56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
28 Days Ago
When Oliver wakes the next morning, he finds the other side of the bed empty and cold. This in itself isn’t unusual; Ciara often gets up before him on weekdays. But then the events of the night before come back to him like a spray of bullets: one at a time but in rapid succession, each one compounding the pain of the previous hit. The fire alarm going off. Her possibly seeing the text message from Rich. Him trying to keep her inside. Her talking to the woman from the Westbury.
Her not talking to him at all when she came back in, except to say that she was going to sleep in the other bedroom.
The sound of the lock turning in its door a moment later had hurt him almost as much as the dragging of jagged glass across his skin had years earlier.
But he couldn’t dwell on it, because he was consumed with the fact that the woman with whom he’d randomly spoken outside a hotel door a few weeks back just happened to be living in the same apartment complex in a city of half a million people, and the implications of it.
One problem at a time.
But now he worries that it was a mistake not to talk to Ciara last night, to try to explain himself.
She could have gotten up this morning and left, not just the apartment but him as well—
At the tinkle of steel against china, coming from the living room, Oliver’s muscles sag with relief.
She’s still here.
He finds her sitting on the couch, close to the patio door, which is standing open a few inches and letting in both a breeze of fresh, cool air and a soundtrack of chirping birds. Her legs are tucked underneath her, and a cup of coffee rests in her lap. Her phone is on the arm of the chair, within easy reach.
“Morning,” he says.
She turns and looks at him, her face expressionless. “Morning.”
He takes a seat at the opposite end of the couch.
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Just gone eight.”
“Look,” he starts, “about last night—”
“Maybe this was a mistake.”
Her tone isn’t angry or upset, just flat and tired.
But he thinks he can detect an invitation in it, as if this isn’t a declarative statement but a proposal that he’s being invited to discuss.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on his part.
“I don’t know anything about you,” Ciara says, “except what’s in the present tense. What you like. What you’re like. What you’re like with me, to me. Under normal circumstances, that amount of information might be a normal amount to have. I mean, we’ve known each other, what? A month now? But there’s nothing normal about this. We’re living together, being together, twenty-four-seven. But I haven’t met a single other person who knows you. No family, no friends, no colleagues. I was just sitting here thinking, if I had to prove you are who you say you are—”
“Why would you need to do that?”
“—what evidence would I have? On the one hand, it’s like you’re this mystery man, but on the other, you’re the closest person in the world to me right now. It’s like we’re on this road where there’s two lanes going in the same direction, one accelerating everything, the other one slowing everything down, and I’ve got a wheel in each one and I’m stuck. And last night . . . You made me afraid, Oliver. You made me feel afraid.” She bites her lip. “Of you.”
The words make his chest tight with pain.
“I didn’t mean to,” he says. “I just wasn’t thinking . . . No, I was thinking, but only about how I’d told Kenneth you’d moved back to your own place, and what would happen if he found out I’d lied . . . And I was right, wasn’t I? It was a false—”
“Don’t,” she says in a tone that instantly silences him.
A beat passes.
“I’m sorry,” he says then. “But I can’t undo it. And I’m not trying to excuse it. I can only explain what was going through my head and promise that it won’t happen again.” Oliver pauses to take a deep breath. “So where does that leave us?”
She looks away.
“You know, I could say the same about you,” he says tentatively. “I only know what’s in your present tense.”
“But the difference is I want to know more.” Ciara stretches to set the coffee cup on the table, then settles back into the couch and folds her arms: defensive pose. “You don’t seem to be at all interested in the rest of me. Not that there’s anything particularly interesting or exciting there, it’s just . . . Sometimes I’d just wish you’d ask.”
He can’t, of course, tell her the truth about why he doesn’t, which is that he can’t tell her the truth about himself. The more she shares, the more he’ll owe it to her to do the same, and the more lies he’ll have to tell to fulfill that bargain.
