Anything but Ordinary (9 page)

ou know I hate surprises, Dad.” Bryce followed her father from her bedroom to the basement storage room the next evening.

“Just wait, you’re gonna love it.” It took her dad several kicks to get the storage door open, but when he did, Bryce gasped.

All the boxes were gone. Rubber mats covered the unfinished floor, and on top of the mats stood a full rack of free weights, medicine balls, and a large piece of equipment that could transition from an elliptical to a rowing machine. The sole piece of decoration hung under one of the high, small windows: a
Rocky
poster. Sylvester Stallone’s gray sweat-suited form seemed to nod back at her in appreciation.

Her father put his hands on his hips proudly. His gold shirt with the Vanderbilt logo was tucked neatly into his pants, and a speck of shaving cream still hung near where his close-cropped hair met his neck. “Started installing it when you came home.”

“Wow.” Bryce stepped up to wrap her hand around a free weight. She picked it up. The metal was cool to the touch, and the weight of it jerked her weak arm down. She set it back on the rack and closed her eyes, letting memories overtake her.

She remembered putting one foot in front of the other on the rough, bright turquoise board. Pushing off her left, her head leading her body, limbs tight but relaxed. The world seemed to rotate around her as she stayed still in the air. For a millisecond that contained an eternity, she was weightless. Flying. Then she snapped, tight, and straightened, ready to break the surface. When she hit the water, her sight was a dark kaleidoscope. Her body hung in suspense in the water, then flew upward.

She broke for air on the sunny day, hitting the water with her fist, her dad shouting in celebration.

“Perfect!” He shouted. “REVERSE! Two and a half!” he yelled, pausing between each word, like a football announcer calling a touchdown. “SOMERSAULT! TUCK!”

She swam over and gave him a high five.

At the snap of the two hands, Bryce opened her eyes to the workout room, her father beside her. It was the dive she’d done when she hit her head. The dive she was
supposed
to do.

“Things didn’t work out the way we planned, did they?”

Her father gave her a long look. “No, they didn’t.” He took a breath, but then didn’t say anything else.

Bryce shivered. “It must have been hard.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Your old man wasn’t really sure what to do with himself when he wasn’t yelling at you all the time.” He chuckled, but the sound caught in his throat.

Bryce pretended to be occupied by picking up a medicine ball. She pressed it from her chest. “I know,” she said. “I saw the plane.” She thought of its still, silent form sitting in the unused barn.
You stopped doing everything. Working. Coaching.
Living.
“Still not done.”

He nodded wordlessly and looked away, blinking. He was blinking back tears, she realized.

He dabbed at his eyes with his wrist, gesturing around the room. “I thought about making it more like your physical therapy room at the hospital, but then I remembered those mornings at the Y.…”

When Bryce made the Tennessee AAU team in eighth grade, her father had driven her to the Nashville Y to lift weights most mornings before school. Bryce had hated it at first, groaning and snapping at her dad as he pulled her out of bed, even crying some days from the fatigue, but then he would say, “Okay. Go back to sleep. If you want to skip today, that’s fine.” She would stay silent, then, pulling on her sweatshirt, and walk ahead of him out to the car.

He turned her to face him now, both hands on her shoulders. “It’s not going to be easy.”

Bryce just nodded. She still resented her dad for not telling her that he’d stopped coaching. For spending every night holed up in the den. But then she looked around the room. It said everything that he couldn’t. That he was sorry for what happened. That he never meant to push her so hard. That he needed to get back to normal just as badly as she did.

Finally, she smiled, putting her hands on his. “You know me too well.”

Five minutes later, Bryce was in a Hilwood High T-shirt and shiny blue athletic shorts. She sat at the rowing machine, trying to keep her knobby knees from pressing together, gripping and regripping the handles to find the perfect fit.

She pushed her body backward off the metal plate by straightening her legs, yanking the bands with her. Her thigh muscles were already trembling. Her shoulders cried out with the effort. She clenched her jaw against the pain and smiled up at her dad.

“Thatta girl,” he said. “We’ll make the first goal five.”

Warmth ran through Bryce’s veins. Maybe it was the endorphins, maybe it was just muscle strain, but Bryce got a special pleasure from working out. It was her drug, and her dad had just provided her with unlimited doses.

“Unh!” she grunted, shooting her body backward, again yanking the rowing bands. She held the tension for a millisecond, then let go as she poised for another rep.

“Can we do this every day?” she asked her dad breathlessly.

“That’s the idea,” he answered.

She used to train
twice
a day. Mornings in the weight room, afternoons in the pool. Bryce shot back for another rep, watching her puny quads ball up under her shorts and release, feeling now like they were going to detach from the bone.

“Maybe we could make long-term goals, too,” Bryce panted. “Try to get my PRs back to what they were.”

“Bryce? Are you down here?” Bryce’s mother’s voice came down the stairs. A moment later she entered, holding a mug of steaming tea. She took in the miniature workout center with her eyebrows raised. “What is this?” she asked slowly.

