Anything But Ordinary

by Lara Avery

  Suddenly, Zen was grabbing Bryce by the elbows, standing her up. “Maid of honor!” she cried.

  “I don’t have anything,” she said in a low voice.

  “Just say what you feel right now,” Zen whispered.

  Bryce floated above the faces in the dim light. Greg’s groomsmen looked at Bryce, their polite smiles like carbon copies of one another, their toned arms crossed over their chests. Greg fiddled with his risotto. Bryce tightened her hand around the stem of the wineglass.

  What she felt. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here.”

  She stopped. That was supposed to sound like she was actually happy. She pushed on. “I remember the first time I heard Greg and Gabby were getting married.…” The sips of alcohol were swimming to her stomach like they had on that day at Los Pollitos. “We were at a restaurant and I had just, you know, come home. And I was happy for them.”

  Lies. Gabby’s face twisted into a smile, trying to keep back tears.

  “I’m happy for them now,” Bryce continued.

  Their lives stretched in front of them, and behind them. Bryce’s life was another day gone.

  “And I will always be happy for them.…” Her life was draining by the minute, by the second. And so was her blood. Isn’t that what Carter said? Draining from her brain.

  People were starting to fidget. Bryce swallowed her nerves. She should get it together. She didn’t want to leave them with this impression of her. These sniveling, stumbling words. She took a deep breath.

  “Gabby and Greg have been a blessing to me. They’re my best friends. As you know, it’s been an eventful few years for all of us.” Scattered laughter. Bryce paused, looking into her glass. She looked up. “It’s been amazing to have them around, to remind me of how great our pasts were. But I know the future’s going to be even better. To Gabby and Greg,” Bryce finished, because she didn’t know what she was supposed to do at the end. She didn’t know anything about any of this, and she needed some time. She needed more time.

  Elena stood up and raised her glass with everyone at the table. Bryce set down her wine with a splash and made a beeline for the bathroom.

  It was dark inside the small, tiled room. She couldn’t find the light switch. She shuffled through the space, feeling tile after tile. Why couldn’t she find one freaking light switch? She heard her own heavy breathing, scattered with sobs.

  Someone turned on the light.

  “Are you okay?” It was a man’s voice. Greg.

  “Yeah, I just need to wash my face,” Bryce said tensely.

  “I don’t like it either, Bryce,” he said, stepping farther inside, filling the room with the smell of cologne and his wine-stained breath. He looked toward the main room, and back to Bryce.

  “Hear me out,” he said. Bryce ran her hands under the water, her vision blurred. She could feel his whispers on her neck. “I can’t stop thinking about us. I think about my life with Gabby, and I think about what my life could be with you, and I always choose you. Always, and I always will.”

  Bryce turned off the water. Paper towels. Where were the paper towels? Greg turned her around and took her shoulders, breathing in her face. His eyes wouldn’t leave hers, and she caught them, a blazing blue. He loosened his grip.

  “Bryce, I don’t believe you want this to happen any more than I do, so let’s do something about it!”

  “I’m not going to change my mind.” Bryce shook him off and dried her hands on her dress. “And if you really didn’t want to be here, you wouldn’t be here.”

  He stood in the doorway, blocking her. “What do you mean?”

  Bryce stood facing him, looking him straight in the eye. “I mean that if you really didn’t want to be with Gabby, things would never have gotten this far. You wouldn’t be at the rehearsal dinner the night before your wedding.”

  He said nothing. He backed down from the doorway. “I can’t do it, Bry.”

  “I asked you this before, and I’ll ask you again.” Bryce kept her voice low, under the din of the restaurant. “What do you want?”

  “Honestly?” Greg grimaced. “I don’t know.” He hung his head.

  Bryce didn’t like to see him this way. She had cut herself off from him, but she had never stopped caring. He wasn’t happy, she could see that.

  She took his cheeks in her hands, not because she wanted him, but because she wanted him to do better.

  “It’s not just your life you’re deciding here, it’s Gabby’s, too. And she deserves to be happy. She deserves her fairy-tale prince.”

