When Kerrigan had left, Sherry sank back more comfortably into the couch. She absentmindedly stroked one of the fringes of her shawl.
Olive had used up all her patience and soft tones with Mr. Hutchinson. She didn’t want to be nice anymore; she wanted to demand that Sherry state her purpose and then go. There was so much to think about, and anywhere other than her bed right now felt like an unbearable place to be. The only thing that was preventing her from losing her temper was the memory of Sherry’s well-timed snort yesterday. That and a tiny voice begging Olive to take notice: Sherry had not made this unexpected visit to her place last year.
“Did you enjoy the party yesterday?” Olive asked.
“I always do. Your mother’s guacamole was excellent. I was surprised to get an invitation. It’s been a while since Kathy’s thrown a party, hasn’t it?”
“It has.” For a moment, the death of her father and courtship of her mother floated between them. And because Sherry’s expression encouraged her to say more, Olive said, “Three years to be exact. Or rather, two years.” She flushed.
Sherry nodded regally, as if by granting her approval, she was bestowing a favor on Olive. “And are you having a nice new year so far?”
Her question caught Olive off guard. She was about to say, Yes, and you? but something stopped her. There was something about the way Sherry had said new. Most people rushed the words new and year together as though they were an inseparable expression, part of a phrase that had become almost meaningless with use. But Sherry pronounced the word as though she were asking a question. As in: Oh, is that sweater new? As in: But is this year really new? “It’s been kind of crazy,” Olive said at last. “I’m having a hard time adjusting.”
Sherry steepled her masculine fingers. Her intense brown eyes sought Olive’s in a way that made Olive feel as though Sherry were physically reaching out to her, not just reaching, but pulling. At that moment Olive fully appreciated something that she had always suspected: Sherry Witan was not an ordinary middle-aged woman. She was not simply bookish or socially awkward. She was alien. Olive had been only twelve years old when her mother introduced her to Sherry, whom she was instructed to call Ms. Witan. Four other women had come over to their house to discuss Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which had stuck in Olive’s head because of its funny-sounding title. She’d been quietly finishing her social studies homework in the kitchen when shouts erupted from the living room. Poking her head through the doorway, Olive had witnessed a white-faced Sherry towering over the other book club ladies. “None of you get it,” she had accused. “You don’t understand the sacrifice she made for him. Why did she even tell him the truth? For love? For nothing. Look where it got her.”
Olive saw the same intensity in Sherry’s face now. But instead of yelling, Sherry murmured, “I overheard you yesterday.”
“I know.” Sherry hadn’t exactly been Miss Subtle at the other end of the couch with her nose stuck in Barns across America. “With my aunt Laurel. I heard you”—she had been about to say snort but thought better of it—“laugh.”
Sherry shook her head. “That’s not what I’m referring to. I was outside the bathroom. You said, ‘I’m not crazy. I know I’ve lived this year before.’”
Olive felt her cheeks flush. At the very moment she had been wishing for a confidant, a nosy eavesdropper had been lurking outside the bathroom. She didn’t know what to make of this. Was Sherry questioning her sanity? Would she tell her mother? Or was it possible that Sherry was experiencing the same thing?
“I saw you looking at that wall of family photographs. I saw you studying that newspaper.” Sherry listed these facts off as if they were proof of a crime. She stared at Olive.
Olive didn’t break eye contact. “So what?” she asked, and sat perfectly still with her hands clasped in her lap as though she were posing for a portrait that Sherry was drawing.
“I’ve talked to only one other person about this before, so if I got it wrong, just forget it.” Sherry scooted forward until her knees were brushing the coffee table. She and Olive were now leaning toward one another, like friends with a secret.
“Please go on.”
“It’s not just a feeling, Olive. It’s real. You’ve already lived through 2011. I have, too, and I remember all 365 days of it. But here I am back at the beginning. Here we are, I should say.”
