Page 5 of Not You Again
“Glad it’s just the eclipse and not an apoc-eclipse—get it, like apocalypse?”
Adam forced out a laugh of acknowledgment. And then the silence stretched, the bitter reality of his life wrapping around him like an unwelcome blanket. Where the only comfort his dad could offer was his presence, and the only thing Adam could do was try not to break down in front of him.
When the eclipse ended, Bill quickly said, “Should we head out?”
“I’ll just take another minute,” Adam replied. So Bill stood up, gave Adam a pat on the back and walked into the house.
Adam needed to process whether this was all some kind of bad dream, or a very sick joke. Because how in the fucking world was he living throughthis? His wife. With his best friend. Their marriage... He’d avoided the worddivorceat all costs, but where else could this be going?
Divorce. A word Adam’s parents had never had to use fortheir own marriage, but now he—at thirty-two—would be using frequently.
Out of habit, Adam looked up toward the sky that was endless with potential—that was how he’d naively imagined his marriage would be. He quickly wiggled his wedding ring off his finger and launched it into the woods.
He rubbed the spot where it had been, already regretting the choice. He loved Shireen. Even after what she’d told him, Adam still loved her. And then he realized that while Shireen had, for some time, slowly removed herself from their life—planting seeds wholly separate from his—there was something he could do to make himself feel better, too. He could bury this whole experience. Adam didn’t want to process what had happened, and maybe he didn’t have to.
The sun burned as bright as he’d ever seen and, as he watched from behind the safety of his eclipse glasses, Adam felt the sharp flicker of hope in his chest. Maybe he could come through this stronger. While he was suffering unspeakable pain now, perhaps in the near future he’d truly forgive and forget, like people always said happened.
Then that flicker turned warm, a heat that radiated across his shoulders and down his arms. His vision blurred. Was he crying? No, but something was making it impossible for him to so much as open his eyes. Maybe staring at the sun, even safely, hadn’t been wise.
Then his eyes suddenly snapped open. No more blurry vision. Instead of the warmth he’d felt, Adam was downright sweating. And instead of being surrounded by the woods, he was standing in the office at the funeral home.
The overhead lighting illuminated Shireen, right in front of him and wearing the same clothes from earlier that day. Had he fallen asleep, somehow? He took a step back from the moment he never wanted to relive again, but his leg hitthe side of the desk. Sharp pain raced across his skin and he gripped the spot. He looked to Shireen, and the anguish on her face was just as he’d remembered. He instinctively reached out to comfort her.
There, on his ring finger, was the wedding band he’d tossed into the woods.
Chapter 3
Carly
Day 238
Carly shivered as a blast of intense air-conditioning came through the vent above her head. Goose bumps trailed her arms and she rubbed her hands up and down her skin to warm herself. “Hey, Dad,” she said and fell back into the seat with a thud.
By her count, this was the two hundred thirty-eighth time she’d attended her dad’s funeral. Not in a metaphorical, dream, or fantastical sense—in a very real, butt-in-a-hard-white-chair-facing-her-father’s-coffin kind of way. Being stuck in a time loop had not been on her bingo card, and if she’d known such a thing was even possible, she’d have opted for a more comfortable bra.
But as it stood, Carly couldn’t change anything about how she started the loop. It was always 10 a.m. on April twenty-third. Her dad was permanently in the casket. She was forever in a black dress with combat boots, a box of tissues in her lap and her hair parted in the middle.
Even after 238 times, seeing her dad here was never easy. A constant reminder that she’d never be able to take back thelast thing she’d said to him. Just the memory of those words made her shoulders hunch.
In order to avoid becoming a human snowman of negativity, she found the best approach was to avoid thinking about her problems altogether.
Carly approached the closed casket and drummed her bitten fingernails across its sleek top. “Morning,” she said. “Want to hear a story?”
Carly understood her father was dead, but she still spoke to him. If for no other reason than to try to be a good daughter. Something she hadn’t been able to do when he was alive.
“I met this guy.” She leaned an elbow on the lid and crossed one combat boot over the other. “Early thirties, like me. He’d driven to Julian on a whim and got stuck in the loop. He was apparently about to graduate from med school. Anyways, I helped him open a bottle of wine. He couldn’t find a corkscrew, and I remembered that elbow trick you taught me.”
She waited for an acknowledgment of her good deed, but of course none came. So she pursed her lips and patted herself on the back. Carly had accepted that this loop was her life—maybe it was even karmic retribution for being a terrible daughter. So as a way to repent, she’d decided to do one nice thing for someone else every time she looped. It helped pass the hours, and doing something considerate distracted her, albeit momentarily, from the fact that she was undeniably the worst.
A nearby door banged open. “That’ll be the love birds,” she joked to her dad.
The other super-fun, not-at-all-alarming thing about the loop was that everyone in Julian was stuck—not just Carly. Their days all restarted at 10 a.m. on April twenty-third, just as hers did. And like Carly, they’d had to relive the same dayover and over. Adam and Shireen, however, hadn’t been coping well.
The slap of flip-flops down the hall made Carly turn just in time to spot the wife—orex-wife—Shireen. Carly didn’t personally know Shireen, but she knewofher. In the sense that she’d overheard her conversations with Adam 238 times, and therefore understood the bulk of their relationship history: met in high school, together soon after, both happy until Adam took over the family business and Shireen started to feel neglected, Adam didn’t notice her new haircut, there were no more big or small romantic gestures, Shireen ran into Adam’s best friend, Dean, during a particularly low point and next thing you know...
Carly usually waited for them to leave before making her own exit. Not only because the situation was awkward—funeral and breakup colliding—but because Adam was... how to say this politely...
Ah, yes, a vindictive prick.
