The Repeat Year (5 page)

“Hey, Ollie. It’s me. You must be at work. I thought you might call in sick today, but I should’ve known better. I guess that means you’re back to your old self? I hope so anyway. My dad’s in town tonight, and he asked if he could take me out to dinner, sometime around eight. I was hoping you might come along. Call me when you get off work. Love you. Bye.”

Phil and his father, Charlie, shared a volatile past. For the first eight years of Phil’s life, he had believed his father had separated the light from the dark and the ocean from the sky. Charlie had taken him along on short-distance hauls to Chicago and Des Moines and the Twin Cities, feeding him gas station candy and truck stop breakfasts and teaching him the science of the road. But that had all changed in 1993 when Charlie lost his job, and his drinking, which had always been a problem lurking in the corner, got really ugly. Not long after that, Phil’s parents got a divorce, and Charlie became less and less a part of Phil’s life, until he disappeared altogether. In the spring of 2010, he had suddenly reappeared—sobered up, attending AA meetings, and wanting to be part of his grown son’s life. Phil refused at first but eventually allowed himself to be persuaded to go out to dinner. They had gone out a handful of times since then, whenever Charlie passed through Madison.

Olive couldn’t imagine going out to dinner with Phil and Charlie tonight, the tense silence as steak knives scratched against plates, the banal talk of rising gas prices. But what was more, she couldn’t imagine simply picking up where she’d left off with Phil, before things had fallen apart, and pretending everything was normal between them. It seemed deceitful. Where was the ethics manual for all of this? If you wronged someone in a year that you had lived through, but the year seemed to exist for no one else, had it really happened? Her conscience, always loudest at the most inconvenient times, spoke up:
Yes, of course. To you, it happened. You did it and you remember it. So you’re still responsible.
But if you broke someone’s heart, and the other person didn’t remember, was it so wrong just to slip back into his arms?
Theoretical question,
she told her conscience before it could respond.

The rest of her shift felt like a television rerun. She couldn’t remember the entire script, but she knew the shape of the day. Some events resounded in her head. The Amish family that walked solemnly through the ward like a funeral procession to visit a middle-aged woman with lymphoma. The way the day nurse manager, Toya, got the theme from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
stuck in everyone’s head, because whenever she saw the respiratory therapist, whom she thought looked like a young Harrison Ford, she would hum the first few bars. (Behind his back, they all called him Indy.) A basket of teddy bear cookies on sticks arrived. They were decorated to look as though the bears were wearing scrubs and surgical masks and were sent by a former patient’s family in gratitude—a family whose loved one had lived, of course; the ICU staff was rarely thanked for the care they had given to patients who died.

Before Olive left for the night, she briefed the incoming nurse, Kevin. Then she moved from room to room, dimming the overhead lights in the patient rooms to bring them the twilight they had missed.

Chapter 4

A
fter working for twelve hours, Olive found it difficult to reenter the world. She often thought of coal miners emerging from the bowels of the earth: blinking and rubbing their eyes against the daylight, marveling that their trucks were parked where they had left them, that their homes had mirrors and electric lights and their children scrubbed-pink fingers. She inhaled the fresh wintry air and then picked her way across the slushy parking lot to her SUV.

When she had first started in the ICU last year, it had been almost impossible to reconcile her work life with her personal life. She had scoffed at Phil’s complaints about his obnoxious, lazy students and her mom’s anxiety that her extended family would feel excluded from the wedding. It had been difficult for her to care about what to have for dinner, or whose turn it was to pay the cable bill, or the illogical filing system Kerrigan’s office had recently implemented. The stakes in that part of her life were mercifully lower; nothing could compare to the tragedies she witnessed every day. Kerrigan had once accused her of being condescending.

But eventually she had learned to dim the fluorescent lights in her mind. While the faces of her dying patients flickered before her eyes frequently, she did not bring them up at the dinner table. She did not talk about tumors like jellyfish or skin that had been so badly burned it flaked and crumbled like dead leaves. She did not talk about toddlers who would grow up without their mothers or husbands who lay weeping on the tile floor. She kept most of this to herself.

It was already pitch-black when she climbed the pink, rickety stairs to her apartment. Miserable Wisconsin winters with their scanty hours of daylight. She longed to put her feet up. To take a hot shower and crawl into bed with her hair still damp and clean-smelling. She had hardly set foot on the landing when Kerrigan greeted her at the door. Kerrigan gripped her coat sleeve and blocked her entry into the apartment.

“Were you expecting a visitor?” She took a step back, allowing Olive to stand on the welcome mat.

Olive’s initial thought was that it was Phil waiting for her. Dinner with his dad, she suddenly remembered. She hadn’t called him back! He was probably sitting sullenly in a papasan chair, jiggling one of his long legs in that impatient way he had.

