The Repeat Year by Andrea Lochen Page B

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

    A fter 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