Passage

42

That night Richard had gone back to his lab—even though work was impossible, unthinkable—because the police had said they might want him to make a statement and because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. The ER had been cordoned off into a crime scene, with all the emergency patients shunted off to Swedish and St. Luke’s, and the doctors’ lounge and the hallways and the cafeteria were full of people asking him, “How are you holding up?” and, “Where the hell were the security guards? I’ve been saying for the last three years that ER was an accident waiting to happen. Why didn’t they have a metal detector?” and, “Have they determined the cause of death?” All questions he had no idea how to answer.

She died of drowning, he wanted to tell them. She went down on the Titanic.

At one point—the first night? the next day?—he had gone down to the morgue. “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” the attendant had said, shamefaced. “They took her over to University.”

For the autopsy, Richard thought. When a crime was involved, they didn’t do it at Mercy General. They sent the body over to the forensic pathologist at University Hospital.

“Maybe you could…” the attendant began. Go over there, Richard thought, but the attendant didn’t finish, and Richard knew he was sorry he’d spoken, that he was thinking of the Y-shaped incision in the chest, the ribs and breastbone removed, the heart pulled out, weighed, dissected. Joanna’s heart.

“It’s all right,” Richard said. “I just wanted—”

Wanted—what? To convince himself that she was safely there, swathed in a plastic sheet in a metal drawer, safely dead. Instead of still on the Titanic, clinging to the railing on the slanting deck, waiting to drown.

“Why don’t you go home and try to get some sleep, Dr. Wright?” the attendant had said gently, and Richard had nodded and turned, and then just stood there stupidly, staring at the wall.

“How do I get out of here?” he had said finally.

“You go down this hall and take a right,” the attendant had said, pointing, and it was like a knife going in. You take that hallway down. There’s a stairway. You take the stairs up to seventh and go across the walkway to Surgery. Joanna, pointing. There’s a hall on the right. You take that to the elevators and that’ll take you down to Personnel. Him, disbelieving. Isn’t there a shortcut I could take? Joanna, laughing, That is the shortcut.

The attendant had taken his arm. “Here, I’ll walk you up,” he said. He had led him back up to the first floor, supporting Richard’s arm as if Richard were an old woman, down a hall and up a stairway and into the lobby.

And it must have been during the day because Mr. Wojakowski was there, waiting for the elevator, his freckled face beaming. “Mornin’, Doc,” he’d said, bustling over to them. “Say, did Joanna Lander ever find you?”

Beside him, the attendant gasped, his grip tightening on Richard’s arm, but Mr. Wojakowski, oblivious, swept on. “I saw her up in Medicine,” he said, “and she was—Say,” he said, looking at the attendant and then back at Richard, “say, Doc, are you okay?”

The attendant pulled him off to one side, whispering, and Richard watched his face go white and abruptly old, the freckles standing out starkly against his skin. “Hell, if I’d known, I wouldn’t of—How’d it happen?”

The attendant whispered some more, and the elevator opened on emptiness. Richard stared into it.

“I want to tell him I didn’t have any idea—” Mr. Wojakowski said, looking anxiously in Richard’s direction.

“Not now,” the attendant said and led Mr. Wojakowski by the arm into the elevator, and then stood there like a bouncer, arms folded, till it closed.

He came back over to Richard. “Are you okay, Dr. Wright?” he said, taking possession of Richard’s arm again. “Do you want me to call somebody?”

Yes, Richard thought. The Carpathia. The Californian. But their wireless is turned off. The captain’s gone to bed.

“You’re sure there’s nobody I can call? Girlfriend? Somebody you work with?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be driving right now, man,” he’d said. “Is there someplace here you could lie down?”

“Yes,” Richard had said, and gone back up to the lab. He’d slept on the floor, wrapped in the blanket he’d covered Amelia Tanaka, covered Joanna with, his pager next to him, turned on, as if it were not too late, as if what had happened were somehow reversible.

He wondered if the wireless operator on the Californian had done that, leaning endlessly over the key, headphones on, listening for other messages, hoping for a second chance. Or if, after two days, the operator had switched it off again, the way he did, unable to stand the questions, the condolences.

The resident who’d tried to save Joanna had called, and three reporters, and Tish. “I’ve decided to go back to Medicine,” she said. “In light of everything that’s happened… I’ve put in a formal transfer request. I’ll need your signature.”

In light of everything that’s happened.

“I’ll be glad to show my replacement the lab procedures, of course.” She hesitated. “I haven’t told anybody about… I don’t want to get you in trouble with the hospital for going under like that. I wouldn’t want you to lose your funding, and I know you reacted out of panic and weren’t responsible for what you were doing—”

Responsible. I left Joanna on the Titanic, he thought, I left Joanna to drown.

“Dr. Wright?” Tish was saying. “Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“I think it might be a good idea for you to talk to somebody,” she said. “There’s a really good doctor on staff here. Dr. Ainsworth. She’s a psychiatrist who specializes in cases like this.”

Like what? he wondered. Cases of abandonment? Of betrayal? He thought of Tish, standing over him, tears running down her mascara-stained cheeks. “I’m sorry I frightened you,” he said into the phone.

“I know,” Tish said, and her voice quavered. “I couldn’t bring you out of it…” Her voice broke. “I thought you were dead.”

“Tish,” he said, but she’d recovered herself.

“Dr. Ainsworth’s extension is 308,” she said steadily. “She specializes in posttraumatic stress disorders. I really think you should call her.”

Richard lasted two days with the pager on. Carla from Oncology called to tell him about a wonderful book called Dealing with Tragedy in the Workplace, and Dr. Ainsworth, and a police officer. “I just need to ask you a few questions,” he said. “Just for the record. Were you there when the incident occurred?”

“No,” Richard said, “I wasn’t there.” I was in the White Star offices in New York, too stupid to tell the difference between an office building and a ship, too late to be of any use.

“Oh, sorry,” the police officer said. “I’d been told you witnessed the murder.”

“No,” Richard said.

The officer hung up, and Richard unplugged the phone. And turned his pager off. But that only made it worse. When they couldn’t get him on the phone, they came. Eileen from Medicine, to bring him a wonderful book called The Healing Help Book, and Maureen from Radiology with Nine Steps to Recovering from Personal Tragedy, and Dr. Jamison.

She had a book, too. The Idiots’ Guide to Mourning? Richard wondered, but it was a medical journal. “This is that study I called you about,” she said. “I’ve found concentrating on your work is the best way to get through a loss.” She tried to hand him the journal. “It’s the article by Barstow and Skal. They did a study of aspartate endorphins, and theta-asparcine—”

“The project’s canceled.”

Her face went maddeningly sympathetic. “I understand how you feel, but in a week or two—”

She left the journal on the desk. Richard shut the door behind her, but that didn’t stop anyone either. Tara from Ob-Gyn knocked timidly and then opened the door as if he were one of her patients, and the resident who’d been on duty in the ER didn’t knock at all.

“I thought you’d want to know the results of the autopsy,” and Richard wondered for one long, awful moment if he would say, “They found water in her lungs.”

“The cause of death was acute hemorrhage leading to hypovolemic shock,” the resident said. “It was just bad luck that the knife happened to hit the aorta. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the knife would have hit a rib, or, at the very worst, punctured a lung. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He flipped up a sheet. “She bled out in under two minutes. There wasn’t anything anybody could’ve done.” I could have kept my pager on, Richard thought. I could have gone under two minutes earlier. In time to make it to the Titanic.

“We got the results on Calinga, too,” he said.

Calinga? That must be the teenager. He’d never heard his name.

“Enough rogue to kill an elephant.” The resident shook his head. “Sixteen years old.” He slapped the file shut. “Well, anyway, I thought you’d want to know Dr. Lander didn’t suffer.” He started for the door. “She would have lost consciousness in under a minute. She probably didn’t even have time to realize what had happened.”

That afternoon Vielle came up. “I came…” she said and then hesitated.

“To bring me a copy of The Dummies’ Guide to Grieving!” Richard said bitterly.

“I know,” she said. “Dr. Chaffey gave me a copy of Coping with the Death of a Colleague. A colleague!” She looked like she hadn’t been home either. She was still wearing the same rumpled dark blue scrubs and surgical cap. Her eyes were red and swollen, with maroon smudges under them, like bruises, and her hand and her arm were both bandaged. “You keep thinking it can’t get any worse, and then it does,” she said.

“I know,” he said and pulled out a chair for her.

She sank down onto it. “I came because… I keep seeing her there in the ER, I keep thinking about what she must have been going through those last few… There was this guy in the ER who’d had a myocardial infarction. Joanna interviewed him, and right before he died, he said, ‘Too far away for her to come,’ and Joanna said he was trying to tell her something, she kept talking about it, and then she…” She looked up at Richard. “I know this’ll sound like I’m crazy, and I guess I am a little. I keep seeing her running up to me and him whirling around, and the knife—” she said, and he realized that, rumpled as they were, they couldn’t be the same scrubs. Those were covered with blood.

“I just stood there,” Vielle said, staring blindly ahead of her. “I didn’t do anything. I should have—”

“What?” Richard said. “Tried to stop him? He was on rogue.”

“I could have warned her,” she said. “If I’d shouted at her, told her not to come any closer… I didn’t even see her till she was right next to him. I was looking at the knife he was holding, and by the time I saw her… she just walked right into it.”

And why didn’t she see what was going on? he wondered. Why hadn’t she noticed the charged silence, the frightened expressions on their faces?

Vielle blew her nose. “Anyway, I keep going over everything in my mind, what she… and I have to ask you, even if it does sound crazy. When Joanna underwent the NDE experiments, what did she see?”

He stared at her.

“Did she see the Titanic?” she asked, and before he could answer, she rushed on tearfully, “The reason I’m asking is, she asked me all these questions about the movie, about this one scene, and when I asked her why we didn’t just rent it and watch it again, she said she couldn’t, and then yesterday Kit told me Joanna was having her do all this research on the Titanic, and she’d seemed so preoccupied and worried these last few weeks… Is that what she saw in her NDE? The Titanic?”

“Yes,” he said, and watched her face go rigid with horror.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “Oh, God, I just stood there. I—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It was mine.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, anguished. “She wanted me to transfer up to Peds.” She stood up. “She said the ER was dangerous. Dangerous!”

He reached for her hand. “Vielle, listen to me. It wasn’t your fault. I had my pager turned off. I—”

She shook his hand off angrily. “She wouldn’t even have been in the ER if I’d listened to her. She came down there to talk to me about Dish Night, about a stupid movie!” she said, and flung herself out of the room and down the hall.

“Vielle, wait!” he said and started after her, but she’d already disappeared into the elevator.

He punched the “down” button impatiently, and the other elevator opened.

“Oh, good,” a middle-aged woman in a green dress said. “I was coming to see you. I’m Sally Zimmerman from Surgery. I just wanted to drop this by.” She held out a book. The orange-and-yellow cover read Eight Great Grief Helps. “It’s really helpful,” she said. “It has all kinds of mourning exercises and closure activities.”

“You keep thinking it can’t get any worse,” Richard murmured.

“That’s in there, too,” she said, taking the book back from him and thumbing through it. “Here it is. ‘How to Raise Your Hope Quotient.’ ”

The next day Mr. Wojakowski came. “I’m sorry I went on about Joanna like that,” he said. “Nobody’d told me what happened.” He shook his head. “Gone just like that! You never get used to it. One minute they’re standing next to you on the gunnery deck and the next, gone! Bucky Tobias, my bunkmate. Nineteen years old. ‘Think the Japs know where we are?’ he said to me, and ten seconds later, wham! half the deck’s gone and nothing left! I heard he was on drugs,” he said, and for a moment Richard thought he was talking about his bunkmate on the Yorktown.

“Sixteen years old,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Damned waste. I still can’t believe it.” He shook his head. “I just saw her that day up in Medicine looking for you.”

“Looking for me?” Richard said and felt a pain in his side, like a knife going in.

“Yeah, and whatever it was she was trying to find you for, it musta been important. She practically ran me over. ‘Did somebody call battle stations?’ I asked her, she was movin’ so fast.”

“When was this?” Richard demanded.

“Monday morning. I was over here seeing a friend of mine—had a stroke square dancing—after I did my hearing-research-sitting-around.”

“What time did you see her?”

“Let’s see,” he said, scratching his cheek, “Musta been around thirteen hundred hours. I came up right after I was done in the arthritis center, and that goes from eleven to twelve forty-five.”

One o’clock, Richard thought. She must have been on her way down to the ER. “And she told you she was looking for me?”

“Yeah, she said she had to find you right away, so she didn’t have time to talk.”

Joanna hadn’t been looking for Vielle. She had been looking for him. He had to tell her, so she wouldn’t go on thinking it was her fault. It was the least he could do.

“Just wanted you to know how bad I feel,” Mr. Wojakowski said, picking up his hat. “She was a great little gal. Reminded me of a navy nurse I dated in Honolulu. Pretty as a picture. Killed off Tarawa. Japs sank the transport she was being shipped home on.”

As soon as Mr. Wojakowski left, he plugged in the phone and called the ER. Vielle wasn’t there. He had her paged, and then sat there by the phone, waiting for her to call. She didn’t, but Mrs. Brightman did. And his old roommate.

“I was just watching CNN,” Davis said, without preamble. “What the hell kind of hospital are you working in? Did you know this Lander person?”

“Yes,” Richard said.

“But you’re all right?” Davis asked, and it was more a statement than a question.

Richard wondered what Davis would say if he said, “No.” If he said, “The NDEs aren’t temporal-lobe hallucinations. They’re real.” He already knew. “You can’t seriously believe that!” And “First Foxx and now you? I knew it was a virus!” and “Have you called the Star yet? Make them pay you for an exclusive, at least. You’re going to need the money now that you’re going to be out of a job.”

“I’m all right,” Richard said.

“You’re sure?” Davis asked, and sounded really concerned.

“Yes,” Richard said, and went down to the ER to talk to Vielle. The crime scene tape had been removed, but there were cops at all the doors. They checked Richard’s ID badge against a computer list before they let him in. Vielle was at the station desk, writing up a chart with her bandaged hand.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “She wasn’t looking for you that day to ask you about Dish Night. She was looking for me.”

“For you?” she said blankly. “But you weren’t—”

“I’d told her I was going to go talk to Dr. Jamison.”

“And Dr. Jamison had just been down here,” she said, and he could see the relief in her face, as if a load had been lifted off her.

“When she asked you about the movie Titanic, did she say what she was trying to—” he said, and saw she wasn’t listening. She had glanced up, toward the door, and gone suddenly stock-still. He looked over at the door.

Joanna was standing in it. Richard’s heart began to beat frantically, like a trapped bird battering its wings against the bars. She wasn’t dead. It was all, all, the blood and the flatline and the White Star Line offices, a dream, it had only felt real because of elevated acetylcholine levels and temporal-lobe stimulation.

“Joanna,” he breathed, and took a step toward her.

“I’m June Wexler, Joanna Lander’s sister,” the woman at the door said, and it was like hearing the news all over again. She’s dead, he thought, and finally believed it. She’s been dead three days.

“I’m glad I found the two of you together,” Joanna’s sister said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “I understand you both worked with Joanna. I was wondering if I could talk to you about her.”

Her voice sounded like Joanna’s, too, but somehow harsher. That’s from crying, he thought, looking at her reddened eyes, the Kleenex in her hands.

“I hadn’t talked to her in several months, and…” She dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex. “We always think there’ll be plenty of time, and then suddenly there isn’t any time at all… I was wondering if you knew whether she had been saved?” she said, and Richard wondered if she had somehow found out that he’d gone after her and failed.

“Saved?” Vielle said.

“Accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as her personal savior,” Joanna’s sister said. “I’d tried several times to bring her to the Lord, but each time Satan hardened her heart against me.”

“Satan,” Vielle said.

“Yes. I tried to witness to her, to tell her of the destruction that awaits the unrepentant, of God’s judgment and the fire that shall never be quenched.” She dabbed at her eyes again.

Richard gazed at her. She didn’t look like Joanna at all. It was only a trick of hair color, of the glasses.

“I continued to pray that, in working with you,” she said to Richard, “and in speaking with people who had seen Christ face to face, she might come to believe.”

Richard realized after a moment that she was talking about near-death experiences.

“Did she?” she asked. “Tell you that she had been saved?”

“No,” Vielle snapped.

“And you’re sure she didn’t change her mind at the last minute?” She turned to Vielle. “They told me you were with her when she died. Did she say anything?”

Richard expected her to say “no” again, but instead she hesitated a fraction of a second before she said, “The knife slashed the aorta. Joanna lost consciousness almost immediately.”

“But even if it was in the last second,” Joanna’s sister said. “It’s never too late for Jesus to forgive you for your sins, even if it’s with your last breath that you beg that forgiveness. Did she?” Joanna’s sister said eagerly. “Say anything?”

“No,” Vielle said.

She’s lying, Richard thought. She did say something.

“Are you sure?” Joanna’s sister persisted. “I’ve read about near-death experiences. I know they see Jesus waiting to welcome them into heaven, and ‘they that have seen have believed.’ Surely even Joanna’s heart wasn’t so hardened that she wouldn’t repent when she saw the fate that awaited her.”

“I’m sure,” Vielle said stonily. “She didn’t say anything.”

“Then there’s no hope,” Joanna’s sister said, dabbing at her eyes, “and she is in hell.”

“Joanna?” Vielle said, outraged. “How dare you—!”

“It is not I who have condemned her, but God,” Joanna’s sister said. “For is it not written, ‘But they that do not believe shall be cast into outer darkness, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’?”

“Get out,” Vielle said.

Joanna’s sister looked at Richard, as if expecting support. He wondered how he could have ever thought she looked like Joanna. “I will pray for you both,” she said, and walked away.

“Don’t you dare,” Vielle shouted after her, and one of the police officers over by the door looked up alertly. “You arrogant, wicked, holier-than-thou—”

“What did Joanna say?” Richard cut in.

Vielle turned and looked at him, the anger dying out of her face. “Richard—”

“She did say something, didn’t she? What?”

“I can’t believe she’d come in here like that,” Vielle said. “That bitch! I’ll tell you who the Lord casts into outer darkness. So-called Christians like her.”

“What did Joanna say?”

“Joanna told me she and her sister weren’t all that close,” Vielle said, walking over to the station. “Light-years apart is more like it.” She picked up a chart. “How sweet, kind, sensible Joanna could even have a sister like that is beyond—”

Richard caught her arm. “What did she say?”

“Look, I’ve got patients to see. We’re completely behind.”

“It’s what you came up to the lab to see me about, isn’t it? You said the guy who coded said, ‘Too far away to come,’ and that you’d been thinking about what she must have been going through those last moments. It was because of what Joanna said, wasn’t it?” He gripped her arm. “What did she say?”

The police officer at the door started toward them, his hand on his gun.

“Richard—”

“It’s important. Tell me.”

“She said, ‘Tell Richard—’ ” She paused, looking down at the chart.

Richard waited, afraid to speak.

She stared blindly down at the chart, and then looked up again, looking like Tish had in the lab. “ ‘Tell Richard it’s,’ ” she said, and swallowed hard, “ ‘SOS. SOS.’ ”

43

“Did you page Joanna?” Maisie asked her mother.

“Yes,” her mother said, busily straightening the things on Maisie’s bed tray. “Would you like some juice? Or a Popsicle?”

“When did you page her? Yesterday?”

“She probably has lots of things to do. How about some Jell-O?”

“She said she was coming on Thursday, and she didn’t come Thursday or yesterday,” Maisie persisted. “Are you sure Nurse Barbara paged her?”

“I’m sure,” her mother said, taking the top off the water pitcher and peering in. “Guess who Nurse Barbara said’s supposed to come and visit the floor tomorrow afternoon? A clown!”

“Like Emmett Kelly?” Maisie said, perking up.

“Emmett Kelly?” her mother said, surprised. “Now, how do you know about Emmett Kelly?”

“He was in one of my videos,” Maisie said. “One of the Disney ones. I don’t remember which one. About the circus.”

“This clown does magic tricks,” her mother said. “Won’t that be fun?”

“Dr. Lander told me about this clown who pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and it was hooked to another one and another one and another one,” Maisie said. “Maybe she got busy and forgot. Maybe you need to call her.”

“If she’s busy, we shouldn’t bother her. Look, I brought you some new videos. The Best Summer and The Parent Trap. Which one would you like to watch?”

“She always comes when she says she will,” Maisie said. “Even if she’s really busy. Maybe she’s sick. Nurse Amy was out with the flu.”

“You’re supposed to be thinking positive thoughts, not worrying,” her mother said, putting The Best Summer in the VCR. “Remember what Dr. Murrow said. You’ve got to work on getting ready for your new heart.” She switched on the TV, picked up Maisie’s water pitcher, and took it over to the sink. “Which means no worrying.” She dumped the water and ice rattlingly into the sink and started for the door, holding the pitcher. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to ask them for some ice.”

“Ask them if they paged her,” Maisie called after her. “Tell them I found out the stuff she asked me to.”

Her mother stopped halfway out the door. “What stuff?”

“Just some stuff we were talking about when she came to see me.”

“It’s very nice of the hospital staff to come visit you, but you have to remember they have jobs, and those have to come first.”

“But this was about her job,” Maisie started to say, but if she did, her mother would want to know what Joanna had asked her, so she didn’t. She just said, “Ask them if they paged her,” and when her mother came back in, carrying the pitcher and a can of juice, she said, “Did you ask them?”

“Look, pineapple juice,” her mother said, popping the tab on the can of juice and holding it out to her. “Your favorite.”

“Did you?” Maisie asked.

“Yes,” her mother said, setting the juice down on Maisie’s bedtable. “The nurses said she got a new job, and she moved. Do you want a straw?”

“Where did she move?”

“I don’t know,” her mother said, unwrapping the straw.

“She wouldn’t move without telling me,” Maisie said.

“She probably didn’t have time. The nurses said she had to start her job right away.” She handed Maisie her juice. “They told me she said to tell you good-bye, and that she wanted you to think happy thoughts and do what Dr. Murrow tells you.” She turned up the TV. “Now rest and watch your movie. It’s about a little girt who’s getting well. Just like you.” She handed Maisie the remote. “I’ll be back when you have your dinner,” she said, kissed her good-bye, and left.

After a minute, Maisie got out of bed, tiptoed to the door, and peeked down the hall. Her mother was at the nurses’ station, talking to Barbara and the other nurse. She got back in bed, sitting on the edge where she could scramble under the covers if she heard anybody coming, and watched the first part of The Best Summer.

The little girl in the movie was in a wheelchair. She had a big bow in her hair and a shawl over her knees and looked very sad. “You’ll never get well looking like that,” the little girl’s doctor said. “It takes smiles to get well.”

“I haven’t any smiles,” the little girl said.

“You must take one of my happy pills,” the doctor said, and pulled a puppy out from behind his back.

“Oh, a puppy!” the little girl cried. “The darling! What is his name?”

“Ulla,” Maisie said, and got out of bed to check to see if her mother was still there.

She was gone. Maisie clicked off the TV and set the remote on the floor half under the bed. Then she got into bed and arranged the covers neatly. She waited awhile till she wasn’t breathing so hard and then hit the nurse’s call button.

It took a long time for the nurse to come. When she did, it was Barbara. She was glad. Nurse Amy was always in a hurry. “What do you need, honey?” Barbara asked.

“I dropped my remote,” Maisie said, pointing at the floor, and then, as Barbara stooped to pick up the remote, “My mother said Dr. Lander moved away.”

Barbara stayed bent down, looking for the remote. Maisie wondered if she had put it too far under the bed, it took her so long to answer.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said finally.

“Is she already gone?” Maisie asked.

“Yes,” Barbara said, and her voice sounded funny from being under the bed. “She’s gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Barbara said. She stood up and switched on the TV. “Which channel were you watching?” she asked without turning around.

“A video,” Maisie said. “Maybe she isn’t gone yet. I mean, don’t people have to pack all their clothes and rent their apartments and stuff before they move?”

Barbara hit “play.” The puppy was licking the face of the little girl in the wheelchair. The little girl was giggling. Barbara handed the remote to Maisie. “All right now?” she asked, patting the covers over Maisie’s knees.

“Maybe she isn’t gone yet,” Maisie said. “She’s still getting ready to go, and then she’ll come back and tell everybody good-bye.”

“No,” Barbara said, “she left,” and went out before Maisie could ask her anything else.

Maisie lay there watching The Best Summer. The little girl got out of her wheelchair and walked with old-fashioned-looking crutches. “You were right. You told me all it took to get well was smiles,” she told the doctor.

I’ll bet the nurses forgot to page Joanna, Maisie thought, and she was so busy packing she didn’t even think about the wireless messages the Titanic sent. I’ll bet when she gets to wherever she moved to, she’ll remember. She pushed the call button again, and when Barbara came in, she said, “Where did Joanna move to?”

Barbara looked angry, like she was going to tell Maisie not to ring the call button so much, but she didn’t. She reached over Maisie’s head and flicked it off. “Back east.”

“Back east where?”

“I don’t know, New Jersey,” Barbara said and went out.

New Jersey was where the Hindenburg crashed. Maisie wondered if Joanna had gone there to interview the crewman who had had the near-death experience.

