The Repeat Year

by Andrea Lochen

  Only a few tufts of white hair covered Mr. Paulson’s flaky scalp. He hadn’t left as much of an impression on Olive as Sarah Hutchinson had, which made her feel a little guilty. She felt sorry for the man her memory had blotted out, or, perhaps more accurately, the man who had become lumped in with the hundreds of nameless, faceless elderly patients who came to the ICU with pneumonia every year. Their wrinkled, distorted features once handsome, their diminished bodies commenced a trip backward through time, returning first to infancy, and then marching onward to their death. Olive was there to make their trip more comfortable, or sometimes, if necessary at a family member’s request, prolong the time until they reached their destination.

  Already running behind, she hurried to take his vitals. The troupe of residents on their rounds would be inquiring after her patients soon, and she hated measuring how much urine was in a Foley catheter in front of an audience. She tallied Mr. Paulson’s fluid balance and was almost out the door before she remembered the most important part of nursing, as Gloria, the compassionate nurse who’d mentored her, had put it.

  She covered Mr. Paulson’s tubing-free hand with her own. His skin felt like worn flannel. “Mr. Paulson, I’m your nurse, Olive, and I’m going to be taking good care of you. We’re going to have you back to Green Glen in no time, watching baseball or cardinals at the bird feeder, or whatever it is you like to do there, okay? Okay.”

  Talking to the unconscious patients had once seemed like an exercise in futility to Olive. She had felt awkward and theatrical, like she was holding a conversation with herself. But now it came second nature to her, and it helped remind her that her patients were real people with real stories, not just bodies to be bathed and cared for.

  A cluster of white coats stood outside Sarah’s room. Without realizing it, Olive scanned the group for Alex. He wasn’t among them. She was grateful.

  Dr. Su, the attending physician, smiled when she saw Olive approach. “Your patient?”

  Olive nodded and ducked into the room. Being thrust back into the beginning of her ICU career off-kilter like this made her feel incompetent and unsure of herself. You’ve had over a year of experience in this, she reminded herself. Just chill out. You know what you’re doing. Even if no one else thought she did. And of the five people in the room—six, including Sarah—Olive was the only one who knew for certain what would happen to the college student. Although she didn’t write off Sarah’s recovery as an inevitability. Everything still had to be done vigilantly. No care or treatment could be neglected. That thought steadied her hands as she measured Sarah’s blood pressure. She rattled off numbers to Dr. Su and her residents, and after a brief discussion, they went on their way.

  She stood at the foot of Sarah’s bed for a moment and allowed herself to appreciate the weirdness of the situation. The forward momentum of the past twenty-four hours came to a screeching halt. She’d had repeat patients before—like poor Mrs. Gertler, whose body had rejected her new kidney and needed to be put back on dialysis—but never in such a literal way. She tried to imagine what Sarah had done last year after her hospital stay. She tried to imagine her studying for an economics exam or cheering at a Badger game but couldn’t. To Olive, Sarah somehow existed only in this hospital bed, in this blue-speckled gown, with a patch of her white-blond hair missing.

  “Miss Hutchinson, I’m your nurse, Olive,” she started, and then didn’t know what else to say. She patted the girl’s bony foot through the sheet. “You probably don’t remember me, but we’ve met before. You pulled through then, and I promise I’ll help you pull through now.”

  She looked up to see Mr. Hutchinson’s lanky figure obscuring the window. The stubble on his face and dark smudges under his eyes confirmed Tina’s report that he’d spent the night at the hospital. He wore ribbed corduroy pants and a denim shirt and held a furry winter cap in his hands. Olive remembered the intimidation he had inspired in her last year. Now she saw him only as a man filled with sorrow and remorse. She knew he blamed himself for his daughter’s sickness. He hadn’t wanted her to go to college for reasons like this.

  Stepping into the room, he was immediately on the offensive. “The other nurse said I could come in here around half past eight. She said someone would come get me, but nobody did.”

