56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “I mean, I really don’t want to. I hate hospitals. Rich had some health issues when he was younger”—a lie—“and I don’t know, something about the smell . . . I wouldn’t even want to go into one to take a test. So I will do anything at all to avoid them—including wiping down bottles of milk with anti-bac wipes and obeying arbitrary distance rules. It’s not because I’m paranoid or a germaphobe, I just really don’t want to have to go into hospital. So . . . I don’t want to be a complete dickhead, but what I’ve been too embarrassed to say is that, well, you live with me, so whatever you get I’ll get too, so I need you to be just as careful.”

  “I was being careful,” she says reassuringly. “I am. What with the asthma . . .”

  He’d totally forgotten he’s supposed to have asthma.

  “Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Yes, that too. I’ve mostly grown out of it, but this is a respiratory thing, so . . .”

  “Actually,” Ciara says, “I was thinking: maybe we should be wearing masks when we come and go from here. Inside the complex, I mean. Until we’re outside. That was my dastardly plan to avoid that guy from your firm seeing me, but it would also qualify as being more cautious, right?”

  How absolutely perfect.

  Even more so because she came up with it herself.

  “Great idea,” he says.

  “And speaking of wanting to avoid imminent death . . .” She inhales. “Oliver, last night, there could’ve really been a fire.”

  “But—”

  “There could’ve really been a fire. I don’t care if it had gone off every night for the last fifty, you had no way of knowing for sure that there wasn’t one. If you want to stay inside and risk your life, I won’t stop you, but you tried to stop me from leaving.”

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  “No shit.”

  “I just thought if we went out there, he’d definitely be out there—the senior partner—and . . . Well, I’ve just started there. And I was lucky to get the job in the first place. The director is my brother’s best friend’s dad. I don’t want to let anyone down when they basically gave me the job as a favor.”

  He wishes he’d used different words to make that point, but Ciara appears to take them at face value instead of wondering why he might have needed that favor in the first place.

  “What does this guy look like?” she asks. “The senior partner?”

  Oliver mentally flips through the older guys in the office, picks one at random, and then does his best to describe him physically.

  “I didn’t see anyone out there like that . . .”

  “Maybe he was in the courtyard?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why did you go out on the street?”

  “Why did you go back in?”

  Good question, he thinks.

  He says, “I didn’t want to disturb you.” It’s lame and he knows it; time to change the subject. He picks up what must by now be a half-drunk cup of stone-cold coffee. “Want a fresh one?”

  “Sure.”

  Oliver gets up and starts toward the kitchen, making sure to phrase his next question as a casual afterthought, not at all important, just wondering . . .

  “Who was that woman you were talking to?”

  “Just one of your neighbors.”

  “Which apartment?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What were you talking about?”

  “How noisy it was,” she says. “Why?”

  “Just wondering.” He clears his throat. “Did you get her name?”

  He’s in the kitchen now, at the fridge, his back turned toward her. He wants to still be sitting in front of her, studying her, tracing her face for any glimmers of a reaction, but he also doesn’t want to make it too obvious and settles for a glance as he flips the lid open on the coffee machine.

  She’s turned toward the window and he can’t see her face.

  “No,” she says. “No, I didn’t.”

  When it comes time for her walk, Ciara slips on a disposable face mask before she leaves the apartment. Between Oliver’s door and the main entrance of the Crossings, she walks with her head down, letting a half-curtain of hair fall in front of her face. She pockets the mask once she’s reached the street and determined there’s no one else around.

  She doesn’t want to risk meeting that Laura woman again.

  Not until she’s decided what she’s going to do about her.

  Ciara heads in the direction of the canal, following her usual route. If she crosses it and keeps going, she’ll eventually emerge onto Stephen’s Green, which she’s taken to doing laps around while the gates remain closed.

  But today, she doesn’t cross the water.

  Instead, she turns and follows the canal all the way back to her apartment.

  It’s hot and stuffy inside, the space repeatedly warmed by the recent streak of sunny weather that feels like a cosmic joke considering the fact that everyone is trapped at home. There’s a faintly sour smell in the air too, like she’s left something in the trash can or milk spilled in the fridge.

  Ciara throws open the windows as far as they’ll go and starts hunting for the source, eventually finding a rotting banana peel hidden under the plastic liner in the kitchen trash can. She puts it inside the liner, ties a knot in the top, and sprays the countertops with a floral cleaner to cover any lingering smells.

  Then she takes her phone—her other phone—from a drawer, plugs in the charging cable, and uses it to call her sister.

  Siobhán picks up so quickly, the phone must have been in her hand.

  “Ciara,” she says, exhaling. “I was getting worried.”

  “It’s only been a few days.”

  “Five, by my count.”

  “I told you I’d call when I could. Things are hectic here and when I’m done for the day, I’m exhausted. I keep thinking, ‘I’ll call Shiv when I have the energy to actually talk to her . . .’”

