A siren wailed in the distance.
“You should go inside, Olive. You’re shivering.” He lightly touched her arm and then melted into the jumble of cars in the dark parking lot.
The ambulance would be arriving soon with its red-and-white flashing lights and matter-of-life-and-death commotion. She stepped out from under the concrete overhang. The sky was an electric blue. Clouds dark as soot scudded across, making her feel she was on a world that was spinning much too fast. Her thoughts were moving as quickly as those clouds.
The siren was a constant, high-pitched whine now, probably only blocks away. She crossed back under the overhang and glided through the automatic doors.
Chapter 21
The world continued to turn too quickly, each day chasing the tail of the next. Olive was torn between wishing it would accelerate even more and wanting the hurried days to slow down. She was reminded of the story of Sherry’s mother’s death. Sherry and her mother had been so close to reconciliation at the end of the year, and then Sherry had run out on her. Another year, another try. Chastened and subdued, Sherry had finally conformed to her mother’s expectations so the old woman could die peacefully. So what was the lesson Olive was supposed to be learning here? To always tell the truth? To never ever tell the truth? The strength of her conviction—that the universe had rolled back time to reunite two fated lovers—was flagging. She was confused and heartsick.
Phil had moved out and taken Cashew with him. She coped the best way she knew how: She threw herself into her work. She bathed and turned patients, comforted their families, administered medications, ordered chest X-rays and ABGs. She suctioned out air passageways, changed colostomy bags, irrigated wounds, collected sputum and urine. She was her patients’ advocate and guardian angel. She was everything they needed her to be and nothing of her own. She stayed late. She took extra shifts. She kept her distance from Alex.
When Thanksgiving approached and Olive remembered it would be a depressing day alone with her mom and Harry like last year (since Verona and Christopher were spending the holiday in California with her family), she eagerly volunteered to cover Jennifer’s day shift and then apologized profusely to her mom, saying there was no way to get out of it. But then her mom and Harry showed up in the ICU that day with a plate of turkey, mashed potatoes, and green bean casserole, and a whole pumpkin pie to share with her coworkers, and Olive felt like the most unworthy, selfish daughter on the planet.
Her unworthiness was a recurring theme these days. She had been avoiding Sherry as well; she hadn’t even thanked her for the generous act she had performed. She was too ashamed to tell her that even after the perfect setup, she had still managed to wreck things. Even a miracle hadn’t been enough. But Sherry didn’t call her, either, and Olive started to fret. She ignored her broken heart and her shame and called Sherry, but several days later, Sherry still hadn’t gotten back to her. Olive was planning a visit to Sherry’s house when she received a call from her mom. They’d found a lump in Sherry’s left breast; the cancer had metastasized. The surgery was scheduled for the next day.
Olive sat alone on a love seat in the waiting room of the surgical ward. Her mom had to work until five o’clock and would join her then. Glittery snowflakes hung from the ceiling tiles by paper clips and string. On the walls, the framed pieces of artwork were wrapped like presents. A fat fleece snowman sat on the counter of the nurses’ station and blared “Frosty the Snowman” whenever someone walked past it, which was often. It was hard to get in the Christmas spirit when she felt so numb inside.
The procedure had started at nine o’clock this morning, and it was now almost two, and still Olive hadn’t heard a word from the surgeon. It had been a while since she’d been on the waiting-and-praying end of things—not since her dad—and it was all she could do to keep herself from barging into the operating room and demanding an update. She jiggled her crossed legs. She wondered why Sherry’s doctor hadn’t encouraged a double mastectomy from the start. The pain of going through the operation twice—Olive shuddered. Yet she was encouraged by the fact that Sherry had undergone the surgery at all. That meant she was still fighting.
