Extraordinary (10 page)

But now it came to Phoebe as she glanced around that the two rooms were not really so different. Yes, the turquoise room at her house was cozy and warm and beautiful, while this room was white and barren. But in both, Mallory lived without leaving much of a personal mark beyond the occasional set of crumpled bedcovers. And in both, Mallory lived completely without items from her past.

Sad. And also weird?

Maybe there were still things about Mallory that Phoebe didn't know?

Phoebe looked past the barren room to the huge heap of quilts on the bed. At first she had assumed that Mallory was beneath it, asleep. But when she put her hand on them, the quilts collapsed into air.

The bed was empty.

Phoebe thought of Ryland's missing car, and of how Mallory had not returned messages all day. And she realized: Mallory's unauthorized snow day hadn't been about her sulking at home in bed. She had instead gone off somewhere with her brother—leaving their mother home alone, confused, no health care worker, and not taking her medication.

Phoebe sat down on the edge of Mallory's messy bed. She took in a shallow breath. Indignation and confusion filled her. She had spent an entire day obsessing over yesterday's conversation with Ryland, but somehow she had lost track of what she had originally meant that conversation to be about.

Until now.

She tried to think. First, she had better go back to Mrs. Tolliver and see if she could figure out the deal with the missed medication. Then, when the woman had calmed down a little, she would try calling Mallory again. Or—or she'd call Ryland. She'd scream at him this time. She'd tell him exactly what she thought. She wouldn't get distracted by his voice.

She got up to leave Mallory's room, to return to Mrs. Tolliver, and she looked around for a moment and noticed, once more, how barren it was.

And then Phoebe wondered: What did Ryland have in
his
room?

One moment, Phoebe was in Mallory's bedroom. The next, she was standing in the hall before the room next door, which she knew belonged to Ryland. His door was closed.

There was an instant during which Phoebe imagined being caught by Mrs. Tolliver. How embarrassing would it be if Mrs. Tolliver actually found her snooping in Ryland's bedroom? Or even outside, in front of it, with her hand on the doorknob?

Combined fear, shame, and excitement made Phoebe's heart beat fast. She knew she shouldn't do this. But she turned the doorknob anyway, because it was only going to be for a minute. Because she'd just take a quick look and do no harm. Because Mrs. Tolliver was totally out of it and Phoebe would never be caught.

Because she wanted to.

In a second, she had closed the door of Ryland's room gently behind her.

The room was dark, with only a small amount of daylight filtering in from around the edges of the window shades. Phoebe groped automatically for a light switch on the wall and pressed the one she found. When nothing happened, she thought it hadn't worked, and then realized that the room was indeed brightening, filling almost imperceptibly with a soft, warm, growing light.

The room and its contents gradually materialized before Phoebe's eyes. But it was not as if they had been there all along in the dark and were now revealed. It was as if they were budding right now, fed by the light itself, taking shape and form out of nothingness—first slender, shapeless shadows, then developing edge and texture, then seeming to enlarge, and then to subtly tighten, now taking on color, then depth, and then—then—

Phoebe gasped. She was no longer standing on the Berber carpet of a small suburban bedroom. She stood instead on an enchantingly worn stone path that lay just inside the archway of a private little walled garden.

Such a garden.

Although not large, the garden was bigger than the bedroom into which Phoebe had slipped. Beyond its low walls, which were covered with delicate new spring ivy, the vista of nature seemed endless, with purple hazy mountains in the far distance and a green forest in the near. But these only provided backdrop to the garden itself, for it was breathtakingly beautiful and yet cozy and welcoming; the kind of garden that seems the ideal mix of planning and accident, of wild nature and cultivation.

Sunlight flowed down on the garden from the clearest of late spring skies overhead; Phoebe could feel it warming her shoulders through her sweater. Just inside the garden walls were deep raised flower beds bursting exuberantly with lilies, daffodils, larkspur, sweet William, poppies, daisies, freesia, and anemones. Their scent drifted to Phoebe on a little breeze. Were these flowers even supposed to bloom at the same time like this, Phoebe wondered. Then she thought of Mrs. Tolliver's garden dreams. Surely this room, down the hall in her own home, was exactly what Mallory's mother longed for?

