56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

50 Days Ago

Leo is about to make a statement, live from Washington, DC. The apartment doesn’t have a TV so Ciara finds a live stream online and watches it horizontal on the couch with her laptop balanced on her stomach.

It’s not even light over there yet. He walks to an artificially lit podium set up outside a grand-looking building shrouded in predawn darkness, his face solemn and serious.

She wonders what he’s thinking. He’s a medical doctor as well as the leader of the country. He must understand more than most.

He begins to speak, slowly and deliberately, reading easily from some unseen teleprompter, but looking as if he’s talking directly to the lens.

The virus is all over the world.

We have not witnessed a pandemic of this nature in living memory.

We will prevail.

As soon as the program cuts back to the talking heads in the news studio, Ciara shuts the laptop and then surprises herself by bursting into hard, hot tears.

She’s not scared, at least not physically; the virus may be in the country but it still feels very far away from her. It’s mostly a benign flu, from what they say. She trusts that the people who are supposed to know how to protect her from this will, that they already are. But all this is still . . .

Well, scary.

Some of the things the Taoiseach said she’d heard before, many times, but in sci-fi virus thrillers and postapocalyptic zombie movies, not from the mouth of the leader of her country in a press conference so pressing he had to do it in the predawn dark on the other side of an ocean.

And this is real-world.

Hers.

Her mother once told her that the scariest thing she saw on TV on 9/11 was a live shot of the southern tip of Manhattan when thick, dusty smoke was billowing into the sky from between the injured buildings. It was a familiar shot of a city her mother felt she knew even though she’d never been, because she’d seen it destroyed and invaded and exploded countless times across decades’ worth of TV shows and Hollywood movies. But this scene was rendered utterly alien by the fact that it was happening for real. The mundane and the incomprehensible, smashed violently together—it caused cognitive dissonance, her mother had said. She’d read about it somewhere, probably in one of her self-help books.

What if she gets this thing?

Ciara can’t deal with that particular worry right now, so she replaces it with another one: Why hasn’t Oliver called her?

They’re supposed to meet again in a few hours, but she hasn’t heard from him since he put her in that cab outside the Westbury three days ago. It’s exhausting to be worried and actively trying to keep yourself from not being that. The very fact that plans are already in place might well be why he hasn’t called or messaged her. Everything is set except for the exact time and actual location of their meeting, and maybe he’s presuming they’ll meet outside his office after work just like they did last time, because this is the thing they were supposed to do last time but didn’t, so maybe in his mind this promised text is just a formality, firmly in the just checking we’re still on category of communication, and that’s why he’s leaving it until the last minute.

Or maybe he’s changed his mind.

The radio silence since Monday night can be bent to support both hypotheses, that’s the problem.

And can they even still go to the cinema, after Leo’s speech?

Ciara opens up her laptop again and surfs national news sites until she finds a bulleted list of what’s happening, published ten minutes ago and updated in the last two. She scrolls down. Schools, colleges, and childcare facilities will close. Museums, theaters, and other cultural institutions will close, too. No mass gatherings of more than one hundred people indoors or five hundred out, which still sounds like an awful lot to her. Shops, restaurants, and bars to remain open but with the immediate implementation of social-distancing measures. Everyone must aim to limit their social interaction.

It sounds straightforward but nothing is, not now. Cinemas aren’t mentioned by name—do they qualify as a cultural institution? Or are they like shops or bars, somewhere that can remain open so long as they limit the number of people allowed inside? Oliver said this one is small, so it may not even have that many seats, and, really, how many people are going to go see a space documentary on a Thursday night? Especially now, after that. And what exactly does “limit social interaction” mean? If he is her only interaction, does that qualify as limiting?

What happens if he decides not to include her in his?

She closes her eyes and rubs at them in frustration.

Of course this would happen now. Of course it would. After all this time, she’s somehow managed to cultivate a seed . . .

And here comes a bloody once-in-a-lifetime, global pandemic to kill it off.

You couldn’t make it up.

