56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

35 Days Ago

Ciara does another circuit of the apartment, counting her steps as she goes. She starts in the little kitchen, standing at the counter with her palms flat on the only surface that isn’t stovetop or sink: a thick off-white slab of Formica whose smooth gloss has long been scrubbed away. Take three steps and she’s in the living room, which is also the dining room, which is also the bedroom, which is only separated from the kitchen by what she’s seen people on property programs call a breakfast bar.

Five steps to cross the floor to the couch. Seven from the couch to the door. Two from that door to the front door. She turns back around and counts out the four steps it takes her to enter the bathroom.

Oliver’s a foot taller than her. He’ll be able to do it in even fewer.

She stands before the mirror above the sink and inspects the glass for smudges. She opens the medicine cabinet and tries to see the contents as a stranger would. She did this very thing already, not even half an hour ago, but on second thought the blister plasters might make him think of red-raw skin and seeping wounds, specifically herred-raw skin and seeping wounds, so she slides them behind a pack of soothing eye gels until they disappear from sight.

Then, as an afterthought, she hides the hair-removal cream too.

She once spent a summer in college working as a housekeeper in a seaside hotel and something from her training drifts back to her now.

Sit where the guest will sit. Lie where the guest will lie. See what the guest will see.

She puts the toilet lid down and perches on it, looks around.

The bathroom is like the rest of the apartment: tiny and from the seventies. It has avocado fixtures, rippled linoleum on the floor, and a shower curtain attached to a precariously positioned tension rod. It’s already come down on her twice in the short time she’s lived here, once hitting her square on the forehead and leaving a red mark. At least the caulking has been redone recently, but its brightness only serves to highlight how much the wall tiles have yellowed over the years.

She scans the floor for dust, wayward hairs, a dropped cotton bud sullied with wax.

All clear.

The bathroom has no window and no fan, only a narrow vent in the wall above the bath that she’s already excised the dust from. She’s bought a little canister of nonoffensive air freshener—Soft Cotton, it claims to smell like, although how you can smell something is soft is beyond her—but now she wonders if its current placement, sitting on top of the cistern, seems a bit passive-aggressive . . . Does it look like a demand? She puts it on the little shelf below the sink instead, turning the label out so it’s easy to find.

Four steps back into the everything room, seven steps back to the couch.

She sits down carefully so as not to disturb the placement of the throws or the plumped-up cushions, and systematically scans the room for dust, cobwebs, or any other offenses.

She finds none. She doesn’t think the apartment was this clean on the day she moved in.

She wonders, yet again, what he’ll make of it. She tries to see it as he will, as she did before she got a little used to it. For a studio in a crumbling tower block, it’s actually not that bad. A large window offers clear-sky views because she is on the top floor of the complex’s tallest redbrick block in a city where almost everything else is much shorter. Right now, the evening sun is filling the room with natural light and the room’s bare white walls are reflecting it, amplifying it. There’s a small, square dining table with two chairs and a battered, sunken couch currently hiding beneath a deep purple throw she bought at Primark—or three purple throws, because they were small and that’s how many of them it took to mostly cover it. A desk doubles as a dressing table. Most of one wall is taken up with what looks like a built-in wardrobe in beech effect but is actually a Murphy bed that folds down, its sheets and pillows kept in place by Velcro straps. A faded canvas print of a sunrise over Dublin hangs by the door to the kitchen, but it’s too big for the space and has been hung slightly askew and half a foot too high. Nothing matches and there are few personal items, save for the NASA mug that’s been demoted to a pen pot and the small stack of well-thumbed books lined up neatly beside it.

She’s already carefully considered each spine and how it might make her look. The collection promises stories about the Apollo moonwalkers, a tech start-up that failed spectacularly, and the crisis aboard the space station Mir back in the nineties, as well as a pulpy thriller, a millennial literary novel that’s been on the bestseller charts for what feels like years, and a copy of Pride and Prejudice, brittle and yellowed from years of rereading.

She’s hidden the book she’s actually reading—a historical romance—in one of the desk drawers.

She’s also cut the anthers out of the pink lilies arranged in a vase on the dining table just in case he doesn’t know not to touch them, just in case he arrives in one of his knit sweaters with the little polo-player emblem embroidered on the left breast and leans down to breathe in their scent.

