56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “Since I last saw you, by the look of things.”

  “Yeah, well.” He swallows hard. “Are you coming in?”

  “I was going to. We need to talk, but . . .” She hesitates. “I don’t think you’re in any fit state to, right now.”

  “I’m fine,” he protests.

  “I can see that you’re not. You look like shit and your pupils are the size of saucers.” A pause. “Have you been drinking?”

  He shakes his head, no. “I just need to sleep. But I’m okay for now. Come in—”

  “Like hell you are.”

  “Please.”

  A beat passes.

  “Look,” she says then, “why don’t you just go to bed, get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll come back tomorrow. We can talk then.”

  The kindness in her voice cuts through him. He doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve her.

  “Okay,” he says, “but will you stay?”

  It takes what feels like forever for her to decide.

  “All right, but only to make sure you rest. And I’ll be on the couch.”

  They go inside, and he closes the door behind them.

  “What’s that smell?” she says, wrinkling her nose.

  All he can smell is her, the stuff she puts in her hair that smells of the sea and sunny days. He thinks of the day in the park, her lying beside him, nothing else on the earth but blue sky and their heartbeats.

  She gently guides him toward the bedroom, motions for him to get into bed.

  “Are you back?” he says. “Can you love me anyway?”

  She doesn’t speak and he closes his eyes before he can see the answer on her face.

  He hears the blind coming down, the heels of her boots crossing the floor, the soft click of the bedroom door as she closes it gently, saying, “We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

  56 Days Ago

  “Go ahead,” are the first words he ever says to her.

  It’s Friday lunchtime and her fifth time following Oliver into the Tesco opposite his office building, swinging the Space Shuttle tote bag on her arm, pretending to be just another office worker buying yet another unimaginative meal deal. Today, though, she lost him somewhere inside and then, distracted, had picked up a bottle of water of the kind with a sickly sweet fruit flavor added. She can’t afford to spend money on props; this will actually be her lunch. So she’s paused by a stack of Easter eggs (Easter? Already?), wondering if she can be bothered to go back and change it. That’s when she looks up and sees him, standing less than two feet away, leaving a space for her to join the line ahead of him.

  She’s never got this close, never been able to look directly at him. Never felt his presence before now.

  She can’t do this, she thinks. She’s not able to.

  He’s got a strange look on his face. Expectant, almost. Like he’s . . . challenging her? Does he know who she is? Know what she’s planning on doing? She feels like her real motivation is on naked display, written all over her face. If she could just get a hold of herself, take a minute to prepare . . .

  She’ll come again, she thinks. On Monday.

  She’ll be more ready then.

  “It’s okay,” she says, starting to turn. “I’ve just realized I’ve got the wrong one.”

  Ciara turns and heads back toward the fridges, feeling his eyes on her as she moves away.

  And the beat of her own heart, pulsing with promise.

  She takes her time swapping the water and then walks to the very back of the store, making a show of searching for something, before going to the tills and joining the line there again.

  He’s long gone.

  She finally feels like she can breathe again.

  But then, when she gets outside, she hears a voice say, “Nice bag.”

  It’s him. Standing in the next doorway, looking right at her. The sandwich he’s just bought is tucked under his arm, getting squished by the pressure. There’s the hint of a grin on his face, tinged with something else she can’t readily identify.

  She stops. “My . . . ?”

  “Your bag,” he says, pointing to the NASA tote.

  And she takes this as a sign.

  Due to the reporting restrictions, the details in the articles she’d found were scant, but they’d all spared a column inch to mention the fact that Boy B had hidden a bloodstained T-shirt with a NASA logo in a rubbish bag inside a holdall under his bed. His grandmother had bought it for him. It proved, his legal team argued, that he didn’t want to hurt Paul Kelleher, that he had never intended to, but that after Shane had, Oliver had gone to the boy’s assistance, tried to help.

  “Thanks,” she says. “It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—”

  “New York,” he finishes. “The one on the aircraft carrier, right? Have you been?”

  It was seventeen years ago, he was a child, and maybe he didn’t even like space things. Maybe his grandmother was playing a guessing game. But it was all she had, and then, when she’d seen the bag in the window of the charity shop . . .

  But it turns out he did.

  And still does.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Once.”

  He can’t have been there. He wouldn’t have been. She’d checked: the space shuttle on display there was only added in 2012, and she presumes he can’t have traveled to the United States since he got out of Oberstown because he’d have had to declare his conviction at immigration. For direct flights from Ireland, that happened at the airport on this end; America had Homeland Security controls at Dublin and Shannon. He wouldn’t even have made it onto the plane.

  And memories of one visit a while back should be easy enough for her to flub.

  He asks, “Was it good?”

  Ciara hesitates, because this is it. This is where she makes her choice.