If she shares details about her family, he’ll be forced to admit he’s only in contact with one member of his. If she recalls adventures from her teenage years, he’ll have to cover up the fact that he missed his entirely. If she lists her dreams, he’ll have to come up with a good reason for why he doesn’t dare to have any.
Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.
He tries not to tell any more of them than is absolutely necessary.
He says, “What do you want me to ask?”
“Well . . .” There’s a hint of a smile on her face, which relaxes something inside of him, vents a little fear from the pressurized chambers of his chest. “I suppose I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to rant about how my mother is the worst person in the world. Or about how my best friend up and left for Australia—just abandoned me to go and have this absolutely amazing bloody time, and I kind of hold it against her that she didn’t ask me to go with her, even though I know I would’ve said no. Or about how I’m not sure I like this job, or want it. I don’t know what I want. I have no clue what my passion is and I worry that I don’t have one.” A pause. “Okay, so. I’m realizing now that I’m just giving you excuses not to ask me questions.”
“No, no.” Oliver smiles. “All good stuff. Very much looking forward to hearing all about it.”
“You’re going to have to do a much better job of faking being interested than that.”
“I am interested.”
Her face falls serious again. “Then why don’t you ask?”
A version of the truth is always the safest bet.
“I just feel like I don’t need to know all that right now,” he says. “I kind of like our blank slates. No baggage. Nothing weighing us down. We have these stories we tell ourselves—and other people—about ourselves, based on what happened to us in the past, or what we did, or decisions we made, and then they become our future just by the telling. It’s like a . . .”
“Self-fulfilling prophecy?” she offers.
“Yeah. We want things to be different but we start by telling the other person how they were the last time, and that kind of, like, limits us to being that person again . . . I suppose what I’m saying is that, for once, I’d like to start something clean. Without any stories limiting where this can go, who we can be.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” she says, frowning.
“What if you’d told me you were shy? Just for example. I wouldn’t have thought so otherwise, not based on your actions, but you said you are, so that’s what I think now, and I treat you differently. Maybe we don’t do things or go places we would’ve otherwise, because I’m worried it’ll make you uncomfortable, because you’ve told me you’re shy. But what if you’re not really? What if it’s something you mistakenly believe about yourself, or that someone else made you feel, or mistook you for? Wouldn’t it have been better then that I didn’t know, that you didn’t tell me?”
I just want a chance to try to convince you of who I am before you find out what I did, before you find out what they say I am.
“When you’re working out here,” Ciara says, indicating the living room, “are you actually, or have you been watching old Oprah shows on repeat?”
He grins. “Hours of it.”
“Thought so.”
“And, Ciara . . .” He takes a deep breath. “Look, the truth is there isn’t really anyone for you to meet. Not here in Dublin, anyway. My family aren’t here, and all the guys at work are older than me, and married with kids, and kinda boring, and I haven’t really had the chance to meet anyone else yet. I’ve only been here a few weeks and, well, how do you meet people except through work and college and stuff? I didn’t go to college here and I don’t play sports and, well, we can’t go anywhere or do anything now, can we?”
She smiles. “You’re so lucky you met me.”
“I am.”
“And I’m in the same boat,” she says, “in lots of ways. You’re the only person I know here. So I get all that. But . . . Well, there are things I do want to know, that I want you to tell me.”
“Like what?”
He holds his breath.
“Like, who was texting you at four o’clock in the morning?”
“My brother,” he says. “Richard. Rich.”
She nods, understanding. “The one in Australia. The time difference.”
“It was lunchtime there.”
“Okay, but why get up in the middle of the night for it? It was just a text. And you were dressed; you didn’t just hop out of bed because you heard the notification.”
He has to give her something, he thinks.
“I didn’t get up for it. I was already up. I usually am, at that hour. I don’t really sleep.” Admitting this reminds him of one of those sequences from nature documentaries warning of climate change: the cracking of ice, a cliff of it suddenly breaking off from a gigantic glacier, the steady downward slide as it sinks and disappears into the sea. He feels lighter, but what’s just happened is a terrible thing—he’s revealed a secret. “I’m an insomniac.”
