The Repeat Year (17 page)

Olive stepped alongside Kerrigan and met her ghostly eyes in the window reflection. “You don’t see me going anywhere, do you? I’m not moving out. And as for this knowing what the future holds—well, it sucks, and I’d be one to know, right? It can make you feel trapped at first, like you don’t have the power to change anything. But you have to get past that. You have to get to a place where you realize you’re the only one who’s been standing in your way all along.”

She was finally starting to believe that herself.

“Master of my fate, captain of my soul, and all that garbage?” Kerrigan asked with a hint of a smile.

“Yes,” Olive said. “All of that garbage.” She started to close the blinds. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

Kerrigan rolled her eyes. “Who would believe me?”

Chapter 13

I
t was a hot, muggy afternoon. Olive’s black steering wheel scorched her hands, so she drove with her fingertips. College girls in sundresses and flip-flops walked lazily down the streets. Sailboats drifted in the distance, looking like bobbing seagulls as she curved her way around the lake to Maple Bluff.

The weeks leading up to her mom’s wedding had spilled into each other like waves at high tide. June 25 had seemed so far away, but now it was already the day before they left for St. Lucia. Olive couldn’t believe she was almost halfway through her year. All her good intentions—helping her mom prepare for the wedding, reaching out to her brother, checking in on Sherry after her mastectomy—had never become more than intentions.

When she wasn’t working, she and Phil were taking Cashew to the dog park, eating at little sidewalk cafés on State Street, or tumbling into bed together. Just the other day, she’d gotten off work at seven in the morning, positively ravenous for him. Instead of going home to bed like she usually did, she picked up his favorite coffee drink, a large hazelnut latte, and drove to his apartment. He answered the door with his shirt unbuttoned, his tie slung around his neck, and his hair still damp from the shower, and she couldn’t help herself; she’d thrown herself into his arms and almost made him late for his first-period class. After he managed to leave, she burrowed into his bed and slept for eight hours, then showered, climbed back into bed, and waited for him to get home for another round. It was intoxicating, just like the year they had first met, and she felt like a lovesick college student again.

But she hadn’t heard from Sherry since their chance encounter at the hospital, and the image of her—washed-out, vulnerable, alone—gnawed at Olive and disrupted her otherwise rose-colored summer. Sherry needed help, even if she didn’t want it, and Olive was clearly the one to give it. She was most likely the only one in Sherry’s life who even knew about her breast cancer, and she was definitely the only one who knew about the repeating. There were only sixteen hours to go until her flight, and she hadn’t even started packing, but she needed to see Sherry.

Maple Bluff was a wealthy village, where the governor himself lived in a mansion. Many of the houses overlooked the lake. There were no sidewalks and many of the snaking roads were so steep that other cars and houses appeared only when you were almost on top of them. Olive didn’t know how Sherry could afford to live in Maple Bluff. While her house was on the side of the road that didn’t overlook the lake and was substantially smaller than many of the surrounding homes, it still had an impressive log façade with giant picture windows. As far as she knew, Sherry held no steady job. She suspected she had inherited money from one or all of her past husbands.

She rang the doorbell three times, but no one answered. She was about to give up and leave, when she wondered if Sherry was outside, out of earshot. The lawn on the side of the house was less cared for than the front yard. Spidery weeds grew, and the grass was taller and drier and made Olive’s ankles itch. As she made her way around back, the landscaping became more and more unkempt. There were no fences separating the lots, yet Sherry had created the impression of one with shaggy trees and shrubs, clinging vines, and knee-high grass. Olive stuck to the only path now, a twisting trail of flat river stones.

“Sherry?” she called into the dense greenness.

“Who’s there?”

Sherry was squatting in front of a bush with glossy, heart-shaped leaves. She used the plastic watering can on the ground to push off and stand. Wearing an orange cotton smock and a floppy straw hat, she looked like a drooping, exotic flower. The symmetry to her chest had been restored, and Olive wondered if she’d had breast reconstruction surgery or was wearing a prosthetic.

“Hello,” she said, sounding almost happy to see Olive. She wiped her hands on her dress, leaving two wet smudges that clung to her thighs.