  He just nodded, solemnly. There was wetness in the corners of his eyes.

  She dropped her hands from his cheeks. There was nothing left in Bryce but heavy tiredness. She felt sucked dry. Emptied.

  She walked past Greg’s slumped figure, but before she hit the doors, she turned around. “You were going to be happy before me. Now be happy after me.”

  Outside she watched the traffic for a taxi. After several cars, she saw one speed through a yellow light a block away. With the hollow jolt of death in her, Bryce walked in front of the hurtling car.

  Two feet in front of her, the cab screeched to a halt. “Are you crazy?” the driver yelled out his open window. “You wanna get killed?”

  In answer, Bryce got inside and asked him to take her home.

  he next day, Bryce woke up. What a miracle. Call the president.

  During the ride home last night she had started laughing to herself about the ridiculousness of it all. The car pulled up to her house and she took out her money, laughing. She collapsed on her bed and laugh-cried herself to sleep. The driver must have thought she was out of her mind.

  Well, she was out of her mind. Technically, since a little more than five years ago, she was.

  Bryce had fallen asleep in her dress. She changed into sweatpants, washed her face, grabbed her red gown in its Saks bag from her closet, and asked her mother for a ride.

  Her mom greeted Bryce like it was any other morning, absently flipping through a design magazine. Dr. Warren must not have called them yet.

  “Good luck, baby,” she said when she pulled up to the church. “We’ll be there for the ceremony.”

  “Bye, Mom,” Bryce said, and kissed her on the cheek.

  She refused to let her thoughts drift away from the wedding. Did she have her shoes? Yes. Did she remember how to walk down the aisle? One, together. Two, together. She approached the church’s heavy wooden doors through the warm morning haze. They creaked open, and Bryce stepped into the velvety hush.

  A silk white ribbon hung from the pews on either side of the church’s center aisle—Gabby’s path to the altar. She and Greg would stand between two huge, mounted bouquets of white roses. Beautiful. Bryce veered off to the right, to the side room where everyone would be getting ready.

  At first she thought the beige room was empty; then she saw the bride sitting in the far corner. Her dress was thrown haphazardly across a chair, its full, creamy length on the carpeted floor like spilled milk.

  “Hey!” Bryce called. “Where is everyone?”

  Gabby didn’t look up. Her hands stayed folded in her lap, hair falling around her face. Bryce walked over and kneeled beside her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t,” Gabby said quietly from behind the curtain of her hair.

  “Don’t what?”

  She pulled back to face Bryce. She didn’t look like herself. She looked like a wax version of Gabby, a permanent scowl on her tear-stained face. “The wedding’s off.”

  “Oh!” Bryce let out a little cry. “Wha—why?”

  “I don’t know, Bryce,” Gabby said quietly. “Why don’t you tell me?” Her voice was tight, like coiled springs.

  Bryce stood. An anvil dropped between them. An unmovable, unchangeable truth.

  “I wish I had told you,” Bryce said, backing up. Gabby followed Bryce with her eyes.

  “How could you?”

  “It was a huge, giant mistake
.” She was yanking the words out, pulling them like string, and none of what she was saying could ever be right.

  “Which time?” Gabby’s voice was like ice.

  “What?”

  “Which time was it a mistake?”

  “Every time,” Bryce said automatically.

  “He still loves you.”

  “No, he doesn’t. I told him to make you happy.”

  Gabby’s eyes narrowed, her lip still trembling. “Too late.”

  Bryce wanted to disappear somewhere, blend into the air or the water.

  Gabby got up, too, stepping away from the chair with her arms stiffly at her sides. Her feet scuffed the white patch of fabric on the ground.

  “You’re standing on your dress,” Bryce said, feeling tears well up. She had ruined everything.

  “Don’t be an idiot.” Gabby laughed bitterly.

  The room was so silent then. So quiet. Bryce could hear cars pass by outside.