But Kerrigan continued in a rushed whisper. “She’s been here for almost an hour. One of your mom’s friends, she said. I tried to tell her that I didn’t know what time you’d be home and that I had somewhere to be, but she insisted on waiting for you.” She backed up farther, allowing Olive an unobstructed view of the living room.

A heavy woman with graying reddish hair sat on the black-and-white floral couch. Sherry Witan. She looked quite at home in Olive’s living room, even though she had never set foot in the apartment before.

“Hi, Sherry,” Olive said. “What a nice surprise.” She hoped she sounded convincing.
Surprise
was definitely the right word for what she was feeling right now, but not preceded by an adjective like
nice
. She couldn’t imagine why Sherry Witan was here. Olive had never seen her outside her parents’ parties before. It wasn’t as though they were good friends who went out for coffee and chatted weekly on the phone; she didn’t think her mom even maintained a close relationship with her. At her parents’ parties, Olive had never held a conversation with Sherry that exceeded the typical one-minute party platitudes. “Hi, how are you doing?” “Good. How are you?” “Great. This hummus is fantastic.” “My mom’s a good cook.” “She is.” Olive had found that she had relatively few small-talk skills. She didn’t seem to notice the awkward pauses and would instead gaze intently at the speaker as though eye contact were the only crucial element in a social encounter.

Sherry didn’t stand. Instead, she swiveled her head like an owl to survey Olive. “Your mother gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.” Olive sat down in the papasan chair closest to Sherry. “Is there something you wanted to talk about?”

Sherry ignored the question. Her eyes swept over the room, seeming to miss nothing. Kerrigan’s
On Wisconsin
alumni magazines and issues of
Sports Illustrated
on the coffee table. The dusty artificial orchid. Nail holes riddled the walls and yellowish water stains bruised the ceiling. A beer bottle hid halfway behind the TV.

Olive scrutinized the living room, too. When she returned her attention to Sherry, Olive found that she was watching her as though no one had ever taught her not to stare, as though she believed she was magically concealed from public view and therefore able to watch people as hungrily and conspicuously as she liked. Olive stared back. Sherry was in her late fifties.
Large
was the best word to describe her. She carried her weight with importance and made you feel in her presence, especially if you were thin, that you were an insubstantial waif. Her facial features were remarkably refined and delicate by contrast to her body: narrow brown eyes; thin, pink lips; a small, babyish nose; finely penciled-in eyebrows. If you studied Sherry in two separate photographs, one of her face and one of her body, you would never imagine that the two parts belonged to one another, and yet they somehow seemed to work in harmony for her. Her hair was a washed-out red that defiantly revealed several inches of gray roots at her part and temples. It fell in loose waves over the shoulders of her fringed gray silk shawl.

“I’m leaving,” Kerrigan called in a loud voice from the foyer area. “I’m supposed to meet Steve for dinner and the hockey game. I’m already almost twenty minutes late.” Olive straightened herself up and peered over Sherry’s head. Kerrigan stood as if waiting for some kind of recognition that she was free to go. She raised her eyebrows at Olive.

“Okay. Have fun. Thanks for waiting.”

When Kerrigan had left, Sherry sank back more comfortably into the couch. She absentmindedly stroked one of the fringes of her shawl.

Olive had used up all her patience and soft tones with Mr. Hutchinson. She didn’t want to be nice anymore; she wanted to demand that Sherry state her purpose and then go. There was so much to think about, and anywhere other than her bed right now felt like an unbearable place to be. The only thing that was preventing her from losing her temper was the memory of Sherry’s well-timed snort yesterday. That and a tiny voice begging Olive to take notice: Sherry had not made this unexpected visit to her place last year.

“Did you enjoy the party yesterday?” Olive asked.

“I always do. Your mother’s guacamole was excellent. I was surprised to get an invitation. It’s been a while since Kathy’s thrown a party, hasn’t it?”

“It has.” For a moment, the death of her father and courtship of her mother floated between them. And because Sherry’s expression encouraged her to say more, Olive said, “Three years to be exact. Or rather, two years.” She flushed.

Sherry nodded regally, as if by granting her approval, she was bestowing a favor on Olive. “And are you having a nice new year so far?”

Her question caught Olive off guard. She was about to say,
Yes, and you?
but something stopped her. There was something about the way Sherry had said
new
. Most people rushed the words
new
and
year
together as though they were an inseparable expression, part of a phrase that had become almost meaningless with use. But Sherry pronounced the word as though she were asking a question. As in: Oh, is that sweater new? As in: But is this year
really
new? “It’s been kind of crazy,” Olive said at last. “I’m having a hard time adjusting.”

