The Repeat Year Read online

  “What?” she called back to him, but he had already closed the apartment door. The puzzle of last night’s events was becoming more and more complex. Had Phil stopped by the ICU to visit her, or had their paths crossed somewhere else? She was tired—and a little ashamed—of trying to give shape and substance to the black hole in her memory of last night. She would ask Phil the specifics sometime soon, but right now, she didn’t want to give him any more reason to be concerned about her. Frankly, she was concerned about herself. Blacking out and sleeping with her ex? Definitely not a very good way to start the new year.

  She heard Phil’s door open and shut again, and he was soon at her side.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind driving me?” she asked. “I mean, do you have the time? Because I could call a taxi or something.”

  Phil laughed. “Um, yeah, I have the time.”

  His ancient tan Mercedes-Benz was parked in one of the farthest spots in the parking lot. It was a 1987 diesel, a car he had told Olive he bought back in high school when driving a Mercedes, no matter how old, was considered cool. But more than nine years later, the thing still wouldn’t die. Phil was too reasonable to trade the Mercedes in for a newer car when it was still running all right. Prudence was his religion.

  He pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Regent Street. Debris from last night’s parties littered the lawns and sidewalks. Beer bottles, empty kegs, old couches with rips like wounds revealing their stuffing. Undergrads, bed-headed and hungover, slunk down the sidewalks, trying to look nonchalant in their walk of shame.

  “Why are you turning here? You need to stay on Park to get on the Beltline.”

  “Why would I want to take the Beltline?” He made another turn onto Orchard this time, and Olive recognized every house they passed. They were relics, taken over and run down by college kids and landlords who were tired of putting in the effort. The three-story white colonial that had been converted into a law office. The green-and-maroon Victorian with the gingerbread lattice. The mossy brick house with the lawn full of political signs. The house with the missing balcony that had smashed to the ground, injuring five college students a couple of years ago.

  Olive stared at Phil in disbelief as the car slowed to a stop. “Talk about a trip down memory lane,” she said softly. She turned her head to look out the window. They were parked in front of her old house, a two-story clapboard painted Pepto-Bismol pink. She and her old roommate Kerrigan Morland had lived in the upstairs flat for seven years. She identified her old bedroom window. A plant was sitting there. The familiar touch made her smile, remembering the African violet she had kept in the window when she lived there. It had been the plant she’d kept alive the longest. In November, it had finally crossed over.

  “So, here we are,” Phil said.

  “Here we are,” Olive repeated. “Just as glorious and gaudy as I remembered.” Phil was waiting for her. Was he waiting for her to get out of the car? A prickly shiver buzzed across the back of her neck. Something was not quite right here. The house, the street, the entire morning. She felt as though Phil were following a script while she was simply saying whatever it took to get herself offstage and back safely into the wings.

  “Do you want me to come up?” he asked.

  “You know that I don’t live here anymore,” she said, “and I haven’t lived here in almost a year. Please just take me home. I’m tired. I’m tired of this. Please, Phil.” She waited for his sigh of resignation. She waited for him to put the car in drive and take her back to her condo on the east side. “Phil?” She suspected he was putting together his own monologue. She could tell by the way he was flexing his lips, pursing and then relaxing them.

  “You’re scaring me, Olive,” he said so softly that she had to lean in to hear the words that followed. “You don’t remember how you got to my place last night? Well, I do, and I’ll tell you every detail if it will wake you up out of this . . . state that you’re in.

  “Kerrigan wanted to have a party for New Year’s Eve, and you didn’t. She told you she’d keep it small, and you agreed to it. We were there, Kristin and Brian were there, Jeff was there, Robin and Lisa, Ciara, Steve. You made the sangria, Kerrigan made cupcakes with little plastic babies on top. More people kept coming, and it started to get so loud and crowded, that you said you wanted to go to my place.

