56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Oliver said that when she went to close the bedroom door, her boss saw that someone else was there and asked him if there was. That’s when the talk of employee accommodation and a senior partner in another apartment began.

  But before Ciara had even advanced down the hall, before she’d got anywhere near the doorway, she’d heard the other man raise his voice.

  I thought we’d agreed you wouldn’t hide things from me.

  You can’t—

  So what had that been about? What had Oliver been hiding from him?

  And what was he hiding now, from her?

  35 Days Ago

  Fresh out of the shower, Oliver sits on the couch in a towel to watch the Taoiseach’s speech live.

  With effect from midnight tonight, Leo’s steady, even voice blares from the TV—probably from all the TVs, everywhere, throughout the country, for a two-week period until Easter Sunday, April 12, everybody must stay at home in all circumstances except for the following situations: To travel to and from work, for the purposes of work, only where the work is an essential health, social care, or other essential service that cannot be done from home. To shop for food or household goods, or to collect a meal. To attend medical appointments or to collect medicines and other health products. For vital family reasons such as providing care to children, elderly, or vulnerable people. To take brief, individual exercise within two kilometers of your home. All public and private gatherings of any number of people, outside a single household or living unit, are prohibited. All public transport will be restricted to essential workers. Outside of the activities I’ve listed, there should be no travel outside of a two-kilometer radius of your home for any reason.

  The Taoiseach doesn’t use the word lockdown, but it’s clear that that’s exactly what it is. Basically: everyone has to stay at home for the next two weeks.

  In their own home.

  They can’t meet anyone, indoors or out, who doesn’t live with them.

  Oliver stares at the TV screen, shaking his head in disbelief.

  This is so perfect for him, it’s bordering on ridiculous. If he had had the opportunity to design a set of circumstances, he couldn’t have come up with anything better than this.

  He’ll ask Ciara to move in with him.

  Or to come stay with him for the next couple of weeks. Let’s put it like that, he tells himself, so as not to scare her off.

  According to the rules, that’s the only way they’ll be able to keep seeing each other. If they remain as they are now, living separately as two individual households, they won’t be able to see each other at all.

  It’s unclear to him if this is a legal stance or just advice, but Oliver has no intention of breaking any rules. He wouldn’t do anything that would prompt a member of An Garda Síochána to so much as look his way, but there are other, worse punishments. He’s already seen plenty of pictures and videos shared online of people who other people suspected of contravening restrictions, and in many of them the people were clearly identifiable. He can’t risk that.

  He’ll tell her he can’t risk it because of his—nonexistent—asthma; that the rules are there for a reason and he wants to abide by them.

  He doesn’t know why she’d say no when she’s effectively living in his apartment anyway; she only goes back to her place to work. He hasn’t been there yet, but he’s going tonight. Based on what she’s told him about it and what he found when he googled current rental listings for the complex, his place is twice the size—and he doesn’t think she has any balcony or private outside space.

  Unless, of course, she doesn’t want to come stay with him. There’s always the possibility that he’s read her all wrong, that whatever he thinks is happening here actually isn’t, that she doesn’t feel at all the way her actions imply she does.

  But he doubts it.

  So theoretically, for the next two weeks, they could be together all the time.

  Alone together.

  Not seeing anyone else. No colleagues, no friends, no family. Because they can’t see any of them. He’s felt relatively safe since she’s just moved to Dublin and, as she’d said herself, didn’t even get a chance to get to know any of her coworkers before they were all told to go and work from home, but this would be an entirely different level of security.

  Not only can she not introduce him to anybody, but she can’t expect him to introduce her to anybody either. It won’t be at all suspicious that she’s not meeting his friends, or colleagues, or family, or anyone else who knows him.

  And he’s already established that she doesn’t use social media, so there’s no threat of her Geotagging pictures taken in his apartment or anything like that.

  Maybe there’s even an opportunity here to encourage her not to tell anyone about this, to keep it a secret. Because it’s a bit crazy to move in with a guy you’ve only just met, isn’t it?

  And, really, she’s just coming to stay for a couple of weeks, to ride out the lockdown. No need to say anything to anybody, when you think about it.

  This could be his chance. The one he’s been waiting for.

  We are not prisoners of fate, Varadkar booms from the TV screen. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

  He thinks the leader of the country might have just quoted a line from the Terminator movies while announcing grave new measures needed to stop the spread of a deadly virus—is that wise?—but that aside, Oliver finds himself agreeing with this sentiment for the first time in his entire life.

  He might not have to be a prisoner of his fate anymore. A global emergency might just be about to release him from it.

  What happens next is up to each and every one of us.

  Two weeks, Oliver thinks. If he can convince Ciara that this is a good idea, he has two whole weeks.

  When no one else can contradict anything he says.

  When he can be with her all the time and be anyone he wants to be while he does it. Be the man she wants to be with, the Oliver she thinks she knows.

