The Repeat Year

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The Repeat Year Page 18

by Andrea Lochen


  Maple Bluff was a wealthy village, where the governor himself lived in a mansion. Many of the houses overlooked the lake. There were no sidewalks and many of the snaking roads were so steep that other cars and houses appeared only when you were almost on top of them. Olive didn’t know how Sherry could afford to live in Maple Bluff. While her house was on the side of the road that didn’t overlook the lake and was substantially smaller than many of the surrounding homes, it still had an impressive log façade with giant picture windows. As far as she knew, Sherry held no steady job. She suspected she had inherited money from one or all of her past husbands.

  She rang the doorbell three times, but no one answered. She was about to give up and leave, when she wondered if Sherry was outside, out of earshot. The lawn on the side of the house was less cared for than the front yard. Spidery weeds grew, and the grass was taller and drier and made Olive’s ankles itch. As she made her way around back, the landscaping became more and more unkempt. There were no fences separating the lots, yet Sherry had created the impression of one with shaggy trees and shrubs, clinging vines, and knee-high grass. Olive stuck to the only path now, a twisting trail of flat river stones.

  “Sherry?” she called into the dense greenness.

  “Who’s there?”

  Sherry was squatting in front of a bush with glossy, heart-shaped leaves. She used the plastic watering can on the ground to push off and stand. Wearing an orange cotton smock and a floppy straw hat, she looked like a drooping, exotic flower. The symmetry to her chest had been restored, and Olive wondered if she’d had breast reconstruction surgery or was wearing a prosthetic.

  “Hello,” she said, sounding almost happy to see Olive. She wiped her hands on her dress, leaving two wet smudges that clung to her thighs.

  “I hope you don’t mind. I rang the doorbell. I wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  “It’s a new day,” Sherry said with a little shrug. She carried the watering can to the patio and motioned for Olive to follow her. “Do you like my garden?”

  There were no flowers. No vegetables as far as Olive could tell. The ground cover was thick; no pathways cut through it. It looked like a miniature jungle, overrun by weeds.

  “It’s very green,” Olive said. “Very peaceful.”

  Sherry laughed once, a sharp, barking sound. “Robert would be spinning in his grave. He put in delphiniums and pansies and chrysanthemums and feverfew and hired a gardener to look after it. It was really lovely, but time-consuming, and rather stifling, and after Robert died, I let the gardener and the garden go. This suits me better.” She set the watering can on the bottom step. “Wait here. I have something for you.”

  The patio needed another coat of stain. Two brown wicker chairs sat beside a mosaic-topped table. A stack of paperbacks balanced there, looking like they’d been left out in the rain, their covers rippled, the pages stamped into a permanent wave. On the top was Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

  Sherry returned, a large cream-colored envelope in hand. “Don’t think I forgot. This is for your mom and her beau. I’ve been meaning to mail it, but now here you are.”

  Olive accepted the envelope, which felt heavy in her hand. She could imagine a pair of doves embossed on the front of the card and a congratulatory message inside about a lifetime of love, a new beginning. “Thanks. I’ll make sure they get this. How are you feeling?”

  Sherry sat down heavily. “You caught me on a good day. I’m constipated, my abdomen is swollen, my feet feel like they’re burning, everything tastes like metal, and I’m tired and achy all over.” She lifted her hat, and even before she had removed it, Olive knew Sherry’s hair would be thin and wispy, if not totally gone. She remembered the way her dad’s thick, brown hair had fallen out in clumps almost overnight and never grown back.

  “Chemo,” Olive stated.

  With the hat gone, she could see that Sherry’s face was a little pinker and puffier than usual. Her scalp was peeling, and the hair that covered it was gray and threadlike. Without her characteristic red hair, Sherry’s face looked naked and old.

  “Four treatments so far,” Sherry said, replacing the sun hat. She peered at Olive from under its brim. “So, what’s the significance of the wedding? In the context of your repeat year, I mean.”

