Extraordinary (22 page)

Ryland's eyes narrowed. Then he nodded. “Yes. I do.”

Phoebe breathed. “Really?”

“Really.” He reached out a hand and she let him pull her to him and hold her. She relaxed, again feeling loved and cared for, again feeling as if there might be a floor beneath her, even if it had gone soft and spongy for a few seconds.

Ryland said, “Your mother is fighting a battle in there, by herself. But she doesn't give up easily. You know that about her. I think she'll fight into waking up in the end. She's an unusually strong person, and she has a lot to live for, and she knows it.”

“Yes,” said Phoebe. “That's all true. If anybody can force herself to wake up, it would be her. Thank you. You don't know how much it helps me to hear you believe that.”

Ryland's breath tickled her ear; it was warmer than his skin. “I just don't see your mother
agreeing
to die,” said Ryland, which almost made Phoebe smile.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.”

“I wonder what sort of person would agree to die,” said Ryland. “Someone for whom life was very bad, obviously. Who else? What other reasons might make that happen, do you think? What would make you give up that way, Phoebe?”

“I don't know,” said Phoebe. She could feel that Ryland's body had gone still against hers; he felt like that sometimes, hard, alien. After a while she realized he was truly waiting for a reply from her. “If life was bad,” she said feebly, repeating what he'd said, not wanting to think about it. “Hopeless.”

“Have
you
ever felt that way?” asked Ryland. “Hopeless?”

Phoebe buried her face in Ryland's shoulder, fighting a sudden sense of vertigo, which it made no sense she should feel. But she did.
Now,
she thought.
Right now. Don't you know that?

“You just told me to hope,” she managed to say.

“Yes, I did, didn't I?” said Ryland thoughtfully. “Even when it's not reasonable, one should hope.”

“Are you—not reasonable—but don't you think—before, you said—”

Ryland interrupted smoothly. “But before we got sidetracked, we were talking about your father. And it was an important conversation, so I want to go back to it, sweetheart. Okay? We can talk later about how hopeless you're feeling. Your father—he's just barely hanging on, isn't that right? Didn't you say that? That he hardly recognized you today?”

Phoebe nodded against Ryland's chest. “Yes.” She winced, remembering. Drew's face was as lined now as if he had aged ten years.

“So, and this is just a question, Phoebe. You wanted to tell him about us, but would it help him in any way to cope with life right now, if he knew about you and me?”

“I don't know,” Phoebe said. “Maybe. Maybe he'd feel better able to cope if he knew that you were taking such good care of me?” But even she could hear the uncertainty in her voice.

Ryland smiled. “Well. If he knew me, and trusted me. Maybe. But since he doesn't, I honestly think it would add to his worries. Remember all the things we talked about originally? My age? Your youth?”

Phoebe felt so tired, and yet, at the same time, so knotted up. She leaned into Ryland. “Oh. Right. You're so smart. All right, then. I won't tell him. I don't—I don't even remember why I thought it was a good idea.” And she didn't, although it had been something about honesty. Something about feeling the floor beneath her—but wait, Ryland was her floor. And honesty didn't matter; there were things that mattered more. Being held and having someone. Even just one person could hold you up—keep you from falling—one person was all you needed. Just the one right person.

Ryland nodded. “Good.” He held Phoebe even closer. “It's so interesting,” he said thoughtfully, after another moment. “The more time I spend with you, the more I think about what Mallory said about you. And how true it is.”

Phoebe pushed back away from Ryland, so she could see his face. “What do you mean? That I'm not special? That I'm not—” The word from Mallory's fairy tale came to her. “Not
extraordinary
?”

Why did this particular topic keep coming up? She didn't understand. And why did it hurt more, each time it did?

“Well, yes, but—”

“Stop it!” said Phoebe. “Stop it!”

It was as if a tiny pinprick had been bored into her skin, something that would have healed on its own without too much trouble, except that it wasn't being allowed to scab over. Instead it was being poked, irritated, enlarged, and made worse. First Mallory. Now Ryland.

Phoebe spoke rapidly. “What Mallory said was that I'm nothing without, you know, my family and money and—you know. Whereas my mother, well, she's so amazing just all on her own. Extraordinary. My mother's extraordinary. I know that!”

Ryland cupped Phoebe's face. “Do you believe Mallory, then? That you're
not
extraordinary?”

His eyes had never been so intense.

“I guess,” Phoebe said slowly.

“So you're ordinary. Just say it, in so many words. You'll feel better.”

Phoebe chewed on the inside of her cheek. She had talked with Benjamin about this, and she had been calm then. She could be calm now. She had to be. She had to explain to Ryland what she really thought. She had to make him understand. It felt so—so vital.

She reached automatically for her inhaler. She felt him watching her, still calmly, as she had her puffs and then, a few minutes later, she returned to the conversation, groping again for words, the right words.

She said, “Spending all this time with my mother at the hospital . . . I've had time to think about her. And about us—me and her, our family.”

“And what have you thought?”

“
She
thinks I'm special. My mother. I'm not, okay, maybe I agree with Mallory that I'm not very amazing, in the larger sense, not extraordinary. But my mother thinks I am—my dad too, of course—and that, well, that does something to me. I can't really explain it.”

“Try.”

Oddly, as Phoebe searched now for words to explain how safe she had always felt in her family, it was as if she was herself rebuilding that shaky floor beneath her feet.

“My parents love me,” she said. “And that gives me something foundational, a confidence that's very basic. It has nothing to do with money or an impressive family. That's what Mallory didn't understand.”
Or you, either
. “It's just about love,
unearned
love, even.”

“What do you mean, unearned love? Say more.”