Ciara raises her eyebrows. He thinks what’s on her face reads more like concern than suspicion, but he can’t be sure.
“On a good night,” he says, “I get about two hours. Three is great. Three is positively refreshing. I go to bed and fall asleep, like normal, but at some point, I wake up and that’s it. I cannot get back to sleep. Doesn’t matter what I do. Usually by five, six a.m.—it depends on the time of the year, it seems tied to when it gets light outside—I manage to doze off for another hour or two, if I’m lucky, but it’s not proper sleep. Certainly not the restorative kind. Then I wake up, get up, and feel like absolute shit all day. Repeat as required.”
“Do you get up every night?”
“Most nights, yeah. Before you were here, I might have turned on a light and tried to read a book or watch something on my phone, but I don’t want to disturb you, so . . .”
“But how do you function on so little sleep?”
He shrugs. “You just get used to it.”
“Can’t you take something? A sleeping pill?”
“I do take something, sometimes. Tranquilizers. But they’re pretty strong. They knock you out, basically. I get a great night’s sleep but then I’m groggy for the next two days. So I use them sparingly. I go as long as I can without them and then when I’m in danger of having, like, hallucinations, I take one. Usually on a Friday night, so I can just veg out for the weekend and be okay for work on Monday. That’s the only thing that works for me. All the other stuff is like swallowing Tic Tacs.”
“When did you last take one of those tranquilizer things?”
“The weekend after we met. It’ll be time to again, soon.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I suppose I was embarrassed.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s weird.”
“It’s a medical condition.”
He sighs. “Still.”
“Is there anything else I should know that you’re too embarrassed to tell me?”
He considers the question.
And then he says, “Well . . . I don’t want to get sick.”
She waits for him to say more and when nothing comes, laughs and says, “Oliver, none of us wants to get sick.”
“I mean, I really don’t want to. I hate hospitals. Rich had some health issues when he was younger”—a lie—“and I don’t know, something about the smell . . . I wouldn’t even want to go into one to take a test. So I will do anything at all to avoid them—including wiping down bottles of milk with anti-bac wipes and obeying arbitrary distance rules. It’s not because I’m paranoid or a germaphobe, I just really don’t want to have to go into hospital. So . . . I don’t want to be a complete dickhead, but what I’ve been too embarrassed to say is that, well, you live with me, so whatever you get I’ll get too, so I need you to be just as careful.”
“I was being careful,” she says reassuringly. “I am. What with the asthma . . .”
He’d totally forgotten he’s supposed to have asthma.
“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Yes, that too. I’ve mostly grown out of it, but this is a respiratory thing, so . . .”
“Actually,” Ciara says, “I was thinking: maybe we should be wearing masks when we come and go from here. Inside the complex, I mean. Until we’re outside. That was my dastardly plan to avoid that guy from your firm seeing me, but it would also qualify as being more cautious, right?”
How absolutely perfect.
Even more so because she came up with it herself.
“Great idea,” he says.
“And speaking of wanting to avoid imminent death . . .” She inhales. “Oliver, last night, there could’ve really been a fire.”
“But—”
“There could’ve really been a fire. I don’t care if it had gone off every night for the last fifty, you had no way of knowing for sure that there wasn’t one. If you want to stay inside and risk your life, I won’t stop you, but you tried to stop me from leaving.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“No shit.”
“I just thought if we went out there, he’d definitely be out there—the senior partner—and . . . Well, I’ve just started there. And I was lucky to get the job in the first place. The director is my brother’s best friend’s dad. I don’t want to let anyone down when they basically gave me the job as a favor.”
He wishes he’d used different words to make that point, but Ciara appears to take them at face value instead of wondering why he might have needed that favor in the first place.