The small waiting room was crowded and tense. A middle-aged black woman held the hand of her elderly mother in a wheelchair, a teenage couple passed a fussy baby back and forth, a young man with spiky black hair had his nose buried in a thick book. A bearded man talked on a cell phone, saying over and over, “They won’t let me see him yet, Aunt Gladys. I don’t know if they’ve fixed his heart. They won’t let me see him.” A Hispanic woman sitting back-to-back with Olive was praying the rosary, her soft whispers spoken almost directly into Olive’s ears. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen.
She thought of Ryan Avery’s mother, who had sat at his bedside every day of his hospital recovery, mouthing the words to the prayers and rubbing the rosary beads between her fingers until Olive thought the beads would crumble into dust. His dad had stopped coming after those first few days of demanding miracle cures from doctors, and even Ryan’s girlfriend—a heavy girl with a Celtic tattoo on her ankle—began to visit less and less frequently. But his mother was there every day. She combed his hair and read aloud to him from Field & Stream magazines.
He had been released from the hospital a week ago to adapt to his life as a paraplegic. She hadn’t been working then, but Tina had described to her how Ryan had sat tall in his manual wheelchair and rolled it forward himself.
“I still don’t know why you did what you did the night he came in,” Tina had said to her, holding up her hand as if to stifle any explanation that Olive might try to offer, but Olive remained silent. “I’m willing to explain it away as some kind of intuition, like the moment I had when Conner wanted to ride a pony at the county fair, but I had a really bad feeling—achy like this intense pressure in my gut—and I told him no, and then the next little kid who rode that pony was bucked off. That kid scraped up his hands and knees pretty bad, but Watson, you saved this man’s life with your intuition. I’ve been having nightmares about what would’ve happened if you hadn’t stopped me from giving him the morphine. Really bad, wake-up-at-three-o’clock-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares. And every time I wake up like that, I think, Thank God Watson stopped me.”
Olive interrupted. “Tina, I really don’t think you should give me that much credit.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself, forgetting one of the cardinal rules of ICU nursing. You can’t expect perfect outcomes for our patients. They come to us very, very sick, and we do our best, but it’s not always in our hands. Ryan Avery is alive today because of you. He would thank you if he only knew what you had done for him. Don’t pity him because he’s in a wheelchair—that’s closed-minded. He’s coming to terms with it, and I think you should, too.”
Olive started to protest again, but then stopped herself. Tina was right: His outcome was not perfect, but what in life, she thought, ever was? There were car crashes and cancer and Alzheimer’s and alcoholism. Fathers died too young, and their families just moved on. Lovers were weak and careless with one another’s hearts. Living meant playing with fire. It was amazing that anything ever went right at all with all the bad things lurking around every corner.
She closed her eyes and tried to tune out the noise and anxiety that was rolling off the other people in the waiting room in overpowering waves. But with her eyes closed, she remembered the way Phil had held her hand and brought her cold cans of soda from the vending machine while her dad was in the hospital. Maybe perfection didn’t exist in the long term. Maybe it existed only in brief slices that happened so quickly you didn’t even realize you had been happy until months or even years later. She sighed and opened her eyes. The snowman was singing again. She pressed her fingertips to her temples.
The spiky-haired man leaned across the aisle. “If I have to hear that song one more time, I’m going to thro
w that thing out the window.”
Olive smiled politely. She didn’t feel like making small talk with strangers right now. She looked down at the stack of magazines next to her, as if seriously considering which one to read.
“It’s sad when all the meaning is stripped from the holidays because everyone is trying to be so PC,” he added. “No Christmas trees, no menorahs because we don’t want to offend anyone. And this”—he pointed to the singing snowman and the snowflakes on the ceiling—“this is what we’re left with.”
Olive looked up from the magazines. His eyes were a dark, piercing blue. He was younger than she had thought at first. Maybe only twenty or twenty-one. “It is awfully depressing.”
He set the heavy book on his lap. “Are you here for a family member?”
“Friend. You?”
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I’m here. Because I like to be tortured, I guess.” He patted the top of his hair lightly, confirming that each spike was still perfectly gelled in place.
