56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “Better if I don’t.”

  “I might order something. Or run over to Georgie’s.”

  “Your keys are still on the hall table,” he says.

  “Thanks. I’ll try to be quiet.”

  “There’s really no need. You could have a rave in here and I wouldn’t hear it. Those things completely knock me out.”

  Oliver goes into the kitchen to pour a glass of water from the sink, and then into the bathroom to get a tablet. In his experience, they take a few minutes—maybe as many as ten—to start to kick in, at which point you’d better get yourself into bed because the next stage falls like a curtain, like a heavy object from a great height.

  If he’s standing he will fall down, wherever he is.

  And God, he’s ready for it, this blissful unconsciousness. He wants to stop feeling as awful as he does. He wants to wake up tomorrow feeling rested and energized and ready to start building a life with Ciara, for the rest of his life—his After—to finally begin.

  He swallows a tablet.

  He goes back into the bedroom, takes off his shoes and socks and then, too exhausted to bother with the rest, pulls back the blankets and climbs into bed. He hears the living-room door close with a soft click and then the muffled sound of the TV on at low volume.

  He closes his eyes.

  He opens them again.

  From this angle, he has a line of sight out into the hallway. Ciara’s bag is sitting on the floor there, her large black leather one with the handles that doesn’t close at the top. She would normally drop it on the floor of the bedroom, but she hasn’t set foot in here since she returned.

  What has got his attention is what he can see sticking out of it: a large black Moleskine notebook, with the corner of a paper napkin sticking out of that.

  The napkin has the logo of the Sidecar Bar printed on it.

  That’s the bar at the Westbury, where they had their first date. Did she take it from the bar the night they went there, to keep as a souvenir?

  The thought that all the way back then—only a few weeks in reality, but what feels like years in lockdown time—she was thinking that this, him and her, was going to be something fills him with a sleepy warmth.

  He raises his head, holds his breath, listens.

  The fridge door opening and closing; Ciara is in the kitchen.

  Oliver throws back the covers, gets up and goes to the bag. He already feels a little woozy, so he keeps his hands held out for emergency wall contact, should the need arise. He’s not planning on snooping, he just wants to know for sure. He wants to be able to take the promise of Ciara’s love with him to bed, to infuse it into his dreams. If she still has that, even after Wednesday, and if she’s carrying it around with her . . .

  That has to be a good sign, right?

  He bends to reach for the napkin, pulls it out.

  Something is written on it. Notes, it looks like, in blue pen.

  French 75

  NYC bar—no sign/secret door

  Only child

  He blinks at it, confused. It looks like a list of things they talked about on the night but . . .

  Why would she write these things down?

  Maybe she keeps a diary, he thinks, and she was just making notes to help her remember things until she got a chance to write about them, later.

  His eyes stray from the napkin in his hand to the notebook in the bag.

  And then to the closed door of the living room.

  He reaches for the notebook.

  It has the bloated, crinkled look of heavy use. He opens it, flicks through. Each page is filled with Ciara’s handwriting.

  He stops randomly at one.

  Space shuttles

  Challenger—1/28/86, O-ring failure (cold), explosion at “throttle up“

  Columbia—2/1/03, foam strike/tiles damaged, burned up on reentry

  Atlantis—KSC Florida

  Discovery—Smithsonian, Virginia

  Endeavour—California Science Center

  Enterprise—Intrepid, NYC (test vehicle)

  If the TV is still on next door he can’t tell anymore, because he can’t hear anything over the thunderous rush of blood in his ears.

  He turns the page and finds a square of printed text, glued onto it. The paper is glossy and smooth, as if from a magazine. It looks like it’s been cropped from an interview; there’s a question printed in bold at the top and then the corresponding answer underneath.

  He turns another page.

  2020—left Apple (Cork)

  2017—graduated Swansea

  2002—moved to Isle of Man (7)

  He flips to the back cover, where a piece of paper has been folded in half and taped in place along one short edge. He unfolds it, turns the notebook so he can read what’s on it. It looks like a screenshot of a LinkedIn profile for a woman named Ciara Wyse who lives in Dublin and works for Cirrus, but the accompanying profile picture is of someone else.

  There’s a fog rolling in now from all edges of his brain, making everything cloudy, blocking all pathways out, cutting off the trails of his thoughts before they can even establish themselves.

  It’s a familiar feeling and, he knows, a chemical one.

  It can’t be stopped.

  He knows this, and yet he wants to push it back, to keep a little space clear in the middle, so he can think straight, so he can figure out . . .

  This notebook.

  Things she told him, but written down.

  With dates like . . .

  Like she needed to remember them.

  Not a diary, but a . . .

  Through the fog, he sees three words emerge clearly.

  A cover story.

  Ciara needed a cover story.

  He looks again at the living-room door and wonders who—what—is actually in there.

  But the fog is growing thick, swirling, taking over. He stumbles a little, and has to reach out and place both palms on the wall to steady himself.

  She’s a journalist after all. That’s what Ciara is. What she has to be. It’s the only explanation.

