The Repeat Year

by Andrea Lochen

  “It’s going to be okay, sweetie,” Kerrigan said. “Why don’t you give him a call?”

  On the short drive to Dane County General, Olive tried to do just that, but Phil didn’t answer his phone. She left him a message: “Hi, honey. I’m headed to work now. I wish we were spending the night together instead.”

  Her mom beeped in as she was leaving the message. She hurriedly switched over. “Hi, Mom. I don’t have a ton of time to talk right now. I’m driving to work. How are you doing?”

  “I’m good. Look, I know you’re busy, but I thought maybe if you have a free moment tonight, I could stop by for a late dinner and bring some subs, or we could go to the cafeteria. I’m not picky.”

  The thought of having her mom there as emotional support was appealing, but then she would probably have to share the details of last weekend and listen to stories about how wonderful Harry was. “I appreciate the offer, but I just don’t think I’ll have time tonight. Friday nights are always hectic. Maybe sometime next week?”

  The ICU was in its usual tumultuous, transitional period when she arrived. Gloria was shepherding a middle-aged couple into the Family Room, and Olive knew that their loved one had probably just died, and they were now about to learn this unbearable truth—a pain with which Olive was all too familiar. An unusual number of specialists milled around the ICU; she recognized Dr. Nichols from cardiology and Dr. Dumont-Gray from nephrology. The deceased patient had probably been an organ donor. Now, in this critical window, it was important to secure the family’s permission to begin the organ procurement process.

  Tina was at the nurses’ station talking to Toya. They were both eating brownies from a white bakery box. Alex was thankfully nowhere to be seen. Olive’s plan was to stay as far away from him as possible.

  “Brownie?” Tina offered. “Gloria brought them as a birthday treat.”

  “Maybe later. I think I’d better check in first.”

  “You’re taking over for Jennifer tonight,” Toya said.

  Olive found Jennifer, the new mom, typing rapidly at one of the computer stations outside a fishbowl room. She was wearing pale pink scrubs. Jennifer always wore pastel-colored scrubs; during the later months of her pregnancy she’d looked like an Easter egg. She swiveled on her stool to face Olive.

  “You’re not going to like this.” She tapped a finger against the spiky green lines on the computer monitor. “You’ll have only one patient tonight because she’s circling the drain. Mrs. Gardner was brought in this morning. End-stage renal disease, congestive heart failure, and emphysema. I don’t expect she’ll make it through the night.”

  Betty Gardner. Olive pictured the old woman’s frail, hunched body, her translucent skin and the web of purple veins beneath. She could almost smell the cloying scent of rose talcum powder and urine. She wasn’t the first patient under Olive’s care who had died—there had been five others before her last year—yet she was the first patient who had died on Olive’s watch. Her family was the first that Olive had comforted, or rather had tried to comfort—Mr. Gardner had advanced Alzheimer’s. Alex had requested she be there when he broke the news.

  “Her daughter’s in the waiting room. At the first sign of a downturn, she wants to know so she can make sure her dad’s here for the end.” Jennifer slid off her stool. “Ask Tina if you have any questions. The new resident’s on tonight, and he can’t find his ass with both hands.”

  She was referring to Alex. Olive smiled tightly and accepted Mrs. Gardner’s chart.

  She took the vacated seat. Behind the glass lay the old woman’s motionless body. The chart and the ill patient it described felt damning. She had forgotten about Betty Gardner in the context of this night; she had thought only of her own tawdry, trivial affairs. Now she was starting to understand the connection between these two events. How had she not seen it before? Her raw sense of culpability and failure had blinded her.

  The chart offered no answers, no loopholes; it read like a death sentence.

  “Mrs. Gardner, I’m your nurse, Olive. You’re in good hands tonight.”

  Olive squeezed the old woman’s gray nail beds. She pressed down on her breastbone. No response. She felt like she was handling a corpse, a woman who had literally been raised from the dead. She had been the one to wash Mrs. Gardner’s body last year and prepare it for the morgue. She knew she would be repeating the procedure again tonight. The thought made her light-headed. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

  What was the point of this? To make these poor people suffer all over again? If there was nothing she could do for her patients anyway, then why taunt her with the possibility? The cosmos had a cruel sense of humor.

  “Olive.”

  She leaped up at the sound of Alex’s voice. It was almost as if she had summoned him through her thoughts. He was like some kind of wicked reply: the universe wasn’t through with her yet. His light brown hair and beard were shaved close and looked fuzzy to the touch. He wore his wrinkled white coat over pale blue scrubs that matched his eyes. His presence filled the room. Her body felt extremely conscious of his as he walked to Mrs. Gardner’s bedside.

  “I’m glad you’re on tonight,” he said. Both last year and this year, he had made much of their both being “new.” Like Olive, he had initially been intimidated by Tina and some of the other nurses. “Is this your first time losing a patient?”

  He had asked her this last year. Then the question had seemed premature to her; she hadn’t picked up on the inevitability that all the other staff sensed when a patient was about to pass.

  “It feels like it,” she said.