  The change in topic was not lost on Olive. She crossed her legs and shifted in the worn wicker seat. “I wasn’t very accepting last year. I made things pretty hard on my mom.”

  “Ah.” Sherry slipped on a pair of large tortoiseshell sunglasses. Behind the brown lenses, her eyes were unreadable.

  Eager to restore the conversation to the matter of Sherry’s health, Olive rushed on, “But now I’ve come to terms with it, and Christopher’s giving her a hard time instead. Maybe if it were anyone other than Harry.”

  “Well, he’s certainly not as handsome as your father, but he’s not without all appeal,” Sherry said. “He’s very attentive and physically fit; he reads medieval poetry. He cooks for Kathy, and he wants to broaden her horizons, and God knows at our age, a woman needs her horizons broadened. I remember when they first met, when Harry gave that reading on The Canterbury Tales at the library, and—”

  “What reading at the library?” Olive interrupted. When her mom had introduced her to Harry last spring, she said they’d met in yoga class, which had seemed too bizarre to be untrue.

  “There was a special spring reading series at the Richmond branch, UW professors discussing their work and fields of expertise, and Harry was one of them. He really knows his Chaucer. After the reading, they started talking and really hit it off, and Harry stayed so long that he ended up helping Kathy take down the chairs.”

  “When was this?”

  “A few years ago. Maybe 2008?”

  “Two thousand eight?” It was several degrees cooler in the garden. Olive suddenly felt chilled in her shorts and tank top. If what Sherry said was true, her mom and Harry had known each other for three years. They had known each other before Olive’s dad had died, and they had lied about it.

  “Yes, it must have been 2008 because it was around the time Robert had his first heart attack.” Sherry inhaled deeply. “Can you smell that freshness? That’s photosynthesis in the process.”

  Olive poked the sharp edge of the envelope into her palm. Just because they’d met each other at a library event three years ago didn’t mean anything, she reprimanded herself. It could’ve been a coincidence, a fluke. But why the need for secrecy then? When they’d reconnected in yoga class and started dating, why hadn’t Olive’s mom explained the wacky circumstances to her? God knows Harry would’ve loved to interrupt and supply words for that story. Unless they had felt guilty . . . Yet why the guilt if they had done nothing wrong, nothing that needed to be hidden? Her thoughts were becoming more tangled than the foliage in Sherry’s yard.

  “Sherry, do you think my mom and Harry have had some kind of relationship going on since then?” She hadn’t realized she was going to voice the question until it burst between them into the moist, cool air.

  Sherry tipped her sunglasses down to study Olive with her cool, brown eyes—eyes that had seen everything and seemed no longer surprised at the scandals and injustices of the world. “I honestly wouldn’t know. Perhaps you should ask your mother.”

  Olive hugged herself with goose bump–covered arms. How could she possibly ever ask her mom that question? Its implication was too awful. Did you cheat on Dad while he was on his deathbed? In the ICU, she’d witnessed husbands who’d abandoned their wives in their greatest time of need—cancer, multiple sclerosis, a stroke—and the nurses viewed it as one of the greatest sins of men. Olive couldn’t decide what was worse—the husbands who divorced their sick wives or the husbands who stuck with them and quietly saw other women. She had never heard of a wife who’d deserted her sick husband. Her mom had been by her dad’s side every step of the way, lovingly feeding him and
giving him his medications, even when he insisted he couldn’t taste anything and the medicine was a waste of time. She had taken him everywhere he wanted to go no matter how complicated it was to get him there, especially after he needed a wheelchair: the lakeshore path, the House on the Rock, even Memphis to see Sun Studios, Graceland, and the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated. She had been the picture of a devoted wife. But a picture . . . or the real thing?

