56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
23 Days Ago
Yesterday morning, Oliver had been what he told her is called doomscrolling—mindlessly browsing bad news stories on his phone—when he’d come across an article that said movies like Contagion and Outbreak,virus thrillers that had come out years before, were rocketing to the top of streaming and rental charts all over the world. When Ciara said she’d never seen Contagion, Oliver had snapped his fingers and said, “That’s tonight sorted, so.” She’s reminded of a scene from it now as she leaves the midday sunshine behind and enters the gaping entrance of Stephen’s Green shopping center. She’d been surprised to see it open; shopping centers, as far as she knows, are supposed to be closed.
The last time she was here, the entrance was a bustling meeting place with steady streams of shoppers going in and out; today, it’s just her and the masked security guard making sure she avails of the hand-sanitizer station and follows the newly implemented one-way system once inside.
After passing through the dim of the entrance, Ciara emerges into an enormous atrium of glass, light, and iron girders painted white. Storefronts line the balcony levels, which rise two stories above her head. Even though she can’t immediately see every corner, it’s obvious the place is deserted, lights off, shutters rolled down. Her footsteps squeak on the linoleum floor and the background music, playing from unseen speakers, echoes around the space.
The shops on the ground floor are all closed too, it looks like, and access to the higher levels is forbidden, the stairways roped off and the elevator locked. A handwritten sign warns that the public toilets are closed, which immediately makes her feel like she needs to go. She’s wondering why on earth the place is even open at all when she turns a corner and finds out: one of its tenants, Dunnes Stores, is too.
Ciara feels elated, almost giddy, at the thought of being able to walk around a department store, to potentially shop for things that aren’t edible—or even just to look at them, since she can’t really afford to buy. She makes a beeline for the door where two female staff members stand in plastic visors and latex gloves, wearing tense expressions. They point her to a small line inside waiting patiently in front of a down escalator.
“Grocery,” one of the women says when they see Ciara’s confusion.
She doesn’t need to buy any food and she knows that Oliver wouldn’t love to hear that she’d done an extra, unnecessary trip on her own. But she’s here now, she thinks, and if she just goes down for a look, for a walk around, who’s to know?
She joins the line, making sure to stand right on the strip of yellow tape stuck to the floor. No one else in the line is wearing a mask so she doesn’t take hers out of her pocket. There is a little table by the door offering customers complimentary plastic gloves—the clear, cheap, baggy kind that are surely a total pain in the arse to wear—but no one seems to be taking up the offer.
From behind her, a woman calls out, “Sir? Sir?”
When Ciara turns, she sees a tall man in a duffle coat striding into the store without stopping, leaving the two staff members glaring murderously at the back of his head.
He’s wearing noise-canceling headphones and the kind of rigid, ridged face mask that she’s seen tradesmen on TV wear when they’re stripping lead paint or working in plumes of dust. Every pore in his body is emitting a mix of self-importance and impatience. He’s ignored the women, it seems, mustn’t have heard them calling after him with those headphones on. But there’s no excuse for his not seeing the line waiting to descend to the basement, which he blithely strides past now.
As Ciara watches this masked-up man earn a look of pure disgust from everyone standing patiently, spaced two meters apart, on strips of yellow tape, she can’t help but note the strangeness of the scene and what she would have made of it a month ago. Today is the eighth of April. On the eighth of March, she was still twenty-four hours from her first date with Oliver, the night they ended up in the Westbury.
She doesn’t know what’s more terrifying: how much has changed in such a short space of time, or how little time it’s taken for people to adapt to this situation.
How easily she has, to hers.
When it’s her turn, Ciara steps onto the escalator, childishly excited about getting to walk around a grocery store by herself.
But the feeling quickly fades. Despite the store controlling the numbers of customers, enough of them have been allowed in to create a bustle and there seems to be no “shop alone” rule in place here. Couples are ten a penny and there are even some full family units: pairs of parents with variously sized children attached to them with little hands, moving in convoy through the aisles. Shopping carts choke open spaces and all of the checkout lanes look swamped by lines. A member of staff is doing his best to spray and wipe the self-service checkout screens after each use, but the ratio of screens to customers is making it look like a losing game of Whack-a-Mole.
Ciara has just stepped off the elevator when she begins to feel the first wave of unease. It’s nothing more than a faraway train on approach to begin with: a quickening pulse and a sudden, cold sweat in the small of her back.
But she knows exactly what it means, what’s coming. It may have been a while, but the feeling is unmistakable.
She’s going to have a panic attack.
Ciara takes a deep breath, tells herself that she’s fine, repeats this. She drifts into the fresh produce section, unsure of what she’s actually looking for or where she’s heading to, forgetting now why she’s even come in here at all. She can’t really get anything to bring back home without revealing to Oliver that she’s gone in somewhere, but at the same time she’s paranoid she’ll be pegged as a shoplifter if she comes in and goes out again without buying a thing.
