Oona Out of Order

Oona sees herself in the mirror as she and Edward go inside and says that it could be worse. Edward chimes in that she’s a “stunner,” and they go to the kitchen for him to make her toad-in-the-hole, but not before Oona checks to see that she has her watch from Dale, which she decides to frame.

While Edward cooks, he asks if she remembers anything from last year. She says she doesn’t and that she feels bad her condition makes life hard for people like him. He is understanding and patient, and Oona—knowing that she is not married to him in 2015—wonders if he signed a prenup and if it’s possible for her to change her future. Oona eats, and Edward reveals that he is a chef and starting a restaurant with her. This astonishes Oona, but it turns out her primary role is as the financial backer.

The next day, Oona and Edward go to look at the property they are renovating for Clary’s Pub, and Oona isn’t happy with the location. Edward is defensive about it, and Oona backs off, thinking that her old self wanted her to make the relationship work. Edward’s passion when he talks about the restaurant’s food and concept makes her feel better, despite the smell of sewage behind the property. Inside, a beautiful, sophisticated woman named Francesca surprises them. She is Edward’s consultant, and Oona gets a bad feeling about her. Oona decides to call her mother, but Edward tells her Madeline is away with her boyfriend, Nathan, and won’t be back for two weeks. This makes Oona unhappy, and Edward tries to appease her.

Oona feels pressure to get back to their normal married life but feels like an imposter. She checks her binder and finances and finds that she gives Edward an allowance of over $5,000 a month; she also pays his credit cards bills, which doubles that amount. She has spent over $1 million on the restaurant and wonders if she is buying his love.

She looks at her wall of guitars and remembers how much she wanted one when she and Dale went to the local music store. Dale discouraged her and talked her into buying a keyboard instead, but Oona loved playing with the band enough that it didn’t matter. Edward interrupts her thoughts, and they end up making passionate love. Oona asks if that’s what married sex is like, and he says it is for them. Still wondering about Peter, she asks if they are monogamous. He says they are. Oona feels like a fraud and fears that Edward will soon find out he’s married to an imposter.

Edward is busy with the restaurant, and Oona barely sees him. One day, she decides to wake up early to cook him breakfast, but he doesn’t want anything and she feels awkward. She then offers to come to the restaurant, and he seems panicked at the idea. He tells Oona that last year she didn’t enjoy working on the restaurant and focused on music and philanthropy instead, but he makes an effort in the following days to include her in little decisions.

Oona is surprised to get a postcard from Kenzie in Thailand. It gives her little information about him, except that he seems to be escaping a difficult situation that has left him sad and lonely. He says traveling alone is what he needs.

Madeleine comes back from vacation. She has broken up with her boyfriend and asks Oona over to help paint her house. Instead of having a positive reunion, they fight. Oona is unhappy that Madeleine wasn’t there on New Year’s Eve, and Madeline is still smarting from a fight they had the prior year. When Oona asks what happened so she can prevent the fight in a different leap, Madeline says life isn’t about preventing mistakes.

They make up and talk about Edward, Oona wondering aloud if anyone will measure up to Dale. She confesses that she feels like she is betraying his memory by being with another man. Madeleine agrees that first love is memorable but says Dale wasn’t perfect. Oona is surprised, and Madeline points out that he didn’t allow Oona to follow her passion for the guitar. This truth hits Oona hard. As she goes home, she picks up a newspaper and sees an advertisement for guitar lessons with someone named Peter.

Oona meets Peter. He is attractive, with kind eyes and a leather jacket like hers and Dale’s. When he translates his tattoo from his native Korean as “everything has its time” (179), she knows he is the right man to teach her the guitar.

As soon as they begin playing, something inside her begins to “glow” and wake up. Her world becomes brighter as she practices and improves, and she develops a flirtatious connection to Peter. However, she feels this isn’t fair to Edward and is determined to keep herself in check. When they take breaks, they talk about music they both love, and Peter comments that life can get in the way of dreams but that it’s good that Oona finally found her true instrument.

Oona feels that Edward’s preoccupation at work has helped her adjust to married life, but little by little she gets to know her husband. Wanting to spend more time with him, she shows up at the restaurant one evening. Francesca, the consultant, answers the door in a disheveled state and won’t let her in, but Oona demands to see her husband and storms upstairs. He is in his office, stressed about the opening, and Oona feels bad disturbing him. He says he’ll be around more for her. As Oona leaves, Francesca warns that Oona will be a “restaurant widow” for the next nine months. Oona realizes this will leave only two months for her to get to know Edward better before she leaps again.

Oona meets Madeleine at a farmers market and asks if she ever flirted with men besides Oona’s father. Madeleine is intrigued, especially when she hears the man Oona is flirting with is her guitar teacher. She says that it’s okay for Oona to have a crush and tells her not to feel obligated to last year’s self. When Edward comes home and they make love, Oona imagines he’s Peter and asks herself if she really wants to be married.

