The Repeat Year (12 page)

“Thank you.” Anne unwound her scarf and removed her jacket. “I think that’s the right decision. I owe it to my parents.”

“Would you like to see your mother before they arrive?”

“Yes, please. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve made my call.”

She had been given the chance to avert something of a disaster, and she hadn’t gone through with it. The memory of Mr. Gardner, Anne, Michelle, Alex, and herself all locked together in that room distressed her. It would’ve been so easy to say, “No. Don’t worry him. You can tell him tomorrow in the familiarity of his own home. He can say good-bye to her at the funeral.” She knew nothing good could come of this. So why had she agreed with Anne?

Because it was Anne’s decision to make, not hers. And Anne had seemed to want some reassurance that she was doing the right thing. While Olive didn’t know if it was the right decision, the Gardners weren’t her parents. Their story was not hers to revise. She seemed to be there only to bear witness.

She took Betty Gardner’s vitals and then returned to her post at the computer station outside the room. What had at first seemed like a new road filled with so much possibility now felt like a well-worn path she had already trod and couldn’t break out of. Anne went into her mother’s room, held her hand, and talked to her. Only moments later, she left. Olive sat sentinel on the stool for what felt like hours. She had no other patients to attend to, so she had no reason to leave.

Nothing seemed to be in her power to change. She couldn’t save Mrs. Gardner’s life. She couldn’t even protect the woman’s daughter from unnecessary heartache. She hadn’t fixed her problems with Phil.

A change in the heart monitor’s steady beeping rhythm brought Olive back from her thoughts. She hurried to Mrs. Gardner’s bedside. After a quick survey of the machines, she discovered that the pulse oximeter was the culprit. Mrs. Gardner’s oxygen saturation levels were dangerously low. Olive turned up the ventilator to one hundred percent oxygen. The old woman’s chest rose with each whoosh of forced oxygen, but her skin remained bluish and clammy, and her saturation levels didn’t rise. Feeling as if she were caught in a dream she’d had before, Olive removed the oxygen bag from the wall and began ventilating Mrs. Gardner herself, with quick, measured pumps. “I need help in here!” she called.

Tina was immediately by her side. She whipped off her stethoscope and listened to the old woman’s chest. She suctioned her lungs and listened again. “I can’t hear any airflow in there. Listen, Watson, there’s no hope for her anymore. All we can do now is make sure she’s not suffering.” Tina injected another dose of morphine into the IV.

She had known what was going to happen all along; she just wasn’t ready to accept it. Tonight’s events had unfolded as swiftly and relentlessly as they had last year, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing she could do about it. She stared down at Betty’s face as she forced the air into her uncooperative lungs. Her forehead was high and angular, her long nose beaky, her blue lips drooped downward.

Olive’s hand was cramping up from her rhythmic squeezing of the oxygen bag. She turned to see Alex enter the room.

He reached across the bed and placed his hand over Olive’s, which was still compressing the bag. “You’ve done all that you can. She’s gone. It’s time to stop now.”

Olive gave the bag one last squeeze and then slowly removed the plastic mask. Last year, she hadn’t been able to peel her eyes from the cardiac monitor’s dips and dives, anticipating that one final flat line, the moment when it was all over. Now she continued to watch Betty.

“Twenty-two seventeen,” Tina announced as the old woman’s body gave its last weary shudder.

Olive wanted to flee. She didn’t want to participate in what happened next. But Alex was inadvertently blocking the door.

“I understand the family is in the waiting room and that you’ve established a rapport with them,” he said. “Would you please bring them to the Family Room?”

Mr. Gardner, plaid pajamas and all, was sitting awkwardly next to his daughter. He didn’t seem to fit in the chair. It took both Anne and Michelle to raise him to a standing position. He shuffled along well enough on his own, with only his daughter’s hand gently placed on his elbow.

The Family Room was painted a sunny yellow, but that hardly disguised its purpose. Scratchy gray couches lined the walls. End tables in between were stocked with tissue boxes and pamphlets. Only one picture hung on the wall—a framed photograph of a rainbow arcing over a rural landscape.

Alex introduced himself. “I have some very sad news. We did everything we could to revive Betty, but she died a short while ago.” He launched into a brief explanation of how her body had shut down and the measures they had taken.

It was strange to watch the three figures on the couch. Anne, already resigned to her mother’s death, was stoically watching her father’s face. Mr. Gardner was scowling down at his hands in his lap. Only Michelle, the paid help, reacted in a typical way. She gulped and wrung her hands and reached for a tissue to dab her eyes. “Poor Betty.”