But he lived in Germany. Maybe she had found out about somebody else on the Hindenburg who’d had a near-death experience, and that was why she’d left in such a hurry. She’ll call me as soon as she gets there, Maisie thought.

She wondered how long it took to get to New Jersey. She didn’t think she’d better use the nurse’s call button again. She waited till Eugene brought in her supper tray and asked him, “How long does it take to get to New Jersey, Eugene?”

Eugene grinned at her. “You plannin’ to fly the coop?”

“No,” she said. “To drive there, how many days would it take?”

“Oh, you’re drivin’,” he said. “Ain’t you a little young to be drivin’?”

“I’m serious, Eugene,” Maisie said. “How many days would it take?”

“I dunno,” he said, “three, maybe four. Depends on how fast you drive. You strike me as one a’ them speedy drivers! You better watch out the police don’t stop you and ask to see your license!”

Maisie figured it would probably take Joanna four days if she was moving all her stuff, but she had already left. When? Yesterday or Thursday? If she had left on Thursday, she might call the day after tomorrow.

When her mom came back right before supper, she asked her, “Do you know when Joanna left?”

“No,” her mom said. “Did you watch The Best Summer? I brought you another video, The Secret Garden.”

Maisie decided she had probably left yesterday. So she’ll probably call Saturday, she thought, and I’d better find out as much as I can about the wireless messages so I’ll have lots to tell her. She looked through her Titanic books again and wrote down the ones they sent before the iceberg, just in case Joanna decided she wanted them, too, and waited for her to call.

But she didn’t call on Saturday, or on Sunday. She’s probably busy interviewing the Hindenburg person, Maisie thought, watching the video of The Secret Garden. There was a little boy in a wheelchair in this one, and a little girl who was very crabby. Maisie liked her.

The little girl kept hearing funny noises, like somebody crying. When she asked the people in the house about it, they told her they didn’t hear anything and tried to change the subject, so she went upstairs and looked for herself. She found the little boy in the wheelchair and started taking him outside without telling anybody.

I’ll bet he gets well, too, Maisie thought disgustedly, and fell asleep. When she woke up, the little girl was writing her uncle a letter. “Where shall I send it?” she asked the maid, and the maid told her the address.

When Barbara came in to take her blood pressure, Maisie waited until she’d taken the stethoscope off and then asked, “Do you know Dr. Lander’s address?”

“Her address?” Barbara asked, putting the stethoscope back around her neck.

“The address of where she moved to.”

Barbara peeled the blood pressure cuff off Maisie’s arm and put it in the basket on the wall. “Maisie—” she said and then just stood there.

“What?” Maisie said.

“I forgot the thermometer,” she said, feeling in her pockets. “I’ll be right back.”

“But did she? Leave an address?”

“No,” Barbara said, and just stood there, like she had before. “I don’t know where she is.”

But I’ll bet Dr. Wright does, Maisie thought. They were working on a project. Joanna had to tell him the address of where she was going. She thought about asking Barbara to page him, but she remembered Joanna saying he sometimes turned his pager off, so she called the hospital switchboard herself.

“Can you give me Dr. Wright’s number?” she asked the operator, trying to sound like her mother.

“Dr. Richard Wright?”

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “I mean, yes.”

“I’ll connect you,” the operator said.

“No, I want—” Maisie said, but the operator had already connected her. The phone was busy.

Maisie waited till nighttime, when the evening operator would be on, and tried again. This time she said, “Dr. Wright’s number, please.”

“Dr. Wright has gone home,” the operator said.

“I know,” Maisie said. “I need his number so I can call him tomorrow. To make an appointment,” she added.

“An appointment?” the operator said doubtfully, but gave her the number. Maisie called it, just in case he hadn’t gone home, but nobody answered. Nobody answered the next day either, even though she called every half hour.

She would have to go see him. She called the operator again and asked where Dr. Wright’s office was. “602,” the operator told her, which was good. She would have to take the elevator, but her room was 422, so his office should be right above it, and she wouldn’t have to walk very far.

The hard part would be getting down to the elevator without anybody seeing her. The little girl in The Secret Garden had gone at night, but Dr. Wright wouldn’t be in his office then, and she couldn’t do it in the morning because that was when they made the bed and helped her take her shower and brought the library cart around. And at two o’clock her mother came.

She would have to do it after they picked up the lunch trays. As soon as they made her bed, she went over to the closet and got her clothes and put them under the covers. She laid one of the Titanic books open on top of the lump it made so it wouldn’t show, and then lay down and rested so she would have enough energy for the walking.

She ate a lot of her lunch, too, and Eugene, when he came in to pick up the tray, said, “Awright! That’s what I like to see! You keep eatin’ like that, and you’ll be out of this place in no time!”

She had put on her pants and socks before lunch. As soon as he took her tray out, she put on her shoes and turtleneck. She put her robe on over her clothes, pulled the covers up, and lay down, catching her breath and listening.

The little boy in 420 started crying. Footsteps came down the hall and went in the room.

She’d better turn on the TV so the nurses would think she was watching a video and wouldn’t come in to see what she was doing. She got the remote off the bed table, rewound The Secret Garden, and hit “play.”

The crying stopped. After a few minutes footsteps came out of the room and went back toward the nurses’ station. On the TV, the little girl was sneaking up a long winding staircase. Maisie got out of bed, and took off her robe. She stuck it under the covers and tiptoed to the door. There was nobody in the hall, and she couldn’t see Barbara or anybody in the nurses’ station. She snuck really fast to the elevators, pushed the button, and then stood inside the door of the waiting room till the elevator light blinked on. The elevator door opened, and she darted across and pushed “six.”

Her heart was pounding really hard, but it was partly because she was scared that somebody would see her before the door shut. “Come on!” she whispered, and it finally shut, really slow, and the elevator started going up.

Okay. Now all she had to do was find 602. When the elevator opened, she got out and looked around. There were lots of doors, but none of them had numbers on them. TTY-TDD, a sign on one of them said.

She walked down the hall. LHS, the doors said, and OT, but no numbers. A lady carrying a clipboard came out of a door marked PT. She stopped when she saw Maisie, and frowned, and for a minute Maisie was afraid she knew she was a patient. The lady came over to her, holding the clipboard against her chest. “Are you looking for somebody, honey?” she asked.

“Yes,” Maisie said, trying to sound very certain and businesslike. “Dr. Wright.”

“He’s in the east wing,” the lady said. “Do you know how to get there?”

Maisie shook her head.

“You need to go back down to fifth and take a right, and you’ll see a sign that says ‘Human Resources.’ You go through that door, and it’ll take you to the east wing.”

Is it real far? Maisie wanted to ask, but she was afraid the lady would ask her where she had come from, so she said, “Thank you very much,” and went back to the elevator, walking fast so the lady wouldn’t know she was a patient.

She rested in the elevator and then got out and turned right, like the woman said, and walked down the hall. The sign was a long way down the hall. Her heart started to beat real hard. She stopped and rested a minute, but a man came out of one of the doors, carrying a tray full of blood tubes, so she had to start walking again.

The door to the walkway was heavy. She had to push really hard on the handle to get it to open. Inside was a straight gray hallway. Maisie didn’t know how long it was, but it was way farther than she was supposed to walk. Maybe she’d better not go down it. But it was a long way back to the elevators, too, and after she found Dr. Wright and he told her Joanna’s address, she could tell him he needed to take her back, and he could get a wheelchair or something. And she could walk really slow.

She started down the hallway. It was a funny hallway. It didn’t have any windows or doors or anything, and no railings along the side to hang on to like in the rest of the hospital. She put one hand on the wall, but it wasn’t as good, you got a lot tireder than with a railing.

“I think I’d better rest for a little while,” she said, and sat down with her back against the wall, but it didn’t help. She still couldn’t get her breath, and the lights on the wall kept swimming around in a funny way. “I don’t feel good,” she said, and lay down on the floor.

There was a loud noise, and the lights flared into brightness and then went nearly all the way out, turning a dark red. Like the lights on the Titanic, Maisie thought, right before they went out. I hope these don’t go out, or the hall’ll be really dark. But it wasn’t the hall. It was the tunnel she had been in before. She could sense the tall, straight walls on either side of her.

This is an NDE, she thought, and sat up off the tile floor. Only it wasn’t tile. It felt funny. She wished it weren’t so dark, and she could see it. She had to look at everything so she could tell it to Joanna.

And listen to everything, she thought, remembering the sound before the lights turned red. It had been a boom, or a loud clap. Or maybe an explosion. She couldn’t remember exactly. I should have been listening, she thought. I’m supposed to report on what I saw.

Her heart had stopped pounding, and she didn’t feel dizzy anymore. She stood up and started walking along the tunnel between the high, straight walls. It was dark and foggy, like before, and really warm. She turned and looked back. It was dark and foggy both ways.

“I told Mr. Mandrake there wasn’t any light,” she said, and right then a light flickered at the end of the tunnel. It was red, like the lights in the hall had been, and wobbly, like somebody running carrying a lantern or something, and that must be what it was, because she could see people running toward her, though she couldn’t see who they were because of the fog.

“Hurry!” they shouted. “This way! Call a code! Now!”

They ran past her. She peered at them as they went past, trying to see their faces through the fog. Mr. Mandrake said they were supposed to be people you knew who’d died, like your grandma, but Maisie didn’t know any of them. “Get that cart over here,” one of the ladies said to her as she ran past. She had on a white dress and white gloves. “Stat!”

“Clear,” a man said. He was wearing a suit, like Dr. Murrow always wore. “Again. Clear.”

“Do you know who she is?” the lady with the white gloves said.

“My name’s Maisie,” she tried to say, but they weren’t listening. They just kept on running past.

“She must be a patient,” the man said. “Do you know who she is?” he said to somebody else.

“It’s on my dog tags,” Maisie said.

“What’s she doing up here?” the man said. “Clear.”

The light flared brightly, like an explosion, and she was back in the hallway and a bunch of nurses and doctors were kneeling over her. “Awwll riight!” the man said.

“I’ve got a pulse,” one of the nurses said, and another one asked, “Can you hear me, honey?”

“I had a near-death experience,” Maisie said, trying to sit up. “I was in a tunnel, and—”

“There, there, lie down,” the nurse said, just like Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz. “Don’t try to move. We’re going to take care of you.”

Maisie nodded. They put her on a gurney and put a blanket over her, and when they did, she saw she wasn’t wearing her turtleneck anymore, and she reached for her dog tags, afraid they’d taken those off of her, too. That was the one bad thing about dog tags, people could take them off of you.

“Just lie still,” the nurse said, holding her arm, and Maisie saw they were starting an IV and hanging a bag of saline on a hook above her. Her other arm was under the blanket. She reached up real slowly across her chest till she could feel the chain. Good, she still had them on.

“What’s your name, honey?” the nurse starting the IV said.

“Maisie Nellis,” she said, even though it was right there on her hospital bracelet and her dog tags. What good was having I.D. stuff if people didn’t read them? “You need to tell Dr. Wright to call Dr. Lander,” she said. “You need to tell him—”

“Don’t try to talk, Maisie,” the nurse said. “Is Dr. Lander your doctor?”

“No,” Maisie said. “She—”

“Is Dr. Wright your doctor?”

“No,” Maisie said. “He knows Dr. Lander. They’re working on a project together.”

Another nurse came up. “She’s from Peds. Viral endocarditis. Dr. Murrow’s on his way up.”

“Jesus,” the man who had. shouted, “Awwll riight!” said, and somebody else she couldn’t see, “There’ll be hell to pay for somebody for this.”

At the same time, the nurse who’d started her IV said, “Ready,” and they started to wheel her really fast back down the hall the way she’d come.

“No, wait!” Maisie said. “You need to tell Dr. Wright to call Dr. Lander first. He’s in the other wing. Tell him to tell her I didn’t just see fog this time, I saw all kinds of stuff. A light and people and a lady in a white dress—”

The nurses looked at each other above her head. “Just lie still,” the nurse who’d done her IV said. “You’re going to be fine.”

“You just had a bad dream,” the other one said.

“It wasn’t a dream,” Maisie said. “It was an NDE. You have to tell Dr. Wright to call her.”

The first nurse patted her hand. “I’ll tell her.”

“No,” Maisie said. “She moved away to New Jersey. You have to tell Dr. Wright to tell her.”

“I’ll tell him,” the nurse said. “Now just lie still and rest. We’re going to take care of you.”

“Promise,” Maisie said.

“I promise,” the nurse said.

Now she’ll call for sure, Maisie thought happily. She’ll call as soon as she hears I had a near-death experience.

But she didn’t.

44

Joanna stood at the railing a long time, looking out at the darkness, and then went over to the deck chairs and sat down.

She clasped her hands around her knees and looked down the Boat Deck. It was deserted, the deck lamps making pools of yellow light, illuminating the empty lifeboat davits, the deck chairs lined up against the wall of the wheelhouse and the gymnasium. There was no sign of the officers who had been loading the boats, or of J. H. Rogers, or the band. Or of Greg Menotti.

Well, of course not. “ ‘All alone, so Heav’n has will’d, we die,’ ” Mr. Briarley had said, reading aloud from Mazes and Mirrors, and Mrs. Woollam had said, “Death is something each one of us must go through by ourselves.”

“ ‘Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on the wide wide sea,’ ” Joanna said, and her voice sounded weak and self-pitying in the silence. Don’t be such a baby, she told herself. You were the one who said you wanted to find out about death. Well, now you’re going to. Firsthand. “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” she said firmly, but her voice still sounded shaky and uncertain.

It was very quiet on the deck, and somehow peaceful. “Like waiting, and not waiting,” Mr. Wojakowski had said, talking about the days before World War II. Knowing it was coming, waiting for it to start.

She wondered if there was something she was supposed to do. Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet had gone below and changed into formal evening dress, but the staterooms were already underwater. And you can’t do anything, she thought. You’re dead. You’ll never do anything again. You’re not even here. You’re in the ER, on the examining table where you died, with a sheet over your face, and you’re not capable of doing anything at all.

“Except thinking,” she said out loud to the silent Boat Deck, “except knowing what’s happening to you,” and she remembered Lavoisier, who had still been conscious after he had been beheaded, who had blinked his eyes twelve times, knowing, knowing, she thought, horror rising in her throat, that he was dead.

But only for a few seconds, she thought, and wondered how long twelve blinks took. “Bud Roop went down, bam! just like that,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. “He never even knew what hit him. Died instantly.” Only it wasn’t instant. Brain death took four to six minutes, and Richard believed there was no correlation between time in the NDE and actual time. That time she had explored the entire ship, she had only been under for a few seconds. “I could be here for hours,” she said, her voice rising.

But you’ve already been here a long time, she told herself. You went down to the writing room and the First-Class Dining Saloon. You’ve already been here a long time, and the brain cells are dying, the synapses being shut down one by one. Soon there won’t be enough of them to sustain the central unifying image, and it will start to break down. And in four to six minutes, all the cells will be dead, and you won’t be capable of memory, or thought, or fear, and there won’t be anything. Nothing. Not even silence or darkness, or the awareness of them. Nothing.

“Nothing,” she said, her hands gripping the hard wooden arms of the deck chair. You won’t know it’s nothing, she told herself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll be unconscious, oblivious, asleep.

“ ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ ” Joanna murmured, but there was no possibility of dreaming. There were no synapses to dream with, no acetylcholine, no serotonin. Nothing. “You won’t exist,” she told herself. “You won’t be there.”

Not there. Not anywhere. And no wonder people loved Mr. Mandrake’s book—it wasn’t the relatives and the Angels of Light they loved—it was the reassurance that they still existed, that there was something, anything, after death. Even hell, or the Titanic, was better than nothing.

But the Titanic’s sinking, she thought, and the panic rose like vomit in her throat. Her heart began to pound. I’m afraid, she thought, and that proves the NDE isn’t an endorphin cushion. She looked at her palm, clammy and damp, and pressed it to her chest. Her heart was beating fast, her breathing shallow—all the symptoms of fear. She pressed two fingers to her wrist and took her pulse. Ninety-five. She reached in her pocket for a pen and paper to note it down so she could tell Richard.

So she could tell Richard. “You still don’t believe it,” she thought, and put her hand to her side. “You still can’t accept that you’re dead.”

“It’s impossible for the human mind to comprehend its own death,” she had blithely told Richard, and imagined that that would be a comfort, a protection against the horrible knowledge of destruction. But it wasn’t. It was a taunt and a tease, beckoning tantalizingly just out of reach, like the light of the Californian, promising rescue even after the boats were all gone and the lights were going out.

“Hope springs eternal” isn’t a saying of Pollyanna’s, it’s a threat, Joanna thought, and wondered, horrified, if Lavoisier had been signaling for help, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. He had blinked twelve times. SOS. SOS.

Hope isn’t a protection, it’s a punishment, Joanna thought. And this is hell. But it couldn’t be, because the sign above the gate to hell read, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” But that was an order, not a statement, and maybe that was the true torture of hell, not fire and brimstone, and damnation was continuing to hope even as the stern began to rise out of the water, as the flames, or the lava, or the train overtook you, that there was still a way out, that you might somehow be saved at the last minute. Just like in the movies.

And it was sometimes true, she thought, you were sometimes able to summon the cavalry. “That’s what I was trying to tell Richard,” she said, and remembered trying to move her lips as Vielle’s worried face leaned over her, trying to hear, her hand holding tight to hers.

I didn’t say good-bye to Vielle, Joanna thought. She’ll think it was her fault. “It was my fault, Vielle,” she said as if Vielle could hear her. “I didn’t stay alert to my surroundings. I was too busy working Cape Race. I didn’t even see it coming.” “I didn’t say good-bye to anyone,” she said, and stood up hastily as though there were still time to do it. Kit. She’d left Kit without a word. Kit, whose fiancé and uncle had already left her. “I didn’t even say good-bye to Richard,” she said. Or Maisie.

Maisie. She had promised Maisie she would come see her. She’ll be waiting, Joanna thought, the dread filling her chest, and Barbara will come in and tell her that I died. She had taken a step forward on the deck as if to stop Barbara, but she could not stop anyone from doing anything, and she had been wrong about the punishment of the dead—it was not hope or oblivion, but remembering broken promises and neglected good-byes and not being able to rectify them. “Oh, Maisie,” Joanna said, and sat back down on the edge of the deck chair. She put her head in her hands.

“Are you supposed to be out here, Ms. Lander?” a stern voice said. “Where is your hall pass?”

She looked up. Mr. Briarley was standing over her in his gray tweed vest. “Mr. Briarley… what?” she choked out. “Why are you here? Did you die, too?”

“Did I die?” He pondered the question. “Is this multiple choice? ‘Neither fish nor fowl, neither out nor in.’ ” He smiled at her and then said seriously, “What are you doing out here alone?”

“I was trying to send a message,” she said, looking over at the darkness beyond the railing.

“Did it get through?”

No, she thought, remembering Vielle’s worried voice saying, “Shh, honey, don’t try to talk,” and her own, choking on the blood pouring out of her lungs, out of her throat, the resident’s voice cutting across them, shouting, “Clear. Again. Clear,” and behind it, above it, around it, the code alarm, drowning out everything, everything.

No, she thought, Vielle didn’t hear me, didn’t understand, didn’t tell Richard, and the knowledge was worse than realizing she was dead, worse even than Barbara telling Maisie she’d died. Worse than anything. “No,” she said numbly. “It didn’t get through.”

“I know,” he said, looking out past the railing, “I know. I try sometimes. But it’s too far,” and put his hand on her shoulder. She laid her own hand over his, and they stayed like that for a minute, and then Mr. Briarley pulled his hand free and gave hers a brisk pat. “It’s freezing out here.” He pulled her to standing. “Come along,” he said, and started off down the deck.

“Where are we going?” Joanna said, trying to catch up to him.

“The First-Class Smoking Room,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s rather smoky, I’m afraid, as its name would indicate, but it’s farther astern, and secondhand smoke is something we no longer have to worry about.”

Joanna caught up with him. “Why are we going there?”

“That’s one of the blessings of death, not having to be afraid of dying,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Having died by one means, you have eliminated all the others. As Carlyle wrote—” He glanced sternly at Joanna. “You do remember Thomas Carlyle? British author of—? He will be on the final.”

“The French Revolution,” Joanna said, thinking of Lavoisier beheaded, blinking.

“Very good,” Mr. Briarley said, slackening his pace momentarily. “He also wrote, ‘The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.’ ”

He walked rapidly along the deck, as he had before on Scotland Road, so that Joanna nearly had to run to keep up with him. It was hard work. Joanna couldn’t see that the deck was slanting, but it must be. It felt oddly uncertain, and Joanna stubbed her toe against the wooden boards several times.

“I was always afraid of dying in a plane crash,” Mr. Briarley said. “And of being beheaded, I suppose because of its connection to English literature. Sydney Carton and Raleigh and Sir Thomas More. More told the executioner, ‘I’ll see to my going up, and you shall see to my coming down.’ Witty to the last.”

He shook his head. “I also feared dying of a heart attack, though in retrospect I see that any of the three would have been a blessing. All of them quick, nearly painless, and the mind functioning fully to the very end.” He opened the door to the Grand Staircase. The band was at the head of the stairs, playing a Gilbert and Sullivan song. “You no longer need fear volcanoes or zeppelin crashes or torpedoes. Or drowning,” he said and started down the curving steps.

It can’t be the end yet, Joanna thought, stopping to look at the band. They aren’t playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Or “Autumn,” she thought, and then, wonderingly, Now I’ll find out which one they played.

“Come along,” Mr. Briarley said from below. “They’re waiting.”

She started down the steps. “Who is?”

Mr. Briarley was standing in a shadow just above the first landing, and below him the steps curved down into darkness. And water. “Who’s waiting for me?” she said, coming down cautiously.

“There are all sorts of death you no longer have to fear,” Mr. Briarley said. “Drug overdoses. Gunshot wounds—”

Gunshot wounds. The teenager with the knife, lying dead on the emergency room floor. Dead. Joanna stopped, holding on to the railing. “Is everyone here?” she asked breathlessly. “Everyone who’s died? On the ship?”

“Everyone?” Mr. Briarley said. “The Titanic was a great disaster, but she carried only two thousand souls. That’s only a fraction of those who die every day,” he said and continued down the steps.

“That isn’t what I meant,” she said, and thought, I meant, is he here, somewhere belowdecks, waiting? “I meant, are the people who died when I did here?” she said aloud. “In Mercy General?”

Mr. Briarley stopped just above the landing and looked up at her. “We’re only going as far down as the Promenade Deck,” he said and pointed at the wide door leading out.

Joanna clutched the railing. “Were you telling the truth when you said we can’t die more than once?”

He nodded. “ ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ ” He went down the last two steps and across to the door. “Dylan Thomas. ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child—’ ” he said and, still talking, went out the door.

“What do you mean, the death of a child?” Joanna said. She let go of the railing and ran down the stairs after him. “What do you mean, by fire?”

Mr. Briarley was already walking rapidly along the Promenade Deck. “The line ‘there is no other’ has a double meaning. It alludes to the event of another’s death awakening us to our own mortality, and to the Resurrection, but it can also be taken literally. There is no other. Having had our first death, we cannot be killed by lightning or by heart disease—”

“Is Maisie here?” Joanna said.

“By tuberculosis or kidney failure, by Ebola fever or ventricular fibrillation.”

“Did Maisie die?” Joanna said desperately. “When Barbara told her I’d been killed? Did she go into V-fib?”

“You no longer need fear the gallows,” Mr. Briarley said. It was colder down here, even though this part of the Promenade Deck was glassed in. Joanna shivered. “Nor the guillotine.” He touched his neck gingerly. “Nor strychnine poisoning. Nor a massive stroke—” and she was in a dark hallway, groping her way toward the phone that was ringing wildly, wrestling one arm into her robe, feeling for the light switch, and for the phone, nearly knocking the receiver off, her heart jangling, knowing what she was going to hear, “It’s your father—”

“What was that?” Joanna said. She was flattened against one of the windows, staring into her frightened reflection.

“What was what?” Mr. Briarley said irritably from halfway down the deck.

“Something just happened,” she said, afraid to move for fear it would happen again. “A memory or a…”

“It’s the cold,” Mr. Briarley said. “Come along, it’s warmer in the smoking room. There’s a fire.”

“A fire?” Joanna said. Smoke and a fire. The death of a child by fire. She turned away from the windows and caught up to him. “Please tell me Maisie isn’t here.”

“Fire’s another death you don’t have to fear,” Mr. Briarley said. “Nasty, lingering death. Joan of Arc, Archbishop Cranmer, Little Miss—Ah, here we are,” he said, and stopped in front of a dark wooden door.

45

Joanna’s funeral wasn’t till Tuesday. Vielle came up to tell him. “The sister doesn’t trust any of the local ministers to conduct the service. She insists on bringing in her own hellfire-and-damnation specialist from Wisconsin.”

“Tuesday,” Richard said. It seemed an eon away.

“At ten.” She gave him the address of the funeral home. “I just wanted to let you know. I’ve got to get back down to the ER,” but she didn’t leave.

