56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
26 Days Ago
When Ciara suggests that they head to Merrion Square Park with a picnic, Oliver points out that according to Google Maps, it’s technically three kilometers from the Crossings.
But he’s only teasing her. The Gardaí would hardly bother with pedestrians, and he wants to go there too. It’s a beautiful, blue-sky Sunday—and an increasingly warm one. The very last year you’d want it to happen, summer has decided to show up early, unexpectedly, in the middle of spring. The kind of weather that makes you want to sit on freshly cut grass in open space and lift your face to the sun.
The streets that connect the Crossings with Portobello Bridge are lifeless, but when they reach the canal it’s as if they’ve slipped into another world. The waterside paths are thronged with people and pets strolling, and wherever there’s a patch of grass or somewhere to sit and swing your legs out over the water, pale limbs and heads thrown back in laughter have already gathered around collections of supermarket bags filled with cans. Houses facing the water stand with their front doors flung open, letting the tinny sounds of Lyric FM drift out into the air. Next-door neighbors sit in deck chairs on the grass, having slightly shouted conversations with each other over walls and fences. Outside one house, two young children are having the time of their lives with a simple garden sprinkler, running repeatedly through its thin, upright stream with squealing, giggling abandon. In another, a disposable barbecue is cooking up a feast.
It’s almost as if everyone saw the weather forecast and prearranged a socially distanced block party.
An alien visitor would have to know what to look for to find evidence that anything is wrong, but it’s there. Everyone milling about is doing so in small, confined pods; signs begging Help Stop the Spread of COVID-19 are cable-tied to every second lamppost; and whenever Ciara and Oliver come to pass another person or couple walking in the opposite direction, one or both parties steps aside, onto the grass or even down off the curb and onto the road, flashing a friendly smile as they politely try to get as far away as they physically can.
When they turn onto Leeson Street, a stretch of city dominated by office buildings and schools that would’ve been quiet anyway on a Sunday, there’s an unusual depth to its desertion. A solidness. At the opposite end, the gates of Stephen’s Green remain locked. On the other side of the park, taxi ranks stand empty. The open-topped tour buses and horses and carts that tend to lay in wait on sunny spring weekends like this for foolish tourists on the northwest side are gone and the Shelbourne Hotel, normally a hive of activity with lines of blacked-out SUVs and uniformed doormen helping well-heeled guests to and from them, is shut, locked up, dark inside. Grafton Street, one of the busiest shopping streets in the world, a gauntlet of other people’s swinging shopping bags, street performers, and elbows during normal times, empty, is the most disconcerting sight of all. It’s something that was never meant to be seen like this, like when the lights come on in the club at the end of the night.
But none of it is weirder than the fact that Oliver is seeing all this with Ciara by his side.
Every now and then he steals a glance at her, or squeezes her hand, or lifts the hand he holds to his lips to kiss it lightly, just to prove to himself that she really is there.
Still, despite everything.
But for how much longer?
There was nothing resembling a picnic blanket in Oliver’s apartment—or hers even, if they’d been prepared to take a detour—so they lie flat on their backs in the park on a white bedsheet Ciara worries they’ll never get the grass stains out of. She has no shades, so she rests her arm on her forehead, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. She’s hoping her old bottle of off-brand body lotion isn’t lying about being SPF30, because that’s all she has on in the way of sunscreen. She didn’t think she’d have to worry about sunbathing-in-the-park essentials when lockdown began, but here they are.
Apart from the occasional distant belly-laugh or child’s excited squeal, she can’t hear anything except Oliver’s gentle breathing as he dozes beside her after their lunch of sugary carbs and fizzy alcohol that they picked up in an almost deserted Marks & Spencers food hall on Grafton Street. They found a spot right in the southwest corner of the park, near the railings and so near the road, but there’s no traffic noise because there’s no traffic to make it. They are right in the city center but the soundtrack is Idyllic Countryside.
“Lockdown has its advantages,” she whispers.
Oliver stirs, hoisting himself up onto his elbows to look around the park. His forehead, she sees, is getting a little red. He searches among the plastic carton debris of their picnic lunch until he finds a water bottle and then sits up to take a long gulp.
She sits up too.
The expanse of grass around them seems, at first glance, to be densely packed with lounging bodies, but a closer inspection reveals dozens of groups gathered together but staying a fair distance apart. There’s a few who are definitely breaking the one-household rule unless they live in a house where every single corner is chock-full of bunk beds, but it’s hard to get worked up about it when they’re all outside, and outside is looking as it does today: the sky a canopy of cornflower blue and the sun shining from almost directly overhead.