“Dad, did you hear what the doctor said?”

Mr. Gardner glared at his daughter.

“Mom was very sick. She passed away. She’s gone now.”

Mr. Gardner didn’t talk, but he seemed to be listening to Anne. His eyes didn’t leave her face.

“Are you okay, Dad? How are you feeling?” She patted his knee.

“Don’t touch me! You’re not going to lock me up in a goddamn hospital. I want to go home!”

“It’s okay, Dad. It’s me, Anne. Your daughter. We’ll go home in just a little bit. We’re here at the hospital because of Mom. Do you remember your wife, Betty? She just died. It’s very, very sad. We’re all very sad.”

Mr. Gardner tried to stand up. He hoisted himself up partway, and then fell back down onto the seat.

“Would it help if he saw her body?” Alex asked.

“No,” Anne and Olive both said in unison.

“It will just make him more agitated. He’s not usually like this. He’s not good in unfamiliar places,” Anne explained. “I thought I would try, but I guess I’ll have to wait until he’s more lucid—”

Mr. Gardner was trying to stand up again, and this time, Michelle assisted him.

“Get off me!” he shouted. “I don’t know you! I want to go home.”

“I’m going to take you home, Walt,” Michelle said.

“If there’s anything further I can do to help, please let me know,” Alex said to Anne.

Anne looked from Alex to Olive with pleading eyes. “He loved her so much. He put in a Japanese garden in their backyard because she always wanted to see Japan but was too afraid to fly. He’s going to ask for her in the morning. And the next morning. And the next. I don’t think he’s ever going to realize what he lost.”

Because Olive had lost a parent before and knew there was nothing anyone could really say to lessen that pain, she hugged Anne. The older woman seemed surprised at first, but then she embraced Olive the way Olive suspected she wished her father would embrace her.

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days. Mr. and Mrs. Gardner had been robbed of that.

She needed to tell someone. Someone who would care, someone who would try to understand. Someone who would remind her that she was loved and cherished.

Olive blindly found her way to the locker room. She sat on a bench with her knees tucked into her chest. She needed to talk to Phil, but it was almost eleven thirty. She didn’t know where he was or what his plans for the night had been. Perhaps he was already in bed. Her desire to talk to him was so strong, however, that she decided it was worth the risk of waking him up.

He answered on the fourth ring. “Olive?” he shouted into the phone over the din of a noisy bar. “I thought you were at work.”

“I am. Where are you?”

“Castaway’s with Brian and Jeff. Is something wrong? You never call me from work.”

“Phil, I—”

“Hang on a second. I can’t hear a thing in here. I’m going to go outside.”

“No, don’t. Really, it’s not necessary. I just wanted to—”

A huge swell of music and laughter rose up, and she could barely make out his next words. “Olive? I’m going to call you back, okay? I can’t hear anything you’re saying.”

“No, really. It’s fine. Have fun. I’ll talk to you later.”

She cradled her cell phone in her cupped hands. It seemed unthinkable that Phil could be at a bar with his friends right now, while she was here, alone, inundated with feelings of grief, failure, and self-pity. Last year he had asked her to share this part of her life with him. He had said he wanted to help her protect herself from too much sorrow. But at times like these, their worlds seemed almost irreconcilable. And how could she really explain the twofold loss of Betty Gardner?

She contemplated calling Kerrigan. But no, Kerrigan was probably still at a bar or club, too. Only then did she think of her mom.

The locker room door swung open, and Alex stepped inside. He was holding the bottom of his blue scrub top away from his stomach. A long drip of blood clung to the fabric. Olive froze.

“Excuse me,” he said, and gingerly lifted the shirt over his head. He balled it up in his hands, the bloodied side in, and stood in front of her, naked from the waist up. He was not as muscular as Phil, but his body was long, tan, and lean. The body of a swimmer. He seemed to want something from her.

“Oh,” she said. Of course. “Scrubs with body fluids on them go in the biohazard hamper.”
Body fluids?
Why couldn’t she have just said
blood
? She stood up so that the bench was between them.

He deposited the shirt into the hamper and shut the lid. “I was putting in a central line,” he said. He opened his locker and pulled out a fresh blue scrub top. He bent at the waist to put it on, and Olive could see the familiar tattoo of a caduceus, a winged staff entwined by two serpents, on his shoulder blade.

She started making her way to the door. Everything was a direct echo of what had happened last year. She needed to remove herself from this situation as quickly as possible.

“That was the most depressing thing I’ve ever witnessed. Are you doing all right?” he asked.

