The Repeat Year (9 page)

While she’d been inspecting a prism hanging from a suction cup on one of his windows, deep in thought, he had come up behind her. He planted a soft, stealthy kiss on her collarbone and then backed away, as if nothing had happened.

She laughed at his innocent expression. He was all but whistling with his hands clasped behind his back. “I’ve missed you,” she said, before she could stop herself.

But he surprised her. “I’ve missed you, too. It seems like we haven’t gotten to spend much time together—like this—lately.” He looked as if he were going to say something more, but didn’t. He lifted a strand of her hair to his nose and inhaled deeply. “God, you smell good.”

She couldn’t believe the way her body responded to his proximity. She had expected to feel guarded and hesitant around him at first. They had been separated for ten long months. Shouldn’t there be a period of readjustment? Probably it had something to do with the hormone-saturated air. And it was hard to feel tentative when he was looking at her like that. Her memory of his eyes hadn’t done them justice—they were an even more brilliant shade of green than she remembered. The yellow flecks dotting his irises looked almost golden.

“This morning I was thinking about the way we met,” she said. “Do you remember?” The snow was coming down more heavily now; the flakes were white and fat and blotted out the gray sky.

“Of course I do. You were wearing a white skirt like a petticoat and your hair was in two braids.” He reached over and tenderly divided her hair into two loose pigtails. “Why don’t you ever wear your hair like that anymore?”

She shook out her hair, letting it fall down her back. “I don’t remember that.”

Phil perched on the edge of a desk, in a way she was certain he scolded his students for on a daily basis. “When I saw you drop those apples, I knew it was my chance. Thank God for your clumsiness. Otherwise, I might not have gotten up the courage to talk to you.”

“Hey! I wasn’t clumsy.” She lunged forward, pretending she was going to disturb his precarious balance, and he laughed and straightened. “The bottom of the paper bag broke. The apples were too heavy for it.”

“That’s right. Well, thank God for that paper bag, then. It certainly played its role in our fate.”

“Do you really believe we were destined to meet?” she asked.

He nodded and took a step closer to her. “Don’t you?”

She had never believed in fate before, instead preferring to believe in her own free will. While the apples had created an introduction for them, if she and Phil hadn’t hit it off, nothing would’ve come of the incident. It had been her decision to accept his dinner invitation. Their mutual decision to start a relationship. She had made some good choices, some bad—that was for sure—and she’d accepted the consequences.

But Olive was starting to seriously reconsider the idea of destiny. Perhaps they
were
meant to be together, but her free will had led her astray. Now fate was bringing them forcibly back together. What was this repeat year for if not to restore Phil to her?

“I’m starting to think something like that,” she said with a smile.

“Good.” Phil ambled back to his desk and retrieved a granola bar from one of the drawers. “You’re positive you don’t want anything? I forgot to mention I have something in here that’s either chocolate-covered raisins or mouse turds.”

“Gee, tempting, but no thanks.”

He took a large bite of his granola bar. “You seem to be feeling a lot better.”

“I’m fine.”

“You were really disoriented on New Year’s Day.”

She forced a laugh. “I was loopy. Sleep-deprived.”

“I’ve never seen you like that.” He frowned. “You didn’t remember what we’d done the night before. It was almost like you’d blacked out. You didn’t seem to know where you lived. You said something about Kerrigan living with her sister. You were really agitated. You seemed almost mad at me.”

She looked down at her hands. “I don’t know what to tell you, Phil. I was exhausted. This working the night shift is really getting to me. I’m tired all the time. My circadian rhythm must be out of whack.”

“Then maybe you need to ask them to put you on the day shift because this schedule does not agree with you.” He crumpled up his wrapper and tossed it into the garbage can.

“Well, I’m on the day shift this month, so we’ll see how it goes, okay?” She tried to add a note of gentle finality to her tone.

But he would not be so easily swayed. “Your behavior was really disconcerting. I’m worried about you, Olive, and I feel like there’s something more to this. Is everything okay?”

She was unsure how to proceed. He was opening up a safe space for her. A space to confess her problems, but he couldn’t even begin to fathom the depth of what was troubling her. She knew this was the moment, if not exactly the ideal place, to tell him the truth about her repeat year. He was concerned, sympathetic; he might even humor her and pretend to believe until she’d found a more scientific way of convincing him. But if he agreed to believe her story—that she had seen the future, so to speak—he would eventually ask questions. He would want to know what had happened in the year and why she thought she was reliving it. And how could she possibly respond to his questions without disturbing the fragility of this fleeting, shimmering second chance?