“What does this guy look like?” she asks. “The senior partner?”
Oliver mentally flips through the older guys in the office, picks one at random, and then does his best to describe him physically.
“I didn’t see anyone out there like that . . .”
“Maybe he was in the courtyard?”
“Maybe.”
“Why did you go out on the street?”
“Why did you go back in?”
Good question, he thinks.
He says, “I didn’t want to disturb you.” It’s lame and he knows it; time to change the subject. He picks up what must by now be a half-drunk cup of stone-cold coffee. “Want a fresh one?”
“Sure.”
Oliver gets up and starts toward the kitchen, making sure to phrase his next question as a casual afterthought, not at all important, just wondering . . .
“Who was that woman you were talking to?”
“Just one of your neighbors.”
“Which apartment?”
“Don’t know.”
“What were you talking about?”
“How noisy it was,” she says. “Why?”
“Just wondering.” He clears his throat. “Did you get her name?”
He’s in the kitchen now, at the fridge, his back turned toward her. He wants to still be sitting in front of her, studying her, tracing her face for any glimmers of a reaction, but he also doesn’t want to make it too obvious and settles for a glance as he flips the lid open on the coffee machine.
She’s turned toward the window and he can’t see her face.
“No,” she says. “No, I didn’t.”
When it comes time for her walk, Ciara slips on a disposable face mask before she leaves the apartment. Between Oliver’s door and the main entrance of the Crossings, she walks with her head down, letting a half-curtain of hair fall in front of her face. She pockets the mask once she’s reached the street and determined there’s no one else around.
She doesn’t want to risk meeting that Laura woman again.
Not until she’s decided what she’s going to do about her.
Ciara heads in the direction of the canal, following her usual route. If she crosses it and keeps going, she’ll eventually emerge onto Stephen’s Green, which she’s taken to doing laps around while the gates remain closed.
But today, she doesn’t cross the water.
Instead, she turns and follows the canal all the way back to her apartment.
It’s hot and stuffy inside, the space repeatedly warmed by the recent streak of sunny weather that feels like a cosmic joke considering the fact that everyone is trapped at home. There’s a faintly sour smell in the air too, like she’s left something in the trash can or milk spilled in the fridge.
Ciara throws open the windows as far as they’ll go and starts hunting for the source, eventually finding a rotting banana peel hidden under the plastic liner in the kitchen trash can. She puts it inside the liner, ties a knot in the top, and sprays the countertops with a floral cleaner to cover any lingering smells.
Then she takes her phone—her other phone—from a drawer, plugs in the charging cable, and uses it to call her sister.
Siobhán picks up so quickly, the phone must have been in her hand.
“Ciara,” she says, exhaling. “I was getting worried.”
“It’s only been a few days.”
“Five, by my count.”
“I told you I’d call when I could. Things are hectic here and when I’m done for the day, I’m exhausted. I keep thinking, ‘I’ll call Shiv when I have the energy to actually talk to her . . .’”
A beat of silence blooms and Ciara knows why: her big sister is weighing up the pros and cons of pushing her, demanding some plausibility to go with that embarrassingly flimsy excuse, which would also risk potentially ending this conversation before it’s even begun.
Siobhán ultimately opts for pretending to believe, for letting it go.
She always does.
“So what’s going on up in the Big Smoke?” she asks.
“Not much. Working and falling asleep in front of Netflix. Like everyone else, I suppose.”
“What’s Dublin like?”
“The opening scenes in something postapocalyptic, at the moment. You know when Cillian Murphy wakes up in 28 Days Later and everyone’s left London except for him? That. How is it down there?”
“Beats me. We’re barely leaving the house. Pat does all the food shops. There could actually be zombies out there for all I know.” A pause. “What about your job? Do you like it?”
“It’s fine.”
“What does it involve?”
“What does it involve?” Ciara frowns. “Why would you ask me that?”