  “We drove over to my place around eleven o’clock. We ordered a pizza, but it didn’t show up until two. We had to call Luca’s about ten times to figure out where the heck the delivery guy was. Apparently, it’s one of their busiest nights of the year. We watched the ball drop twice, once for the Eastern time zone, another time for the Central time zone. We kissed both times. I went into the kitchen to find a corkscrew for the wine, and you followed me, and we—”

  “That’s exactly right,” Olive interrupted. She remembered the noisy party and the late pizza, the sangria and the pretense of helping Phil find the corkscrew. She even remembered Kerrigan’s cupcakes and the plastic Mardi Gras babies she’d reused as decorations to symbolize Baby New Year. “Every last detail. But that all happened a year ago.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that! A year ago? 2009? We already agreed we were in Vegas.” He splayed his fingers and drummed them against the steering wheel.

  “No, I mean last year, 2010.” That wasn’t what she meant. That was Phil’s definition. Her language was becoming imprecise. The boundaries between the years were starting to confuse her, and Phil was complicating things by making her pin numbers to years instead of allowing her to say “last year” and “this year.”

  “This is giving me a headache. Can we just go inside and figure this out somehow?” He formed fists with his hands and punched the steering wheel. His fists connected with the horn, and it let out a squawk like a sick bird. At the sound, a young woman poked her head out the door of the mossy brick house next door.

  “Go inside? We can’t. I don’t know who lives here anymore.”

  “You live here. Kerrigan lives here.”

  “I just told you I don’t live here, and Kerrigan doesn’t live here anymore, either. She couldn’t keep up with the rent after I left. She moved in with Ciara.”

  “Olive. Please. Just trust me.”

  At this moment, she couldn’t have trusted him less. To trust him meant doubting herself and a year’s worth of memories. But she was tired of sitting aimlessly in his car, and the sooner they got out of the car, the sooner she could disprove him.

  The outside stairs leading to the upper flat on the left side of the house—these, too, were painted Pepto-Bismol pink—were rickety and unsafe. Obviously, the landlord hadn’t gotten around to fixing them yet. She felt the boards sway beneath her and Phil as they made their ascent. Her hand was on the doorbell when Phil brushed it away.

  “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll wake Kerrigan.”

  “Right. Kerrigan. How considerate of you.”

  He pulled his keys from his pocket and rifled through them. He’d kept a copy of her old apartment key! She had turned in her own copy, even though her landlord had insisted he would change the locks. Phil found the key and held it up to the lock. It was Olive’s turn to brush his hand away.

  “We are not letting ourselves into somebody else’s apartment.”

  He unlocked the door and stepped inside. She stood resolutely on the threshold.

  “They’re going to call the cops,” she whispered.

  “If you don’t tell, I won’t tell,” he whispered back. He caught her hand and pulled her inside.

  Peeking in on the new tenant was like returning to her elementary school and realizing how short the lockers were and how low the bubbler was. The strip of pink seashell-patterned linoleum in the kitchen looked as though it were better suited to a bathroom. The row of three giant picture windows let in buckets of sunlight but let out any warmth generated by the congested electric heater
. The water-stained ceiling resembled a map of the world. But then there was the furniture. The black-and-white floral couch from IKEA. The black-cushioned papasan chairs. The red throw pillows. A geometric black-and-white rug, also from IKEA. Olive’s brain needed a second to catch up with her eyes. Then she sat down directly where she was standing. She didn’t collapse or keel over. Her knees didn’t fail her. She just sat down. Hard.

  Bristly fibers scratched against her hands. She looked down and found she was sitting on a coir and rubber welcome mat. She scooted her butt over to read the message she knew by heart. Did you remember to wipe? She laughed out loud.

  Phil turned around and looked down at her. He extended his hand to help her up, but she refused it. “Are you okay?” he asked, but she could barely hear him over her own laughter. The welcome mat’s message wasn’t even what tickled her so much. It was the ridiculousness of that fashionable, uncomfortable couch, standing in a place that Olive knew, according to all laws of nature, it shouldn’t be standing in. She knew that because she had left it positioned in her own living room at High Pointe Hills Condominiums, fifteen miles away, on top of the same geometric rug. Her stupid IKEA living room set was disrupting the order of the universe.