  He can become him, fully, finally, and leave all his other selves—with their other names, their dark mistakes—far, far behind.

  29 Days Ago

  In one moment Ciara is deep in a dreamless sleep and in the next she is wide awake and the world is on fire.

  A siren is wailing.

  So loud that the peak of each iteration feels like something has reached into her ear canal and pinched whatever’s at the very end of it, deep inside the center of her skull.

  And it’s here, this ceaseless noise.

  With her, in this pitch-black room.

  But when she turns she sees that Oliver, for some reason, is not.

  It takes a moment for Ciara’s brain to absorb the shock and put the pieces together: the building’s fire alarm has gone off in the middle of the night and Oliver isn’t in bed beside her. His half of the duvet is folded back onto her and when she touches a hand to the exposed sheet, she feels no warmth in it.

  But the siren is louder than her thoughts, so she can’t think about that now. She can’t think about anything. She has only one objective and it’s to get to a place where she can’t hear this torturous noise.

  She throws back the covers just as the door to the bedroom opens, the warm glow of the light in the hallway swiftly banishing the majority of the dark. Oliver stands in the doorway in silhouette, rendered a shadowman by the hall light.

  She can see enough to see that he’s dressed. Sweatpants and a T-shirt—what he puts on when he gets up in the morning but before he gets actually dressed. He only wears his boxers to bed, so wherever he was, it was more than a sleepy trip to the bathroom.

  What was he doing?

  The open bedroom door has made the siren even louder; the alarms themselves must be in the hall. She reaches for the jeans she wore yesterday and hung from the back of the chair last night, and jams h
er bare feet into the sneakers she had neatly set on the floor.

  She is dimly aware of Oliver not moving as she does this. He remains in the doorway, still, his facial expression blurred by the dark, seemingly unaffected by this brain-piercing noise.

  He holds this position even when she reaches him, making no effort to move out of her way.

  She calls out his name but he doesn’t react. It crosses her mind that he could be sleepwalking, but now that her eyes have adjusted there’s enough light to see that he’s very much awake and alert.

  Awake and alert and blocking her way out of the bedroom.

  “Oliver,” she says again.

  And then, as if coming out of a daze, he nods and steps aside.

  She pushes past him into the hall and grabs her coat from the hook by the door. Her keys are on the hall table; she slips them into a pocket. My phone, she thinks then. This could be an actual fire and God knows how long they’ll be out there if it is. She should take that, too. Where is it? She doesn’t usually bring it into the bedroom with her, so she dashes into the living room—the lights are on in there—and scans for it.

  It’s on the coffee table, next to Oliver’s phone.

  Which just at that moment lights up with a notification.

  She barely glances at it as she picks up her own phone, but she thinks it was a text message.

  Touching the screen of her phone makes it light up too—with the time: 4:01 a.m.

  Why would someone be texting Oliver at four in the morning?

  She turns back around.

  “Where are you going?” Oliver shouts over the din.

  She points at the door. “Out!”

  The entire world is starting to feel as if it’s made of noise and Ciara can’t take much more of it. Whoever designed this alarm did their job extremely well. She needs to get away, to get outside. But as she starts down the hallway she feels a tug on her arm and then a pull, a force strong enough to spin her right around.

  Oliver pulls her into the bathroom and shuts the door.

  The siren, mercifully, drops a few decibels. She can hear him when he speaks, but there’s a distant buzzing sound that feels as if it’s coming from inside her own ears.

  “It’ll go off in a second,” he says, putting his hands on her shoulders. “It’s a false alarm. Happens all the time. Every time someone burns their dinner. Relax.”

  But his touch doesn’t match this sentiment. It feels different.

  Not reassuring, but holding in place.

  She says, “Who’s making dinner at four a.m.?”

  “Or someone comes home drunk and lights up in the lift.”

  “Comes home from where? There’s a lockdown.”

  His response to this is a shrug. He’s standing with his back against the door.

  “Oliver,” she says evenly, “there could be a fire. I want to go outside.”

  “But there’s no need.”

  “Oliver,” she says again, this time in the exhale of a nervous laugh, because this situation is at once completely absurd and increasingly unsettling.

  What the hell is he doing?

  Her mind runs toward dark places. He’s a foot taller than her, stronger than her, and he’s preventing her from leaving a small room in the middle of the night during a potential fire. Physically holding her in place. She has her phone but . . .

  She can see him snatching it from her hand, throwing it against the tiled wall. They’re in the smallest space of the apartment, at the end of the hall, while a deafening siren wails. Even if she screamed—

  She pulls herself back. No. She’s just overreacting.

  To his overreacting.

  “I need to not hear this noise,” she says, breaking away from him and reaching an arm around his side to get to the door handle.

  “It’ll stop in a second.” He repositions his body, blocking her path again.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. Happens all the time.”

  “You just moved here.”

  “And since I did, it’s been happening all the time.”

  “Well, until then . . .”

  She reaches again, ducking a little, and grabs a hold of the handle.