She didn’t want to collect another sad story—she had enough of her own—but the expression on his face was so troubled that she couldn’t give him the cold shoulder now. Yet she still didn’t want to hear his tale of woe. “What are you reading?” she asked instead.
“The Da Vinci Code.”
“That doesn’t look like The Da Vinci Code.”
“No?” He flashed a handsome smile. Olive wondered if he was flirting with her. “Dante’s The Divine Comedy,” he amended.
“So which circle of hell are we in right now?” she joked, before she could wonder if he would misconstrue this as flirting back.
He laughed. “I’m not sure yet.” He tucked the book under his arm and stood up. “I seriously need a cup of coffee. Do you want to join me?”
Olive nodded toward the double doors of the surgical ward. “I’d better stay here. I need to be here for my friend.”
“Right. Can I bring you anything?”
There was something oddly familiar about the sly curve of his lips. She studied him for a moment too long. “That’s very nice of you to offer, but I’m fine, thanks.”
“Be back soon.” He turned down the hallway that led to the hospital cafeteria.
Olive endured curious stares from the teenage couple. She crossed her legs at the ankle. An efficient-looking nurse returned to the desk, and she leaped up to talk to her.
“Excuse me. Is there any word on Sherry Witan?”
“Why, yes. I wasn’t aware there was any family present.” The nurse paged through a pile of forms.
“Not family. A close friend. Is she out of surgery yet?”
“Yes. She did quite well. She’s been out of surgery since noon and under observation in the recovery room.” The nurse checked her watch. “I’d say we’re just about ready to transfer her to her room on the oncology floor.”
Olive moved to the waiting room on the oncology floor. The same chintzy snowflakes dangled from the ceiling there as well; a jar of miniature candy canes adorned the counter of the nurses’ station. She called her mom to let her know Sherry was safely out of surgery and that she should come directly to oncology on the fourth floor when she arrived. While she was on the phone, a scrawny, bundled body that looked like it had once been Sherry was wheeled on a gurney from the elevator to the patient rooms. It was hard to believe that only months ago she had thought of Sherry as a large woman; she had become so reduced.
It was another half hour before they let Olive back to see her. Sherry’s fragile body seemed swallowed up by the large pillows supporting her. There was nothing covering her head, only wisps of fine gray curls dotting her scalp. Her chest looked sunken in. She had only been wearing a prosthetic, Olive realized, and now both her breasts were gone. Despite her wretched condition, Sherry’s thin lips actually curved into a smile when Olive entered the room.
“On the home stretch,” she murmured hoarsely, and beckoned Olive with her pulse oximeter–clamped finger.
Did she mean that they were nearing the end of their repeat year or that she was nearing the end of her life? Olive pulled a chair to her bedside and wrapped both her hands around Sherry’s cool and bony hand. “I’m so glad you made it through,” she whispered.
Sherry turned her head. Her brown, all-seeing eyes were still just as sharp. “Me, too. There’s not much more they can take from me. I’m practically just a shriveled-up corpse right now.” She squeezed Olive’s hand, and the sly smile spread across her face again. “If I make it through to January, though, I’m finally going to undergo that reconstruction surgery, and then I’m going to have the perkiest pair of knockers a fifty-eight-year-old woman has ever had. I won’t even need to wear a bra, they’ll be so perky.”
“Well, then.” Olive laughed. She released Sherry’s thin hand and leaned back in her chair. Something had changed. Sherry seemed almost optimistic now. What had happened? Had her doctor given her a promising prognosis? But she was worried Sherry’s buoyant mood had come from her good deed toward Olive and Phil. She didn’t want to let on that Sherry’s kind overture had not panned out. “Do your doctors think they’ve removed all the cancer?” she asked.
“Yes, for now. I’ll have to go through more chemo, of course, and there’s always the chance of the cancer metastasizing to somewhere else, but I have a good feeling about this. I don’t think it’s going to come back. I think I’ve suffered enough.” Her face was practically beatific.
