56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Then he asked her what she does.

  She explained that after her astronaut dreams fell by the wayside, she ended up working for a tech company that just happens to have one of their European hubs in a sprawling complex of glittering glass-and-steel office buildings a few minutes away from where they stand. She held up her bright-blue lanyard and he read her name off it and said, “Nice to meet you, Ciara,” and she said, “Nice to meet you, too.”

  Now, at the counter in the coffee shop, she says she’ll have a cappuccino. He orders two of them, both large.

  “To go?” he suggests. “We might snag a seat by the canal.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  She tries not to look too pleased that he wants to prolong this, whatever this is, into drinking the coffees as well.

  She goes to wait at the end of the counter and watches him pay at the till with a crisp ten-euro note. She sees the barista—a teenager; she can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen—steal glances at him whenever she thinks he’s looking at something else. She wonders if he’s aware of that and, if he is, what it feels like. (Approval or scrutiny?) She traces the lines of his body as suggested by his clothes and wonders what it would feel like to know the skin underneath, if she will know it, if this really is the start of something or just an anomaly.

  She imagines those arms around her, the strength in them, how it would feel to be held by him.

  Then she tries not to.

  She doesn’t put sugar in her cappuccino, even though she normally does, and she thinks to herself, If this becomes something, I’ll never be able to put sugar in my coffee now.

  The sun has been appearing and disappearing all day; when they go back outside, they’re met with mostly blue sky. The canal bank is busy with lunching office workers, but they find a spot on the wall by the service station, near the lock.

  They settle down.

  He prizes the lid off his cappuccino to take a sip. She resists the urge to tell him that this will make it go cold faster but lets him know when he’s managed to collect a crescent of foam on his upper lip.

  “So,” he says, “Kennedy Space Center.”

  “What about it?”

  “Tell me things that will make me very jealous that you’ve been there.”

  She describes the bus tour that takes you around the launch pads, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and the famous blue clock that you see counting down to launch on TV. Tells him about the IMAX cinema and the Rocket Garden. The “ride” where they make you feel like you’re on a launching space shuttle, how they tilt it straight up so you’re lying on your back and then forward a bit too much so you start to slide out of your seat in a clever approximation of zero-G. The Apollo Center where you get to see an actual Saturn V rocket, lying on its side at ceiling-height above the floor. The shuttle Atlantis, a spaceship that has actually been in space, on magnificent display.

  “It’s revealed to you,” she says. “Unexpectedly. A surprise. You’re herded into this big, dark room to watch a video about the shuttle program, and then, at the end, the screen slides up and reveals the shuttle just . . . just there, in all its glory, right in front of you. With the cargo-bay doors open and at an angle so it actually looks like it’s flying through space. It’s amazing. People actually gasped. After I’d walked around it and taken all my pictures and read all the exhibits and stuff, I went back to where I’d come in and I waited for the screen to go up so I could watch other people’s faces, so I could see their reactions, and it was . . .” She sees what looks to her like his bemused expression and panics. “It’s just that I wanted to go for so long—since I was a child, really—so it was a bit like, I don’t know . . . walking around in a dream.”

  A long moment passes.

  Then he says, “I really want to go.”

  Relief.

  “You should,” she says.

  “Thing is, I hate the heat.”

  “Don’t let that stop you. It’s all ice-cold air-conditioning and misting machines. Plus, it’s not always hot and steamy in Florida. I went in March and it was actually quite nice.”

  “Was this a girls’ trip or . . . ?”

  She pretends not to have noticed that he is fishing for information, and he pretends not to have noticed her noticing but pretending not to.

  “Work, primarily,” she says. “A tech conference in Orlando. So I was able to slip away and go geek-out without an audience, thankfully.”

  Ciara turns to look out at the canal. It is beautiful up close, she’ll give it that. The water is still, the reflections in it defined. The weather is pleasant enough for people to sit on the benches in their coats but not to show skin or plonk down on the grass. A steady stream of office workers and lunchtime runners cross back and forth on the narrow planks of the lock right by a sign that warns of deep water. Watching them makes her nervous, and she looks down at her coffee instead.

  She can feel his eyes on her.

  “Cork, right?” he says.

  “Originally. We moved to the Isle of Man when I was seven.”

  “The Isle of Man? I don’t think I’ve met anyone who lived there before.”

  She smiles. “Well, I can assure you, thousands of people do. My dad grew up there and thought I’d want to, too.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not at the time, no. But it was all right in the end. What about you?”

  “Kilkenny,” he says, “but we moved around a lot.”

  “How long have you been in Dublin?”

  “What’s it now”—he makes a show of thinking about it—“six weeks?”

  “Six weeks?”

  “Well, six and a half. I arrived on a Tuesday.”

  “Where were you seven weeks ago?”

  “London,” he says. “And you?”

  “How long am I in Dublin?” She pretends to think, mimicking him from a moment ago. “Well, next Monday it’ll be, ah . . . seven days.”

