The Repeat Year by Andrea Lochen Page A

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 down 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