Free The Repeat Year by Andrea Lochen

looked and smelled like what she imagined urine would look and smell like after someone had eaten large quantities of grass. Perhaps the tea even tasted like it, although she had no proof to back this up. “Mmm. Yeah, it’s still not my thing.” She pulled out the drawer of the coffee table and extracted two sandstone coasters. She set her mug down on one of them and laid the other within Sherry’s reach.
    “See? You look like you’re feeling better already.”
    “I’m eager to hear what you have to say about this—” She interrupted herself, not sure what to call it. Phenomenon? Time warp? Miracle? Curse? “This . . .
this
.” She kicked her tennis shoes under the coffee table.
    “I knew you would be. So let’s see. Where to start? I’ve never done this before.” Sherry looked pleased with her role as storyteller. “I’ve met only one other person who’s repeated a year before, at least in the thirty years I’ve known about it. There could have been people in my childhood and adolescence who were experiencing the same thing, but I wasn’t aware of it. The one other person I met was my first husband’s boss, the district attorney. But he wasn’t very receptive to my conversation. It was my first time, in ’82, and I had just as many questions for him as you have now.”
    “How did you know he was living the same year over?” Olive asked.
    “My husband, Clyde, kept making comments about him at home. Gene McGregor was his name. I guess in meetings he would hint at the fact that he could predict the outcome of a trial, and was insistent on the fact that if they didn’t do A, B, and C, they would fail. In theory this doesn’t sound that strange for an arrogant lawyer, but Clyde and some of his coworkers suspected something else was at work. They began to wonder if Gene was getting outside information and, in effect, working with the defense. There was one particular case in March of that year that Clyde told me about. Gene was in a frenzy trying to convince his staff that the evidence wouldn’t hold in court and that they needed to come up with some other tactic. Clyde went out to a bar with Gene one night and Gene confessed that if he lost this case, he knew he would never find rest, and claimed he would be stuck in the ‘purgatory of this year all over again.’ After Clyde relayed this to me, clearly thinking that his boss had lost it, I decided to seek Gene out and confirm if my suspicions were accurate.
    “It took a great deal of courage for me to go over to his house—I was only a little older than you at the time. Gene answered the door completely plastered. We had met briefly at the office Christmas party, but he couldn’t conceive why one of his employee’s young wives was visiting him at his home. I tried to talk to him about the big case he was working on, but he became really angry, saying that Clyde shouldn’t be sharing confidential issues with me. I tried to placate him, and he invited me inside for a drink, asked me if I was lonely because Clyde was working late. I realized I had better articulate myself more clearly, so I was very blunt with Gene. I asked him if he was reliving 1982.
    “I could tell from his shocked expression that I had hit the nail on the head, but he didn’t want to admit it. He told me he would blow his head off if he had to live 1982 over again. I asked him if he thought failing to put an evil man behind bars had been the impetus for his repeated year, if it was the event he needed to correct before moving on, that that was my theory of how things worked. He laughed at me and told me I was delusional. I was barely out the door when he came out onto the front lawn and asked me what I supposed he should do to change the course of his year. I told him that I didn’t know but I thought winning the trial would be a good start, although it couldn’t hurt to focus on improving other aspects of his life as well.”
    “So did he make it to 1983?” Olive