  A beat of silence blooms and Ciara knows why: her big sister is weighing up the pros and cons of pushing her, demanding some plausibility to go with that embarrassingly flimsy excuse, which would also risk potentially ending this conversation before it’s even begun.

  Siobhán ultimately opts for pretending to believe, for letting it go.

  She always does.

  “So what’s going on up in the Big Smoke?” she asks.

  “Not much. Working and falling asleep in front of Netflix. Like everyone else, I suppose.”

  “What’s Dublin like?”

  “The opening scenes in something postapocalyptic, at the moment. You know when Cillian Murphy wakes up in 28 Days Later and everyone’s left London except for him? That. How is it down there?”

  “Beats me. We’re barely leaving the house. Pat does all the food shops. There could actually be zombies out there for all I know.” A pause. “What about your job? Do you like it?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “What does it involve?”

  “What does it involve?” Ciara frowns. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Why wouldn’t you answer?”

  So now it’s her turn to decide whether to push or pretend.

  Ciara, too, goes for pretend.

  “Right now it mostly involves making lists and looking at spreadsheets.”

  “Sounds kinda boring,” Siobhán says.

  Ciara knows her sister is just trying to get a rise out of her and she refuses to take the bait.

  “It is,” she agrees, “a bit.”

  “Then why did you run away to Dublin to do it?”

  “Aren’t I lucky I did? I wouldn’t even have a job to go to if I’d stayed at home. The hotel is closed.”

  “You would have your emergency pandemic payment, or whatever it’s called.”

  “I’d rather
be here.”

  “Why do I feel like I’m not getting the whole story?”

  “Because you always feel that way, because you’re paranoid.” Ciara doesn’t want to get into it with her sister, again. “Anyway. How’s Mam?”

  “About the same. Or so I’m told, since we can’t visit her now. They’re trying to get iPads in, so we can FaceTime.”

  “Does she know what’s going on?”

  There’s a long pause before Siobhán answers.

  “She has good days and bad.”

  “What about . . .” Ciara doesn’t like to think about this bit; she has to force the word out. “Pain?”

  “They keep her comfortable. She sleeps a lot.”

  “Do they know how much . . . ? How long?”

  “No.”

  There’s another long silence.

  “What are you not telling me?” Siobhán asks then.

  That I might have got myself into something here.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  Things might be the furthest from okay they’ve ever been, and you and I both know that that’s saying something.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I’ve never been less sure about anything, about everything. Because I’ve met someone who’s made a bonfire of everything I thought I knew and poured lighter fluid on it, and now I’m standing beside it, holding a lit match.

  And the flame is almost at my fingers.

  “You know,” Siobhán says, “I really think there should be one person in your life you don’t lie to. It doesn’t have to be me, but . . .”

  Ciara nods, forgetting that her sister can’t see her do it.

  “Shiv, can I ask you something?”

  “You just did.”

  She could hear a smile in her sister’s voice as she said that.

  It’s an inside joke, born on Patrick Street in Cork many years before, when one of those god-awful charity workers—so-called—stepped in front of them, blocking their way on a dark, cold, and rainy Christmas Eve, and said, “Can I ask you ladies something?” and Siobhán, without missing a beat, quipped, “You just did,” stumping the guy long enough for them to make their escape.

  “Do you think people can change, Shiv? Like, really change? At their core?”

  Her sister sighs so hard it sounds like a gale blowing down the line.

  “What does that even mean, ‘at their core’? What does a person changing actually look like? How would you know if they did?”

  “They’d act differently. Different to how you’d expect them to.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on how they’d acted in the past.”

  “I think people can change their habits and behaviors,” Siobhán says carefully, as if she’s on the stand in a courtroom, testifying for the defense, and the hot-shot prosecutor has just tried to trip her up with a cleverly worded question. “And sometimes their mind and their beliefs. People get older and wiser and have more experiences, and that all updates their . . . let’s call it their central operating system. Because everything they do they learned in the first place, right? No one is born being X, Y, or Z. And theoretically, if you can learn how to be a certain way, you can unlearn it, too. But at the same time, you can’t erase the past. You can lock it in a box and put that box away, but you can’t make it disappear.” She pauses. “Is this about you? Because I think you absolutely can change. Your problem has always been that you don’t want to.”

  Ciara rolls her eyes.

  It’s the same old song.

  That she’s sick of hearing.

  “I’ve got to go, Shiv. I have to work. I was just on a break.”

  “Look after yourself, okay? And I can come up there, if you need me. Just give me a call and I’ll get into the car.”

  “You can’t, actually.”

  “Watch ’em try to stop me.”

  Ciara smiles as she pictures Siobhán busting through a Garda checkpoint somewhere on the motorway, Thelma and Louise style.

  “I’ll call you again in a few days,” she tells her sister.

  “Make sure you do.”

  26 Days Ago

  When Ciara suggests that they head to Merrion Square Park with a picnic, Oliver points out that according to Google Maps, it’s technically three kilometers from the Crossings.

