The Repeat Year (3 page)

“Really? I thought you and Phil had plans.”

Olive paused. “There was . . . a big change of plans.” She accepted a cup of punch from Jody Kessler, her mom’s friend and fellow librarian. “I didn’t know you were having this party.”

“Of course you did. I invited you last week. But to be fair, I didn’t think you’d come since you’ve been dodging these parties since you were a teenager.”

“These parties? Mom,
these parties
were a tradition you had with Dad.” She didn’t realize how shrill she sounded until she saw Jody peek out from whatever she was doing in the pantry and then disappear as though it were unsafe to return.

“So was eating dinner and going for a walk. Does that mean I can’t ever do those things again?” Though her tone was light, her smile had evaporated. Without it, Olive could clearly see the crow’s-feet and the hair-thin lines around her mom’s drawn lips. Not a college cheerleader. A widow in only her early fifties.

“Olive, these parties are for my neighbors and friends—
our
neighbors and friends—to celebrate the new year together.”

Olive planted her palms on the cool marble countertop. She couldn’t help wondering if these were the same words Harry had used to persuade her mom to host the party. Her fingers curled around the smooth edge. Shouldn’t she be past all this? This back-and-forth with her mom, the subtle insinuations, each fanning the flames of grief and guilt for the other. She had struggled so hard last year to come to terms with her mom’s remarriage. She took a deep breath. “The new year. Right.”

Her mom leaned forward to tuck an escaped strand of hair behind Olive’s ear. “Is everything okay, honey?”

The tenderness in that question made her want to burst and spill everything like a shattered decanter of wine. This was the comfort she’d been seeking—the opportunity to place this burden on someone else, someone who had the capacity to bear it, the wisdom to sort it out, or better yet, make it all go away. But this visit was not how she had envisioned it. The party guests, for one. The youthfulness and glow of her mom, for another. She had already disrupted the party enough; there was no need to bring it to a screeching halt by making her mom question her mental stability.

“Everything’s fine.” She took a small sip of punch. “Is Harry here?”

Her mom furrowed her eyebrows and searched Olive’s face. “Of course. He’s grilling the salmon fillets.”

She drifted into the living room, out from under her mom’s worried gaze. It was so like Harry to grill something like salmon. In her mind’s eye, she could see her dad in his University of Wisconsin sweatshirt and red-and-white striped sneakers planted firmly on the deck that he had built, a bottle of Miller Lite in one hand, a metal spatula in the other. It had been only hamburgers and brats for him. The occasional steak or chicken breast. Through the French doors, Olive could see the slim silhouette of Harry at the helm of the grill, like a man tangling with an unruly beast. She didn’t go outside. Instead, she walked to the picture wall. She braced herself for the worst. After the wedding in June, Olive’s mom had hung up a photograph of the five of them, all standing barefoot on the beach—the newlyweds; her brother, Christopher, and his wife, Verona; and then Olive, the only one unpaired, like an unmatched sock. Her eyes sought the place where the picture had hung, which was now marked only by its absence—a conspicuous hole among the other framed memories.

She stood looking at the wall for a long time. She felt like she might crumple to the floor again, the way she had back at the apartment, so she made her way to the couch. Sherry Witan was sitting on the other end of the couch leafing through a coffee table book. Olive pulled one of the worn paisley pillows onto her lap. It was soothing to hold.

The wedding had happened. The whole year had already happened—all 365 days of it. Olive knew it; perhaps someone else knew it. Just because Phil and Kerrigan and her mom didn’t remember didn’t mean that she was the only one. She studied the other party guests to see if she could detect a difference in their behavior, an awareness, a kind of recognition of the absurdity of their position. Mrs. Pinto seemed to be a little off, clutching her beer bottle in both hands and surveying the room hurriedly with her small, black eyes, but Olive suspected she was just drunk. There had to be someone else. She couldn’t be the only one.

She shifted in her seat and touched the edge of a folded newspaper her mom must have wedged between the couch cushions. It was often her way of quickly tidying up. Olive opened up the newspaper and began skimming through the headlines.
Dane County snowmobile trails to close. Injured bald eagle on the mend at wildlife center. UW marching band ready for Pasadena.
Nothing caught her eye, but she didn’t know what she was looking for. Was she looking for an article to reassure her that others were aware of this strange loop in time, or was she looking for something to irrevocably convince her of this awful fact? The date on the newspaper was December 31, 2010. Her mom wouldn’t have let something a year old stay under the couch cushion if that were the case. But it wasn’t. There was no refuting the facts now. Olive bowed her head.

