Anything But Ordinary

by Lara Avery

  “Bryce,” Carter called through the open door, but she shut it behind her before he could say more. Her heartbeat pulsed in her fingertips. She stepped slowly up the walkway and around the side of the house. She looked back as Carter finally pulled away. Night was coming, and fireflies started making dots in the tall plants lining the curb.

  If a day like this happened five years ago, she would have immediately called her best friend. She would have said hi to her parents sitting in the living room with her phone already to her ear, gone down to her room, flopped on her bed with a handful of trail mix, and figured things out.

  But she couldn’t do any of that. Her room wasn’t her room, her best friend wasn’t waiting at home for her call.

  Bryce stayed in the middle of the lawn, surrounded by the stretching road and scattered houses, and realized River Drive was the only thing that hadn’t changed.

  It was the people—the people settling into their houses, those people and the thick pastures that separated them, the GO TENNESSEE! signs on their long lawns—it was them Bryce had to ask:

  “What the hell?”

  Nobody answered, of course, and she went inside.

  ryce found her mother in her home office at the back of the house, her face glowing blue from the monitor’s light. The office used to be the place where Bryce and Sydney kicked off their muddy galoshes or threw their coats, but now the small space was outfitted with a flat-screen computer and prints of some of the places her mother had designed. Out of habit, or maybe because she refused to acknowledge this wasn’t the mudroom anymore, Bryce kicked off her boots and set them in the corner. Her mother turned to face her.

  “You knew,” Bryce said accusingly.

  Her mom sat up in her Aeron chair, her spine stiff. “About Greg and Gabby? Are they… ?” She slumped. “I had heard they were dating,” she admitted.

  “Engaged,” Bryce said, making her hands into fists. The sky outside the tall windows had faded to black. “Not dating. Engaged.” She tried to make her words hard. She wanted to hold on to the anger, to feel anything besides emptiness. But the anger was slipping away from her, out of her grasp, like water down a drain. Her lip began to quiver.

  “No,” her mom whispered, getting up from the desk to put an arm around Bryce. “Oh, honey.”

  At first Bryce tried to resist, but then she let her head fall on her mother’s shoulder. She used to do the same thing when she had done badly at meets, when her father’s face fell in disappointment. She felt that way now. Like she had lost.

  Her mother’s voice sounded quiet above her. “I had hoped it was just a college thing. I didn’t want to say anything in case they weren’t still together, but…” With her head in the crook of her shoulder, Bryce could feel her mother shake her head. “I should have told you. It was stupid of me. I should have told you.”

  She let her mother rock her back and forth, closing her eyes.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Bryce said, even though it wasn’t. It might never be okay again, but right now that seemed somehow beside the point.

  “At least the toilet is clean,” Bryce called through the crack in the door. It was the next day, and she was standing outside the only indoor restroom of the Belle Meade mansion.

  “The toilet was clean,” Sydney’s voice corrected, and Bryce heard the sounds of retching.

  Bryce tried not to feel nauseous herself. The potpourri and decrepit lace that covered every surface of the old Southern house didn’t help.

  “Girls?” their mother called from down the hall. “Everything okay?”

  Bryce slipped into the bathroom, holding her nose. “Mom’s coming,” she said, panicky. Sydney shrugged from her kneeling position on the cracked tile.

  “Yep, Sydney’s just having stomach issues,” Bryce called, peeking from behind the door. “Must have been bad cream cheese.”

  “Don’t even bother,” Sydney said, still halfway inside the bowl. “They know I’m hung over.”

  “I’m just trying to help,” Bryce said.

  “Don’t,” Sydney replied shortly. “You can leave now.”

  Bryce sighed. That morning, her mom had helped her upstairs to see her dad and Sydney gathered in the kitchen, Sydney’s eye makeup running from the night before.

  “Family outing,” Sydney had muttered, and they piled into the van.

  Her face had become increasingly pale on the winding drive to the other edge of Nashville. Their mother chattered up front about how they used to go to Belle Meade when the girls were small.

