The Repeat Year (7 page)

“Perhaps I should get going,” Sherry said. “You look like you’re near your breaking point.”

Once in the refuge of her bedroom, Olive began to undo her French braid, slipping off the elastic band at the end and then running her fingers through her hair. Kerrigan had woven it tightly, the way Olive liked it, so her hair would stay in place all day. The braid loosened at first and then completely unraveled. The tension in Olive’s head and neck dissolved.

She closed the filmy curtains of her window and smiled at her African violet in its clay pot. “One outcome I am going to change is your death,” she told it. “I promise this time around to do everything in my power to keep you alive.”

Then she lay awake trying to picture the moment the year had rolled back into itself. It hadn’t happened at midnight, as she might have expected of such a magical event. Instead, it had happened sometime between the hours of seven and ten
A.M.
, after she got off work and before she woke up next to Phil. She imagined her slumbering body, wrapped up in a sheet, soaring over rooftops, trees, and lakes to get to Phil’s apartment. Her furniture dispatched like something out of a children’s book: her bed and dresser galloping down the road, halting for stoplights, her books flapping overhead like giant, inverted insects. But these were just the material objects. What of intangible time itself? What of the 365 days? Where had those days disappeared to?

She exhaled deeply and rolled onto her other side, squeezing her down comforter to her chest with both fists.
Sticking points
, Sherry had called the moments that had condemned them both to this repeat year. Olive thought of a scarf she had attempted to knit her first year of college. Brandi had taught her how to knit, and Olive had brought yarn and needles with her everywhere: on the bus, to lecture, to the Arboretum on sunny autumn days. The scarf had taken her five months to complete but had turned out so knotted and irregular that she had hidden it at the bottom of her closet instead of giving it to her mom for her birthday as she’d intended. But
now she imagined the scarf coming undone: the knots untangling, the bumpy, woven wool separating, flying apart into pieces of colored yarn again. Blue, purple, white, and pink, the yarn rewound itself onto cardboard cones. The knitting needles fell to the ground with a clatter.

Chapter 5

E
leven hours of dreamless sleep restored Olive. She awoke with the desperation of a deep-sea diver coming up for air. Her heart pummeled her rib cage as though it had little fists. Clarity reigned over her. Last February she had begged Phil for a chance to try to make things right between them again. He had answered, “How? What will you do, Olive? Change the past?” Then the impossible had happened. New Year’s Day. A second chance. She had been granted the unbelievable opportunity to
change the past
, and already two days had slipped away. What was she waiting for? She needed to see Phil. Every frantic thud of her heart articulated that desire.

She untangled the sheets from her legs and stumbled to the bathroom. As she waited for the water to warm, she mulled over the way they had met—at the farmers’ market in the fall of their senior year at Madison. She had bought a paper bag of apples that had promptly dropped out of the bottom and rolled across the crowded sidewalk, bumping against Birkenstocks and tennis shoes, obstructing the wheels of wagons and strollers. A small group of people had stopped to help her salvage what she could—she couldn’t remember the others now—and Phil was among them. They had nearly bumped foreheads as they’d stooped to collect the apples.

“This one doesn’t seem too bruised,” he said, as he dusted a squat McIntosh off on his navy blue polo shirt and handed it to her.

Their fingers touched, transferring energy between them almost like a static shock, and she raised her eyes to meet his. His eyes were the most startling shade of green she had ever seen, with a kaleidoscope pattern of amber overlaying his irises. Balanced on the balls of her feet, she would have fallen backward at the sight of those eyes and the overwhelming warmth emanating from them, had he not reached out to steady her. He helped her rise to a standing position.

“Thank you,” she said with a slight question in her voice, hoping he would supply his name.

“Phil,” he said, with a smile as stunning as his eyes. “You’re welcome . . .”

“Olive.” She was trying not to stare. His glossy brown hair seemed to glow in the morning sunlight, and his fitted polo shirt was doing little to hide his well-defined biceps and pectoral muscles. And yet there was something about his casual demeanor suggesting he was that rare and refreshing combination of a person who is both drop-dead gorgeous and completely unaware of it.

He didn’t comment on her old-fashioned name, as most people felt compelled to do. Instead he pulled a couple of plastic bags filled with produce from his backpack. Within a minute, he had transferred all the vegetables and herbs into one and freed up the other for her use.

“The bruises taste the sweetest,” he said. “That’s what my mom always said, at least. Now whether that’s true or just something she told me to stop my complaining remains to be seen.” He grinned.