  “It’s been a busy morning,” she said. “But you’re more than welcome to sit with Sarah now.”

  Mr. Hutchinson took the seat next to his daughter’s bed. “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s doing well. Her heart rate and blood pressure are strong, and her white blood cell count and temperature are steadily becoming more normal.”

  “Aren’t there any doctors around here? No offense, but I’d rather hear this from a doctor.”

  “Sarah’s physician, Dr. Su, just checked in on her, and agreed that she’s doing quite well.”

  “Is he still around? I’ve got a lot of questions.”

  “She’s conducting her rounds right now. She should be back soon, if you’d like to speak with her.”

  “Yes, I would. And why are there bubbles in Sarah’s IV tubing? Couldn’t one of those bubbles go straight to her heart and kill her?”

  Olive straightened out a kinked length of tubing and flicked away the bubbles. “They’re quite harmless.” She was surprised by the way her earlier feeling of enlightenment was swiftly being eroded. She felt like strangling him with the tubing. Yet when she turned around, she saw he had his head in his hands. He rubbed his forehead vigorously. She knew what was coming next. Olive watched Mr. Hutchinson expectantly. She felt like she was waiting for an upcoming monologue in a play she’d seen before.

  “I didn’t want her to go to Madison,” he began, head still in hands. “I didn’t go to college, my father didn’t go to college, and we did just fine on our farm. And now all of a sudden, folks are telling us we need some fancy college education to run a dairy? Heck, our cows don’t need a diploma to know how to produce milk. But Sarah wanted to go to school; she wanted to make our farm more profitable, and I was stupid enough to let her go. And look where it got her!” Here he got choked up, and his next words came out strangled. “Deathly ill. Lying in a hospital bed like her poor mother, God rest her soul.”

  Olive was ready to offer him what solace and reassurance she could. She had never before known with such certainty the right thing to say to a patient’s family member. “Mr. Hutchinson, letting Sarah go off to college was very generous of you. It shows how much you love your daughter. Don’t think of it as a mistake. Sickness can come at any time or any place. And Sarah’s strong. I know she’s going to recover soon and be back to her old self. I have a very good feeling about that.”

  Mr. Hutchinson looked up at her and instead of relief in his eyes, she saw anger. “You don’t know that. That’s what they told me about my wife ten years ago, and she died within the week. So don’t you make me any promises you can’t keep.” He stood up and looked as if he’d like to stalk out of the room, but thought better of it because he didn’t want to leave Sarah. “Where’s that doctor? Can you bring that doctor to me?”

  She had been naïve to think that her reassurance would mean something to Mr. Hutchinson. He simply viewed it as the same kind of hollow promise that other doctors and nurses made. He didn’t have a grain of trust in Olive and wouldn’t believe in his daughter’s recovery until he witnessed it with his own eyes. If that meant staying at her bedside for the next three days, he would do it. She didn’t blame him, and yet she longed to tell him about the yellow balloons and give him something to which he could cling.

  Olive was relieved to take her lunch break at one o’clock, even if she had no one to take it with. At this point in the year, she was still the new girl who hadn’t quite broken into their cliques. With the stress of her morning, she didn’t mind sitting alone at a round table in the hospital cafeteria. Instead of trying to make polite conversation, she had a moment to finally let dow
n her guard and do some serious wallowing in the horrifying implications of reliving this year. She didn’t think she could come back here day after day, night after night, and see the same patients over again in their various stages of dying. It was all too cyclical. It all felt so pointless. But maybe there was more to it. Maybe she was supposed to use her foreknowledge of the year to save lives. The thought was both exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.

  There were two voice mail messages on her cell phone: one from her mom, the other from Phil. Hearing his voice felt like swimming up to the surface after being underwater for a long time. She pressed the phone to her ear and tried to remember this was someone she had broken up with and lived without for the past ten months. Someone who had pushed her away. Someone who had been incapable of giving her a second chance. How could he still have such an effect on her? She felt betrayed by her own feelings.