Sherry steepled her masculine fingers. Her intense brown eyes sought Olive’s in a way that made Olive feel as though Sherry were physically reaching out to her, not just reaching, but pulling. At that moment Olive fully appreciated something that she had always suspected: Sherry Witan was not an ordinary middle-aged woman. She was not simply bookish or socially awkward. She was alien. Olive had been only twelve years old when her mother introduced her to Sherry, whom she was instructed to call
Ms.
Witan. Four other women had come over to their house to discuss
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
, which had stuck in Olive’s head because of its funny-sounding title. She’d been quietly finishing her social studies homework in the kitchen when shouts erupted from the living room. Poking her head through the doorway, Olive had witnessed a white-faced Sherry towering over the other book club ladies. “None of you get it,” she had accused. “You don’t understand the sacrifice she made for him. Why did she even tell him the truth? For
love
?
For nothing.
Look where it got her.”

Olive saw the same intensity in Sherry’s face now. But instead of yelling, Sherry murmured, “I overheard you yesterday.”

“I know.” Sherry hadn’t exactly been Miss Subtle at the other end of the couch with her nose stuck in
Barns across America
. “With my aunt Laurel. I heard you”—she had been about to say
snort
but thought better of it—“laugh.”

Sherry shook her head. “That’s not what I’m referring to. I was outside the bathroom. You said, ‘I’m not crazy. I know I’ve lived this year before.’”

Olive felt her cheeks flush. At the very moment she had been wishing for a confidant, a nosy eavesdropper had been lurking outside the bathroom. She didn’t know what to make of this. Was Sherry questioning her sanity? Would she tell her mother? Or was it possible that Sherry was experiencing the same thing?

“I saw you looking at that wall of family photographs. I saw you studying that newspaper.” Sherry listed these facts off as if they were proof of a crime. She stared at Olive.

Olive didn’t break eye contact. “So what?” she asked, and sat perfectly still with her hands clasped in her lap as though she were posing for a portrait that Sherry was drawing.

“I’ve talked to only one other person about this before, so if I got it wrong, just forget it.” Sherry scooted forward until her knees were brushing the coffee table. She and Olive were now leaning toward one another, like friends with a secret.

“Please go on.”

“It’s not just a feeling, Olive. It’s real. You’ve already lived through 2011. I have, too, and I remember all 365 days of it. But here I am back at the beginning. Here we are, I should say.”

Olive nodded, not trusting her voice. The mixture of relief and vindication she’d been expecting to feel—to have someone else acknowledge this bizarre occurrence—did not come. Instead, to hear it spoken aloud—spoken aloud by someone like Sherry Witan, no less—made the whole thing seem like an elaborate hoax. She felt inexplicably defeated.

“I went to bed in December 2011 and woke up the next day in January 2011,” Olive mused aloud. She knew there was no taking it back now that she had spoken it in Sherry’s presence. She had chosen her side, or rather, her side had been chosen for her. The surreal side. Sherry Witan’s side.

“So I thought.” Sherry nodded again with her magisterial grace. She removed her fringed shawl and spread it across her lap like a blanket. Underneath, she was wearing a white blouse with lace detailing on the collar and sleeves.

“Are there other people? Do you know why this happened? What are we supposed to do?”

Sherry held up her hands as though to dam up the flood of questions. Her left hand was bare, Olive noticed. No wedding ring. She had heard from her mom that Sherry had been married something like three or four times. On her right hand was a thick-banded gold ring with a garnet the size of a grape.

“Slow down. I’ve got a lot to tell you, and I don’t want to leave anything out,” Sherry said. “I should start by telling you that this isn’t my first time.”

“You mean you’ve lived this year over more than once already?” Olive asked in disbelief. She saw the past year loop before her eyes, continuously, over and over again like the reel of a movie. She imagined 2011 was a trap. Perhaps, one by one, everyone would fall into it until the history of the world repeated and erased itself at the start and end of every year—always the same year, 2011. Or maybe it was just she and Sherry stuck here while everyone else marched forward.

Sherry held up her bare left hand again to silence Olive. “No, not 2011. This is my first time repeating it, same as you. What I meant was I’ve repeated other years in the past. My first was 1982. And then 1997. I had to repeat 2005 twice.”

“You had to live the same year three times?” Olive asked. She felt a little light-headed at the prospect. “Why did you have to do that one over again and not the others?”

“Calm down, calm down. You look like you’re going to faint. Why don’t I get us something to drink? Is it okay if I do that?”

Sherry looked fuzzy and pixilated as she walked to the kitchenette. Olive rested her head against her knees. Three times? How many additional years had Sherry lived total? Four years? This would be Sherry’s fifth repeat. Would Olive have the same fate?

“For heaven’s sake,” she heard Sherry say from the kitchen area. “You’ve only got beer and diet soda in here. How do you kids live? No milk? No orange juice?” Olive heard the wooden rattle of drawers and cupboards opening and closing. “Don’t you have any tea?” Sherry called.