She had chosen to tell him the truth last year. She had confessed her infidelity to him and he had given up on her. What made her think he would react differently this time? Where had her honesty gotten her last year?

But the infidelity had technically not happened yet, and Olive would not allow it to happen this year. She realized that telling him the truth had never really been a serious possibility. She needed to protect him; she needed to protect his unmarred image of her.

“I had had this really strange dream, and I just couldn’t shake it,” she said.

“What kind of dream?”

She spoke softly. “Everything had changed. Kerrigan had moved out and I lived somewhere else, on my own. You and I had broken up. It was a terrible dream.”

Phil looked thoughtful. His hand hovered over the folder he had so hastily filled with ungraded homework assignments earlier, but he didn’t touch it. She couldn’t tell if he was buying her story, or if he was puzzling through the other strange things she had said on New Year’s Day. At last he said, “Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

The concern written on his face made it difficult to answer. It was now or never. She could do what was right or she could do what was best. For both of them.

“Everything’s great,” she said. “I think my subconscious was trying to remind me how good I have it.” She squeezed his hand. “How lucky I am to have you.”

He squeezed her hand back and then grabbed the folder. “Not to ruin the moment, but you probably need to get going in the next five minutes before the bell rings and there’s a stampede in the hallways.”

Olive looked up at the clock. Eleven fifty-three. “Good idea.”

“Will I see you tonight?”

“You can count on it, Mr. Russell.”

Chapter 6

O
live was on her fifth cup of coffee. The transition back to third shift had been brutal. Her eyes felt gluey, and it seemed like every breath she took was followed by an irrepressible yawn, yet somehow, she had survived the night. It was now eight in the morning. Her replacement, Kelly—the flakiest nurse on the ward—had called in sick. It had taken Toya, the nurse manager, forty-five minutes and ten calls to guilt someone into taking Kelly’s shift.

“I’d lay off the coffee if I were you,” Toya told Olive as they convened at the nurses’ station. “You’re going to give yourself heart palpitations.”

While Olive’s heart did seem to be beating abnormally fast, she suspected it had more to do with her anxiety about the upcoming weekend than her caffeine intake. It was the Friday of her fateful trip to Lake Geneva with Phil. She had to get home to pack and take a long nap so she’d be well rested for tonight. She wanted everything to be perfect this time around.

“Well, look who it is. My favorite employee,” Toya said as Christine arrived to relieve Olive. Olive quickly briefed the incoming nurse on her patients, and then the two older women shooed her away and ordered her to go straight to bed.

In the elevator, she mentally ticked off reminders for the weekend. She needed to pack warm, comfortable clothes. She needed to persuade Phil to drive her SUV instead of his Mercedes. She needed to be simply wowed by the shabby cabin in the woods, his choice of a romantic getaway. She needed to avoid all talk of her job. She needed to stay awake.

The elevator doors slid open to a view of the lobby. A small crowd pressed forward as Olive struggled to step out. Among the crowd was a woman who looked suspiciously like Sherry Witan at first glance. Olive looked again. “Sherry?”

Sherry looked like a rabbit caught in a cage. She quickly thrust her hand out to prevent the doors from closing, much to the displeasure of the other passengers. “Hold your horses,” Sherry grumbled as she pushed her way off the elevator. Sherry eyed her. “Olive,” she said. The doors closed behind them with a ding. “You look like shit.”

“I just worked thirteen hours,” Olive said defensively. She suppressed the urge to comment on Sherry’s own bedraggled appearance. Sherry’s unkempt hair was streaked with even more gray than normal, and there were shadows under her eyes the same shade of lavender as her shapeless overcoat. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you think? I’m here to visit you.”

Olive was about to scoff at that when something stopped her. It had been a month since Sherry’s first unexpected visit with her offer of guidance. Olive hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her since that day. But now at a pivotal moment in Olive’s year, Sherry had popped up again. It was almost like she was her fairy godmother. Olive rubbed her aching forehead. Oh man, she was sleep-deprived. Sherry—a fairy godmother?

Sherry dug in her crocheted handbag for a handkerchief and blew her nose. She looked at her watch and then up at Olive. “You need someone to talk to, don’t you? Why don’t I buy you a cup of coffee?”