Olive nodded, not trusting her voice. The mixture of relief and vindication she’d been expecting to feel—to have someone else acknowledge this bizarre occurrence—did not come. Instead, to hear it spoken aloud—spoken aloud by someone like Sherry Witan, no less—made the whole thing seem like an elaborate hoax. She felt inexplicably defeated.
“I went to bed in December 2011 and woke up the next day in January 2011,” Olive mused aloud. She knew there was no taking it back now that she had spoken it in Sherry’s presence. She had chosen her side, or rather, her side had been chosen for her. The surreal side. Sherry Witan’s side.
“So I thought.” Sherry nodded again with her magisterial grace. She removed her fringed shawl and spread it across her lap like a blanket. Underneath, she was wearing a white blouse with lace detailing on the collar and sleeves.
“Are there other people? Do you know why this happened? What are we supposed to do?”
Sherry held up her hands as though to dam up the flood of questions. Her left hand was bare, Olive noticed. No wedding ring. She had heard from her mom that Sherry had been married something like three or four times. On her right hand was a thick-banded gold ring with a garnet the size of a grape.
“Slow down. I’ve got a lot to tell you, and I don’t want to leave anything out,” Sherry said. “I should start by telling you that this isn’t my first time.”
“You mean you’ve lived this year over more than once already?” Olive asked in disbelief. She saw the past year loop before her eyes, continuously, over and over again like the reel of a movie. She imagined 2011 was a trap. Perhaps, one by one, everyone would fall into it until the history of the world repeated and erased itself at the start and end of every year—always the same year, 2011. Or maybe it was just she and Sherry stuck here while everyone else marched forward.
Sherry held up her bare left hand again to silence Olive. “No, not 2011. This is my first time repeating it, same as you. What I meant was I’ve repeated other years in the past. My first was 1982. And then 1997. I had to repeat 2005 twice.”
“You had to live the same year three times?” Olive asked. She felt a little light-headed at the prospect. “Why did you have to do that one over again and not the others?”
“Calm down, calm down. You look like you’re going to faint. Why don’t I get us something to drink? Is it okay if I do that?”
Sherry looked fuzzy and pixilated as she walked to the kitchenette. Olive rested her head against her knees. Three times? How many additional years had Sherry lived total? Four years? This would be Sherry’s fifth repeat. Would Olive have the same fate?
“For heaven’s sake,” she heard Sherry say from the kitchen area. “You’ve only got beer and diet soda in here. How do you kids live? No milk? No orange juice?” Olive heard the wooden rattle of drawers and cupboards opening and closing. “Don’t you have any tea?” Sherry called.
“I don’t drink tea,” Olive called back. She had to lift her head momentarily from her knees to respond. “My roommate does, though. There might be some in the silverware drawer. You can make some for yourself, but I don’t want any.”
Sherry stood before her shortly holding two mugs. One of them was a novelty mug that read, You are dumb. The other was a global warming mug that had a map of the world drawn on it; when you poured a hot beverage in it, some of the land disappeared. Olive chose global warming. The bitter smell of green tea rose up from it. She watched as Florida vanished.
“Thanks. I don’t really like tea, though,” she said, and bent down to unti
e her tennis shoes.
Sherry resumed her spot on the couch. “You should try it. It will make you feel better.”
“I’ve tried tea before. It’s not really my thing,” Olive protested, but she took a small sip to show Sherry she was appreciative of her efforts. The green tea looked and smelled like what she imagined urine would look and smell like after someone had eaten large quantities of grass. Perhaps the tea even tasted like it, although she had no proof to back this up. “Mmm. Yeah, it’s still not my thing.” She pulled out the drawer of the coffee table and extracted two sandstone coasters. She set her mug down on one of them and laid the other within Sherry’s reach.
“See? You look like you’re feeling better already.”
“I’m eager to hear what you have to say about this—” She interrupted herself, not sure what to call it. Phenomenon? Time warp? Miracle? Curse? “This . . . this.” She kicked her tennis shoes under the coffee table.
