56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Ciara thinks he’s telling them that they’ll each need to collect a shopping cart before they go inside—why on earth would that be a rule?—until Oliver turns to her and says, “It’s okay. I’ll go do it,” and she puts it together: The rule is that they have to shop alone. They can’t both go inside.

  Oliver is already moving away from her, toward the doors.

  She starts to say, “But . . .” then stops because she doesn’t know what the rest of the sentence is.

  Somewhere behind them, a woman sighs theatrically.

  Someone else mutters something sweary under their breath.

  “Email me the list, will you?” Oliver calls over his shoulder.

  And then he is gone, disappeared into the store, and Ciara is left standing outside by herself, wondering what the hell she’s supposed to do now.

  She can’t even go sit in the car. He has the keys.

  “You can go in, too,” the guard says, “but you have to shop separately.” He holds up a hand in a stop gesture to let her know that she can’t do this just yet, that she’ll have to wait until another person comes out. Her face must communicate some kind of reaction to this because he adds, “It’s to keep the aisles as clear as possible so everyone can stay well away from each other.”

  When she hears tut-tutting from behind her, Ciara feels compelled to say, “Of course, yeah. I understand,” more loudly than she might have otherwise.

  “It’ll just be a minute,” the guard says.

  She pulls out her phone and looks for the grocery list they made that she’s recorded in her Notes app. Oliver is an okay cook while she’s mostly a microwaver, so the bulk of the meal planning was his. She doesn’t know what he’s going to do with things like lamb cutlets, a fresh mint plant, garam masala (?), and tahini (??), but he’s promised she won’t starve. They’ve also made what Oliver nicknamed their Doomsday Prepper List. They’re saying if you get this thing you’ll have to isolate yourself from everyone else for up to two weeks, so they both tried to think of nonperishable things they could stock up on—extras, to have just in case.

  It was, in a weird way, fun. A challenge. They came up with dried pasta and readymade sauces, the kind that don’t go bad for years. Bread mixes that can be baked as needed—but only the brown or soda ones, because they need water added, not milk. Porridge. Sweet snacks so full of preservatives they’ll last until the next global crisis. Canned fruit. Canned fish. Canned beans. Maybe some multivitamins, just in case. Instant coffee, the fancy kind with supposedly fresh grounds mixed in. Cartons of oat milk because it doesn’t require refrigeration and won’t completely ruin the coffee. Bottled water, although when the shops open again Oliver says he’s going to buy one of those filter jugs. Toothpaste and shower gel. Toilet paper, toilet paper, toilet paper, because who wants to be trapped in a confined space with someone they don’t know very well, who may be suffering from intestinal issues, without an ample supply of that?

  There is no part of Ciara that believes for one moment that either of them will ever need to survive on a diet of dried pasta and canned grapefruit segments, but the idea of having them is reassuring nonetheless.

  She emails the list to Oliver and waits to hear the whoosh that confirms its safe departure.

  Another three or four minutes pass before a man in his forties emerges from the doors pushing a cart overflowing with crates of beer, and the guard gives Ciara the okay to go inside.

  Running to catch up with Oliver seems like a childish contravention of the rules, and not one he’d approve of. And anyway, he can manage the shopping by himself. They’ve already agreed she’ll reimburse him for half the total in cash; she can just give it to him afterward. But she might as well have a browse rather than stand outside, bored and waiting for him.

  As soon as the sliding doors close behind her, she’s struck by how eerily quiet it is inside. She’s never taken any notice of how much sound there normally is in a vast supermarket—chatter, she supposes, and shopping-cart wheels on the floor and rubber soles squeaking—but she’s sure this is the first time she’s ever been able to hear distant music being played from some concealed speaker system. The one-person-one-cart system is evidently working; the only other person she can see is the uniformed staff member directing her to follow the large red arrows stuck to the floor.

  Ciara grabs a basket to keep up pretenses and goes where she’s told.

  The flower bays and magazine racks are empty. A store-brand clothing area has been roped off with a sign that says, “This section is temporarily closed. We apologize for any inconvenience.” Even as Ciara advances into the food aisles, she meets no other customers, only staff members hurrying to empty the contents from stacks of blue bins and transfer them to the shelves.

  Milk fridges and bakery baskets are stuffed to overflowing, but elsewhere there are huge, yawning gaps where product should be. There is toilet paper, but signs warn one package per customer; Ciara puts one in her basket because it seems silly not to. The pasta section has been picked clean and she doesn’t see any of those bread mixes in the aisle where she knows they should be; apparently they weren’t the only ones with that bright idea.

  It’s a weird feeling to know that whatever you need, you must get it here, right now. There’s nowhere else to go except shops just like this one and smaller versions of it with more limited product ranges.

  What if this thing lasts longer than two weeks?

  She grabs a packet of ballpoint pens in the stationery aisle, and some razors and a bottle of hair conditioner in beauty. When she finds a small selection of paperbacks with discount-price stickers on them, she picks up a few in turn, inspecting the text on their back covers until she remembers that she shouldn’t be touching things unnecessarily. She chooses two at random and throws them into her basket, mentally updating its total cost.