The strangeness of it all hit Phoebe. She felt her knees weaken. She reached out and found and gripped the stone archway, feeling its rough-hewn texture and its covering of ivy beneath her palm and fingers, and then against her back and head as she leaned on it.

The flowers. Their colors whirled before her eyes; their scents dizzied her. A few bees seemed to levitate above them; one drifted down into the petals of a half-open rose as if hypnotized, and Phoebe thought dazedly,
Me too
.

Nothing that the Rothschilds' own gardener had come up with was ever like this.

Finally she tore her gaze from the flowers and looked down. Yes, those were her feet. Her own regular size seven feet. She was wearing clunky red clogs that long ago, this morning, she had thought fun yet practical for a light snowy day, and a good way to start edging out of dressing entirely in black. But now, looking at them, Phoebe was forcefully reminded of the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, which had stuck out beneath Dorothy's house in Munchkinland and looked so completely ridiculous that it didn't matter to you that she'd been horribly, brutally killed.

Had Phoebe now somehow entered Oz? Some magical place? But there were no such places. Not in the real world. Cautiously, Phoebe put more weight back against the archway. It felt solid and real. It was supporting her . . .

She closed her eyes and rubbed them. Dropping her fists, she kept her eyes closed because, when she did open them, she decided, she would be in a regular bedroom, Ryland's bedroom. With her eyes closed, plausible theories came easily. Mrs. Tolliver had slipped her a hallucinatory pill. Somehow. For some reason. Or maybe Phoebe was actually home, in bed, and asleep. With a fever.

Did dreams have scents? Did hallucinations? Phoebe could smell the flowers, feel the breeze and the sunlight, hear—was it birdsong? Insect buzz? Both? Yes.

“One, two, three,” Phoebe whispered, and then she opened her eyes. There were her red feet again, solidly planted, and beneath them, the stone path. She turned to look at where the door of the room ought to be, just behind her. It was still there, weird in its ordinariness. She reached back for the knob and kept her hand—one hand—securely upon it.

Then she looked out again at the garden.

In the very center of the garden, ringed by the flower beds, lay a circular clearing or terrace, paved with the same mellow gray stone. Just beside this terrace, a large oak tree lofted its shapely branches high into the sky. And beneath those branches, in the perfect place for a little pagoda or a small pond or even a simple bench, stood a throne.

Once you saw the throne, you couldn't believe you hadn't noticed it before, for it was imposing; it commanded attention. Yet at the same time it fit completely and easily into the landscape, for it was made of trees and flowers.

A little table sat beside it, and on that table were a couple of stacked books. And as Phoebe stood with her mouth open, a plump little hermit thrush alighted on the top of the books and cocked its head to the side, its bright black eye seemingly fixed upon her.

Something about the bird jogged Phoebe's mind, and, one-handed, she groped for her phone. Click. The bird flew as she photographed the throne, the oak tree, the flower beds, and her red shoes on the path. Click, click. More flowers. The mountains in the distance. Click. She even stuck her arm out and got a shot of herself before the stone archway.

Taking the photos steadied Phoebe. She checked to make sure the camera had worked properly and that she had the pictures—she did—and then she released the doorknob behind her. Still clutching her phone, she stepped forward into the garden, slowly but compulsively following the stone path down the short flight of steps onto the terrace and up to the throne.

Her gaze was drawn to the books on the table. The one on top was familiar:
The House of Rothschild, Volume 1: Money's Prophets: 1798—1848
, by Niall Ferguson. Beneath it she could see
Volume 2: The World's Banker: 1849—1999.

Of course these were books she knew.

And now, finally, she was afraid. She was overwhelmed by fear, in fact; it swelled inside her throat. She had meant to take one more photograph, a close-up of the books, but she didn't. Instead, Phoebe turned and fled. Reaching the archway, she grabbed the doorknob again—miraculously, she remembered to grope for the light switch and press it off—and she was out. She was back.