Olive laughed. “Well, there’s one way to test that theory.” She rubbed an apple against the hem of her skirt and turned it over, looking for the flat side where it had hit the sidewalk. She sank her teeth into the slackened skin, and a flood of nectarous juice filled her mouth. She looked up to see Phil watching her intently, as if committing her face to memory.

“Your mom’s right,” she said, wiping her mouth self-consciously with the back of her hand. “That was delicious. Would you like one?”

“Yes, I would. Very much.” They had sat on the steps of the Capitol, eating their apples and talking long after the farmers’ market vendors had taken down their booths and packed up their vans, and then Phil had invited her to his apartment for a dinner of spaghetti with homemade sauce seasoned with the fresh basil he had purchased.

To start over with Phil again—what a blessing! To be given a fresh start not at the very beginning, but at a place where they’d already grown so close together and shared so much. She couldn’t wait to see him, to surprise him at school, and embrace him with none of the hesitation she’d felt on New Year’s Day. She quickly lathered her hair with shampoo and stepped under the showerhead. The water whisked the frothy soap along the length of her body before it disappeared down the drain. Perhaps this was what new believers who waded into rivers to be baptized felt. With each plunge under the water, more and more sins were washed away, until they were left clean. Every misstep she had made last year had been forgiven. No, better than forgiven: erased.

The drive to Wright High School took fifteen minutes, thirty if traffic was congested like it was at present. Insubstantial gray snowflakes landed on the windshield and instantly melted. Phil had fifth period off for lunch, and if she remembered correctly, it ran from the precise and rather odd times of 11:14 to 11:58. In the past, she had brought him meatball subs or cheeseburgers and fries and they’d eaten in his classroom with the lights turned off and the door locked so his students wouldn’t bother them. But when she’d started on the night shift, she had joined him for his lunch break less and less because it was difficult for her to wake up before noon.

She was stopped behind a silver hybrid car plastered with bumper stickers for local schools, co-ops, a greener community, and peace and tolerance for everyone.
Coexist
, one of the bumper stickers read. The hybrid inched forward a little.

What if she was already too late? What if she had missed a tiny window of opportunity to work things out with him? She was starting to feel panicked. It was already eleven o’clock. She listened to the worried message Phil had left on her cell phone last night wondering why she hadn’t returned his call. Her need to see him grew stronger. All the things she loved about him, the things she’d missed about him, were rapidly coming into focus.

After that first date, Olive had suddenly felt like she was seated backward in a whitewater raft, speeding blindly toward a huge waterfall. Scary as hell, but not a totally unpleasant feeling. In fact, she found it strangely exhilarating. It was unlike any other relationship she’d had before.

She’d dated only two other guys in college: Jonathan, a political science major and passionate activist, her freshman year, and Aaron, a shy and romantic English major, her sophomore year. Neither relationship had lasted more than three months, and Olive knew she was mostly to blame for the failures. She tended to jealously protect and separate the different regions of her life. Her dad and family came first, then her schoolwork, then her friendships, and a boyfriend was somewhere beneath all that. She meted out dates and growing intimacies cautiously, as if there were a science to it all. She never told either boyfriend about her dad’s cancer for fear that she’d be seen as needy.

But Phil wasn’t content to abide by the conventional rules of dating. The day after they met at the farmers’ market, he invited her to the driving range. He taught her to hit golf balls and regaled her with funny stories from his experiences student teaching. She told him about her clinicals and her big upcoming anatomy test, which he immediately proposed to help her study for. Olive even found herself mentioning her brother’s wedding the following weekend. Phil offered to be her date, and she could see the boundaries already blurring between her regions. Meeting her family on only the fourth date? But Phil didn’t seem to think anything of it.

Her anatomy test was on the musculoskeletal system, and Phil spent an hour quizzing her with a stack of flash cards Olive had already virtually memorized. But she was so incredibly distracted by his presence—he sat only three feet away in the black papasan chair—that she was struggling to come up with the Latin names. Finally she had a better idea.

She nervously dug her fingernails into her palms as she spoke. “The test will actually be a lab practicum. We’ll have to identify the muscles on a cadaver, so maybe it would be more helpful if I tried to recognize them on a model.”

“A model? Say, someone like me?” Phil raised his eyebrows playfully.

