56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
18 Days Ago
When Oliver awakes, the bedroom is bright with early morning sun and something is different about it. He pulls himself up onto his elbows, looks around. It was messier last night, he thinks; there’s no clothes strewn about the floor now. The air is odorless and the window has been opened—he can hear the chirping of birds outside. He’s grateful for the glass of water he finds on his bedside table and gulps it down greedily, trying to banish the layers of acrid dryness that coat his throat.
Noises, in the kitchen: running water, the pump of the coffee machine, the tinkling of a spoon inside a cup.
She stayed here last night then. All night.
He hopes that’s a good sign.
Oliver puts on fresh clothes, acutely aware that this would be his fourth day in a row wearing the same ones otherwise, wincing at the pain in his elbow and then vaguely recalling walloping it on something last night.
He quickly brushes his teeth and splashes his face with water in the bathroom before he goes into the main room to meet her.
“Good morning,” she says.
“Good morning.”
She’s sitting on the couch, drinking coffee. Perched on it, really, back ramrod straight. She looks tense. Braced.
He’s unsure whether or not it’s okay for him to sit down beside her so he hedges his bets, sitting on the couch but at the opposite end, leaving plenty of space between them.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Okay.”
“Did you sleep?”
Not really, he thinks. He tossed and turned, and he lay awake in the dark, and even though every limb was heavy with exhaustion and his eyes were stinging and his temples throbbed—even though all he wanted to do was go to sleep—his body, for whatever reason, wouldn’t let him in.
“I got a little,” he says. “I dozed. Where did you go? Over the weekend?”
“Home. Where else could I go? There’s a lockdown, remember.”
With everything that’s going on, he’s not sure he did.
“What time is it?” he asks.
She leans forward to tap her phone, illuminating the screen.
“Seven thirty-five,” she says. “On Easter Monday.”
He’d forgotten about that, too.
There’s a part of him that would like to keep going like this, talking as they are, suspended in limbo.
But a larger part of him has to ask the question, has to know:
“Are you back?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, she leans back, sighs. “I don’t know what I am, Oliver, to be honest.”
He risks moving a little closer.
“I can’t say this enough, I know, but I am sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you, but I just didn’t see another way. If I told you that up front, if you knew—”
“Would you ever hurt me?”
He recoils as if she’s slapped him. “What?”
“You can’t blame me for asking.”
“Ciara, I would never—”
“But how do I know? I don’t know what you’re capable of now, do I? And I was living with you and absolutely no one knew I was here. Well, except for a journalist, as it turns out. What about her, by the way? What are we going to do about that?”
The we sends a balloon of hope rising in his heart, but remembering Laura pierces it instantly.
“She can’t legally print my name,” he says.
“What about your picture?”
He shakes his head, no. “It’s my identity that’s protected, so anything that might lead to the discovery of that . . .”
Ciara nods slowly, as if considering this.
“I know this is all a lot to take in,” Oliver says. “I just want you to know—and I’m probably the only person in the entire country who can say this—but these last couple of weeks . . . they were the happiest of my life.”
Silence.
Oliver holds his breath.
“Mine too,” Ciara says softly, eventually. “But now . . . Now I don’t know what to do. Or think.”
“You don’t have to forgive me,” he says. “Know that. And being with me isn’t condoning what I did either. I won’t take it as that. You know I don’t condone it. Far from it. But it was a long time ago. And I take responsibility for it—I did take responsibility, I served my time. I live with the regret of that one afternoon every single day and I will until the day I die. But that doesn’t change what we have, what we’ve had these last few weeks. When you were here, that first night you came over, I felt . . .” The lump in his throat is back. He tries and fails to swallow it away. “I just want to feel that again, Ciara. I wish we could. So tell me what I need to do. Tell me what you need to hear from me to make you want to stay.”
She looks at him then in a way that reminds him of that first day by the canal, that first night here in this room, all the mornings since—
He reaches for her.
He pulls her into his arms, presses his cheek against hers, puts his head on her shoulder.
And, miraculously, she lets him.
Slowly but surely, he feels her relax her body into his, feels her arms reach around him, feels the squeeze of her hand on his back.
He’s too scared to move, in case it stops, goes away.
When she speaks, her voice is muffled against his chest.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Can’t we just feel our way through this?” he whispers.
The nod of her head is practically imperceptible.
He dares find her lips with his. She hesitates at first but then responds, pulling him in, kissing him back.
It’s a weird day for both of them, stepping around each other as if on eggshells, not sure what the other one is feeling in any given moment, anxious that it’s not the same.