  Gabby broke the silence, staring at the floor. “I guess since you haven’t left yet, I could ask you why, but I think I kind of know why.” She looked at Bryce with a small, sad smile, her eyes still narrowed. Bryce didn’t understand.

  Before she could muster up a reply, Gabby continued. “He was still yours, in your mind, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know,” Bryce said, shaking. She clenched her jaw, trying to control it.

  “I feel sorry for you,” Gabby said. She spoke slowly, drawing out each word.

  “Don’t,” Bryce said. “It was my fault. I don’t know what—” She stopped. She wished she could stop saying that. She didn’t know anything. And it seemed like she never would. “Listen,” Bryce said, collecting herself.

  “I don’t have to listen to anything.” Gabby jumped on Bryce’s words.

  “I’ll be gone.” The words rushed out of her. “I mean it. I’ll leave you alone. You guys could work things out.”

  Gabby shook her head. “It’s too late, Bryce.” She gathered her dress in her arms and walked past Bryce to the door.

  “Gabby, please,” Bryce begged, but she didn’t know what she was asking for. Gabby stopped in the doorway. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  Her footfalls echoed in the empty church, and the door swung open, creaking, and finally shut.

  Soon Bryce left, too, leaving her gown on one of the pews as she exited through a side door. She didn’t call her mom to pick her up.

  The day was gray, her mind was gray.

  None of it was hitting her, but not because she wasn’t letting it. There was nothing left of her to absorb the impact. Bryce had done all the damage she could possibly do, and now everything was in pieces. Sometimes Bryce had to pause in the middle of a parking lot, or on someone’s lawn, and wrap her arms around her stomach. She was falling apart, and the pieces were going to float away from her. Her arm would fall off first, then a leg, her head would drift up to the sky like a balloon.

  The long, dry walk ended, and Bryce was home on River Drive, standing in front of the big blue house. Her fingers and toes were numb, and her limbs ached from tiredness. Her family was inside, laying out their clothes for a ceremony that wouldn’t happen.

  Bryce took a deep breath.

  “Forgive me,” she said out loud to everyone. To her family. To Carter. She walked up the sidewalk with the last ounce of energy she had left. All she wanted was to curl up under a blanket and hope that time passed quickly.

  Forgive me.

  ithout going into too much detail, Bryce stepped into her house and announced the canceled wedding. She stood behind the couch, where her mother sat in a knee-length silk dress next to her father in his best suit.

  “Why?” they had asked, worried.

  “It’ll blow over,” Bryce had said listlessly. “I’m going outside.”

  Bryce had made it about halfway through the pasture before she collapsed on her knees. She lay in the grass, the grass where she and Sydney pretended to shoot each other with guns, and let tears run down her cheek into the dirt.

  Bryce was dying. The sheer, hard fact of that would remain under everything she did, as if there was a voice that wasn’t hers saying, “Remember?”

  You’re eating a bowl of cereal, Bryce. Cold milk and puffy, flavored corn. Will these half-digested Cocoa Puffs still be inside you when your stomach stops working? Will your heart be in midbeat, or will it have just finished one? Will you be thinking of Carter or your family? Or will you just be at the drugstore with your mom, expiring with a list of useless prescriptions in your hand?

  The voice had infinite questions, but Bryce had no answers. The answers would only come with the thing itself.

  Since she had found herself in a hospital bed, the thought of dying hadn’t occurred to her once. It hadn’t come to her in dark thoughts. It hadn’t even come to her in visions. It had only been secondhand: In the tension behind everyone’s words, in the fear running across their faces when she sat up or stood, in the way people she didn’t know touched and talked to her, as if her closeness with death was the only thing about her they should pay attention to.

  So she treated the thought of death like a piece of floating debris in her way at the lake. Like a crate of oranges knocked over in one of the aisles of the supermarket. It was a temporary obstacle she could overcome.

  Bryce had learned to trust her body that way. If she did all the right things, it would take care of the rest. But she had remembered “the right things” too late. Somewhere, something had gone terribly wrong.

  Bryce sat up in the pasture, her body feeling like a squeezed sponge, her skin as salty dry as the grass around her.