  “See? You remember now?” Phil was saying. He hoisted her up by the armpits and led her to the couch. She didn’t want to sit on it, so she shook herself loose of his grip and sat with her knees bent under her on the rug. Plastic cups and paper plates were tossed everywhere. On the coffee table and rug, stuck in the cushions of the couch.

  “I’m so sorry,” a familiar female voice said from across the room. Olive craned her neck upward but couldn’t see over the couch. “I’m going to clean this up, I promise. You won’t have to lift a finger. I was going to do it before you came home, but you surprised me.”

  “Kerrigan?” Olive asked. Her friend’s blond head peered over the couch. Kerrigan’s expression was cautious, as though she expected Olive to scold her. Olive could only gape. The red pillows, papasan chairs, and party debris were crushing her. And on top of that, she sensed Phil hovering. She tried to ignore the muted conversation going on above her.

  She bent forward and rested her forehead on her knees, in the agile position her dad had always identified as “the Yoga Thinker.” As a child, she had curled herself inward like this whenever times seemed especially tough or uncertain. It was a way of holding the world at bay.

  Chapter 2

  January 1, 2011, the date on her laptop’s toolbar maintained. Revelers ring in 2011 was the top headline on an international news website, accompanied by a picture of fireworks exploding over the Sydney harbor. On her desk: a 2011 tropical beaches calendar—a Christmas gift from her mom—the same one she had used all year to record her experiences in her cramped, boxy handwriting. The calendar was still wrapped in cellophane, and when she removed the plastic, the days were unmarked, the pages crisp and white. She flipped through the images of white sand beaches, hammocks strung between palm trees, and pink-streaked sunsets. Every photograph was familiar to her; each grid of days was as blank as the next.

  She hurried past February, a page she had longed to rip from the calendar last year. She could visualize the row of heavy black Xs that had marred the page—the days of her and Phil’s demise.

  She paused over June. The corresponding photograph showed two canoes floating in a cove of shallow, green water. She associated that pair of canoes with a lingering feeling of dread. June had been the month of her mom’s marriage to Harry Matheson. Saturday, June 25, on the island of St. Lucia. With this memory came a flood of other events she’d faced in 2011, and she suddenly felt like to do it all over would be more strenuous than swimming upstream.

  “I can’t do this again,” she said aloud.

  She dropped the calendar, and the weight of its slippery pages pulled it over the edge of the bed. She fell back against her pillow. Perhaps it was possible to stave off the situation if she lay very, very still. Perhaps she could even subvert it with the power of her thinking. The only thing that mattered right now was her body against the pillow and bed. She closed her eyes. The white crown molding began to recede. The ceiling above her felt open and expansive, as if someone had lifted the roof off the house. But into this expansiveness crowded all the people, places, and things that had been erased from the boxes on her calendar. She saw the look on Phil’s face when she told him about her transgression. She saw the yellow rental truck into which she had packed all her belongings for the move across town. She saw Alex and the haphazard crush of weeks they had spent together. She saw her mom with a gardenia in her hair. She saw an assembly of her patients, like ghosts in their white gowns—the ones she’d sent home, and the ones she’d lost.

  Someone knocked on her bedroom door. Before Olive could even call out that she wanted to be left alone, Kerrigan was sitting at the foot of her bed.

  “Don’t go to sleep, okay?” Kerrigan said. She tickled the bottom of Olive’s foot. “Phil thinks you might have a head injury or something.”

  Olive laughed and pulled her foot away. “I’m fine, really. And I should be the one to know, right?”

  “So then you know what year it is?”

  Olive nodded and propped herself up into a sitting position. Sitting with her old friend was strangely comforting. They hadn’t spent much time together since Olive had moved out. The intimacy of living together had faded, revealing how dissimilar they really were. The last time Olive had seen Kerrigan was in November when they’d gotten together for coffee. They’d still been on good terms, but things hadn’t felt as comfortable and easy between them. Now Kerrigan was unshowered and still in her pajamas. She cradled a leftover cupcake in one hand.