  Oliver grabs her wrist.

  She looks down at his fingers pinched around her skin and then up, very slowly, into his face.

  “What are you doing?”

  A tense beat passes.

  Then he lets go.

  “The senior partner,” he says. “At KB Studios. He’ll be out there too.” His tone is desperate and his eyes glisten as if he’s on the verge of tears. “And it’s four in the morning. You can’t be visiting if you’re here at four in the morning.”

  Responses to this rush up Ciara’s throat—it’ll be dark, we can stay away from him; we can separate, he won’t recognize her anyway; who the hell cares when the alternative is either going insane from this noise or burning to death in a fire?—but instead of saying any of them, she yanks her arm free and turns around, to the medicine cabinet.

  She opens it and pulls out the packet of masks Oliver came home with a couple of days ago, carelessly enough that other things come out too (a can of shaving gel, a box of Band-Aids), which she lets fall to the floor.

  Along with all the masks as they spill out of the packaging, except for the one she holds in her hand. She snaps the elastic bands over her ears, roughly pulls on the material until it feels like it’s sitting comfortably on her face, and then slams the cabinet closed again for good measure.

  Her hands, she realizes, are shaking.

  “Good idea,” Oliver says, “but you really don’t need to go out—”

  “Let me go.”

  It sounds like what a prisoner might plead of her captor and she fully intends it to.

  The words have an immediate effect on Oliver. Something melts away from him. He hangs his head.

  And he steps aside so Ciara has a clear path to the door.

  She doesn’t waste any time. She pulls it open. With the siren back at full tilt, it feels like the inside of her brain is being burned by each wail. She runs down the hall, toward the front door.

  She doesn’t look to see if he’s following her.

  She doesn’t care if he is.

  On the other side of the apartment door the noise is even worse, with siren wails from every individual unit joining the assault from the speakers installed in the corridor. It’s a tunnel of aural torture and Ciara can’t get outside fast enough. When she reaches the double doors that lead into the courtyard, she jabs the Press to Exit button and pushes her way out into the night.

  A small crowd of residents has gathered in the courtyard. They stand at varying distances from each other, shifting their weight from foot to foot, arms crossed against their chests. Everyone has the pale, puffy face of the deep sleeper suddenly disturbed, is wearing some combination of pajamas and outerwear, and is stealing surreptitious looks at their fellow neighbors. They’ve all been locked up together for a while now but have never seen each other quite like this, together in a group, up close. Other residents stand on their balconies, shivering in shirtsleeves and looking annoyed.

  No one else is wearing a mask. Ciara quickly pulls hers off and stuffs it into her coat pocket. She’d only be more conspicuous with it on.

  The siren wails out here too, but at a much more manageable level. There is no sign of any flames or smoke. She can see there are red bell-like units outside everyone’s balcony doors; a little blue light on each one flashes on and off. She feels very sorry for anyone who lives in the vicinity.

  One woman paces up and down by one of the courtyard’s benches, barking into her mobile phone about this happening yet again and how this disruption is utterly unacceptable and why every false alarm makes us less likely to be alarmed when there’s an a
ctual fire.

  The other residents are mostly silent, not even talking to each other. Some rub at their eyes, others roll them. One lights a cigarette.

  She can’t see anyone who might be the partner at the architect firm that Oliver is apparently living in fear of, and no one seems to be paying her an unusual level of attention.

  The woman on the phone drops the device to her neck and says to no one in particular, “They’re saying I can’t turn it off. They’re telling me to wait for the fire brigade.”

  A ripple of scoffs and sighs spreads through the residents.

  “We’ll be here ages,” someone groans.

  A thumping has started in Ciara’s right temple, a pulse out of time with the wail of the siren. As she stands in the cold, she feels it spreading out across her forehead and down over her right eye, but she doesn’t know if it’s actually getting worse or if thinking it is is what’s making her feel that way.

  She wants to be in bed in the dark with a Solpadeine tablet. She wants to not be hearing this bloody noise. She’d settle for one out of two for the moment.

  Ciara goes back through the double doors that lead to the lobby, and then out the second set directly opposite them, onto the street.

  On this side of the building, the night holds everything still. The roads are bare, the sky is a dark mass of starless clouds. There’s a row of terraced houses opposite, just beyond the narrow strip of unlit park; she counts eight whose windows she can see from here and zero signs of life. Surely it would be like this at this time of night anyway, but there’s a deeper level to this stillness, a concentrated quality that she hasn’t experienced anywhere before. It’s as if the city has been reduced to its inanimate parts, the brick and the steel and the glass. The flow of human life that would otherwise be passing through it has slowed to such a trickle that it no longer leaves an afterburn in the night.

  It’s empty, that’s what it is.

  While she can still hear the siren, it’s nowhere near as loud.

  And then a voice says, “God, it’s so much better out here, isn’t it?” and Ciara turns and finds herself face-to-face with Yoga Woman.