“This…”
Bryce’s father said, “is a gift for my daughter.”

Bryce’s mother’s knuckles whitened around her mug. Her darting eyes rested on the
Rocky
poster. “You did all this without talking to me first?”

“It’s just some basic stuff.”

“You really think she’s in a condition to use all this?” her mother said tersely. “She has a CAT scan tomorrow, by the way.”

Her mother turned to Bryce. “Bryce, your laundry is
still
on the dryer.”

Bryce nodded, taking the hint. With her head down, she made her way out the door, grabbing the clean clothes on her way to her room. But her mother’s voice didn’t leave her.

“You can’t help yourself, can you?” she hissed.

Bryce’s head shot up. There were now two walls and a large room between her and her parents, but she could hear them as if they were right next to her. She wanted to cover her ears, or to move further away, but she knew somehow that it would make no difference.

“Do you
want
her to have a relapse? You heard what the doctor said. I’m not going to let you push her like you did before.”

Alone in her room, Bryce cringed. She could feel the words echo in her skull.

“Goddamnit, Beth.” Her father spoke in hardly more than a whisper. She always knew he was angry when his voice got that quiet. “I get it. I almost killed our daughter. You haven’t let me forget that in five years. But for god’s sake, let me help her get better.”

“I’m just trying to—”

“Would you just have her stay inside all day, never try and get back to normal?”

“No, but…” Her mother’s voice choked. “We’re supposed to be a team.”

Bryce sat on her bed, feeling sick. They weren’t a team anymore. Her accident had split them in two. And her recovery was pushing them further apart.

She heard her father scoff. “Wow, Beth, you were really thinking of the
team
when you took on a thousand clients and turned our house into your office.”

Bryce broke away to the small bathroom next to her room and turned on the faucet, letting the roar of the water drown her parents out, dabbing at the tears that were beginning to form in the corners of her eyes. When she came back into her room, she saw her phone was lit up with missed calls and text messages. They were all from Greg.

pls pick up bry. we need to talk
.

Another missed call after that. And then:

meet me tonite? arboretum @ midnight. i’ll be waiting.


Bryce kept scrolling. There was one final message:

for as long as it takes.


Bryce nodded to the empty room, letting a single tear slide down her cheek.

Her heart was pounding as she slid open the basement doors that night, tiptoeing around the pool, ducking through the tall grass. The route to the arboretum came to her as smoothly as a pike. That’s what this was. Nothing but muscle memory.

All the houses on River Drive shared a “backyard” with a half acre of land set aside by the state of Tennessee to house rare species of trees. About a mile beyond Bryce’s barn, off of County Road B, where dust broke through the pavement in cracks, the leaves of threatened trees shivered behind a wrought-iron fence. Plaques were driven in the dirt in front of each type—
AFRICAN TEAK, RED SANDALWOOD, WEST INDIAN CEDAR
. When she was five, the arboretum had just been sanctioned, and the trees were only inches taller than she was. Now people got married in the dappled light, kids played hide and seek behind the trunks, and older couples rested in the shade.

Tonight it was empty. Bryce had to suck in sideways to squeeze between the iron bars. She wandered between the rows, listening for Greg. It was ten past midnight. Maybe he had decided not to come. Bryce’s thoughts swam in the warm hush.

Here, midnight, five years ago, Bryce had watched Greg smoke a cigarette he took from his dad’s glove compartment. The ice packs strapped to their shoulders after practice had long ago melted. Greg had taken the cigarette out of his pocket on the walk from the barn, saying he had been saving it to celebrate the shittiest practice he had all year. He wanted to punish his body, he said. Bryce refused to get within ten feet of him.

That night, they walked parallel with two rows of trees between them, Bryce kicking dead dandelions, trying not to look at Greg surrounded by smoke.

“Admit it,” he called to her through the dark. “I look sexy. I look like the Marlboro Man.”

Bryce answered by grabbing her throat and gagging.

“It’s really not bad,” he said, and a fiery dot appeared briefly in the air. He exhaled and said, “Better than the stupid clove cigarettes Tommy Orr made me try that time.”

Bryce stopped, squinting at the cloudy figure she could barely make out between the skinny lines of young trees. “Better than fresh air? I doubt it.”

“Oh, Bryce,” he said, stamping out the cigarette on the sole of his Nikes. “You’re so pure.”

Then he had zigzagged his way through the trunks and kissed her gently on the mouth. It was true, what they said; he tasted like an ashtray. But surprisingly, Bryce didn’t mind it. Greg never smoked again.

“Sorry I’m late.”

Bryce glanced up. Her eyes found his form in the dark. Greg’s chiseled torso was visible under his polo shirt. He sidestepped to lean back on a tree, his hands in his pockets.

“That’s okay,” Bryce said. She lifted her chin. “So what are we doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

Bryce stepped closer to him.
We did talk,
she wanted to say. But she stopped herself. “Okay,” she said. “So…”