56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

23 Days Ago

“It was just a normal day. I was walking home from school with this other boy from my class, Shane, and . . .”

Ciara puts her head down so Oliver can’t see her face, can’t judge her reaction. She holds her body as still as she can, tries not to shake, tries not to cry.

How is she supposed to do this?

How is she supposed to listen to this and not react, not reveal that she knows this already, that he’s describing not only what he did, but what her own brother did, too?

“It was all over something so stupid,” he says. “And we were stupid. But in just a matter of minutes, everything got completely out of hand.”

She’s encouraged to see that his eyes are filling with tears.

He talks about Paul Kelleher, about how he used to follow them home, and how on this day he did it while throwing stones.

“Most of them miss, but a couple hit our schoolbags and then Shane gets one square in the back of his head. And he like, reels around on Paul, and I think he’s going to roar at him or something, but instead he says, ‘Okay, fine. You can come with us. We’re going down to the water to skim stones.’ And then he gives me this look, like . . . Follow my lead. And he takes off running. Paul follows him. I do, too.”

She tries to imagine her brother behaving this way, attempts to play the scene out in her head like a film reel. But she was only eight at the time, and her memories from then feel fake and edited, as if contaminated by family photographs and stories she’s heard since. She doesn’t feel at all confident that she could say who Shane really was, what was he like, how he tended to behave.

“The estate was built on the bank of the river,” Oliver says, “that’s where it got its name.”

I know.

“The houses kind of sloped down to the water, and then in order to actually get to it, you had to climb through some trees.”

I remember.

“So once the three of us were down there, we were pretty much hidden from view. And that’s when . . .” He swallows. “That’s when . . . That’s when Shane just starts, like, pummeling Paul. That’s the only word I could use to describe it. Shane had been kept back a year, he was nearly thirteen by then, and Paul was small for his age . . . I don’t remember everything but I remember Shane towering over Paul, and Paul looking at up at him”—his voice cracks—“like—like—” He pauses, tries to regain his composure. “At first, I didn’t intervene. I just stood there. But then Shane was like, come on, and Paul was kind of squirming, trying to get away, and he’d started to cry by then, so I went and I”—his voice cracks again here, goes up a pitch—“I didn’t intervene. I joined in. I held him. By the arms. In place. So that Shane could keep . . . So that Shane could—”

He stops, swallows hard.

Ciara’s heart feels like it’s breaking in two, ripping down an invisible seam, bursting open like stitches. One half is heartsick about what Shane did, about what he was capable of doing . . .

But the other is filling with warmth, with feeling, with love maybe, even, for how much regret Oliver feels about it now, how much it hurts him just to tell the story.

He’s a good man, she thinks. Now. He turned out to be.

Maybe Shane would’ve too, if he’d gotten this far.

They made a terrible, terrible mistake—something that the word mistake doesn’t even begin to cover. That’s not in dispute. But they were children, ones who’d never done anything like it before, who’d been perfectly average, everyday kids up until this awful afternoon.

And now Oliver wouldn’t even break the travel limit.

Shane might have been all right.

Everythingmight have been.

Ciara desperately wishes he were here to prove that himself. And to show it to their mother, to take away the pain she’d felt for so many years, the blame she’d inflicted on herself, the responsibility she’d taken for his actions.

She’d always blamed herself.

“I was his mother,” she’d used to mutter, its implication lost on nine- or ten-year-old Ciara at the time.

Soon after, her mother had stopped talking about it altogether.

“Shane says to Paul, we’re going to wash the blood off in the river. And I just knew what was going to happen, what he’d decided to do, but it was like—It was like there was one half of me that felt like, yeah, good idea, that’s what we have to do, what I have do now, to help Shane, to protect him, to stop him from getting in trouble. But at the same time, the other half of me was looking at Paul, all covered in blood, saying okay and obediently following Shane down to the water, and that part wanted to scream, ‘What the hell are you doing? Run. Run away.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. Instead, I . . . I just followed them to the water and I helped Shane push Paul into it and then I helped hold him down. Until . . . Until he drowned.”

Silence.

Ciara feels sick. For so many years, she had wanted the details and now that she has them, she’d give anything to give them back.

“The guards came that night,” Oliver says. “To our homes.”

I was there when they arrived.

“Everything happened really quickly after that.”

The way I remember it everything happened in quick succession, one long horrific blur of tears and whispered arguments and a house as quiet and sad and empty as a funeral home.

“We were charged and sent to Oberstown—it’s a juvenile detention center. There was a trial. Our identities had to remain a secret so we became Boy A and Boy B. We were both found guilty of murder, but got different sentences based on our level of . . . involvement. I got out on my eighteenth birthday and Shane . . . Well, Shane took his own life on his. He still had another fifteen years to go at that point.”

She looks up at the mention of Shane’s suicide, hoping that, somehow, Oliver has more information about it, that he can tell her more about why her brother did such a thing, what it was that had, evidently, pushed him to his absolute limit. She’d never seen him again after his arrest and what little she knew about his time in Oberstown she’d picked up from eavesdropping on whispered conversations.

“I’m not some evil seed, Ciara. I’m no psycho monster. I was just a child who, for five minutes, completely lost his fucking mind. A kid who, on the way home from school one afternoon, made a stupid, terrible mistake because he didn’t want to look like a coward in front of his older, bigger friend. I was twelve. I couldn’t undo it so I did the next best thing: from that moment on, ever since, I have tried to make up for it. I have done every single thing I was supposed to. I took my punishment. I was a model detainee. Did all the therapy, obeyed all the rules. Whatever they asked of me, I did it and then more besides. And since the day I was released I haven’t as much as littered. But it doesn’t matter what I do because all anyone thinks about, all anyone cares about, is what I did.”

He moves closer to her.

One step, two.

“And then I meet you. And you like me. And when I’m with you, it’s like . . . I feel like me. The me I should’ve been. The me I really was. Am. And even though I knew it couldn’t last, knew you’d find me out eventually, I kept wanting to feel that way, so I kept seeing you. And then, unbelievably, a bloody global pandemic comes along, and we hear there’s going to be a lockdown, and you’re living in this tiny apartment, working from home, just moved to Dublin, not knowing anybody and”—he shakes his head as if in disbelief—“you don’t even use social media, so I think to myself, I’ll just take these two weeks. I won’t tell her for two more weeks. And I hoped, I desperately hoped, that by the time the truth came out, you’d have seen enough of me to know that this is me. Now. Here.”

She is desperate to tell him that she knows.

And what she feels. Which is that she knows this, here, now, is who Oliver really is. These last few weeks.

The night she stood here, in this room, in his embrace and saw the scar. The evening on the terrace, when he surprised her. The sunny day in the park.

Every little good thing, she collected them all and kept them safe in her heart, because every one was proof that Shane wasn’t evil, that he was good, that he could’ve lived a good life and been a good man if he’d just been able to hang on long enough to come back out into the world, like Oliver had.

And somewhere along the way, she’d started to love Oliver, too.

And now, she wants to stay. To be with him.

To turn this into something real.

But first, she has to tell him her truth, reveal who she really is, how she found him, why she did.

So they can forgive each other, and start afresh.

But now is not the time. Let the dust from the demolition of these lies, the ruins of the past, settle. Let the shock absorb.

Until then, for now, she has to act like anyone else would, hearing all this for the first time. So she gets up and runs out of the room, into the bathroom, and does her best to sound like she’s being sick into the toilet bowl.