Her phone rings, startling her. It’s wedged down the side of one of the couch cushions; in reaching for it, she accidentally answers the call. There’s no time to prepare for talking to the name she sees as she puts the device to her ear: OLIVER.

“Hello?” She’s immediately convinced that her attempt at sounding casual has failed spectacularly.

“Ciara?”

“Oliver.” She feels the urge to stand up. “How are you?”

“Good—apart from the whole, you know, end-times-plague thing. You?”

“Same.”

“Did you watch Leo’s speech just now?”

“Yeah.”

She starts pacing back and forth in front of the window.

“It’s all a bit surreal, isn’t it?” he says.

“Very.”

“Are you limiting yourself to one-word responses on purpose, or . . . ?”

“No.”

He laughs at that.

“So,” he says. “Tonight. I don’t know if the cinema is even still open . . . And I’m not sure if I really want to go there. Have you ever seen Outbreak?”

“Is that the one where a monkey bites the doctor from Grey’s Anatomy?”

“Odd angle, but factually correct.”

“Then yes. But years ago.”

“Well, there’s a scene in a cinema where you can actually see the germs coming out of people’s mouths. I thought it was funny at the time but now . . .” He sighs. “I don’t know. I could just be overreacting.”

She says, “Hmm,” because she doesn’t know where he’s going with this and doesn’t want to show her cards before he does.

This is so bloody exhausting. She wishes she could just press a button and skip ahead, past this part.

“We could do something else?” he suggests. “We could—”

“Yeah.”

“—go get a drink or something. Are you still in the office?”

Her mortification at reacting too eagerly is quickly replaced by terror that he might be about to suggest coming here.

“It’s just that I was going to say we could meet in the same spot,” he says. “Outside my office? But if—”

“No, no. That’d be great. Actually, I am working from home now, but I live, like, five minutes away from there, so . . .”

“We could meet somewhere else if it’s better?”

“No, no. That’s good. Let’s do that.”

“Five thirty?”

“See you then.”

He ends the call, and she falls back, spent, onto the couch, where she allows herself half a minute of sweet relief.

So she hasn’t fucked this up.

Yet.

Apart from how busy Tesco is and the disproportionate number of people rushing from its doors clutching jumbo-sized packs of paper products, nothing about Baggot Street seems to suggest that anything is wrong. All the shops are open, including the florist. So too are the cafés, pubs, and restaurants. Ciara thinks a few too many people are wearing winter gloves for this kind of weather, but that could just be because she’s looking for signs that the world has changed, evidence that these people are the kind who watch the news too. When she pulls the cuff of her coat down to avoid touching the button at the pedestrian crossing with her bare skin, it feels like overkill. A part of her hopes that no one has seen her do it, that he hasn’t.

But he couldn’t have, because he’s late today.

While she waits she tries to distract herself from overreacting to this by focusing on the two men standing outside Tesco in the plain black uniform of store security guards. One of them is sucking on a cigarette he’s keeping hidden in his palm, listening while the other one talks animatedly and points into the shop. A third person, a woman in a skirt suit, comes out and joins the conversation. She keeps glancing nervously behind her, back inside. Ciara thinks maybe they’re flustered about how many people are in-store.

This distraction works a little too well and Oliver is suddenly there, beside her, apologizing as he bends to kiss her on the cheek—an upgrade from their last greeting, sending a little electric shock through her skin. She feels the same flutter of nerves in the pit of her stomach that she did when she saw him the last time, and she wonders if this is what people mean when they talk about butterflies.

He blames his minor delay on a meeting that ran over. The partners had been hoping for the best and been uninterested in planning for the worst, so now the office is abruptly closing from tomorrow and no one quite knows how that’s going to work.

There’s a lot to figure out, he says.

“How about you? How are you getting on?”

“Grand,” she answers. “Honestly, it’s not even that different. My job is like ninety-nine percent silently staring at my computer anyway. Okay, I have to pay for my own VitaminWater now but, apart from that . . . My couch is a lot comfier than those horrible ergonomic chairs they make us sit on.”

“So are you, like, coding all day or . . . ?”

She smiles. “ ‘Coding’?”