“I hope you don’t mind. I rang the doorbell. I wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“It’s a new day,” Sherry said with a little shrug. She carried the watering can to the patio and motioned for Olive to follow her. “Do you like my garden?”

There were no flowers. No vegetables as far as Olive could tell. The ground cover was thick; no pathways cut through it. It looked like a miniature jungle, overrun by weeds.

“It’s very green,” Olive said. “Very peaceful.”

Sherry laughed once, a sharp, barking sound. “Robert would be spinning in his grave. He put in delphiniums and pansies and chrysanthemums and feverfew and hired a gardener to look after it. It was really lovely, but time-consuming, and rather stifling, and after Robert died, I let the gardener and the garden go. This suits me better.” She set the watering can on the bottom step. “Wait here. I have something for you.”

The patio needed another coat of stain. Two brown wicker chairs sat beside a mosaic-topped table. A stack of paperbacks balanced there, looking like they’d been left out in the rain, their covers rippled, the pages stamped into a permanent wave. On the top was Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
.

Sherry returned, a large cream-colored envelope in hand. “Don’t think I forgot. This is for your mom and her beau. I’ve been meaning to mail it, but now here you are.”

Olive accepted the envelope, which felt heavy in her hand. She could imagine a pair of doves embossed on the front of the card and a congratulatory message inside about a lifetime of love, a new beginning. “Thanks. I’ll make sure they get this. How are you feeling?”

Sherry sat down heavily. “You caught me on a good day. I’m constipated, my abdomen is swollen, my feet feel like they’re burning, everything tastes like metal, and I’m tired and achy all over.” She lifted her hat, and even before she had removed it, Olive knew Sherry’s hair would be thin and wispy, if not totally gone. She remembered the way her dad’s thick, brown hair had fallen out in clumps almost overnight and never grown back.

“Chemo,” Olive stated.

With the hat gone, she could see that Sherry’s face was a little pinker and puffier than usual. Her scalp was peeling, and the hair that covered it was gray and threadlike. Without her characteristic red hair, Sherry’s face looked naked and old.

“Four treatments so far,” Sherry said, replacing the sun hat. She peered at Olive from under its brim. “So, what’s the significance of the wedding? In the context of your repeat year, I mean.”

The change in topic was not lost on Olive. She crossed her legs and shifted in the worn wicker seat. “I wasn’t very accepting last year. I made things pretty hard on my mom.”

“Ah.” Sherry slipped on a pair of large tortoiseshell sunglasses. Behind the brown lenses, her eyes were unreadable.

Eager to restore the conversation to the matter of Sherry’s health, Olive rushed on, “But now I’ve come to terms with it, and Christopher’s giving her a hard time instead. Maybe if it were anyone other than Harry.”

“Well, he’s certainly not as handsome as your father, but he’s not without all appeal,” Sherry said. “He’s very attentive and physically fit; he reads medieval poetry. He cooks for Kathy, and he wants to broaden her horizons, and God knows at our age, a woman needs her horizons broadened. I remember when they first met, when Harry gave that reading on
The Canterbury Tales
at the library, and—”

“What reading at the library?” Olive interrupted. When her mom had introduced her to Harry last spring, she said they’d met in yoga class, which had seemed too bizarre to be untrue.

“There was a special spring reading series at the Richmond branch, UW professors discussing their work and fields of expertise, and Harry was one of them. He really knows his Chaucer. After the reading, they started talking and really hit it off, and Harry stayed so long that he ended up helping Kathy take down the chairs.”

“When was this?”

“A few years ago. Maybe 2008?”

“Two thousand eight?” It was several degrees cooler in the garden. Olive suddenly felt chilled in her shorts and tank top. If what Sherry said was true, her mom and Harry had known each other for three years. They had known each other before Olive’s dad had died, and they had lied about it.

“Yes, it must have been 2008 because it was around the time Robert had his first heart attack.” Sherry inhaled deeply. “Can you smell that freshness? That’s photosynthesis in the process.”

