The Repeat Year (6 page)

“I don’t drink tea,” Olive called back. She had to lift her head momentarily from her knees to respond. “My roommate does, though. There might be some in the silverware drawer. You can make some for yourself, but I don’t want any.”

Sherry stood before her shortly holding two mugs. One of them was a novelty mug that read,
You are dumb
. The other was a global warming mug that had a map of the world drawn on it; when you poured a hot beverage in it, some of the land disappeared. Olive chose global warming. The bitter smell of green tea rose up from it. She watched as Florida vanished.

“Thanks. I don’t really like tea, though,” she said, and bent down to untie her tennis shoes.

Sherry resumed her spot on the couch. “You should try it. It will make you feel better.”

“I’ve tried tea before. It’s not really my thing,” Olive protested, but she took a small sip to show Sherry she was appreciative of her efforts. The green tea looked and smelled like what she imagined urine would look and smell like after someone had eaten large quantities of grass. Perhaps the tea even tasted like it, although she had no proof to back this up. “Mmm. Yeah, it’s still not my thing.” She pulled out the drawer of the coffee table and extracted two sandstone coasters. She set her mug down on one of them and laid the other within Sherry’s reach.

“See? You look like you’re feeling better already.”

“I’m eager to hear what you have to say about this—” She interrupted herself, not sure what to call it. Phenomenon? Time warp? Miracle? Curse? “This . . .
this
.” She kicked her tennis shoes under the coffee table.

“I knew you would be. So let’s see. Where to start? I’ve never done this before.” Sherry looked pleased with her role as storyteller. “I’ve met only one other person who’s repeated a year before, at least in the thirty years I’ve known about it. There could have been people in my childhood and adolescence who were experiencing the same thing, but I wasn’t aware of it. The one other person I met was my first husband’s boss, the district attorney. But he wasn’t very receptive to my conversation. It was my first time, in ’82, and I had just as many questions for him as you have now.”

“How did you know he was living the same year over?” Olive asked.

“My husband, Clyde, kept making comments about him at home. Gene McGregor was his name. I guess in meetings he would hint at the fact that he could predict the outcome of a trial, and was insistent on the fact that if they didn’t do A, B, and C, they would fail. In theory this doesn’t sound that strange for an arrogant lawyer, but Clyde and some of his coworkers suspected something else was at work. They began to wonder if Gene was getting outside information and, in effect, working with the defense. There was one particular case in March of that year that Clyde told me about. Gene was in a frenzy trying to convince his staff that the evidence wouldn’t hold in court and that they needed to come up with some other tactic. Clyde went out to a bar with Gene one night and Gene confessed that if he lost this case, he knew he would never find rest, and claimed he would be stuck in the ‘purgatory of this year all over again.’ After Clyde relayed this to me, clearly thinking that his boss had lost it, I decided to seek Gene out and confirm if my suspicions were accurate.

“It took a great deal of courage for me to go over to his house—I was only a little older than you at the time. Gene answered the door completely plastered. We had met briefly at the office Christmas party, but he couldn’t conceive why one of his employee’s young wives was visiting him at his home. I tried to talk to him about the big case he was working on, but he became really angry, saying that Clyde shouldn’t be sharing confidential issues with me. I tried to placate him, and he invited me inside for a drink, asked me if I was lonely because Clyde was working late. I realized I had better articulate myself more clearly, so I was very blunt with Gene. I asked him if he was reliving 1982.

“I could tell from his shocked expression that I had hit the nail on the head, but he didn’t want to admit it. He told me he would blow his head off if he had to live 1982 over again. I asked him if he thought failing to put an evil man behind bars had been the impetus for his repeated year, if it was the event he needed to correct before moving on, that that was my theory of how things worked. He laughed at me and told me I was delusional. I was barely out the door when he came out onto the front lawn and asked me what I supposed he should do to change the course of his year. I told him that I didn’t know but I thought winning the trial would be a good start, although it couldn’t hurt to focus on improving other aspects of his life as well.”

“So did he make it to 1983?” Olive asked.

“He did. But I’m not sure how long it took him to get there. I cornered him at the office Christmas party and asked him to contact me on New Year’s Day, but he didn’t. I was too afraid to go back to his house, so I called him at the office. He acted like he hardly remembered me, like it had been years since we’d talked, not just days. He wouldn’t tell me for sure, but I think it
had been
years for him.”