  “Y’all just loved the horses,” her mom had said, adopting the accent of the reenactors who wandered the historical plantation in Civil War–era clothes.

  Sydney had put her arms inside her oversized Ramones T-shirt and swallowed what was probably puke.

  Now she stood up from the toilet, wiping her mouth. Her face was still tinged green.

  “You look like a kid on one of those Just Say No posters,” Bryce said.

  “You would know all about being a poster child, wouldn’t you?” Sydney responded, scrunching her brunette curls in the mirror.

  Bryce stood beside Sydney. They were the same height and had the same hazel eyes. Their dad’s eyes. Dad’s dark eyebrows. Their mother’s ski-jump nose. If Bryce pushed back her waves, the blond disappearing, they nearly looked like twins. Minus the lip-piercing and heavy eyeliner. Bryce wondered vaguely what Sydney would look like now if she had been around.

  “What is it like to be hung over?” she asked Sydney’s pale reflection.

  Sydney made a face and turned to her sister. “I don’t know, Bryce. What is it like to wake up from a coma?”

  “Touché,” Bryce said.

  Their mother was waiting around the corner of the creaky mansion corridor with a new piece of plantation trivia, a small shopping bag hanging from her wrist. Their father looked comically out of place near the grand staircase, staring up at portraits in his Vanderbilt T-shirt and athletic shorts.

  “You remember this one, Bryce?”

  He pointed to an intricate portrait of a woman in a blue hoop skirt, her fan poised as it would be on a sweltering day like today. Her hair was slicked and her rouge formed perfect small circles, but she had a sparkle in her eye like she had just done something she shouldn’t.

  “The Southern Mona Lisa.” Bryce smiled.

  Her mother let out a happy sigh and wrapped Bryce in a hug.

  Sydney twisted her curls into a messy bun and grabbed her phone from a nearby table. “I’m going back out to the car,” she announced.

  Bryce’s father looked at Sydney, his lips in a straight line. “We just got here.”

  Her mother shot her dad a look. “Are you sure, sweetie?” she said awkwardly, her arm around Bryce. “You want some pop or something?”

  “Nah, you don’t need me now that the prodigal daughter has returned.” Sydney gestured to Bryce.

  “Come on, Syd. Don’t be like that,” Bryce said.

  “Screw off, Bryce,” Sydney said with a fake smile, and she turned to the door.

  They decided to call it a day when her mom stepped in a pile of droppings left by the geese that roamed the front lawn. Though her dad laughed a little too heartily, he bent over with an old newspaper to wipe off his wife’s loafers. When Bryce saw Sydney again, she was leaning against the whitewashed fence, staring at the horses as she massaged her head.

  The sycamores seemed oddly still to Bryce without the constant chirp of cicadas, but they didn’t come out until sunset. Her father used to wager he could hear them even in the daytime, if everyone held their breath for a long time, as quiet as they could be. Bryce could never really be sure if she could actually hear them, or if it was just that she wanted to believe him.

  She stepped lightly underneath the mossy branches, only hobbling slightly, her legs sore from the constant effort. Dr. Warren said her body would never be at its best again, but what did she know? Bryce fanned herself against the wet heat.

  And then sh
e heard it, brief but clear: the high, chirping cry of a cicada. At first it echoed like it came from far away, and then it seemed to push through the silence and join with another call right next to her, as full and clear as if it were beside her ear. Bryce moved a hand up to touch it, but nothing was there. I knew that, she mused. They’re far away. I can tell. She put her hand down. They’re waiting for night. The calls came again, washing over her, making the air around her pulse.

  After a moment, it stopped. The midday sun broke through in patches, and the trees were silent once more.

  She set the fan down at her side and turned her face up to the sky. She was here on earth, wasn’t she? She was better off than she had been a month ago. She looked down at her feet, so pale in strappy sandals against the green grass. She needed sun. She needed exercise. It was time to accept that things were different, but she could be different, too.

  “Bryce, honey!” her mother called to her from where their van was parked. “Let’s go!”