Olive’s adrenaline spiked. She couldn’t believe her own boldness. “Well, you are much cuter than our cadaver.” Oh, no! What was she getting herself into? Didn’t
Cosmopolitan
recommend something like two months of dating until sleeping with someone? No, wait!
Cosmo
approved of sex after the third date or whenever the time felt right, but it was a magazine primarily about sex, so probably it was pretty permissive. She tried to drown out her prudish conscience.

“I should hope so.” Phil grinned and set the flash cards down on the coffee table. “Anything to help science. Where do we start?”

“The head and neck.” She stood up from the couch and crossed the short distance to Phil. She brushed his forehead with her fingertips. “Occipitofrontalis.” She lightly caressed his silky eyelid. “Levator palpebrae superioris.” Her touch became more sure as she stroked his handsome jaw. “Masseter.”

“Who knew I had so many muscles just in my face?” he said.

She pressed her finger against his lips. “It’s a good, strong face.” Her fingers walked down to his neck and then his shoulders, and Phil let out a sigh. “Sternocleidomastoid. Trapezius. Biceps. Deltoid.”

As if on command, he lifted his arms upward for her to take off his shirt. She complied and bowed her head to kiss each muscle she named. “Pectoralis major. Rectus abdominus. Serratus anterior.”

He stopped her progress by cupping her face in his hands. “Those are the sexiest words anyone has ever said to me.” He guided her face toward his to kiss her, and she fell forward into his lap. Coming up for air between kisses, Phil murmured into her ear, “You. Are. Beautiful.” The disapproving voice in her head was silenced. She was amazed by his gentle forcefulness; his ability to make her feel powerful yet totally helpless at the same time; the way his hands and mouth were everywhere at once but always where she wanted him to be. She had had sex before, but this was the first time someone had made love to her.

Afterward, they lay naked and breathless on the couch, covered only by a decorative throw blanket.

Phil sighed contentedly. “Not to state the obvious, but you seem to have a pretty good grasp of anatomy.”

Olive laughed. “You think I’m going to ace the test?”

“I do.” He rolled over onto his side to face her. “This may be a totally naïve question,” he started, “but it seems strange a nursing student wouldn’t have to take an anatomy class until her senior year. Shouldn’t that be one of the first weed-out classes?”

Olive bit her lip. “It is. I first took it last year, but I had to drop it. I withdrew from the semester because my dad was getting really sick, and I was so worried about him that I couldn’t focus on any of my classes.” Lying in his arms in the most vulnerable position she could imagine, she told him about her dad’s leukemia, and he listened and he held her, and for the first time ever, she didn’t feel the need to cry. All her carefully constructed boundaries were tumbling down. He stripped her bare, but she had never felt safer.

She pulled into a visitor space in the parking lot behind the school. Wright High School was a beautiful, three-story brick building with a red roof situated in a nice neighborhood. On the front façade, the classical stone pillars and clock tower with a decorative cornice seemed to belong more to a national library or Unitarian church than a high school. In the back, the hulking building cast a dense shadow that stretched nearly halfway across the football field and track.

She sat in this shadow, watching the clock on her dashboard change from 11:15 to 11:16 to 11:17. She knew she should go inside, that she didn’t have a moment to spare if she wanted to catch Phil before his sixth-period class started, but for some reason, she couldn’t force herself to get out of the SUV.

Phil had been a big hit at Christopher and Verona’s wedding. He had a confidence and ease that were contagious, and Olive found herself talking to second cousins and members of Verona’s family as if they’d been best friends all her life. He’d made an excellent impression on Olive’s dad, too, who appreciated that Phil hadn’t asked him once about his health or congratulated him on making it through the wedding, as so many other well-meaning guests had. Instead, Phil had shaken his hand firmly and immediately launched into a discussion about Badger football, which was one of her dad’s absolute favorite topics.

“It’s remarkable,” her dad said to her later that evening. Phil had left their table to get drinks for everyone.

“What is?” Olive had been watching her brother and Verona slow dance. She couldn’t remember having ever seen two happier people.

But her dad wasn’t watching the newlyweds; he was watching Olive. He was wearing a black bowler hat to hide his baldness. During the church ceremony, Olive had thought he looked quite dapper in his tux with the old-fashioned hat. Now, she noticed the way the hat cast shadows over his increasingly angular and hollow features.

He smiled at her, softening the sharp corners of his face, as if he could read her mind. “How different you are from Phil.”

“You think?” She frowned slightly.

“I do. It’s—it’s the way you both move through life, I guess. He’s so self-assured. I’ve never seen someone make living look so graceful. And you’re so—”