The opening of Clary’s Pub goes well, but the reviews that follow do not. Edward is devastated, but when Oona tries to follow him into his office to comfort him, Francesca blocks her. When she asserts herself, Edward asks for Francesca instead of Oona. Over lunch at another restaurant, Edward is awful about everything from the food to the wait staff. Oona suggests some marketing ideas for their restaurant, and he sarcastically belittles her. Oona is furious and says that she doesn’t think it’s right that he ignores her ideas while she funds his. She leaves the restaurant, and Edward follows, contrite. He confesses that his ego is taking a huge hit. He uses her ideas and gains a few new customers, but not enough.

Oona continues her guitar lessons, and her feelings for Peter intensify. She also spends more time with her mother. They don’t talk about the restaurant or Peter, though Oona sometimes plays the guitar for Madeleine. Meanwhile, Edward and Oona’s relationship deteriorates.

Oona gets another postcard from Kenzie, this one implying that he’s less angry but still not coming back. Peter and Oona discuss music, comparing it to a drug, and Peter asks Oona to play at a cancer benefit. Peter also confesses he was married but that it didn’t work out. Music was one of the reasons it failed, as he chose it over a career in medicine. He mentions that being lonely is sometimes better than being married to someone who feels like a stranger.

Oona is a hit at the benefit, and Peter gives her a silver guitar pick keychain with the engraved words “nice dream,” referencing the Radiohead song she performed. When Oona arrives home, she tells Edward she wants a divorce. He tries to change her mind by saying he can fix the situation: Someone wants to buy the restaurant property, and they can start over with another restaurant. However, Oona says she’s not the person he met last year.

Edward moves out, and Oona despairs that she will always end up alone. She continues her lessons with Peter and, in mid-November, asks him out to coffee. He says it’s bad timing, which she says is the story of her life. She stops her lessons for the remainder of the year.

Kenzie sends word that he’ll be home in 2005. On New Year’s Eve, Madeleine comes over. Just before midnight, Oona wishes to wake up younger next year, but she isn’t “specific” enough.

Oona wakes up in her kitchen with Madeline and is upset when she realizes it’s 2003, the year she meets and marries Edward. She reads her letter, which says she needs to experience the highs and the lows: She “can’t live a safe, sterile, painless life” (204). It tells her that she is going to meet and divorce Edward but that she has already experienced the heartache, so she should enjoy falling in love. She reminds herself to enjoy things while they last and to just live.

Oona feels like her earlier self is patronizing and refuses to listen to her. She decides to travel so that she won’t encounter Edward. Noticing that a familiar snow globe depicting a pyramid is not in her knickknack cabinet, she books a trip to Egypt. After boarding the plane, she puts on her eye mask and feels someone sit next to her. The person begins to hum a Velvet Underground song, and when he apologizes, saying that singing is how he copes with his fear of flying, Oona recognizes Edward’s voice.

Oona tries to get another seat on the plane, but nothing is available. She resigns herself to sitting next to Edward and wows him with her knowledge, including his tastes in bands and love of the film Pulp Fiction. Edward is funny and charming, and Oona decides she might as well enjoy falling in love. They have a fantastic trip through Egypt, full of amazing sights and sex. Edward buys her the snow globe with a pyramid in it and says he’s never connected with someone like this before.

Oona is worried things will change back in New York. She notices two famous guitars that are missing in 2004 are currently on her wall and wonders what happens to them. Meanwhile, she becomes more attached to Edward as they spend more time together.

One night, Edward comes home late from his weekly card game to his apartment, where Oona is waiting. He is rude about her being “clingy.” They have their first fight, but they make up quickly and have sex, which is becoming an addiction for Oona. In March, Edward’s lease ends and he moves into her house, laughing in surprise when he sees how wealthy she is.

They invite Madeleine over for dinner, and she obviously doesn’t hit it off with Edward. After she leaves, Edward talks about struggling to open a restaurant of his own and says he doesn’t like that Oona pays all his day-to-day bills. Oona is privately willing to fund his restaurant but hopes he isn’t after her money.

Madeliene has a new boyfriend, Nathan, whom she introduces to Oona over lunch. Oona thinks he’s a racist who is using her mother for her money, which causes her relationship with Madeleine to become strained. Edward proposes while he and Oona walk in the park. Despite knowing how it ends, Oona says yes, but she also explains that she needs to tell him something about her memory.

Oona and Edward marry a week later at City Hall. A few days later, Edward loses his investor and Oona steps in, confident he isn’t after her money. Before work starts on the restaurant, they go on vacation to Barbados. They return after a city-wide blackout to find the house has been robbed. Two of Oona’s guitars are gone as well as Dale’s watch, which she left on the counter. She is devastated at its loss.

