The Repeat Year (29 page)

They reached the ground-floor landing at the same time. Phil seemed to be slowing down. He pushed through the metal door and halfheartedly held it open for her. The lobby was almost empty. A tired-looking woman read a book at the front desk; she didn’t look up when they entered. The only sound was the peaceful patter of the water fountain. Olive passed it every day on her way to the ICU, but she had never truly taken the time to see it before. It had two tiers with what looked like a caduceus on top; both the stone of the smaller basins and the water in the pool had a greenish tinge. Spotlights under the water made the droplets spilling over the tiers shimmer. Phil paused in front of the fountain, too.

“Why did you come here?” she asked his back. “Were you ready to talk?”
Were
, not
are
, in case what he had just seen upstairs had changed his mind. Still she was hopeful.

“I went to the condo,” he started. “The lights and the TV were still on, there was food on the stove, but nobody was home. I was worried about you.” He sat down on the fountain’s edge.

She stood before him. “I was watching the news, and I saw this awful rollover accident happen on the Beltline. They said the victim had been brought here, and I thought—I thought I could somehow help. I had called in sick because—well, you know—and then I felt guilty for not being there when I saw that.”

Phil was watching her strangely. She wasn’t sure if he believed her. Did he think she had dropped everything and rushed to the hospital to be with Alex? The light from the fountain cast a hazy glow over his handsome features.

“Someone stopped by when I was there,” he said. “That friend of your mom’s. Sherry Witan.”

Olive froze. How had Sherry, in her weakened condition, made it to her condo? And what for? She seated herself a few feet away from Phil. Tiny drops of water pelted the side of her face.

“I told her you weren’t there,” Phil continued, “but she invited herself in anyway, and she looked so sick, I couldn’t turn her away. She told me everything about this year, Olive, everything you’ve been going through.”

Warmth bloomed in the pit of her stomach and spread to her extremities. It was nothing short of a miracle. Sherry—opinionated, jaded, self-absorbed, tough-as-nails Sherry Witan—had performed an act of love for her. An act to save Olive’s love. She had forced herself from her home to talk to someone she had never met before, to convince him of the truth in a way that no one else, not even Olive, could have done. Olive dipped her fingers in the fountain and touched the water to her forehead like a benediction. There was hope after all.

She was ready to launch herself at Phil and envelop him in a hug, but his face warned her away. All was not forgiven. There was still a very long conversation ahead of them.

He glowered at his hands in his lap. “I still can’t fully wrap my head around it, it’s so bizarre, and I felt like I’d wronged you in some way by not listening to you and letting you explain. I felt like I needed to give you that chance, so I came here, and what do I walk in on? You and that bastard holding hands, looking like the coziest couple in the world.”

“It wasn’t what it looked like. Alex was upset about his patient”—he winced when she said Alex’s name—“and I patted his hand. That was all there was to it. We were talking about how his patient’s life was going to change now, how his family was going to handle it.”

His eyes burned into hers. “Really? That was all there was to it? So you can honestly tell me that if I hadn’t walked in when I had, things wouldn’t have gone any further? History wouldn’t have repeated itself?”

Her cheeks grew warm. A rush of embarrassment tinged with anger coursed through her. She wanted to snap at him,
Maybe if you stopped treating me like a yo-yo, bringing me in close only to fling me away again, I wouldn’t be so out-of-my-mind confused
, but she held her tongue. “Of course not. I don’t want him. I want you. You’re the only man I want to be with. I’ve never felt otherwise—not even in my one lapse of judgment.”

He stood up and loomed over her. “How can I ever trust you again, Olive? Maybe you didn’t cheat on me this time, but how do I know you don’t want to? How can I know that you’re not going to run into his arms every time things get rough between us? Why is it that you never seek comfort from me? Why is it that everybody else—this prick, Kerrigan, even your mom’s book club friend—is your best buddy, while you keep me in the dark?”

Because she had wanted to protect him from the truth. Because she hadn’t thought he would believe her. Because she hadn’t wanted something like this to happen and ruin her beautiful second chance. “Because I didn’t want you to think less of me. And I really didn’t want to hurt you.”