“Oh yes, I know all the lingo.”

“Do you now?”

“What can I say? I read a lot of Wikipedia.”

She laughs. “I don’t code. I’m in web services. It’s like technical customer service. I’m basically the IT guy who asks if you’ve tried turning it off and on, but with cloud-computing clients so it’s a little bit more complicated than that.”

“I thought you lot made apps or something.”

“That’s just what we want you to think. The actual money is in server farms, cloud computing, slowly but surely moving toward a place where the entire internet will run on our equipment so our maleficent leader will effectively control the world . . . That kind of thing.”

“Should I be scared?”

“It won’t change anything.”

“Let’s go get a drink, then.”

He suggests a pub on Haddington Road, around the corner. They walk toward it side by side, without touching.

“You’re not thinking of going to Cork?” he asks. “To your parents?”

She’s confused and not just by the parents, plural. “For what?”

“It’s just that, one of the guys in the office, that’s his plan. Legging it to Galway tomorrow. His dad is a GP and he’s telling them that we’ll all be confined to our localities soon. There’ll be no going anywhere. Although personally I think he’s just looking for an excuse to make his mother do his washing. He’s a bit younger than us, so . . .”

“How do you know that?”

“What?”

“That he’s younger than us.”

Oliver raises an eyebrow. “Should I be bracing myself for a bombshell?”

She lets a beat pass, enjoying this. “I’m twenty-five.”

“Phew.” He mock-wipes at his brow. “Although I figured. You said you were Class of 2017. I did the maths.”

“Well done.”

“On a calculator.”

They cross Baggot Street by the bridge, passing a man carrying two boxes of beer, one stacked on top of the other, hurrying in the opposite direction.

Priorities, she thinks.

“This is the bit where you tell me how old you are,” she says.

He grins. “Is it?”

They reach the pub, which is actually more of a sports bar. One elderly man sits in the far corner of an enclosed smoking area at the front of the building, a box of cigarettes and a lighter neatly aligned on the table next to his pint.

As Oliver pulls the door open he says to her, “I’m twenty-nine. Just.”

Inside, a long, narrow room with a bar on the left stretches away from them. It’s full of nooks and crannies, of snugs and booths, and all of them are empty. Suspended screens are tuned to Sky Sports. There’s no music to compete with the commentators. If it hadn’t been for the man with the pint outside, she might think they’ve accidentally walked into a place that’s not open for business yet.

She tells Oliver he has quite the eclectic taste in drinking establishments.

“Yeah, well . . .” Again the hand on the small of her back, gently directing her to a booth just inside the door, protected from the rest of the bar by a stained-glass partition. “I’ve chosen tonight’s location purely based on its potential infection rate.”

“Lovely.” She slides into the booth. “But how about we not talk about that? I’m in the mood to stick my head in the sand for an hour.”

“Fair enough. What can I get you?”

“A glass of white wine, please.”

“Any particular kind?”

“So long as it’s cold and not chardonnay . . .”

“God, you’re so demanding.”

He winks at her before turning away.

She angles her body toward the window so half a minute later she hears rather than sees the barman approach Oliver at the bar. He must have been in the back. After their order is placed, it becomes apparent that he was, and why: he explains that they’re rearranging the interior so they are in line with the government’s new social-distancing guidelines ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

Ciara can’t imagine how a bunch of drunk people on the country’s drunkest day of the year will figure out how to stay two meters apart, in a pub, but the barman seems confident. She supposes he has to be.

“Here you go.”

Oliver carefully places her glass of white wine and his pint of something on the table and then slides into the booth until he’s sitting next to her, but still a polite foot away.

“They’re rearranging the tables,” he says, lifting his chin to indicate the back of the bar.

“I heard.”

“Some of the booths are already taped off.”

“Taped off with what?”

“Hazard tape,” he says. “Black and yellow stripes.”

“That’s . . . slightly terrifying.”

“I would say, ‘And surreal,’ but I think I’ve already maxed out my allowance of that word for the week. See also: unprecedented. Anyway . . .” He puts a hand on her forearm, lightly squeezes it. “Let’s talk about something else. Or attempt to. Why did you move to Dublin?”