  She looked at her family, her mother next to the SUV, her father at the steering wheel, and Sydney, her long legs stretched across the bucket seat, closing the door. They might not be as happy as they used to be, but they were there, together, and Bryce was awake, alive, walking toward them.

  Back on River Drive, Bryce stepped down the stairs and let out an “Ahhh” at the air-conditioning. She moved slowly across the basement tile in her bare feet and stripped off her damp tank top and shorts, tossing them in the hamper in the corner of her room. She opened her closet. Nothing but everyone’s old clothes and a pair of skis.

  Clothes, she added to the list. Sun, exercise, and clothes. She chose an old tunic of her mother’s from the seventies. Nothing fancy, Bryce thought as she pulled the white cotton over her head. Literally, just clothes of my own. The tunic was short on her but it would have to do.

  “Bryce!” her father called down the stairs. Bryce groaned. Her name sounded loud and short when her father yelled it, as if he were yelling “Go!” at diving practice.

  “What?” Bryce yelled back.

  “Carter is here!”

  Carter. She sat on her bed. Oh god, oh god, oh god, Bryce thought.

  “He’s just gonna come around back,” her father yelled.

  “No!” Bryce yelled.

  “What?” her father yelled.

  “Never mind,” Bryce said. It was pointless, she saw as she came out of her room and spotted Carter through the glass doors, making his way down the hill. He stopped at the pool, staring down into the water. Her father had cleaned it recently, and it was back to its pristine turquoise blue.

  Bryce took a deep breath. What should she say? “Why?” was the only thing she could think of.

  Carter had picked a leaf and was crouched over the pool with it, trying to help a floating bug to safety. Bryce jiggled her arms a little bit to relax, like she used to do on the platform before she dove. She swallowed and walked through the doors onto the patio.

  “Hi,” Carter said, looking at a spot above her head.

  Bryce could see that he had just come from the hospital. He was still wearing his ID badge on the pocket of a worn button-down shirt, through which she could see the lines of his upper half. He was lean and long and solid, all the way from his broad shoulders down to the waist of his khaki cutoffs.

  “Hey,” Bryce said, trying not to smile.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Great,” Bryce responded. He was now staring at his feet. Bryce continued, “I mean, physically. I’m sore, but…good.”

  “Good,” he echoed.

  “Yeah,” Bryce said, looking at him pointedly. He still avoided her eyes. Was he going to say something about the other day? She wished he would make a joke. This clean, formal version of Carter was making her nervous. “Am I due to go in for a checkup or something?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “Remember when you made me take you to that restaurant?”

  Before Bryce could nod, he continued. “I forgot to tell you. Before I left, I told Dr. Warren where I was going. She said it was a good idea. Didn’t seem to think you’d be coming in much on your own. So. She decided to work something out where you don’t have to go all the way to the medical center, if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” Bryce said quickly. “I definitely do not want to.”

  “There ya go,” Carter said, shrugging.

  “And instead…”

  “I will be checking up. On you,” he said slowly, almost one word at a time.

  “Is that standard procedure?” she asked, tilting her head, smiling.

  He squinted off into the distance. “Not really.”

  Bryce made her way over to the edge of the pool, where Carter’s bug was crawling away. “You know, if med school doesn’t work out, you could always find work rescuing drowning insects.”

  Finally, a small laugh. “At least then I wouldn’t be tempted by beautiful patients.”

  Bryce froze, looking at him.

  “What happened the other day was completely out of line. I apologize.”

  “That’s okay,” Bryce said, but cursed herself immediately afterward. She should say something more—well, more official. But she was distracted. Carter had said she was beautiful. He had just gone ahead and said it. “Apology accepted,” she added.

  “And it wasn’t professional,” Carter went on, taking a breath. “Not only was it unprofessional, it was inappropriate. You know, to what—to what you were feeling at the time.”

  “Right,” Bryce said. But she didn’t mean “right.”

  She looked at him. His brow was unfurrowed, but his head was still down. “So.” He looked up at her and forced a smile. “Do you remember what ‘checking vital signs’ means?”