  She doesn’t find Oliver until she reaches the last red arrow on the trail and emerges at the row of checkout desks. He’s three tills away, stuffing things into his backpack. There’s no one waiting behind him and the cashier is protected behind a plexiglass screen, so she hurries to join him.

  The last item on the belt is a large box containing a Canon printer. She hastily dumps the contents of her basket behind it.

  “You got one, then?”

  Oliver swings around, surprised to see her. “Oh. Yeah. Thankfully.”

  The cashier sees Ciara’s toilet paper and does a little eye roll, evidently unimpressed by her rule bending.

  “No pasta, though,” Oliver adds.

  “I saw. Whoever thought there’d be a pasta shortage in Ireland?”

  “Hey, at least we’ve moved on from potatoes.”

  He hands her a scrunched-up plastic bag, one of the ones she saw him stuff into his backpack before they left the apartment.

  The question is, what’s in the backpack now?

  She could swear that, just before he turned around, she saw him hastily zip it closed in a way that makes her think he’s put something in there he doesn’t want her to see.

  Operation Grocery Shop takes up most of the day. Between the queuing to park and the queuing to get in, it’s after two by the time they’re driving back to Harold’s Cross. Unloading the car takes two trips up to the apartment, and then wiping everything down and finding somewhere to put it takes an age. Oliver seems to visibly relax when they reach the collection point for the GoCar—to which they’re returning it now—without having encountered any Garda checkpoints. His shoulders and spine lose a tension that they’d been carrying for much of the day. He may claim it’s about his driving, but on the walk back they passed two squad cars in the process of setting up a roadblock and Ciara would swear she felt the hand holding hers grow clammy with a cold sweat at the sight.

  But she didn’t ask him about it.

  She’s still caught on the backpack.

  She’d watched
for it when they’d returned to the apartment the first time: he’d hurried off into the bedroom with it before coming back to the kitchen without it, so whatever was in there, it wasn’t food.

  What would he have bought in that place that he didn’t want her to see? What could he have?

  And why hide anything from her at all?

  She’d casually asked him for the receipt in the car on the way home, under the pretense of figuring how much she owed him. But he’d told her he didn’t know where he’d put it, even though she’d watched him slip it inside his jacket at the checkout.

  Had he genuinely forgotten that?

  Or just outright lied?

  When they return to the apartment a second time, Oliver starts tearing at the printer box and Ciara announces that she’s going to have a shower.

  She takes a towel into the bathroom, locks the door behind her, and strips. She turns the monsoon showerhead up full, the temperature to just below scalding, and stands under its pressurized rainfall for thirty seconds, making sure to get the ends of her hair dripping wet. Then she steps out of it, wraps the towel around her, and sinks down until she is sitting cross-legged on the tiled floor, back against the door.

  She needs a minute alone.

  To think.

  The backpack isn’t a big deal. People are entitled to privacy and there’s plenty of things you can buy in a supermarket that you might not want to announce to the woman you’ve just started a relationship with. Like . . .

  The best she can come up with is hemorrhoid cream, which she’s not even sure they sell in supermarkets, but there must be lots of things.

  A thick steam starts to swirl in the air above her.

  The problem is that it’s reminded her that there could be a set of kitchen knives in there. Or a half-pint of vodka he’ll drink before noon from a water bottle. Or something from the health section that he needs because of some undisclosed medical condition.

  The problem is she doesn’t know what could be in there, because she doesn’t know him.

  Not well enough to feel certain she’s safe here, living with him in this place where no one else knows she is.

  She wants to be here. She does.

  But should she be?

  A hard knock on the bathroom door startles her.

  “You alive in there?” Oliver’s voice, muffled by the door.

  Ciara jumps up, out of the towel, and back into the shower stream before answering so that her, “Yeah?” sounds like it’s coming from the right place.

  “I’ve put dinner on,” he says. “Ready in ten minutes or so.”

  “Okay,” she calls out. “Great.”

  She hears a clicking noise then—is that the door handle? Is he trying to get in?

  Or is he just checking to see if she’s locked it?

  She waits.

  “Is everything all right?” he asks after a beat.

  “Yeah. Fine. Why?”

  She waits for an answer but none comes, and a few seconds later she thinks she hears the door to the living room clunk closed.

  She stays in the bathroom for another few minutes to keep up appearances, then gathers up her things and unlocks the door.

  The steam spills out behind her into the colder air of the hall—directly opposite, the door to the living room is indeed closed.

  She pauses next to it, head turned, listening. There’s no sound at all coming from the other side.

  What’s he doing in there?

  She moves closer until her left ear is almost touching the wood.

  Nothing. But then—

  She thinks she might have just heard a scrape of metal on cement.

  Which would mean he’s outside, on the terrace.

  There’s a drip-drip sound then, much closer, and after a beat she realizes it’s her, shedding droplets onto the hall floor, marking the spot where she’s been eavesdropping, the sodden ends of her own hair giving her away.