The hospital cafeteria was slow at that time of morning. Only a few careworn residents and family members hunched over breakfasts of nuked eggs and sausages. Sherry chose a cinnamon roll caked with icing, then put it back, and filled a disposable cup with hot water. Olive took Toya’s advice to lay off the coffee and let Sherry buy her a bottle of apple juice instead.

“Did you know that apple juice is a natural laxative?” Sherry asked conversationally as she pulled an Earl Grey tea bag from her purse.

“You don’t say.”

Sherry glanced at her watch. “I know you probably want to get home to bed, so let’s cut to the chase. How has your month been? Any difficulties?”

Every single day had been difficult. Every day she second-guessed herself, comparing her memory of last year to her present actions. Sometimes it felt like she was digging a hole with dirt continually raining back down on her. How was she supposed to know if she’d made progress? This wasn’t
Groundhog Day
, where Bill Murray knew at the end of his day if he’d fixed things or not. She would have to wait until the end of the year to find out. It was something she didn’t like to dwell on.

“My relationship with Phil has been going well. This weekend was actually a big turning point for us last year.”

Sherry cocked her head and stirred her tea.

“He surprised me with a trip to a cottage in Lake Geneva, and one bad thing just seemed to happen after another. His car broke down, and we were stranded in the cold for hours. By the time we got to the cabin, we were both pretty crabby, and I said some things I probably shouldn’t have said. I was just so disappointed about the cabin. I mean, that’s Phil’s idea of romance, not mine. Initially, I thought maybe he was taking me to Chicago so we could see a play or musical. But no. He wouldn’t have thought of something like that.”

She paused, conscious of her resentful tone. She took a deep breath.

“I could tell Phil was really hurt. He’d tried to do something sweet for me, and I blew it. I apologized. He apologized. We decided to try to start the night over. He went out to get some firewood. I had this patient who I was really worried about—an eighteen-year-old kid with multiple stab wounds. He’s upstairs right now, and I know he’s going to be okay. But I didn’t know that then, so I called to check on him. Phil came back with the firewood when I was on the phone. He got pissed off when he realized I was talking to the hospital and accused me of never being able to separate myself from my job.

“We had another big argument. He told me that ever since I’d started in the ICU he felt like he was losing me, little by little. That I never shared stuff with him anymore. When I tried to explain that I didn’t share as much with him anymore because he overreacted like he had just done, he said, ‘I just want you to protect yourself. You get so involved with each of your patients, it’s like it was with your dad all over again. I can’t bear to see you like that. I’m not asking you to stop caring for your patients. I’m just asking you to distance yourself a little, get a little perspective . . .’ He reminded me how I had helped him keep his sanity when he had first started teaching and he’d brought home mountains of work with him and lain awake every night, fretting over what to do differently, how to reach one student, how to help remove another from a bad home environment.”

Olive paused. She wanted to stop now, but she couldn’t. But how could she admit to Sherry something she couldn’t even admit to herself? The words she’d suppressed in her memory of the very idea that
she
had given him. She’d been so furious with him, unable to see that his suggestions came from a loving place, instead fixated only on the belief that he couldn’t possibly understand because he had never witnessed death and he’d never experienced the loss that she experienced almost weekly, and it was cruel and insensitive of him to try to deprive her of that hard-won truth.
Maybe it’s not as easy for me to close my heart off,
she had said.
Maybe I’m not as good as you at cutting people out of my life just like that.
It was petty and mean, a sucker punch to the soft, vulnerable parts of Phil that he had revealed and entrusted to her over the years, and she didn’t need to elaborate for him to understand and the light in his eyes to flicker out.

“I threw it back in his face,” she summarized for Sherry. “Phil said he was going to ‘cool off’ and take a walk in the woods. I was so exhausted that I fell asleep before he came back. The next day we decided to cut our stay short and leave early.”

She twisted off the cap of her apple juice and took a swig. It was strange that Sherry hadn’t interrupted her, and that even now, at what could’ve presumably been the end of her story, she wasn’t volunteering her wisdom.

Sherry watched Olive with her shrewd, unblinking eyes. “So why did you break up?”

