Anything but Ordinary(8)
While her parents got the car, Bryce wheeled to the front desk. Her legs were twitching with impatience as Dr. Warren wrote out prescriptions and schedules.
“Hey,” a voice said behind her. She turned to see Carter, who was wearing an enormous backpack. He smiled wide at her, his eyes crinkling in the corners. Freckles dotted his cheeks.
“Guess what?” Bryce almost shouted. Before he could say “What?” she squealed, “I’m going home!”
“Oh,” he said, looking surprised. “Right now?”
“Right now. I don’t even have to wait for a van. My parents are going to try to fit my chair in the back of their SUV.”
“Well, hot damn,” he said, feeling for the pen he always kept behind his ear. He looked a little crestfallen but managed a smile. “The neurology wing is going to be so boring without anyone demanding obscure trivia from me.”
“You’re not going home for summer break?”
“Ha,” he let out. “No such thing as summer break in med school.”
“Sorry,” Bryce said, smiling. “But at least everyone is going to get their lunch faster.”
He hesitated for a moment, then ripped off a corner of the sign-in paper and scrawled his number on it. “In case you ever need anything. Five-letter word for underneath or whatever.”
“Below.” Bryce smiled.
“Give your parents my best.”
“There they are,” Bryce said as a large black vehicle pulled up in front of the outpatient doors.
Carter got behind her, pushing Bryce across the lobby. Since she’d gained the strength to use her chair, Bryce had dismissed anyone who wanted to wheel her around like an infant. But Carter had done it without a word, and though she could hear his sneakers padding across the floor, he seemed to barely be there.
The midmorning light swept in through the automatic doors, opening and closing for people coming and going. Bryce put her feet on the rests of her chair, and let herself enjoy the sensation of being led into the sun.
ryce sat back in her seat as the sycamore trees whizzed by the windows of the SUV. Each tree and house and lamppost left a swirl of color as they drove past, like the trail of a painter’s brush. She looked away, trying to savor the feeling of coming home. Though she’d never admit it, she was tired. Tired of the fuss it took to do anything besides sleep, tired of the smell and taste of antibacterial everything, of being surrounded by stainless steel.
The buildings of Nashville had scattered to make way for rolling pasture that rose up before Bryce’s eyes like bread baking, and she felt the road change from pavement to gravel under the tires. They were in her neighborhood. She couldn’t wait to collapse on the giant corduroy couch in her living room and drink some lemonade out of the plastic Vanderbilt cups that passed for stemware at the Grahams’.
The car finally slowed, and Bryce’s vision was filled with her big blue house, the stone pathway up to the door seeming to float in the lawn like lilypads. It was beautiful and different in her new way of seeing, but just that it was still there was enough. Her father set up the wheelchair near the curb. Sydney stood outside the door in bare feet and an enormous T-shirt with the Muppets on it, looking half asleep.
“Sydney!” her father called. “Take Bryce to her room. We’ll go get everything set up inside.”
Sydney latched on to the chair and wheeled Bryce down the hill in the back of her house, toward the pool and the basement entrance. Bryce’s entrance.
Bryce’s room was the only bedroom downstairs, and on summer days she would leave the sliding doors open and blast her pump-up playlist from the speakers in the common room. She and Greg and Gabby would practice on the high dive, or take turns pushing each other into the water. Bryce smiled to herself. Her dad was always at the office, but when her mom was home, she would play Queen albums out of courtesy. For god’s sake, her mom would say if hip-hop entered the mix, coming around the side of the house, her pale knees streaked with dirt under her gardening apron, at least pick something I can sing along to.
Bryce couldn’t wait to see the bright blue of the pool. She had grown up as comfortable in the water as she was on land; before long, she was happiest in the air, the emerald lawns spilling out around her for miles. But as they came down the hill, she grimaced. The pool was full of bugs and sticks and leaves. The high dive was encrusted with dirt.
“There,” Sydney said as they reached the back entrance.
“I’m so glad to be home,” Bryce sighed, but as they wheeled through the sliding doors, she gasped.
The floor was covered in bright white tile, and the only places to sit were long, boxy shapes near the wall. In the corner sat a large black rectangle, hardly a chair, and where the antique grandfather clock had once been were vivid red platforms topped by black and white sculptures. Bryce felt like she was in the lobby of a trendy hotel.
“What…happened?” she stammered.
There was a moment of silence before Sydney looked up from her phone. “Oh, yeah, it’s really different, I bet,” she said, barely glancing at Bryce.
Bryce rolled forward, but it was not onto the rust-colored shag carpet. There were none of the tables with bowls of hard candy on them, or the vases of dried flowers she and Sydney picked for her mother when they were kids. This was not her basement.