She has told him this already, she thinks.

She says, “Because of my job.”

“But you knew the job was here before you applied for it. So why did you apply?”

“Oh, you know.” She looks into her wine glass, picks it up, takes a sip. “The usual. I fancied a change. A new adventure. Fresh start.”

“Was going on a date with a rando you met in the supermarket part of that plan?”

Date.

“It might help achieve its objectives,” she says without looking at him, feeling her cheeks warm under his gaze. “We’ll see.”

The long silence that follows this is so excruciating for her that she fears she will spontaneously combust.

“I know what you mean,” he says then. “That’s why I’m here. Why I left London.”

When she turns to him she sees that his gaze is fixed now on something that isn’t there, some memory in the middle distance, and although she wants to ask him what he’s thinking about, wants to know more about whatever it was that went on in London, she has a very real sense that now isn’t the time, that it’s too soon.

“Cheers,” he says, picking up his glass. “To fresh starts.”

Two more rounds later, the barman comes to tell them that he’s closing up early. He apologizes profusely but they tell him they understand. They are the only patrons, they have been since the man outside left more than an hour ago, and it’s obvious the staff needs them out of the way to get ready for opening under very different conditions tomorrow. The hazard tape has crept as far as the booth directly across from theirs.

The barman has kindly brought one more round, on the house, to soften the blow, but it’s not even nine o’clock by the time they’ve finished it.

“We could go to mine,” Oliver suggests casually.

She agrees to this plan with as much nonchalance as her tipsy self allows and then slides out of the booth with as much grace as she can muster. The amount in each case, she suspects, is nowhere near as much as she hopes. But Oliver’s eyes are looking a little unfocused and it takes him longer than it should to put his suit jacket back on, so she has to conclude that they’re both a little drunk or at least well on their way there.

She hopes his place has food in it, for both their sakes.

They arrive at his apartment complex arm in arm; she doesn’t quite remember when that happened, or who initiated it, but she’s happy with this turn of events. They’ve walked along the canal for a bit, back toward hers—although she didn’t mention that because she doesn’t want him suggesting they go to her place, not yet—and then turned left, and there might have been a park on the right at some point . . . Now they are outside a modern building shaped like a U, standing at its glass doors while Oliver roots for his keys.

Gold lettering above the doors says it’s called The Crossings.

She reads this aloud, adding a question mark at the end. This many drinks in, on an empty stomach, it seems like a silly name.

“Harold’s Cross,” Oliver says, by way of explanation.

“Whose what now?”

He laughs. “That’s where we are. Harold’s Cross. It’s the name of the area.”

“Oh.”

He touches a plastic fob to a sensor and one of the doors obediently clicks open. They enter a lobby made of glass; a light comes on overhead, making Ciara blink.

Through another set of doors opposite them, she glimpses a central courtyard with a little tinkling water feature in its center, surrounded by wooden benches and carefully planted trees and flowerbeds. The apartments rise up around them on three sides, each of their balconies empty, soft lights on behind wispy curtains.

“Do you have roommates?” she asks.

“It’s just me. It’s a work thing. Came with the job. Only temporarily, though. I get it rent-free for three months.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll see.”

He grins in a way that makes her think he wants her to think she’ll have some part to play in that.

Christ, she really needs to eat something.

She follows him past the lifts and down a long corridor of spaced-apart doors from whose other sides there comes no sound. She keeps a couple of steps behind because there is no way after this much time and that many glasses of wine that her makeup still looks the way it did when she left the house, and the bright white spotlights clicking on directly overhead will only make it worse.

She’s relieved when he pushes open his own door—1—to reveal a dim, softly lit space beyond.

“Come on in,” he says, waving a hand theatrically.

She smiles and accepts the invite, the heels of her boots making a hollow noise as they connect with the hardwood floor.

He takes her coat and says he’ll give her the tour, which consists of him walking her into the living room while pointing at things—the closed doors of two bedrooms and a third, partially open one which leads to a wet-room-style bathroom with a monsoon shower and subway tiles.