Who would bother doing such a thing with things the way they are? Only shoplifters, she’s sure the store security will think.
Which makes her heart beat faster.
She’ll buy a bottle of wine, she decides. Something she can pretend she got in a local shop when she gets back to the apartment. She starts toward the alcohol section, or at least where she thinks it might be, pretending she doesn’t feel the sped-up thumping in her chest.
A woman with a basket stops right in front of her, forcing Ciara to stop too, and reaches out to snatch something from the shelf beside Ciara. This movement releases a cloud of sickly floral perfume into the air and as Ciara turns her head away to avoid taking a breath in, she sees—
A flash of a familiar face at the end of the aisle, stepping out of sight.
“Excuse me,” Cheap Perfume says pointedly.
Ciara steps out of the way and absently collides with the front end of someone else’s cart.
Her balance is off, as if her head isn’t quite connected to her body. The store seems even busier now, bodies and breath around her on all sides. She sees people touching things, calling to each other across the aisles, brushing each other as they pass.
And then all of a sudden there is not only a lack of air but no space, no space at all, only other people and their hot, germ-filled breath, and the danger that floats out of it and sticks to Ciara’s skin, and she knows—she’s sure—that in the next few moments, if she doesn’t get out of here, she will faint.
She swings right, then left, desperately searching for a sign pointing to or sight of an escalator that will carry her out of here and back into the open air outside.
She can’t find either.
A gray blur is encroaching on her vision from all sides and her chest is tightening.
Someone comes close, too close, right up to her. Ciara wants to push them away and almost does until she spots the black uniform of the store and, above it, the sheen of a plastic visor.
“Are you okay, love?” A woman with too-dark eyebrows and bright-red, sticky lips is peering into her face through the plastic. “Are you all right?”
People are looking, Ciara can feel it.
“How do I—” Her mouth is dry, her tongue uncooperative. She tries again. “How do I get out?”
“Here.”
It’s a new voice, a woman’s, from her left side.
A familiar one.
An unwelcome one.
But Ciara doesn’t have the strength to protest. All she wants to do is get out. Once she’s done that, she’ll worry about getting away. She yields to her unseen helper and focuses on the floor as it changes beneath her feet.
Marble-effectlinoleum, scuffed with shoe marks.
The cold ridges of an escalator step.
A coarse floor mat with lettering she can’t read because it’s upside down.
She feels almost drunk, the kind when you know you’re not walking straight but you walk as if you are, too heavy on each foot, as if the sheer will of your own belief will be enough to steady you but actually just makes everything worse.
Stone steps. Gray cement. Different light—
They’re outside.
The fresh air is cool and welcoming and transformative. Ciara closes her eyes and gulps down lungfuls of it.
When she opens them again, she sees an almost deserted King Street. Her would-be Samaritan has led her to one of the benches outside the Gaiety Theatre and is now gently pulling on her, encouraging her to sit down.
“Give yourself a minute,” she says. “Take a few deep breaths.”
Ciara is racing back to normal, to feeling perfectly fine, and chasing after it is a wave of hot, itchy embarrassment.
“Here.” A bottle of water appears in front of her face. “I’ve already drunk some but if you don’t mind, I don’t mind . . . Actually, here. I have some anti-bac wipes. Let me clean the neck of it for you.”
When the bottle reappears, Ciara takes it and gulps it down.
“Thank you,” she says then.
“Has that happened to you before? A panic attack?”
Only now does Ciara turn and look directly at the other woman and finds her suspicions confirmed.
It’s Laura who is sitting next to her.
What the hell is she doing here?
Was she following her?
“Oh,” Ciara says, pretending to only have recognized her now. “Hello again.” And then, playing dumb, “Is that what that was? A panic attack?”
“Came on suddenly, hyperventilating, feeling sick?” Laura nods when Ciara does. “Sounds about right to me. What happened?”
“I don’t know, I just felt . . . claustrophobic.”
“Anywhere now that isn’t practically empty feels that way to me. I’m totally paranoid about catching this thing. How was your headache, in the end?”
It takes Ciara a second to remember her physical reaction to the fire alarm.
“Oh. Fine.”
“Look, ah . . .” Laura clears her throat. “There’s something I wanted to say to you. I was going to say it the other night but . . .” She shifts her weight. “I don’t really know how to put this, so I’m just going to come out with it, okay?”
Ciara braces herself.
“I know it’s Oliver you’re staying with. And I know there’s a good reason why you might not have wanted to confirm that for me the other night. I’d understand if you’re trying to protect him. What I want to make sure of, though, is that if you don’t know what that good reason might be, if you’re not trying to protect him, if you don’t know who he is, then . . .” Laura stops. “Did he tell you about the envelope he found? The one with his real last name on it?”