Last year she had come unhinged at this question. She hadn’t cried for Betty Gardner. She had cried for Mr. Gardner, who didn’t remember enough to cry for his beloved wife. She had cried out of fear that things were over with Phil. She had cried for her dad, who had died too young and wouldn’t get to walk her down the aisle one day, if that day ever came. She had cried for the dread that possibly one day she might die alone and forgotten. Alex had held her. He’d rubbed her back and whispered things like, “You did everything you could for her. She’s not suffering now,” and “They’ll be reunited one day,” and when he’d inclined his head to kiss her, she hadn’t resisted. Instead, she had accepted his mouth like it was her only chance at salvation. She’d had a chance to come to her senses and stop. He had asked her, “Is this okay? Do you want to go somewhere more private?” and she had followed him back into the Family Room, the scene of tragedies, where they had locked the door behind them. In essence, with that desperate act, Olive had been trying to ward off death. Dispel the stench of it that seemed to cling to her. Prove that she was young and recklessly alive.

She looked at Alex, who didn’t remember all that had passed between them. She knew he would readily comfort her again if she only gave him the chance. Last year she had craved reassurance and understanding, and Alex had given that to her. She hadn’t even given Phil the opportunity to do the same. His frustration with her work preoccupation had made her believe that he wouldn’t even try to understand. Now she realized how unfair that had been. If he loved her, he would try. If she loved him, she owed him the chance to try.

Though the rest of the night had been almost an uncanny replication of last year, this was one incident she was going to change. “I’m okay,” she told Alex. “Thanks for asking.” She pushed open the locker room door. The door paused briefly on its outward swing, allowing a couple of seconds for her to look back, but she didn’t, and the door completed its sweeping arc and closed behind her.

She returned to Betty Gardner’s room. Olive freed the old woman’s body of all the tubing and wires. Then she bathed her as gently as she had been taught to bathe the newborns in her obstetrics clinicals.

A little after two, she called Phil again, tucked in the corner of the break room next to the antiquated microwave and TV. It was clear she had woken him up. Before he could ask her about her earlier call, she told him everything about the Gardner family. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t comment or ask questions or offer consolation. The only way she knew he was there was by his breathing, but his reverent silence made her certain he was listening to her every word.

Chapter 9

T
he days grew longer. The sun shone with an intensity unusual for late March, melting the hills of dirty snow. Only a few gray patches remained, protected by the constant shadows of buildings. The front yard of the pink house offered up a bizarre assortment of abandoned objects. Disposable plastic cups, flattened beer cans. A solitary purple stiletto, one raggedy black mitten. Unaccountably, a three-hole punch.

Olive’s mom had invited her and Phil and Christopher and Verona over for dinner. She knew what tonight was: the engagement announcement dinner. Phil hadn’t been here for this last year—she had faced it alone and blundered it quite badly—but she felt certain that with him in the mix, everything would carry on more peaceably. He had that effect on people. She felt like a better person with him by her side. But she was slightly worried that her mom’s news might hit too close to home for him with their own unsuccessful engagement still lingering unspoken between them.

They took Olive’s SUV for the twenty-minute drive to her mom’s house; Phil’s Mercedes was in the shop as predicted—at least by Olive—for a new fuel pump. The sun had set only moments before, and the sky was a luxurious shade of blue. Everything looked muted and surreal, like viewing the world through gauzy fabric; even the sooty, diminished snow on the side of the highway looked picturesque.

Olive turned off the radio and straightened up in her seat. “I’m pretty sure my mom asked us over tonight to tell us they’re getting married.”

“Wow. That’s big. What makes you think that?” Phil asked, swiveling in his seat to watch her profile.

“They’ve been together for almost a year now. He’s at every single holiday and nonholiday family function. They threw a New Year’s Day party together. They flew to Arizona to visit his mother in January, and they’re learning how to retile the upstairs bathroom together.” When she stacked it all up, it did make a pretty compelling argument. Why hadn’t she seen that last year? Everything seemed so obvious in hindsight.

The windows were starting to fog up. Phil turned on the defroster. “You seem okay with this.
Are
you okay with this?”

Since Harry had started dating her mom last May, Phil had heard Olive’s many complaints about him. He was too old for her mom—six years older, to be exact. He was divorced and not on great terms with his ex-wife and daughter, who lived on the north side of Chicago. He wore cuff links and had perpetual coffee breath. He had an annoying habit of trying to supply words for people. He bought her mom opera tickets, and because she was too nice to tell him she hated the opera, they kept going. He tried to win Olive over by name-dropping campus locations: “It was so nice outside yesterday, I ate my lunch at Union Terrace” or “I was hiking up Bascom Hill the other day when . . .”