She scans again but can’t find anything out of place. This should give her confidence but it has the opposite effect: the perfection feels exceptionally delicate, impossible to maintain, even just for these last few minutes.

Her eyes flick to the digital clock on the TV.

Almost eight. He’ll be here any second.

Five steps back into the kitchen. She opens a cupboard and checks again that her two wine glasses are clear, no smudges or residue. That there’s ice in the freezer. That when you open the oven door you aren’t met with a chemical whiff of oven cleaner you might suspect will somehow taint the taste of cooked food, or the sight of a long-forgotten chip burned to black ash.

“Do you think he put this much effort into prepping his place for you?” she asks the empty kitchen.

Of course he didn’t. But his place is brand new. And enormous.

She has to work to impress.

The buzzer goes.

She rushes to the intercom and says, “Hello?” into the microphone as if anyone at all might respond, as if the buzzer-presser is a mystery man, as if it would be anybody but him.

Then she takes a deep breath and tells herself to calm the hell down.

“Hey,” he says, his voice sounding tinny through the speaker. “It’s me.”

She presses the button that releases the door lock downstairs and hears the corresponding mechanical click through the speaker.

“Sixth floor,” she reminds him, even though she’s already told him this twice by text. The only response is the sound of a heavy door left to slam closed.

She releases the button and goes back into the main room. One last check of it. One last check of herself in the mirror.

But by the time she’s done she still hasn’t heard the ding of the elevator or the clunk of the fire door swinging shut at the end of the hall, so she has time to check again. She finds a smudge of mascara beneath her left eye now. How did that happen? When did it happen?

She licks a finger and carefully rubs it off.

Ding.

Clunk.

Showtime.

She opens her front door and sticks her head out into the hall. He’s in jeans, a T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. Carrying a brown paper bag by its handles and a bottle of wine by its neck. When he sees her, he smiles.

Every time she sees him like this—up close, coming toward her, coming to her—she can’t quite believe that it’s really happening.

That it still is, three weeks in.

She smiles back. “You found me.”

“This time.” He looks sheepish. “I may have gone to the wrong block first . . .”

She laughs because this is exactly what she warned him would happen if he didn’t follow her instructions to the letter. There are several identical-looking blocks in the complex, no decent signs, and multiple entrances and exits.

When he reaches her, she steps back inside so he can come in.

He stops to bend down and meet her lips with his, lifting the wine as he does, absently pressing its cold glass against her side. The chill of it through the thin material of her shirt startles her momentarily, as does the reality of this tall, strong, male body being in the smallest, tightest space of her apartment.

In the same moment, the lock turns in the door directly across the hall.

Shit.

The door opens a crack, no more than two or three inches, its rusting safety chain not even pulled taut. An elderly woman—her eyes narrowed, her white hair pulled into a tight bun, one blue-white hand of swollen knuckles and yellow fingernails holding a surgical mask over her mouth—appears in the gap with only gloom visible beyond.

Maura, the sixth floor’s self-appointed chief enforcement officer.

“No visitors!” she barks.

Ciara pushes Oliver inside. “I think that’s just from midnight tonight, Maura.”

“Oh, so he’ll be leaving before then, will he?”

“Well, actually . . . he’s, ah, moving in. So we’ll be one household now. It’s fine.” Ciara fixes a smile to her face. “You don’t need to worry.”

Maura’s eyes narrow further still. “He’s got nothing with him.”

“His stuff is coming later. Tomorrow.”

“There isn’t room enough in there for two.”

“We’ll manage.”

“And I suppose Niall knows about all this, does he?”

“He does indeed.” Ciara raises a hand to wave and starts to pull her door closed with the other one. “Have a good evening now, Maura. Let me know if you need anything.” She shuts the door.

When she turns, she sees him standing in the middle of the living room—the everything room—looking around with great interest, and she silently curses Maura for interfering, for messing up her carefully choreographed plans.

She wanted to see him see this place for the first time. She wanted to be able to gauge his reaction.

“So I live here now?” he asks, grinning.

“That was my delightful neighbor, Maura. If we were in East Germany, she’d have the Stasi on speed dial.”

“And Niall?”

“That’s my landlord.”

Oliver pretends to wipe this brow. “Phew.”

“I mean, he is also my ex-husband—”

“Right, right.”

“—and the father of my secret child.”

“Oh, I assumed.”

“That I had a child or that he was the father?”

“Both, I think.”