She lingered by the door, cradling her bandaged hand and looking unhappy, and then said, “What Joanna said—it might not have meant anything. People say all kinds of crazy things. I remember one old man who kept muttering, ‘The cashews are loose.’ And sometimes you think they’re trying to tell you one thing, and they’re actually trying to say something else. I had an ischemia patient one time who said, ‘Water,’ over and over, but when we’d try to give her a drink of water, she’d push it away. She was actually saying, ‘Walter.’ ”

“And—what?” Richard asked bitterly. “Joanna was really saying ‘Suez’? Or ‘soy sauce’? You and I both know what she was trying to say. She was calling for help. She was trying to tell me she was on the Titanic.”

He unplugged the EKG monitor. “That was what she’d come running down to the ER to tell me,” he said, winding up the cord, “in such a hurry she ran straight into a knife. That it wasn’t a hallucination. That it was really the Titanic.”

“But how could it be? Near-death experiences are a phenomenon of the dying brain.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and sat down and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

Vielle went away, but late that afternoon, or maybe the next day, she came again. “I talked to Patty Messner,” she said. “She ran into Joanna just as she came through the door of the ER, and she asked if Dr. Jamison was there. She said, ‘I have to find Dr. Wright. Do you know where he is?’ ”

He must still have been harboring some hope that something, someone else had brought Joanna to the ER, because as she spoke, it was like hearing Tish telling him Joanna was dead all over again. He wondered numbly why Vielle had come up all this way to tell him that.

“Patty said Joanna was in a hurry, that she was out of breath. I think you’re wrong,” Vielle said. “About what she was coming to tell you.”

She paused, waiting for him to ask why, and then, when he didn’t, went on. “When I got shot, I didn’t tell Joanna because I knew what she’d say. She was always telling me I should transfer out of the ER, that I was going to get hurt. The last thing I wanted was for her to find out.” She looked expectantly at him.

“And Joanna knew I’d accuse her of turning into a nutcase if she told me it was the Titanic, is that the point you’re trying to make?” Richard asked.

“The point I’m trying to make is, I avoided Joanna for days so she wouldn’t see my bandage,” Vielle said. “The last thing Joanna would have done if it was really the Titanic was to have gone looking for you all over the hospital. Don’t you see?” she said earnestly. “What she’d found out must have been something good, something she thought you’d be happy about.”

It was a nice try. It even made sense, up to a point. “She was in such a hurry she almost ran me over,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. And maybe she had been coming to tell him “something good,” something one of her NDEers had told her, but whatever it was, it had been overwhelmed by the reality of what was happening to her, the panic and terror of being trapped on board. “SOS,” she had called, and there was no mistaking what that meant, in spite of Vielle’s well-meaning rationalizations. It meant, “I am on the Titanic. We are going down.”

“I think you should try to find out what it was, the thing she was coming to tell you,” Vielle said and went away, this time for good.

But any number of other people came, bearing books and advice. Mrs. Dirksen from Personnel, proffering a copy of Seven Mourning Strategies. “It’s not healthy to sit here all by yourself. You need to get out and be with people, try not to think about it.”

And Ann Collins with Words of Comfort for Trying Times: “God never sends you more than you can bear.” And somebody from Personnel Relations with a flyer for a Coping with Post-Trauma Stress Workshop the hospital had scheduled for Wednesday.

And a fragile-looking young woman with short blond hair. Her frailness, her youth were somehow the last straw, and when she stammered, “I’m… I was a friend of Joanna Lander’s. My name’s Kit Gardiner, and I came—”

He cut in angrily. “—to tell me it isn’t my fault, there was nothing I could do? Or at least it was quick and she didn’t suffer? Or how about God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb? Or maybe all of the above?”

“No,” she said. “I came to bring you this book. It—”

“Oh, of course, a book,” he said viciously. “The answer to everything. What’s this one? Five Easy Steps to Forgetting?”

He didn’t know what he’d expected. That she would look hurt and surprised, tears welling up in her eyes, that she would slam the book down and tell him to go to hell?

She did neither. She looked quietly at him, no trace of tears in her eyes, and then, in a conversational tone, said, “I slapped my aunt Martha. When my fiancé died. She told me God needed him in heaven, and I hauled off and slapped her, a sixty-year-old woman. They said I was half out of my mind with grief, that I didn’t know what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. People say unbelievable things to you. They deserve slapping.”

He stared at her in relief. “They—”

“—tell you you’ll get over it,” Kit said. “I know. And that it’s unhealthy to be so upset. And that you shouldn’t blame yourself, it wasn’t your fault—”

“—there was nothing anybody could have done,” he said. “But that’s a lie. If I’d gotten there earlier, if I’d had my pager on—” He stopped, suddenly afraid she’d say, “You couldn’t have known,” but she didn’t.

She said, “They all told me it wasn’t my fault. Except Uncle Pat.” She stopped, looking down at the book she held, and then went on, “It’s a terrible thing to be told it isn’t your fault when you know it is. Look,” she said, and started for the door. “I’ll come some other time. You’ve got enough to deal with right now.”

“No, wait,” he said. “I’m sorry I was so rude. It’s just that—”

“I know. My mother says it’s because they don’t know what to say, that they’re just trying to comfort you, but Uncle Pat says… said that’s no excuse for them telling you stupid things like you’ll get over it.” She looked up at him. “You don’t, you know. Ever. They tell you you’ll feel better, too. That isn’t true either.”

Her words should have been depressing, but oddly, they were comforting. “ ‘You think things can’t get any worse,’ ” he said, quoting Vielle, “ ‘and then they do.’ ”

Kit nodded. “I found this book Joanna had asked me for, the day she was killed,” she said. “I called and offered to bring it to her, but she said no, she’d pick it up later on.”

And if you’d brought the book over to her, she might not have been down in the ER when the teenager pulled his knife, Richard thought, marveling at how everyone found some way to blame himself. If only the lookouts had seen the iceberg five minutes earlier, if only the Californian’s wireless officer hadn’t gone to bed, if only the Carpathia had been closer. It was amazing how much guilt and blame and “if only’s” there were to go around.

But the fact remained, they were going too fast, they didn’t have enough lifeboats, he had turned his pager off. “It was my fault, not yours,” he started to say, but she was still talking.

“I’d been looking for the book for her for weeks, and then when I found it, it was too late to be of any help to her. She wanted so much to find out what caused near-death experiences, how they worked. That’s why I brought the book to you. She didn’t get a chance to finish what she started, but maybe it’ll help you in your research.” She held the book out to him.

He didn’t take it. “I’ve shut the research project down,” he said. And now she would say, “You only think you feel that way now.”

She didn’t. “It’s the textbook they used in Joanna’s English class,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken. “My uncle was her English teacher in high school. Joanna asked me to look for it. She thought there might be something in it that made her NDEs take the form of the Titanic.” She held the book out.

“I don’t need it,” he said. “I already know the answer.”

“I talked to Vielle,” she said. “She told me about your theory, that you think she was really on the Titanic.”

“Not think,” he said. “Know.”

“Joanna didn’t think she was. She thought the Titanic was a symbol for something else. She was trying to find out what. That’s why she needed the book.” She laid it down on the examining table between them. “She was convinced something Uncle Pat had said in his English class had triggered the image of the Titanic, but he has Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember, so she asked me to help her. She was convinced there was some connection between it and the nature of the near-death experience, and that the book would help her find out why she was seeing the Titanic.”

“I know why she was seeing it. Because it was real. I have outside verification.”

“You mean because she said, ‘SOS’? That could mean lots of—”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Because I went after her.”

She stared at him for a long minute. “After her? What do you mean?”

“I mean, I went under to try to save her.” He gestured at the RIPT scan, at the examining table between them. “I self-induced an NDE and went after her to try to bring her back.”

“You went after her,” she said, struggling to understand. “Onto the Titanic?”

“No,” he said bitterly. “I was too late for that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There are apparently several varieties of hell. Mine was to stand in a crowd in the White Star office and listen to an official read the names of the passengers who’d been lost.”

“You were there?”

“I was there. It really happened. She went down on the Titanic. And she called to me for help. And I came too late.” He had said it finally, and getting it all out, sharing, venting, was supposed to make you feel better, wasn’t it, according to Eight Great Grief Helps? It didn’t.

And now that it was out, Kit would say—what? “You left her to drown?” or, “I am so sorry,” or, “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re half out of your mind with grief?

None of the above. She said, “How do you know? That you were really in the White Star office?”

“I know. It was a real place,” he said, and knew he sounded just like Mr. Mandrake’s nutcases, swearing they’d seen Jesus, but Kit only nodded.

“Joanna said it felt real,” she said, “not like a dream. She said it was a very convincing hallucination.”

She was offering him a way out, just like, “It wasn’t your fault,” and, “There’s a reason for everything,” only this one was even better: it was only acetylcholine and random synapses and confabulation. He had conjured the White Star office out of Joanna’s NDE accounts and the movie, created a unifying image out of panic and grief and temporal-lobe stimulation.

It almost worked. Except that Joanna, dying, had called out to him for help: “SOS. SOS.” “No thanks,” he said and handed her back the book.

And now she would say, “You owe it to Joanna to continue your research. It’s what she would have wanted.”

But she didn’t. She said, “Okay,” and put the book in her bag and then walked over to his desk and wrote on a pad. “Here’s my phone number if you decide you need it.”

She walked to the door, opened it, and then turned around. “I don’t know who else to tell this to,” she said. “Joanna saved my life. My uncle… living with someone…,” she stopped and tried again. “I was going under, and she got me to go out, she convinced me to use Eldercare, she invited me to Dish Night. She told me,” she took a ragged breath, “she wished she could die saving somebody’s life. And she did. She saved mine.”

She left then, but the head of the board came, to remind him of the Coping with Post-Trauma Stress Workshop, and Nurse Hawley with Practical Mourning Management, and an elderly volunteer with a copy of the Book of Mormon. And on Tuesday, Eileen and two other nurses from three-west, to take him to the funeral. “We won’t take no for an answer,” they said. “It’s not good to be alone at a time like this.”

He supposed Tish had put them up to it, but although he had finally slept, he still felt bone-tired and unable to concentrate, unable to think of an excuse they would accept. And maybe this was a good idea, he thought, climbing into the cramped Geo. He wasn’t sure he was in any shape to drive.

“I still can’t believe she’s dead,” one of the nurses said as soon as they had pulled out of the parking lot.

“At least she didn’t suffer,” the other one said. “What was she doing down in the ER, anyway?”

“Have you thought about grief counseling, Richard?” Eileen asked.

“I’ve got a great book you should read,” the first nurse volunteered. “It’s called The Grief Workbook, and it’s got all these neat depression exercises.”

There was a crowd at the church, mostly people from the hospital, looking odd out of their lab coats and scrubs. He saw Mr. Wojakowski and Mrs. Troudtheim. Joanna’s sister stood by the door of the narthex, flanked by two little girls. He wondered if Maisie would be there, and then remembered that her mother relentlessly shielded her from “negative experiences.”

“Look, there’s the cute policeman who took all of our statements,” one of the nurses said, pointing to a tall black man in a dark gray suit.

“I don’t see Tish anywhere,” the other one said, craning her neck.

“She isn’t coming,” the nurse said. “She said she hates funerals.”

“So do I,” the other one said.

“It isn’t a funeral,” Eileen said. “It’s a memorial service.”

“What’s the difference?” the first nurse asked.

“There’s no body. The family’s having a private graveside service later.”

But when they came into the sanctuary, there was a bronze casket at the front, with half of its lid raised and a blanket of white mums and carnations on the other half. “We don’t have to file past and look at her, do we?” the shorter nurse asked.

“Well, I’m not,” Eileen said and slid into a pew. The other two nurses sat down next to her. Richard stood a moment looking at the casket, his fists clenched, and then walked up the aisle. When he got to the casket, he stood there a long moment, afraid to look down, afraid Joanna’s terror and her panic might be reflected in her face, but there was no sign of it.

She lay with her head on an ivory satin pillow, her hair arranged around her head in unfamiliar curls. The dress she was wearing was unfamiliar, too, high-necked, with lace ruffles, and around her neck was a silver cross. Her white hands lay folded across her chest, hiding the slashed aorta, the Y incision.

A gray-haired woman had come up beside him. “Doesn’t she look natural?” she said. Natural. The mortician had set her glasses high on the bridge of her nose, and put rouge on her white cheeks, dark red lipstick on her bloodless lips. Joanna had never worn lipstick that color in her life. In her life.

“She looks so peaceful,” the gray-haired woman said, and he looked earnestly into Joanna’s face, hoping it was true, but it wasn’t. Her ashen, made-up face held no expression at all.

He continued to stand there, looking blindly down at her, and after a minute Eileen came up and led him back to the pew. He sat down. The nurse who had recommended Ten Steps reached across Eileen and handed him a pamphlet. It was titled “Four Tips for Getting Through the Funeral.” The organist began playing.

Kit came in, leading a tall, graying man. Vielle was with them. They sat down several rows ahead. “Who’s getting married?” the man said, and Kit bent toward him, whispering, and no wonder she hadn’t been shocked by what he’d told her. She witnessed horrors every day.

And the funeral was one of them. A soloist sang, “On Jordan’s Banks I Stand,” and then the minister preached a sermon on the necessity of being saved “while there is yet time, for none knows the day or the hour when we will suddenly come face to face with God’s judgment.

“As it says in the Holy Scriptures,” he intoned, “when that judgment comes, those who have confessed their sins and taken Jesus Christ as their personal savior shall enter life eternal, but those who have not accepted Him shall go away into everlasting punishment. Now, will you please turn to Hymn 458 in your hymnals?”

Hymn 458 was “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” I can’t stand this, Richard thought, looking wildly around for a way out, but there was a whole row of people on either side.

The minister brought down his hands in a broad gesture. “You may be seated. And now, Joanna’s colleague and dear friend would like to say a few words about her life,” he said and nodded at Mandrake. Mandrake stood up, holding a sheaf of papers, and started for the front. As he came near the casket, he turned to smile comfortingly at Joanna’s sister.

And if Richard had needed any proof that Joanna wasn’t there, that she was oceans, years away, trapped on the Titanic, this was it.

Because if she’d been there, even though she was dead, she would never have lain there passively on the shirred satin, eyes closed, hands composed, with Mandrake coming. She would have been out of the casket and sprinting for the choir loft, making a dash for the side door, saying the way she had that first day, “If I talk to him I’m liable to kill him.”

She didn’t move. Mandrake went up to the casket, looked down at her, still with that disgusting smile, and bent to kiss her forehead. Richard must have made a sound, must have made a move to stand up, because Eileen reached over and put a hand on his arm, grasping it firmly, holding him down.

Mandrake walked to the pulpit and then stood there, his hands on the sides of the pulpit, smiling oilily at the congregation. “I was Joanna Lander’s friend,” he said, “perhaps her best friend.”

Richard looked ahead at Vielle. Kit had her hand clasped firmly in Vielle’s.

“I say that,” Mandrake said, “because I not only worked with her, as many of you did, but because I shared a common goal with her, a common passion. Both of us had devoted our lives to discovering the mystery of Death, a mystery that is a mystery to her no longer.” He smiled gently in the direction of the casket. “Of course we all have our faults. Joanna was always in a hurry.”

Yeah, trying to get away from you.

“She was also sometimes too skeptical,” he said, and chuckled as if it were an amusing shortcoming. “Skepticism is an excellent quality…”

How would you know?

“But Joanna often carried it to extremes and refused to believe the evidence that was so plainly before her, evidence that Death was not the end.” He smiled at the congregation. “You may have read my book, The Light at the End of the Tunnel.”

“I don’t believe it,” Eileen muttered next to him. “He’s plugging his book at a funeral.”

“If you’ve read it, you know that Death need hold no fears, that even though dying may seem painful, terrifying, to those of us left behind, it is not. For our loved ones await us, and an Angel of Light. We know that from the mouths of those who have seen that light, seen those loved ones, from the message they have brought back from the Other Side.”

He cast a sickly smile in the direction of the casket. “Joanna didn’t believe that. She was a skeptic—she believed near-death experiences were hallucinations, caused by endorphins or lack of oxygen,” he waved them away with his hand. “Which is why her testimony, the testimony of a skeptic, is so compelling.”

He paused dramatically. “I heard Joanna’s last words. She spoke them to me only moments before her death, as she was on her way down to that fateful encounter. Joanna was heading down a hallway to the elevator that would take her down to the emergency room. And do you know what she did?” He paused expectantly.

She looked frantically around for a stairway, Richard thought, for a way out.

“I’ll tell you what she did,” Mandrake said. “She stopped me and said, ‘Mr. Mandrake, I wanted to tell you, you were right about the near-death experience. It was a message from the Other Side.’ ”

“ ‘You have seen what lies on the Other Side then?’ I asked her, and I could see the answer in her face, radiant with joy. She was a skeptic no longer. ‘You were right, Mr. Mandrake,’ she said. ‘It was a message from the Other Side.’ What more proof do we need of the afterlife that awaits us? Joanna herself has told us, with her last breath, her last words.”

Her last words, Richard thought. “Why do people in movies always say things like ‘The murderer is… Bang!’ ” Joanna had said at Dish Night. “You’d think, if they had something that important to communicate, they’d say it first.”

“Joanna used her last words to send a message from the Other Side,” Mr. Mandrake said. “How can we fail to heed that message? I for one intend to as I complete my new book, Messages from the Other Side.”

“ ‘You’re doing it wrong,’ ” she had said. “ ‘Important words first.’ ” “ ‘Tell Richard… SOS.’ ”

“Joanna had only a few minutes to live,” Mandrake said, “and how did she choose to spend it?

By sharing her vision of the afterlife with us.”

“She didn’t think it was the Titanic,” Kit had said. “She said she wished she could die saving somebody’s life.”

Mandrake must have finished. The organ was playing “Shall We Gather at the River?” and people were starting to file out. Richard followed them into the aisle, and then stood there, staring at Joanna’s casket.

“I don’t think that was what she was trying to tell you,” Vielle had said. “I think she was trying to tell you something good.”

People filed out past him, talking about the flowers, the solo, the casket. “She can’t be gone,” Nina sobbed to a gangly resident, “I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe it about fox, can you?” Davis’s message on the answering machine had said. “Warn me before it hits the star,” and Richard hadn’t understood the message at all. “She kept saying, ‘Water,’ ” Vielle had said. “She was really saying, ‘Walter.’ ”

The minister laid a hand on his arm. “Do you wish to say good-bye to the departed?” he whispered. “They’re about to close the casket.” Richard looked up the aisle. Two men in black suits stood by the casket, hands folded in front of them.

“There’ll be a luncheon in the fellowship hall downstairs,” the minister said. “We hope you’ll stay.” He gave Richard’s arm a gentle squeeze and walked up the aisle, nodding to the men as he went. They began moving the spray of flowers.

“The best plan would be to decide in advance what you wanted your last words to be and then memorize them, so you’d be ready,” Joanna had said.

The two men lowered the casket lid.

“Whatever it was must’ve been important,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. “She was in such a hurry to tell you, she almost ran me down.”

“Are you all right?” Eileen said, coming rapidly up the aisle to him.

The men fastened the casket lid shut and began shifting the blanket of flowers so it lay in the center.

“Look, we’re all going to go over to Santeramo’s and get a pizza,” Eileen said, taking his arm and leading him out of the sanctuary and over to the other two nurses. “Why don’t you come with us?”

“No,” he said, looking around for Kit and Vielle. He couldn’t see them.

“It’d do you good,” the nurse who had given him the pamphlet said. “It’d get your mind off it.”

“You need to eat something,” the other nurse said.

“I need to get back to the hospital. Vielle’s giving me a ride back,” he said firmly and set out through the crowd to find her and Kit.

The minister and Joanna’s sister were standing with Mandrake. “—just acknowledging there’s an afterlife isn’t enough,” Joanna’s sister was saying stubbornly to Mandrake. “You have to confess your sins before you can be saved.”

He couldn’t see Vielle anywhere, or Kit. They must have left, or else gone downstairs to the fellowship hall. He started across to the basement steps and ran into Mr. Wojakowski, holding forth to a circle of elderly ladies. “Hiya, Doc,” he said. “Sad, sad thing. I’ve seen a lot of funerals. On the Yorktown, they—”

“When you saw Joanna, that last day,” Richard said, “did she say what she wanted to tell me?”

“Nope. She was in too big a hurry. She didn’t even hear me the first coupla times I yelled at her. ‘Did somebody call battle stations?’ I asked her. At Midway, they’d call battle stations, and boy, did everybody scramble for their tin hats, ’cause they knew in about five minutes all hell’d be breaking loose. They’d run up those gangways so fast they didn’t even take time to put on their pants, scared as rabbits—”

“Joanna was scared?” Richard asked. “She seemed frightened, upset?”

“Joanna? Hell, no. She looked like my bunkmate Frankie Cocelli used to look during a battle. Little skinny guy, looked like you could snap him in two, but not afraid of anything. ‘Let me at ’em!’ he’d shout when the sirens went, and go tearing off like he couldn’t wait to get shot at. Did, too. Did I ever tell you how he got it? This Jap Zero—?”

“And that’s how Joanna looked?” Richard persisted. “Eager? Excited?”

“Yeah. She said she had to go find you, that she had something important to tell you.”

“But she didn’t say what?”

“Nope. So anyway, this Zero—”

Richard spotted Vielle, just inside the door. “Excuse me,” he said and edged his way through the crowd to her. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

“I was outside with Kit. She had to take her uncle home,” Vielle said. “He kept asking her who’d died, over and over.” She shook her head. “Poor man. Or maybe he’s the lucky one. At least he won’t remember this funeral.”

“I need to talk to you,” Richard said. “I need to know exactly what Joanna said to you in the ER.”

“If you’re worried about what Mandrake said, forget it. He’s lying,” Vielle said. “Joanna never voluntarily said two words to him in her life, let alone that NDEs were a message from the Other Side.”

“I know that,” he said impatiently. “I need to know what she said to you.”

“There’s no point in torturing yourself over—”

“The exact words. It’s important.”

She looked curiously at him. “Did something happen?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. What did she say? Exactly.”

“She said, ‘Tell Richard,’ ” Vielle said, squinting in her effort to remember. “ ‘It’s…’ The resident was trying to start an airway, and she waved him away. And then, ‘SOS. SOS.’ ”

He grabbed a pen out of his pocket and scribbled the words on the order of service. “ ‘Tell Richard… it’s… SOS, SOS,’ ” he said. “Is that all?”

“Yes. No. Just before that, she grabbed for my hand and said, ‘Important.’ ”

Important.

“Are you okay?” Vielle said.

“Yeah,” he said, staring at the order of service. Tell Richard it’s… what? What had she been trying to tell him when they interrupted her to put the airway in?

“Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone right now,” Vielle said, “especially after that travesty of a funeral.” She glared across the room at Mandrake and Joanna’s sister. “Some of us from the ER are going to go get something to eat. Why don’t you come with us?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to the hospital.” He walked quickly out into the parking lot and caught a ride with Mrs. Dirksen from Personnel.

“Wasn’t that a beautiful sermon?” she asked him. “I loved the music.”

“Umm,” Richard said, not listening. Tell Richard it’s… Important. She had been trying to tell him something. Something important.

But what if he was confabulating? Manipulating her words so he didn’t have to face the fact that she had called out to him for help? “The problem with NDEs is, there’s no way to obtain outside confirmation,” Joanna had said.

“And Mr. Mandrake’s eulogy was just wonderful,” Mrs. Dirksen said. She pulled into the hospital parking lot. “Didn’t you think so?”

“Thanks for the ride,” Richard said and dashed up the shortcut to the lab.

He pushed a chair over against the cabinet, climbed up on it, and reached his arm over the edge, feeling far back. There was nothing there. He patted around the top of the cabinet with the flat of his hand and then reached all the way back to the wall and swept his hand along the edge.

It was a piece of cardboard. He scooted it forward with his fingers till he could pick it up. It was a postcard of a tropical sunset, garish pink and red and gold, with palm trees silhouetted against the bright orange ocean. He turned it over, half afraid of what it would say, but it wasn’t Joanna’s handwriting.

Up at the top someone had written in a clear, spiky hand, one under the other, “Pretty Woman, Remember the Titans, What Lies Beneath.” The other hand, not Joanna’s either, was a barely legible scrawl. He couldn’t read the signature, and he had a hard time reading the message. “Having a wonderful time,” it said. “Wish you were here.”

A message from the dead.

He got down off the chair, plugged in the phone, and found Kit Gardiner’s number. “Kit,” he said when she answered. “I need you to come to the hospital. And bring the book.”

46

They met in the cafeteria. Richard had called Vielle as soon as he hung up with Kit, and she had suggested it as being closer to the ER in case she was paged. “If it’s open,” she had added. “Which I doubt.”

Amazingly, though, it was. Joanna would never believe this, Richard thought, and it was the first thought of her that didn’t feel like a punch in the stomach.

The cafeteria was nearly empty. Because everyone assumes it’s closed, Richard thought, going through the deserted line for his coffee, but Vielle said, filling a paper cup with Coke, “Everybody’s at the Coping with Post-Trauma Stress Workshop.” They paid a put-out-looking cashier in a pink uniform and sat down at the table in the far corner where Kit was already waiting.

“So,” Vielle said, setting her Coke down. “Where do we start?”

“We reconstruct Joanna’s movements that day,” Richard said. “The last time I saw her was in her office. She was transcribing interviews. I went to tell her I was going to meet with Dr. Jamison at one, but that I’d be back in time for Mrs. Troudtheim’s session. That was at eleven-thirty. At a little after one she told Mr. Wojakowski she had something important to tell me, so important it couldn’t wait till I got back to the lab, even though I’d told her I’d be back before two.”