Blood rushes in Ciara’s ears as she does her best to look utterly confounded.
“It isn’t Kennedy,” Laura continues. “And I’m a journalist. I’m hoping—”
“I have to go,” Ciara blurts out.
She doesn’t trust her knees to hold her, but she stands up anyway. She lets the bottle fall from her hand and is vaguely aware of the splash of cold water that soaks the lower right leg of her jeans.
She takes three steps away, then turns back to face Laura.
“I don’t know what this is,” she says, “or what’s wrong with you, but Oliver and I have known each other since we were in primary school, so whatever this is about or whoever it’s about, it’s got nothing to do with us.”
Then she turns and walks away, fast, almost running. Feeling like her heart might be about to burst out of her chest.
And thinking, This bloody bitch is going to ruin everything.
Oliver paces back and forth across the living-room floor, practicing his opening line in his head.
There’s something I really need to tell you.
He’s made a decision.
Not just now but really, if he’s honest with himself, back on Sunday night, just a few hours after opening the envelope.
He’s going to tell Ciara the truth.
Not the whole of it. But most of it. There are some things he can never say out loud, things he can’t bring himself to summon to the forefront of his own mind, let alone plant forever in someone else’s.
What really matters are the broad strokes, and his plan is to tell her those as soon as she gets back from her walk.
He doesn’t want to do it. Every hour he gets to be with Ciara, every minute she still thinks of him as the Oliver she thinks she knows, is too good of a drug to cut himself off from—but he must, because he also knows it’s a drug that will kill him in the end.
He can’t continue on like this, with all the secrets and the lies and the hiding.
He can’t stand to feel like this, as if he’s constantly holding his breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, dreading the inevitable moment of reveal.
He has to tell her.
And then . . . Well, whatever happens, happens.
He had thought the timing of their meeting was a gift from the universe to make up for all it had taken away from him in the past: days before a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic that had changed the whole world in a matter of weeks, that forced people to make decisions without precedent, like what to do when lockdown loomed and the only way to keep seeing the man you’ve just met was to move in with him. And then there was the fact that Ciara didn’t use social media, had only just moved to the city, and agreed with him that this was a unique opportunity.
For her to grow something real in a protective environment, away from the scrutiny and influence of family and friends.
For him to show someone what was in his heart now, and would be, always, before they found out what he had done without any forethought seventeen years ago.
The first sign of trouble had come less than forty-eight hours after she’d moved in, on that first Monday morning, when Kenneth called to warn him that a friend of his wife’s had moved into the other apartment KB Studios was renting in the complex. The woman was a nurse who lived with her elderly parents who needed to cocoon, and the apartment was empty, so . . . Problem was, Kenneth’s wife—Alison—had always absolutely hated Oliver and the idea of her husband doing anything to help him. She didn’t know that he was back in Dublin, much less that he was working in the family business and living in a place they were paying for, and Kenneth was adamant that she couldn’t find out.
But this immediately got Oliver worried about something else: Kenneth finding out that Ciara was staying here.
Alison might well have told this family friend where the other KB Studios apartment was, and she could casually mention to Alison that she’d seen a couple out on its terrace, and Alison could say this to Kenneth, who might then think—and justifiably so—that Oliver was taking advantage of his kindness when he’d already done so much, and he might even have to admit to her who one half of the couple was, and then Oliver would be in real trouble, homeless and unemployed.
He’d been contemplating how to protect himself from that scenario when, just hours later, he found himself forced to explain something else away.
Since leaving London, he’d been having his monthly sessions with Dan, his therapist, by Zoom, and had had one scheduled for the Monday after Ciara moved in. He’d asked if it was possible to move it to noon, to match up with the hour Ciara said she was going to go for a walk. But she’d returned earlier than expected and overheard Dan admonishing Oliver for failing to tell him before now that he was in a relationship, which Dan was not pleased to hear coming so soon after the implosion in London.
In other circumstances, Oliver might have felt a little proud of the elegance of his solution. Dan became Kenneth, and avoiding the terrace killed two birds with one lie. But it just made him feel sick. That night, he lay in bed and wondered what it must be like to live your life without worrying that every little thing is forming the first link in a chain in a series of catastrophic events. He couldn’t even imagine it.
And then there was the woman from the Westbury, the one who’d given him a cigarette, who it turned out was not only living here but talking to Ciara too, and since Sunday night he could add the envelope situation to the list.
It was all getting too much. He was maxed out on lies.
And he absolutely hated telling them to Ciara.
So he’s going to stop now.
When he hears her keys clink out in the hallway, Oliver stops pacing and turns to face the doorway, ready to face her.
He rubs his clammy palms on his thighs, takes a deep breath. His right leg refuses to stop shaking.
He will kiss her, he thinks. And hold her. Just for one minute more.