Her cell phone suddenly vibrated against her leg, and she wiggled it out of her pocket. It was a text message from Phil.
How are you feeling? Call if you need anything. I’m helping my mom take down her Xmas lights today. Love
you.

She stared at the message until the letters looked like hieroglyphic groupings of pixels. How was one supposed to respond to a loving, concerned message from an ex-boyfriend who didn’t remember he was an ex-boyfriend? Was there some kind of etiquette to follow? She finally settled on a reply:
No need to worry about me. I’m at my mom’s.
She pressed the send button and slumped even further into the couch.

Someone sat down next to her. “Hungover?” a female voice asked with a low laugh. Her aunt, Laurel.

“Tired,” Olive corrected. She pocketed her phone and sat up straighter. She could see Sherry Witan on the other side of her aunt, still pretending to be captivated by the coffee table book, but Olive had a feeling she was eavesdropping on their conversation.

“I missed you guys at Christmas,” Laurel said. “I’m really sorry I couldn’t be there.” She was a flight attendant for Frontier and was often scheduled to work both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

“We missed you, too,” Olive said.

“I heard Harry joined in the festivities.” Laurel leaned in conspiratorially.

“He did.”

Her dad, a car salesman, had never been quite impressive enough for Laurel, who had remained vigilantly single her whole life, and dated pilots and doctors and actors—or at least men who claimed to be pilots and doctors and actors—that she met on her flights to Kansas City and Cleveland and Indianapolis. Laurel found Harry’s job as a professor at the University of Wisconsin much more glamorous. Wrongfully so, since he taught medieval studies, perhaps the dorkiest of all departments. She claimed a scholar was just the thing for her brainy older sister, who had been the acquisitions director at the Richmond branch of the Madison Public Library for the past nineteen years.

“Aren’t you warming up to him yet?” Laurel asked. “I know it’s hard for you and your brother to see your mom with anyone other than your dad, but you’ve got to get used to it sooner or later. For Kathy’s sake.”

Olive disliked when people talked down to her like that, as though she and Christopher were a pair of school-age brats reluctant to gain a new stepfather. However, she had just told off her mom for throwing a New Year’s Day party with Harry—maybe she
was
a brat. “He’s a great guy,” she said. “He’s grilling salmon right now,” she added, as though this substantiated her claim.

“How nice.” Laurel nodded and sifted through a handful of mixed nuts. “Nuts are good for you, right? Protein. I’m trying to lose some weight. Do you have a New Year’s resolution?”

Olive didn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. They seemed like something dreamed up by health clubs, a feel-good method of making it through January’s postholiday blues and the guilt of overindulgence. It was so much easier to focus on a problem with your body than with your personality. So much easier to come up with a solution, too. There were products to purchase. Exercise balls, diet pills, an elliptical machine, Weight Watchers cookbooks, Pilates classes. Where was the quick fix for a character flaw like recklessness or selfishness or just downright stupidity?

“Not yet,” she said. “But I probably need one. Or ten.” She must have done something seriously wrong to be here. Made mistakes of epic proportions, mistakes worthy of attracting the universe’s attentions. Unless it was just some random glitch in the otherwise relentless march of time. “Is that your only resolution, Aunt Laurel? To lose weight?”

Laurel’s chipper expression became serious. She wiped her salty palms on her black skirt and leaned closer. “Don’t tell your mom, okay? I want to try Botox. All the women I work with are trying it, and they look fabulous.” Sometimes it was hard to believe Laurel was her mom’s sister, they were so different.

A loud snort came from the other end of the couch, but when Olive turned to look, Sherry Witan appeared engrossed in
Barns across America
and unaware of their conversation.

“Would you excuse me for a minute?” Olive asked. “I need to use the bathroom.”

She wanted to lock herself in the bathroom the way she had in third grade. Over a dinner of brats and corn on the cob, her mom had announced that Olive would have the same fourth-grade teacher Christopher had, Mrs. Katz. Christopher had been a troublemaker in her class, and Olive was horrified to think Mrs. Katz would think the same of her. Though it was painful to give up her corn on the cob with the beloved miniature corn-shaped holders, Olive fled to the downstairs bathroom and refused to come out until her dad convinced her Mrs. Katz would give her a fair shake and quickly discover what a bright, well-behaved student she was. A goody-two-shoes, Christopher had clarified.