“I talked to her on the phone around eleven-thirty, too,” Kit said. “It must have been either right before or right after you saw her. I called to tell her I’d found the book she asked me to look for.”

“And how did she seem?” Richard asked.

“Busy,” Kit said. “Distracted.”

“But not excited?” Vielle put in.

Kit shook her head.

“Mr. Wojakowski says that when he saw her she was in a hurry, very excited,” Richard said. “And Diane Tollafson saw her then, too, going down the stairs to the ER, which leaves us with an hour and a half.”

Vielle shook her head. “An hour. I talked to Susy Coplis. She says she saw Joanna getting into an elevator at ten to one, also in a hurry.”

“And excited?” Richard asked.

Vielle shook her head. “She only saw Joanna from the back, but Susy was headed for the same elevator, and she was in a hurry, too, because she was late getting back from lunch, but Joanna was in so much of a hurry that by the time Susy got to the elevator, the doors had already closed.”

“Did she see which floor Joanna was going to?”

“Yes,” Vielle said, pleased, “because she had to stand there and wait for it to come back. She said it went straight up to eight.”

“What’s on eight?” Kit asked.

“Dr. Jamison’s office,” Richard said. “She obviously went up there looking for me and found the note Dr. Jamison had left on her door, saying she’d gone down to the ER, and assumed I’d gone there, too.”

“So that she was on her way there when she ran into Mr. Wojakowski,” Kit put in.

“Yes,” Richard said. “What floor was Susy on when she saw her?”

“Three-west,” Vielle said.

“The ICU’s in the west wing, isn’t it?” Richard asked, and when Vielle nodded, “Did you call Joanna with any patients who’d coded that morning?”

“No, we didn’t have any codes in the ER that day… that morning,” Vielle corrected herself, and Richard knew she was thinking of the code alarm buzzing as they worked over Joanna.

He said rapidly, “But a patient could have coded after they were sent upstairs? Did you have any coronaries that morning? Or strokes?”

“I don’t remember. I’ll check to see if we had any life-threatenings,” she said, jotting it down. “And I’ll find out if anyone coded in the ICU or CICU that day. If they did, one of the nurses might have phoned her.”

“And when she interviewed them they told her something,” Kit said.

“Yes,” Richard said. “Is there a way to find out who coded that day, and not just in the ICU and CICU?” he asked Vielle.

She nodded. “Couldn’t Joanna also have talked to a patient she’d interviewed before,” Kit asked, “and they told her something new? Or she found something in the transcript and went to ask them about it? You said she was transcribing interviews when you saw her.”

Richard nodded. He asked Vielle, “Do you know if any of her previous subjects are still in the hospital?”

“Mrs. Davenport,” Vielle said, but Richard doubted very much if Joanna would have voluntarily gone to see Mrs. Davenport, or believed anything she had to say if she had. Who else had she mentioned? Mrs. Woollam. No, Mrs. Woollam had died. He would have to check her transcripts for their names. It was unlikely any of the ones she’d interviewed in recent weeks were still in the hospital in this age of HMOs, but he made a note to check the transcripts for their names.

“We’ve still got an hour unaccounted for,” Richard said. “Vielle, you haven’t found anyone else who saw Joanna during that time?”

“Not yet,” Vielle said.

“What about Maurice Mandrake?” Kit asked. Richard and Vielle both turned to look at her.

“At the funeral, he said he talked to Joanna.”

“He was lying,” they both said together.

“I know he lied about what Joanna said,” Kit said, “but isn’t there a possibility he was telling the truth about having seen her?”

“She’s right,” Vielle said. “Joanna might have run into him accidentally, and if that’s the case, he might be able to tell us which part of the hospital she was in and which direction she was headed.”

Away from Mandrake as fast as she could, Richard thought. “Okay,” he said.

“Joanna might have found something in the transcripts,” Vielle said, “and gone to ask someone about it, but couldn’t she have just found something in them and gone to look for you, in which case the answer would be in the transcripts?”

Richard shook his head. “She would have gone to the lab and then up to Dr. Jamison’s office on eighth, not down to three-west.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Vielle said. “Wait, Kit said she’d called and told Joanna she’d found a book. Joanna could have started over there to get it and gone down to the parking lot and then thought of something she’d seen in the transcripts. No, that wouldn’t have taken her to the west wing either.”

“And she told me she didn’t think she could come get the book till after work.”

“She might have changed her mind,” Vielle said, but Kit was shaking her head again.

“She didn’t show any interest in the book at all,” Kit said. “The first time I found it she was excited, she said she’d come right over. This time I got the idea she didn’t even care.”

“What did she say?” Richard asked. “Her exact words?”

“She said she was really busy, and she didn’t know when she’d be able to get over,” Kit said slowly, trying to remember. “She said, ‘Things are really crazy around here,’ but she didn’t sound like that, like she was harassed and busy.”

“How did she sound?” Richard asked.

“Distracted,” Kit said. “When I first told her about the book, I got the idea she didn’t know what I was talking about. She sounded… distant, worried. Definitely not excited or happy.”

“And she didn’t say why she was busy or what she was working on?”

“No,” Kit said, but she had hesitated before answering, she wasn’t looking at him.

“She said something,” he said. “We have to hear it, even if it’s bad. What did she say?”

Kit tamped down the straw in her Coke. “She asked me if I’d found out if there were any fires on the Titanic.”

“Fires?” Vielle said incredulously. “The Titanic hit an iceberg, it didn’t burn down.”

“I know,” Kit said, “but she wanted to know if there had been any fires on board after it hit the iceberg.”

“Were there?” Richard asked curiously.

“Yes and no,” Kit said. “There had been a fire smoldering in the coal in Boiler Room 6 since before the ship sailed, and there were fireplaces in the first-class lounge and the smoking room, but no other fires.”

“You said she asked you if you’d found this out?” Richard said. “Had she asked you about a fire before?”

Kit nodded. “The day I found the book,” she said. “The first time, I mean. I’d found the book four days before, but when she came over to get it, my uncle had hidden it again.”

“And she asked you about the fires then?”

“Yes.”

And four days later she was still on the same track, Richard thought. Whatever it was.

“That was the day I saw her getting into a taxi,” Vielle said. “She looked like she was in a desperate hurry, and she didn’t have her coat on or her purse. Kit, did she have a coat on when she came to see you?”

“No, just a cardigan,” Kit said, “but she didn’t come in a taxi. She had her car.”

“And she asked you about fires on the Titanic?” Richard asked.

“Yes, and I said I didn’t know of any, but I said I’d check.”

“And you’re sure she came in her own car and not a taxi?” Vielle said.

“Yes, because she left in such a hurry. When I came downstairs from looking for the book, she said she had to go, and went out and got into her car without even saying good-bye. I thought she was upset because my uncle had said something to her—he does sometimes, he can’t help himself, it’s the illness—or because I couldn’t find the book—”

Vielle was shaking her head. “She was already upset when I saw her,” she said. “I wonder where she was going in that taxi? What time did she come to your house?”

“Two o’clock,” Kit said.

“Are you sure?” Vielle asked, frowning.

“Yes. I was surprised to see her. She’d said she didn’t think she’d be over till later on that afternoon. Why?”

“Because it was a quarter after one when she got in the taxi,” Vielle said, “and she would have had to go wherever she went, come back, get her own car, and drive to your house, which is how far from the hospital?”

“Twenty minutes,” Kit said.

“Twenty minutes, by two o’clock,” Vielle finished her sentence. “Which means wherever she was going in that taxi could only have been a few blocks away. What’s a few blocks from the hospital?”

“What are you getting at, Vielle?” Richard asked. “You think she found out whatever it was four days ago instead of the day she was killed?”

“Or part of it,” Vielle said, “and then she spent the next three days trying to find out the other part, or trying to prove what she’d discovered. And it had something to do with a fire on the Titanic.”

“But there wasn’t a fire on the Titanic,” Kit said, “at least not the kind she wanted. When I told her about Boiler Room 6, she asked me if it had caused a lot of smoke, and when I said no, she asked me if there had been any other fires. And she wasn’t excited. She seemed worried and upset. Was she excited when you saw her getting into the taxi, Vielle?”

“No,” Vielle conceded. “I saw her that night after she got back, and she looked like she’d just had bad news. I was worried about her. I was afraid the project was making her sick.”

And four days later, excited and happy, she had run down to her death in her eagerness to tell him something.

“Are you finished with this?” a voice said. Richard turned around. The cafeteria lady was standing there, pointing grimly at his coffee.

He nodded, and she snatched it and the Coke cups off the table and wiped at the table with a gray rag. “You need to finish up. We close in ten minutes,” she said, and went over to stand pointedly by the door.

“We need more time,” Vielle said.

Richard shook his head. “What we need is more data. We need to find out where she went in the hospital.”

“And in that taxi,” Vielle said.

Richard nodded. “We need to find out what she was doing on three-west, what she was looking for in the transcripts—”

“And what happened between her and my uncle while I was upstairs,” Kit said.

“Will he remember?” Richard asked.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “Sometimes a direct question, if it’s casual enough—I’ll try.”

“I want you to go through the textbook, too,” Richard said, “and see if you can find anything in it about the Titanic.”

“But she’d lost interest in the textbook,” Kit said.

“Maybe, or maybe she’d remembered what was in it and no longer needed it,” Richard said. “And see what else you can find out about a fire. The ship was listing. Maybe a candle in one of the cabins fell over and caught the curtains on fire.”

“I’ll talk to the staff,” Vielle said, “and see if anybody coded that day, and if anybody else saw Joanna. And I’ll try to find the driver of the taxi she took.”

“And I’ll go through the transcripts,” Richard said.

“No,” Kit said, and he looked at her in surprise. “I can go through the transcripts. You’ve got to keep working on your research.”

“Finding out what she said is more important—” Richard began.

She shook her head violently. “There’s only one thing Joanna could have had to tell you that was so important it couldn’t wait, and that was that she’d figured out what the NDE is, and how it works.”

“How it—?” Richard said. “But Joanna couldn’t read the scans or interpret the neurotransmitter data—”

Kit cut him off. “Maybe not the actual mechanics of the NDE, but the essence of it, the connection. She was determined to find out what my uncle said in class about the Titanic. She was convinced it was the key to the NDE, to how it worked. That was why she wanted the textbook, because she thought it might help her remember,” she said, and her earnestness reminded him of Joanna, saying, “The Titanic means something. I know it.” And he had said, “It’s a content-less feeling. It’s caused by the temporal lobe.”

“You think she discovered the connection?” Richard asked.

Kit nodded. “It’s the only thing that would have made her try so hard to tell you when she…” Kit faltered. “She has to have remembered the connection. Maybe she found something in the transcripts, or someone she talked to said something that clicked, but whatever it was, it had something to do with the NDEs and the scans, so you have to keep working on them.”

“All right,” he said. “And I’ll talk to Mrs. Davenport. What else?”

“You need to check her messages,” Vielle said. “Someone might have called her. People who’d had NDEs were always calling her.”

Richard wrote down “answering machine” and “switchboard.” “We’ll meet again—when?” he asked. “Friday? Does that give everybody time?”

Kit and Vielle both nodded. “Same time, same place?” Vielle asked.

“We’re closed on Fridays,” the cafeteria lady called over from the door. She tapped her watch. “Five minutes.”

“In the lab,” Richard said, pushing his chair under the table. “Or, if anybody finds out anything before then, we call and set up something sooner.”

The cafeteria lady was holding the door open. They filed through it under her disapproving eye. “Do you want to come up to Joanna’s office with me and get the transcripts now?” Richard asked Kit.

“I can’t,” she said with an anxious glance at her watch. “The Eldercare person can only stay until four. I’ll come get them tomorrow morning. Will ten work?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I’ll see you then,” she said and hurried toward the elevator.

“And I’ve got to get back to the ER,” Vielle said. “I’ll call you if I find anybody else who saw Joanna.”

She started for the stairs. Halfway there, she stopped, said, “Damn!” and came back toward Richard.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I keep forgetting I can’t get there from here,” she said, exasperated. “They’re painting the whole first floor. It’s completely blocked off.” She walked past him and headed for the elevator. “I’ve got to go up to second and take the service elevator down.”

And that was exactly the problem, he thought, looking after her. Half the hospital’s stairs and walkways were blocked off at any given time, and even when they weren’t, it was nearly impossible to get from one part of Mercy General to another. And Joanna had had Mandrake on her tail. She might have ducked into an elevator or down a hall to avoid him, or taken a shortcut to avoid a blocked-off walkway. Which meant her having been seen on three-west didn’t mean a thing. Unless we’ve got a map of Mercy General, and not just a map. A map of Mercy General that day. Which meant talking to Maintenance.

He went down to the basement and talked to a man named Podell, who clearly thought Richard was there to complain about something and who eventually reluctantly produced a work schedule. “They may not have been painting those when it says, though,” he said helpfully.

But it was a start. Richard copied the schedule down and stuck it in his pocket. “Do you have a map?”

Podell stared incredulously at him. “Of Mercy General?”

Richard settled for asking Podell the quickest way to get up to three-west, and carefully writing his instructions down, then going up to Medicine to see Mrs. Davenport. She wasn’t there—she was out having a CAT scan. Richard asked how long she would be and then how to get to eighth, writing those instructions down, too, and drawing the beginnings of a rudimentary map of the halls and elevators as he went.

He did the same thing on eighth, opening doors to various linen closets and storage rooms, and when he found a stairway, following it as far down as it would go. By the time he went back to the lab, the paper was a maze of crisscrossing lines and squares. He put them on the computer, sketching in floors and the walkways, marking the routes he’d taken and the ones he knew, and outlining the sections he needed to fill in.

All of which was an elaborate form of stalling, so he wouldn’t have to go into Joanna’s office and get the transcripts. But Kit would be there in the morning to pick them up, and it had to be done sooner or later. He got the keys, and went down to her office.

He hadn’t been in it since she died. He stood outside, bracing himself, for several minutes, before he unlocked the door and went in. Her computer was still on. Books and stacks of transcripts were heaped on either side of it, with a shoe box full of tumbled tapes on top. Joanna’s minirecorder lay next to it, the tape bay open as if she had just popped a tape out. The message light on her answering machine was flashing.

It was impossible not to imagine, looking at the office, that she had not simply stepped out for a second. That she would not be right back, appearing in the doorway, breathless, saying, “I’m sorry I’m late. Did you get my message?”

But the messages on the machine were a week old, the plant on top of the file cabinet was withered and brown, and he would have to figure out the message himself. Unless whomever she’d gone to see had called her, and she’d listened to the message and then not erased it. He went over to the answering machine and stood there, his finger poised above the “play” button, bracing himself for the sound of her voice. But her voice wouldn’t be on it, only the voices of the people leaving the messages and, he hoped, a clue. He hit “play.”

Mr. Mandrake with a long tirade about Joanna never returning his calls. Mr. Wojakowski. Mrs. Haighton’s housekeeper, relaying the message that Mrs. Haighton couldn’t come Wednesday, she had a PEO meeting and would have to reschedule. Mr. Mandrake again, trying to convince her to go see Mrs. Davenport, who had “overwhelming proof of psychic powers she was granted by the Angel of—machine full. No more messages can be recorded.”

He called the hospital switchboard. All pages were confidential, the operator told him, which under other circumstances would have struck him as funny, and, anyway, no permanent record was kept of the pages.

He hung up and started through the transcripts piled on the desk.

Phrases and words were highlighted in yellow. “I felt happy and peaceful,” a Mr. Sanderson had said, “as though I had come to the end of a long voyage and was finally home.” The word “voyage” was highlighted, and elsewhere in the transcript, “water” and “cold,” which both made sense, and “glory,” which didn’t. In the next transcript, “cold” was highlighted again, and “passage” and “a sound like something ripping.” In the next, “darkness” and “smoke” and one entire sentence: “I was standing at the bottom of a beautiful stairway going up as far as I could see, and I knew it led to heaven.”

Or the Boat Deck, Richard thought. Joanna had clearly been pursuing a connection with the Titanic. Every word and phrase she’d marked, with the exception’ of “glory,” was Titanic-related. And “smoke.” No, “smoke” could relate to possible fires on the Titanic. Had she seen one? But she hadn’t mentioned a fire in any of her accounts. Or had she? The last two times she’d gone under he’d scarcely listened to her accounts, he’d been so wrapped up in why she’d kicked out. Could there be something in one of them that had triggered the discovery, whatever it was? And made her go tearing off in such a hurry that she’d left the computer on and forgotten her minirecorder?

But she’d had her last session four days before she died. And gone tearing off somewhere in a taxi, looking upset, had showed up at Kit’s an hour later without her coat and then left abruptly.

That’s it, he thought, there was something in that NDE, and began going through the stack of transcripts, looking for Joanna’s. They weren’t there, and when he called up her files, neither of her last two accounts were on it. They must still be on the tapes.

He started sorting through them, but a third of them weren’t labeled, and those that were, were in some kind of code. He would have to take them home and play them. He dumped all the tapes back into the shoe box and carried them, Joanna’s minirecorder, and the computer disks down to the lab and then went back for the transcripts.

It took him two trips. He debated taking the plant, but it looked too far gone to be saved. He shut and locked the door, carried the transcripts down to the lab, stacked them on the examining table, and started down to see Mrs. Davenport. Halfway to the elevator, he turned around, walked back to the lab for a beaker of water, and went back to Joanna’s office to water the plant.

47

The first-class smoking room,” Mr. Briarley said and led Joanna into a wide, red-carpeted room. It was paneled in dark wood, with deep red leather chairs. At the far end, near a blazing fireplace, sat a group of people around a table, playing cards.

Joanna could not make out who they were because of the bluish haze of smoke that hung in the room, but she could see that they were all adults. Maisie’s not here, she thought, relieved, and then, these must be the first-class passengers who sat playing bridge as the Titanic was going down, Colonel Butt and Arthur Ryerson and—

But there were women at the table, too, and the people weren’t playing bridge. They were playing poker. She could see the red chips stacked in piles in front of the players and scattered in the middle. And the table wasn’t one of the oak ones of the smoking room. It was one of the cafeteria’s Formica-topped tables.

Mr. Briarley led her across the oak-paneled room toward them. The players looked up and saw them, and one of them laid down his cards and came to meet them. It was Greg Menotti, dressed in sweatpants and a white nylon jacket. “Where have you been?” he demanded. “There weren’t any lifeboats on the other side. Are there some in second-class?”

“You’ve met Mr. Menotti, of course,” Mr. Briarley said, leading Joanna past him and on over to the table.

“I call,” a man in a white waistcoat said, fanning his cards out in front of him, and Joanna saw it was the mustached man who had given her the note. He began raking in a quantity of red chips.

Mr. Briarley said, “Ms. Lander, may I introduce—,” and the man let go of the chips and stood up, pulling on a dinner jacket.

“J. H. Rogers,” Joanna said. “I put your message in a bottle and threw it over the side.”

He shook his head. He knows it didn’t reach his sister, she thought. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rogers,” she said, and he shook his head again.

“Not J. H. Rogers,” Mr. Briarley whispered in her ear. “Jay Yates. Professional gambler working the White Star liners under a variety of aliases.”

“You were the one who worked so hard loading the boats,” Joanna said. “You were a hero.”

“Loading the boats?” Greg Menotti said, pushing himself between Joanna and Yates. “Where are the others?”

“Others?” Yates said, bewildered.

“The other boats,” Greg insisted.

“There aren’t any others,” one of the women said, and Joanna saw it was the woman who’d been out on deck in her nightgown. She was wearing her red coat and the fox fur stole.

“Miss Edith Evans,” Mr. Briarley whispered to Joanna. “She gave up her place in the last lifeboat to a woman with two children.”

“It can’t have been the last one!” Greg said. “There have to be others!” He whirled to face Yates again. “You were loading the boats. What did they say about them? There were some down in second class, weren’t there? Weren’t there?”

Yates frowned. “I remember there was some mention of lowering the boats to the Promenade Deck and loading them from there,” he said.

“But when they got there, the windows were shut,” Mr. Briarley said, “and they had to send everyone back up to the Boat Deck,” but Greg had already run out, pushing his way through the door to the Promenade Deck.

“Greg!” Joanna called after him and turned to Mr. Briarley. “Shouldn’t we—?” but he was sitting down at the table, and Yates was pulling out a chair for her.

She sat down and looked around the table. W. T. Stead sat on her left, intent on his cards, which he had laid out in front of him on the table like a tarot hand and was turning over one by one. “You know Mr. Stead,” Mr. Briarley said.

Stead glanced impatiently at Joanna, nodded curtly, and went back to turning the cards. “And everyone else I think you know,” Mr. Briarley said, waving his hand around the table.

No, I don’t, Joanna thought, but as Mr. Briarley introduced them, she realized they were NDE patients she had interviewed: Mr. Funderburk, who had been so upset that he had not had an out-of-body experience, and bald, emaciated Ms. Grant, who had been so afraid. “And finally,” Mr. Briarley said, indicating a frail, white-haired woman, “Mrs. Woollam.” Oh, no, Joanna thought, not Mrs. Woollam. She didn’t deserve to be here. She was supposed to be in a beautiful, beautiful garden with Jesus. But the garden’s the Verandah Café, Joanna thought. “Oh, Mrs. Woollam,” she said.

“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’ ” Mrs. Woollam said, “ ‘I will fear no evil,’ ” but as she spoke, she pressed her Bible to her thin chest fearfully.

“Is that what this is?” Ms. Grant said anxiously. “The valley of the shadow of death?”

“No,” Mr. Funderburk said firmly. “That’s nothing like this. I’ve been there. There’s a tunnel, and at the end of it, there’s a light. And a Life Review.” He looked skeptically around the smoking room. “I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s five-card draw,” Yates said. He swept up the cards Stead had been turning over and shuffled them into the deck. “Aces high,” he said, and began to deal the cards.

Joanna picked hers up as he dealt them. A five. An eight. “If it isn’t the valley of the shadow of death,” Ms. Grant said, looking at Joanna, “what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said.

“Really?” Mr. Stead said, arching an eyebrow at her. “I was given to understand you were an expert on the phenomena of dying.”

“No,” Joanna said. “I thought I was, but I didn’t know anything.” And neither do you, she thought. Nobody knows anything.

“In that case,” Stead said, “I will explain. There is nothing to fear, Ms. Grant. Death is not an end, but a transition. We are but sailing to the Other Side, where wait the spirits of our dear departed. They will greet us on that farther shore, where all is peace and knowledge.”

“And a Life Review,” Mr. Funderburk said.

“And we shall understand all mysteries,” Stead said and picked up his cards.

“Are they right?” Ms. Grant said. She was gazing hopefully at Joanna, and so was Mrs. Woollam. So was Yates.

Joanna glanced at Mr. Briarley, but his face was carefully impassive, like it had been in English class, offering no clue to what the answer was, no help at all. “Are they?” Edith Evans said quietly, and Joanna thought suddenly of Maisie asking, “Will it hurt?” and of her saying, “People should tell the truth, even if it’s bad.”

“No,” Joanna said, and a sigh went around the table, though of relief or despair she couldn’t tell. “This isn’t real. It’s all a hallucination. The dying mind—”

“A hallucination?” Mr. Stead said, arching an eyebrow at her. “Are you saying that this fire, this table, these cards—” he said, plucking two from his hand and pushing them across the table toward Yates. “Two,” he said, and Yates dealt him a pair. He picked them up, arranged them in his hand, “—that these cards—” he fanned them out, face up, “are not real, and we only imagine that we see them?” He stood up and went over to the fire. “We only imagine we feel this fire’s warmth?” he said, spreading his hands out to the flames. “Or are we part of the hallucination as well?”

I don’t know, Joanna thought.

“ ‘All alone, so Heav’n has will’d, we die,’ ” Mr. Briarley murmured beside her. She looked at him, wondering what he was, what they all were. Confabulations? Snatches of memory and sound and color, flickering randomly? Or metaphors? Symbols of her fear and faith and denial?

“The mind tries to make sense of whatever it experiences,” she said, trying to explain. To whom? To Edith Evans and Jay Yates, who had died ninety years ago? Or to herself? “The mind can’t help it. It keeps doing it even when what it’s experiencing is a systems failure. The brain’s shutting down and synapses are firing randomly as the cells die, but the mind keeps trying to make sense of it, even though it can’t.”

Mrs. Woollam was praying, her lips moving silently. Edith Evans had her chin up proudly, bravely. “It looks for associations from long-term memory, for metaphors to explain what’s happening,” Joanna said, “and since the body’s damaged and its systems are slowly going under, it confabulates the Titanic.”

“The very image and mirror of Death,” Mr. Briarley said.

“But it isn’t real,” Joanna said. “It only seems real.”

“The sinking,” Ms. Grant said fearfully. “Will that seem real?”

“The soul cannot sink,” Stead said sternly. “It is immortal, and if this,” he waved his arm to include the cards, the fireplace, the entire room, “is, as Miss Lander says, a symbol, what else can it symbolize but the ship of the soul, eternal, indestructible?” He smiled at Ms. Grant. “Such a ship shall never sink.”

Joanna thought of Mr. Wojakowski saying earnestly, “All ships sink sooner or later.”