Work goes ahead on the restaurant, though Oona tries to talk Edward into choosing a different location. He remains firm and brings Francesca on as a consultant. Oona dislikes her even more this year and notes that Francesca and Edward have inside jokes and tease each other like old friends. Edward tells Oona to trust them, so she tries to ignore it.

In November, Oona and Madeleine have breakfast and argue about Madeleine’s boyfriend. Madeleine says he is going to ask her to marry him, and Oona is horrified. She decides to tell Madeleine the future: The relationship won’t even last a year, so there’s no point in pursuing it. Madeleine is more devastated than Oona has seen before. Oona tells herself she did the right thing, but she can’t make it home before crying. However, she doesn’t go back to comfort her mom.

Oona doesn’t reach out to Madeleine for a while but then feels guilty and offers to take her to a Suzanne Vega concert. When Oona goes to the venue, Madeleine is nowhere to be seen, but a younger, less healthy version of Kenzie is smoking outside. Oona asks him if he’s seen someone who fits Madeleine’s description, and he says he has: She gave him a ticket to the concert.

Kenzie seems reluctant to join Oona but goes in anyway and is wowed by how close the seats are to the stage. However, he leaves before the concert starts, and Oona worries that he won’t come back. He does, but he then leaves again before it’s over. Oona is concerned about him and can’t figure out how to talk to him without scaring him away, as he seems not to know her.

They go to a bar and order drinks, and Oona coaxes him into sharing his problems. He says his mothers recently died in a car accident and that he is having a hard time with it. He feels guilty knowing that when they died, he was playing video games and getting high. Oona shares the difficulty she had when her father died: She initially laughed when he fell into the water and didn’t realize he was drowning. Kenzie confides that he’s always angry now, and while he thought New York would be a good place to lose himself, it just makes him angrier.

Oona offers Kenzie a job as her personal assistant, but he wants to go to Thailand instead. He asks for her address and says he’ll send postcards. She tells him to be out of Southeast Asia in 2004, thinking of the tsunami, and says she hopes they meet again. Oona goes home to find Edward also returning. When he asks how the concert was, she gets upset and lets him hold her, all the while thinking he is “temporary.”

Oona is upset over her rift with her mother and Kenzie’s absence. Edward decides to throw a New Year’s Eve party at the as-yet-unfinished Clary’s Pub and holds a dinner two days before to thank key people. At the dinner, Oona picks up her napkin under the table and sees Francesca’s bare foot in Edward’s lap. She snoops through his things at home and finds nothing. However, during the New Year’s party, she goes into his office, unlocks one of his drawers, and finds photos of Edward and Francesca together, naked. She looks further, finds her stolen watch, and realizes her husband orchestrated the robbery.

When Edward comes in, he admits to stealing from Oona to pay $200,000 in gambling debts and says that he has been having an on-and-off affair with Francesca for the last three years. Oona puts her wedding and engagement rings on the desk and laughs bitterly when Edward says he loves her. Remembering that her brain will reset in a few hours, he suggests that they can have a fresh start. Oona says she won’t let that happen and realizes she has one hour to get home, tear up the letter she’s already written to herself, and create a new one.

On the subway home, Oona remembers that she woke up on the subway in 2004. Oona tries desperately to write a letter to herself with paper and a pen she grabbed from Edward’s office, but partying crowds knock them onto the tracks. She runs toward a woman whom she recognizes from last year as the person who offered a pen and says she needs to tell herself about Edward and Peter. However, she isn’t able to finish her sentence before she leaps.

Oona wakes up in bed in a house on a tropical beach. When she notices a figure sleeping on the balcony, Oona screams and wakes her. It is Madeleine, who tells her it is 1995 and that they are in Vietnam. The 1994 Oona decided that 1995 would be a hard year with Kenzie still in elementary school and Edward’s betrayal fresh, so she arranged for Oona to spend a year getting lost. Oona wants to tell Madeline about Edward so she can be warned about him in the future, but Madeleine cautions her against this: The more mature Oonas never ask for help changing the future because she has accepted her fate, so Madeleine refuses to sabotage Oona’s relationships. Oona apologizes for the fight they have in 2003 over Madeleine’s boyfriend. When she asks for her letter, Madeleine says there’s no letter—just a present. It’s a ring—the same one Kenzie wears in 2003—and a note that tells Oona to use her anger to soar instead of burn.

The landscape is so beautiful that Oona feels better. She and her mother travel and see as much as they can, during which time Oona faces her fear of boats and gets on the water again. After a month of traveling, Madeleine goes back to New York, but Oona continues traveling, playing her guitar, and saying yes to as many experiences as she can. She finds that, in doing this, she begins to heal from the heartbreak of Edward. By the end of the year, she can’t wait to be with her mother again and feels ready for anything.