  “Seven days? And here was I thinking I was the newbie.”

  She laughs. “Nope, I win that game.”

  “Where were you before?”

  “Cork, since I finished college. I went to Swansea. Not-at-all-notable member of the Class of 2017, here.”

  His face can’t hide the fact that he’s trying to do the math. She almost offers, “I’m twenty-five,” but that’s not how this game is played.

  She doesn’t know much but she knows that.

  “What about you?” she asks. “Where did you go?”

  “Newcastle,” he says flatly.

  Ciara senses that something has changed, that she’s lost him somewhere along the line. What was it that did it? She has no clue, but knows she can look forward to lying awake in the dark and wondering for days to come, forensically analyzing everything she said and then reanalyzing it, trying to find the wrong thing, the mistake, the regret.

  “I’m going to be late back.” He says this a fraction of a second before he shakes his wrist and looks at his watch.

  He stands up then and, not knowing quite what to do, she does as well.

  “Yeah, I better go, too,” she lies. “Well . . . thanks for the coffee.”

  He chews on his bottom lip as if trying to decide something.

  “Look,” he starts, “I was going to go see that new Apollo documentary. On Monday. Night. They’re showing it at this tiny cinema in town. Maybe—if you wanted to—we could, um, we could go see it together?”

  She opens her mouth to respond but is so taken aback by this invite that she delays while her brain tries to catch up with this change of course, and into this pause he jumps with an embarrassed, “God, I’m so shit at this.”

  This.

  She wants to tell him that no, he’s not, and she doesn’t believe for a second that he thinks he is, but mostly she doesn’t want to have to respond to h
im referring to this as a this because what if he didn’t mean what she hopes he did?

  “That sounds great.” She flashes her most reassuring smile. “Sure. Yeah.”

  He says he will book the tickets. They arrange to meet outside the building where he works at five thirty on Monday evening. He gives her his phone number in case there are any last-minute problems and she sends him a text message so he has hers. They walk back together as far as his office, then wave goodbye. She doesn’t take a deep breath until she’s turned her back to him.

  And so it begins.

  Today

  Technically speaking, it’s Friday-morning rush-hour, but Lee has the roads to herself. She makes it to Kimmage in no time at all and lucks into a parking space right outside the house. The street is still, its residents robbed of all their reasons to get up early, to start their days somewhere farther away than another room of their home. There’ve been no commutes for weeks now, no school runs, no tourists arriving in or heading off. Even the plague of early morning joggers from the start of lockdown seems to have tapered off.

  The nation’s collective motivation to make the most of this is waning, that much is obvious. She wonders how many sourdough starters have been, by now, unceremoniously fecked in the bin.

  Lee rolls down the driver’s-side window and settles in to drink her coffee. The coffee that she had to watch someone make with gloved hands and theatrical caution as if it wasn’t a cappuccino they were making but a bomb, whose cost included the forced sanitizing of her already dry and chapped hands before and after collecting, that only has two sugars instead of her preferred three because now the barista has to put them in for you and she was too embarrassed to ask for that many, the coffee that she’d literally risked life and limb to get.

  She refuses to let it go cold after all that.

  With her free hand, Lee pulls down the visor and inspects the wedge of her own face she can see in the little mirror there. She seriously needed her roots done before they shut down the salons; the brunette is practically down to her ears and in this natural light, appears to end in a blunt line. Like every other morning she’s left home in a hurry, hair still wet, and now it’s drying into her trademark helmet of electrified frizz. She thought she had thrown some makeup on but it has evidently managed to clean itself off in the last half hour. The smudge of tan foundation on the collar of her white shirt is the only evidence it was ever there at all.

  She really needs to get her shit together.

  There’s a part of her that wishes she had a different job, the kind that’s normally done from a stationary desk in an office and can now be—now must be—done from home. She’s found herself fantasizing about being one of those women who live alone, temporarily free from all exhausting social expectations, finally able to establish a skincare routine and a yoga practice with that girl on YouTube who everyone raves about; to crack the spine on the healthy-food cookbooks her family has been pointedly gifting her for years; to go for long walks along beaches and clifftops and through woodland, the kind of treks that leave you pink-cheeked and aching with smug self-satisfaction and reconnected with nature (although Lee would have to connect with it first); emerging from the other end of this lockdown a shinier, smoother, brighter version of herself, Lee 2.0.

  And honestly, she’d settle for painting her living room and losing half a stone.

  But there are no beaches or clifftops or woodland within a two-kilometer radius of her front door, the hardware shops are closed and there is no lockdown for her. She’s still at bloody work.

  On the passenger seat, her phone beeps with a new text message.

  She knows damn well who it is before a glance at the phone’s screen confirms it: KARLY.

  Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly. She’d added the “Y” to annoy him and it had worked a treat.

  The message says:

  BTA?