  Which means he can’t let himself fall asleep.

  He cannot.

  No.

  Oliver turns and stumbles into the bathroom, feeling woozy, drunk. When he looks down, the ground seems very far beyond his own bare feet. And it’s moving, the streaks of pale marble in the tiles morphing and swirling—

  He falls to his knees, holds his head over the toilet bowl, and sticks his fingers down his throat. It’s too late to stop it, but maybe he can delay it a bit. Long enough to think.

  Long enough to figure out what he needs to do.

  With her.

  But the fog is swirling, clouding his mind, pulling his eyelids down. He can see it coming toward him on a black tide.

  Cold water. He can keep himself awake with cold water.

  Oliver hoists himself up and steps into the shower—his elbow burns with a fresh pain; he must have hit it—and smacks the lever until a monsoon shower of droplets starts hitting his skin. But the temperature is set to its usual one—warm, getting warmer—and it just makes him want to go to sleep even more. He twists the dial he thinks will make it cold, but it doesn’t get cold. No change.

  His hands are starting to feel as if they’re detached from his body, as if he’s watching someone else’s hands at work, and they don’t seem to have any grip.

  The sink, he thinks. There’s cold water in the sink.

  He stumbles back out of the shower, hitting the porcelain basin with his body and narrowly missing hitting his head on the mirror hanging above it.

  He turns on the tap. Ice cold.

  He tries to fill his cupped hands with enough water to throw at his face.

  “Oliver?”

  She’
s standing in the doorway, staring at him. He doesn’t even remember turning around.

  “What’s wrong?” she says. “What are you doing?”

  Her words sound distorted, like some unseen editor has slowed down the audio.

  “Who are you?” he spits through his teeth.

  He looks around for the notebook, the napkin, but he can’t see them.

  He can’t remember what he did with them.

  “Oliver, did you already take your pill? Because I think you should be in—”

  He feels himself sway and tries to take a step to steady himself, reaching out for the shower door he hopes is where he thinks it is, but he stumbles and then he’s falling and there’s an impact and pain and a wall rushing toward him and the sound of breaking, falling, shattered glass—

  And then Ciara screams.

  23 Days Ago

  “It was just a normal day. I was walking home from school with this other boy from my class, Shane, and . . .”

  Ciara puts her head down so Oliver can’t see her face, can’t judge her reaction. She holds her body as still as she can, tries not to shake, tries not to cry.

  How is she supposed to do this?

  How is she supposed to listen to this and not react, not reveal that she knows this already, that he’s describing not only what he did, but what her own brother did, too?

  “It was all over something so stupid,” he says. “And we were stupid. But in just a matter of minutes, everything got completely out of hand.”

  She’s encouraged to see that his eyes are filling with tears.

  He talks about Paul Kelleher, about how he used to follow them home, and how on this day he did it while throwing stones.

  “Most of them miss, but a couple hit our schoolbags and then Shane gets one square in the back of his head. And he like, reels around on Paul, and I think he’s going to roar at him or something, but instead he says, ‘Okay, fine. You can come with us. We’re going down to the water to skim stones.’ And then he gives me this look, like . . . Follow my lead. And he takes off running. Paul follows him. I do, too.”

  She tries to imagine her brother behaving this way, attempts to play the scene out in her head like a film reel. But she was only eight at the time, and her memories from then feel fake and edited, as if contaminated by family photographs and stories she’s heard since. She doesn’t feel at all confident that she could say who Shane really was, what was he like, how he tended to behave.

  “The estate was built on the bank of the river,” Oliver says, “that’s where it got its name.”

  I know.

  “The houses kind of sloped down to the water, and then in order to actually get to it, you had to climb through some trees.”

  I remember.

  “So once the three of us were down there, we were pretty much hidden from view. And that’s when . . .” He swallows. “That’s when . . . That’s when Shane just starts, like, pummeling Paul. That’s the only word I could use to describe it. Shane had been kept back a year, he was nearly thirteen by then, and Paul was small for his age . . . I don’t remember everything but I remember Shane towering over Paul, and Paul looking at up at him”—his voice cracks—“like—like—” He pauses, tries to regain his composure. “At first, I didn’t intervene. I just stood there. But then Shane was like, come on, and Paul was kind of squirming, trying to get away, and he’d started to cry by then, so I went and I”—his voice cracks again here, goes up a pitch—“I didn’t intervene. I joined in. I held him. By the arms. In place. So that Shane could keep . . . So that Shane could—”

  He stops, swallows hard.

  Ciara’s heart feels like it’s breaking in two, ripping down an invisible seam, bursting open like stitches. One half is heartsick about what Shane did, about what he was capable of doing . . .

  But the other is filling with warmth, with feeling, with love maybe, even, for how much regret Oliver feels about it now, how much it hurts him just to tell the story.

  He’s a good man, she thinks. Now. He turned out to be.

  Maybe Shane would’ve too, if he’d gotten this far.