  “Hey, Ollie. It’s me. You must be at work. I thought you might call in sick today, but I should’ve known better. I guess that means you’re back to your old self? I hope so anyway. My dad’s in town tonight, and he asked if he could take me out to dinner, sometime around eight. I was hoping you might come along. Call me when you get off work. Love you. Bye.”

  Phil and his father, Charlie, shared a volatile past. For the first eight years of Phil’s life, he had believed his father had separated the light from the dark and the ocean from the sky. Charlie had taken him along on short-distance hauls to Chicago and Des Moines and the Twin Cities, feeding him gas station candy and truck stop breakfasts and teaching him the science of the road. But that had all changed in 1993 when Charlie lost his job, and his drinking, which had always been a problem lurking in the corner, got really ugly. Not long after that, Phil’s parents got a divorce, and Charlie became less and less a part of Phil’s life, until he disappeared altogether. In the spring of 2010, he had suddenly reappeared—sobered up, attending AA meetings, and wanting to be part of his grown son’s life. Phil refused at first but eventually allowed himself to be persuaded to go out to dinner. They had gone out a handful of times since then, whenever Charlie passed through Madison.

  Olive couldn’t imagine going out to dinner with Phil and Charlie tonight, the tense silence as steak knives scratched against plates, the banal talk of rising gas prices. But what was more, she couldn’t imagine simply picking up where she’d left off with Phil, before things had fallen apart, and pretending everything was normal between them. It seemed deceitful. Where was the ethics manual for all of this? If you wronged someone in a year that you had lived through, but the year seemed to exist for no one else, had it really happened? Her conscience, always loudest at the most inconvenient times, spoke up: Yes, of course. To you, it happened. You did it and you remember it. So you’re still responsible. But if you broke someone’s heart, and the other person didn’t remember, was it so wrong just to slip back into his arms? Theoretical question, she told her conscience before it could respond.

  The rest of her shift felt like a television rerun. She couldn’t remember the entire script, but she knew the shape of the day. Some events resounded in her head. The Amish family that walked solemnly through the ward like a funeral procession to visit a middle-aged woman with lymphoma. The way the day nurse manager, Toya, got the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark stuck in everyone’s head, because whenever she saw the respiratory therapist, whom she thought looked like a young Harrison Ford, she would hum the first few bars. (Behind his back, they all called him Indy.) A basket of teddy bear cookies on sticks arrived. They were decorated to look as though the bears were wearing scrubs and surgical masks and were sent by a former patient’s family in gratitude—a family whose loved one had lived, of course; the ICU staff was rarely thanked for the care they had given to patients who died.

  Before Olive left for the night, she briefed the incoming nurse, Kevin. Then she moved from room to room, dimming the overhead lights in the patient rooms to bring them the twilight they had missed.

  Chapter 4

  After working for twelve hours, Olive found it difficult to reenter the world. She often thought of coal miners emerging from the bowels of the earth: blinking and rubbing their eyes against the daylight, marveling that their trucks were parked where they had left them, that their homes had mirrors and electric lights and their children scrubbed-pink fingers. She inhaled the fresh wintry air and then picked her way across the slushy parking lot to her SUV.

  When she had first started in the ICU last year, it had been almost impossible to reconcile her work life with her personal life. She had scoffed at Phil’s complaints about his obnoxious, lazy students and her mom’s anxiety that her extended family would feel excluded from the wedding. It had been difficult for her to care about what to have for dinner, or whose turn it was to pay the cable bill, or the illogical filing system Kerrigan’s office had recently implemented. The stakes in that part of her life were mercifully lower; nothing could compare to the tragedies she witnessed every day. Kerrigan had once accused her of being condescending.

  But eventually she had learned to dim the fluorescent lights in her mind. While the faces of her dying patients flickered before her eyes frequently, she did not bring them up at the dinner table. She did not talk about tumors like jellyfish or skin that had been so badly burned it flaked and crumbled like dead leaves. She did not talk about toddlers who would grow up without their mothers or husbands who lay weeping on the tile floor. She kept most of this to herself.