“I cheated on him,” Olive said in a small voice. “He wasn’t speaking to me the following week. I felt so alone and so uncertain. I was here at the hospital working, and I had a really rough night. Alex, a resident, was working, too. And he was there for me. He seemed to really understand me.” She turned the bottle cap over and over between her fingers. “The next day Phil called me. He said he knew we could work things out, that we’d just had a bad night. I knew I had to tell him about Alex. I thought he might be able to forgive me over time. But he changed his mind about us pretty quickly.”

She tried not to envision Phil working out on his Bowflex, a reflexive habit he had whenever he was worried or depressed. When he’d called to apologize, she had suggested they continue their conversation in person, that there was something important she needed to tell him. But she nearly lost her nerve when she walked into his apartment and found him seated on the enormous black-and-silver contraption, the veins bulging in his arms, the machine’s black rods bending as easily as wheat swaying in the wind. He stood up immediately when she entered, his face sweet and eager with forgiveness. In retrospect, that was what had hurt her the most: his sweet expression before he found out the awful truth.

“Well, aren’t you are a sight for sore eyes.” Phil squeezed her in a sweaty hug, Cashew dancing frantically around their ankles. She could feel Phil’s heart lub-dubbing under his cotton shirt, hardy and unafraid. She almost chickened out then.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she said. Her words were muffled by his chest.

He gently released her. “Me, too. I’m such an idiot for hassling you about your job. I’m really proud of everything you do. I just worry about you sometimes. But I know you’re your own person and you’ll figure out a way to handle it, even if it’s different from my way. Just know that I’m always here whenever you want to talk.” He took a long pull from his water bottle.

She couldn’t stand there letting his bittersweet apologies wash over her for one more minute. “Phil, do you think you could sit down? I need to—”

“Can I just change out of these sweaty clothes first? I thought maybe when we’re done talking we could go to the Lion’s Head Pub for a bite to eat.” He wiped the perspiration from his temple with the hem of his T-shirt, revealing the landscape of his abdomen.

Her resolve weakened. It would be so much less painful to keep her mouth shut and go out to dinner and act as if nothing had happened. But the guilt would consume her like a slow burn; she knew that. And Phil was the best person she knew, the biggest-hearted, the truest, the most honorable. If she couldn’t put her trust in him, well then, she didn’t know what she could believe in anymore. They required complete honesty from each other. They had both made hurtful mistakes before, but none as hurtful as this. But he would forgive her. She would find a way to make him understand and then regain his trust.

“Please sit down. I need to tell you something.” Beneath the thin mattress of the futon, she could feel the metal frame, as bony and sharp as cracked ribs. Cashew immediately bounded onto her lap, and she stroked his velvety ears.

“All right.” He draped a green towel around his neck and sat down.

She didn’t know how to get started. What could possibly be an appropriate prologue to soften such unbearable news? “I tried calling you for a week, but you wouldn’t return my calls. I thought we were through. That you didn’t love me anymore.”

“That I didn’t love you?” He blew out an exasperated sigh. “Ollie, by now, you should know how I operate. I needed some time alone to think about us. And when I did, I realized how stupid I’d been.” He grinned boyishly at her, dabbing his forehead with the towel.

She suddenly felt like shaking him. “But I didn’t know that! You can’t expect me to read your mind. I’m just trying to explain to you how I felt. Not as an excuse, but just so maybe you can understand where I was coming from and why I did it.”

His smirk vanished. “Olive,
what did you
do
?”

She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I slept with someone.” The statement pervaded the air like poison. Spoken aloud, it sounded too blunt, too appalling; she sought to qualify it somehow, but everything she could think of sounded like a cliché from a daytime talk show or soap opera. “It only happened once, and it will never happen again. I just felt so miserable and confused. I thought I had lost you. But I never meant to hurt you.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Phil’s body stiffen.

A hush fell over the room, punctuated only by their soft breathing and the musical jangle of the tags on Cashew’s collar as he restlessly shifted position. Seconds dragged into minutes, and still Phil didn’t speak. Finally, she gathered enough courage to face him. He was sitting ramrod straight, his hands pulling the ends of the towel around his neck as taut as a noose.

“Phil?”

“What do you expect me to say, Olive?” His tone was subdued. He stared straight ahead.

“I don’t know.” She paused, anxious for him to jump in and give her the opportunity to explain herself, but he remained silent. “Something.
Anything.
Please, Phil.”

He took a deep breath and released it slowly as though the act of exhaling pained him. “Do you love him?”