  They made a terrible, terrible mistake—something that the word mistake doesn’t even begin to cover. That’s not in dispute. But they were children, ones who’d never done anything like it before, who’d been perfectly average, everyday kids up until this awful afternoon.

  And now Oliver wouldn’t even break the travel limit.

  Shane might have been all right.

  Everything might have been.

  Ciara desperately wishes he were here to prove that himself. And to show it to their mother, to take away the pain she’d felt for so many years, the blame she’d inflicted on herself, the responsibility she’d taken for his actions.

  She’d always blamed herself.

  “I was his mother,” she’d used to mutter, its implication lost on nine- or ten-year-old Ciara at the time.

  Soon after, her mother had stopped talking about it altogether.

  “Shane says to Paul, we’re going to wash the blood off in the river. And I just knew what was going to happen, what he’d decided to do, but it was like—It was like there was one half of me that felt like, yeah, good idea, that’s what we have to do, what I have do now, to help Shane, to protect him, to stop him from getting in trouble. But at the same time, the other half of me was looking at Paul, all covered in blood, saying okay and obediently following Shane down to the water, and that part wanted to scream, ‘What the hell are you doing? Run. Run away.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. Instead, I . . . I just followed them to the water and I helped Shane push Paul into it and then I helped hold him down. Until . . . Until he drowned.”

  Silence.

  Ciara feels sick. For so many years, she had wanted the details and now that she has them, she’d give anything to give them back.

  “The guards came that night,” Oliver says. “To our homes.”

  I was there when they arrived.

  “Everything happened really quickly after that.”

  The way I remember it everything happened in quick succession, one long horrific blur of tears and whispered arguments and a house as quiet and sad and empty as a funeral home.

  “We were charged and sent to Oberstown—it’s a juvenile detention center. There was a trial. Our identities had to remain a secret so we became Boy A and Boy B. We were both found guilty of murder, but got different sentences based on our level of . . . involvement. I got out on my eighteenth birthday and Shane . . . Well, Shane took his own life on his. He still had another fifteen years to go at that point.”

  She looks up at the mention of Shane’s suicide, hoping that, somehow, Oliver has more information about it, that he can tell her more about why her brother did such a thing, what it was that had, evidently, pushed him to his absolute limit. She’d never seen him again after his arrest and what little she knew about his time in Oberstown she’d picked up from eavesdropping on whispered conversations.

  “I’m not some evil seed, Ciara. I’m no psycho monster. I was just a child who, for five minutes, completely lost his fucking mind. A kid who, on the way home from school one afternoon, made a stupid, terrible mistake because he didn’t want to look like a coward in front of his older, bigger friend. I was twelve. I couldn’t undo it so I did the next best thing: from that moment on, ever since, I have tried to make up for it. I have done every single thing I was supposed to. I took my punishment. I was a model detainee. Did all the therapy, obeyed all the rules. Whatever they asked of me, I did it and then more besides. And since the day I was released I haven’t as much as littered. But it doesn’t matter what I do because all anyone thinks about, all anyone cares about, is what I did.”

  He moves closer to her.

  One step, two.

  “And then I meet you. And you like me. And when I’m with you, i
t’s like . . . I feel like me. The me I should’ve been. The me I really was. Am. And even though I knew it couldn’t last, knew you’d find me out eventually, I kept wanting to feel that way, so I kept seeing you. And then, unbelievably, a bloody global pandemic comes along, and we hear there’s going to be a lockdown, and you’re living in this tiny apartment, working from home, just moved to Dublin, not knowing anybody and”—he shakes his head as if in disbelief—“you don’t even use social media, so I think to myself, I’ll just take these two weeks. I won’t tell her for two more weeks. And I hoped, I desperately hoped, that by the time the truth came out, you’d have seen enough of me to know that this is me. Now. Here.”

  She is desperate to tell him that she knows.

  And what she feels. Which is that she knows this, here, now, is who Oliver really is. These last few weeks.

  The night she stood here, in this room, in his embrace and saw the scar. The evening on the terrace, when he surprised her. The sunny day in the park.

  Every little good thing, she collected them all and kept them safe in her heart, because every one was proof that Shane wasn’t evil, that he was good, that he could’ve lived a good life and been a good man if he’d just been able to hang on long enough to come back out into the world, like Oliver had.

  And somewhere along the way, she’d started to love Oliver, too.

  And now, she wants to stay. To be with him.

  To turn this into something real.

  But first, she has to tell him her truth, reveal who she really is, how she found him, why she did.

  So they can forgive each other, and start afresh.

  But now is not the time. Let the dust from the demolition of these lies, the ruins of the past, settle. Let the shock absorb.

  Until then, for now, she has to act like anyone else would, hearing all this for the first time. So she gets up and runs out of the room, into the bathroom, and does her best to sound like she’s being sick into the toilet bowl.

  18 Days Ago

  Oliver is on the floor and his head is filling with pain and there’s shattered glass everywhere and the water is warm and Ciara is shouting something at him, the same words over and over, sounding like she’s very far away.