“I knew you would be. So let’s see. Where to start? I’ve never done this before.” Sherry looked pleased with her role as storyteller. “I’ve met only one other person who’s repeated a year before, at least in the thirty years I’ve known about it. There could have been people in my childhood and adolescence who were experiencing the same thing, but I wasn’t aware of it. The one other person I met was my first husband’s boss, the district attorney. But he wasn’t very receptive to my conversation. It was my first time, in ’82, and I had just as many questions for him as you have now.”
“How did you know he was living the same year over?” Olive asked.
“My husband, Clyde, kept making comments about him at home. Gene McGregor was his name. I guess in meetings he would hint at the fact that he could predict the outcome of a trial, and was insistent on the fact that if they didn’t do A, B, and C, they would fail. In theory this doesn’t sound that strange for an arrogant lawyer, but Clyde and some of his coworkers suspected something else was at work. They began to wonder if Gene was getting outside information and, in effect, working with the defense. There was one particular case in March of that year that Clyde told me about. Gene was in a frenzy trying to convince his staff that the evidence wouldn’t hold in court and that they needed to come up with some other tactic. Clyde went out to a bar with Gene one night and Gene confessed that if he lost this case, he knew he would never find rest, and claimed he would be stuck in the ‘purgatory of this year all over again.’ After Clyde relayed this to me, clearly thinking that his boss had lost it, I decided to seek Gene out and confirm if my suspicions were accurate.
“It took a great deal of courage for me to go over to his house—I was only a little older than you at the time. Gene answered the door completely plastered. We had met briefly at the office Christmas party, but he couldn’t conceive why one of his employee’s young wives was visiting him at his home. I tried to talk to him about the big case he was working on, but he became really angry, saying that Clyde shouldn’t be sharing confidential issues with me. I tried to placate him, and he invited me inside for a drink, asked me if I was lonely because Clyde was working late. I realized I had better articulate myself more clearly, so I was very blunt with Gene. I asked him if he was reliving 1982.
“I could tell from his shocked expression that I had hit the nail on the head, but he didn’t want to admit it. He told me he would blow his head off if he had to live 1982 over again. I asked him if he thought failing to put an evil man behind bars had been the impetus for his repeated year, if it was the event he needed to correct before moving on, that that was my theory of how things worked. He laughed at me and told me I was delusional. I was barely out the door when he came out onto the front lawn and asked me what I supposed he should do to change the course of his year. I told him that I didn’t know but I thought winning the trial would be a good start, although it couldn’t hurt to focus on improving other aspects of his life as well.”
“So did he make it to 1983?” Olive asked.
“He did. But I’m not sure how long it took him to get there. I cornered him at the office Christmas party and asked him to contact me on New Year’s Day, but he didn’t. I was too afraid to go back to his house, so I called him at the office. He acted like he hardly remembered me, like it had been years since we’d talked, not just days. He wouldn’t tell me for sure, but I think it had been years for him.”
She turned to Olive, as if suddenly remembering her presence. “But that won’t happen to you. Gene was an anomaly. He was a pretty awful man, and you know what? They never won that trial.”
But Olive was still trying to wrap her head around the idea of the lawyer existing in some sort of alternate reality as the rest of the world, Sherry included, had sped past him. Years of his life condensed into mere minutes for everyone else. “But didn’t you just say you had to live 2005 over twice?” she asked.
“Don’t focus on that,” Sherry said. She tapped a spoon against her mug. The sound rang out like a chiming bell. “It will only make things worse. You have to focus on the big picture. The reason for the repeat year.”
“So what you’re saying is that the essential idea behind reliving this year is to correct something we did wrong last year?” Perhaps Olive hadn’t been far off the mark yesterday when she’d supposed that she’d done something seriously wrong last year to deserve this fate.
“That was my theory,” Sherry said. “But it’s not quite as simple as that. If every time someone made a mistake, they had to relive that year, we’d all be in the same boat. We’d all probably still be in the Stone Age because we wouldn’t be able to progress further than that. But as far as I can tell, there are only a few of us having these experiences.”