  “I know what you mean. It never gets any easier, does it?” As he pulled the loop of his stethoscope from his lab coat pocket, his arm brushed softly against hers. She wondered if his body had a recollection of hers, if somehow it had secretly retained memories separate from his mind.

  She held the clipboard against her breasts like a shield. “Only if you want it to.”

  Alex looked up at her with startled eyes. Not the answer he’d been expecting.

  It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness—it was scarred and worn beyond repair.

  Alex warmed the bell of his stethoscope with his breath before touching Mrs. Gardner’s skin with it. “I lost my first patient in medical school,” he started, “my very first day of my internal medicine rotation. A middle-aged man came in complaining of a horrible headache. He begged me for some pain medication, Tylenol, anything. I left the room to check with a resident. When I came back in, he was unconscious on the floor. He died within minutes. A subarachnoid hemorrhage.”

  Olive had heard this story before. It was obviously one that had left a deep impression on Alex; it had stuck with her as well. “That’s awful,” she murmured.

  “The resident had never seen anything like that before, either, so he tried to make a joke out of it. Called me Dr. Death. They called the man’s wife at work to ask her to come to the hospital. I remember this because it was so strange—she worked at a travel agency that planned big-game hunting safaris. They made me stay in the room to learn how to break the news to a family member. She didn’t believe that he was dead until we showed her.”

  He smoothed the white hair off Mrs. Gardner’s forehead. “You should contact her family now,” he sai
d. He prescribed a dosage of morphine, squeezed Olive’s shoulder, and left the room.

  Olive administered the morphine, watched the labored rise and fall of the old woman’s chest a few moments longer, and then left the room, too. She wished she could leave the ICU, the hospital even. She didn’t feel strong enough to handle this again. The woman she was now seemed a lot weaker than the woman she had been.

  It was nine twenty-five. Mrs. Gardner’s daughter was watching a rerun of Friends in the otherwise empty waiting room. She was somewhere in her fifties or sixties, a woman who had probably once been very handsome, but time and misfortune had aged her severely. She was still bundled in her winter jacket and a pink scarf, despite the fact that it was unusually warm in the waiting room.

  She stood up when Olive entered the room. “Anne Delaney. How’s my mother?”

  “She’s hanging on, but we don’t know for how much longer. Dr. Carpenter suggested you contact any family you wish to have with you.”

  “I should call Michelle to bring my dad.” Anne said this without any conviction. She looked at Olive for affirmation.

  Last year, Olive hadn’t known who Michelle was. She had thought she was a sister, a daughter, a partner maybe. Now she knew she was the home health aide. She had a sudden image of Mr. Gardner, a giant of a man, strangely dignified in his plaid pajamas. With his advanced Alzheimer’s, he hadn’t understood the reason for the late-night ICU visit, hadn’t even recognized his wife’s name. He’d become agitated and mean. Olive suspected he had brought more sorrow than comfort to his grieving daughter, but she didn’t feel she had the right to instruct Anne to do otherwise.

  “That’s your decision, Anne. I know it’s a difficult one.” Olive rubbed Anne’s upper arm, but she didn’t know if the woman could feel it through her heavy jacket.

  “It will be after ten o’clock by the time they get here. He’s normally in bed by eight. And I just don’t know”—here her voice broke as she stifled a sob—“if he’ll even remember.” She covered her face with the tail of her pink scarf like a child. “If you had loved someone for sixty-one years but couldn’t remember that now, would you still want to be there at the end?”

  In nursing school, they had taught her how to deflect personal questions, as well as moral or value judgments. The trick was to turn it around on the person with a question about them. What do you think about that? How does that make you feel? What religion do you practice? It didn’t fool the persistent patients, and Olive knew Anne deserved better than that.

  “Yes, I would. But it would be hard. It will be hard.”

  “Thank you.” Anne unwound her scarf and removed her jacket. “I think that’s the right decision. I owe it to my parents.”

  “Would you like to see your mother before they arrive?”

  “Yes, please. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve made my call.”

  She had been given the chance to avert something of a disaster, and she hadn’t gone through with it. The memory of Mr. Gardner, Anne, Michelle, Alex, and herself all locked together in that room distressed her. It would’ve been so easy to say, “No. Don’t worry him. You can tell him tomorrow in the familiarity of his own home. He can say good-bye to her at the funeral.” She knew nothing good could come of this. So why had she agreed with Anne?

  Because it was Anne’s decision to make, not hers. And Anne had seemed to want some reassurance that she was doing the right thing. While Olive didn’t know if it was the right decision, the Gardners weren’t her parents. Their story was not hers to revise. She seemed to be there only to bear witness.

  She took Betty Gardner’s vitals and then returned to her post at the computer station outside the room. What had at first seemed like a new road filled with so much possibility now felt like a well-worn path she had already trod and couldn’t break out of. Anne went into her mother’s room, held her hand, and talked to her. Only moments later, she left. Olive sat sentinel on the stool for what felt like hours. She had no other patients to attend to, so she had no reason to leave.

  Nothing seemed to be in her power to change. She couldn’t save Mrs. Gardner’s life. She couldn’t even protect the woman’s daughter from unnecessary heartache. She hadn’t fixed her problems with Phil.