“That’s wonderful. I hope you’re right.” Despite her numbness, she caught a tiny spark of Sherry’s serenity and let it warm her. Sherry was going to make it. She had won her battle at the eleventh hour. The universe had allowed her a second chance at life. At least one of them was making something worthwhile of this year.
“He just needed some more time,” Sherry murmured, and her eyelids fluttered drowsily. “More time to work things out.”
“Yes,” Olive agreed because it seemed like the wrong time to tell her the truth. It seemed egotistical and cruel to break through Sherry’s moment of bliss. “I wanted to thank you,” she choked out.
Sherry’s eyes flickered open again. “No, I want to thank you. For telling it like it is. For pushing me to take a risk and reminding me what it means to be a mother. I never would’ve swallowed my pride and called him without your constant nagging. I couldn’t have done it without you, Olive. You’re the reason he’s back.”
It was quickly becoming apparent to Olive that they were not talking about the same he. Her thoughts spun in a sloppy, graceless pirouette. “Do you mean . . . ? Are you talking about Heath?”
“Yes.” Though her body was blanched and wasted, Sherry beamed like a woman in her prime.
Everything clicked into place. This was the reason for Sherry’s beatific smile. Heath had come home. Olive wondered how long he had been in town and what had passed between them. It was unsettling to her that he wasn’t here with his mom now. She had so many questions for Sherry, but she didn’t want to tire her out after her mastectomy.
“Oh, Sherry. That’s terrific.” Her face hurt from a combination of smiling so hard and suppressing tears. Overcoming the cancer, reuniting with Heath—it was all too much. The wall between Sherry and the rest of the world had seemed too high, too impenetrable, but here it was, crumbling down, and all these good things were flowing in effortlessly. Sherry had been through so much in her life, and God knew she deserved this. But just behind Olive’s happiness for Sherry lurked an envy that she didn’t even want to acknowledge because it was so mean and low. Why Sherry? Why not me? I’ve been working ten times as hard as she has. But she ripped the envy away as though it were a spiderweb obscuring her view and told herself to be happy for Sherry.
“He arrived three days ago. He was so mad, I could hardly bear to look at him. He was mad at me for having cancer, can you believe it?” Sherry rasped.
Olive swallowed
. Actually, she could. She remembered all the ugly stages of grief she’d been through with her dad.
“I told him, ‘Excuse me for inconveniencing you with my life-threatening breast cancer.’ We went on like that for a long time, and I thought for sure it was going nowhere and that he would leave any minute, and I’d never see him again. But then he showed me some pages from his journal that he took with him to Spain.”
In her eagerness to tell the story, Sherry tried to lean forward, her diminished body pulling against the various tubes and wires, but Olive gently restrained her. Sherry relaxed against the pillows as if that had been her plan all along.
“He had actually made a list of every wrong I’d ever done him! Can you believe it? God, that was hard to look at. But after I read the list to myself, I started to read it aloud to him, item by item, saying, ‘Heath, I am sorry for leaving you at Camp Loon Lake even though you wrote me twenty times that summer to come get you. I am sorry for promising to take you and your friends to Six Flags Great America for your eleventh birthday and then blowing it off. I am sorry for never learning that you hate peanut butter. I am sorry for bringing Robert to your cross-country awards banquet even though you asked me not to.’ He told me I was being stupid and to stop, but I told him I needed to do it.”
Her breathing sounded more like panting now. Olive didn’t know if it was from the emotion or the recent surgery, or both. Sherry’s heart rate and blood oxygen levels looked normal on the monitor. Olive stroked her forehead. “Take a breath. Easy now. You need to rest, Sherry. Don’t strain yourself.”
Sherry scowled at her but took a few slow, deep breaths. “I didn’t know what to expect when I finished. Neither of us said anything. But then Heath asked me if it was okay if he stayed with me for Christmas, and of course I said it was.”
The Repeat Year Page 29