  She headed back to the house.

  Inside, her parents were still in their good clothes. Bryce heard electronic beats blaring faintly from Sydney’s room.

  “You both look so nice,” Bryce said, emotion welling in her again. Her mother had put on pearls. Her father had once again forgotten to rinse a patch of shaving cream near his ear. “Why don’t you guys go out for brunch?”

  “What?” her mother scoffed, glancing sideways at her husband. “No.”

  “Yeah,” Bryce said, putting on a big smile. “Take me to see Carter and go. It’ll be fun. You probably haven’t been out in forever. Go to the Opryland.”

  Bryce’s mother swallowed, nodding. “We haven’t. It’s true, Mike.”

  “Let’s do it,” her father said quickly. His eyes were sparkling. “We might not look this presentable again for another year.”

  Thirty minutes later, Bryce watched her parents pull away from the Vanderbilt Medical Center parking lot. The overcast morning had changed into a sickly, clouded afternoon, where the sun burned the clouds’ edges like toast, and even the birds were too choked with wet air to sing.

  She passed through the sliding doors of the hospital, through the entryway lined by framed waterfalls, and ascended to the third floor with three quiet beeps of the elevator.

  Carter wasn’t here, Bryce knew that. He usually spent Saturdays at her house. Maybe he’d stop by the neurology wing in the evening to see Sam, but most likely he was at his apartment on campus, making himself an omelet. Doing his laundry. Staring at a book.

  Dr. Warren had pulled up the shades in her office, bathing the room with gray light from the window. She was bent over her desk, immersed in paperwork. Bryce knocked on the door frame.

  Dr. Warren looked up, her plucked eyebrows raised in surprise. “Bryce.”

  “We need to talk,” Bryce said.

  “All right.” Dr. Warren got up from her desk, glancing around the dim office. “You know what? Let’s eat.”

  They sat on a bench facing a manmade pool, giant pretzels and hot cheese between them. Spanish moss climbed tree trunks behind their bench, twisting around the gnarled branches before it dropped green toward the shady trickle of the water.

  After Bryce had chewed her last bite of pretzel, she turned to Dr. Warren. “So this is the part when you say ‘I told yo
u so,’ right?”

  Dr. Warren crossed one panty-hosed leg over the other. “I consider it my job to never have to tell anyone that.” She sighed. “What did Carter tell you?”

  “Everything.”

  Dr. Warren tossed the wax paper she was holding aside. Her steeled face was trying to hold back disappointment. “So you understand there’s very little we could have done in the first place. The only ‘I told you so’ is perhaps that we could have known sooner.”

  Bryce looked guiltily out to the fountain. “And now I’m going to pay.” A bitter laugh rose in her. “But not even me. My family…”

  Tears stung Bryce’s eyes for the third time that day, thinking of her parents waiting for her that morning. They had finally put on their good clothes again, and they were going out for a nice meal. Together. With a sob like a blow to her gut, Bryce imagined the day of her funeral. Her dad only owned one suit. He’d wear it that day, too.

  Dr. Warren leaned toward her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t think about that.”

  “I have to think about that,” Bryce said, shaking her head. “I have to.”

  The doctor stayed silent, uncrossing her legs and leaning her forearms on her knees. She looked like an athlete, too, with her chopped hair and wiry frame. She squinted out at the park, trying to solve a problem that had already been solved.

  “I haven’t really thought of anyone but myself,” Bryce said softly.

  “I’d imagine it would be difficult not to,” Dr. Warren responded. “You know, Bryce…it’s funny, the way you resisted.”

  Bryce looked at the doctor, who was smiling to herself.

  “No patient has ever been so feisty about her freedom. It made me look at all my patients differently. It made me remember that even though I know how to help them, I can’t quite imagine what they’re going through.” Dr. Warren leaned back against the bench, her eyes still narrowed in focus, looking into Bryce’s. “How would you like to move forward, Bryce?”

  “You mean tell them?” Bryce felt her insides burn at the thought.