  It was already pitch-black when she climbed the pink, rickety stairs to her apartment. Miserable Wisconsin winters with their scanty hours of daylight. She longed to put her feet up. To take a hot shower and crawl into bed with her hair still damp and clean-smelling. She had hardly set foot on the landing when Kerrigan greeted her at the door. Kerrigan gripped her coat sleeve and blocked her entry into the apartment.

  “Were you expecting a visitor?” She took a step back, allowing Olive to stand on the welcome mat.

  Olive’s initial thought was that it was Phil waiting for her. Dinner with his dad, she suddenly remembered. She hadn’t called him back! He was probably sitting sullenly in a papasan chair, jiggling one of his long legs in that impatient way he had.

  But Kerrigan continued in a rushed whisper. “She’s been here for almost an hour. One of your mom’s friends, she said. I tried to tell her that I didn’t know what time you’d be home and that I had somewhere to be, but she insisted on waiting for you.” She backed up farther, allowing Olive an unobstructed view of the living room.

  A heavy woman with graying reddish hair sat on the black-and-white floral couch. Sherry Witan. She looked quite at home in Olive’s living room, even though she had never set foot in the apartment before.

  “Hi, Sherry,” Olive said. “What a nice surprise.” She hoped she sounded convincing. Surprise was definitely the right word for what she was feeling right now, but not preceded by an adjective like nice. She couldn’t imagine why Sherry Witan was here. Olive had never seen her outside her parents’ parties before. It wasn’t as though they were good friends who went out for coffee and chatted weekly on the phone; she didn’t think her mom even maintained a close relationship with her. At her parents’ parties, Olive had never held a conversation with Sherry that exceeded the typical one-minute party platitudes. “Hi, how are you doing?” “Good. How are you?” “Great. This hummus is fantastic.” “My mom’s a good cook.” “She is.” Olive had found that she had relatively few small-talk skills. She didn’t seem to notice the awkward pauses and would instead gaze intently at the speaker as though eye contact were the only crucial element in a social encounter.

  Sherry didn’t stand. Instead, she swiveled her head like an owl to survey Olive. “Your mother gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” Olive sat down in the papasan chair closest to Sherry. “Is there something you wanted to talk about?”

  Sherry ignored the
question. Her eyes swept over the room, seeming to miss nothing. Kerrigan’s On Wisconsin alumni magazines and issues of Sports Illustrated on the coffee table. The dusty artificial orchid. Nail holes riddled the walls and yellowish water stains bruised the ceiling. A beer bottle hid halfway behind the TV.

  Olive scrutinized the living room, too. When she returned her attention to Sherry, Olive found that she was watching her as though no one had ever taught her not to stare, as though she believed she was magically concealed from public view and therefore able to watch people as hungrily and conspicuously as she liked. Olive stared back. Sherry was in her late fifties. Large was the best word to describe her. She carried her weight with importance and made you feel in her presence, especially if you were thin, that you were an insubstantial waif. Her facial features were remarkably refined and delicate by contrast to her body: narrow brown eyes; thin, pink lips; a small, babyish nose; finely penciled-in eyebrows. If you studied Sherry in two separate photographs, one of her face and one of her body, you would never imagine that the two parts belonged to one another, and yet they somehow seemed to work in harmony for her. Her hair was a washed-out red that defiantly revealed several inches of gray roots at her part and temples. It fell in loose waves over the shoulders of her fringed gray silk shawl.

  “I’m leaving,” Kerrigan called in a loud voice from the foyer area. “I’m supposed to meet Steve for dinner and the hockey game. I’m already almost twenty minutes late.” Olive straightened herself up and peered over Sherry’s head. Kerrigan stood as if waiting for some kind of recognition that she was free to go. She raised her eyebrows at Olive.

  “Okay. Have fun. Thanks for waiting.”