  People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course.

  Moments like this.

  She wants the truth of what happened that day for her mother, before the woman’s time runs out. She was never the same after that fateful day, after the knock on the door that revealed two strange men outside, one in a Garda uniform, one in a dark suit, both of them looking apologetic and solemn.

  I’m afraid we need to ask your son some questions.

  It had broken something in her mother’s soul that could never be repaired, that had somehow only grown more broken since.

  It’s about the local boy who went missing, Paul Kelleher.

  But Ciara also needs the truth for herself.

  It may not bother Siobhán—or her sister might do a good job of pretending it doesn’t—but for Ciara, the not knowing is a torment. Both boys had different stories; in each, the other was the ringleader, the real killer, the bad seed that started it all. The Gardaí had a third: who started it didn’t matter, because they’d both contributed to the boy’s death.

  Is Shane in? Could you ask him to come down?

  The jury considered everything—how quickly Oliver had let go of his lies, his tortured tears in interviews, the bloodstained NASA T-shirt—and decided that whatever had happened had happened because Shane took the lead. Perhaps this was helped by the fact that their family lived in a house in Mill River set aside for social housing, that her father was one of the long-term unemployed and that, before any of this had happened, Shane had struggled to concentrate at school and been held back a year. Meanwhile, Oliver’s family occupied one of only six detached, corner houses on the estate that came with an extra acre, he had two doctors for parents and one of his character references was the parish priest. He even looked better—clean, neat, and handsome compared to Shane’s pale pudginess and spray of angry red acne. The judge p
unished Shane with a sentence of no less than twenty years and promised Oliver he’d be out at eighteen, which by then was less than five.

  Ciara could remember the foreign stillness hanging over the house hours after the sentencing, her lying on the camp bed in Siobhán’s room because for months she’d been unable to sleep in a room alone, knowing they were both wide awake, staring into the dark.

  “What happened?” she’d asked her sister.

  “Your brother murdered someone,” came the flat reply.

  Ever since, whenever anyone got close, Ciara felt something clamp down inside of her, something sharp and dangerous, like a bear-trap. Fearing that there’s something in her soul that lies in wait, a part of her unknown even to herself, a dark, barbed-wire thread through her DNA that could make awful things happen if the opportunity arose.

  How can she be sure she isn’t like him?

  She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most. Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s fear she struggles with. She thinks courage might be choosing between what you want now and what you want the most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the doors. To retreat. To stay in the place where she feels safe and secure. In this moment, that’s nowhere near Dublin, or KB Studios, or Oliver St Ledger.

  But she needs to know what happened that day.

  Exactly what happened.

  Who or what Shane was then. Who or what he might be now, if he had lived.

  And here is her chance.

  “Yeah,” she says. “But not as good as Kennedy Space Center.”

  18 Days Ago

  When Oliver awakes, the bedroom is bright with early morning sun and something is different about it. He pulls himself up onto his elbows, looks around. It was messier last night, he thinks; there’s no clothes strewn about the floor now. The air is odorless and the window has been opened—he can hear the chirping of birds outside. He’s grateful for the glass of water he finds on his bedside table and gulps it down greedily, trying to banish the layers of acrid dryness that coat his throat.

  Noises, in the kitchen: running water, the pump of the coffee machine, the tinkling of a spoon inside a cup.

  She stayed here last night then. All night.

  He hopes that’s a good sign.

  Oliver puts on fresh clothes, acutely aware that this would be his fourth day in a row wearing the same ones otherwise, wincing at the pain in his elbow and then vaguely recalling walloping it on something last night.

  He quickly brushes his teeth and splashes his face with water in the bathroom before he goes into the main room to meet her.

  “Good morning,” she says.

  “Good morning.”

  She’s sitting on the couch, drinking coffee. Perched on it, really, back ramrod straight. She looks tense. Braced.

  He’s unsure whether or not it’s okay for him to sit down beside her so he hedges his bets, sitting on the couch but at the opposite end, leaving plenty of space between them.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  “Okay.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  Not really, he thinks. He tossed and turned, and he lay awake in the dark, and even though every limb was heavy with exhaustion and his eyes were stinging and his temples throbbed—even though all he wanted to do was go to sleep—his body, for whatever reason, wouldn’t let him in.

  “I got a little,” he says. “I dozed. Where did you go? Over the weekend?”

  “Home. Where else could I go? There’s a lockdown, remember.”

  With everything that’s going on, he’s not sure he did.

  “What time is it?” he asks.

  She leans forward to tap her phone, illuminating the screen.

  “Seven thirty-five,” she says. “On Easter Monday.”

  He’d forgotten about that, too.

  There’s a part of him that would like to keep going like this, talking as they are, suspended in limbo.

  But a larger part of him has to ask the question, has to know:

  “Are you back?”