Her dad wasn’t here now to make this problem go away. She had come to this house looking for some solidity and reassurance, conveniently forgetting all that had vanished three years ago. Even though this year seemed to be standing still, time hadn’t stood still in her childhood home. Everything was changing. Her mom had resurrected the New Year’s Day party tradition last year, and Olive hadn’t even known about it. She hadn’t been a part of it. She was ninety-five percent sure that her mom hadn’t invited her last year, and if her mom had, she had intentionally misled Olive into thinking it was a different type of get-together. Somehow that seemed like the biggest betrayal—that she’d had to live a whole year of her life and return to the beginning just to find out what she’d missed that first day.

She fingered the basket of small holiday soaps her mom put out every year. These soaps were never used; they were for decoration only. There was a gold bell, a green tree, a red cardinal. Underneath the colored wax in some places, flakes of white shone through.

She knew her situation was incredible, unbelievable, unfathomable, but still she wished she didn’t have to face this year again alone. She needed a confidant: someone imaginative, who could suspend his or her disbelief and just trust her. Phil was too rational; he’d insist there was some sort of explanation, maybe having to do with quantum physics, but most likely one that had to do with her mind. Kerrigan couldn’t keep a secret to save her life, and her mom obviously had enough on her plate as it was.

Her face was pale and tired-looking. Her long, dark hair was knotted at the nape of her neck because she hadn’t had a chance to shower yet. She looked a little unbalanced. “Maybe it is all in your mind,” Olive said to herself in the mirror. She dipped her fingers in cold water and traced the circles under her eyes. She pinched the apples of her cheeks a couple of times and turned off the tap.

“I’m not crazy. I
know
I’ve lived this year before.”

Sherry Witan was waiting to use the bathroom when Olive came out. They exchanged glances and Olive tried to smile at her because she knew most people avoided Sherry and she felt a little bad for her, sitting all alone at the end of the couch with a coffee table book throughout the entire party. Sherry squinted sternly back at her. Olive walked away.

Chapter 3

O
live’s cell phone startled her awake the next morning. Tina, one of her fellow ICU nurses, was irate on the other end.

“It’s ten after seven, Watson! Where are you?”

Olive was too groggy to make sense of Tina’s question. She had slept poorly last night, trying to convince herself that if she believed strongly enough, she would wake up in 2012 in the tranquillity of her condo. A brief scan of her cramped bedroom proved otherwise. “I’m at home.” Her voice sounded husky with sleep. She tried to clear her throat discreetly. “I’m not on till tonight. Why are you calling me?”

“You’re supposed to be working the day shift this month, remember? Like we’ve been planning for weeks, since Jennifer’s on maternity leave. And
I’m
supposed to be picking up my kids from their dad’s house right now.”

The day shift? Of course: last January, Olive had worked the day shift, seven
A.M.
to seven
P.M.
She had disliked every minute of it. The day shift was ten times busier with its visiting hours and grieving, beseeching family members and doctors’ rounds with flocks of gawking residents and med students in tow. As someone who had been relatively new to the ICU—Olive had transferred there in October 2010 from the surgical floor—she had felt adrift in a sea of impossible demands. Taking a patient’s vitals with an audience of six or more. Checking ventilators, pushing meds, drawing blood, calling for X-rays and EKGs. Bringing fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters back to life.

That was why she preferred the night shift, even though it put her at odds with the rest of the world’s schedule. It wasn’t that nothing ever happened at night. Patients worsened at all hours, and family members often watched over their loved ones through the night, but Olive looked forward to the moments when a kind of peace descended over the ICU in the early hours of the morning, when everything hung in a delicate balance.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said. She trapped her cell phone between her ear and shoulder and dug through the pile of dirty scrubs on her closet floor, hunting for a top that wasn’t too wrinkled.

“And when will that be?” Tina snapped.

Olive felt assaulted by her tone. She knew her lateness put Tina in a tight spot, but she didn’t understand the hostility in her voice. Of all the ICU nurses, Tina was her closest ally and friend. Some nights they ordered pizza with fresh mozzarella, tomato slices, and basil. Together they had imagined elaborate, fascinating lives for the intubated, geriatric patients who couldn’t tell their own stories and got few visitors. Mrs. Estrada, they speculated, had danced the flamenco in her prime. Mr. Gorski, with his dyed black hair and jowls, had definitely been an Elvis impersonator. Or should’ve been. It had taken some time for Tina to warm up to Olive, but—

A swift realization struck her. They were back to the beginning of the year, back to the point when Tina was still wary of Olive’s four-year university education and assumed Olive would look down on her own community college background. Olive had also made a series of mistakes when she first arrived that had sent her to the top of the more experienced nurse’s shit list. Taking too long to start IVs, especially with elderly patients and their uncooperative, sluggish veins. Hesitating to contact the doctor on call during emergencies in the middle of the night.
It’s his job, Watson. We’re here, aren’t we? And we aren’t allowed to do anything major without him. So get his lazy ass out of bed.
But perhaps her gravest offense was showing astonishment when Tina told her that she had a seven-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son, despite the fact that she was Olive’s age.