“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “They’ll get married with or without my blessing. I just want my mom to be happy.” And as difficult as it was for her to admit, in the first five months of the marriage, Olive’s mom was the happiest she had seen her prior to 2003, when her dad had been diagnosed with leukemia. It was one of the questions that had nagged at Olive the most before the wedding: Would Harry make her mom truly happy, or was her mom simply lonely? She knew the answer to the first part now, and she wasn’t so sure it mattered anymore if her mom’s desire for remarriage stemmed from loneliness.

Phil’s knees bounced up and down; he was always such a restless passenger. “Good for you. Well, Harry has some pretty big shoes to fill. Your dad was one of the best men I’ve ever known.”

“Oh, he won’t be filling my dad’s shoes. There’s no way.” Olive dug her fingernails into the steering wheel. “I will never think of him as my dad, or probably even my stepdad. He’s just Harry.”

“Okay.” Phil turned his face toward the window.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. What you said was very sweet, and I know my dad thought the world of you, too. I’m trying to be very Zen about all of this, but I don’t think I will
ever
see what my mom sees in Harry.”

“I don’t know about that,” Phil said. “Professor Matheson attended the coronation of Charlemagne.”

She grinned. “Professor Matheson thinks March Madness is a seventh-century plague.”

Phil snorted. “That’s a good one.”

“Thanks. I’ve been saving it for the right time.”

It was an inside joke they shared. When Olive’s mom had first introduced her to Harry, Olive had immediately started “researching” him. She had checked out the medieval studies department web page and Harry’s individual profile. She had Kerrigan put her ear to the ground for any university rumors. She even found a website where students rated their professors. Though overall Harry’s marks were high, one of his students had written in the comments section: “Professor Matheson attended the coronation of Charlemagne. Archbishop Stephen Langton plagiarized the Magna Carta from Professor Matheson. Professor Matheson thinks Hoobastank was a city in the Byzantine Empire.” The last one was Olive’s particular favorite. She wondered if Harry had ever seen the website.

They pulled up to the gray Cape Cod with its slanted roof and white shutters just as Christopher and Verona were pulling up, too. Olive hurried to remove her seat belt, but Phil caught her hand. Expecting some last silly words of encouragement, she gazed up at him, but his expression was solemn.

“You didn’t tell your mom about my proposal, did you?”

“No. No one knows.” She freed her hand, which he had almost crushed in his grip.

“Good.”

It felt like such a cold note to end on, but he was already opening his car door. Christopher and Verona called out to them, and suddenly they were hurled into the spotlight, quite literally, as the motion sensor lights snapped on, illuminating the front lawn and white picket fence.

Christopher and Verona had brought a bottle of wine. Even with the foresight of a year, Olive would never be as prepared and well mannered as Verona.

They were a handsome couple: Christopher was tall, dark, and attractive, and Verona was his complementary opposite—petite with alabaster skin and blond, baby-fine hair. She owned a sweater set in every color. She was a PhD student in the math department, working on her dissertation on algorithmic randomness.

“Olive! Have you done something different with your hair? It looks so pretty in curls.”

Phil and Christopher clapped each other on the back as if they were old buddies. Christopher wrote articles for a progressive online newspaper and did freelance web development on the side. He and Verona had three dogs—a chocolate Lab named Fanny, a Corgi named Dixon, and a Papillon named Lola. Though Christopher and Phil had little in common besides a love for dogs, they held each other in very high esteem. Christopher had been especially disappointed with their breakup last year.

Their mom was waiting, framed in the doorway, squinting against the brightness.

Inside the house, everything had been carefully orchestrated. A row of pillar candles had been lighted on the mantel. Soft piano music streamed from the stereo. Bruschetta slices had been daintily arranged on a china platter and laid on the coffee table. They were told the shrimp primavera—Harry’s specialty—would be ready in fifteen minutes.

When Olive had walked into this last year, it had felt like she had mistakenly stepped into someone else’s living room. Who was this woman in the beige silk blouse with a string of pearls? Certainly not her mom, who wore the same flowery dresses to work almost every day and had never owned a valuable piece of jewelry in her life, aside from her wedding ring. If they turned the stereo on, which they rarely did, she had popped in a James Taylor or Joni Mitchell CD. Dinner had never been an “affair” before. She had thought her mom was trying to be a different woman for Harry. Or even worse: that her mom had been wishing for a life like this all along.

