Page 44 of 56 Days
She can see the top of the scar just above the sheets.
She rolls onto her back and stares at the smooth white ceiling. She hates this bit, the morning after the night before. Daylight is no one’s friend and, she’s convinced, her active enemy. Above the blankets she knows there’s only what’s left of yesterday’s makeup on her puffy face, and beneath them there’s nothing at all.
She feels vulnerable and exposed.
She wishes she could just put on underwear and aT-shirtbefore she goes to sleep and tell him that that’s how it needs to be for her, but she hasn’t managed to find a voice to say it in yet. She imagines she can feel a dampness between her thighs that she worries might transfer to his sheets. She absolutely hates not knowing what time it is.
From the moment she wakes up like this she’s waiting for the moment she can return to her own place and start putting herself back together in her own time. Shower. Fresh makeup. Clean clothes.
Building herself back up, reassembling the woman who will be ready to meet him again later in the day for lunch or dinner, to sip a glass of wine they both know is the first stepping stone in a row of several that will lead her right back here again.
Putting things on she knows he will be taking off, that shehopeshe will, because if he is, that means that they are still moving forward, that this is still happening, that this is working.
But from tomorrow, all that will have to happen here, in this apartment. There will be no other place. She’s not ready for it, but it’s a go. She’s agreed to it.
Because she wants to keep seeing him and this, right now, is the only way.
Over the course of three Saturdays, she’s watched the life drain out of Dublin city.
On the first—the day after Oliver spoke to her outside Tesco—the pubs were still open even if the parade had been canceled and the tourists who’d flocked into what should’ve been ground zero for St. Patrick’s Day festivities hadn’t yet fled. They’d milled around Stephen’s Green with their outstretched iPhones and bags from Carrolls Irish Gifts, wearing too many layers for the mild spring weather, feeding the pigeons on purpose and the seagulls inadvertently. They’d all seemed to Ciara to be inexplicably carefree, carrying on as if everything were normal, as if they hadn’t noticed that the only nontourists around were loners scurrying nervously past, clutching grocery bags and giving them sidelong glances, doing their best to avoid getting close. Even the Italians, who, by then, must have known all too well what was coming, seemed utterly untroubled. The only anomaly was a guy in his late teens wearing a mask, holding his phone in front of his face while he spun around to offer the lens athree-sixtyview of the streets behind him. In what sounded like a German accent he was narrating the scene, pointing out that he was the only one wearing a face covering. At the time, he’d struck Ciara as a bit of an alarmist.
A week later, the tourists were gone and the vast majority of businesses had preemptively closed. The people left on the streets were few but from both ends of the caution spectrum. She’d seen two women in their twenties sitting outside one of the few remaining open cafés exchange glances as a man hurried past wearing latex gloves and a mask that, by then, Ciara could identify asrespiratoryas opposed tosurgical. The women had had stiff, waxed bags bearing the logo of ahigh-endclothing store by their feet and were drinking coffees in seats nowhere near two meters apart.
It was as if some people thought the end was nigh while others hadn’t even seen the papers.
A strange phenomenon of all this, she’d discovered since, was that you yourself were capable of being both types of people. One afternoon, Ciara had put on a nice dress and waves in her hair and set off in chilly sun to Oliver’s place. The sky was blue, the birds were chirping, and she felt good. She was also making this walk a little earlier than she usually did, during theSix Onenews bulletin instead of just after it, so she’d missed her nightly ritual of waiting on the couch for the four numerical horsemen of the apocalypse: new deaths, new cases, total deaths, total cases.
She’dforgotten, just for a few minutes.
But directly across the canal was a construction site surrounded by blue hoarding and, overnight, new signs had been stuck to it. Multiple copies of the same one, their surfaces bubbling and creased from a hasty application. The only words large enough for her to read at that distance were in the headline: YOU Can Help Stop the Spread of COVID-19! It was like walking out of real life and onto the set of a Hollywood virus thriller, only the poles were reversed.Thiswas what was real, and that was terrifying.
This morning, the first of this de facto lockdown, it’s as if some awful event has come in the night. There’s nowhere near enough vehicles on the road to justify calling ittraffic. The loudest sound is that of her own footsteps, the hollow heel of her boots hitting the path as she walks alongside the canal. She passes a pharmacy with a handwritten sign in the window screaming, Hand Sanitizer 50ml In Stock, €4.99, Max 3 Per Customer! But if you want it, you’ll have to wait for it because the lights are off inside and a metal grate is in place across the door. Above the rooftops stand an array of motionless cranes, stopped clocks in the sky.
By the time Ciara reaches her building she has only passed one other pedestrian, an older man walking a small dog who’d stepped out into the bus lane to give her the requisitetwo-meterberth, and she sees only one other neighbor as she goes inside, aLycra-cladgym-brodoing planks on the dewy grass.
An information sheet aboutCOVID-19, government issued, has appeared in the lobby, taped up next to the list of emergency numbers, and anindustrial-sizedbottle of hand sanitizer is sitting in a little pool of clear liquid on a stool by the main door.
As she slides her key into the lock, she thinks about all the units in this building and all the hands that have touched the same door she is touching right now. She takes the fact that there are fewer units at Oliver’s place and, so, fewer people, and mentally adds it to her collection of reasons why this might not be a terrible idea, actually.
Inside her apartment, she kicks its door closed behind her and goes straight to the bathroom sink to wash her hands—in the dark, because she won’t touch the light switch untilafterthe handwashing.
That’s what Oliver says you should do and now that they’re riding out this thing together, she feels obligated to follow his lead.
She also finds these cleansing rituals oddly calming. Anything simple with a series of steps will probably have that effect, even when it’s in an attempt to minimize the risk of catching a deadly virus.
She strips her clothes from her skin and stands in the scalding stream of the shower until the bathroom grows thick with steam. (His shower is better, too—there’s another reason.) Then she wraps herself in a towel and trails water droplets through the living room and into the kitchen, where she makes herself a cup of tea and a slice of buttered toast and wonders what should she pack?
What exactly does a girl need to move in with a guy she barely knows because there’s a global emergency, the country is going into lockdown, and her apartment is about the size of a matchbox?
She lands on: everything. She has so little stuff that it all fits into her one suitcase.
Even now, transferring her underwear from a drawer to her case, she still can’t quite believe that she’s doing this, that she’smoving in with him. But here’s another reason to add to her collection: she’s not. Not really.
She’s juststaying with himfor a couple of weeks. She’s not letting this place go. Nothing about this is permanent or irreparable.
Not yet, anyway.
And there’s a lot about this that is incredibly lucky or at least could prove to be, in time. These strange,unprecedentedcircumstances—when all this is over, she vows to never use that word ever again—might just conspire to take her via express train to everything she’s ever wanted when there might not even have been a route there otherwise.