“Will we confabulate the sinking?” Ms. Grant repeated, and it was Joanna she was looking at.

Yes, Joanna thought, afraid. “I don’t know,” she said. “This is all just a metaphor for what the mind’s experiencing, and as the experience changes, as the brain shuts down and the synapses start firing more and more erratically, and—” She thought of what had happened to her on the way down here, memories flaring up like a match and then going out.

“And what?” Ms. Grant said frightenedly. “What will happen?”

“Nothing,” Joanna said. “As the cells die, there’ll no longer be enough to hold the unifying image together, and the Titanic will fade, or come apart. It’s already happening. This table is a table from Mercy General, and you—” She broke off and began again, “—and just now, on the stairs, I wasn’t on the Titanic. I was in the hallway of my apartment the night my father died. And before, on the Boat Deck, I saw two cheerleaders from my high school. That will happen more and more, till the image of the Titanic breaks up completely.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Ms. Grant said.

“What happened on the Titanic?” Edith asked. “After the boats were gone?”

Joanna looked at Mr. Briarley, but he was busy sorting the cards in his hand. “Her bow went under and she began to list to port,” she said. “The water came up over the forward well deck and the A Deck companionway. The lights…” she faltered.

“The lights went out,” Edith Evans said.

“Do you think that will be part of the metaphor?” Ms. Grant said fearfully. “The lights going out?”

How can it not be? Joanna thought. This is the lights going out, one by one, memory by memory, sensation by sensation, telephone calls and birthday presents and Dish Night, peanut M&M’s and snow and sitting perched on Maisie’s bed, looking at pictures of the Johnstown flood.

“What happens then?” Edith asked. “After the lights go out?”

The stern rises into the sky, Joanna thought, rearing up like a drowning swimmer, like a dying soul, and we go down into darkness.

“Death is only an illusion,” Stead said. He poked at the fire. “A snare of science and unbelief.” He flung the poker into the fire, sending up sprays of ash and sparks. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Ms. Lander, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he said, and stalked out of the room.

“What happens then?” Ms. Grant asked fearfully.

They take you to the morgue, Joanna thought, and cut your chest open in a Y to measure the knife wound, to determine the cause of death. And then they take you to the mortuary and inject embalming fluid into your veins and mastic compounds into your cheeks and brush your teeth with Ajax. And bury you in the ground.

“What happens then?” Edith said. “After the lights go out?”

They were all looking at her, waiting for her answer. “She sinks,” Joanna said.

There was a silence, and then Mrs. Woollam said, “ ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, for I am the Lord your God.’ ” She took a quavering breath. “The important thing is to trust in Jesus.”

“And behave well,” Edith said, her chin up.

“And play the hand you’re dealt,” Yates said.

“Yes, so we should,” Joanna said, and picked up the rest of her cards. A two. A six. An ace.

“How many cards do you want?” Yates asked her.

“Two,” she said, and pushed two of her cards at Yates. He dealt her two more, and she knew what they were before she even picked them up.

“I’ll open for a hundred,” Mr. Funderburk said.

“I’ll see your hundred and raise you a hundred,” Edith said. The others, even Mr. Stead, even Mrs. Woollam, made their bets.

“I’ll see you,” Joanna said to them all, “and raise you everything I’ve got.” She pushed her stack of red chips to the center.

“When the end comes,” Edith said, reaching over to take Yates’s hand. “When it comes, what should we do?”

You’ve already done it, Joanna thought, looking enviously at them, all those mothers, all those children, you gave up your place and your life and saved them.

“The end can’t come yet,” Mr. Funderburk said. “There is supposed to be a Life Review first.”

And this is it, Joanna thought, looking at Edith, at Yates, this is the Life Review, knowing you failed where others succeeded. Being tried in the balance and found wanting. Maisie, she thought despairingly. Maisie is the important thing. And I didn’t do it.

“I call,” Yates said, and Joanna laid down her hand.

“Two pair,” she said. “Aces and eights.” The dead man’s hand.

The doors banged open and Greg stormed in. “Half of C Deck’s underwater,” he announced, “and the whole First-Class Dining Saloon.”

Ms. Grant stood up, wringing her hands. “How long before the end, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said. “Irreversible brain death occurs in four to six minutes, but synapses continue to fire for several minutes after that—”

“It’s been longer than that,” Ms. Grant said hopefully. “Maybe—”

Joanna shook her head. “Time doesn’t—”

“The last regular lifeboat was launched at 1:55 a.m.,” Mr. Briarley said. “The lights went out at 2:15, and five minutes later the ship went down. That means there was approximately twenty minutes betwee—”

“Regular lifeboats?” Greg Menotti said. “What do you mean, regular lifeboats?”

“Time doesn’t what?” Ms. Grant asked.

“There were also four collapsible boats with canvas sides,” Mr. Briarley said, “but only two of them were launched. Collapsible A was washed off the deck and swamped, and Collapsible B capsized. The men who managed to climb aboard her bottom had to—”

“Where are they?” Greg said to Joanna.

“Greg—” Joanna said.

“Time doesn’t what?”

Greg grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet, knocking cards and poker chips onto the floor. “Where did they keep the collapsibles?”

“On the roof of the officers’ quarters,” Mr. Briarley said.

“Where are the officers’ quarters?” Greg demanded.

“You don’t understand,” Joanna said. “This isn’t the Titanic. It’s a metaphor. We—”

Greg’s grip tightened viciously on her arm. “Where are the officers’ quarters? Which deck?”

“Even if they are there,” Joanna said, “it’s too late. You had a heart attack. You d—”

“Which deck?”

“The Boat Deck,” Joanna said.

“Where on the Boat Deck?”

“On the starboard side,” Joanna said. “Between the wheelhouse and the wire—” The wireless shack. Where Jack Phillips had kept sending out SOSs long after the boats were gone. Where he had kept sending out signals to the very end.

“Between the wheelhouse and the what?” Greg demanded, but she had already wrenched free of his arm, was already running.

48

Mrs. Davenport told Richard she had spoken to Joanna only yesterday. “She has a message for you,” Mrs. Davenport said. “She said to tell you she is happy and doesn’t want you to mourn her, because Death is not the end. It is only a passage to the Other Side.”

“I need to know when the last time you saw her on this side was,” Richard insisted. “Did you see her on the day she was killed?”

“She was not killed,” Mrs. Davenport said. “Only her body. Her spirit lives eternally.”

I’m wasting my time here. Mrs. Davenport doesn’t know anything, Richard thought. But too much was at stake to turn on his heel and walk out. “Did you see her on the day her body was killed?” Richard asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Davenport said. “I saw her walking toward a bright light, and in the light was an angel, extending his hand to her, leading her to the light, and I knew then that she had crossed over, and I was glad, for there is no fear or sorrow or loneliness on the Other Side, only happiness.”

“Mrs. Davenport,” Richard said, and her psychic powers must have told her his patience was at an end.

“I did not see her in her earthly body that day,” she said. “I hadn’t seen her for several weeks, even though I’d paged her a number of times.” She smiled beatifically. “Now I speak with her nearly every day. She said to tell you that you cannot find the truth of death, or life, through science. Instead, you must seek the light.”

“Did she also say, ‘Rosabelle, believe’?” Richard asked.

“Yes, now that you mention it, I do remember her saying that,” Mrs. Davenport said eagerly. “She said, ‘Tell Richard, “Rosabelle, believe.” ’ What does it mean?”

That you’re just as in touch with the Other Side as all those bogus spiritualists Houdini’s wife consulted, Richard thought. “I have to go,” he said.

“Oh, but you can’t,” Mrs. Davenport said. “You have to tell me what ‘Rosabelle, believe’ means. Is it some kind of secret code? What does it mean?”

“It means it isn’t Joanna you’ve been getting messages from, it’s Houdini,” he said.

“Really?” Mrs. Davenport said, thrilled. “You know, I had a feeling it was. Oh, I must tell Mr. Mandrake.”

Richard escaped while she was reaching for the phone, and went back up to the lab and science. He called up Amelia Tanaka’s scans, and then, after a moment, deleted the command. The secret, if there was one, lay in something Joanna had experienced, something Joanna had seen. He called up Joanna’s.

Her scan appeared on the screen, a pattern of purple and green and blue. Telling him something. “Is it some kind of secret code?” Mrs. Davenport had asked. It was, and like Houdini’s mind-reading code, it had to be deciphered a little at a time. He began going through her scans, analyzing the patterns grid by grid, mapping the areas of activity, the receptors, the neurotransmitters.

The last time he’d talked to Joanna, he’d told her about the presence of DABA in her and Mrs. Troudtheim’s scans. Could she have discovered something about—? But she didn’t know anything about inhibitors, and DABA was present in other NDEs.

Still, it was a place to start. He checked for its presence in each of Joanna’s sessions. It was present in high levels in her last three sessions and at trace levels in her first one. He went through Mr. Sage’s scans. No DABA at all, but high levels in all but one of Amelia Tanaka’s, and trace levels in the template scan. Wonderful.

He started through each session’s data, graphing the neurotransmitters. Cortisol in 60 percent, beta-endorphins in 80 percent, enkephalin in 30 percent. And a long list of neurotransmitters present in only one blood panel: taurine, neurotensin, tryptamine, AMP, glycine, adenosine, and every endorphin and peptide in the book.

All right, combinations of neurotransmitters, he thought, and started looking for endorphins in tandem, but there weren’t any. It’s totally random, he thought at ten-thirty, grabbed a stack of transcripts to read through, and went home.

But the answer wasn’t in Ms. Kobald’s “The angel touched my brow, and I knew Death was only the beginning,” or in Mr. Stockhausen’s “Brigham Young was standing in the light, surrounded by the elders.” It lay in the Titanic.

He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. The Tattered Cover and Barnes and Noble would both be closed. Who would have books on the Titanic? Kit. She had said Joanna had asked her to find out about fires and fog, and Mr. Briarley had been an expert on the Titanic.

Richard picked up the phone and then put it down again. It was too late to call her, but as soon as he got to the hospital the next morning, he got her on the phone and said, “When you come to pick up the transcripts, can you bring me an account of the sinking of the Titanic?”

“Yes, but I’ve got a problem. Eldercare can’t send anyone over till this afternoon, and I really wanted to get started on the transcripts.”

“I could bring them over to your house,” Richard offered.

“No, I don’t want you to have to do that. Look, I can bring Uncle Pat with me, I just can’t leave him in the car by himself. Could you meet us in the parking lot at ten with the transcripts?”

“Sure,” he said, but, looking at the transcripts, he knew there was no way he could get them all down to the parking lot in one trip. He needed a box. He went down to Supplies to get one.

They didn’t have any. “Records might have one,” the pretty clerk said, smiling winsomely at Richard. “They go through a lot of computer paper.”

He went over to Records and told an imperative-looking woman with “Zaneta” on her nametag, “I need a box—” but she had already swiveled in her chair to a rack of forms.

“A box of what?” she said, her hand poised to pluck the correct form from its slot.

“Just a box. An empty box,” and amazingly, she handed him a requisition form.

“Fill out the size and number of boxes you need,” she said, pointing to a square on the form, “and your office number. It’ll take a week to ten days.”

“All I want is an empty computer box,” he said, and his pager went off. He switched it off. Zaneta pushed the phone toward him.

“I’ll call from my office,” he said and went down the hall and out a back door to the Dumpsters, found an empty IV-packs box, and took it back upstairs. Back in the lab, he filled it with the transcripts, keeping a close eye on the clock, and started down to the parking lot. At the elevator, he remembered he hadn’t answered his page, and lugged the heavy box all the way back to the lab on the off-chance it was Vielle who had called.

It wasn’t. It was Mrs. Haighton, asking if she could reschedule. He didn’t call her. He glanced at his watch and started down again, glad he already knew the quickest route to the parking lot and thinking he needed to add it to his map. Kit’s car was already pulled up next to the handicapped entrance, its motor running, when he got there. “Sorry I’m late,” Richard said, leaning in the window Kit rolled down.

“Do you have an excuse from your first-period teacher?” a man’s voice demanded, and Richard looked across her at the graying man he’d seen at the funeral. Joanna’s Mr. Briarley.

“Don’t just stand there,” Mr. Briarley said. “Sit down. We’re on page fifty-eight, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”

“Uncle Pat,” Kit said, laying her hand on his arm, “this is Richard Wright. He—”

“I know who he is,” Mr. Briarley said. “When are you going to marry this niece of mine?”

“Richard’s just a friend, Uncle Pat,” Kit said. “I need to talk to him for a minute. You just stay here, all right?”

“ ‘It is an ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three,’ ” Mr. Briarley said. “ ‘ “By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin.” ’ ” His hand scrabbled at his door, looking for the handle.

“No, you stay here,” Kit said, reaching across him and pushing the door lock down. “I’ll just be a minute. I have to put something in the trunk. You stay here.”

Mr. Briarley let his hand drop into his lap. “That’s what history is, and science, and art,” he said waveringly. “That’s what literature is.”

“I’ll be right back,” Kit said, opening the door. Richard stepped back, and Kit got out and went around to the back of the car to open the trunk. “What did Mrs. Davenport say?” she asked.

“A lot of nonsense,” Richard said.

“Had Joanna been to see her?” Kit pulled the trunk lid up.

“No.” He set the heavy box in the trunk. “What about the textbook? Did you find anything?”

“ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” she said ruefully, “but nothing about the Titanic.” She shut the trunk and came around to open the back door. She leaned in and came up with a stack of books. “Here’s the stuff on the Titanic,” she said, handing them to him. “I’ve got more if you need them.”

“These should keep me busy for a while,” he said, looking at the books.

“Ditto,” Kit said, gesturing toward the trunk. She got back in the car and started it. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

“ ‘He holds him with his skinny hand,’ ” Mr. Briarley said. “ ‘ “There was a ship,” quoth he.’ ”

“A ship?” Richard said.

Kit switched off the ignition and turned to face Mr. Briarley. “Uncle Pat,” she said, “did you and Joanna talk about a ship?”

“Joanna?” he said vaguely.

“Joanna Lander,” Kit said gently. “She was a student of yours. She came to see you. She asked you what you said in class. About the Titanic? Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Mr. Briarley said gruffly.

“What did you tell Joanna?” Kit asked, and Richard waited for his answer, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

“Joanna,” he said, staring at the windshield. “ ‘Red as a rose was she.’ ” He turned and looked at Richard. “It’s a metaphor,” he said. “You need to know it for the final.”

And that was that. Dead end. Try something else, Richard thought, carrying the books back up to the lab. He started in on the scans, comparing the frontal-cortex patterns with the presence of different neurotransmitters and then with the core elements, looking for correspondences.

There weren’t any, but when he graphed the NDEs for length, he saw that Joanna had awakened spontaneously after her third session, and that was one in which theta-asparcine was present. I wonder if that’s the one where she turned and started back down the passageway, he thought.

It was. He checked the accounts of the other two with theta-asparcine. The one where she had kicked out and the one where she had stepped from the elevator into the passage. But not the one where she had run headlong down the stairs and into the passage. And she had been under for nearly four minutes in the one with the elevator.

He worked until twelve-thirty and then went down to the cafeteria, got a sandwich, and started through the books Kit had given him. He checked their indexes for the entry “elevator,” not really expecting to find it, and he didn’t. He was going to have to read the books.

He started with a coffee-table book called The Titanic in Color, with detailed drawings of the smoking lounge, the gymnasium, the Grand Staircase. “At the head of the William-and-Mary-style staircase was a large clock carved to represent Honour and Glory Crowning Time.” Glory, which Joanna had underlined. But no sign of an elevator.

The Untold Titanic didn’t mention one either. It concentrated on the area belowdecks and the crew, hardly any of whom had survived: the officers who’d loaded the boats, the wireless operator, the engineers who had stayed at their posts, working to keep the dynamos for the wireless and the lights going till the very end. Assistant Engineer Harvey, who’d gone back into a flooded boiler room to rescue a crewman with a broken leg. And all the firemen and trimmers and postal clerks who’d stayed at their posts long after they’d been released from duty.

Richard read till he couldn’t stand it anymore and then went down to the ER to see if Vielle had found anyone else who’d seen Joanna. “Nobody,” she said, bandaging a little girl’s elbow. “I talked to a taxi driver who picked up a woman without a coat, but he couldn’t remember what she looked like, so it may not have been Joanna.”

“Did he say where he took her?”

She shook her head. “They’re not supposed to give out that information except to the police. There’s a guy on the force I’m going to call to see if he can help.”

Richard went back upstairs through the main building, noting down the locations of the elevators and stairways as he did. When he got back to the lab, Kit was waiting outside the door. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I found something,” she said, “and I was going to call you, but the Eldercare person came—I forgot to call them back this morning and tell them not to come—so I thought it would be easier if I showed you.”

He unlocked the door, and they went inside.

“I found a couple of odd transcripts. Most of them are in a question-and-answer form,” she handed him three stapled sheets, “but this one’s a monologue, and the name on it, Joseph Leibrecht, isn’t on her interview list.”

Joseph Leibrecht. The name sounded familiar. He looked at the transcript. A whale, apple blossoms. “This isn’t an interview,” he said. “It’s an account of the NDE a crewman on the Hindenburg had.” He wondered what it was doing in with the transcripts. He thought she’d said it had been recorded too long after the fact to be useful, but she had highlighted the words sea and fire. The fire again.

“You said you found a couple of odd transcripts?” he asked Kit.

“Yes, I made a list of patients Joanna interviewed during the last few months, and there’s one who comes up several times.”

“What’s his name?” Richard asked, grabbing for a pencil.

“Well, that’s just it,” Kit said, taking a transcript out of her bag. “The name on the transcript is Carl, but I don’t know if that’s a first or a last name. All the other patients are listed by a first initial and a last name, and the transcripts are different from the others, too.” She pointed to a section. “The other ones are all in the form of questions and answers, but this one’s just phrases and single words, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Richard looked at the line she was pointing at. “Half?… red… patches…” it read. “When were these interviews, or whatever they were?” he asked.

Kit consulted her list. “The first one’s dated December fourth, and the last one’s the eighteenth of this month.”

“Then whoever he is, there’s a chance he was still in the hospital that day,” Richard said.

“Or she,” Kit said. “If Carl’s the last name, it might be a woman.”

“You’re right,” Richard said and picked up the phone. “Let’s see if Vielle knows who it is.” He dialed the ER, expecting he wouldn’t be able to get through and would have to page her, but a nurse’s aide answered and said she’d get her, and after a short interval, Vielle came on the line. “Did you ever hear Joanna mention a patient named Carl?” he asked her.

“Yes,” Vielle said, “but that can’t be who she went to see.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wasn’t in a position to tell her anything. He was in a coma.” A coma. “He muttered things sometimes,” Vielle explained, “and she had the nurses write down what he said.”

And that explained the disjointed words and phrases, the question marks after the words. They represented a nurse’s best guess at what Carl had mumbled. “Did you talk to your friend on the police force?”

“No,” she said, “but I talked to the crash team coordinator, and there were no codes that morning, so if she went to see an NDEer, it must have been one she’d interviewed befo—what?” she said to someone else, and then, “Shooting accident, gotta go.” She hung up.

“Dead end,” Richard said, putting down the receiver. “Carl’s in a coma.”

“Oh,” Kit said, disappointed. “Well, anyway, here are the names of the patients.” She started to hand the list to him and then took it back. “And one of them…” she ran her finger down the list, “mentioned fog. I thought that might be the source of her asking me if it had been foggy the night of the Titanic.” She found the name. “Maisie Nellis.”

Maisie.

“I think I know where Joanna went,” he said, starting for the door, and then stopped. He didn’t even know if Maisie was still in the hospital. “Hang on,” he said to Kit and picked up the phone and called the switchboard operator. “Do you have a Maisie Nellis listed as a patient?” he asked her.

“Yes—”

“Thanks,” he said and jammed the receiver down. “Come on, Kit,” he said.

He told her about Maisie on the way down to four-west. “She told me she’d seen fog in her NDE the first day I met her, and Joanna told me she saw fog in her second NDE, too.” They reached Peds.

The door to 422 was standing open. “Maisie?” he said, leaning in. The room was empty, the bed stripped, and folded sheets and a pillow at the foot of it. The tops of the nightstand and the bed table had been cleaned off, and the door to the closet stood open on emptiness.

She’s dead, he thought, and it was like Joanna all over again. Maisie’s dead, and I didn’t even know it was happening.

“Hi,” a woman’s voice said, and he turned around. It was Barbara. “I saw you go past and figured you were looking for Maisie,” she said. “She’s been moved. Up to CICU. She coded again, and this time there was quite a bit of damage. She’s been moved to the top of the transplant list.”

“The top of the list,” he said. “She gets the next available heart?”

“She gets the next available heart that’s the right size and the right blood type. Luckily Maisie’s Type A, so either a Type A or a Type O will work, but you know what a shortage of donors there is, particularly of children.”

“How long before a heart’s likely to become available?” Kit asked.

“There’s no way to tell,” Barbara said. “Hopefully, no more than a few weeks. Days would be better.”

“How’s her mother taking all this?” Richard asked.

Barbara stiffened. “Mrs. Nellis—” she started angrily and then stopped herself and said, “It’s possible to carry anything to extremes, even positive thinking.”

“Can Maisie have visitors?” Richard asked.

Barbara nodded. “She’s pretty weak, but I’m sure she’d love to see you. She asked about you the other day.”

“Do you know if Joanna was down here to see Maisie on the day she was killed?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t on that day. I know she’d been down to see her or called her or something the day before because Maisie was all busy looking up something for her in her disaster books.”

“You don’t know what it was, do you?”

“No,” Barbara said. “Something about the Titanic. That was Maisie’s latest craze. Do you know how to get to CICU?” She gave them complicated instructions, which Richard jotted down for his map, and they started toward the elevator.

“Dr. Wright, wait,” Barbara said, hurrying after them. “There’s something you need to know. Maisie doesn’t—” she said, and then stopped.

“Maisie doesn’t what?”

She bit her lip. “Nothing. Forget it. I was just going to warn you she looks pretty bad. This last episode—” she stopped again.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t—”

“No. I think seeing you is just what she needs. She’ll be overjoyed.” But she wasn’t. Maisie lay wan and uninterested against her pillows, a daunting array of monitors and machines crowded around her, nearly filling the room. Her TV was on, and the remote lay on the bed close to her hand, but she wasn’t watching the screen, she was staring at the wall below it. Her breath came in short, shallow pants.

There were at least six bags hanging from the IV pole. The tubing ran down to her foot, and when he looked at her hand, he could see why. It looked like she had been in a fight, the whole back of it covered in overlapping purple and green and black bruises. A metal ID tag hung around her neck.

“Hi, Maisie,” Richard said, trying not to let any of the horror he felt into his voice. “Remember me? Dr. Wright?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, but there was no enthusiasm in her voice.

“I’ve got somebody I want you to meet,” he said. “Maisie, this is Kit. She’s a friend of mine.”

“Hi, Maisie,” Kit said.

“Hi,” Maisie said dully.

“I told Kit you’re an expert on disasters,” Richard said. He turned to Kit. “Maisie knows all about the Hindenburg and the Hartford circus fire and the Great Molasses Flood.”

“The Great Molasses Flood?” Kit said to Maisie. “What’s that?”

“A big flood,” Maisie said in that same flat, uninterested tone. “Of molasses.”

He wondered if this was what Barbara had started to warn him about. If it was, he could see why she had changed her mind. He would never have believed it, that Maisie, no matter how sick she was, could be reduced to this dull, passive state. No, not passive. Flattened.

“Did people die?” Kit was asking Maisie. “In the Great Molasses Flood?”

“People always die,” Maisie said. “That’s what a disaster is, people dying.”

“Dr. Wright told me you were friends with Dr. Lander,” Kit said.

“She came to see me sometimes,” Maisie said, and her eyes strayed to the TV.

“She was a friend of mine, too,” Kit said. “When was the last time Dr. Lander came to see you, Maisie?”

“I don’t remember,” Maisie said, her eyes on the screen.

“It’s important, Maisie,” Kit said, reaching for the remote. She clicked off the TV. “We think Dr. Lander found out something important, but we don’t know what. We’re trying to find out where she was and who she talked to—”

“Why don’t you write and ask her?” Maisie said.

“Write and ask her?” Richard said blankly.

Maisie looked at him. “Didn’t she leave you a forwarding address either?”

“A forwarding address?”

“When she moved to New Jersey.”

“Moved to—? Maisie, didn’t anybody tell you?” Richard blurted.

“Tell me what?” Maisie asked. She pushed herself to a sitting position. The line on her heart monitor began to spike. Richard looked appealingly across the bed at Kit.

“Something happened to Joanna, didn’t it?” Maisie said, her voice rising. “Didn’t it?”

Her mother, trying to protect her, had told her Joanna had moved away, had kept Barbara and the other nurses from telling her the truth. And now he had—Behind her head the line on her heart monitor was zigzagging sharply. What if he told her, and she went into V-fib from the shock of it? She had already coded twice.

“You have to tell me,” Maisie said, but that wasn’t true. The heart monitor was setting off alarms in the nurses’ station. In a minute a nurse would be down here to shoo them out, to quiet her down, and he wouldn’t have to be the one to tell her. “Please,” Maisie said, and Kit nodded at him.