“But he lets me live here rent-free so long as I keep sleeping with him, so . . .”

“Good deal.”

“You know,” Ciara says, “this joke isn’t that funny when you know what Niall looks like.”

“And what does Niall look like?”

“His age. Which is about eighty-five, I’d say.”

Oliver laughs.

They’ve already had the exes talk. She told him that she only has one even worth mentioning: Jack. Met in college, started as friends, stayed together for eighteen months after graduation. When things went south, he told her the problem was that she didn’t want a nice guy, but the actual problem was that he wasn’t one.

Oliver said there’d been a girl that he’d met at his university. For a long time, he thought she was the girl. But then she’d gone to work abroad for a year. They’d carried on long-distance, or so she’d led him to believe—but the day she came back she told him she’d met someone else and that was that.

If you discount short-lived flings with roommates (and they both do), neither of them has ever officially lived with anybody. Neither of them has any faith in dating apps; they’ve already traded their best horror stories. Both also claim to be crap at flirting—at everything, really, associated with convincing other people to be with you above anyone else—but yet it’s been three weeks and here they are.

“So,” she says. “Would you like a tour? I should warn you it could take as long as ten whole seconds.”

“I like it,” he says, looking around. “It’s . . .”

“Claustrophobic?”

She doesn’t find it claustrophobic. Not really. Or at least she hasn’t until now. But this is the first time she’s ever had a visitor in here, and it’s him, all six feet of him, and all she can think about is how claustrophobic it must be making him feel and how different it must look to where he lives, and she wants him to know that she knows that, that she isn’t naive, that she isn’t stupid.

And that bed. That bloody bed. She’s almost certain he’s too long for it. She could nearly plot this whole evening out with certainty now: it’ll be nice, and he’ll stay, but from now on they’ll resume their routine of staying at his bigger and better place.

And she won’t object.

“I was going to say compact,” he says. “And it’s well designed, really. You don’t see windows this size on other blocks this age.” He sets the bag and bottle on the dining table and lifts his hands. “The, ah, bathroom?”

She points. “Just in there.”

He goes, and she takes the bag and the bottle and carries them into the kitchen.

The bathroom is on the other side of the wall behind her now. As she unpacks the food she listens to the gush of water from the tap. It goes on for ages: he’s doing it properly. When he returns, he brings the lemony scent of her antibacterial handwash with him.

“Where do you sleep?” he asks.

She points. “That’s the bed, there.”

“It comes down from the wall?” He looks childishly excited about this fact.

“Trust me, the novelty wears off in about five minutes.”

“Everything’s so neat. Where’s all your, you know, stuff?”

She explains she came to Dublin from Cork with one large suitcase and her laptop bag. One of her friends was supposed to come up in his father’s van with the rest, but . . . essential travel only. There were a few bits and pieces already here—pots and pans, an iron and ironing board, that kind of thing—and whatever she needed that she didn’t have she picked up at Primark before they closed. Until things go back to normal her stuff will be sitting in boxes in the garage of her parents’ house.

“But actually, I kinda like it this way,” she says. “I might not even bother bringing up that much of it.”

He’s stopped at some fancy deli near his place and got them a ready-made meal for two that only needs to be heated up in the oven. The foil tray looks like it’s filled with lasagna but the label says bobotie. Ciara has no idea what that is. The price is on there too and she can’t help but think about how much more food the same amount of money could buy in a supermarket if you were just willing to cook it yourself. There’s also a plastic bowl of bistro salad and two individual tartes au citron. The wine has won a gold sticker from somebody.

She steals a glance at him.

He’s bent at the waist, head to the side, reading the spines of her books.

She sets the oven to the temperature the bobotie’s label dictates. It’ll take ages to heat up; maybe she should’ve done this before he arrived. She puts the wine bottle on the counter and wipes it with an antibacterial wipe. She does the same with the food cartons. She throws the wipe in the trash can and washes her hands. She takes the wine glasses out and pours two glasses before putting the bottle in the fridge.

Then she washes her hands again.

The new normal, which is in absolutely no way normal at all.

She doesn’t actually believe that the bottle or cartons present a danger, but he believes it. He told her he heard something about it on the radio during the week and she’s since read a couple of articles online. The shops are so busy now that all the stuff on the shelves was probably just put there, and customers pick stuff up and put it back, and one of them might well have coughed on it . . .