  Olive couldn’t believe she was even allowing herself to think these thoughts. Her initial reason for coming seemed foggy and far away. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Sherry’s round, pink forearm resting on the table. Cold, unflappable Sherry Witan, who could disclose information that Olive’s mom might have had an affair while her dad was still alive without batting an eyelash. Only days before the wedding, when Olive had finally made peace with their marriage! And after Sherry had called Olive’s mom an angel . . . how could she? Olive had been wrong to think that Sherry had changed, that the person she’d seen in the hospital bed was the real Sherry, someone crying out for help. The real reason she’d reached out to Olive back in January was to puppeteer someone else’s failures.

  Olive raised her head. “Have you told your son?”

  Sherry didn’t respond immediately, and Olive wondered if she was going to pretend she didn’t understand. But then Sherry muttered, “I tried calling him. He won’t answer his phone.”

  “Did you leave a message?”

  “It seemed unkind to leave him a voice mail about cancer.”

  “Unkind, yes. But then maybe he’d call you back.”

  Olive couldn’t tell what emotions, if any, were flickering behind those dark glasses. At that moment, it wasn’t too hard to empathize with Sherry’s son. Whatever Sherry had done to warrant this silent treatment, this excommunication from his life, she had probably deserved it. Even so, Heath had the right to know what was going on with his mother’s health, and Olive felt that with absolute certainty. Her parents had waited three weeks to tell her about her dad’s leukemia. They hadn’t wanted to ruin her high school graduation, they said. But now whenever she thought back to the four-hour ceremony in the stuffy gymnasium and the string of parties that followed over the next two weeks, she could think only of her parents, quietly suffering, faking smiles and laughter. Three whole weeks she had been kept ignorant.

  “It’s a risk, I know,” Olive said. “Opening yourself up to rejection. But for Pete’s sake, Sherry, don’t be selfish. Your son deserves to know.”

  “Ah, selfish. There’s that word again.” Sherry smirked. “It’s been hurled at me many a time, because being a mother and wife is all about selflessness, see?” She imitated a perky, syrupy-sweet voice. “Giving up every molecule of your soul. If you want anything for yourself, you’re accused of being selfish. Marriage and especially motherhood mean being condemned to play second fiddle your entire life.”

  “I disagree, but anyway, maybe selfish was the wrong word—”

  “You disagree on what grounds? Have you ever been married? Have you ever had a child?”

  “No, but—” She had witnessed her mom over the years and could testify to the pure love and joy her mom had gained from her role in the family; she always said raising such wonderful children was the accomplishment she was most proud of in her life. Maybe it did take an act of total selflessness to give that kind of love. Wasn’t it worth it? But maybe her mom had wanted something more from this life, something separate from them, all her own, but had been too afraid to go after it.

  Sherry rose from the table with some difficulty. “Get back to me in about ten years. Then we’ll talk about selfishness.”

  Olive stood, too. “What do you have to gain by keeping this all to yourself? I see it all the time with my patients—having the support of family and friends can make a huge difference. You told me that repeat years are for last chances, Sherry. You think you’re just going to get surgery and chemo and everything will be fine? You don’t think there’s a bigger picture here?”

  “I’m tired,” Sherry said, her sun hat covering most of her face. “I’d like you to go home now.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll leave soon, but you know I’m right. You know that you’re here this year so you can try to fix things with your son, but you’re scared he won’t forgive you.”

  “You don’t know anything about my son.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t presume to. I just think—”

  “I think you have enough of your own problems to fix this year without nosing into mine.” Sherry made her way around the table, opened the glass patio door, and slipped inside. She slid the door back into place with a quiet click.

  Stunned, Olive sat alone and waited. She was sorry but not sorry enough to go inside and apologize. She doubted Sherry was torturing herself about dropping the bombshell on her about her mom and Harry. Since January, Sherry had been the one doling out advice. The suggestion to reach out to Heath was really the first time Olive had ventured to speak up. Perhaps she could have said it better, but maybe brusqueness was what it took to get through to Sherry. Nothing else seemed to work.

  Sherry didn’t come back out. Finally giving up, Olive walked around to the front of the house, returning to manicured lawns, order, and civilization. The sun was hot on her skin, but she knew it would be even hotter in St. Lucia. As she drove back down the bluff, the buoyant feeling she’d experienced on the way there was replaced with heavy reluctance.