“Joanna didn’t move away, Maisie,” he said gently. “She died.”

Maisie gaped at him, her mouth open, her eyes wide with shock, not even moving. Behind her on the screen of the monitor, the green line spiked, and then collapsed. I’ve done it, Richard thought. I’ve killed her.

“I knew it,” Maisie said. “That’s why she didn’t come to see me after I coded.” She smiled, a radiant smile. “I knew she wouldn’t just move away and not come and tell me good-bye,” she said happily. “I knew it.”

49

Joanna tore back along the Promenade Deck. Let the wireless operator still be there, she prayed as she ran. Let him still be sending.

The slant of the deck had gotten worse while she was in the smoking room, and the ship had begun to list. She had to put her hand out to keep from falling against the windows as she ran. Don’t let the stairs be underwater, she thought, and then, There was a crew stairway near the aft staircase, and began trying doors.

Locked. The second one opened on a tangle of ropes that fell forward onto the deck. The next was locked. Where is it? she thought, yanking on the doorknob, and the door came abruptly open on a metal stairway.

It wasn’t the one she’d seen before. It was narrower, steeper, and the stairs were open, the rungs made of metal latticework. The other stairway had had doors on each deck, but this one was open. She could see, looking below her through the latticed steps, that it went all the way down. What if he’s down there? Joanna thought, her hand still gripping the doorknob.

Joanna looked back down the Promenade Deck. Greg Menotti was halfway down the deck, running hard, his arms and legs pumping. “You have to show me where the collapsibles are,” he shouted, and Joanna darted inside the stairway. The door swung shut with a click, and she fled up the steps, her feet clattering loudly on the metal stairs.

They tilted forward, so that her feet kept sliding backward off them. She needed to hang on to the metal railing, but she couldn’t. She looked down at her hands. She was carrying a cafeteria tray. You’ve carried it all the way up to Peds without even knowing it, she thought, and tried to give it to the nurse with no hips, but she wasn’t in Peds, she was on the stairs, and Greg was coming. You have to let go of it, she thought, and dropped the tray, and it fell through the stairs, hitting the stairs below and falling again, down and down, deck after deck after deck.

Joanna grabbed on to the metal side railing with both hands. It was sharp, so sharp it cut into her palms, and wet. She looked up. Water was trickling down from somewhere above. It’s too late, Joanna thought, the railing cutting into her hands like a knife. It’s going down.

But Jack Phillips had continued sending to the very end, even after the bow was underwater, even after the captain had told him it was every man for himself. Joanna released her left hand from the railing and began climbing again, staggering a little with the awkward angle of the steps, hitting her hips against the table, knocking her Kool-Aid over, her mother saying, “Oh, Joanna,” and reaching for the glass and a towel at the same time, soaking up the Kool-Aid, the towel turning red, redder, soaking through, and Vielle saying, “Hurry! The movie’s starting,” handing her the tub of popcorn, and Joanna feeling her way along the dark passage, unable to see anything, afraid the movie had already started, hoping it was only the coming attractions, seeing light ahead, flickering, golden, like a fire… she was on her knees, her fingers tangled in the metal latticework of the step above her. No, she thought, not yet, I have to send the message, and pulled herself to her feet. She started up the steps.

There was a sound, and she braced herself against going into the darkness, into the tunnel again. The sound came again from below, echoing, metallic. He’s on the stairs, Joanna thought. He’s coming up them. She looked down through the open steps, but it wasn’t him, it was Greg Menotti starting up the stairs.

Hurry, she thought, and scrambled up the last of the steps, through the door, and was out on the Boat Deck, running, past the air shaft, past the raised roof of the Grand Staircase. Behind her, a door slammed. Hurry, hurry, she thought, and raced past the empty lifeboat davits. The light was still on in the wireless room. She could see it under the door up ahead. The wireless operator kept sending till the power failed, she thought, he kept—

The tail of her cardigan caught, yanking her backward. She fell awkwardly onto one knee. “Where are the—?” Greg demanded, and there was a sudden, deafening roar of steam. Smoke swirled around them, and she thought, Maybe I can escape in the fog, but when she tried, he grabbed for her wrist, his other hand clutching a fold of her cardigan.

He yanked her to her feet. “The collapsibles,” he shouted over the roar of the steam. “Where are they?”

“On top of the officers’ quarters,” Joanna said. She pointed with her pinioned hand in the direction of the bow. “Down there.”

He pushed her ahead of him, her wrist twisted behind her back. “Show me,” he said. He half-walked, half-shoved her past the funnel, past the wireless shack.

“I have to send a message,” Joanna said, her eyes on the light under the door of the wireless shack. “It’s important.”

“The important thing is getting off this ship before it goes down,” he said, pushing her forward.

He’s not real, Joanna thought, willing him to disappear. He’s a confabulation, a metaphor, a misfiring. I’ve invented him out of my own desperation to make sense of what’s happening, out of my own panic and denial. He isn’t really here. He died six weeks ago. He can’t do anything to anybody. But even though she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to see his lifeless body in the ER, his fingers still dug into her wrist, his hand still propelled her roughly forward, past the chart room to the officers’ quarters.

“They would have been there,” Joanna said, pointing with her chin at the flat roof above them.

“Where?” he said, looking up. “It’s too dark. I can’t see.”

“These are the officers’ quarters. They were stored on top,” she said. “But they aren’t there. This isn’t the Titanic, it’s—”

He climbed onto a deck chair, still grasping her wrist, pulling her up after him onto the chair, onto a windlass. He reached across to a stanchion, stretching, and let go of her wrist. Joanna didn’t wait. She jumped down off the windlass, off the deck chair, and ran for the wireless shack.

The door was shut, and on it was a large poster. “Do you know someone at risk?” it read. “You can save a life.”

She pushed the door open, praying, Please let him still be there, please let him still be sending.

He was. He sat bent over the wireless key, his coat off, his headphones on over his blond hair, his finger jabbing fiercely at the telegraph key. The blue spark leaped between the poles of the dynamo. It’s still working, she thought, a wave of relief washing over her. “I have to send a message,” she said breathlessly. “It’s important.”

Jack Phillips didn’t glance up, didn’t pause in his steady tapping. He can’t hear me, she thought, because of the headphones. “Jack,” she said, touching his shoulder. He turned impatiently, pulling one of the headphones away from his ear. “Mr. Phil—” she said and stopped, staring.

50

Maisie insisted on hearing everything. “How did she die?” she asked Richard. “In a disaster?”

“No,” Richard said.

“She was stabbed by a man on drugs in the ER,” Kit said, and Maisie nodded in confirmation, as if they had said yes, in a disaster. And wasn’t it? Unexpected, undeserved death, caused by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How was it different from being in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius blew? Or on the Lusitania?

“Did he stab her lots of times?” Maisie was asking.

Richard looked worriedly at the door. The CICU nurse had already been in once and demanded to know what they were doing. “I felt funny before,” Maisie had said smoothly, “but then Dr. Wright and Ms. Gardiner came to see me and made me feel better.”

It was true. She even looked better, though Richard couldn’t have said quite how. Her eyes were still shadowed, her lips still faintly blue, but the strength was back in her voice, and the interest. “Did the crash team work on her?” she asked. “Did they use the paddles?”

“They did everything they could to save her,” Richard said, and there was no point in using layman’s terms with an expert like Maisie, “but the knife had sliced the aorta. She died of acute hemorrhage.”

Maisie nodded knowingly. “What happened to the one who stabbed her?”

“The police killed him,” Kit said.

“Good.” Maisie leaned back against her pillows, and then sat up again. “You said Joanna found out something important. What?”

“We don’t know,” Richard said. He explained about Joanna telling Mr. Wojakowski she had something important to tell him, about her trying to tell them something when she was dying.

“Was it about the Titanic?” Maisie asked.

Richard looked across the bed at Kit. “What makes you say that?”

“She was always asking me about the Titanic. Was it about a wireless message?”

“Why?” Richard said, afraid to ask.

“She asked me to look up about the wireless messages the last time she came to see me,” Maisie said.

“When was that?” Richard asked. He started to say, “She died on the fourteenth,” and could hear Joanna saying, Don’t lead, don’t lead.

“Umm,” Maisie said, screwing her face in thought. “She asked me to look up the messages, and it took a long time because my mom was here a lot and I went into A-fib a couple of times and had to have all these tests. And then she came and asked me was there a garden on the Titanic, and I had to look that up—”

“A garden?” Kit asked. “There was a list of garden references in her patients’ NDEs,” she said to Richard.

“Was there a garden?” Richard asked Maisie.

“Kind of. There was a picture of the Verandah Café in one of my books, and it looked like a garden. You know, with flowers and vines and trees and stuff. I called her and told her she should come look at it and that I had the wireless messages all done.”

“Was that the same day she came and asked you about the garden?”

“No, she asked me the day before, and when I called her, she said she couldn’t come, she was too busy, and she promised she’d come later, but she didn’t. I thought she forgot, but she didn’t.” She looked up at Richard. “I don’t know exactly what day it was. You can ask Nurse Barbara. I bet she’ll know.”

There was no need to. Whoever Joanna had been to see the day she died, it wasn’t Maisie. “When did you call her, Maisie?” Richard asked. “What time of day?”

“Right after my mom left to go see her lawyer. I think nine o’clock.”

Nine o’clock, and she had told Maisie the same thing she’d told Kit, that she was busy, that she’d come see her later.

“Did she say when she was going to come see you?” Richard asked.

“She said right after lunch.”

“And when is lunch?” Kit asked.

“Eleven-thirty.”

Joanna had intended to go see Maisie and then hadn’t. That confirmed that something had happened, but not what. “Did she say what she was busy working on?”

“I think the Titanic wireless messages, ’cause she asked me to find out what ones they sent.”

Richard and Kit looked at each other. “Did she say why she wanted to know that?”

Maisie shook her head. “She just said to write them down, so I did.” She reached over to the nightstand, and the line on her heart monitor began to jump.

“Here, let me,” Kit said hastily, coming around the bed. Maisie lay back against her pillow, and the line steadied. Kit opened the drawer. “I don’t see it,” she said.

“It’s inside the Secret Garden box,” Maisie said. Kit picked up the video, slid the tape out, looked in the box and then shook it. A tightly folded piece of paper fell out.

Kit handed it to Maisie, who unfolded it carefully. “Okay, the first one—I listed them by the times they sent them,” she explained. “The first one was at five after twelve. The last one was at two-ten. It sank at two-twenty.” She stopped to take a breath. “Okay, so the first one said, ‘CQD,’ that means, ‘all stations distress,’ ” another breath, “ ‘MGY,’ that means the Titanic,” yet another breath, “and then where they are.” She handed it to Richard.

He stared blankly at the first message on the page, printed in Maisie’s childish hand. “CQD. CQD. MGY 41.46N, 50.14W. CQD. MGY.”

“The Titanic didn’t use SOS as its distress signal?” he asked, hope roaring up in him.

“Joanna asked me that, too,” Maisie said. “They did later on.” She leaned forward to take the paper from him. “Here it is,” she showed him the place, “ ‘MGY SOS,’ at twelve-fifteen.”

SOS. Had Joanna seen the wireless operator tapping out one of those messages and wanted outside confirmation? Or was she trying to find out something else, and the clue was here, in Maisie’s list? But it couldn’t be, because Joanna had never seen it. “Maisie,” he asked, “when you called Joanna, did you tell her about the messages you’d found?”

“No,” Maisie said. “I just told her I’d found them out. I showed her two of them before.”

“Which two?” Richard asked, handing her back the list.

“This one,” she said, pointing, “and this one.”

“ ‘Come quick. Our engine-room flooded up to the boilers.’ And ‘Sinking. Cannot hear for steam.’ ” Joanna had asked Kit about steam and fires on the Titanic that might have caused smoke.

“Had she asked you other things about the Titanic?” Kit asked.

“Yeah, she asked me did it have an elevator and a swimming pool. And about the Carpathia.”

An elderly nurse poked her head in the door. “It’s been five minutes.” Richard nodded. Kit stood up.

“No, you can’t go yet,” Maisie said and set the monitor zigzagging jerkily. “You haven’t told me what you think she found out or how you’re going to figure it out. Please, Nurse Lucille,” she appealed to the nurse, “just two more minutes, and then I’ll rest, I promise.” She lay obediently back against the pillows as if to prove it. “I’ll drink my Ensure.”

“All right,” Lucille said, defeated. “Two more minutes, and that’s all.” She went out.

As soon as she was gone, Maisie sat up. “Okay, tell me,” she said. “You think she went to see somebody and they told her something, don’t you? That’s why you came to see me, because you thought it was me, right? But it wasn’t. I bet it was one of her NDE people, so the first thing we’ve gotta do—”

“We?” Richard said. “You aren’t doing anything except resting.”

“But I could—” Maisie stopped short and slumped back against the pillows.

“Maisie?” he said, glancing anxiously at Kit, who had looked at the monitor and then back at Maisie. Maisie was watching the door.

Lucille came in with a small can with a straw in it. She set it on the tray across Maisie’s bed. “All of it,” she said.

“This is vanilla,” Maisie said. “Don’t you have any chocolate?”

“All of it,” Lucille said and walked out.

“I hate vanilla,” Maisie muttered, and pushed the can to one side. “I bet Mr. Mandrake knows who all the NDE people are. We could go ask—”

“You aren’t going anywhere, Maisie. I mean it,” Richard said, “you’re not going to do anything except rest and get strong so you’ll be ready for your new heart. Kit and I will find out who Joanna was talking to.”

“I wouldn’t be doing anything,” Maisie said, appealing to Kit. “Just asking people when they come to do stuff if they saw her talking to anybody, the guy who empties the wastebasket and stuff. I wouldn’t even get out of bed.” She looked at Richard. “Please. Joanna said I was really good at finding stuff out.”

And you fully intend to go ahead whether I give you permission or not, he thought. He wondered how Joanna would have handled her, and then realized he knew. She had put her to work looking up wireless messages and Pacific islands. “All right,” he said, looking at Kit, who nodded, “you can help, but you have to promise you’ll rest—”

“And do everything your nurses tell you,” Kit said.

“I will,” Maisie said meekly.

“We mean it,” Richard said. “You’re just to ask questions. You’re not to do anything or go anywhere.”

“They won’t let me anyway,” Maisie said disgustedly, and Richard wondered what the story behind that was. “I promise. I’ll just ask questions.”

“All right,” Richard said. “The time we’re looking for is after eleven and before twelve-fifteen.” Maisie started to reach over to the nightstand, and Kit leaped to get a pencil and tablet for her.

“Eleven and twelve-fifteen,” Maisie said, writing them down. “Do you want me to page you when I find out?”

Richard smiled. “You can just call me,” he said. He fished one of his cards out of the pocket of his lab coat.

“What if you’re not there?”

“You can leave a message on my answering machine,” he said, and, at her skeptical look, “I promise I’ll come the minute I get the message.” He looked at his watch.

“We’d better go,” Kit said, standing up. “It’s been two minutes.”

“You can’t go yet. I don’t have your number,” Maisie said. “In case Dr. Wright’s answering machine doesn’t work.”

The master staller at work. She wrote down Kit’s number and then Vielle’s. “But you’re not to call the ER,” Richard said sternly. “They’re very busy. You call me.”

“I will,” Maisie said meekly.

“Now, you drink your Ensure and rest,” Richard said, and they started for the door.

“You know what this is just like?” Maisie said.

“What?”

“It’s just like the Titanic. They had to figure out what happened to the people, only they were dead, so they had to talk to other people and find out what they did and who saw them and stuff.”

Piecing together the tragedy, bit by bit, conversations and glimpses and last words. “Joanna was crazy about you, you know,” Richard said, and Maisie nodded solemnly.

“I knew she wouldn’t just go off and leave me.”

“Are you going to be all right, Maisie?” Kit asked.

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “It’s almost time for the magazine lady to come. She goes all over the hospital giving people magazines. I bet she might have seen Joanna. Kit, can you fluff up my pillows before you go?”

It took them another five minutes and Lucille’s finally coming in to get away. “You’re right,” Kit said as they waited for the elevator. “She’s quite a kid.”

“How did you know I should tell her about Joanna?” Richard asked her.

“She looked just like my uncle Pat the day he got the diagnosis,” she said, staring at the closed elevator door. “There are worse things than death.”

“Like letting someone down.”

Kit looked up at him. “We’re not going to let Joanna down. We’re going to decipher her message.”

But how exactly? By piecing together bits and pieces and conversations. Kit brought him the list of garden references she’d found in among the transcripts and another one headed “Abrupt NDE Returns.”

“That’s from several weeks ago. I’ve already seen it,” he told Kit, but when he looked at it again, he noticed Amelia Tanaka’s name on the list, and when he checked her account against that session’s scans, he found she’d come out of the NDE-state on her own, and that theta-asparcine was present.

He went through all of her NDEs and then started on Mr. Sage’s. Testimony was of no use with Mr. Sage, but when Richard checked the scans, he found that he’d gone straight from the NDE-state to waking twice. Both times theta-asparcine had been present. But it wasn’t present in Mr. Pearsall’s NDEs, or Mr. O’Reirdon’s.

He worked on the scans until his eyes began to burn, and then walked over to the west wing and mapped the rest of the floors, asking assorted nurses and orderlies, “How can I get up to eight-east from here?” and, “What’s the quickest way down to the ER?,” jotting down the answers, and adding the routes to his map.

In between, he pored over Maisie’s list of wireless messages. They were almost unbearable to read, a litany of increasing disaster and desperation: “We are on the ice.” “We are putting the women off in boats.” “Require immediate assistance.” “Sinking fast.” “SOS. SOS. SOS.”

There was a clue here somewhere, a connection. Joanna had had a reason for asking Maisie to look them up, but he was as dense as the ships replying to the Titanic’s SOSs had been. “What is the matter with you?” the Olympic had asked, and then unbelievably, “Are you steering south to meet us?” The Frankfurt had been so clueless that the wireless operator had snapped at him, “You fool, stand by and keep out!” and even the Carpathia’s operator had asked, “Should I tell my captain?” Thick-headed fools, all of them, unable to figure out a perfectly simple message. Like me, he thought.

Vielle called. “I found somebody else who saw Joanna. Wanda Rosso. She’s a radiologist. She says she saw Joanna on four-west around eleven-thirty.”

“Where on four-west?” Richard asked, calling up the map of Mercy General.

“She was getting into an elevator.”

There were two banks of patient elevators and two service elevators on four-west. “Which elevator?” he asked.

“She didn’t say,” Vielle said. “I assume the one by the walkway.”

“Ask her,” Richard said. “Did this Wanda know in which direction Joanna was going?”

“She couldn’t remember,” Vielle said. “She thinks she remembers the ‘down’ arrow being lit, but she’s not sure. I asked her if Joanna looked excited or happy, and she said she didn’t notice anything except that she seemed to be in a hurry because she kept looking up at the floor numbers and tapping her foot.”

In a hurry, and going somewhere in the west wing. But where? Third was orthopedics, which didn’t seem likely, and below that it was all administrative offices. And this Wanda had said she wasn’t sure which arrow was lit. Fourth was Peds, and she hadn’t gone to see Maisie. Sixth was cardiac care, a possibility as far as NDEers were concerned, but Joanna hadn’t taken her minirecorder with her.

“Did she say if Joanna had a notebook with her?”

“No.”

“Did you find out about the tape?” he asked. “Do the police have it?”

“No,” Vielle said, and there was an odd change in her voice. “Her clothes were disposed of.”

“Disposed of?” he said. “Are you sure? It was evidence.”

“There’s no case,” Vielle said. “The suspect’s dead, and there were eyewitnesses, so there was no reason to keep it.”

“But they wouldn’t have disposed of the things in her pockets,” he said. “They’d have returned them to her next of kin. Maybe her sister has the tape. And listen, I’ve been thinking, there may be notes, too. Joanna always took notes when she did interviews, and we know she didn’t have her recorder with her. There may be a notebook, or a piece of paper—”

“It was all disposed of,” Vielle said, and her voice was clipped, definite. “In the contaminated-waste bin.”

“The contaminated-waste bi—?” he said and then realized what Vielle had been trying to tell him without coming out and saying it. Joanna’s clothes had been soaked in blood, and anything in her cardigan pockets would have been drenched, too. Ruined. Unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” Vielle said. “I still haven’t found the taxi driver, but I’ve got a couple of leads. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got anything.”

“Yeah,” he said, and went back to the Titanic, looking up “A La Carte Restaurant,” “gymnasium,” “First-Class Dining Saloon.” Jim Farrell, a young Irish immigrant, had rounded up four young girls he’d promised to look after and led them all the way from steerage, through the First-Class Dining Saloon and a maze of passages and decks and stairwells to the Boat Deck, and then stepped back, unable to go in the boat himself. He looked up “Boat Deck.” Archibald Butt and Colonel Grade and a gambler named J. H. Rogers had loaded boat after boat, handing babies and children down as the boats were lowered along the side.

Maisie didn’t call, which surprised him. He hadn’t really thought she’d be able to find out what Vielle, with all her staff connections, couldn’t, but he hadn’t expected that to stop her from calling him. But there were no messages on his answering machine, no urgent pages. He wondered if she was all right. She had seemed to take the news about Joanna’s death in stride, but with kids, it was hard to tell, and it sometimes took bad news a while to sink in.

When she still hadn’t called by the next afternoon, Richard ran over to see her. She wasn’t there—she was out having an echocardiogram—but the nurse (not the one who’d shooed them out of the room) assured him she was doing fine. “She’s cheered up a lot these last few days,” she said, smiling. “We’ve really had to sit on her to see that she stays in bed.”

“Tell her Dr. Wright said hi, okay? And that I’ll come see her later,” he said, took a few steps toward the elevator and then turned back, looking appropriately confused. “I need to get down to the ER,” he said. “What’s the easiest way to get there?”

He repeated the process with a nurse and two orderlies, getting three completely different answers, and went back to the lab to add them to the map. He had all of Main and the west wing done and the top four floors of the east wing, and the map was starting to look as complicated as his diagrams of the scans, and just as intelligible.

Joanna had left her office and gone down to two-west and then later had gone up to Dr. Jamison’s office, and, from there, down to the ER. And in between? He had no idea. All he could deduce for sure was that it hadn’t been anything on four-west, since she had been heading down—or up—from there, and that she had probably come down to four-west from her office and taken the walkway across. If she had in fact been coming from her office, if she hadn’t gone somewhere else first.

He worked on the map awhile and then listed the neurotransmitters present in the theta-asparcine scans, looking for commonalities. There weren’t any. But there was a connection somewhere. Joanna had seen it, and the answer lay somewhere in the scans or the transcripts or her NDEs. Or Joseph Leibrecht’s, he thought, and read the crewman’s account that Kit had left. He had seen a whale and a bird in a cage and apple blossoms.

Richard went back to the scans, trying to determine if there was any similarity among the non-theta-asparcine scans. There wasn’t. He fished the journal Dr. Jamison had left out of the mess on his desk and read the article on theta-asparcine. An artificial version had been produced and was being tested to determine its function, which was still not known.

It has something to do with NDEs, he thought. But what? Was it an inhibitor, after all? Or was its presence a side effect of the temporal-lobe stimulation or the acetylcholine?

He worked till he could justify going home, and then called Kit, who hadn’t found anything either. “It definitely has something to do with the Titanic, though,” she said, sounding tired. “All the words she’s highlighted relate to it.”

“Is that Ms. Lander?” Mr. Briarley said in the background. “This is the second time she’s been late for class.”

“It’s Dr. Wright, Uncle Pat,” Kit said patiently.

“Tell her the answer is C, the very mirror image.”

“I will,” Kit said, and to Richard, “I’m sorry. What I was saying was that everything she’s marked—‘elevator’ and ‘glory’ and ‘stairway’—are things she described seeing on the Titanic during her NDEs.”

“Are there any highlighted references to wireless messages?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “even though the word message is in nearly every transcript. I’ve gotta go. Have you heard from Maisie?”

“Not yet,” he said, and started in on the Titanic again, looking for clues. But all he found were more horror stories: the postal clerks going down for more sacks of mail and being trapped by water belowdecks; the steerage passengers being kept in the hold while two crew members led small groups up the second-class staircase to C Deck, through the third-class lounge, across the well deck, into the passage that led to first class and up the Grand Staircase to the Boat Deck; Captain Smith swimming toward one of the boats with a baby in his arms and then disappearing.

Richard didn’t hear from Maisie the next day either, or the next. Vielle called to say that she’d checked with Wanda Rosso, and it had been the patient elevators next to the walkway. “And she says, now that she’s had a chance to think about it, she definitely remembers seeing Joanna press the ‘down’ button.”

I’ll bet, he thought, shaking his head. A classic case of confabulation, of filling in a memory that wasn’t there with images of other times, other elevators, and of no use at all. “And you haven’t found anybody else in the west wing who saw her?” he asked.

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to them. I’m still working on the taxicab thing,” she said and hung up.

All right then, he’d go ask. But nobody else on four-west, or third, or sixth, remembered seeing her. He did find out something. Fifth was completely blocked off for renovation and had been since January. A sign just outside the elevator said the arthritis clinic had been temporarily moved to the second floor of the Brightman Building.