“It’s weird,” Oliver says, “isn’t it? It feels normal but also . . . not. Like we’re in a Black Mirror episode where some computer company has made a simulation of the world, but everything is just a little off.”
“I’ve never seen Black Mirror.”
“Oh, we’re so adding that to the binge-watch list.”
“But isn’t that all, like, dystopian stuff? The world is going in the wrong direction, etc., etc.? I’m not sure we really need to be watching that kinda thing right now.”
“Fair point. We’ll stick it on the After list.”
The After list.
A promise of the future, dropped casually into the conversation. Ciara takes it and holds it and adds it to her collection, along with something he said about Ranelagh being a fun place for them to live and how she’s going to love his brother’s wife, Nicki, whenever it is they manage to travel home from Australia again.
Even though she shouldn’t be collecting such things.
Even though she should destroy the ones she already has, because that’s what’s going to happen to them anyway, eventually, and why torture herself until then by pretending that there can be another way?
You can’t erase the past. You can lock it in a box, yeah, but you can’t make it go away.
The box is here now, sitting on the grass between them.
But Oliver doesn’t know it exists and she’s stubbornly pretending she doesn’t see it.
“Do you ever think about what we’d be doing if all this wasn’t happening?” he asks. “If there wasn’t a pandemic?”
“No.”
This is true. This set of circumstances has proved so dangerously perfect in so many ways, she doesn’t like thinking about what might have happened otherwise.
What might have had to happen.
“Really?”
“Nope.” She shakes her head. “Why, do you?”
“All the time. In fact . . .” He takes out his phone, taps the screen a few times, and then holds it out to her. “I do more than that.”
She can’t see through the glare of the sun on the screen, so she takes the phone from him and cups her hand around it until there’s enough shadow to make out what it is. He’s opened his Notes app to a list, it looks like.
“What’s this?”
“Places I’m going to take you,” he says. “After. Things we’re going to do.” He pauses. “Things I want to do with you.”
She only manages to read the first few items on the list before the words begin to blur.
Stella Cinema
Killiney Hill
Chapter One (chef’s table)
National Gallery
Long Room
Sunrise @ Sandycove (swim?)
She doesn’t even know what to say, much less feel.
She’s stunned that he would admit to this, that he would show her such a thing. She’s touched that he made this list. She finds it amusing that so many of the things on there are the same things that appear in tourists’ schedules, that it’s a list designed for two people new to Dublin, keen to explore the city but lacking any real knowledge of where to go. She’s scared that she wants to do all this too, with him, that she can already picture them walking hand in hand around the streets, like they did earlier today but with normality having returned and there being nothing left to fear.
Apart from the thing that will never go away.
Ciara feels a sudden flare of heat on her cheeks. His face is inches from her own; there’s nowhere to hide a reaction. She works to keep her expression neutral as she feels wave after wave of feeling rush up and crash over her, pulling her under and lifting her to the surface, leaving her dizzy and disoriented, her throat dry.
“And it’s not on the list,” he says, “but there’s a hotel in Killarney where you wake up and you’re just looking out at the lakes, and the mountains beyond, and you can’t see anything except green and blue. When we can go places again, I thought we might go there. Just to not see city for a while.”
It was never supposed to go this far.
But now that it has, she doesn’t want to turn back.
And really, what did she think was going to happen? Isn’t there a part of her that wanted this all along, despite the cost of it? Hasn’t she been lying to herself just as much as she’s been lying to him?
“I want to do those things, too,” she says. “With you.”
It’s the truth.
He traces a finger along her forearm, connecting her freckles with an invisible line.
“Except for the swimming bit,” she adds. “Because I would definitely drown.”
“I’d save you.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll save you the bother.”
“You don’t swim?”
“I prefer to think of myself as a very good sinker.”
He laughs.
“I do miss the water, though,” she says. “Looking at it, that is. I could see it from my apartment in Cork. The harbor. Well, estuary. I don’t know, maybe they’re the same thing. Anyway, I didn’t realize how much I liked seeing it until I left. I feel a bit landlocked here.”
Another truth.
“I hate to break it to you, but we’re on the coast.”
She slaps his arm playfully. “We’re near a river. I’m talking about seeing nothing but water all the way to the horizon. The beaches are well outside our two K.”
“There might be somewhere else, somewhere closer. Come on.” Oliver moves to get up. “Let’s go.”
Less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the bright greens of Merrion Square Park and the washed-out reds of the Georgian townhouses that surround it sits an industrial, futuristic feast of silver, gray, and blue: Grand Canal Dock. Ciara has never been, and it’s not at all what she was expecting from the name.