  A change in the heart monitor’s steady beeping rhythm brought Olive back from her thoughts. She hurried to Mrs. Gardner’s bedside. After a quick survey of the machines, she discovered that the pulse oximeter was the culprit. Mrs. Gardner’s oxygen saturation levels were dangerously low. Olive turned up the ventilator to one hundred percent oxygen. The old woman’s chest rose with each whoosh of forced oxygen, but her skin remained bluish and clammy, and her saturation levels didn’t rise. Feeling as if she were caught in a dream she’d had before, Olive removed the oxygen bag from the wall and began ventilating Mrs. Gardner herself, with quick, measured pumps. “I need help in here!” she called.

  Tina was immediately by her side. She whipped off her stethoscope and listened to the old woman’s chest. She suctioned her lungs and listened again. “I can’t hear any airflow in there. Listen, Watson, there’s no hope for her anymore. All we can do now is make sure she’s not suffering.” Tina injected another dose of morphine into the IV.

  She had known what was going to happen all along; she just wasn’t ready to accept it. Tonight’s events had unfolded as swiftly and relentlessly as they had last year, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing she could do about it. She stared down at Betty’s face as she forced the air into her uncooperative lungs. Her forehead was high and angular, her long nose beaky, her blue lips drooped downward.

  Olive’s hand was cramping up from her rhythmic squeezing of the oxygen bag. She turned to see Alex enter the room.

  He reached across the bed and placed his hand over Olive’s, which was still compressing the bag. “You’ve done all that you can. She’s gone. It’s time to stop now.”

  Olive gave the bag one last squeeze and then slowly removed the plastic mask. Last year, she hadn’t been able to peel her eyes from the cardiac monitor’s dips and dives, anticipating that one final flat line, the moment when it was all over. Now she continued to watch Betty.

  “Twenty-two seventeen,” Tina announced as the old woman’s body gave its last weary shudder.

  Olive wanted to flee. She didn’t want to participate in what happened next. But Alex was inadvertently blocking the door.

  “I understand the family is in the waiting room and that you’ve established a rapport with them,” he said. “Would you please bring them to the Family Room?”

  Mr. Gardner, plaid pajamas and all, was sitting awkwardly next to his daughter. He didn’t seem to fit in the chair. It took both Anne and Michelle to raise him to a standing position. He shuffled along well enough on his own, with only his daughter’s hand gently placed on his elbow.

  The Family Room was painted a sunny yellow, but that hardly disguised its purpose. Scratchy gray couches lined the walls. End tables in between were stocked with tissue boxes and pamphlets. Only one picture hung on the wall—a framed photograph of a rainbow arcing over a rural landscape.

  Alex introduced himself. “I have some very sad news. We did everything we could to revive Betty, but she died a short while ago.” He launched into a brief explanation of how her body had shut down and the measures they had taken.

  It was strange to watch the three figures on the couch. Anne, already resigned to her mother’s death, was stoically watching her father’s face. Mr. Gardner was scowling down at his hands in his lap. Only Michelle, the paid help, reacted in a typical way. She gulped and wrung her hands and reached for a tissue to dab her eyes. “Poor Betty.”

  “Dad, did you hear what the doctor said?”

  Mr. Gardner glared at his daughter.

  “Mom was very sick. She passed away. She’s gone now.”

  Mr. Gardner didn’t talk, but he seemed to be listening to Anne.
His eyes didn’t leave her face.

  “Are you okay, Dad? How are you feeling?” She patted his knee.

  “Don’t touch me! You’re not going to lock me up in a goddamn hospital. I want to go home!”

  “It’s okay, Dad. It’s me, Anne. Your daughter. We’ll go home in just a little bit. We’re here at the hospital because of Mom. Do you remember your wife, Betty? She just died. It’s very, very sad. We’re all very sad.”

  Mr. Gardner tried to stand up. He hoisted himself up partway, and then fell back down onto the seat.

  “Would it help if he saw her body?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Anne and Olive both said in unison.

  “It will just make him more agitated. He’s not usually like this. He’s not good in unfamiliar places,” Anne explained. “I thought I would try, but I guess I’ll have to wait until he’s more lucid—”

  Mr. Gardner was trying to stand up again, and this time, Michelle assisted him.

  “Get off me!” he shouted. “I don’t know you! I want to go home.”

  “I’m going to take you home, Walt,” Michelle said.

  “If there’s anything further I can do to help, please let me know,” Alex said to Anne.

  Anne looked from Alex to Olive with pleading eyes. “He loved her so much. He put in a Japanese garden in their backyard because she always wanted to see Japan but was too afraid to fly. He’s going to ask for her in the morning. And the next morning. And the next. I don’t think he’s ever going to realize what he lost.”

  Because Olive had lost a parent before and knew there was nothing anyone could really say to lessen that pain, she hugged Anne. The older woman seemed surprised at first, but then she embraced Olive the way Olive suspected she wished her father would embrace her.

  What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days. Mr. and Mrs. Gardner had been robbed of that.