  Bryce smiled back. “Is that what they call it these days?”

  Carter blushed. “It means you’ll have to stay in one place for ten minutes. Can you do that?”

  “I can try,” Bryce said with mock exasperation, and sat gingerly on a pool chair while Carter removed a stethoscope from his shoulder bag.

  He kneeled next to her and put the cold disc to her chest. Bryce felt an electric jolt with his hand near her skin. He stared in concentration, his mouth turned down at the corners.

  “A little fast, but consistent,” he said after a minute, looking at his watch.

  He recorded the number on her chart. Bryce could see somebody had typed her name incorrectly on the top of the paper; BRICE GRAHAM, it read. Carter had crossed out the i and replaced it with a y in his own scratchy writing. He took her blood pressure and temperature, staying quiet all the while.

  “Well.” He stood up.

  For some reason the motion was too fast for Bryce.

  A small fire seemed to travel up the base of her neck, to her skull, behind her eyes. At first, Bryce just thought she was blushing, but no, this was a real fire. Pain branded the top of her spine and traveled in shots of heat to her forehead. This again. She looked down, trying to get control.

  “Wait,” she tried to say.

  But the cement by the pool turned on its side. Again, she fell. It was almost as if Bryce moved forward right into it, like a wall.

  A spring day.

  She was looking through a crack in the hospital curtain. A young man in a white shirt was facing away from her, bending over a bed. There lay Bryce’s body in a light-blue gown.

  The young man pulled the covers closer to her face as a cool breeze came through the open window, washing away the hospital smell. He sat down on one of the empty chairs and cracked open a book with a gold cover and a deep red spine.

  The sound was clear. No crackling or buzzing, just the sweet song of birds from outside. He began to speak.

  “I, uh. I heard you like Westerns.” He cleared his throat. “This is a biography of Wyatt Earp. Ahem. Sheriff Wyatt Earp was a man of swift and decisive action.…”

  The poolside cement appeared again, like it was knocking her over, and she was tipped back to
the chair. Her head jerked back.

  The hot pain flashed once again, then faded into cool relief. She blinked, situated herself, and shook her hands out of the numb feeling.

  “Yeah? Do you need something?” Carter was saying, standing over her. “Bryce?”

  Bryce shook the vision away. “Huh?” she said, pulling her mother’s tunic around her legs. She bit her lip. “No.”

  “All right, then,” he said, putting his bag over his shoulder. “Stay healthy.” He looked at Bryce. “I mean that.” He turned away from her, heading up the hill.

  “Carter, wait.” Bryce blinked slowly.

  Flashes of what she had just seen would not leave her. The person by the bed. The way his voice sounded. There was something connecting them to the reality of Carter next to her, right then. Something had just fallen into place.

  Carter stopped.

  “You spent a lot of time with me when I was asleep, didn’t you?” she asked. “You were there.”

  Carter found Bryce’s eyes and held them there for a second. A long second, puzzling. “Almost every day.”

  And with that, Carter continued up the hill. Bryce watched his figure as he disappeared around the house. He was a person from her strange dreams, but she didn’t know him before her accident. She had known he was with her while she slept—before anyone told her.

  Which meant that the visions from her bedside were not just visions. They were real.

  Bryce leaned against the chair, her stomach in knots. Gray clouds were collecting over the sun, fading the blue sky like a sheet washed too many times. Little laps of the now darkening pool water spilled over the sides—the wind had picked up this afternoon.

  She closed her eyes, trying to bring up the scenes like the one she had just been inside of. Tipping back and forth from her hospital room, her body behind the blue curtain; Sydney as a child; her parents drifting around her like they barely knew each other; Greg in the barn; Carter sitting, reading on a spring day she had never known. They were all looped in her mind now, somehow.

  Something had gone too far when her brain reignited. She could be in a time where she wasn’t supposed to be, she could see what she wasn’t supposed to see. Colors seemed to fall on her like overturned buckets of paint, and each sound was its own little orchestra. Her senses were wide open now, and they would stay that way, wider than she could have ever imagined.