“Perhaps it’s some kind of major mistake we made that affects the outcome of the world?” Olive offered, feeling sheepish immediately after the question escaped her mouth.
Sherry’s thin, pink lips stretched into a wry smile. “That thought had crossed my mind, too. Delusions of grandeur? But I don’t think we’re here to assassinate any villains or warn anyone of meteors hurtling toward the earth. We’re not superheroes; we’re still us. Just with a little extra knowledge. And the things I changed—well, it’s still not obvious to me how to go about this year even though this will be my fifth go of it.”
“Really? What have you changed?”
“I set myself up for that one.” Sherry’s lips straightened into a stern line. “I want to help you through this, but you have to understand that this doesn’t make us instant bosom buddies.” She draped her silk shawl around her shoulders, and Olive thought she saw the return of the Sherry Witan she knew from parties: serious and aloof with an almost accusatory stare.
“If you could just give me a ballpark idea,” Olive pressed.
“I’m sure you’ve heard rumors about my illustrious track record.” Sherry gave her shoulders a slight shake as though awakening herself. “I’m probably the worst guide you could have through this. I obviously haven’t learned my lesson; I’ve had to do this so many times.”
“That means you’ve had a lot of experience,” Olive said gently. “I’m just happy to have someone to confide in.”
“So you haven’t tried to talk to anyone else about it?” Sherry asked. When Olive nodded, she continued, “That’s good. I made the mistake of trying to tell my second husband about it, and I ended up spending the whole year in therapy. Which was helpful, don’t get me wrong, but not really the issue at hand.”
“Yeah, I think my ex-boyfriend thinks I’m a little nuts, too. I was so disoriented when I woke up at his apartment on New Year’s Day. We hadn’t seen each other in months, and then all of a sudden, we’re back together.”
Sherry traced the mug’s rim with her fingers. She seemed to be waiting for Olive to expand on her situation. Olive looked down. Two large pockets were sewn along the bottom of her scrub top. The left one was starting to sag and detach from the weight of the instrum
ents she carried with her all day. A pocket-sized procedures and pharmaceutical guide, hemostats, bandages, ibuprofen (for her), the Motorola, pens. Her pocket would soon be hanging on by a thread.
How could Sherry assert her own desire for privacy in one breath and then give Olive such a look—a look that demanded Olive’s life story? It seemed an unfair expectation. She felt reluctant to admit any of the secrets that might have helped to land her here.
“We’d been dating for over three years and we broke up last February,” she finally said.
“Ah,” Sherry said. She set her cup of tea on the coaster.
“We had a big fight and then were on a kind of break, and I—” She couldn’t form the words. Unspoken, they tasted acidic on her tongue. The burning sensation spread to her sinuses, and without warning, she began to cry. It was wholly inappropriate. Sherry Witan was the last person on earth in front of whom she wanted to lose it. She grabbed for the tissue box on the end table, but it was empty. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why . . .”
“For heaven’s sake,” Sherry said, but her voice was kind, motherly. She handed Olive a handkerchief that smelled of men’s cologne. “You’re doing all right. You’re handling this quite well, actually. My first January like this, I spent in bed. I didn’t shower, I didn’t dress, I barely ate. By the end of the month, I was getting out of bed, but only to bring back books from the library. I read books on Buddhism, Hinduism, existentialism. I read Hawking, McTaggart, Kant, Leibniz, the ancient Greeks. I read H. G. Wells’s goddamn Time Machine. And none of it helped. If anything, it made things worse, because I became confused, paralyzed, too scared to try anything. I went back to bed for another month, and I didn’t snap out of it until my husband started talking about Gene McGregor.”
Olive felt humbled. A part of her had always secretly admired the complete abandon with which some people could break down and wallow in their misfortune. Whenever Kerrigan broke up with a boyfriend, she called in sick to work and camped out on the couch for several days watching the Soap Network and eating canned pineapple. But Olive liked to be clean and eat regular meals and keep busy. Moving forward as though nothing had happened was her preferred method of coping.
The Repeat Year Page 6