And then he’ll tell her everything.
Almosteverything. The broad strokes. If he can manage to get any words out from behind the lump in his throat.
There’s something I really need to tell you.
He’ll start there, he thinks.
But when she walks into the living room, it’s her who says those words to him.
She made her decision on the walk home: she has to tell Oliver about Laura.
She got away without telling him what Laura said the night of the fire alarm, but since the bloody woman seems intent on a confrontation, and since she could tell Oliver that she’d already confronted Ciara . . .
He’ll know then that Ciara’s been lying to him, and that will be that.
But Ciara needs more time with him as the woman he thinks she is, so she needs to get in there first.
She lets herself into the apartment, setting her keys down on the hall table as the door swings shut behind her.
The place is quiet and the door to the second bedroom is closed; she assumes Oliver is in there, still working.
The safest option, she thinks, is to play dumb. Tell him what Laura just told her. Ask him what the hell it means.
And tell him what she just told Laura, making like her first instinct was to protect him, to lie for him even, and therefore—hopefully—reaffirm her trustworthiness.
The problem is that she has absolutely no idea how he’ll react.
Her eyes flick to the keys. The front-door key could scratch someone, maybe, but—
What is she doing?
This is Oliver, for God’s sake. He’s not going to hurt her.
But then again, this is Oliver.
Ciara shuffles out of her jacket and hangs it from one of the hooks in the hall. She pauses for a moment to lean forward and rest her head against the soft, familiar material of the sleeve, closing her eyes and steeling herself for what she’s about to do, for saying the things she knows she has to say to him.
It’s only the truth. Considering how well she’s been doing telling him lies, this should be easy.
Ciara goes to the living-room door—
Her breath catches in her throat.
Oliver is right there, standing in the middle of the room, apparently waiting for her, looking tense and ill at ease.
She wants to ask him what’s wrong but she’s afraid if she doesn’t push these words out of her mouth right now, she’ll never say them, so instead she says:
“Oliver, there’s something I really need to tell you.”
One footstep off the ledge and now she’s in freefall. Too late to change direction—or her mind. All she can do is try to ensure she doesn’t hit anything on the way down, and has the best possible landing.
Even if the odds of surviving the impact are astronomically slim.
“Can we sit down?”
Oliver nods and moves to take a seat on the couch. She takes one beside him, and then one of his hands in hers.
It’s cold and clammy.
She thinks maybe hers is, too.
“So,” she starts. “I . . . I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
He’s rigid beside her, barely breathing, watching her with unblinking eyes. Looking at her in the same way she’d imagine he’d look at an apex predator he was worried was going to suddenly lunge at him and bite into his neck.
“Something happened today,” she says. “Just now. In town, on my walk. And it makes me think that I should tell you about the other thing that happened because . . . Well, maybe you know what it all means and you can explain to me.” She squeezes his hand. “The first thing was the night of the fire alarm. The woman I was talking to outside. She asked me something weird—”
Hesqueezes her hand the same way her sister does during take-off and landing because she’s a terrible flyer and is always terrified.
“—and I didn’t tell you at the time, because you were paranoid about that guy from the firm knowing I was here, and there was a lot going on with us that night and I didn’t want to add to it. I just didn’t want to listen to you going on about it, to be honest, so—”
“What did she say?”
It’s the first time he’s spoken since she came in.
“Well . . .” Ciara swallows hard. “She asked me if I’d recently moved in, and I said I didn’t really live here, that I was staying with a friend, and then she said, ‘Is it Oliver?’ I knew you didn’t know anyone here, and then I was thinking, shit, maybe she’s pretending to live by herself and actually she’s the wife of this senior partner or whatever and she’s trying to catch me out, so I didn’t say anything. Then she says, ‘It is Ollie?’ which made me even more confused because you never mentioned that anyone calls you that . . . And then she said something about how I could . . . I could go to her for help if I ever needed it?”
He’s squeezing her hand so tight, it’s started to hurt.
When he speaks, his voice is barely above a whisper.
“And what did you say?”
“Nothing, to that. I thought she was a headcase.”
“Did she tell you her name?”
“Not that night,” Ciara lies. “But today she did. It’s Laura.” She pauses, looks down at her hand in his. “You’re, ah, kind of hurting me. A little.”
He pulls away as if her hand is on fire.
“Sorry,” he says. “So . . . You met her again today, this Laura woman?”
Ciara nods. “I was in Stephen’s Green”—let him assume it was the square—“and she just walked right up to me. Said she knew it was you—Oliver—that I was staying with, and that she knew there was a good reason why I might not want to confirm it, and something about my wanting to protect you. She said she knows your last name isn’t Kennedy. And that she’s a journalist.”
His face is as pale as she’s ever seen it.
“Who is she, Oliver?” She swallows hard. “And who are you?”