“Well, I guess it's basic,” she said. “Think of babies. There's no reason to love a baby for anything but the fact that it's there. The baby doesn't do anything to earn love, except being little and cute, which all babies are automatically. So, the baby is ordinary, right? But it feels special and fabulous before it even understands language, just because everybody is cooing over it and cuddling it and feeding it and loving it.”

Phoebe paused. “If somebody loves the baby and takes care of it, then automatically, the baby believes it's special. And that conviction gets, sort of, baked permanently into its feelings.”

“But then the baby grows up,” Ryland said. “And finds out it's not special. It's just a regular human being like millions of others. Nothing extraordinary. What then?”

Phoebe dug deeper and, miraculously, found an answer. “Well, that's the thing. Maybe life teaches the baby—not a baby anymore—that he or she isn't extraordinary. But because of all that love right from the start, deep inside, he or she can never really believe it completely. He or she is secretly convinced of his specialness. That's what early parental love gives to you. It's primal. It's probably why the human race survives.”

She had said it. She knew she had somehow blundered her way into the truth, or at least, her own truth. She drew in a deep breath that she felt all the way to the bottom of her lungs.

Ryland said nothing.

“It's pretty amazing, isn't it?” said Phoebe. She smiled shyly. “I sit there by my mother's bedside, and I know that I'll be the first thing she wants to see when she opens her eyes. She gave me this primal belief in my specialness when I was an infant, just by loving me. I don't deserve it, I completely don't deserve it, but I have it anyway.”

“And nothing can take it away?” Ryland reached out. He stroked Phoebe's back. It felt good, but she had the fleeting thought it was the kind of indifferent caress you might give a stray cat.

“That's where I keep landing on this,” said Phoebe. She laughed a little; but now there was a sob in it too. “I'm absolutely nothing special and I know it. Mallory's right.”
You're right.
“But deeper down, my ego doesn't believe that, and, well, that's just how it is.”

“So. Because your extraordinary mom loved you when you were a baby, that set your own value high within yourself, is what you're saying.”

Phoebe frowned. He hadn't understood after all. But she now knew how to explain. “No, not exactly. I didn't know my mother was Catherine Rothschild. I was a baby, I knew squat.”

Then Phoebe had a thought and it was this: Even if Catherine died tomorrow, even if Drew did also, she would still have had their love. Nothing that happened in the past could be taken away. This was an amazing gift. The past was done and over and settled; you couldn't get it back, but still, whatever good you had gotten from it, spiritually, emotionally, would be yours for your lifetime.

Phoebe discovered that she was babbling this out, in a flurry of excitement. “God,” she finished. “I'm totally incoherent, but do you see what I'm saying?
Do you
?”

She looked up into Ryland's impassive face.

He did not reply for a full minute. Then, slowly, he nodded. “I believe so.” He spoke drily. “You're saying that my sister's words about you not being worthy of your mother and family resonate in you. You know they're true. But at the same time you have a—sorry, Phoebe—a stupid infantile ego that stubbornly refuses to face reality.”

Phoebe blinked. Then she laughed. It was a shocked, uncertain laugh. She searched Ryland's face. Was he joking? “I—I guess you can look at it that way. That wasn't quite what I meant. At least, I don't think it was. Maybe—maybe it's true.”

There was silence. The good feeling—the floor—that Phoebe had had as she thought about her parents' love was rapidly receding again, replaced by uncertainty. She tried to cuddle up close to Ryland.

“Ryland?” she asked tentatively. “What are you thinking?”

It took him a moment to respond. “I'm remembering something else my sister said about you, before I met you. It fits in with what you were just saying.”

Phoebe now just felt tired. So tired and empty. “What is it?”

“She said that the big psychological struggle of your life was your relationship with your mother and, in a more abstract sense, with the Rothschild family history. She said that you would use every excuse you could find to not look at it straight on and take it seriously.”

Phoebe sat up. “I am taking it seriously. That's what I was just talking about. It's nothing to do with the Rothschilds—I was talking about parents and children and love and how in any family—”

“No, actually. It seemed to me you were still talking about how you could be a bratty toddler—just as my sister said—and that was okay.”

Phoebe was very, very still. Then she got up. “No,” she managed. “You totally misunderstood me.” Suddenly she felt as if she were alone with a total stranger.

A hostile stranger. But why?
Why
? Was what she had said so terrible? It must have been. Even if she couldn't understand why.

Was he right after all? Was Mallory?

She couldn't stop herself from talking. “Look,” she said desperately. “I don't understand why Mallory harped on this and I—I don't understand why you are now too.”

Then fury overtook her.

“The big psychological struggle of my life, Ryland? I mean, seriously? The way I feel now, if I get to be intimidated by my mother and worry about living up to her expectations, that would be a wonderful problem to have and I hope I get to have it, and her, for thirty or forty more years.”

She glared.

“I see,” said Ryland.

But then, abruptly, the fight went out of Phoebe. Did he really think she was a bratty toddler? Why hadn't he understood her? Was she wrong? Stupid?

“Phoebe,” said Ryland. His voice was very soft.

She looked at him. Then she turned away and looked for her backpack. Finally she spotted it on the kitchen counter. She went there and picked it up. And then, when she turned toward the door, meaning to leave, she found that Ryland was up also, and he was standing directly in her path. With his arms out.

She couldn't help herself. She burst into tears and flung herself, wordless, fully into his arms. He could say anything he wanted to. Anything he needed to. She would listen. If only he would hold her, if only he would be there for her, she would listen.

“Phoebe,” he said quietly. “Let's go to bed. I think I'll be better able to communicate with you there.”

Phoebe felt herself go very still.

“Please, Phoebe. Let's try again.”

“I don't know . . .”

“Phoebe.”

It felt so good to be in his arms. To be held like this. And he did love her. She knew he did.

“All right,” Phoebe said tentatively.