He went back to the lab and marked it on the map, grateful he could eliminate something. And at least they had narrowed the place she’d been going to the west wing. Unless she’d been going down to second to the walkway to Main.

He gave up and went back to the scans. He did a series of superimposes of the scans in which theta-asparcine was present, looking for pattern similarities. There weren’t any, which meant the theta-asparcine was just a side effect. Or the product of a randomly fired synapse.

And Kit had said, “It definitely has something to do with the Titanic.” The answer was somewhere in the pile of books. He sat down, pulled The Tragic End of the Titanic out of the pile, and began to read, his head propped on his hand.

“Accounts of those left on board after the last boats were gone are, of course, sketchy,” he read, “though all agree there was no panic. Men leaned against the railing or sat on deck chairs, smoking and talking quietly. Father Thomas Byles moved among the steerage passengers, praying and offering absolution. The deck began to list heavily, and the lights dimmed to a reddish—”

Richard slapped the book shut and went back over to the mind-numbing monotony of mapping the scans. He graphed the levels of cortisol and acetylcholine, and then got on the Net and did a search on theta-asparcine. There were only two articles. The first was a study of its presence in heart patients, which—

Someone knocked on the door. He turned around, hoping it was Kit, or Vielle, but it wasn’t. It was a woman in a dressy pink suit and high heels. Could this be Mrs. Haighton, he wondered, finally here, several eons too late, for her first session?

“Dr. Wright?” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Nellis, Maisie’s mother.”

Oh, this is all I need, he thought tiredly. Here it comes. I had no business telling Maisie Joanna died, it’s terribly important for her to have only upbeat, cheerful experiences. Positive thinking is so important.

“Maisie’s told me so much about you,” Mrs. Nellis said. “I appreciate your taking the time to visit her. It’s hard to keep her spirits up, here in the hospital, and your visit cheered her up no end.”

“I like Maisie,” he said warily. “She’s a great kid.”

Mrs. Nellis nodded. She was still smiling, but the smile was a little strained. “She’s all right, isn’t she?” Richard said. “Nothing’s happened to her?”

“No, oh, no,” Mrs. Nellis said. “She’s doing extremely well. This new ACE-blocker she’s on is working wonders. She tells me you’re a research neurologist.”

He was surprised. He had had no idea Maisie knew anything about him except that he was a friend of Joanna’s. And what was all this about? If she was going to lecture him over having told Maisie about Joanna, he wished she’d stop smiling and get it over with. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, and, to give her the opening she was apparently looking for, “I’m researching near-death experiences.”

“So I was told,” she said. “I understand you believe near-death experiences may actually be some sort of survival mechanism. I also understand that you hope to use your research to develop a technique for reviving patients who’ve coded, a treatment for bringing them back.”

Who had she been talking to? Joanna would never have told her anything like that, especially knowing her tendency to unbridled optimism, and neither would Maisie. Mandrake? Hardly. Who then? Tish? One of the subjects? It didn’t matter. He had to stop this before it went any further. “Mrs. Nellis, my research is only in the very preliminary stages,” he said. “It’s not even clear yet what the near-death experience is or what causes it, let alone how it works.”

“But when you do find out how it works,” she persisted, “and when you do develop a treatment, it could help patients who’ve coded. Like Maisie.”

“No—Mrs. Nellis—” he said, feeling like someone trying to stop a runaway train, “At some point in the far-distant future, the information that we’re gathering might possibly be put to some practical use, but what that use might be, or whether, in fact, it will even turn out that—”

“I understand,” she said. “I know how uncertain and time-consuming medical research is, but I also know that scientific breakthroughs happen all the time. Look at penicillin. And cloning. Amazing new treatments are being developed every day.”

Not a runaway train, a pyroclastic flow, he thought, seeing Maisie’s photo of Mount St. Helens in his mind’s eye, the black cloud roaring unstoppably down the mountain, flattening everything in its path, and wondered if that was where Maisie had gotten her original interest in disasters. “Even if there were a breakthrough in understanding near-death experiences,” he said, knowing it was useless, “it wouldn’t necessarily result in a medical application, and even if it did, there would have to be experiments, tests, clinical trials—”

“I understand,” she said.

No, you don’t, he thought. You don’t understand a thing I’ve said. “Even if there were a treatment, which there’s not, there has to be hospital approval and clearance by the research institute’s board—”

“I know there will be obstacles,” she said. “When amiodipril was approved for clinical trials, it took months to even get Maisie on the waiting list, but my lawyer’s very good at overcoming obstacles.”

I can imagine, Richard thought.

“That’s why it’s critical to have Maisie in your project now, so all the problems can be worked out in advance. Of course, it’s all just precautionary. Maisie’s doing extremely well on the ACE-blocker. She’s completely stabilized, and she may not even need the treatment. But if she does, I want everything to be in place. That’s why I came to see you as soon as Maisie told me about your coding cure. If she’s in your project, she’ll already be approved and the paperwork all completed when the treatment becomes available, and there won’t be any unnecessary delays in administering it,” she said, but he had stopped listening at “as soon as Maisie told me.”

Maisie had told her mother? That he could bring people back from the dead? Where would she have gotten an idea like that? The only person she would ever have talked to about the project was Joanna, and Joanna had always been completely honest with her. She would never have given her false hopes. And even if she had told Maisie there was a miracle cure (which Richard refused to believe), Maisie wouldn’t have believed it. Not hardheaded Maisie, who wore dog tags around her neck so they would know who she was if she died while she was down having tests. If the Hindenburg and the Hartford circus fire and the Lusitania had taught Maisie anything, it was that there weren’t any last-minute rescues. Her mother might believe in miracle cures, but Maisie didn’t. And even if she did, she wouldn’t have told her mother, of all people.

Joanna had said Maisie never told her mother anything. She hid her books from her, her interest in disasters, even the fact that he’d told her about Joanna’s death, and her mother only allowed upbeat discussions. She would never even have let Maisie bring up the subject of coding. Something else must have happened. Maisie must have accidentally mentioned his name, and, to cover, so her mother wouldn’t find out he’d been there telling her about Joanna, she’d said something about the project, and her mother had confabulated it, through her powers of positive thinking, into a miracle cure.

“You’ll need a copy of her medical history,” Mrs. Nellis said, busily planning. “I’ll pick up the project application from Records. Maisie will be so pleased. She was so excited when she was telling me about your project. The possibility of coding again’s really worried her, I know. I told her her doctors won’t let anything happen to her, but she’s been fretting about it.”

But she had coded twice without a quiver. And she had known about the transplant when he and Kit saw her and hadn’t seemed frightened. Her only thought had been to help them find out where Joanna had gone.

“Of course I realize a cure for coding will be tremendously in demand, and that there will be many patients competing for it. That’s another reason I want Maisie in on the project at this stage,” Mrs. Nellis said. “I’ll talk to my lawyer about arranging a waiver for participation by a minor. I’m on my way there now, and I’ll ask him about any other possible obstacles.”

Why would Maisie have told her? She had to know she’d take even a casual mention of a possible treatment and turn it into an accomplished fact. So why had she told her? She had to have known she’d do exactly what she had done, come roaring up to the lab and—

That’s it, he thought. That’s why Maisie told her. So she’d come up here. So she’d insist on my going to see Maisie. Maisie’s found out where Joanna was, he thought, and this is her way of telling me. But why hadn’t she just called? Or had him paged?

“I’ll need to talk to Maisie before I make any decisions regarding the project,” he said.

“Of course. I’ll notify the CICU. Maisie doesn’t have a phone in her room, but I’ll tell the sector nurse to let you speak to her.” Maisie doesn’t have a phone, he thought, and she couldn’t get anyone to carry a message for her. This is her way of paging me.

“…and if you have any trouble getting through, just have the CICU call me,” she said. “I’ll go straight down there from here and have you put on the approved visitors list, and after I’ve seen my lawyer, I’ll talk to Records about the application process. And I’ll leave you to work on your project. I know your breakthrough’s going to happen soon!” she said, smiled brightly, and was gone.

He waited till he heard the elevator ding, then grabbed his lab coat and his name tag, picked up an official-looking clipboard for good measure, and took off for the CICU, taking the stairs to seventh and crossing the walkway, thinking, All those hours of mapping paid off. I can get anywhere in this hospital in five minutes flat.

He ran up the stairs to sixth and down the hall to CICU, where a volunteer at a desk guarded the door. She glanced briefly at his name tag and smiled. He strode through the ward to Maisie’s room. The nurse at the desk outside her door stood up. “Can I help you?” she asked, moving so she was blocking the door.

“I’m Dr. Wright,” Richard said. “I’m here to see Maisie Nellis.”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Nellis said you’d be down,” she said and led the way into the room. Maisie was lying against her pillows, watching TV. “Dr. Wright’s here to see you,” the nurse said, moving around behind the bed to look at her IVs. She pushed a button on the IV stand.

“Hi,” Maisie said listlessly, and looked back up at the TV. What if I’m wrong, and she wasn’t trying to send a message? Richard thought, watching her. What if I confabulated the whole thing?

The nurse straightened the IV line, pushed the button again, and went out, pulling the door nearly shut behind her. “Well, it’s about time,” Maisie said, pushing herself up to sit. “What took you so long?”

51

Joanna stared at the wireless operator’s blond hair, at his young, open face. The face that had laughed happily at her from the photo in Mr. Briarley’s library. “You’re Kit’s fiancé,” she said.

“You know Kit?” Kevin said, yanking the earphones off. “She’s not here, is she?” He leaped up, gripped Joanna’s shoulders. “Tell me she’s not here.”

“No,” Joanna said hastily. “She’s fine. She’s—” but he had already sat back down, was already sending again.

“I have to get a message to her,” he said, tapping out the code. “I have to tell her I’m sorry. It was my fault, I didn’t watch where I was going.”

“Neither did I,” Joanna said.

“I have to get the message to her that I love her,” Kevin said, his forefinger relentlessly tapping out the code. “I didn’t tell her. I didn’t even say good-bye.” He picked up the headphones and held the earpiece to his ear. “There isn’t any answer,” he said. “It’s too far.”

“No, it isn’t,” Joanna said, kneeling beside him, her hand on his arm. “The message got through. She knows you loved her. She understands you couldn’t say good-bye.”

“And she’ll be all right?” he asked anxiously. “I left her all alone.”

“She’s not alone. She’s got Vielle, and Richard.”

“Richard?” he said. An expression of pain crossed his face and was replaced by something sadder. “I was afraid she’d be alone. I was afraid it was too far for the message to get through,” and laid the headphones down on the table.

“It wasn’t,” Joanna said, still kneeling by him. “It isn’t. And I have to get a message through. It’s important. Please.”

He nodded, put his finger on the key. “What do you want to say?”

Good-bye, Joanna thought. I’m sorry. I love you. She glanced at the spark. It wavered, dimmed. “Tell Richard the NDE’s a distress signal from the brain to all the body’s systems. Tell him it—” she said, and was yanked brutally to her feet.

“The collapsibles weren’t there,” Greg growled, his hands gripping her shoulders. “Where are they?” He shook her. “Where are they?”

“You don’t understand,” Joanna said, looking frantically back at Kevin. “I have to send a—”

But Greg had let go of her, had grabbed Kevin’s arm. “That’s a wireless!” he said. “You’re sending out SOSs! There are ships coming to save us, aren’t there? Aren’t there?”

Kevin shook his head. “The Carpathia’s coming. But she’s fifty-eight miles from here. She won’t make it in time. It’s too far for her to come.”

Joanna sucked in her breath.

“What do you mean, too far for her to come?” Greg said, and Joanna understood finally what it was she had heard in his voice in the ER. She had thought it was despair, but it wasn’t. It was disbelief and fury. “Fifty-eight?” Greg said, jerking Kevin around to face him. “There has to be something closer than that. Who else are you sending to?”

“The Virginian, the Olympic, the Mount Temple,” Kevin said, “but none of them are close enough to help. The Olympic’s over five hundred miles away.”

“Then send the SOS to somebody else,” Greg said and pushed Kevin down into the chair. “Send it to somebody closer. What about that ship whose light everybody saw?”

“She doesn’t answer.”

“She has to answer,” Greg said, and jammed Kevin’s hand down onto the key. “Send it. SOS. SOS.”

Kevin glanced at Joanna and then bent forward and began to tap out the message. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Above his head, the blue spark arced, flickered, disappeared, arced again.

It’s fading, Joanna thought, and pushed forward between them. “No! It’s too late for SOSs. Tell Richard it’s an SOS, tell him Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs are the key.”

“Keep sending SOS!” Greg said, his hand snaking out to fasten on Joanna’s wrist. “You, show me where they keep the lifejackets.”

She called to Kevin, “You have to get the message through to Richard. Tell him it’s a code, that the neurotransmitters—” but Greg had already pushed her out of the wireless room, onto the deck.

“Where are the lifejackets?” he demanded. “We have to stay afloat till the ship gets here! Where did they keep them?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said helplessly, looking back at the door of the wireless room. Light radiated from it, golden, peaceful, and in the light Kevin sat, his golden head bent over the wireless key, the spark above his head like a halo. Please, Joanna prayed. Let it get through.

“Where did they keep them?” Greg’s fingers cut into her wrists.

“In a chest next to the officers’ quarters,” Joanna said, “but they won’t help. There aren’t any ships coming—” but he was already pushing her down the slanting deck toward the bow. Ahead, Joanna could hear a gentle, slopping sound, like water, like blood.

“Show me where the chest is—so I can see what I’m doing!” the resident saying, and Joanna flinching away from the scissors, afraid he had a knife, a knife! Vielle saying, “Hang on, honey. Close your eyes,” and the lights going off, the room suddenly dark, and then a door opening somewhere on light, on singing, “Happy birthday to you!,” the candles on the cake flaring into brightness, and her father saying, “Blow them out!,” and her, leaning far forward, her cheeks puffed with air, blowing, and the candles flickering red and going out, the deck lights dimming, glowing red, and then coming on again, but not as bright, not as bright.

Joanna was sprawled over a white metal chest. “What was that?” Greg said, on his hands and knees by the railing. “What’s happening?” His voice was afraid.

Joanna stood up. “The unifying image is breaking up,” she said. “The synapses are firing haphazardly.”

“We have to get our lifejackets on!” Greg said, scrambling wildly to his feet. He wrenched the chest open, hauled out a lifejacket and thrust it at her. “We have to get off the ship!”

Joanna looked steadily at him. “We can’t.”

He tossed the lifejacket at her feet, snatched up another one, began putting it on. “Why not?” he said, fumbling with the ties.

She looked at him with infinite pity. “Because we’re the ship.”

He stopped, his hands still clutching the trailing ties, and looked fearfully at her. “You died, Greg, and so did I, in the ER. You had a massive heart attack.”

“I work out at the health club every day,” he said.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We hit an iceberg and we sank, and all this”—she waved her hand at the deck, the empty davits, the darkness—“is a metaphor for what’s really happening, the sensory neurons shutting down, the synapses failing to arc.” The poor, mortally wounded mind reflexively connecting sensations and images in spite of itself, trying to make sense of death even as it died.

He stared at her, his face slack with hopelessness. “But if that’s true, if that’s true,” he said, and his voice was an angry sob, “what are we supposed to do?”

Why is everyone always asking me? Joanna thought. I don’t know. Trust in Jesus. Behave well. Play the hand you’re dealt. Try to remember what’s important. Try not to be afraid. “I don’t know,” she said, infinitely sorry for him, for herself, for everyone. “Look, it’s too late to save ourselves, but there’s still a chance we can save Maisie. If we could get a message through—”

“Maisie?” he shouted, his voice filled with fury and contempt. “We have to save ourselves. It’s every man for himself.” He yanked the ties into a knot. “There aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, are there?” he said. “That’s why you don’t want to tell me where they are, because you’re afraid I’ll steal your place. They’re down belowdecks, aren’t they?”

“No!” Joanna said. “There’s nothing down there except water!” And darkness. And a boy with a knife.

“Don’t go down there!” Joanna said, reaching out for him, but he was already past her, already to the door. “Greg!” She raced after him.

He yanked the door open on darkness, on destruction. “Wait!” Joanna called. “Kevin! Mr. Briarley! Help! SOS!”

There was a sound of footsteps, of people running from the stern. “Hurry!” she said, and turned toward the sound. “You have to help me. Greg’s—”

It was a squat, white dog with batlike ears, padding down the deck toward her, trailing a leather leash. It’s the French bulldog, Joanna thought, the one Maisie felt so bad about. “Here, boy!” she called, squatting down, but the dog ignored her, trotting past with the frantic, single-minded look of a lost dog trying to get to its master.

“Wait!” Joanna said and ran after it, grabbing for the end of the leash. She caught the little dog up in her arms. “There, there,” she said. “It’s all right.” It looked up at her with its bulging brown eyes, panting hard. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’ve got—”

There was a sound. Joanna looked up. Greg stood on the top step of the crew stairway, looking down into the darkness. He took a step down. “Don’t go down there!” Joanna cried. She thrust the little dog under her arm and ran toward the door. “Wait!” she cried, but the door had already shut behind him. “Wait!”

She grabbed the doorknob with her free hand. It wouldn’t turn. She hastily set the dog down, looping the end of the leash over her wrist, and tried the doorknob again. It was locked. “Greg!” she shouted through it. “Open the door!”

She put her whole weight against the door and pushed. “Open the door!” Pounding on the glass of the door, shouting, “What kind of hospital cafeteria is this?” Beating so hard the glass rattled, the cardboard sign that said “11 a.m. to 1 p.m.” shook, trying to make the woman inside look up from setting out the dishes of red Jell-O, shouting, “It’s not even one yet!” pointing to her watch in proof, but when she looked at it, it didn’t say ten to one, it said twenty past two.

She was on her knees, holding on to one of the empty lifeboat davits. The little bulldog huddled at her feet, looking up at her, shivering. His leash trailed behind him on the slanting deck. I let go of it, she thought in horror. I can’t let go of it.

She wrapped the leash tightly around her wrist twice, and clutched it in her fist. She scooped the little dog up in her arms, staggering against the rail as she straightened. The deck was slanting steeply now. “I’ve got to get a lifejacket on you,” she said and set off with the dog in her arms, climbing the hill of the deck, trying to avoid the deck chairs that were sliding down, the birdcages, the crash carts.

I’m in the wrong wing, she thought, I have to get to the Boat Deck, and heard the band. “The band was on the Boat Deck,” Joanna said, and climbed toward the sound.

The musicians had wedged the piano into the angle of the Grand Staircase and the funnel. They stood in front of it, their violins held to their chests like shields. As Joanna reached them, the bandleader raised his baton, and the musicians tucked their violins under their chins, raised their bows, began to play. Joanna waited, the bulldog pressed against her, but it was a ragtime tune, sprightly, jagged.

“It’s not the end yet,” Joanna said to the dog, climbing past them, past the first-class lounge. “We still have time, it isn’t over till they play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ”

And here was the chest. Joanna rolled an IV pole out of the way, and a gurney, trailing a white sheet, and grabbed a lifejacket. She stood the little dog on the white chest to put the lifejacket on him, wrapping it around his squat body and pulling his front legs through the armholes. She reached for the dangling ties, clutched—“ ‘Come, let me clutch thee!’ ” Mr. Briarley intoned from Macbeth. “ ‘I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou a dagger of the mind…?’ ” Ricky Inman tilted back and forth in his chair, Joanna watching him, fascinated, waiting for him to overbalance. “ ‘…a false creation, proceeding from the oppressed brain?’ ” and Ricky toppled over backward, grabbing at the wall, at the light switch, as he went over, Mr. Briarley saying, as the light went out, “Exactly, Mr. Inman, ‘put out the light and then put out the light,’ ” and the whole class laughing, but it wasn’t funny, it was dark. “It was dark,” Mrs. Davenport said, pausing between every word, Joanna, bored, uncaring, asking, “Can you describe it?” and Mr. Briarley answering, “ ‘The sun did not shine and the stars gave no light.’ ”

She was clinging to the deck railing, her body half over the side. She had let go of the bulldog again, and it scrabbled at her legs, whimpering, sliding away from her down the steep deck.

She caught it up against her chest and groped her way toward the support in the middle of the deck, hanging on to the railing as long as she could and then letting go and half-sliding, half-falling toward the safety of the wooden pillar. The deck lights dimmed down to nothing and came on again, dull red.

“The visual cortex is shutting down,” Joanna said, and lurched for the pillar. She wrapped the leash around her wrist, struggling to bind them to the pillar without letting go of the leash. A crash cart slid past them, picking up speed. A tiger, its striped fur red and black in the dimming light, loped by.

Joanna passed the leash around her waist, the dog, the pillar, and tied it in a knot. “This way I won’t let go of you. Like ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’ ” she said and wished Mr. Briarley were here. “ ‘He cut a rope from a broken spar, and bound her to the mast,’ ” she recited, but when she said the next line, it didn’t come out right. “ ‘And when they were dead,’ ” she recited, “ ‘the robins so red, gathered strawberry leaves and over them spread.’ ”

The ship was beginning to overbalance, like Ricky Inman going over in his chair. The bulldog, between her chest and the pillar, looked up at her with wild, frightened eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “It can’t last much longer.”

Snow began to fall, large gray-white flakes drifting down onto the deck like apple blossoms, like ash. Joanna looked up, half-expecting to see Vesuvius above them. A sailor, all in white, ran past, dragging landing chocks behind him, shouting, “Zeroes at oh-nine hundred!” The band stopped, paused, began to play.

“This is it,” Joanna whispered, “ ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ” But that wasn’t the tune. “Well, at least some good has come out of this,” she said to the dog, trying to smile. “We’ve solved the mystery of whether they were playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ or ‘Autumn.’ ” But it wasn’t “Autumn” either. It wasn’t a hymn at all. It was “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“Oh, Maisie,” she murmured.

An Apache galloped past, brandishing a knife. Water began to pour from the lifeboat davits, from the railings, from the chest. “This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world!” a reporter on the roof of the officers’ quarters sobbed into a microphone. “It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen, the smoke and the flames now! Oh, the humanity!” The code alarm began to scream.

Joanna looked up. The stern of the ship reared above her, suspended against the blackness. She hugged the dog against her and tried to shield its head. The lights went out, blinked on dull red, went off, came on again. Like Morse code. Like Lavoisier.

There was a horrible rending sound, and everything began to fall, deck chairs and the grand piano and the giant funnels, violins and Indian clubs and playing cards, postcards and pomegranates and dishes and Dish Night, transcripts and trellises and telegrams. Books toppled out of their shelves, Mirrors and Mazes and The Titanic ABC and The Light at the End of the Tunnel. The davits broke loose from their moorings, and the mechanical camel, and the weight machine, looking more than ever like a guillotine. The stanchions fell, and the engine room telegraph, set now on Stop, and scans and sleep masks and shortcuts, arteries, ancient mariners, minirecorders, metaphors, dog tags, heating vents, knives, neurons, night.

They crashed down on Joanna and the little bulldog with a rending, deafening roar, and in the last moment before it reached them, she realized she had been wrong about the noise she had heard when she came through. It was not the sound of the engines stopping or of the code alarm buzzing, of the iceberg slashing into the ship’s side, but the sound of her whole life crashing, crashing, crashing down on her.

52

“I’ve been trying to call you since Wednesday,” Maisie said disgustedly to Richard. She reached for her remote and turned down the sound on The Sound of Music. “But they don’t let you have phones in your room in here, you have to tell the sector nurse and she makes the call for you, she dials it and everything, and they don’t allow cell phones either ’cause of people’s pacemakers, you might scramble their signals and they’d go into V-fib or something,” she said, a little like a runaway train herself, “so I asked Nurse Lucille to call you, and she said, ‘What for?’ and I couldn’t say the real reason ’cause I’m not supposed to know about Joanna. We need to have a code for next time.”

“All right, we’ll work one out,” Richard said. “You found out who Joanna had been to see?”

“Yes. So, anyway, I told her to tell you I needed to see you, and I said you weren’t a visitor, you were a doctor, but she still wouldn’t call you.”

She paused to get her breath, wheezing a little, and then started up again. “So I asked her to call Ms. Sutterly to bring me my books, because she’s not a visitor, I have to have my books so I can do my homework. I thought when she came I could secretly hand her this note with your phone number on it, but Nurse Lucille said ‘Family members only.’ It’s like a prison.”

“So you told your mother I’d discovered a cure for coding?” Richard said.

She nodded. “I got the idea watching The Parent Trap, the part where they fool the mom. I couldn’t think of anything else,” she said defensively. “I figured she’d make you come see me if she thought you’d figured out a way to bring people back after they coded. And she did.” She sobered. “I know you don’t really know how to do that. Are you mad?”

“No. I should have come to see you earlier when you didn’t call. I came a couple of days ago, but you were out having tests.”

She nodded. “An echocardiogram. Again. I tried the whole time I was down there to get somebody to page you, but nobody would. They said pages were for hospital business only.”

“But you got the message to me,” Richard said. “That’s the important thing. And you found out where Joanna was and who she talked to.”

She nodded emphatically. “That was even harder than getting the message to you ’cause I couldn’t go anywhere or call anybody, and I knew if I asked the nurses, they’d ask me what I wanted to know for, so I asked Eugene. He’s the guy who brings the menu things. When I was down in Peds, Eugene brought the menu things down there, too, so I figured he did all the floors and saw lots of people.”