Olive sighed. Showing up late today would surely not endear her to Tina. Regaining her friendship would be another uphill battle. “Twenty minutes, tops,” she promised Tina, and tried to shimmy into a pair of mint green drawstring pants. Olive could still hear her grumbling into the phone about having to call her ex-husband when Tina disconnected.

Kerrigan had a pot of coffee brewing. The wide-open bathroom door afforded Olive a view of her friend already dressed for the gym.

“What are you doing up?” Kerrigan asked.

“I have to work the day shift this month. I’m already fifteen minutes late, and Tina’s ready to murder me.”

“Have some coffee first. You look rough.”

“No time.” Olive spun in a helpless circle, trying to remember where she kept her backpack in this apartment. The coat closet.

“Five more minutes won’t make a difference. Sit down and have a cup. I’ll braid your hair.”

Kerrigan loved to braid hair, especially long hair. She wasn’t particularly good at it—some braids turned out lopsided, one strand much thicker than the others, and her French braids sometimes sloped diagonally across Olive’s scalp—but her fingers were gentle and soothing. And the girl had a point: What difference would five minutes make? Tina was already enraged.

Olive breathed in the aroma of her coffee. Kerrigan sat behind her, weaving together sections of Olive’s hair. She had forgotten how Kerrigan could be her own planet with a distinct gravitational pull, exerting both acceptance and a tremendous sense of calm. Olive had first experienced this her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, her second weekend in the dorms. The first two weeks had flown by gaily with dorm-sponsored events, get-to-know-you games, and meals at the cafeteria with her roommate, Brandi. But then the second weekend came, and Brandi had left to visit her boyfriend in Whitewater. Olive would have liked to go home, too, but her parents were both too sapped, figuratively and literally, by her dad’s chemotherapy treatments to make the trip to campus to collect her. She missed them terribly.

She tried to keep herself occupied. She called her best friends from high school, Maggie and Alistair, who were attending the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, to see how they were doing. Maggie sounded like her usual bubbly self; she’d made several friends already and they were planning a birthday party for one of the girls in her suite that night. Olive couldn’t even get hold of Alistair, who she presumed had become such a man-about-town by now that he wouldn’t be caught dead stuck inside his dorm room on the weekend. She sat inside her dorm room, first with the door open, hoping to attract passersby, but then after that didn’t work and she started to feel like a zoo animal on display, with the door shut. The longer she stayed inside, the harder it became to come out. Loud, happy voices ricocheted in the hallway outside her door. If she came out now, they would wonder what kind of loser sat alone in her room on a Saturday night. She didn’t venture out for dinner, fearing eating alone at the cafeteria, instead making a meal from her supply of snacks.

Around ten o’clock, she really needed to use the bathroom. The sounds in the hallway had dwindled; she figured almost everyone in the dorm had gone out to some frat party by then. Trying to look ill in case anyone questioned her, she made a beeline for the girls’ bathroom at the end of the hall. Pushing open the door, she was startled to see someone perched in the open window in nothing but an oversized black T-shirt. The girl’s hair was twisted on top of her head in a chignon and covered in what appeared to be banana pudding. Hair supplies—combs, brushes, clips, bottles, and creams—were strewn across the three sinks.

The girl turned from looking out the window to take Olive in. Her face was strikingly pretty, pretty in the way of prom queens and girls in skin cleanser commercials, but her dressed-down appearance tempered the effect. “Hi,” she called from the window. “Is that your natural hair color?”

Olive touched a strand of her long, dark chocolate–colored hair, as if checking to make sure it was still there. It slithered through her fingertips, falling back against her shoulder. “Yes.”