The front desk lady had looked up from her book and was staring at them. Phil shook his head and walked to the automatic double doors; Olive followed. The fluorescent lights of the drop-off zone overhang buzzed and made everything look lurid and dingy. It was freezing outside. Had she driven here without a jacket? She hadn’t noticed the biting cold in her haste.

“Do you think we could go back to the condo and talk about this?” she asked, rubbing her goose bump–covered arms.

“I don’t think there’s much more to talk about.” Phil buried his hands in his jacket pockets. “This isn’t how I thought tonight would turn out,” he muttered.

“We can change it.”

“No, we can’t.” His tone was resolute. “I’m tired of being made a fool. It’s like—it’s like with my dad. How many chances can I give you to break my heart? There just comes a point when I need to say no. I love you, but no.”

A siren wailed in the distance.

“You should go inside, Olive. You’re shivering.” He lightly touched her arm and then melted into the jumble of cars in the dark parking lot.

The ambulance would be arriving soon with its red-and-white flashing lights and matter-of-life-and-death commotion. She stepped out from under the concrete overhang. The sky was an electric blue. Clouds dark as soot scudded across, making her feel she was on a world that was spinning much too fast. Her thoughts were moving as quickly as those clouds.

The siren was a constant, high-pitched whine now, probably only blocks away. She crossed back under the overhang and glided through the automatic doors.

Chapter 21

T
he world continued to turn too quickly, each day chasing the tail of the next. Olive was torn between wishing it would accelerate even more and wanting the hurried days to slow down. She was reminded of the story of Sherry’s mother’s death. Sherry and her mother had been so close to reconciliation at the end of the year, and then Sherry had run out on her. Another year, another try. Chastened and subdued, Sherry had finally conformed to her mother’s expectations so the old woman could die peacefully. So what was the lesson Olive was supposed to be learning here? To always tell the truth? To never
ever
tell the truth? The strength of her conviction—that the universe had rolled back time to reunite two fated lovers—was flagging. She was confused and heartsick.

Phil had moved out and taken Cashew with him. She coped the best way she knew how: She threw herself into her work. She bathed and turned patients, comforted their families, administered medications, ordered chest X-rays and ABGs. She suctioned out air passageways, changed colostomy bags, irrigated wounds, collected sputum and urine. She was her patients’ advocate and guardian angel. She was everything they needed her to be and nothing of her own. She stayed late. She took extra shifts. She kept her distance from Alex.

When Thanksgiving approached and Olive remembered it would be a depressing day alone with her mom and Harry like last year (since Verona and Christopher were spending the holiday in California with her family), she eagerly volunteered to cover Jennifer’s day shift and then apologized profusely to her mom, saying there was no way to get out of it. But then her mom and Harry showed up in the ICU that day with a plate of turkey, mashed potatoes, and green bean casserole, and a whole pumpkin pie to share with her coworkers, and Olive felt like the most unworthy, selfish daughter on the planet.

Her unworthiness was a recurring theme these days. She had been avoiding Sherry as well; she hadn’t even thanked her for the generous act she had performed. She was too ashamed to tell her that even after the perfect setup, she had still managed to wreck things. Even a miracle hadn’t been enough. But Sherry didn’t call her, either, and Olive started to fret. She ignored her broken heart and her shame and called Sherry, but several days later, Sherry still hadn’t gotten back to her. Olive was planning a visit to Sherry’s house when she received a call from her mom. They’d found a lump in Sherry’s left breast; the cancer had metastasized. The surgery was scheduled for the next day.

Olive sat alone on a love seat in the waiting room of the surgical ward. Her mom had to work until five o’clock and would join her then. Glittery snowflakes hung from the ceiling tiles by paper clips and string. On the walls, the framed pieces of artwork were wrapped like presents. A fat fleece snowman sat on the counter of the nurses’ station and blared “Frosty the Snowman” whenever someone walked past it, which was often. It was hard to get in the Christmas spirit when she felt so numb inside.

The procedure had started at nine o’clock this morning, and it was now almost two, and still Olive hadn’t heard a word from the surgeon. It had been a while since she’d been on the waiting-and-praying end of things—not since her dad—and it was all she could do to keep herself from barging into the operating room and demanding an update. She jiggled her crossed legs. She wondered why Sherry’s doctor hadn’t encouraged a double mastectomy from the start. The pain of going through the operation twice—Olive shuddered. Yet she was encouraged by the fact that Sherry had undergone the surgery at all. That meant she was still fighting.