  But he’s only teasing her. The Gardaí would hardly bother with pedestrians, and he wants to go there too. It’s a beautiful, blue-sky Sunday—and an increasingly warm one. The very last year you’d want it to happen, summer has decided to show up early, unexpectedly, in the middle of spring. The kind of weather that makes you want to sit on freshly cut grass in open space and lift your face to the sun.

  The streets that connect the Crossings with Portobello Bridge are lifeless, but when they reach the canal it’s as if they’ve slipped into another world. The waterside paths are thronged with people and pets strolling, and wherever there’s a patch of grass or somewhere to sit and swing your legs out over the water, pale limbs and heads thrown back in laughter have already gathered around collections of supermarket bags filled with cans. Houses facing the water stand with their front doors flung open, letting the tinny sounds of Lyric FM drift out into the air. Next-door neighbors sit in deck chairs on the grass, having slightly shouted conversations with each other over walls and fences. Outside one house, two young children are having the time of their lives with a simple garden sprinkler, running repeatedly through its thin, upright stream with squealing, giggling abandon. In another, a disposable barbecue is cooking up a feast.

  It’s almost as if everyone saw the weather forecast and prearranged a socially distanced block party.

  An alien visitor would have to know what to look for to find evidence that anything is wrong, but it’s there. Everyone milling about is doing so in small, confined pods; signs begging Help Stop the Spread of COVID-19 are cable-tied to every second lamppost; and whenever Ciara and Oliver come to pass another person or couple walking in the opposite direction, one or both parties steps aside, onto the grass or even down off the curb and onto the road, flashing a friendly smile as they politely try to get as far away as they physically can.

  When they turn onto Leeson Street, a stretch of city dominated by office buildings and schools that would’ve been quiet anyway on a Sunday, there’s an unusual depth to its desertion. A solidness. At the opposite end, the gates of Stephen’s Green remain locked. On the other side of the park, taxi ranks stand empty. The open-topped tour buses and horses and carts that tend to lay in wait on sunny spring weekends like this for foolish tourists on the northwest side are gone and the Shelbourne Hotel, normally a hive of activity with lines of blacked-out SUVs and uniformed doormen helping well-heeled guests to and from them, is shut, locked up, dark inside. Grafton Street, one of the busiest shopping streets in the world, a gauntlet of other people’s swinging shopping bags, street performers, and elbows during normal times, empty, is the most disconcerting sight of all. It’s something that was never meant to be seen like this, like when the lights come on in the club at the end of the night.

  But none of it is weirder than the fact that Oliver is seeing all this with Ciara by his side.

  Every now and then he steals a glance at her, or squeezes her hand, or lifts the hand he holds to his lips to kiss it lightly, just to prove to himself that she really is there.

  Still, despite everything.

  But for how much longer?

  There was nothing resembling a picnic blanket in Oliver’s apartment—or hers even, if they’d been prepared to take a detour—so they lie flat on their backs in the park on a white bedsheet Ciara worries they’ll never get the grass stains out of. She has no shades, so she rests her arm on her forehead, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. She’s hoping her old b
ottle of off-brand body lotion isn’t lying about being SPF30, because that’s all she has on in the way of sunscreen. She didn’t think she’d have to worry about sunbathing-in-the-park essentials when lockdown began, but here they are.

  Apart from the occasional distant belly-laugh or child’s excited squeal, she can’t hear anything except Oliver’s gentle breathing as he dozes beside her after their lunch of sugary carbs and fizzy alcohol that they picked up in an almost deserted Marks & Spencers food hall on Grafton Street. They found a spot right in the southwest corner of the park, near the railings and so near the road, but there’s no traffic noise because there’s no traffic to make it. They are right in the city center but the soundtrack is Idyllic Countryside.

  “Lockdown has its advantages,” she whispers.

  Oliver stirs, hoisting himself up onto his elbows to look around the park. His forehead, she sees, is getting a little red. He searches among the plastic carton debris of their picnic lunch until he finds a water bottle and then sits up to take a long gulp.

  She sits up too.

  The expanse of grass around them seems, at first glance, to be densely packed with lounging bodies, but a closer inspection reveals dozens of groups gathered together but staying a fair distance apart. There’s a few who are definitely breaking the one-household rule unless they live in a house where every single corner is chock-full of bunk beds, but it’s hard to get worked up about it when they’re all outside, and outside is looking as it does today: the sky a canopy of cornflower blue and the sun shining from almost directly overhead.

  “It’s weird,” Oliver says, “isn’t it? It feels normal but also . . . not. Like we’re in a Black Mirror episode where some computer company has made a simulation of the world, but everything is just a little off.”

  “I’ve never seen Black Mirror.”

  “Oh, we’re so adding that to the binge-watch list.”

  “But isn’t that all, like, dystopian stuff? The world is going in the wrong direction, etc., etc.? I’m not sure we really need to be watching that kinda thing right now.”

  “Fair point. We’ll stick it on the After list.”

  The After list.