56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

61 Days Ago

Ciara is dreaming of Mill River. She doesn’t have many clear memories of the place but her subconscious fills in the details, making the river more of a trickling stream, lining its bed with tiny pebbles, and clearing its banks of trees, so you can see the water from the estate, and you can see right through the water to the pale limbs that lie—

Her phone is ringing.

Through the fog of half-sleep, Ciara reaches for her bedside table where it’s always plugged in overnight, but there’s no phone or bedside table.

When she opens her eyes, she finds an unfamiliar scene: a small living room filled with mismatched furniture, grubby white walls that could do with a fresh coat of paint, sunshine streaming through paper-thin curtains. And she appears to be lying in a bed in sheets she doesn’t recognize right in the middle of it, which doesn’t make any sense until . . . The last dregs of sleep leave her like clouds parting in the sky, and she remembers.

She couldn’t afford to stay in the hotel and keep paying her rent back home, so she’d found a cheaper alternative via Airbnb. The owner was surprisingly agreeable, happy to take cash payments and to let the place out week to week; it was the off-season, she figured, and he was probably happy with any level of occupancy. But then she’d collected the key, let herself in, and discovered the truth: the photos online had been taken at extremely generous angles and the guy was lucky to have anyone paying any amount of money to stay there at all.

The ringing is coming from the tiny kitchen, tucked away on the other side of the room. Ciara throws back the sheets and hurries toward the sound, finding her phone vibrating angrily on the Formica countertop.

SHIV, the screen says.

Shit.

Ciara knew that, sooner or later, she’d have to explain herself to her sister, but she was hoping for more of the later bit.

“Hello?” Her voice comes out croaky and dry. She tries again, does marginally better. “Hello?”

“Oh, so you are alive,” Siobhán snaps. She’s outdoors; Ciara can hear the sound of passing traffic and whipping wind. “Get up and let me in. I’m downstairs. Is your buzzer broken or something? I’ve been pressing it for ages.”

Ciara can’t think of a single other Sunday when her sister randomly showed up at her front door, but of course she would do it today. The woman must have a sixth sense.

“I’m not there,” Ciara says. “Am I supposed to be?”

“Where the hell are you?”

“In Dublin.”

“In Dublin?”

“I have a job interview.”

“A job interview?”

“Are you just going to repeat everything I say, Shiv?”

“Yes, until you tell me what the hell is going on.”

“An opportunity came up,” Ciara says carefully. She has practiced this but needs to avoid making it sound that way. “We have a new property opening up here in the summer and they were looking for someone from Events to be on the opening team. I applied for it months ago. I’d forgotten about it, to be honest, until they sent me an email last week. I can’t see myself taking it, especially not now, with Mam. But I figured I may as well go along. For the experience. It’s first thing tomorrow morning but I came up yesterday to, you know . . .”

“Abuse your employee discount?”

That doesn’t kick in until she’s worked for the company for twelve months, but since it’s an easy explanation, Ciara says, “Exactly. Yeah.”

A beat passes.

“Are you sure about the not-taking-it bit?” Siobhán asks. “Because with Mam and everything . . .”

“I’m sure,” Ciara says. “Why were you calling over?”

“Because I made the mistake of drinking a liter of coffee before I left for my walk.”

“Go buy another one at the café on the corner. Millie’s. You can use the bathroom in there.”

“I think I’ll have to. It’s Situation Critical.”

Ciara ends the call and immediately feels terrible about lying to her sister. She wishes she could tell her the truth, which is that the truth is what she’s chasing.

But Siobhán doesn’t even want to hear Oliver St Ledger’s name, let alone that Ciara has been playing internet detective and has now temporarily moved to another city to see if she can accidentally on purpose cross paths with him and ask him questions about that day, the one that cracked open a fault line through the heart of their family.

To discover the full horror of it, whatever it may be.

So that their family—what’s left of it—can maybe find some peace.

But lying, it turns out, is hard. She’s told her boss at work that she needs to take a few personal days because of her mother’s worsening health situation, and now Siobhán that she’s come to Dublin to interview for a job that doesn’t exist. She hasn’t even approached Oliver St Ledger yet and already it feels like there are multiple threads to keep hold of, to keep straight in her head.

She won’t be able to do this. She’s just not cut out for this sort of thing.

Ciara goes back into the main room and to the assortment of items laid out on the couch. She’d only packed a bag for an overnight stay but returning to Cork to collect more things was out of the question; there was the expense of another train ticket, but mostly it was Ciara’s absolute certainty that if she left Dublin now, she would never come back.

She’s just about got the nerve to stay.

She knows she doesn’t have enough to travel all the way back here, again.

So she had to go shopping, on an extremely tight budget. The huge Primark on O’Connell Street had provided extra clothes and underwear, toiletries, a notebook. She takes the notebook now, opens it to a fresh page, and scribbles down in bullet points what she told Siobhán.

Just in case.

She’d had to go elsewhere to find the other things she needed. Eason’s for the blue lanyard and compact laminating machine. The Three store on Grafton Street for her pay-as-you-go phone. The stationers next to Oliver’s office for printing her new ID.

There’d been a guy of about eighteen or nineteen working the counter at the time, and he’d handed over the envelope very slowly, staring at her with a weird look on his face. “It’s for a costume party,” Ciara had said to him, at which point he’d tried—and failed—to act like he had no idea what she was referring to.

And then to one of the charity shops on South Great George’s Street for the thing she didn’t know she’d needed.

She’d just happened to be passing by on her roundabout way back from O’Connell Street when she’d seen it in the window, artfully arranged as part of a themed display. There must have been a rash of space-themed donations lately, and the shop was taking advantage. There was a LEGO Saturn V rocket, already built but standing next to its pristine box; a stack of astronaut biographies; and a blanket, mug, and T-shirt sporting NASA logos.

And a little tote bag, showing the space shuttle flying over skyscrapers.

It was stamped with a logo that said “Intrepid,” which, when Ciara googled it on her phone, turned out to be a museum on an aircraft carrier in New York.

Ciara knew absolutely nothing about who Oliver St Ledger was now, and only very little about who he’d once been. If she had to make a list of things that interested him she’d have to guess, and she could only really do it twice. Rugby, based on a photo from nearly two decades ago in a school newsletter—which, she’d have to presume, they didn’t offer the opportunity to do much of in Oberstown, the juvenile detention center. And space, based on the T-shirt he was wearing the day of the murder, the one that had ended up covered in someone else’s blood.

It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t likely that either of those things still played any kind of role in Oliver St Ledger’s life. But it was all she had, and she knew absolutely nothing about rugby. She could at least fake the space thing a bit. Read a few Wikipedia pages, rewatch Apollo 13.

And just because you were interested in it didn’t necessarily mean you knew every last detail about it. You didn’t have to be obsessive. You could just be the kind of person who was interested enough to have bought yourself a souvenir after a visit to a museum.

Something practical, easily carried around, put on display without looking obvious.

A conversation starter, maybe. Hopefully.

Ciara makes herself a cup of tea and picks up another one of her purchases: the newspaper she bought yesterday that she ended up feeling too sleepy to read when she got back. She spreads it open now, across the piles of things on the couch, and scans the front-page headline.

first irish coronavirus case confirmed.