The small waiting room was crowded and tense. A middle-aged black woman held the hand of her elderly mother in a wheelchair, a teenage couple passed a fussy baby back and forth, a young man with spiky black hair had his nose buried in a thick book. A bearded man talked on a cell phone, saying over and over, “They won’t let me see him yet, Aunt Gladys. I don’t know if they’ve fixed his heart. They won’t let me see him.” A Hispanic woman sitting back-to-back with Olive was praying the rosary, her soft whispers spoken almost directly into Olive’s ears.
Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen.

She thought of Ryan Avery’s mother, who had sat at his bedside every day of his hospital recovery, mouthing the words to the prayers and rubbing the rosary beads between her fingers until Olive thought the beads would crumble into dust. His dad had stopped coming after those first few days of demanding miracle cures from doctors, and even Ryan’s girlfriend—a heavy girl with a Celtic tattoo on her ankle—began to visit less and less frequently. But his mother was there every day. She combed his hair and read aloud to him from
Field & Stream
magazines.

He had been released from the hospital a week ago to adapt to his life as a paraplegic. She hadn’t been working then, but Tina had described to her how Ryan had sat tall in his manual wheelchair and rolled it forward himself.

“I still don’t know why you did what you did the night he came in,” Tina had said to her, holding up her hand as if to stifle any explanation that Olive might try to offer, but Olive remained silent. “I’m willing to explain it away as some kind of intuition, like the moment I had when Conner wanted to ride a pony at the county fair, but I had a really bad feeling—achy like this intense pressure in my gut—and I told him no, and then the next little kid who rode that pony was bucked off. That kid scraped up his hands and knees pretty bad, but Watson, you saved this man’s
life
with your intuition. I’ve been having nightmares about what would’ve happened if you hadn’t stopped me from giving him the morphine. Really bad, wake-up-at-three-o’clock-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares. And every time I wake up like that, I think,
Thank God Watson stopped
me
.”

Olive interrupted. “Tina, I really don’t think you should give me that much credit.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself, forgetting one of the cardinal rules of ICU nursing. You can’t expect perfect outcomes for our patients. They come to us very, very sick, and we do our best, but it’s not always in our hands. Ryan Avery is alive today because of you. He would thank you if he only knew what you had done for him. Don’t pity him because he’s in a wheelchair—that’s closed-minded. He’s coming to terms with it, and I think you should, too.”

Olive started to protest again, but then stopped herself. Tina was right: His outcome was not perfect, but what in life, she thought, ever was? There were car crashes and cancer and Alzheimer’s and alcoholism. Fathers died too young, and their families just moved on. Lovers were weak and careless with one another’s hearts. Living meant playing with fire. It was amazing that anything ever went right at all with all the bad things lurking around every corner.

She closed her eyes and tried to tune out the noise and anxiety that was rolling off the other people in the waiting room in overpowering waves. But with her eyes closed, she remembered the way Phil had held her hand and brought her cold cans of soda from the vending machine while her dad was in the hospital. Maybe perfection didn’t exist in the long term. Maybe it existed only in brief slices that happened so quickly you didn’t even realize you had been happy until months or even years later. She sighed and opened her eyes. The snowman was singing again. She pressed her fingertips to her temples.

The spiky-haired man leaned across the aisle. “If I have to hear that song one more time, I’m going to throw that thing out the window.”

Olive smiled politely. She didn’t feel like making small talk with strangers right now. She looked down at the stack of magazines next to her, as if seriously considering which one to read.

“It’s sad when all the meaning is stripped from the holidays because everyone is trying to be so PC,” he added. “No Christmas trees, no menorahs because we don’t want to offend anyone. And this”—he pointed to the singing snowman and the snowflakes on the ceiling—“
this
is what we’re left with.”

Olive looked up from the magazines. His eyes were a dark, piercing blue. He was younger than she had thought at first. Maybe only twenty or twenty-one. “It is awfully depressing.”

He set the heavy book on his lap. “Are you here for a family member?”

“Friend. You?”

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I’m here. Because I like to be tortured, I guess.” He patted the top of his hair lightly, confirming that each spike was still perfectly gelled in place.