A shimmering square of water stretches toward the sea, overlooked by glass-fronted boxes: apartment blocks and office buildings. Everything is smooth and new, and stone, steel, or glass. The open sea beyond the mouth of the Liffey is blocked from view by a row of buildings in the middle distance, but she can see the Poolbeg chimneys rising into the sky beyond, and there’s more than enough water here to soothe her soul.
“Thank you,” she says to Oliver. “This works.”
He grins. “This isn’t it.”
He leads her past the water and down a narrow street, a gap in the glass-and-steel boxes. They pass closed restaurants, a bank, and a slew of dark office doors, but there are pockets of normality here too: teenage boys in wetsuits diving gleefully into the water, a couple of skateboarders crisscrossing the smooth pavement of the main square, a couple emerging from a grocery shop with takeout coffees.
She has no idea where he’s taking her until finally, they emerge at the other end and she follows him across the road—
He’s brought her to the river, a stretch of it she’s never seen.
On her left, the delicate white curve of the Samuel Beckett Bridge rises into the sky like a bird in flight. Through its tension cables, she can see more familiar Dublin landmarks in the distance: Custom House, the tip of the Spire piercing the sky. Feet away from them is a bright-orange diving bell, according to its signage. She wouldn’t have had a clue what it was otherwise.
She looks to Oliver, who is watching her look. “This is—”
“Still not it. But if you’ll just follow me . . .”
He pulls gently on the hand he’s holding and they both start to turn in the other direction, to the right, so they both see it at the same time.
A navy vessel is docked just feet away and on its deck, three people in full biohazard gear—overalls, gloves and boots, hoods fitted with plastic visors and respiratory masks—are using the spraying devices on their backs to hose down surfaces with what has to be disinfectant. Next to the ship is a large, long, sea-green tent surrounded by metal railings. Signs say it’s a Client Referral Testing Center and point to the Entrance This Way and warn Referrals Only, No Walk-Ins. The railings have black plastic tarps tied to the inside: makeshift privacy screens. A gangplank connecting the ship to the shore says it’s the LÉ Samuel Beckett.
They both stand, gaping at it, transfixed.
Since lockdown began, Ciara has been glued to the news. It’s on for the hour that Oliver is out running, so she watches it alone. They usually start with the numbers, and those are never good. But the numbers are never the worst part, partly because that’s all they are, because it’s too much to take in to match them to the scope of human suffering that they represent. It’s the details beyond the headlines, the sentences filled with words she knows but which, put together, don’t make any sense, that catch in her throat.
Like how a convention center in the middle of New York City had been turned into a 1,200-bed field hospital with a potted plant next to every bed because it was supposed to have been hosting the World Floral Expo. Or how, when someone dies of this thing in an Irish hospital, they have to be left in the clothes they have on, fitted with a mask even though they’ve stopped breathing, and zipped inside not one but two body bags, neither of which will ever be opened again. And how a ship docked down in Cork is prepped to become a makeshift morgue if needs be.
But all of these things have been on the television, safely on the other side of the screen, at the start of evenings she and Oliver spend cuddled up on the couch watching TV shows that don’t know this is coming, hermetically sealed time capsules of Before, and being safe and well and kinda liking this. Walking out into the world and seeing them with her own eyes, right in front of her, is another thing entirely. She looks at the faceless bodies moving about in the biohazard gear and feels like what they’re washing away with that chemical spray is every good thing about today.
“I didn’t know this was here,” Oliver says. “If it wasn’t, you’d be able to see down as far as the port, to the mouth of the river, and a horizon of water, just like you said. Maybe if we walk down there a bit, we can—”
“I just want to go home.”
He doesn’t argue. He squeezes her hand and they turn and walk back the way they came, mostly in silence, until they are back alongside the canal itself, back inside the mirage.
People are still lounging by the water, lit now by the late-afternoon sun. Music drifts out of open windows. The puffed-popcorn blooms of pink cherry-blossom trees sway gently in the breeze.
But it all looks like playing pretend now.
When they get back to the Crossings, Ciara’s eyes go to the letterboxes. A slim, cream envelope is sticking out of the flap of the box for apartment one.
“Oliver,” she says, pointing. “Look.”
He follows her direction, frowns.
“Junk, probably,” he says. “Or a menu.”
He pulls the envelope out of the flap and looks at it for a second, blinking rapidly. Something is handwritten on the front—a name, it couldn’t be anything more—but when Ciara takes a step closer to try to see it for herself, Oliver abruptly turns and slips the envelope into the letterbox beside his, the one for apartment number two.
“What did it say?”
Oliver’s response is, “It wasn’t for me,” which, she’ll think afterward, doesn’t at all answer her question.