He’s too afraid to ask her if she’s going to stay that night, afraid that that will open up an opportunity for her to realize that coming back was a mistake, that she can’t be with him, that she can’t even stand to look at him. There’s already been a few times when she turns to him and inhales as if she’s about to say something, but then changes her mind and doesn’t.
And all the while, Oliver is trying to ignore his most pressing problem: he hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep in going on five days.
It’s taking its toll. He can feel himself shifting into the most dangerous stage, the one he usually tries to avoid: when the fabric of reality starts getting unpicked by unseen forces, when he starts to hear and see things that aren’t there. And then there are the moments of what he’s been told is called microsleep—when he does fall asleep, but uncontrollably, and only for a few moments at a time—which usually signal that he’s reaching the end of the line, that he’s testing his limits, and that if he doesn’t take action soon things could get really, really bad.
He doesn’t want to have to check out now, on the day that Ciara came back, when things between them are so delicate and tenuous, but if he doesn’t sleep, he could ruin everything inadvertently. So, as the sun starts its retreat from the sky, he admits to her that he’s going to have to take one of his pills.
“Oh,” she says. She sounds disappointed. “Should I leave? I can come back—”
“No, no. You can stay. If you want to, I mean.”
“What happens when you take one?”
“I conk out.” He smiles. “That’s about it.”
“And you’ll be, like, all right tomorrow, then?”
“A bit groggy,” he says. “But feeling one hundred percent less zombielike.”
She smiles at him now, for the first time since the Truth, and it’s like a radiator inserted into his chest.
He takes her hand. “Thank you. For coming back. For still being here.” He leans over and kisses her, light but lingering, on the cheek.
When he pulls back, he sees that her eyes are filled with tears.
“Ciara—” he starts.
“Sorry,” she says, wiping at them. “I haven’t really slept either the last few days. I think I could probably do with a good night’s sleep too.”
He waves a hand, indicating the bedroom. “I don’t mind if you take the bed, I could sleep here.”
“No, no. It’s fine.” She reaches for his hand, squeezes it. “Do you want to eat first or . . . ?”
“Better if I don’t.”
“I might order something. Or run over to Georgie’s.”
“Your keys are still on the hall table,” he says.
“Thanks. I’ll try to be quiet.”
“There’s really no need. You could have a rave in here and I wouldn’t hear it. Those things completely knock me out.”
Oliver goes into the kitchen to pour a glass of water from the sink, and then into the bathroom to get a tablet. In his experience, they take a few minutes—maybe as many as ten—to start to kick in, at which point you’d better get yourself into bed because the next stage falls like a curtain, like a heavy object from a great height.
If he’s standing he will fall down, wherever he is.
And God, he’s ready for it, this blissful unconsciousness. He wants to stop feeling as awful as he does. He wants to wake up tomorrow feeling rested and energized and ready to start building a life with Ciara, for the rest of his life—his After—to finally begin.
He swallows a tablet.
He goes back into the bedroom, takes off his shoes and socks and then, too exhausted to bother with the rest, pulls back the blankets and climbs into bed. He hears the living-room door close with a soft click and then the muffled sound of the TV on at low volume.
He closes his eyes.
He opens them again.
From this angle, he has a line of sight out into the hallway. Ciara’s bag is sitting on the floor there, her large black leather one with the handles that doesn’t close at the top. She would normally drop it on the floor of the bedroom, but she hasn’t set foot in here since she returned.
What has got his attention is what he can see sticking out of it: a large black Moleskine notebook, with the corner of a paper napkin sticking out of that.
The napkin has the logo of the Sidecar Bar printed on it.
That’s the bar at the Westbury, where they had their first date. Did she take it from the bar the night they went there, to keep as a souvenir?
The thought that all the way back then—only a few weeks in reality, but what feels like years in lockdown time—she was thinking that this, him and her, was going to be something fills him with a sleepy warmth.
He raises his head, holds his breath, listens.
The fridge door opening and closing; Ciara is in the kitchen.
Oliver throws back the covers, gets up and goes to the bag. He already feels a little woozy, so he keeps his hands held out for emergency wall contact, should the need arise. He’s not planning on snooping, he just wants to know for sure. He wants to be able to take the promise of Ciara’s love with him to bed, to infuse it into his dreams. If she still has that, even after Wednesday, and if she’s carrying it around with her . . .
That has to be a good sign, right?
He bends to reach for the napkin, pulls it out.
Something is written on it. Notes, it looks like, in blue pen.