Olive poked the sharp edge of the envelope into her palm. Just because they’d met each other at a library event three years ago didn’t mean anything, she reprimanded herself. It could’ve been a coincidence, a fluke. But why the need for secrecy then? When they’d reconnected in yoga class and started dating, why hadn’t Olive’s mom explained the wacky circumstances to her? God knows Harry would’ve loved to interrupt and supply words for
that
story. Unless they had felt guilty . . . Yet why the guilt if they had done nothing wrong, nothing that needed to be hidden? Her thoughts were becoming more tangled than the foliage in Sherry’s yard.

“Sherry, do you think my mom and Harry have had some kind of relationship going on since then?” She hadn’t realized she was going to voice the question until it burst between them into the moist, cool air.

Sherry tipped her sunglasses down to study Olive with her cool, brown eyes—eyes that had seen everything and seemed no longer surprised at the scandals and injustices of the world. “I honestly wouldn’t know. Perhaps you should ask your mother.”

Olive hugged herself with goose bump–covered arms. How could she possibly ever ask her mom that question? Its implication was too awful.
Did you cheat on Dad while he was on his deathbed?
In the ICU, she’d witnessed husbands who’d abandoned their wives in their greatest time of need—cancer, multiple sclerosis, a stroke—and the nurses viewed it as one of the greatest sins of men. Olive couldn’t decide what was worse—the husbands who divorced their sick wives or the husbands who stuck with them and quietly saw other women. She had never heard of a wife who’d deserted her sick husband. Her mom had been by her dad’s side every step of the way, lovingly feeding him and giving him his medications, even when he insisted he couldn’t taste anything and the medicine was a waste of time. She had taken him everywhere he wanted to go no matter how complicated it was to get him there, especially after he needed a wheelchair: the lakeshore path, the House on the Rock, even Memphis to see Sun Studios, Graceland, and the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated. She had been the picture of a devoted wife. But a picture . . . or the real thing?

Olive couldn’t believe she was even allowing herself to think these thoughts. Her initial reason for coming seemed foggy and far away. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Sherry’s round, pink forearm resting on the table. Cold, unflappable Sherry Witan, who could disclose information that Olive’s mom might have had an affair while her dad was still alive without batting an eyelash. Only days before the wedding, when Olive had finally made peace with their marriage! And after Sherry had called Olive’s mom an angel . . . how could she? Olive had been wrong to think that Sherry had changed, that the person she’d seen in the hospital bed was the real Sherry, someone crying out for help. The real reason she’d reached out to Olive back in January was to puppeteer someone else’s failures.

Olive raised her head. “Have you told your son?”

Sherry didn’t respond immediately, and Olive wondered if she was going to pretend she didn’t understand. But then Sherry muttered, “I tried calling him. He won’t answer his phone.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“It seemed unkind to leave him a voice mail about cancer.”

“Unkind, yes. But then maybe he’d call you back.”

Olive couldn’t tell what emotions, if any, were flickering behind those dark glasses. At that moment, it wasn’t too hard to empathize with Sherry’s son. Whatever Sherry had done to warrant this silent treatment, this excommunication from his life, she had probably deserved it. Even so, Heath had the right to know what was going on with his mother’s health, and Olive felt that with absolute certainty. Her parents had waited three weeks to tell her about her dad’s leukemia. They hadn’t wanted to ruin her high school graduation, they said. But now whenever she thought back to the four-hour ceremony in the stuffy gymnasium and the string of parties that followed over the next two weeks, she could think only of her parents, quietly suffering, faking smiles and laughter. Three whole weeks she had been kept ignorant.

“It’s a risk, I know,” Olive said. “Opening yourself up to rejection. But for Pete’s sake, Sherry, don’t be selfish. Your son deserves to know.”

“Ah,
selfish
. There’s that word again.” Sherry smirked. “It’s been hurled at me many a time, because being a mother and wife is all about
selflessness
, see?” She imitated a perky, syrupy-sweet voice. “Giving up every molecule of your soul. If you want anything for yourself, you’re accused of being selfish. Marriage and especially motherhood mean being condemned to play second fiddle your entire life.”

“I disagree, but anyway, maybe
selfish
was the wrong word—”