “Unexpectedly. A surprise. You’re herded into this big, dark room to watch a video about the shuttle program, and then, at the end, the screen slides up and reveals the shuttle just . . . just there, in all its glory, right in front of you. With the cargo-bay doors open and at an angle so it actually looks like it’s flying through space. It’s amazing. People actually gasped. After I’d walked around it and taken all my pictures and read all the exhibits and stuff, I went back to where I’d come in and I waited for the screen to go up so I could watch other people’s faces, so I could see their reactions, and it was . . .” She sees what looks to her like his bemused expression and panics. “It’s just that I wanted to go for so long—since I was a child, really—so it was a bit like, I don’t know . . . walking around in a dream.”

A long moment passes.

Then he says, “I really want to go.”

Relief.

“You should,” she says.

“Thing is, I hate the heat.”

“Don’t let that stop you. It’s all ice-coldair-conditioning and misting machines. Plus, it’s not always hot and steamy in Florida. I went in March and it was actually quite nice.”

“Was this a girls’ trip or . . . ?”

She pretends not to have noticed that he is fishing for information, and he pretends not to have noticed her noticing but pretending not to.

“Work, primarily,” she says. “A tech conference in Orlando. So I was able to slip away and go geek-out without an audience, thankfully.”

Ciara turns to look out at the canal. It is beautiful up close, she’ll give it that. The water is still, the reflections in it defined. The weather is pleasant enough for people to sit on the benches in their coats but not to show skin or plonk down on the grass. A steady stream of office workers and lunchtime runners cross back and forth on the narrow planks of the lock right by a sign that warns of deep water. Watching them makes her nervous, and she looks down at her coffee instead.

She can feel his eyes on her.

“Cork, right?” he says.

“Originally. We moved to the Isle of Man when I was seven.”

“The Isle of Man? I don’t think I’ve met anyone who lived there before.”

She smiles. “Well, I can assure you, thousands of people do. My dad grew up there and thought I’d want to, too.”

“Did you?”

“Not at the time, no. But it was all right in the end. What about you?”

“Kilkenny,” he says, “but we moved around a lot.”

“How long have you been in Dublin?”

“What’s it now”—he makes a show of thinking about it—“six weeks?”

“Six weeks?”

“Well, six and a half. I arrived on a Tuesday.”

“Where were you seven weeks ago?”

“London,” he says. “And you?”

“How long am I in Dublin?” She pretends to think, mimicking him from a moment ago. “Well, next Monday it’ll be, ah . . . seven days.”

“Seven days? And here was I thinking I was the newbie.”

She laughs. “Nope, I win that game.”

“Where were you before?”

“Cork, since I finished college. I went to Swansea. Not-at-all-notable member of the Class of 2017, here.”

His face can’t hide the fact that he’s trying to do the math. She almost offers, “I’m twenty-five,” but that’s not how this game is played.

She doesn’t know much but she knows that.

“What about you?” she asks. “Where did you go?”

“Newcastle,” he says flatly.

Ciara senses that something has changed, that she’s lost him somewhere along the line. What was it that did it? She has no clue, but knows she can look forward to lying awake in the dark and wondering for days to come, forensically analyzing everything she said and then reanalyzing it, trying to find the wrong thing, the mistake, the regret.

“I’m going to be late back.” He says this a fraction of a second before he shakes his wrist and looks at his watch.

He stands up then and, not knowing quite what to do, she does as well.

“Yeah, I better go, too,” she lies. “Well . . . thanks for the coffee.”

He chews on his bottom lip as if trying to decide something.

“Look,” he starts, “I was going to go see that new Apollo documentary. On Monday. Night. They’re showing it at this tiny cinema in town. Maybe—if you wanted to—we could, um, we could go see it together?”

She opens her mouth to respond but is so taken aback by this invite that she delays while her brain tries to catch up with this change of course, and into this pause he jumps with an embarrassed, “God, I’m so shit at this.”

This.

She wants to tell him that no, he’s not, and she doesn’t believe for a second that he thinks he is, but mostly she doesn’t want to have to respond to him referring to this as a this because what if he didn’t mean what she hopes he did?

“That sounds great.” She flashes her most reassuring smile. “Sure. Yeah.”

He says he will book the tickets. They arrange to meet outside the building where he works at five thirty on Monday evening. He gives her his phone number in case there are any last-minute problems and she sends him a text message so he has hers. They walk back together as far as his office, then wave goodbye. She doesn’t take a deep breath until she’s turned her back to him.

And so it begins.