Back in the dim hallway of Mrs. Tolliver's normal little ranch house.

Once Phoebe was back in reality, she was tempted to whip around, reopen the door to Ryland's bedroom, and peek in again. Instead she clutched her phone more tightly in her hand. She had evidence.

It was then that she realized she was wheezing, and that her chest felt tight. The next second she remembered that she didn't have an EpiPen with her. Where was her inhaler? At least she had that, but where? In the little front pocket of her backpack, which was, where? Phoebe remembered taking the backpack from her car. She'd had it with her on the doorstep outside the house when she'd rung the bell. Then Mrs. Tolliver had opened the door, and she'd come in—and she'd dropped the backpack in the living room.

She felt dizzy. With one hand on the wall, she walked rapidly toward the living room and Mrs. Tolliver and her backpack. She knew better than to panic. Panic made things worse. And there was no cause for panic; she knew what to do. The only thing that made this asthma attack different from any other time was that she'd just been in that magic garden—or that she had just hallucinated a magic garden—or dreamed it—or whatever.

Maybe she was allergic to something in that garden. Did that mean the garden had to be real? Could asthma be triggered by something imaginary? Actually, yes. Because wasn't anxiety imaginary? And anxiety had always been able to trigger Phoebe's asthma.

She reached the living room, and none too soon, either. The wheezing had stopped—she did not have enough breath to support it.

Which was bad, bad, oh, very bad.

Blurrily, Phoebe saw Mrs. Tolliver lying on the sofa, curled up on her side facing away from Phoebe. Phoebe ignored her and scanned frantically for her backpack.

There it was, a black lump on the beige carpet. She collapsed on the floor beside it and pulled it toward her. There were excruciating seconds of groping blindly inside before she closed her shaking hand around the familiar shape of her inhaler, dropping her phone in exchange.

Now, okay. Now she knew what she was doing. Sit up. Secure the spacer on the inhaler. Breathe out hard. Raise head. Lips around spacer, fingers on trigger. First puff, and with it, the good feel of the medication spray on the back of her throat. Wait; count. Breathe out hard again. Second puff. Normally she'd stop there—but now, a third puff.

Phoebe clutched her arms around her knees and put her head down on them, closing her eyes. She felt the smallest tear trickle out of one eye and moved her shoulder slightly to wipe it away. Mrs. Tolliver hadn't even stirred off her sofa to see what was wrong with Phoebe; maybe she was asleep. It didn't matter. Phoebe could take care of herself and she would. She had. She would take another couple of puffs soon. She was already recovering too. The tight feeling in her chest was beginning to ease. Wasn't it?

She just needed to sit still now. Sit still and breathe. And be calm.

Phoebe did not remember the next few minutes. It was as if she were a black dot in the center of an entirely white, entirely empty dream landscape. She focused only on her tight chest and her breathing, hearing nothing, not even thinking.

Then suddenly noise impinged on her—a door opening and closing, the stamp of feet, the rumble of voices saying words she couldn't make out. It was almost, Phoebe thought fuzzily, as if the voices were speaking some lilting, foreign language. But of course this was only because she was still so out of it. She knew, a moment later, that it was Mallory and Ryland who were speaking. Relief filled her.

Mallory was there. It was all right now, because her friend Mallory—Mallory the calm, Mallory the cool, Mallory who loved her—was there.

And yes, Mallory was kneeling beside her, arm around her shoulders, saying her name, grabbing her hand that was still clutching the inhaler.

“Oh my God, Phoebe. Are you okay?”

Phoebe tried to look up but could only manage to turn her head a little.

“She's bad, Ryland,” Mallory said. “Out of it. I'm calling 911.”

Phoebe couldn't understand the words Ryland said in reply. A spurt of alarm filled her, because this must mean she was sicker than she'd thought. She managed to get her head up so she could look at Mallory. Mallory was looking at her brother. “No,” she said to him distinctly. “We have to take care of Phoebe. She needs human medicine.” Then Mallory's eyes went back to Phoebe's face.