Better to be safe than sorry, Oliver says. He has asthma. That’s an underlying condition. He doesn’t want to risk getting this thing, and she certainly doesn’t want to be the one to give it to him.

She carries the two glasses (five steps) to him and says, “Here,” handing his over. As he takes it, he slips his free arm around her waist and gently pulls her close.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

She breathes him in. “Better now.”

“Were you watching?”

She nods.

The announcement came less than two hours ago. The Taoiseach has said he doesn’t want to use the word lockdown but that’s effectively what it is. For the next two weeks, starting at midnight tonight, everyone is to stay at home. You can leave to buy food or to “briefly” exercise within a two-kilometer radius of your residence, but unless you’re an essential worker, that’s it. No visits to other homes, no arranging to meet people you don’t live with—even outside.

Ciara knows she should be processing the bubbling panic in the pit of her stomach that something really, really bad is happening, but she’s too busy with the tight worry in her chest over what this will mean for them, for her and Oliver.

She senses that he has the same question she does but isn’t asking it.

She lets a beat pass, then another.

Then she decides that she just can’t stand to wait anymore and asks, “What are we going to do?”

When he shrugs, her stomach drops.

Are they not on the same page here? Has she been reading this all wrong?

Panicked, she begins to backtrack, to downplay, words tumbling out of her mouth before she can think about them.

“I mean, it’s less than two kilometers from here to your place, so . . . We could go for socially distanced walks . . . ? Maybe? I know we’re not technically supposed to but that should be okay, right?” He’s frowning; she rushes on. “And is it really that bad if I go to yours and you come to mine? Neither of us is going to work. Neither of us is seeing anyone else.” She instantly regrets this choice of words and the fact that they’ve sent a flash of heat to her cheeks. She’s only assuming he’s not seeing anyone else. “If we’re only in contact with each other, we can’t spread it. Or catch it, even . . . Right?” She desperately wishes she hadn’t ended that sounding so nakedly dripping with hope.

Here is her worst fear realized: despite how well all this has been going, she’s only ever one stupid move away from ruining absolutely everything.

He backs away from her and for one horrible moment she thinks that now he thinks she might be contagious, that she’s just inadvertently revealed to him that she’s a careless person, that her handwashing and social-distancing aren’t medical grade.

But then he takes her hand and leads them both to the couch.

They sit down and she takes a gulp of her wine to stop herself from vomiting out any more words.

“The thing is . . .” He’s still holding her hand; he squeezes it. “The thing is, Ciara . . .”

God, just come out with it.

Is he dumping her? Is that what this is?

Canhe dump her, when they’re barely together?

“I don’t really want to break the rules. They’re there for a reason.”

Her limbs feel suddenly heavy with resignation. It’s as if she’s deflating on the inside, like the burst balloon inside a hardened shell of papier-mâché. All she wants to do now is kick off her shoes and fall back against the couch and drink the rest of the wine all by herself.

She wants him to leave.

She wants him to stay.

The truth is, however well this may seem like it’s going, they don’t know each other, not really. This situation is revealing that, up close and in harsh lighting.

They don’t know what the other one does in times like this. Are they the kind of person who wears a mask before it’s mandatory and disinfects their phones and wipes their groceries down, or are they drinking cans in the park with friends on a sunny Saturday and sneering at anyone who tut-tuts as they pass?

In between favorite movies and what they studied in college and where they hope to go this summer, they forgot to ask each other what kind of person are you in a global pandemic?

“What if . . . ?” he starts.

She turns to him, seized by the hope that all is not lost but trying not to show it. But he’s looking unsure, or maybe too embarrassed to say whatever’s on his mind.

“What?” she prompts.

“I don’t know if . . .” He inhales deeply, slowly, and then everything after that comes out in a tumbling rush. “Well, I have two bedrooms, don’t I? We’d be okay if we were in the same household. We wouldn’t have to worry about the rules. And as it is, when I’m not working, I’m with you, so it wouldn’t really be that big of a change, would it?” He swallows. “And it doesn’t have to be like, an actual thing. It’s just a temporary arrangement. Two weeks. And we can play it by ear. Just take one day at a time. And if it doesn’t work out, you still have here, so . . .”

He stops and looks at her hopefully.

She wants to smile and say yes but first, she wants to make sure.

“What are you saying, exactly?”

“What I’m saying is . . .” He squeezes her hand again. “Ciara, why don’t you move in with me?”