by Lara Avery
“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…”
“Well,” he started, rubbing his chin. “There’s a problem when you’re supposed to get married and an ex-girlfriend is—”
“Ex-girlfriend?” The term was like a lemon in her mouth. But that’s what she was, wasn’t she?
“Not like that,” he started again slowly. “It’s just hard to explain to a girl who is looking at me like she was in my arms yesterday.”
“Oh, really? I’m the one stuck in the past? How about you just showing up in my barn?”
Greg stepped away from the tree, toward Bryce. “I’m not saying I don’t do the same thing. I look at you the same way, I know that.”
“Yeah.” Bryce nodded. “You do.”
He sighed. “How could I not? You’re even more beautiful to me now, if that’s possible.”
Bryce’s hands shot up to her face. She pressed on her cheeks, as if to push the emotions away. “What would Gabby think if she heard you say that?”
“Gabby,” he said. He looked at the ground. “It’s complicated, Bry.”
He looked up slowly, putting his hands in his pockets. He always seemed so relaxed as he stepped on the diving platform. He stepped toward her the same way now.
“It wasn’t that Gabby and I weren’t thinking of you when…” He paused, looking for words. “When we started to be together.”
Bryce couldn’t help but say tensely, “I doubt that.” If they had thought of her, she wouldn’t be standing across from Greg tonight, the distance separating them. He would have been right there with her when she woke up, holding her hand.
“Bryce, you—your accident is why we’re together.”
“Oh, great,” Bryce said, her voice shaking.
“I don’t mean it like that. I mean, it brought us together. We were the only two people who knew what it was like to really miss you.” He sighed loudly. “If you hadn’t gone out of my life, there’s no way I would be with Gabby.”
Bryce stayed silent. The trees were dark silhouettes against the moonglow of an overcast night. Crickets sang. Cicadas sang louder.
Greg took a breath. “Five years were stolen from you, Bryce. And in a way, they were stolen from me, too.” Then he finished, sounding strained for the first time. “From us.”
He took her hand. She started to shake, thinking of something to say.
But by the time the words came to her, he had pressed his lips to hers. She felt a tingling down
her back and the warmth of his arms. Just this once, she told herself, but with her mouth on his, her hands on his neck, moving down to his shoulders, tasting him taste her, her mind became as blank and flat as the sky.
She stopped shaking.
When the caress of Greg’s lips became soft enough for air, Bryce stepped back. His breath was hot on her cheek. Should she kiss him again? She stood on the brink of the next move, like a platform. Feet on stone, skin feeling the endless potential for contact, complete submersion one step away…
Bryce dove back in.
alking was walking. Bryce didn’t even have to think about it anymore. She moved across the rubber floor of the Vanderbilt physical therapy room with all eyes on her.
“Bravo, Bryce!” Jane was loudest of all of them. She stood with a few other nurses Bryce recognized, Dr. Warren, and her parents.
Bryce had walked a straight line back and forth from one end of the room to the other, and then she had walked another line, faster, and another one, faster than that.
“This is truly remarkable, Bryce,” Dr. Warren said kindly.
Jane stepped over to give Bryce an enthusiastic rub on the shoulder. “Do you know how lucky you are, missy?”
“She’s not lucky, she’s a Graham,” her father called from behind the group, and Bryce couldn’t help but roll her eyes.
Dr. Warren smiled politely. “Very impressive.”
“Yeah, so…are all these scans and tests really necessary?” Bryce was pushing now, she knew that.
“I’m afraid so.”
Dr. Warren ushered Bryce to the waiting room. It had one window and smelled like medicine and cleaner, and here she was supposed to wait for a doctor to tell her that she was physically incapable of living a normal life.
She curled up in the chair.
“I heard it was a good show in there.” Carter sat next to her, smelling like clean clothes, holding two smoothies. They hadn’t talked since their trip to Percy Lake, and she felt guilty for ignoring him. “I accidentally bought an extra smoothie, so you can have this one if you want.”
Bryce’s mother looked up from a crossword and smiled at Carter.
Bryce buried herself deeper into the rough fabric of the chairs. “Nobody accidentally buys an extra smoothie.”
“Okay.” Carter looked exasperated. “I bought a smoothie just for you. Do you want it or not?”
Bryce’s dad snorted from behind his ESPN magazine.
“Yes,” Bryce said begrudgingly, and sat up.
But before she could get her lips around the straw, Jane appeared in the waiting room in her Garfield scrubs, her glasses on a chain around her neck. She summoned the Grahams.
“Wipe that look off your face, hon,” she said to Bryce cheerily. “It’s time to get your brain looked at.”
Inside the machine, Bryce could barely hear Dr. Warren’s directions to stay as still as possible. It was like Bryce was underwater and Dr. Warren was calling from above the surface. The problem was that Bryce wasn’t used to keeping still in the water; she was used to moving through it.
The mechanical bed came to a stop in the middle of a wide plastic tube. She was encased. She could barely breathe.
Bryce panicked, her eyes darting around the gray plastic walls surrounding her, inches from her face. There was a stinging heat behind her neck. They said it wouldn’t hurt. Why did it hurt? The pain spread to the familiar spot in her forehead, wrapping around her skull. Oh no.
It hurt worse than before. Her hands went numb. Her feet, too. She should stop the procedure. She tried to lift her head. Hopefully Dr. Warren would notice the movement. But then suddenly she wasn’t in the machine anymore.
