The Repeat Year

by Andrea Lochen

  Nathan was Claire’s husband of two years. Olive had stood up in their wedding.

  Claire plucked her coat and purse from the pile. “He’s good; thanks for asking.” Her cheery tone seemed forced.

  “Is everything all right?” Olive walked with Claire down the hallway. They stopped at the entrance to the living room.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine, it’s just hard sometimes.” Claire fiddled with the zipper pull of her purse before meeting Olive’s eyes. “I’m sure it’s the same way for you and Phil sometimes, too. Being with someone who isn’t in the medical profession and doesn’t quite understand.”

  Olive nodded. She couldn’t see Phil from where they were standing, but she could hear his distinctive voice among the other guests.

  “Nathan doesn’t understand my crazy hours or why I come home depressed sometimes,” Claire continued. “And now he wants to start having kids, and I’m not ready for that professionally or emotionally.” She shielded her eyes with her palm. “You know me: I love babies. That’s why I chose to work in the neonatal unit. Those babies are so beautiful, but once you start to see everything that can go wrong . . .”

  Olive hugged her friend. “I’m sorry, Claire.”

  “It’s fine. We’re fine. Please do come visit, though. It would be nice to have another nurse to commiserate with.”

  It was after midnight, and the other party guests were still going strong. Somebody had replaced the Killers with rap music and moved the coffee table up against the wall to make room for dancing. Alistair and Maggie pulled her into the mix. Brian made her another cosmo. The bass was so loud she could feel it in her spine. She shook out her hair and raised her arms above her head and felt utterly, recklessly, frighteningly out of control.

  Chapter 19

  Olive spent the next three days planning what to say. In the shower, she crafted soliloquies. When things were slow in the ICU, she drafted notes in her head. Dear Phil, You are the most important person in the world to me, and I never intended to hurt you. Or: I have never regretted a mistake more. You are the only person I want to be with. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Stale, tired-out sayings seemed to be the only words left to speak the truth.

  She tried composing a letter to him on her laptop but found she couldn’t stand being indoors for one minute longer. Full-on winter hadn’t even arrived yet, and already she had cabin fever. She zipped herself into her fleece jacket, grabbed her laptop, and headed for the backyard. After tying Cashew out on his rope, she settled herself cross-legged on the sweetheart bench with the laptop balanced on her knees.

  Dear Phil, she typed. The cursor waited patiently for her to continue.

  As I write this, you’re at school. It’s 1:23, so let’s see, that puts you in seventh period. That’s your favorite class, isn’t it? The one with some of your golf boys in it? I can’t remember what you said you’re doing this week, but I bet it’s something fun. Well, maybe not “fun” by most people’s definition, but I bet you’re trying your hardest to make it interesting and engaging for your students.

  I know I’ve told you this before, and you don’t believe me, but you would’ve hated me as a student. Physics was my least favorite class my senior year of high school. I was one of those students about whom you’re always saying, “I just don’t get how someone so bright can be so uninterested in the way the world works.” But I do. Light, color, sound, electricity, the whole shebang. They’re beautiful and amazing, but they can also be explained by some mathematical equation and replicated and expected to behave the same way time and time again. I know that’s probably what you like about them. When you pass out prisms in your class for lab work, you can count on your students to see ROY G. BIV, in that exact order, right? Not some totally new pattern or color. Class period after class period, year after year. But I guess that’s why the way people work has always been more interesting to me. We’re not always predictable or explainable. You can put us in the same situation ten times, and we might react differently every time.

  I don’t know what this repeat year is exactly. If it’s the world’s way of having a bit of fun with me: “See how predictable and explainable I am now, Olive! Take that!” Or if it’s an invisible part of nature that’s been going on for as long as evolution and has been affecting many people over the centuries, or if it’s some sort of divine intervention intended just for me and a few select others. I don’t know what to make of it, and I don’t think your laws of physics would help much to explain it, either. But maybe the Mayans were right. Maybe if we started thinking of time as cyclical instead of linear, people and the world would make much more sense.

  The laptop fan whirred gently, heating her lap. She tucked her cold fingers underneath it briefly to warm them. Cashew had found a stick twice his length and was gnawing on it contentedly in the middle of the tiny yard.

  For the sake of giving my repeat year some context, let’s call it an experiment. The first time the experiment was performed, combustion, so to speak, occurred. We fought. I lashed out. You retreated into yourself. I had sex with someone else. Everything turned to ash, and we couldn’t get it back to its original form. But we had another opportunity to do the experiment, and we were so much more successful this time. And maybe one time isn’t enough to convince you this is the way it’s meant to be, because you’ve got that other time still fresh in your mind, but I can promise you that I could be sent back to live this year a hundred times, and I would always choose you. I would always. Choose. You.

  She reread the letter through tear-blurred eyes. It was gibberish, she realized, shrouded in analogy. The only line he would understand would be “I had sex with someone else.” She tried to close the letter, but a gray box opened up. Do you want to save changes to Document1? it inquired. She clicked no. The box, and the letter behind it, vanished. What good was saving changes to a stupid document? Where was the gray box that allowed her to save the changes in her life to make those permanent?