  Lee doesn’t pick up the phone. She takes another long, slow sip of her coffee. But when her phone beeps for a second time, she curses, shoves the coffee into the cup holder between the front seats, and climbs out of the car.

  The house looks exactly as it did the only other time she was here. A narrow, two-story redbrick terrace that, were it in mint condition, would easily sell for half a million around these parts. But this one is crumbling. The bricks need cleaning and the roof tiles repairing. The window frames are wooden and rotting in the corners. Paint is enthusiastically peeling off the front door. A skip is parked in the driveway, half-full with seventies furniture and broken things.

  It was there the last time, too. Lee distinctly remembers seeing the cracked salmon-colored bathroom sink because her parents had one just like it. This house was a work-in-progress without much progress, and now, like everything else, its renovation is on pause.

  She should ring the doorbell, announce her presence. Should. But she isn’t in a charitable mood this morning. Instead, she goes to the front window and touches her fingers to the underside of its cement sill, feeling for the hollow she’s been told is there. She quickly finds it—and the pointy end of the key that’s inside.

  Stealthily, she lets herself in through the front door.

  The house is still, the air a little musty, stale. There are no carpets on the ground floor—only bare, dusty floorboards—but a heinous swirl of shit-brown and bright-orange clings to the staircase. She starts up it, moving slowly and carefully, testing her weight on each step so as to avoid a telltale creak.

  There’s no noise in the house, no sounds from upstairs, but the quiet has a deliberateness to it.

  Someone is maintaining it.

  He’s not asleep, then, but awake and waiting for her.

  Maybe he even heard her come in.

  Lee reaches the landing. Four doors lead off it. One is open onto a room filled with building materials: a workbench, some sort of sanding machine with its electrical cord wrapped around itself, boxes marked “Crackled White 7.5 × 4.” Another is showing her a bathroom that appears to be in mid-update. A third looks like it can only be hiding a boiler. The fourth then, to the front of the house, is the master bedroom.

  That door has been pulled closed but isn’t fully shut.

  She pauses outside, then kicks it open with such force that it opens all the way, hitting the wall behind it with a thunderclap.

  The first thing she sees is the wallpaper. It must have been bought on the same shopping trip that found the diarrhea-after-carrots-carpet on the stairs. It’s an acid trip of bright-blue paisley, and it hurts her eyes.

  Then the smell hits: sweat and sex and alcohol, trapped and cooking in the room’s warm air.

  She should’ve worn a mask, she thinks now. God only knows what’s floating around in here.

  “Well,” she says, “what seems to be the problem?”

  Karl is lying on the bed, presumably naked under the fitted sheet that he’s somehow managed to lift off the bottom corners of the mattress and drape across his lower half.

  This must have taken some doing seeing as both his arms are outstretched, hands higher than his shoulders, like Christ on the cross.

  Only Karl’s wrists aren’t nailed to the headboard, but handcuffed to it.

  “Two sets?” Lee frowns. “Where’d you get the second lot?”

  “Go on,” Karl groans. “Lap it up.”

  “Oh, I fully intend to.”

  “You know, I could’ve sworn I heard you pull up outside five minutes ago.”

  “How long have you been like this?” Lee asks.

  “All bloody night.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  Karl attempts a shrug, then winces at the pain this move causes him. “Dozed. Hey, do you think you could free me before this interrogation continues? I’d get better treatment in the cells.”

  “How did you text me if—”

  “Siri.”


  Karl nods toward his phone, lying on the bedside table.

  “She got a letter wrong in the last one,” Lee says.

  “You take your time.”

  “Look, you’re lucky I came at all. And I’m just dying to find out what Plan B was.”

  “I know this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you, Lee, but I can’t actually feel my hands here.”

  She indulges in an eye roll before relenting, fishing her keys from her trouser pocket and moving toward the bed.

  “Whatever you do,” she says, “hang on to that fitted sheet.”

  Karl scoffs. “Like you wouldn’t love a look.”

  “I’ve had a look, remember? Although I barely do. Wasn’t particularly memorable.” She pulls Karl’s right wrist toward her—he yelps in pain—and bends to work the small key into the cuff’s lock. “So where is she, then? Who is she?”

  “Fuck knows. On both counts.”

  “Ever the romantic, eh, Karl?”

  “I’ve seen you open cuffs. What the hell is taking so long this—”

  The key clicks in the lock and Lee ratchets the cuff open enough to slide it off Karl’s wrist.

  His arm drops onto the bed like a dead weight that’s been cleanly detached from his body. Gingerly, he tries to bend it but only manages a few degrees before spitting out a string of curse words, closing his eyes and giving up.

  “Are the keys even here?” Lee asks, moving to the other side of the bed to work on the other set.

  “Took them with her. Told me she was going to flush them down the toilet. Well, joke’s on her because it isn’t even connected.”

  Lee makes a face. “Where are you . . . ?”

  “Porta Potti. Out by the shed.”

  “Did she know that before she came back here?”

  “No, and she came over.” He grins. “And she came—”