  “And you’re not having visions of the future?” she asked, and licked the frosting off the cupcake ornament.

  “Of course not,” Olive said.

  “Damn. I was hoping you could tell me if I finally meet Mr. Right in 2011.”

  Olive scanned her memory of Kerrigan’s dating life in 2011 and sadly admitted to herself that she was pretty sure Kerrigan hadn’t met him yet. There was Steve at the beginning of the year, and then a guy named Clay that Olive never got to meet. When Olive and Kerrigan had met over coffee in the fall, Kerrigan hadn’t mentioned seeing anyone. But perhaps there was still hope for her in December.

  Kerrigan had been watching her face, Olive realized. She quickly smiled to hide her depressing insight. “Cupcakes for breakfast?” she asked.

  “Sticking to my resolution,” Kerrigan said. “Never deprive myself of an opportunity for happiness.”

  Olive laughed. Of course—how could she have forgotten Kerrigan’s New Year’s resolution? Kerrigan had used it to justify calling in sick to work on several occasions, buying season hockey tickets, throwing herself an eighties-themed birthday party, and taking a trip to Cozumel with her sister.

  “Want one? There’s still a couple left.” Kerrigan took a large bite.

  “No, thanks. Did Phil leave?”

  “Yeah, but I’m supposed to call him if you start acting kooky.”

  “His words?” Olive frowned.

  “Mine.”

  Olive stood up and walked to the window. A gray van was parked where Phil’s Mercedes had been. She watched two men struggling to slide a plaid sofa into the back of the van. Her attention drifted back indoors. Sitting on the ledge was her African violet, resurrected from the dead. She stroked its fuzzy leaves. “You’re still alive.” She had thrown the entire pot away when it was reduced to a shriveled, grayish stalk, and yet here it was, clay pot and all. She imagined it hurtling through outer space to get here.

  “Kerrigan,” she began, but when she turned to her friend’s expectant face, she realized she wasn’t ready to confide in anyone about these fantastic events just yet. She wasn’t sure what to say exactly, wasn’t sure how to describe this thing, wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Sp
eaking of it aloud would catapult this blurry phenomenon into the solid existence of her reality. And she didn’t want to end up in the emergency room having tests done to see if she had a head injury on New Year’s Day. She spent enough time at the hospital already.

  “I’m going to clean up the apartment,” Kerrigan said, and threw up her hands in exasperation.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Olive insisted. She pushed the African violet an inch closer to the windowpane so it wouldn’t fall.

  “I know, but you were thinking about it. I can tell.” Kerrigan started toward the door. “This is really bad timing, I know, but I asked Steve and a few other people over to watch the Rose Bowl later. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Olive didn’t follow sports, but she vividly remembered the Badgers’ defeat in the Rose Bowl last January because it was all anyone had talked about for weeks. She sighed and tried to hide her irritation. She hadn’t even spent an hour with Kerrigan, and she was already remembering all the reasons why she had eventually decided she needed to move out, move on, and start over in her own place. Even three years after their graduation from the University of Wisconsin, Kerrigan had clung tightly to her college friends and lifestyle. Almost everything she did for fun involved either a keg or a football game. Usually both. And for the first time ever, Olive had finally had her college loans paid off and was starting to make good money at her job. While living within walking distance of Dane County General Hospital had definitely been a perk, the location just hadn’t been worth dealing with their noisy, drunken undergraduate neighbors.

  She and Kerrigan were twenty-six, and it was about time for them to get their lives in order. But wait. Was Olive twenty-six, or was she still twenty-five? She didn’t understand the rules of this bizarre happening yet, but she suspected if it really was only 2011, she was still twenty-five. This thought made her smile. Turning twenty-six had terrified her; it had been the point where she became closer to thirty than twenty. It wasn’t that she thought twenty-six was old; she just had ideas of where she should be and what she would be doing when she turned thirty, and she wasn’t anywhere near reaching any of those goals.