She turned to Olive, as if suddenly remembering her presence. “But that won’t happen to you. Gene was an anomaly. He was a pretty awful man, and you know what? They never won that trial.”

But Olive was still trying to wrap her head around the idea of the lawyer existing in some sort of alternate reality as the rest of the world, Sherry included, had sped past him. Years of his life condensed into mere minutes for everyone else. “But didn’t you just say you had to live 2005 over twice?” she asked.

“Don’t focus on that,” Sherry said. She tapped a spoon against her mug. The sound rang out like a chiming bell. “It will only make things worse. You have to focus on the big picture. The reason for the repeat year.”

“So what you’re saying is that the essential idea behind reliving this year is to correct something we did wrong last year?” Perhaps Olive hadn’t been far off the mark yesterday when she’d supposed that she’d done something seriously wrong last year to deserve this fate.

“That was my theory,” Sherry said. “But it’s not quite as simple as that. If every time someone made a mistake, they had to relive that year, we’d all be in the same boat. We’d all probably still be in the Stone Age because we wouldn’t be able to progress further than that. But as far as I can tell, there are only a few of us having these experiences.”

“Perhaps it’s some kind of major mistake we made that affects the outcome of the world?” Olive offered, feeling sheepish immediately after the question escaped her mouth.

Sherry’s thin, pink lips stretched into a wry smile. “That thought had crossed my mind, too. Delusions of grandeur? But I don’t think we’re here to assassinate any villains or warn anyone of meteors hurtling toward the earth. We’re not superheroes; we’re still
us
. Just with a little extra knowledge. And the things I changed—well, it’s still not obvious to me how to go about this year even though this will be my fifth go of it.”

“Really? What have you changed?”

“I set myself up for that one.” Sherry’s lips straightened into a stern line. “I want to help you through this, but you have to understand that this doesn’t make us instant bosom buddies.” She draped her silk shawl around her shoulders, and Olive thought she saw the return of the Sherry Witan she knew from parties: serious and aloof with an almost accusatory stare.

“If you could just give me a ballpark idea,” Olive pressed.

“I’m sure you’ve heard rumors about my illustrious track record.” Sherry gave her shoulders a slight shake as though awakening herself. “I’m probably the worst guide you could have through this. I obviously haven’t learned my lesson; I’ve had to do this so many times.”

“That means you’ve had a lot of experience,” Olive said gently. “I’m just happy to have someone to confide in.”

“So you haven’t tried to talk to anyone else about it?” Sherry asked. When Olive nodded, she continued, “That’s good. I made the mistake of trying to tell my second husband about it, and I ended up spending the whole year in therapy. Which was helpful, don’t get me wrong, but not really the issue at hand.”

“Yeah, I think my ex-boyfriend thinks I’m a little nuts, too. I was so disoriented when I woke up at his apartment on New Year’s Day. We hadn’t seen each other in months, and then all of a sudden, we’re back together.”

Sherry traced the mug’s rim with her fingers. She seemed to be waiting for Olive to expand on her situation. Olive looked down. Two large pockets were sewn along the bottom of her scrub top. The left one was starting to sag and detach from the weight of the instruments she carried with her all day. A pocket-sized procedures and pharmaceutical guide, hemostats, bandages, ibuprofen (for her), the Motorola, pens. Her pocket would soon be hanging on by a thread.

How could Sherry assert her own desire for privacy in one breath and then give Olive such a look—a look that demanded Olive’s life story? It seemed an unfair expectation. She felt reluctant to admit any of the secrets that might have helped to land her here.

“We’d been dating for over three years and we broke up last February,” she finally said.

“Ah,” Sherry said. She set her cup of tea on the coaster.

“We had a big fight and then were on a kind of break, and I—” She couldn’t form the words. Unspoken, they tasted acidic on her tongue. The burning sensation spread to her sinuses, and without warning, she began to cry. It was wholly inappropriate. Sherry Witan was the last person on earth in front of whom she wanted to lose it. She grabbed for the tissue box on the end table, but it was empty. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why . . .”