The girl pointed to the creamy mixture on her head. “Touching up my roots,” she said, and swiveled in the windowsill, her bare legs dangling down, her back pressing against the wire mesh screen. “You know they always say blondes have more fun, but if I had naturally brown hair like that . . . My own natural color is more of a ‘dishwater’ blond—gosh, who ever heard of having your hair compared to dirty dishwater as a good thing? Yuck. Don’t ever dye your hair,” she concluded. “It’s gorgeous. Color like that doesn’t come from a bottle. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“Thank you,” Olive replied. She felt awkward about ducking into one of the stalls now, not sure if their conversation, if it could be called that, was over, but she really needed to relieve herself. When she emerged, the girl was in front of the sinks, clearing away a space for Olive to wash her hands.

“I’m Kerrigan Morland, by the way. I’m in 410.” She frowned slightly. “My mom is into all things Irish, but she didn’t do her homework before she named me. It means ‘one with dark coloring.’”

Olive laughed as she dried her hands on a paper towel. “Olive Watson, after my grandmother. I’m in 406.”

“Oh,
you’re
Olive,” Kerrigan said, in a tone that worried Olive that rumors had already started about her: the antisocial girl who never went out on weekends. Kerrigan must have seen the anxiety in her eyes, because she hastily added, “I’ve wanted to meet you since I saw your name sign on your door. I thought to myself that anyone named Olive
must
be cool. I’m so tired of all the Brittanys and Ashleys of the world. There are four girls in my calculus discussion section named Katelyn, except they all spell it differently.
K-A-T-E-L-Y-N. C-A-I-T-L-I-N. C-A-Y-T-L-Y-N-N-E.
Okay, I made that last one up. But seriously.”

There was a long moment, and Olive fretted that she was supposed to follow this rant with some witty comment. She missed the mellow, easy banter of her high school friends. In college, every conversation felt like a contest to determine who was the smartest and funniest. How was she ever going to make friends if she could never get a word in edgewise?

Kerrigan was watching her, but her expression wasn’t judgmental. “Have you seen this view?” she asked. “It’s amazing.” She gestured to the window ledge where she had been sitting. “You need to sit down to see it. I think it’s mostly safe.”

Olive wanted to retreat to her room, where it was
totally
safe, but something made her stay. Perhaps it was her awe of this girl who exuded so much confidence that she was at ease dying her hair in just her Goo Goo Dolls concert T-shirt on a Saturday night in the girls’ bathroom. Or maybe it was because this was the first person who had reached out to her, truly reached out to her besides the standard “name-hometown-major” questions, and she felt grateful despite Kerrigan’s obvious eccentricities.

She sat down on the ledge, tucking her knees in the way Kerrigan showed her. The screen seemed even flimsier up close. They were on the fourth floor, and if she lost her balance, it was the only thing separating her from plummeting to the cement pathway below. “What am I looking for, exactly?” she asked, eager to get this stunt over with.

“The lake,” Kerrigan said. “Look way off to the left. You can just see it behind the trees.”

She was right. Beyond the jagged outlines of the trees spread an amorphous bluish black that was so profound it was hard to tell if it was water or sky, earth or heaven. Lake Mendota. Olive hugged her knees to her chest. The night breeze carried the smell of the lake to her—a musty, primordial odor that reminded her of death. At that moment, she subconsciously understood that her dad was not going to win his battle with cancer and that she would one day, in the not too distant future, lose him.

“It’s very pretty,” she said, leaping up.

“Are you okay?” Kerrigan asked. She had rinsed the dye from her hair while Olive was at the window, and her hair now hung in golden tangles around her face. When Olive didn’t respond, she continued, “I think the worst thing about this place is how
happy
everyone pretends to be all the time. I mean, you know that everyone is missing their families and their friends and their houses and their pets and their privacy. And they’re all scared and confused about what they’re doing here and what they’re going to do with their lives, and if they’re good enough, or smart enough, or whatever, but they still feel obligated to pretend that they’re having the time of their lives.”

Though Olive had promised herself she wouldn’t tell anyone in the dorms about her dad’s leukemia—she didn’t want to be like Samantha Trevors from high school, whose mother had Huntington’s disease and whom everybody had pitied and held at arm’s length—she told Kerrigan, this girl she had known for all of five minutes, everything. And Kerrigan listened thoughtfully as though she were memorizing each of Olive’s sorrows and trying them on. When two rowdy drunk girls stumbled into the bathroom, Kerrigan guided Olive into her dorm room to continue the conversation without even pausing to clean up her hair dye mess. Surrounded by satiny pillows on Kerrigan’s futon, Olive felt her loneliness lift. She had never met anyone like Kerrigan before, someone who could switch as easily from being playful and outgoing to contemplative and caring as though simply flipping from one radio station to the next.