A car with no muffler, speeding down the street.
Music with heavy bass was blaring, and a person next to her was laughing, her hair falling around her face. The car was full of people laughing. Something about it was not right. The music was too loud, or the people were too happy, something was off. Everything was sharper than it should be.
They stopped at a light, and Bryce had a terrible sinking feeling.
She tried to get the attention of the dark-haired person next to her, who was whipping her head to the beat, leaning and rocking to the bass. “Something’s wrong—” Bryce shouted, but her voice didn’t exist. She didn’t exist. It was as if she was pressed against glass, a one-way mirror where nobody could see her.
The scene froze, and Bryce watched the laughing faces as lightning seared across her skull again.
She saw red, red, and nothing but red.
When the lightning stopped, Bryce opened her eyes. She was awake on the vinyl bed, the scanner pushed back, and her mother, father, and Dr. Warren surrounded her, making sounds she couldn’t make out.
“I’m okay,” she said immediately, making sure to keep her eyes ahead. The pain was leaving, the heat was leaving, and in its place was the same strange clarity that filtered her vision when she first woke up.
“Sorry, I fell asleep. I think I had a nightmare.” She waited for the numbness to fade.
Her parents nodded with knit brows as Bryce slowly sat up, but Dr. Warren tried to ease her gently down.
She looked more flustered than Bryce had ever seen her. “Just, just one second, here, Bryce. Let me see if we can get any results, and we’ll go back to my office.”
Bryce let herself breathe shallow, openmouthed breaths, ignoring the image still painted on the back of her eyelids, the bright car full of laughter.
Dr. Warren’s office looked exactly the same, not a pen or paper out of place. She loomed behind her desk, gesturing to the Graham family to pull up chairs. Bryce preferred to stand.
The doctor ran her hands through her gray strands, then set them flat on the desk. Bryce heard them hit the wood with a dull slap. She shook the sound away.
“This is a difficult situation. The scan results are unclear. We’re going to try to see what we can salvage from them, but they’re…they’re confusing. I’m afraid we’re going to need to keep you here for observation, Bryce.”
“No!” Bryce cried. “No,” she said again. Her eyes darted toward the door. Something strange had happened to her, she knew that. It would keep happening. And she couldn’t let them find out. They would never let her leave.
Carter knocked, entering the office. “Still no clear results,” he said. He looked at Bryce, sensing tension in the room.
“See? This is pointless.” She threw up her hands.
But Dr. Warren wouldn’t give up. “I just wonder how much toll returning to the real world has had on your stress reflexes. I couldn’t get results, but I could tell you were in pain, Bryce. Perhaps your recovery time could be spent in a less stimulating environment. Maybe not here, but a retreat of some sort…”
The doctor looked at Bryce’s parents for approval.
Bryce stepped in between them. “I won’t. I’ll take more meds if you want.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” Dr. Warren said.
“I’ve had enough of this. I’m sorry. I’ve just—I’ve just had enough.” Bryce walked out of the office, bracing herself to push past anyone who would stop her. No one did.
On instinct, Bryce grabbed her phone from her pocket, her finger poised over Greg’s name. She couldn’t call him, could she? What had happened at the arboretum was a one-time thing. Just once, and it wasn’t going to happen again. She couldn’t let it happen again.
But then she pictured driving and driving until everything receded in the distance. Until her problems were far enough away to feel small and insignificant.
Can you come get me? she typed. Back entrance of hospital ASAP.
Immediately after she closed it, her phone vibrated.
c ya in 10.
She weaved through the halls, trying to lose herself in the hospital’s winding corridors. She walked and walked, but everything about the hallways was familiar—the fluorescent lights, the incessant beeping of machines, the cacophony of TVs mixing from diff
erent rooms, and then the sight of Carter standing beside a bed, silhouetted by the light.
Past him, a little boy with dark hair lay motionless. He looked peaceful, like he was taking a nap.
Carter looked up, meeting her gaze. “What are you doing here? No one knew where you went.”
Bryce gestured to the boy in the bed. “How long has he been here?”
“Too long,” he replied shortly.
“How?” Bryce asked. There was nothing else to say.
“Car accident,” he said flatly. “Head trauma.” His whole face twitched, as if the words hurt him physically.
Bryce looked closer at the boy. That dark hair. The high forehead. “Is that your brother?”
Carter nodded. “Sam,” he said. Their eyes met. There was a deep sadness in his voice. It all hit Bryce in a rush. Why Carter spent so much time in the neurology wing. Why he was so adamant she go easy on her family. You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone you love that way. It was true; she didn’t know. But he did.
Bryce felt ready to collapse. She was spent. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”
She found the back entrance, near the Dumpsters where the nurses went on cigarette breaks, and folded up against the smoke-stained wall. She counted in her head to avoid thinking about what happened in the CAT scan machine, to avoid wondering what would happen now. 1, 2, 3, 4…At 14, Carter reappeared.
“Don’t worry.” He sat next to her. “I won’t tell anyone you’re here.”
She didn’t respond. 15, 16, 17.
“You really should go back to your parents, though. They’re still in the office, waiting for you.” He turned to her. “You know, Dr. Warren can’t force you to do anything. I don’t know why you go so crazy.”
The counting stopped. She couldn’t tell him about the visions, about the strange and beautiful way the world looked now. She couldn’t even tell herself about the visions. What they were. Why they came. Bryce sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”