“For heaven’s sake,” Sherry said, but her voice was kind, motherly. She handed Olive a handkerchief that smelled of men’s cologne. “You’re doing all right. You’re handling this quite well, actually. My first January like this, I spent in bed. I didn’t shower, I didn’t dress, I barely ate. By the end of the month, I was getting out of bed, but only to bring back books from the library. I read books on Buddhism, Hinduism, existentialism. I read Hawking, McTaggart, Kant, Leibniz, the ancient Greeks. I read H. G. Wells’s goddamn
Time Machine
. And none of it helped. If anything, it made things worse, because I became confused, paralyzed, too scared to try anything. I went back to bed for another month, and I didn’t snap out of it until my husband started talking about Gene McGregor.”

Olive felt humbled. A part of her had always secretly admired the complete abandon with which some people could break down and wallow in their misfortune. Whenever Kerrigan broke up with a boyfriend, she called in sick to work and camped out on the couch for several days watching the Soap Network and eating canned pineapple. But Olive liked to be clean and eat regular meals and keep busy. Moving forward as though nothing had happened was her preferred method of coping.

The fact that it hadn’t occurred to her to look in a book for the answers made her feel dimwitted. She knew who Stephen Hawking was but couldn’t imagine wading through one of his scientific texts. The other names Sherry listed were only vaguely familiar to her.

But what struck her the most was that Sherry had assumed she was weeping out of exhaustion and frustration from the overwhelming prospect of reliving the year, which had blissfully, fleetingly left Olive’s mind for a moment. She had been crying for Phil: the way she had hurt him and her disappointment over how things had turned out for them.

“You’re doing all right,” Sherry repeated. “You’re already light-years ahead of where I was. You went to work today, right? That’s good.” She twisted the tassels of her shawl around her fingers. “So you had issues with your husband. What else went wrong last year?”

“Boyfriend,” Olive corrected. “And I don’t really know. You’d think it would be obvious.”

Sherry frowned. “Obvious to others, perhaps. It’s easy to point out someone else’s mistake, harder to recognize your own. Especially because most people—except the lucky few like ourselves—are forced to live with their mistakes. So they learn to justify their mistakes, build on them, until they can look back and convince themselves that their mistake was inevitable all along, a good choice, in fact. An unwed teenage mother can look back at her unexpected pregnancy fondly six years down the road once the child’s out of her hair and in school all day. She wouldn’t dare go back and fix that mistake because it’s become part of her life.”

Olive didn’t know how to respond. Was Sherry talking of her own past? She folded the damp handkerchief into a triangle. “I’m not sure I—”

“You need to think of this as an opportunity, a blessing, a second chance—not an inconvenience and a curse,” Sherry said. “I know it can be difficult. I remember how frustrating, how absolutely heartrending the experience can be. In 2005, I had to watch my mother die three times.” She bowed her head and looked down at her hands. “I hope 2011 doesn’t hold anything that awful in store for you.”

Olive thought of her dad. Why hadn’t she been given the chance to relive 2008? She thought of the patients she had lost last year—the ones who had inspired her to cut out obituaries and keep the small rectangles of newsprint on her nightstand. She wanted to move to the couch and sit beside Sherry, but Sherry’s earlier comment about being “bosom buddies” made her wary. “I’m really sorry, Sherry.”

“That is neither here nor there. What you need to do now is retrace your year to the best of your memory, find the sticking points, and figure out a way to straighten them out.” Sherry raised her head, and Olive saw that there was no hint of tears in her eyes.

If only it were as easy as Sherry made it sound. As if Olive could simply sketch a map of her year—all twelve months, 365 days, 8,760 hours—in pencil and label the catastrophes like little land mines, mark them with red pushpins. If she reexamined her year closely now, every word she had said, every action she had done would become suspect. Had she really made her mom cry the day of her wedding when she’d suggested her mom loved Harry more than she’d ever loved her dad? Had she really moved out on Kerrigan and left her with a rent so steep she’d been forced to move in with her sister? She would mark the weekend trip to Lake Geneva with Phil and the subsequent week in February with a white flag. She felt such shame. Perhaps what Sherry had said was right; it was far easier to resign yourself to your mistakes and move on than acknowledge and try to rectify them.