French 75
NYC bar—no sign/secret door
Only child
He blinks at it, confused. It looks like a list of things they talked about on the night but . . .
Why would she write these things down?
Maybe she keeps a diary, he thinks, and she was just making notes to help her remember things until she got a chance to write about them, later.
His eyes stray from the napkin in his hand to the notebook in the bag.
And then to the closed door of the living room.
He reaches for the notebook.
It has the bloated, crinkled look of heavy use. He opens it, flicks through. Each page is filled with Ciara’s handwriting.
He stops randomly at one.
Space shuttles
Challenger—1/28/86, O-ring failure (cold), explosion at “throttle up“
Columbia—2/1/03, foam strike/tiles damaged, burned up on reentry
Atlantis—KSC Florida
Discovery—Smithsonian, Virginia
Endeavour—California Science Center
Enterprise—Intrepid, NYC (test vehicle)
If the TV is still on next door he can’t tell anymore, because he can’t hear anything over the thunderous rush of blood in his ears.
He turns the page and finds a square of printed text, glued onto it. The paper is glossy and smooth, as if from a magazine. It looks like it’s been cropped from an interview; there’s a question printed in bold at the top and then the corresponding answer underneath.
He turns another page.
2020—left Apple (Cork)
2017—graduated Swansea
2002—moved to Isle of Man (7)
He flips to the back cover, where a piece of paper has been folded in half and taped in place along one short edge. He unfolds it, turns the notebook so he can read what’s on it. It looks like a screenshot of a LinkedIn profile for a woman named Ciara Wyse who lives in Dublin and works for Cirrus, but the accompanying profile picture is of someone else.
There’s a fog rolling in now from all edges of his brain, making everything cloudy, blocking all pathways out, cutting off the trails of his thoughts before they can even establish themselves.
It’s a familiar feeling and, he knows, a chemical one.
It can’t be stopped.
He knows this, and yet he wants to push it back, to keep a little space clear in the middle, so he can think straight, so he can figure out . . .
This notebook.
Things she told him, but written down.
With dates like . . .
Like she needed to remember them.
Not a diary, but a . . .
Through the fog, he sees three words emerge clearly.
A cover story.
Ciara needed a cover story.
He looks again at the living-room door and wonders who—what—is actually in there.
But the fog is growing thick, swirling, taking over. He stumbles a little, and has to reach out and place both palms on the wall to steady himself.
She’s a journalist after all. That’s what Ciara is. What she has to be. It’s the only explanation.
Which means he can’t let himself fall asleep.
He cannot.
No.
Oliver turns and stumbles into the bathroom, feeling woozy, drunk. When he looks down, the ground seems very far beyond his own bare feet. And it’s moving, the streaks of pale marble in the tiles morphing and swirling—
He falls to his knees, holds his head over the toilet bowl, and sticks his fingers down his throat. It’s too late to stop it, but maybe he can delay it a bit. Long enough to think.
Long enough to figure out what he needs to do.
With her.
But the fog is swirling, clouding his mind, pulling his eyelids down. He can see it coming toward him on a black tide.
Cold water. He can keep himself awake with cold water.
Oliver hoists himself up and steps into the shower—his elbow burns with a fresh pain; he must have hit it—and smacks the lever until a monsoon shower of droplets starts hitting his skin. But the temperature is set to its usual one—warm, getting warmer—and it just makes him want to go to sleep even more. He twists the dial he thinks will make it cold, but it doesn’t get cold. No change.
His hands are starting to feel as if they’re detached from his body, as if he’s watching someone else’s hands at work, and they don’t seem to have any grip.
The sink, he thinks. There’s cold water in the sink.
He stumbles back out of the shower, hitting the porcelain basin with his body and narrowly missing hitting his head on the mirror hanging above it.
He turns on the tap. Ice cold.
He tries to fill his cupped hands with enough water to throw at his face.
“Oliver?”
She’s standing in the doorway, staring at him. He doesn’t even remember turning around.
“What’s wrong?” she says. “What are you doing?”
Her words sound distorted, like some unseen editor has slowed down the audio.
“Who are you?” he spits through his teeth.
He looks around for the notebook, the napkin, but he can’t see them.
He can’t remember what he did with them.
“Oliver, did you already take your pill? Because I think you should be in—”
He feels himself sway and tries to take a step to steady himself, reaching out for the shower door he hopes is where he thinks it is, but he stumbles and then he’s falling and there’s an impact and pain and a wall rushing toward him and the sound of breaking, falling, shattered glass—
And then Ciara screams.