  She doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, she leans back, sighs. “I don’t know what I am, Oliver, to be honest.”

  He risks moving a little closer.

  “I can’t say this enough, I know, but I am sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you, but I just didn’t see another way. If I told you that up front, if you knew—”

  “Would you ever hurt me?”

  He recoils as if she’s slapped him. “What?”

  “You can’t blame me for asking.”

  “Ciara, I would never—”

  “But how do I know? I don’t know what you’re capable of now, do I? And I was living with you and absolutely no one knew I was here. Well, except for a journalist, as it turns out. What about her, by the way? What are we going to do about that?”

  The we sends a balloon of hope rising in his heart, but remembering Laura pierces it instantly.

  “She can’t legally print my name,” he says.

  “What about your picture?”

  He shakes his head, no. “It’s my identity that’s protected, so anything that might lead to the discovery of that . . .”

  Ciara nods slowly, as if considering this.

  “I know this is all a lot to take in,” Oliver says. “I just want you to know—and I’m probably the only person in the entire country who can say this—but these last couple of weeks . . . they were the happiest of my life.”

  Silence.

  Oliver holds his breath.

  “Mine too,” Ciara says softly, eventually. “But now . . . Now I don’t know what to do. Or think.”

  “You don’t have to forgive me,” he says. “Know that. And being with me isn’t condoning what I did either. I won’t take it as that. You know I don’t condone it. Far from it. But it was a long time ago. And I take responsibility for it—I did take responsibility, I served my time. I live with the regret of that one afternoon every single day and I will until the day I die. But that doesn’t change what we have, what we’ve had these last few weeks. When you were here, that first night you came over, I felt . . .” The lump in his throat is back. He tries and fails to swallow it away. “I just want to feel that again, Ciara. I wish we could. So tell me what I need to do. Tell me what you need to hear from me to make you want to stay.”

  She looks at him then in a way that reminds him of that first day by the canal, that first night here in this room, all the mornings since—

  He reaches for her.

  He pulls her into his arms, presses his cheek against hers, puts his head on her shoulder.

  And, miraculously, she lets him.

  Slowly but surely, he feels her relax her body into his, feels her arms reach around him, feels the squeeze of her hand on his back.

  He’s too scared to move, in case it stops, goes away.

  When she speaks, her voice is muffled against his chest.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Can’t we just feel our way through this?” he whispers.

  The nod of her head is practically imperceptible.

  He dares find her lips with his. She hesitates at first but then responds, pulling him in, kissing him back.

  It’s a weird day for both of them, stepping around each other as if on eggshells, not sure what the other one is feeling in any given moment, anxious that it’s not the same.

  He’s too afraid to ask her if she’s going to stay that night, afraid that that will open up an opportunity for her to realize that coming back was a mistake, that she can’t be with him, that she can’t even stand to look at him. There’s already been a few times when she turns to him and inhales as if she’s about t
o say something, but then changes her mind and doesn’t.

  And all the while, Oliver is trying to ignore his most pressing problem: he hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep in going on five days.

  It’s taking its toll. He can feel himself shifting into the most dangerous stage, the one he usually tries to avoid: when the fabric of reality starts getting unpicked by unseen forces, when he starts to hear and see things that aren’t there. And then there are the moments of what he’s been told is called microsleep—when he does fall asleep, but uncontrollably, and only for a few moments at a time—which usually signal that he’s reaching the end of the line, that he’s testing his limits, and that if he doesn’t take action soon things could get really, really bad.

  He doesn’t want to have to check out now, on the day that Ciara came back, when things between them are so delicate and tenuous, but if he doesn’t sleep, he could ruin everything inadvertently. So, as the sun starts its retreat from the sky, he admits to her that he’s going to have to take one of his pills.

  “Oh,” she says. She sounds disappointed. “Should I leave? I can come back—”

  “No, no. You can stay. If you want to, I mean.”

  “What happens when you take one?”

  “I conk out.” He smiles. “That’s about it.”

  “And you’ll be, like, all right tomorrow, then?”

  “A bit groggy,” he says. “But feeling one hundred percent less zombielike.”

  She smiles at him now, for the first time since the Truth, and it’s like a radiator inserted into his chest.

  He takes her hand. “Thank you. For coming back. For still being here.” He leans over and kisses her, light but lingering, on the cheek.

  When he pulls back, he sees that her eyes are filled with tears.

  “Ciara—” he starts.

  “Sorry,” she says, wiping at them. “I haven’t really slept either the last few days. I think I could probably do with a good night’s sleep too.”

  He waves a hand, indicating the bedroom. “I don’t mind if you take the bed, I could sleep here.”

  “No, no. It’s fine.” She reaches for his hand, squeezes it. “Do you want to eat first or . . . ?”