  Back to being between a rock and a hard place: the ultimatum she’d given herself a long time ago, and the ultimatum Kerrigan had recently implied. It’s November, and time’s a-wasting . . .

  There had to be some way she could convince Phil first of her repeat year before easing him into other, less pleasant areas of revelation. Sports scores? Spot-on weather forecasts? A prediction of a major national or global event? But she knew that Phil’s rational mind would require something truly spectacular—or horrifying—to convince him of the truth. It seemed that people were always willing to believe the worst.

  The next day, Olive came home from work early in the morning. Phil’s alarm clock was just about to go off, so she slipped carefully into bed, not wanting to rob him of his last minutes of sleep. He lay with his left arm across her side of the bed, as if he had been reaching out for her. She gently moved his arm away and studied his sleeping face. Beneath his closed eyelids, his eyes fluttered back and forth quickly, almost as if he were reading a book. He was having a dream. A tiny furrow of consternation creased the skin between his eyebrows. A bad dream.

  She propped herself up on her elbow and stretched her other arm over him to turn off his alarm clock before it could start its obnoxious beeping. She rubbed his back and kissed his lips. “Time to wake up, honey.”

  He opened his eyes and seemed disoriented for a few seconds. Then he smiled and kissed her back. “Good morning, Ollie.” He folded the comforter down. “How was your night?”

  “Long.” She sighed and curled her body against his. They lay like that for several contented minutes, before Phil glanced at the clock and announced he really needed to get in the shower if he wanted to make it to school on time.

  He kissed her forehead and tucked the comforter around her. “Sweet dreams.”

  It took her a long time to fall asleep. She heard the shower running and then cupboard doors opening and closing and finally the front door a
s it clicked behind Phil. The silence was oppressive after he left; the truth sat on her chest like a sack of flour. She tried to think of something else. She thought of her recent patient, a thirty-two-year-old woman in a coma after a suicide attempt. She tried to think of nothing, and Kerrigan’s angry face rose unbidden in her mind. She imagined Lake Mendota right before sunset, ducks gliding across the glassy surface. Her last thought before she fell asleep was Phil telling her about the moment he knew he wanted to marry her. You were laughing and trying to toss the bread far to the little ones who couldn’t get up close to the pier. You’re always looking out for others. Even the timid ducks. You’re so loving. So kind.

  She woke up abruptly, heart pounding, not sure why. Everything was quiet. There were no garbage trucks, no children playing in the cul-de-sac. Her T-shirt clung to her sweaty skin. The alarm clock read two fifty-five. She was still tired, so she tried to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t. Something felt off.

  She hurried to the kitchen to get a pot of coffee brewing. She would definitely need it today. She froze when she reached the living room. Phil sat at the end of the couch. The TV was off, and he wasn’t reading. He was simply staring off into space.

  “What are you doing home so early?” she asked. Wright High School let out at two thirty, but Phil was always staying after for golf practice or tournaments, physics tutoring, or meetings. He normally got home around five or five thirty. She wondered if it had been a rough day and he’d needed to get out of there. Or maybe he’d been feeling sick? But he’d seemed fine earlier.

  He didn’t answer, and he didn’t look up, either. Had something happened to one of his students? A car accident, a drug overdose? Something was very wrong. He sat totally still with his hands on the knees of his khaki pants. He raised his eyes to meet hers, and suddenly, she understood that he knew. She didn’t know how. She didn’t know how much. But he knew.

  There was a lag time between her brain’s understanding and her body’s reaction. She stood before him in her T-shirt and yoga pants, hair askew, eyes still blurry from sleep. She had to repress a mightily inappropriate yawn. She had imagined how this moment would unfold so many times, but now that it was finally here, she could feel nothing but sharp, cold relief. It felt like the morning of a major surgery. After months of dread, after all the sleepless nights, it was finally about to be over soon. She was going under.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. The sweaty T-shirt against her stomach felt chilly.

  “Judging by the expression on your face, you already know.” He rubbed his temples. “You look like a deer in headlights.”

  “You surprised me. I wasn’t expecting you’d be home.”

  This was the wrong thing to say. He arched his eyebrow. “Were you expecting someone?”

  “No. You just usually don’t get home until five. Did something happen at school?” She felt odd standing, the coffee table between them, but was too anxious to sit down.

  “Yes. Something happened at school. I got an e-mail from Kerrigan.”

  It shouldn’t have surprised her—there was no other explanation, really—but the realization that Kerrigan had betrayed her stung. They had been best friends for more than eight years. What had she done to make Kerrigan want to hurt her so badly? How could she? How could she? Playing the part of the good Samaritan, confessing the truth to Phil, a truth he couldn’t possibly understand without all the facts, and somehow keeping her head held high the whole time as though she herself weren’t sleeping with another woman’s husband. And in an e-mail, no less!

  She imagined him on his off period, eating a turkey sandwich and checking his e-mail. What had the e-mail said? What had his face looked like when he read Kerrigan’s accusations? And then for him to have to keep his cool and teach two more classes before storming home to confront her. Oh, Phil. Her heart was breaking for him. If only she weren’t the cause of his pain.