She didn’t want to collect another sad story—she had enough of her own—but the expression on his face was so troubled that she couldn’t give him the cold shoulder now. Yet she still didn’t want to hear his tale of woe. “What are you reading?” she asked instead.

“The Da Vinci Code.”

“That doesn’t look like
The Da Vinci Code
.”

“No?” He flashed a handsome smile. Olive wondered if he was flirting with her. “Dante’s
The Divine Comedy
,” he amended.

“So which circle of hell are we in right now?” she joked, before she could wonder if he would misconstrue this as flirting back.

He laughed. “I’m not sure yet.” He tucked the book under his arm and stood up. “I seriously need a cup of coffee. Do you want to join me?”

Olive nodded toward the double doors of the surgical ward. “I’d better stay here. I need to be here for my friend.”

“Right. Can I bring you anything?”

There was something oddly familiar about the sly curve of his lips. She studied him for a moment too long. “That’s very nice of you to offer, but I’m fine, thanks.”

“Be back soon.” He turned down the hallway that led to the hospital cafeteria.

Olive endured curious stares from the teenage couple. She crossed her legs at the ankle. An efficient-looking nurse returned to the desk, and she leaped up to talk to her.

“Excuse me. Is there any word on Sherry Witan?”

“Why, yes. I wasn’t aware there was any family present.” The nurse paged through a pile of forms.

“Not family. A close friend. Is she out of surgery yet?”

“Yes. She did quite well. She’s been out of surgery since noon and under observation in the recovery room.” The nurse checked her watch. “I’d say we’re just about ready to transfer her to her room on the oncology floor.”

Olive moved to the waiting room on the oncology floor. The same chintzy snowflakes dangled from the ceiling there as well; a jar of miniature candy canes adorned the counter of the nurses’ station. She called her mom to let her know Sherry was safely out of surgery and that she should come directly to oncology on the fourth floor when she arrived. While she was on the phone, a scrawny, bundled body that looked like it had once been Sherry was wheeled on a gurney from the elevator to the patient rooms. It was hard to believe that only months ago she had thought of Sherry as a large woman; she had become so reduced.

It was another half hour before they let Olive back to see her. Sherry’s fragile body seemed swallowed up by the large pillows supporting her. There was nothing covering her head, only wisps of fine gray curls dotting her scalp. Her chest looked sunken in. She had only been wearing a prosthetic, Olive realized, and now both her breasts were gone. Despite her wretched condition, Sherry’s thin lips actually curved into a smile when Olive entered the room.

“On the home stretch,” she murmured hoarsely, and beckoned Olive with her pulse oximeter–clamped finger.

Did she mean that they were nearing the end of their repeat year or that she was nearing the end of her life? Olive pulled a chair to her bedside and wrapped both her hands around Sherry’s cool and bony hand. “I’m so glad you made it through,” she whispered.

Sherry turned her head. Her brown, all-seeing eyes were still just as sharp. “Me, too. There’s not much more they can take from me. I’m practically just a shriveled-up corpse right now.” She squeezed Olive’s hand, and the sly smile spread across her face again. “If I make it through to January, though, I’m finally going to undergo that reconstruction surgery, and then I’m going to have the perkiest pair of knockers a fifty-eight-year-old woman has ever had. I won’t even need to wear a bra, they’ll be so perky.”

“Well, then.” Olive laughed. She released Sherry’s thin hand and leaned back in her chair. Something had changed. Sherry seemed almost optimistic now. What had happened? Had her doctor given her a promising prognosis? But she was worried Sherry’s buoyant mood had come from her good deed toward Olive and Phil. She didn’t want to let on that Sherry’s kind overture had not panned out. “Do your doctors think they’ve removed all the cancer?” she asked.

“Yes, for now. I’ll have to go through more chemo, of course, and there’s always the chance of the cancer metastasizing to somewhere else, but I have a good feeling about this. I don’t think it’s going to come back. I think I’ve suffered enough.” Her face was practically beatific.

“That’s wonderful. I hope you’re right.” Despite her numbness, she caught a tiny spark of Sherry’s serenity and let it warm her. Sherry was going to make it. She had won her battle at the eleventh hour. The universe had allowed her a second chance at life. At least one of them was making something worthwhile of this year.