56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

78 Days Ago

They’d met on the street outside, Ciara having arrived first, hugging each other before pushing through the restaurant’s revolving doors and joining the line for the host’s attention. He’d led them to a four-top just inside the window, offering both an uninterrupted view of Emmet Place and a close-up of the man talking animatedly on his phone while also picking his nose at one of the outside tables.

“Look at him,” Siobhán said, rapping a knuckle on the window to get his attention. “Having a right old dig for himself. Just what you want to see with your lunch.” When she threw him a disgusted look he threw one back, but also—mercifully—stopped picking.

As they shuffled out of their winter coats and sat into their chairs, Ciara waited, literally biting her tongue until the first possible moment to ask about the only thing that’s on either of their minds presented itself.

“So? What did the doctor say?”

When she sees her sister’s eyes glisten, she wishes she’d waited a little bit longer.

“They’re going to move her into hospice care.”

Even though that’s what Ciara was expecting—what they’ve both been expecting, for months now—it still comes as a body-blow.

Ciara absorbs the impact in silence.

Then she says, “What was Mam’s reaction?”

“She wasn’t there. It was just me and Dr. Corrigan. He says they’ll tell her she’s going in for respite—and that’s what we’ll be telling her, too, even though we know she won’t be coming back out.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s how it’s done. You’ve got to give people hope, even when there isn’t any.”

They slip into a silence.

Ciara’s heart hurts for Siobhán. She has always been much closer to their mother—being older, she could remember her from before, when by all accounts she was an entirely different person, loving and funny and full of beans—and even now, after she’s gone, Ciara will still have her older sister, but Siobhán will have no one further up the generational chain. No older, wiser family member to turn to, to rely on, to ask for help. She’ll be the full stop at the end of their family’s sentence.

She’ll also be the capital letter at the start of her own—her husband, Pat, who Ciara secretly thinks is incredibly boring but who adores Siobhán, and their kids, Lily and David—but that won’t do much to lessen the loss.

Ciara reaches across the table and takes her sister’s hand. “I’m sorry, Shiv.”

She sniffs, smiles a little, sadly. “This is happening to you, too, you know.”

“I know, but . . . I never knew the same woman you did. Or at least, I can’t remember her if I did.”

“That woman died seventeen years ago.” Siobhán wipes away a tear, keeping her eye makeup intact. “This will be her second death. Or maybe even her third, after . . .”

She trails off.

She won’t say his name. They never do.

“At least this time,” Siobhán says, “we’ll get to grieve.”

“Did they say how long?”

“Anywhere from one to six months was his best guess.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. It is that.”

Ciara gives her sister’s hand a squeeze before letting go.

Siobhán straightens up, collecting herself, and turns her attention to the menu—God knows why, because they meet here once a month and they always order the same thing: two club sandwiches with fries, two Cokes, a pot of tea for two after. When the waiter appears and starts reeling off the specials, another ritual is played out: Siobhán silences him with a hand and says, “We know what we’re having, thanks.”

After he’s gone, Ciara asks, “Do you ever think about it, Shiv?”

“What?”

Ciara is unsure of what to call it. She settles on, “Back then. That day.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

Her sister picks up the water jug, pours two glasses. Ciara lets her take a sip, watches her swallow, makes sure she has so she doesn’t start to choke when she says, “I’ve been thinking, lately, about Oliver St Ledger.”

Siobhán freezes, then lifts her head to glare at Ciara, stone-cold.

“I don’t want to hear that name,” she says.

“He’s out there, somewhere—”

“I said, I don’t—”

“—living his life, being normal, getting to do all the things—”

“Acting normal, Ciara. Acting.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“It doesn’t do anything to me, because I refuse to let that cretin take up even a single molecule of oxygen in my life. Which is why I’m not having this conversation. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Did they ever tell you what actually happened?”

“Something else else.” But then Siobhán frowns. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“Mam and Dad.”

“Seriously? The woman who hasn’t even said his name for nearly twenty years and the man who was so traumatized by it all that he tied a rope around the banister outside my childhood bedroom? Why yes. We talked about it all the time. Cozy fireside chats, they were, as I recall.”

“I could do without the sarcasm, Shiv.”

“And I could do without this whole conversation.” Her sister sits back, folds her arms. “What’s this about? What’s going on?”

“It’s just that . . . I only know what’s on the internet. Which is what was reported, back then.”

“So?”

“So that’s what the public were told,” Ciara says. “But he was my brother. If you only know what was reported too, and Mam didn’t tell you anything, well then . . . time is running out to ask questions, isn’t it?”

“To ask Mam questions? Don’t you fucking dare do that.”

“I wasn’t going t—”

“We know what happened.”

“In general, yeah, but I mean, like . . .” Ciara searches for the right words. “The ins and outs.”

“The ins and outs?” Siobhán repeats in a loud enough voice to attract a couple of head turns from surrounding tables. “He’s dead, Ciara. Nothing’s going to change that. We can’t bring him back. Why would you even . . . ? What is wrong with you?”

Over her sister’s shoulder, Ciara sees the hostess turn toward their table with a frown on her face.

“People are looking, Shiv.”

“So what’s new?” Siobhán twists around to throw their nearest audience members—a middle-aged couple two tables away—a filthy look.

“I do remember one thing,” Ciara says. “From back then.”

“Just the one? Aren’t you lucky?”

“I remember Mam saying, over and over, that it couldn’t have happened the way they said.”

All this earns is an eye roll from Siobhán.

“Look, I’m not trying to upset anyone here, Shiv. Quite the opposite. What if we could get something for Mam, some information, that would make her feel better? That would give her some peace before she goes?”

Siobhán scoffs at this. “Like what?”

“What actually happened.”

“We know what—”

“Maybe we do,” Ciara says. “But maybe we don’t. The woman has been tortured, for years, by that one afternoon. Even all these years later, she can’t understand what happened to her son. The official story, what that detective said in court—it never answered her questions. And what the newspapers wrote, they say what happened before and what was found afterward, and that the two—that the boys had conflicting stories about what went on in between. But that’s it.”

“Because no one wanted the gory details of what two children did to another child. Because they were normal. Unlike you, apparently. And you’re wrong about it not answering Mam’s questions. The problem was she never got answers she liked.”

A beat passes.

“I know what you’re doing,” Siobhán says then, her tone gentle now. “Trust me. I’ve done it myself. But you’re looking for something that isn’t there. Yes, their stories contradicted each other. But they were twelve. They were in more trouble than they even knew. And the ending of both stories was exactly the same: murder. That’s what matters. Not the gruesome details.”

“That wasn’t what—”

“You can’t bring him back from the dead, Ciara. And do me a favor: stop pretending that this is about Mam.”

A waiter arrives with their Cokes, his eyebrows rising slightly as he seems to catch the end of what Siobhan said. After he leaves, she announces that since she’s spent the morning inspecting biohazard waste facilities at the Bon Secours hospital—Siobhán works in medical waste management—it’s probably no harm for her to wash her hands one more time before the food arrives.

“And when I come back,” she says, “we talk about something else.”

As Siobhán walks off toward the bathrooms, Ciara turns to look out of the window.

The nose-picker is counting out coins for a tip with the same hand he’d been picking with.

Anywhere from one to six months.

It’s hardly any time at all. Almost certainly not enough to get to the truth of what happened that day at Mill River—those five, ten minutes seventeen years ago that would rob her of a brother, her father of his will to live and, according to Siobhán, the mother Ciara would have had otherwise.

But she has to try.

Siobhán is right: Ciara wants to be able to set their mother’s mind at some semblance of ease before she goes, but she needs the truth too, for herself.

The question is . . . how to get it?