  She ducks into the master bedroom, clutching the towel she’s wrapped around her, closing the door behind her with a soft click.

  And then locking it, too.

  The key has always sat in the lock but she’s never heard it turn, and she winces now at how loud it is. Hopefully he’s still outside. Why would she be locking this door right now? She can’t think of any plausible reason and she certainly can’t share the real one: because she’s going to look for the backpack.

  She puts her clothes back on first—her trusty jeans and a plain black T-shirt, creased from its time as a ball on the bathroom floor—and then scans the room.

  There’s really only two places it could be: in the wardrobe or under the bed. She checks them both, in that order, careful to leave no obvious sign that she’s been rifling through Oliver’s things.

  But there’s no sign of the backpack.

  Did he come in here and take it while she was in the shower? Why would he do that? What the hell is in there that he doesn’t want her to see?

  She checks again to make sure she hasn’t missed anything, but the backpack definitely isn’t there. It’s quick to search; Oliver doesn’t have much stuff. Clothes and shoes and toiletries just about covers the lot.

  But then he did say this was a temporary home. Maybe he only left London with whatever he could bring on the flight.

  “Ciara?”

  She freezes.

  Oliver’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the living room. She quickly turns the key, opens the bedroom door wide, and then hurries to the full-length mirror hung on the wall by the wardrobe, where she still has a line-of-sight to the door to the living room.

  The shower has steamed all the makeup off her skin but not her eyes, leaving her lashes smudged and messy with wayward mascara. She wets a finger and drags it underneath each eye in turn, trying to repair the damage and trying to look like that’s what she’s been doing in here all along.

  The living-room door opens with a flourish and Oliver appears.

  When he spots her in the bedroom, he grins at her mischievously. “You ready?”

  “Ah . . .” Her hair, she notices now, looks plastered to her head. “Yeah.” She pushes her hands up into it, massaging her scalp, in a futile attempt to rescue it.

  “You look lovely,” he says.

  “Now that’s a bold-faced lie.”

  “Lovely to me.”

  Ciara rolls her eyes at him.

  “Come on then.” He holds out his hand, beckoning her. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Just come with me.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “For God’s sake, woman. I’m trying to surprise you here. Help me out.”

  She takes his hand and lets him lead her through the living room, through the open patio doors, and out onto the terrace—

  The terrace has been transformed.

  Strings of miniature LED lights have been wrapped around the railing; they glow warmly in the light of a setting sun. The table is now wearing a red-and-white checked tablecloth and is set for dinner for two, complete with flickering candles and champagne flutes. She laughs when she sees that a chair from the kitchen has been commandeered as a platform for a plastic yellow bucket, the kind children play with at the beach, only filled with ice and holding a sweating bottle of prosecco inside. Oliver’s phone is lying on the tabletop, softly playing something folksy and sweet.

  She turns to him.

  “I was confined to Tesco for supplies,” he says, “so I had to improvise. Don’t look too closely at those lights—they’re actually little unicorns. And the tablecloth is made of paper and the flutes are plastic. And those candles are the ones you light to keep bugs away. But I think I did good, right?”

  She doesn’t know quite what to say. She manages, “What’s this all for?”

  �
��Well . . . you.” He puts a hand on the back of his neck and rubs it absently, which she’s started to notice he always does when he’s embarrassed or afraid that he’s about to be. “You moving in, I mean. Even if it’s just temporary and because of an unprecedented global emergency—I’m electing not to take that part personally, just so you know. I just thought we should, you know, mark the occasion. And since we can’t go anywhere . . .” He grins. “I should warn you, though, I didn’t put quite the same effort into dinner. Or any effort. It’s a pizza and garlic bread. From frozen.”

  “Thank you,” she says, finding her voice finally. “This is . . . It’s lovely.”

  She means it.

  He reaches for her and she lets him.

  “So are you,” he whispers into her ear.

  That’s when she sees it. Over his shoulder, through the open door. In the brightly lit living room.

  Deflated and empty now, lying on the floor by the couch.

  The backpack.

  48 Days Ago

  Saturday morning they wander around town for a while, searching for somewhere to have breakfast. She points out a bustling café at the top of Dawson Street with seats outside, but he doesn’t really want to give hundreds of people the opportunity to take a good long look at his face as they stroll past, and he doesn’t like feeling as if someone unseen could be watching him. When he suggests a small, basement-level restaurant a few doors down, she makes a face and says that maybe somewhere bigger and more open would be a safer option—you know, global-pandemic-wise? In the end they settle on Bewley’s on Grafton Street, partly because they’re both vaguely aware that it’s supposed to be somewhere special and partly because there’s already a line of people waiting to get in, a good sign.

  As soon as they get through the doors themselves, Oliver sees that it’s the perfect choice. Inside it has the same airy, high-ceiling design as grand continental cafés and, better yet, the host leads them all the way to the back and around the corner to a little table where there’ll be no passing traffic. He offers Ciara the seat that faces into the café so he can sit with his back to it.