Page 125 of 56 Days
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.