  Chapter 14

  A world of lush green opened up below. Two spectacular mountains rose up out of the green; the helicopter cast a small shadow as they flew over them. Their pilot said something in his melodious accent, but over the roar of the whirling blades, Olive couldn’t hear him.

  “What did he say?” she asked Phil, who sat on her left, pressed up against the wall of the cabin.

  “Pitons,” Phil said. “Those mountains are the Pitons.”

  “Doesn’t pitons mean ‘breasts’ in French?” Olive’s mom shouted from the other cabin wall. She was a nervous flyer and had had one glass of champagne too many on the plane.

  “Yes. I think it’s actually a Creole word,” Harry said. He was on Olive’s other side, and his sweaty knee touching hers was the only thing preventing her from enjoying the helicopter ride. “According to the guidebook, they’re called Gros Piton and Petit Piton. You can’t tell it from up here, but they’re different sizes.”

  “A pair of lopsided breasts!” Olive’s mom exclaimed, and Olive tried not to think about Sherry.

  “Why do all mountains remind explorers of breasts?” she asked Phil.

  “Perhaps because there’s nothing else quite so majestic,” he said.

  Last year Olive had taken a different flight than her mom and Harry, a later flight. The airport was located in the southern tip of the country, but the resort was located in Castries, a northern city, so she’d taken a shuttle there. Three young couples, all honeymooners, shared the shuttle with her. They’d looked at Olive as though she were an exotic specimen—a single tourist in a lovers’ paradise. Solitary, Olive had sat up front next to the driver and closed her eyes every time they motored up a mountain. In St. Lucia, they drove on the left side of the road, and the roads were so narrow and winding that drivers honked perfunctorily to warn other motorists of their presence before plowing ahead. For the whole two-hour drive the newlyweds had snuggled and talked about all the neat wedding gifts they’d just received and the ones they would still need to complete their registries. By the time they had arrived at the resort, Olive’s nerves were frayed.

  But with Phil by her side, everything seemed better. The bellhop didn’t glance at her with pity as he had last time when he left her alone with her luggage in her room. The king-size bed didn’t appear to be so ludicrously huge. The pools, hammocks, shuffleboard courts, and lawn chess sets looked more inviting. Some of this,
she knew, had to do with the fact that now, as a part of a couple, she belonged here. But there was more to it; it was the way Phil viewed and interacted with the world. He became fast friends with an Australian couple as they waited in line to check in. He made Olive dance with him to the tinny tropical music that emitted from speakers painted to look like rocks along the pathway as they walked to dinner and then wondered aloud if they could make love in a hammock without falling out. His playfulness helped keep her mind off the unpleasant conversation she’d had with Sherry.

  The buffet-style restaurant was mostly outdoors, covered only by roof beams painted a cerulean blue with red flowers. Bananas, pineapple, plantain, and a watermelon with a fish carved into its rind were heaped on a central table. The restaurant had a view of the ocean, if the ocean hadn’t been too dark to see at that time of night. If everyone at the table stopped talking at the same moment, Olive could hear the ocean rise up onto the beach with a forceful, inhaling rush and then retreat with a soft exhale.

  Christopher and Verona, who had taken the late flight this time, arrived as the four of them were just finishing dinner. They both looked a little green around the gills, probably from the shuttle ride, Olive suspected. A pang of guilt shot through her. Her mom invited them to fill up some plates and join their table.

  “We’re pretty tired, so we’re just going to go to bed,” Christopher said.

  “We want to be fresh for tomorrow,” Verona added quickly. “We just wanted to check in and see what’s on the agenda.”

  “Nothing’s set in stone,” Olive’s mom said. “We’ve been tossing around a lot of ideas. Taking a catamaran to Martinique. Checking out the resort and just relaxing on the beach. Phil found out there’s a golf course if anyone wants to golf.”

 

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