Olive’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.
“Don’t move your head around so much. Otherwise the braid will be crooked.” Kerrigan pressed her palms firmly against Olive’s temples.
Olive laughed. The braid would most likely turn out crooked no matter what, but she didn’t mind. It was strange thinking of Kerrigan as the girl in the Goo Goo Dolls T-shirt dyeing her hair in the dorm bathroom eight years ago. She hadn’t known it at the time, but Kerrigan had felt just as lonely and out of place as she had. They had become best friends overnight, in the effortless way of small children, trusting in the confidence of their instincts, never imagining that one could hurt or leave the other. How had she forgotten how essentially good Kerrigan was?
She wanted to hug her friend for the hair braiding, this spontaneous act of tenderness. She felt taken care of. So much of her time she spent tending to others. It was nice to have someone looking after her needs. It had been a long time since anyone saw to that. Probably not since Phil. She remembered his offer of pancakes and the light brush of his fingers against her bare abdomen. Come back to bed. Despite herself, she shivered.
“Did I get your ticklish spot?” Kerrigan’s fingers fluttered against the nape of her neck.
After the caffeine and therapeutic hair braiding, Olive felt almost human again. She parked in the staff parking near Dane County General’s emergency entrance and took the elevator to the second floor, ready to face Tina’s wrath and the bustle of the day shift. She craved the repetitive tasks of her job. Drawing a blood sample would restore normalcy to her world. Watching the steady green waves on a cardiac monitor might help her forget the agitation of her own heart.
Tina ambushed her with a chart before Olive had even locked up her backpack. She watched reproachfully as Olive struggled to squeeze the backpack into the narrow locker. Then they set off at a clip through the semicircular ward to one of the patient rooms.
“A new patient came in last night,” Tina called over her shoulder. Olive struggled to keep up with her. “Sarah Hutchinson, a nineteen-year-old UW student with bacterial meningitis. We’ve started her on vancomycin and meropenem. Her temperature and white count are a little high, but almost back to normal. There’s an ICP monitor to check for any brain swelling. Her father is in the waiting room. He’s very anxious, but I convinced him to get some rest. He’ll want you to call him back in here after rounds.”
They halted just outside the young woman’s room. Each of the patient rooms in the ICU had a floor-to-ceiling window so the nurses could keep an eye on their patients at all times; fishbowls, the rooms were called. Olive stared in disbelief at the girl’s familiar lanky figure beneath the pale blue cotton sheet. Sarah Hutchinson. A nineteen-year-old University of Wisconsin student. Majoring in dairy science to take over the family farm one day. An only child with a dead mother and an overprotective father. Olive listed these details off in her head as surely as if Tina had provided them.
She stepped inside the room and drew close to the girl’s bedside. Sarah Hutchinson’s hair was the color of sun-bleached prairie grass. A patch had bee
n shaved for the insertion of a thin plastic tube, the ICP monitor, into a bolt in her skull. Instinctively, Olive raised her hand to touch her own hair. She remembered how horrified she had been at first by the ICP monitor and its invasiveness, the way it wormed its way into the brain, which Olive had come to view as the last place of privacy in the human body. Tubes invaded throats, catheters probed bladders, IVs snaked their way into veins and arteries in hands, arms, and thighs, yet the brain felt sacred to her, which was why she had avoided neurology as a specialty.
But now she knew that Sarah, in her unconscious state, felt no pain from the ICP monitor’s presence. She also knew that the teenager would recover quickly and leave the hospital within a few days, with no signs of permanent brain damage. She could almost see the yellow balloons Sarah’s father had tied to the handlebars of the wheelchair in which he had delivered her from the hospital. Sarah Hutchinson felt like a cousin. Olive leaned close to her expressionless face; even her blond eyebrows and eyelashes looked colorless and shy.
Olive’s momentary paralysis prompted Tina to step into the room. “Hey,” Tina said gently, misinterpreting her stillness. She touched Olive’s elbow. “She’s going to be okay. She got here just in time.”
Olive turned around, but Tina was already heading to their next patient’s room.
“Mr. Paulson came in on New Year’s Eve from Green Glen Nursing Home. A seventy-nine-year-old diabetic suffering from pneumonia. It’s amazing he’s lived this long; I don’t know what they thought they’d accomplish bringing him here. It seemed just plain cruel to intubate him. We’re trying to wean him off the ventilator now. You know how that goes.” Tina closed the charts with a conclusive snap that seemed to dare Olive to ask her questions and detain her any longer.
“Thanks,” Olive said. She wanted to apologize for her tardiness and give Tina a valid excuse, but what could she say? I’m sorry, Tina, but I woke up in 2011, when I thought I would be waking up in 2012, so I confused my work schedule? Or I’ve already lived this year, and reliving it is just a little disorienting for me, so could you please just cut me some slack? But before she could construct any kind of apology, Tina left.
The Repeat Year Page 4