The living space is open plan, with a glossy kitchen area to the rear. The walls are white and decorated with arty, abstract prints. (“They came with the place.”) A rich brown leather L-shaped sofa faces a faux fire that “burns” inside a black glass box recessed into the wall once Oliver hits a switch. Above it hangs a flat-screen TV bigger than Ciara’s dining table. He pulls the curtains closed across the big windows—no, sliding doors—that face into the courtyard.

There are no things, no possessions. Nothing personalizing the space except for a lone magazine lying open on the couch. But it’s not a clinical neatness that’s going on here—more like a barely lived-in vibe, as if this is a holiday home he’s just checked into for the night.

The kitchen has the same odd, cold bareness: the countertops are empty except for a bottle of supermarket-brand olive oil and a roll of paper towels.

“I could fit my entire place into this room,” she says.

He walks back to her. “I realize this is very much hashtag-first-world-problems, but it’s actually a bit too big. I feel like I’ve been rattling around in here, all by myself.” A pause. “Alone.”

Their eyes meet, a spark of electricity connecting the air between them, a fork of lightning in an otherwise dark sky.

“Well,” Ciara says, hoping she can get the next three words out before her entire face is aflame, betraying her, showing her for the nervous wreck she actually is. “I’m here now.”

“And I’m glad you are.”

He has said this softly, and now he reaches for her.

She lets him.

He slides his arms around her waist and pulls her close until their faces are touching, cheek to cheek. She can feel the heat of his breath, smell the beer on it. The acute intimacy of this, coming so suddenly, is disorienting, and that mixed with the wine makes her feel loose and fluid.

Less anxious. A braver version of herself.

Maybe even a different person altogether.

He presses his lips against her temple and murmurs, “I don’t want to infect you.”

She can hear—and then feel—him smile. She slides one hand around his waist until it’s resting on the small of his back. His skin feels hot beneath his shirt. She runs her other hand up his arm and across his shoulder until she is touching the skin on his neck, cupping his jaw, pulling him toward her.

“I’m willing to risk it,” she says to his lips.

By her estimation, they have now spent around ten hours together, just talking. But when his mouth finds hers, they tell each other something neither of them could possibly say: that they are two very lonely people hungry for touch, needing it, starving for it. Tenderness quickly turns to desperation, as if they’re both trying to cross the barrier of their own skins.

She unbuttons his shirt. His chest is covered in a blanket of fine, dark hair. She presses her palms into it and then up toward his collarbone and onto his shoulders, lifting the material from his skin. It’s when he steps back to do the rest himself that she first glimpses it: a thick cord of scar tissue, snaking nearly all the way down his side.

Seeing her looking, he angles his body to give her a view of the whole thing.

“I know,” he says. “Impressive, right?”

The silvery thread of smooth, newer skin is about half an inch wide and curves from just underneath his left shoulder blade down to his waist. Pairs of pale dots appear at neat intervals, one on either side: the skin’s memories of the staples that must have held it in place while it healed.

She traces it lightly with her fingertips. “What happened?”

“It’s not a nice story.” He sighs then, as if resigned to the telling. “I got in a fight. On a night out. When I was seventeen. Drank too much, got too brave, looked at some guy the wrong way. Looked at the wrong guy the wrong way. He waited for me outside, broke a bottle off the wall. I know I’m lucky it wasn’t worse, but . . .” He turns back to face her. “I feel like I paid a high price for one moment of madness. Not even madness, just stupidity. And now I have this thing on my body forever that isn’t anything to do with who I am.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not yours either.”

He looks away. “I don’t know about that.”

She touches his cheek, pulling his face—and eyes—back toward her.

There are no nerves now, no overthinking.

She feels a strange peace; the voice in her head has, miraculously, gone away.

These last few days have felt like a door being opened very, very slowly. Now, finally, Ciara is ready to step through.

I can do this, she thinks.

It was easier than she’d thought it would be, but there is no solid ground on the other side.

She doesn’t care. She lifts her face to his and kisses him.

She steps over the threshold and throws herself into the fall.