Now that she knew what tonight really meant, she noticed subtleties she hadn’t the first time around. Her mom offered Phil something to drink three times, forcing Phil to finally agree to a glass of sauvignon blanc the third time. Harry had armpit stains right through his tweed blazer. They were both incredibly nervous. They were trying hard to make everyone enjoy themselves because they were striving for a favorable outcome—acceptance.

“Olive, can you give me a hand with the salad?” her mom asked. Harry made a motion to get up, but she shook her head slightly and he remained seated.

“Sure,” Olive said, and followed her mother into the kitchen. She didn’t remember this impromptu chat happening last year. Displayed prominently on the marble kitchen island on a white porcelain pedestal was her mom’s famous chocolate cake. “Oh, yum. For us?”

“Of course it’s for you,” her mom replied. “Don’t tell your brother. It was meant to be a surprise.”

Her mom’s chocolate cake was so notoriously delicious that it had once sold for three hundred dollars at a silent auction fund-raiser for the library. The recipe was her mother’s, Olive’s namesake, who had passed away the week before Olive was born. She baked it only once or twice a year so it could retain its special, sought-after status. Last year Olive had seen the coveted dessert as some kind of bribe, but now she knew better. The chocolate cake was a peace offering. It was supposed to be a reminder that they would still be the same family—it wouldn’t be all bruschetta and shrimp primavera from here on out. It was a reminder that her mom was still the same woman underneath it all. Still, it was hard to know if this was the whole truth.

Her mom handed her a knife and a tomato, and Olive set to dicing it on a pull-out cutting board next to the sink. “I’m sorry we still haven’t gone out for that dinner yet,” Olive said. “Things have just been so busy at work lately. Maybe we can go next month.”

“It’s fine. I understand.” It was the same airy, yet knowing response her mom had used with them in their teen years.
You can’t come to the family reunion because you have too much algebra homework to do? It’s fine. I understand. You came home after curfew last night because there was a brief power outage at the party and all the clocks stopped? It’s fine. I understand.
“I know you and Christopher like Thousand Island. What kind of dressing does Phil like?” She pulled two dusty gravy boats from the cupboard and started rinsing them out.

“He likes anything, but ranch is his favorite. Look, Mom, you really don’t need to make more dishes and use those. The plain old bottles are fine.”

“I don’t mind.” She toweled the silver gravy boats dry. “This clawfoot one was my mother’s. When I was a little girl, it always reminded me of Aladdin’s magic lamp. When Laurel was about six, I convinced her if she rubbed it just the right way, a genie would pop out and make all her wishes come true.”

Olive laughed. She slid the cutting board out of its slot and guided the diced tomatoes into the salad bowl with her knife. “Was Aunt Laurel very disappointed?”

“Not at all. It worked for her.” Her mom poured the Thousand Island dressing into the gravy boat. “She played with it for the rest of the summer until my mother had a big Sunday dinner one day and found out her gravy boat was missing.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before. It doesn’t sound like Aunt Laurel at all.”

“Laurel was very imaginative as a girl. Until she discovered boys, that is.” She returned the bottles of salad dressing to the fridge.

“It sounds like you were also very imaginative,” Olive said.

“Ah, you know me. I was always a reader.”

The salad was ready now, and there was no longer any pretense for being here in the kitchen together, but Olive could tell her mom still wasn’t satisfied. She lifted the lids of pots on the stove and opened both the fridge and oven as though she were looking for something but couldn’t quite remember what. They both decided to speak at the same moment.

“I think I know—” Olive started, as her mom blurted, “Is everything okay between you and Phil?” “—what tonight’s dinner is for.”

Her mom reacted first, her face coloring. “What do you think it’s for?”

“Did Harry propose?”

Her mom could’ve been a debutante preparing for her first dance, twirling happily in front of a mirror, then suddenly standing stock-still as she realized that someone was watching her, unsure of how her giddiness would be perceived. “Yes, he did. And I said yes.” The expression on her face was half defiant, half afraid, and Olive remembered with what frustration her mom had told her before the wedding last year,
“There is no other person in the world who can make me doubt myself like
you.”

“Mom,” Olive said, stepping around the kitchen island to embrace her. “I am so happy for you.” She stirred up memories from last fall and winter—Harry and her mom’s frequent trips to the farmers’ market and subsequent exotic dinners; the way Harry had lied about knowing how to ice skate and then fallen and sprained his wrist, all in an attempt to make her mom happy—and she tried to really mean the words she’d just said, to really feel the happiness in her heart. When her mom squeezed her back and then beamed at her, Olive found it wasn’t very hard.