“Why wouldn’t you answer?”
So now it’s her turn to decide whether to push or pretend.
Ciara, too, goes for pretend.
“Right now it mostly involves making lists and looking at spreadsheets.”
“Sounds kinda boring,” Siobhán says.
Ciara knows her sister is just trying to get a rise out of her and she refuses to take the bait.
“It is,” she agrees, “a bit.”
“Then why did you run away to Dublin to do it?”
“Aren’t I lucky I did? I wouldn’t even have a job to go to if I’d stayed at home. The hotel is closed.”
“You would have your emergency pandemic payment, or whatever it’s called.”
“I’d rather be here.”
“Why do I feel like I’m not getting the whole story?”
“Because you always feel that way, because you’re paranoid.” Ciara doesn’t want to get into it with her sister, again. “Anyway. How’s Mam?”
“About the same. Or so I’m told, since we can’t visit her now. They’re trying to get iPads in, so we can FaceTime.”
“Does she know what’s going on?”
There’s a long pause before Siobhán answers.
“She has good days and bad.”
“What about . . .” Ciara doesn’t like to think about this bit; she has to force the word out. “Pain?”
“They keep her comfortable. She sleeps a lot.”
“Do they know how much . . . ? How long?”
“No.”
There’s another long silence.
“What are you not telling me?” Siobhán asks then.
That I might have got myself into something here.
“Nothing.”
“Is everything okay?”
Things might be the furthest from okay they’ve ever been, and you and I both know that that’s saying something.
“Yeah, fine.”
“Are you sure?”
I’ve never been less sure about anything, about everything. Because I’ve met someone who’s made a bonfire of everything I thought I knew and poured lighter fluid on it, and now I’m standing beside it, holding a lit match.
And the flame is almost at my fingers.
“You know,” Siobhán says, “I really think there should be one person in your life you don’t lie to. It doesn’t have to be me, but . . .”
Ciara nods, forgetting that her sister can’t see her do it.
“Shiv, can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
She could hear a smile in her sister’s voice as she said that.
It’s an inside joke, born on Patrick Street in Cork many years before, when one of those god-awful charity workers—so-called—stepped in front of them, blocking their way on a dark, cold, and rainy Christmas Eve, and said, “Can I ask you ladies something?” and Siobhán, without missing a beat, quipped, “You just did,” stumping the guy long enough for them to make their escape.
“Do you think people can change, Shiv? Like, really change? At their core?”
Her sister sighs so hard it sounds like a gale blowing down the line.
“What does that even mean, ‘at their core’? What does a person changing actually look like? How would you know if they did?”
“They’d act differently. Different to how you’d expect them to.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on how they’d acted in the past.”
“I think people can change their habits and behaviors,” Siobhán says carefully, as if she’s on the stand in a courtroom, testifying for the defense, and the hot-shot prosecutor has just tried to trip her up with a cleverly worded question. “And sometimes their mind and their beliefs. People get older and wiser and have more experiences, and that all updates their . . . let’s call it their central operating system. Because everything they do they learned in the first place, right? No one is born being X, Y, or Z. And theoretically, if you can learn how to be a certain way, you can unlearn it, too. But at the same time, you can’t erase the past. You can lock it in a box and put that box away, but you can’t make it disappear.” She pauses. “Is this about you? Because I think you absolutely can change. Your problem has always been that you don’t want to.”
Ciara rolls her eyes.
It’s the same old song.
That she’s sick of hearing.
“I’ve got to go, Shiv. I have to work. I was just on a break.”
“Look after yourself, okay? And I can come up there, if you need me. Just give me a call and I’ll get into the car.”
“You can’t, actually.”
“Watch ’em try to stop me.”
Ciara smiles as she pictures Siobhán busting through a Garda checkpoint somewhere on the motorway, Thelma and Louise style.
“I’ll call you again in a few days,” she tells her sister.
“Make sure you do.”