56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

56 Days Ago

“Go ahead,” are the first words he ever says to her.

It’s Friday lunchtime and her fifth time following Oliver into the Tesco opposite his office building, swinging the Space Shuttle tote bag on her arm, pretending to be just another office worker buying yet another unimaginative meal deal. Today, though, she lost him somewhere inside and then, distracted, had picked up a bottle of water of the kind with a sickly sweet fruit flavor added. She can’t afford to spend money on props; this will actually be her lunch. So she’s paused by a stack of Easter eggs (Easter? Already?), wondering if she can be bothered to go back and change it. That’s when she looks up and sees him, standing less than two feet away, leaving a space for her to join the line ahead of him.

She’s never got this close, never been able to look directly at him. Never felt his presence before now.

She can’t do this, she thinks. She’s not able to.

He’s got a strange look on his face. Expectant, almost. Like he’s . . . challenging her? Does he know who she is? Know what she’s planning on doing? She feels like her real motivation is on naked display, written all over her face. If she could just get a hold of herself, take a minute to prepare . . .

She’ll come again, she thinks. On Monday.

She’ll be more ready then.

“It’s okay,” she says, starting to turn. “I’ve just realized I’ve got the wrong one.”

Ciara turns and heads back toward the fridges, feeling his eyes on her as she moves away.

And the beat of her own heart, pulsing with promise.

She takes her time swapping the water and then walks to the very back of the store, making a show of searching for something, before going to the tills and joining the line there again.

He’s long gone.

She finally feels like she can breathe again.

But then, when she gets outside, she hears a voice say, “Nice bag.”

It’s him. Standing in the next doorway, looking right at her. The sandwich he’s just bought is tucked under his arm, getting squished by the pressure. There’s the hint of a grin on his face, tinged with something else she can’t readily identify.

She stops. “My . . . ?”

“Your bag,” he says, pointing to the NASA tote.

And she takes this as a sign.

Due to the reporting restrictions, the details in the articles she’d found were scant, but they’d all spared a column inch to mention the fact that Boy B had hidden a bloodstained T-shirt with a NASA logo in a rubbish bag inside a holdall under his bed. His grandmother had bought it for him. It proved, his legal team argued, that he didn’t want to hurt Paul Kelleher, that he had never intended to, but that after Shane had, Oliver had gone to the boy’s assistance, tried to help.

“Thanks,” she says. “It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—”

“New York,” he finishes. “The one on the aircraft carrier, right? Have you been?”

It was seventeen years ago, he was a child, and maybe he didn’t even like space things. Maybe his grandmother was playing a guessing game. But it was all she had, and then, when she’d seen the bag in the window of the charity shop . . .

But it turns out he did.

And still does.

“Yeah,” she says. “Once.”

He can’t have been there. He wouldn’t have been. She’d checked: the space shuttle on display there was only added in 2012, and she presumes he can’t have traveled to the United States since he got out of Oberstown because he’d have had to declare his conviction at immigration. For direct flights from Ireland, that happened at the airport on this end; America had Homeland Security controls at Dublin and Shannon. He wouldn’t even have made it onto the plane.

And memories of one visit a while back should be easy enough for her to flub.

He asks, “Was it good?”

Ciara hesitates, because this is it. This is where she makes her choice.

People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course.

Moments like this.

She wants the truth of what happened that day for her mother, before the woman’s time runs out. She was never the same after that fateful day, after the knock on the door that revealed two strange men outside, one in a Garda uniform, one in a dark suit, both of them looking apologetic and solemn.

I’m afraid we need to ask your son some questions.

It had broken something in her mother’s soul that could never be repaired, that had somehow only grown more broken since.

It’s about the local boy who went missing, Paul Kelleher.

But Ciara also needs the truth for herself.

It may not bother Siobhán—or her sister might do a good job of pretending it doesn’t—but for Ciara, the not knowing is a torment. Both boys had different stories; in each, the other was the ringleader, the real killer, the bad seed that started it all. The Gardaí had a third: who started it didn’t matter, because they’d both contributed to the boy’s death.

Is Shane in? Could you ask him to come down?

The jury considered everything—how quickly Oliver had let go of his lies, his tortured tears in interviews, the bloodstained NASA T-shirt—and decided that whatever had happened had happened because Shane took the lead. Perhaps this was helped by the fact that their family lived in a house in Mill River set aside for social housing, that her father was one of the long-term unemployed and that, before any of this had happened, Shane had struggled to concentrate at school and been held back a year. Meanwhile, Oliver’s family occupied one of only six detached, corner houses on the estate that came with an extra acre, he had two doctors for parents and one of his character references was the parish priest. He even looked better—clean, neat, and handsome compared to Shane’s pale pudginess and spray of angry red acne. The judge punished Shane with a sentence of no less than twenty years and promised Oliver he’d be out at eighteen, which by then was less than five.

Ciara could remember the foreign stillness hanging over the house hours after the sentencing, her lying on the camp bed in Siobhán’s room because for months she’d been unable to sleep in a room alone, knowing they were both wide awake, staring into the dark.

“What happened?” she’d asked her sister.

“Your brother murdered someone,” came the flat reply.

Ever since, whenever anyone got close, Ciara felt something clamp down inside of her, something sharp and dangerous, like a bear-trap. Fearing that there’s something in her soul that lies in wait, a part of her unknown even to herself, a dark, barbed-wire thread through her DNA that could make awful things happen if the opportunity arose.

How can she be sure she isn’t like him?

She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most. Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s fear she struggles with. She thinks courage might be choosing between what you want now and what you want the most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the doors. To retreat. To stay in the place where she feels safe and secure. In this moment, that’s nowhere near Dublin, or KB Studios, or Oliver St Ledger.

But she needs to know what happened that day.

Exactlywhat happened.

Who or what Shane was then. Who or what he might be now, if he had lived.

And here is her chance.

“Yeah,” she says. “But not as good as Kennedy Space Center.”