  “About what?” she managed to choke out.

  Phil shook his head. “This is more awful for me than it is for you. Please stop pretending you don’t know what’s going on here. Tell me the truth: Was Kerrigan lying or are you lying?”

  She collapsed into one of the papasan chairs near the fireplace. She tried to remember the soliloquies she had rehearsed, the letter she had written. Where were the words she needed to answer him? To make him understand it was all just a mistake, and it was really him that she wanted?

  “Answer me, Olive. I can’t bear this anymore.” His hands were clasped in a pleading gesture, and his eyes were filled with pain. “Are you cheating on me?”

  “No,” she answered, and wished desperately that this were the whole truth, that there were nothing more she needed to explain. That this were a second chance with no strings attached. She couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Last year—in February—we had a fight, and I thought everything was over between us. I was distraught. You’re my whole world, Phil, and the thought of losing you was unbearable. I had to work that night, and I lost a patient. I know it doesn’t make sense, and I’m not trying to justify my actions, but I felt so low—about our relationship, about my patient—that I sought comfort from one of my coworkers. But it only happened once. And I’ve regretted it every single day since.”

  Phil squeezed his eyes shut, as if this information were a harsh, blinding light he could block out. He rubbed his forehead with one hand and clutched his knee with the other.

  Olive hugged herself. She felt like she was trapped in last February—the first time she had broken the news to him and he had ended things. His anguished expression was the same, the rigid shoulders, the growing distance in his voice. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t slept with Alex this year. It didn’t matter that she had shunned him and instead devoted all her time and energy to strengthening her relationship with Phil. It was all so unfair, yet the word seemed too small and whiny to fully describe the shitstorm of false hopes and battered expectations that were whirling around her now. She could be given an infinity of repeats, and this mistake would still haunt her, would still ruin her happiness.

  “What happened last February?” Phil asked suddenly.

  She looked up at him, but his eyes were cast away. “What do you mean?”

  “What did we fight about?”

  She paused, uncertain how to proceed. “Phil, there’s something I need to tell you.” She moved to the opposite end of the couch from him. He refused to look at her. “I should have told you this in January, but I didn’t know how.”

  “Oh boy. Two big surprises today.” His sarcasm was scathing.

  “This February you surprised me with the trip to Lake Geneva, and we had a wonderful time. You proposed to me, and I turned you down, not because I don’t love you, but because I wasn’t ready yet. There were still some things we needed to get sorted out.”

  “Like you cheating on me.”

  She tried to ignore him. “Last February, you also surprised me with a trip to Lake Geneva, but things didn’t go as well for us.” Phil looked like he was going to protest, but she held up her hand and continued. “Your car broke down on the way there—the fuel pump. When we finally got to the cabin, we were cold and tired. I was worried about a patient, so I called in to check on his condition. You got really irritated with me for never being able to detach myself from my work—not even on a romantic weekend. You were so upset with me, that you didn’t even propose and we left early.”

  Phil rolled his eyes. “What is the point of this?”

  She inched closer to him on the couch. She wanted so badly to take his hands in hers. She wanted to pin him down until he believed her. “That I’ve already lived this year through once. After that weekend the first time, I made a huge mistake. I slept with my coworker, and I totally ruined things for us. But then New Year’s happened. I woke up in the same year—2011—and I could see that I’d been given a second chance to make things right
between us. So we went on the trip again, and you proposed this time. And I didn’t cheat. My coworker has no memory of us being together because to him and almost everyone else that first 2011 doesn’t exist. And you and I have been so happy together this year, Phil, building a life together. Haven’t we been happy?”

  She laid her hand on his knee, and he flinched away.

  “Don’t you think that one lie was enough?” he asked. “Do you think inventing a whole slew of lies is going to make this better?” He stood up from the couch.

  Exasperation seized her. Why did he have to be so damn hard to convince? Why couldn’t he just take a leap of faith for once in his entire life and believe in her?

  “I’m not lying! Ask me anything. I’ll prove it to you. What do you want to know? The weather? We’re going to have record-breaking highs in early December. In the fifties.”

  “Stop. Just stop. This is absurd. I had to find out you’re cheating on me from an e-mail your roommate sent, and now you’re hiding behind some kind of magical thinking.” He grabbed his jacket off the back of a kitchen chair and slipped it on.

  Olive stood up, alarmed. She was losing him! “I know it sounds crazy. I didn’t believe it at first, either. But if you’d only let me explain—”

  “There’s only one thing I’m interested in hearing you explain, Olive: How could you? If you supposedly love me so much, how could you have cheated on me? How could you do that to me and even entertain my proposal? How could you let us buy a condo together? How could you sit back and let me make such a fool of myself? Do you not have any respect for me?”

  She leaned on the couch for support and closed her eyes. “I tried to do things differently. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t take it back—”

  “I need to get out of here.” He pushed past her on his way to the door, as thoughtlessly as if she were a stranger in a crowd he was trying to escape.