“And he saw Joanna?” Richard said, trying to get Maisie to the point.

“No,” Maisie said. “I had to talk really hard to get Eugene to ask them if they saw Joanna. He didn’t want to. He said patients were always trying to get him to do stuff he wasn’t supposed to, like extra cookies on their tray and sneak in pizza and stuff, and he could lose his job if he did it, and I told him I wasn’t asking him to bring me anything, just ask some questions, and I was really sick, I had to have a heart transplant and everything, and if he wouldn’t do it, I’d have to ask them myself, and I’d probably code.”

Maisie Machiavelli. “So he said he’d ask them.”

“Yes, and one of the tray people saw her in the west wing, going up the stairs to the fifth floor really in a hurry.”

The fifth floor. What was on five?

“I made Eugene talk to all the orderlies and stuff who worked on the fifth floor, but nobody else had seen her. And then I got to thinking about there being a walkway on the fifth floor and maybe she was going up to it.”

“How did you know there was a walkway on the fifth floor?”

“Oh, you know,” Maisie said evasively, her eyes straying to the TV screen, where the von Trapp children were sticking a frog in Maria’s pocket. “They sometimes take me for tests and stuff. Anyway, I thought she might have been going over to the east wing, so I told Eugene to ask all the tray people who worked over there, but nobody’d seen her, so I tried to think who else besides nurses and tray people are usually out in the halls, like the guys who mop and run the vacuum thing.”

“Is that who told you who Joanna talked to?”

“No,” Maisie said, “So, anyway, Eugene told me one of the orderlies saw Joanna going down to the ER, but that wasn’t any good, you already knew she did that, but I wrote his name down anyway in case you wanted to talk to him.” She reached over to the bedstand, pulled out a folded sheet of paper like the one she’d written the wireless messages on, and unfolded it. He could see two names written on it. “Bob Yancey,” Maisie said.

“Is the name of the person Joanna talked to on there?” Richard asked, leaning forward to see the other name.

Maisie snatched the paper out of his reach. “I’m getting to that part,” she said, folding it up. “So, anyway, then this lady in the CICU went into V-fib, she had a quadruple bypass, and the chaplain came, and I thought, I’ll bet he goes to see all the really sick people, he came to see me one time when I coded, so if the person Joanna went to see had had an NDE, he might have seen her.”

The chaplain. Of course. Richard hadn’t even thought of him. “The chaplain saw her?”

“I’m getting to that part.” And it was obvious he was going to have to hear the whole story of how she’d found out before she told him what he wanted to know.

“So I was going to ask Eugene to ask him to come and see me, but when the meal thing came, it wasn’t him, it was this other guy, and when I asked him where Eugene was, he said, ‘He be taking a few days off,’ really madlike, so I said, ‘He didn’t get fired, did he?’ and he said, ‘No, and he don’t plan on it and I don’t neither, so don’t go askin’ me to play detective,’ and he wouldn’t even listen when I said all I wanted was to talk to the chaplain, he just put down the meal thing and left. So then I tried to think of a way to get the chaplain to come see me. I thought about telling the sector nurse I was worried about heaven and stuff, but I figured she’d tell my mom and my mom would get all upset. I figured I could pretend to be in A-fib if I couldn’t think of anything else—”

A-fib! I’ve created a monster, he thought.

“—but while I was trying to decide, the guy came in to draw blood, and he fastens the rubber tube thing around my arm and goes, ‘Are you the one who’s asking around about Joanna Lander?’ and I go, ‘Yes, did you see her?’ and he says he saw her in the room with this patient and he knows the name and his room and everything, because of them having to write it on those little tube things.” She handed over the paper triumphantly.

Richard unfolded it. “Room 508,” it read. “Carl Aspinall.”

“He said he was in a coma,” Maisie said.

Richard’s heart sank.

“What’s the matter?”

He looked at her eager, expectant face. She’d tried so hard and succeeded where the rest of them had failed. It seemed cruel to disappoint her, no matter what Joanna had said about always telling her the truth. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Isn’t he the one?”

“No,” Richard said. “I already know about Carl. Joanna had the nurses write down words he said while he was unconscious. Joanna was probably there to talk to the nurses.”

“Hunh-unh,” Maisie said. “Carl was talking to her. The blood guy said so. He said he was really surprised he was awake, and the nurses told him he just came out of his coma that morning all of a sudden, and everybody said it was a miracle.”

Came out of his coma. And told Joanna what he’d seen, told her something that gave her the key—Room 508. Richard reached for his cell phone, remembered he’d left it at the desk outside. “Thanks,” he said, starting for the door. “I need to go talk to him.”

“He’s not here,” Maisie said. “He went home, the blood guy said. Last week.”

He’d have to call Records, see if he could talk them into giving him an address, and if not, talk to his nurses. “I’ve gotta go, Maisie,” he said. “I need to find out where he lives.”

“3348 South Jackson Way,” Maisie said promptly, “but he’s not there. He went up to his cabin in the mountains.”

“Did the blood guy tell you that?”

“No. Eugene.” She reached over to the bedstand and extracted another sheet of paper. “Here’s how to get there.”

He read the instructions. The cabin was just outside of Timberline. “You’re a miracle worker, Maisie,” he said, sticking the paper in his pocket. “I owe you one.” He started out the door.

“You can’t go yet,” Maisie said. “You haven’t told me if you want me to keep on looking for people who saw Joanna.”

No, Richard thought. This is the one. It made perfect sense. Carl Aspinall had come out of his coma and told Joanna something about what he’d seen that had clicked with Joanna’s own experiences, something that had made her realize what the NDE was, how it worked.

Maisie was waiting expectantly. “You’ve already found the person I was looking for,” he said. “And you’re supposed to be resting. You rest and watch your video.”

“I hate The Sound of Music.” She flounced back against the pillow. “It’s so sweet. The only good part is where the nuns play that trick on the Nazi guys so they can escape.”

“Maisie—”

“And what if he isn’t the guy you’re looking for?” she said. “Or he goes into a coma again? Or dies?”

He gave in. “All right, you can keep looking, but no asking Eugene to do anything that will get him fired. And no faking A-fib. I’ll come see you as soon as I get back from seeing him.”

“Are you going to take Kit with you?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“She’s nice,” Maisie said, looking up at the TV, where Captain von Trapp was singing to Maria. “I just think she’d be good at asking questions. You have to come and tell me what he said right away.”

“I will,” he said and went back to the lab to call Carl Aspinall, but there was no number listed for the mountain cabin. They must have a cell phone, Richard thought, they surely wouldn’t have taken off for the mountains a week after being released from the hospital without any way to get in touch, but the cell phone number was unlisted.

He would have to go there, which was just as well. If he called, he ran the risk of being told Aspinall was too ill to see him, of having Mrs. Aspinall say, “How would next week be?” He couldn’t wait till next week or even till tomorrow, not when he was this close. He called Kit. He doubted if she’d be able to find someone to watch her uncle on such short notice so she could go with him, but he could at least get Carl’s transcripts from her. He wanted to look at them before he interviewed Carl.

Kit’s line was busy. He looked at his watch. It was after two, and Timberline was a good hour and a half into the mountains. He tried Kit’s number again. Still busy. He’d have to go without the transcripts.

He grabbed his keys and started out the door and then stopped. He was doing just what Joanna had done, taking off without telling anyone where he was going. He called the ER and asked to speak to Vielle. “She can’t come to the phone,” the intern or whoever it was said. “We’ve got a real mess down here. Twenty-car pileup on I-70. Fog.”

You had to take I-70 west to get to Timberline. “Where?” Richard asked.

“Out east by Bennett,” the intern said. “Can I give her a message?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “Tell her I’m on my way to interview Carl Aspinall. Carl,” Richard said. He spelled it and then Aspinall slowly. “Tell her I’ll call her as soon as I get back.”

“Sure thing,” the intern said. “Drive carefully.”

Richard hung up and tried Kit one more time. Mr. Briarley answered the phone. “Who’s calling?” he demanded.

“Richard Wright,” he said. “May I speak to Kit?”

“He’s dead. He was stabbed to death in a tavern in Deptford.”

“It’s for me, Uncle Pat,” Kit’s voice said, and a woman’s voice said, “I’m sorry. He asked me for a cup of tea, and—”

He didn’t hear the rest of it. Kit came on the line and, amazingly, already had someone there to watch her uncle. “I was going to go to the library to see what I could find on a fire on the Titanic,” she said.

“What else would they see?” Richard could hear Mr. Briarley say in the background. “It is the very mirror image.”

“How long can the caregiver stay?” Richard asked.

“Till six,” Kit said. “You found the person Joanna went to see, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I want you to go with me to see him. Can you?”

“Yes!”

“Good. Bring the Coma Carl transcripts.”

“Metaphors are not just figures of speech,” Mr. Briarley said.

“I’d better go,” Kit said and told him her address. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

Mr. Briarley said, “They are the essence and pattern of our mind.”

Richard hung up, stuck the cell phone in his pocket, and started for the parking lot. Almost to the elevators a young man in a suit intercepted him. “Dr. Wright?” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m glad I caught you. I’m Hughes Dutton of Daniels, Dutton, and Walsh, Mrs. Nellis’s lawyer.”

I should have taken the stairs, Richard thought. “I really can’t talk now,” he said. “I’m going—”

“This will only take a minute,” Mr. Dutton said, opening his jacket and pulling out a Palm Pilot. “I’m negotiating approval of this coding treatment you’ve developed and I just need to clarify a few details. Is it classified as a medical procedure or a drug?”

“Neither,” Richard said. “There is no treatment. I tried to explain that to Mrs. Nellis but she wouldn’t listen. My research into the near-death experience is in the very preliminary stages. It’s purely theoretical.”

The lawyer scribbled on his Palm Pilot. “Treatment in predevelopment phase.”

He’s as bad as Maisie’s mother, Richard thought. “It’s not in the predevelopment phase. There is no treatment, and even if there were, it would never be approved for experimental use on a child—”

“In ordinary circumstances, I’d agree with you, but where the treatment involved would be utilized in a postcode situation, there are several options, the least problematical of which is to classify the treatment as a postmortem experimental procedure.”

He’s talking about Maisie, Richard thought, gritting his teeth. “I have to go,” he said, going around the lawyer and toward the elevators. “I was supposed to meet someone—”

“I’ll ride down with you,” the lawyer said, leaning past him to press the “down” button. “Since the patient is technically deceased, the same legal permissions as those required for organ harvesting could be used.” The elevator arrived, and Richard and the lawyer stepped in. “What floor?”

“G,” Richard said.

“Mercy General unfortunately has a policy forbidding experimentation on the just-deceased, though since it was intended to prevent interns practicing such procedures as femoral artery catheterizations, we can argue that your treatment doesn’t fall under the ban. Our second option is an Extreme Measures order, which demands that every possible measure be taken to save the life of the patient.”

The elevator opened on G. The lawyer followed Richard out. “An EM order is legally riskier, but it has the advantage of allowing the procedure to be done earlier than a postmortem would. At this point I’m pursuing all options,” he said and stepped back inside as the door began to close.

Thank God, Richard thought, heading for his car at a lope. I thought he was going to go with me. He debated calling Kit to tell her he’d be late, but he didn’t want to take the time to find a phone, and if Mr. Briarley answered again, it would take longer than driving over there, especially if traffic cooperated.

It didn’t. There was fog, just as the intern had said, and traffic had slowed to a crawl. It was three-twenty by the time he got there.

And it will take another half an hour to get away from Mr. Briarley, he thought, but Kit came out with the transcripts as soon as he pulled up. “I brought my cell phone,” she said as he pulled away from the curb. “So who is it?”

“You won’t believe this,” he said, turning onto Evans. He told her about Carl Aspinall as he drove down to Santa Fe and picked up I-25. “Aspinall must have told her what he’d experienced while in the coma, and something about it, or something combined with words he muttered while he was unconscious, provided the key.”

“Do you think he’ll know what that something was?” Kit asked.

“I don’t know. I’m hoping Joanna said something, shouted ‘Eureka!’ and then explained why she was excited. If she didn’t, we’ll have to hope we see the connection, too. Why don’t you read the transcripts out loud?”

Kit nodded and started through Joanna’s notes. Richard turned onto I-70 and headed west. The fog thinned a little toward Golden and then closed in again as they began to climb into the foothills. The cars ahead of them disappeared, and so did the rocky slopes on either side. Twenty-car pileup, Richard thought. He turned his headlights on and slowed down.

“ ‘…half…’ ” Kit read “ ‘…to… (unintelligible)… fire… make…’ ” She glanced up. “Where are we?” she said, looking out at the shrouded landscape.

“I-70, going up toward Timberline,” Richard said, handing her Maisie’s page of directions. “Aspinall and his wife are staying at their mountain cabin. Which exit do I take?”

She consulted the directions. “This one,” she said, pointing at a green sign, barely visible through the fog. “And then north on 58.” They both leaned forward, straining to see the signs and make the turn onto Highway 58, and then Kit went back to reading. “ ‘…water… oh, grand (unintelligible)… smoke—’ ” She stopped, staring out at the fog.

“Is that all?” Richard asked.

“No,” she said, “I was just thinking, maybe the smoke is the clue.”

“I thought you weren’t able to find any fires on the Titanic that night.”

“I wasn’t,” she said, “but that’s just it. Everything else Joanna saw—the mail clerks dragging sacks of mail up to the Boat Deck and the passengers milling around on deck and the rockets—all really happened, and her descriptions of the gymnasium and the Grand Staircase and the writing room could have been taken straight from Uncle Pat’s books.”

“But not the smoke.”

“No, not the smoke, or the fog, or whatever it was she saw. It doesn’t fit, and maybe in trying to find out why it didn’t, she found out the answer. In science, isn’t it the piece that doesn’t fit that leads to the breakthrough?”

“Yes,” he said. “Or maybe she was trying to prove it didn’t fit, because that would prove it wasn’t really the Titanic. Maybe that’s why she asked you all those questions about the mail room and the First-Class Dining Saloon, because she was hoping her description wouldn’t match.”

“But then why didn’t she write down what she saw? If she was trying to prove discrepancies, she’d have wanted to document them, but there’s no mention of smoke or a fire or fog anywhere in her accounts, taped or written. And it’s in Maisie’s account, and Ms. Schuster’s. I think it’s the key.”

“Well, we’ll know in a few minutes,” Richard said, pointing at a sign barely visible in the fog: “Timberline 8 mi.”

The fog grew steadily thicker and the road twistier. Richard had to devote all his attention to seeing the center line. “ ‘…water…’ ” Kit read, “ ‘…no… blanked out…,’ and then two words with question marks after them, ‘cold? code?’ ”

“Tunnel,” Richard said.

“Tunnel?” Kit said. “How do you get ‘tunnel’ out of ‘cold’ and ‘code’?”

“Tunnel,” he repeated, and pointed. The arched mouth of a tunnel loomed ahead, black in the formless fog.

“Oh, a tunnel,” Kit said, and they drove into it.

It was dark, which meant it must be a short one. The longer tunnels, like the Eisenhower and the ones in Glenwood Canyon, were lit with gold sodium-vapor lights. This one was pitch-black beyond the range of their headlights, and foggy.

“Why would I have seen the Titanic, of all things?” Joanna had said. “I live in Colorado. There are dozens of tunnels in the mountains.”

And she was right, he thought. A tunnel like this was the obvious association. The narrow sides, the feeling of swift forward motion, the darkness. The tunnel must curve, because he couldn’t see the end, couldn’t see the light.

The light. There was no sensation of having driven around a curve, but he must have, because there was the mouth of the tunnel, blindingly bright and nearly upon them. Richard squinted against the sudden whiteness.

“A mountain tunnel would have been the logical association,” Joanna had said. The feeling of opening out into light, into space, the blinding brightness of eyes adjusting from blackness to daylight, no, brighter than that. Brilliant, dazzling. It’s too bright, Richard thought and felt a stab of fear. Why is it so bright?

Beside him, Kit put up her hand to shade her eyes, and the movement looked defensive, as if she were shielding herself from a blow. Where are we? Richard thought, and was out of the tunnel and into another world. Blue sky and glittering snow and white, pine-covered slopes.

“What happened to the fog?” Kit asked wonderingly.

“We must have climbed above it,” Richard said, though there had been no sensation of climbing either, but at the next curve in the road, they could see the white layer of cloud below them, blanketing the canyon.

“Heaven,” Kit murmured, and Richard knew she was thinking the same thing he was.

“Everything except the ringing or buzzing sound,” he said, and Kit’s cell phone rang.

“Mrs. Gray, is everything all right?” Kit said anxiously. It must be the Eldercare person. “Oh. In the cupboard above the sink, behind the oatmeal. I hope.” Kit punched “end.” “She couldn’t find the sugar,” she said to Richard, looking relieved. She picked up the transcripts. “I’d better finish reading these. We’re almost there.”

“Correction, we are there,” Richard said, pointing at a sign that said Timberline. He turned onto a narrow, snowy road, and then a narrower, snowier one, and stopped in front of an elaborately rustic-looking chalet.

“I can’t believe it,” Kit said as they walked up to the door. “We’re going to find out what Joanna was trying to tell us.”

A woman met them at the door, looking surprised and a little wary.

“Mrs. Aspinall?” Richard said, wondering suddenly how to explain their mission here without sounding crazy. “I’m Dr. Wright. This is Ms. Gardiner. We’re from Mercy General. We—”

“Oh, come in,” she said, opening the door wide. “How nice of you to come all this way! Carl’s in the family room. He’ll be so pleased to see you.” She took Richard’s coat and hung it up. “Dr. Cherikov was here yesterday.” She took Kit’s coat. “All his doctors have been so nice, coming to check on him.”

“Mrs. Aspinall—” Richard began, but she was already leading them down a long, pine-paneled hall, telling them about Carl’s condition.

“He’s making wonderful progress, especially now that we’re up here. He’s stopped having the nightmares—”

“Mrs. Aspinall,” Richard said uncomfortably. “I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m not one of Mr. Aspinall’s doctors.”

Mrs. Aspinall stopped in midhall and turned to face them. “But you said you were from Mercy General.”

“We are,” Richard said. “We were friends of Joanna Lander’s. She was my partner on a research project.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Aspinall said. She hesitated, as if she were going to show them the door, and then led them on down to the door at the end of the hall. It wasn’t the family room. It was a decidedly unrustic kitchen. “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thanks,” Richard said. “Mrs. Aspinall, the reason we came—”

“I was so sorry to hear of Dr. Lander’s death,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “She was so kind to Carl and to me. She used to come and sit with Carl so I could go get something to eat.” She shook her head sadly. “Such a terrible tragedy! There’s so much violence everywhere these days. It upset Carl terribly.”

Good, at least he knows, Richard thought, and we won’t walk into a hornet’s nest the way we did with Maisie, but he asked, just in case. “You told your husband about her death?”

“I wasn’t going to. He was still so fragile, and he didn’t know her.” She smiled apologetically. “It’s so hard for me to remember that all the people who cared for him all those weeks and who I know so well are total strangers to him.”

Richard and Kit looked at each other across the table. “But Carl heard the nurses talking,” Mrs. Aspinall went on, “and when Guadalupe came into the room, he could see she’d been crying, and he knew something was wrong. He was convinced I was keeping something from him about his illness, so I ended up having to tell him.”

“Mrs. Aspinall,” Richard said, “the day Dr. Lander died, she was on the track of something important, something to do with the project we were working on. We’re talking to everyone she saw that day, which is why we’re here. We’d like—”

Mrs. Aspinall was shaking her head. “I didn’t see her that day. The nurses told me she’d been in two days before to see him, but I wasn’t there. The last time I saw her was at least a week before that, so I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

“Actually, it’s your husband we want to talk to,” Richard said.

“Carl?” she said, bewildered. “But he never even met Joanna. I don’t think you understand, my husband was in a semicomatose state until—”

“—the morning of the day Joanna died,” Richard said. “She had a conversation with him that morning, just after he regained consciousness.”

“Are you sure? Carl didn’t say anything about talking to her,” she said and then frowned, “but he was dreadfully upset when I told him about her. I thought it was because he’d been so close to death himself, that he was so frightened of it, but… when could she have seen him? I came as soon as they told me he was awake, and I was with him the rest of the day.”

“At eleven-thirty,” Richard said, hoping he was right.

“Oh,” Mrs. Aspinall said, nodding. “That was just before I got there.” And just after Carl regained consciousness, Richard thought, when his vision would have been fresh in his memory.

“But I still don’t understand,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “You say she was on the track of something regarding your research project? Why would she have told Carl about it?”

“We think—” Richard began.

There was a sudden loud banging from the next room, like someone hammering. “That’s Carl,” Mrs. Aspinall said apologetically. “He thumps his walking stick when he needs something. I brought a bell up, but I haven’t been able to find it.” The pounding started again, heavy, rhythmic thumps. “If you’ll excuse me,” Mrs. Aspinall said, standing up, “I’ll be right back.” She went out of the room.

The thumps continued a moment and then stopped, and they could hear a man’s voice saying querulously, “Who’s here? I heard a car in the driveway.”

“Some people from the hospital,” she said, “but you don’t have to see them if you don’t feel up to it, I can tell them to come back when you’re feeling stronger.”

Kit shot an anxious glance at Richard. “I feel fine,” the man’s voice said. “Dr. Cherikov said I was making excellent progress.”

“You are, but I don’t want you to overdo. You were very ill.”

Richard couldn’t hear his answer, but Mrs. Aspinall reappeared. “If you could keep your visit short,” she said. “He tires easily. This conversation you think Dr. Lander and Carl had, what did—?”

Whump, the walking stick thumped, louder than before. “We’re coming,” Mrs. Aspinall said, and led Kit and Richard into a pine-paneled room with a fireplace and wide windows looking out on a calendar view: snow-covered peaks, pine trees, an ice-bound mountain stream. The TV was on, and Richard looked toward the chair in front of it, expecting to see an invalid in a bathrobe with a blanket over his knees, but the chair was empty, and the only person in the room was a tanned, healthy-looking man in a white polo shirt and khaki pants, standing over by the window, looking out. The doctor? Richard wondered, and then noticed the gnarled walking stick the man held. Dr. Cherikov was right, he was making excellent progress.

Mrs. Aspinall walked rapidly to a thermostat on the wall, turned up the heat, and went over to the fireplace. “Brr, it’s so cold in here,” she said, taking a remote off the mantel and pointing it at the fireplace. A fire flamed up.

“Carl,” Mrs. Aspinall said, walking over to the chair. She picked up another remote and muted the TV. “This is Dr. Wright and Ms. Gardiner.”

“How do you do, Dr. Wright?” Carl said, coming forward to shake hands. He looked just as healthy close up. His face was tanned, and his grip when he shook hands with Richard was strong. Except for the dark bruises and puncture marks on the back of his hand, Richard wouldn’t have believed he’d been in the hospital only three weeks ago, let alone in a coma. “Were you one of the doctors who stuck all those needles and wires and tubes in me?” Carl asked. “Or have we met before? I keep meeting people who know me, and I don’t know them from Adam.”

“No,” Richard said. “We’ve never met. I’m—”

“And I know I’ve never met you,” Carl said, stepping past him to shake hands with Kit. “I definitely would have remembered that.”

“How do you do, Mr. Aspinall?” Kit said, smiling. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Fit as a fiddle,” he said. “Good as new.”

“Sit down, sit down,” Mrs. Aspinall said, motioning them toward the couch. They sat down, and so did Carl, leaning his walking stick against the arm of his chair. Mrs. Aspinall remained standing. Standing guard, Richard thought.

“Mr. Aspinall,” he said, “we won’t take much of your time. We just want to ask you a few questions about Joanna Lander.”

“Do you remember Dr. Lander, Carl?” Mrs. Aspinall asked. “I’ve told you about so many people, I know it’s confusing—”

Don’t lead, Richard thought, and looked anxiously at Carl, but he was nodding. “Joanna,” he said. “She came to see me. The day I…” His voice trailed off and he looked past them out the window at the icy stream.

At the water, Richard thought. It flowed dark and clear, half under and half over a thin film of ice.

“The day you regained consciousness?” Kit prompted.

“Yes. She died,” Carl said, and then after a moment, “Didn’t she?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “She was killed later that same day.”

“I thought so,” Carl said. “I get it confused sometimes, what really happened and what…” his voice trailed off again.

“Dr. Cherikov said you’d be a little confused at first,” Mrs. Aspinall said, “because of all the medications.”

“That’s right. The medications,” he said. “Are you doing something in Joanna’s memory?” he asked. “A charity fund or something? I’d like to contribute.”

“No,” Richard said, “that isn’t why we came—”

“There is something we’re trying to do for Joanna,” Kit said earnestly, “and we need your help. We think Joanna found out something important that day about the research she and Dr. Wright were doing. We’re trying to find out what it was. We think she may have said something to someone about it.”

“And you think she said something to me?” Carl said, already shaking his head. “She didn’t say anything about a discovery—”

“No, we don’t think she said anything directly,” Kit said hastily. “But we thought if we could talk to the people she talked to that day, there might be a clue of some kind.” That’s why I brought you along, Richard thought, looking at her gratefully. “Can you tell us what you talked about, Carl?”

“Talked about?” He looked past them again at the dark water. His hands fidgeted on the arms of the chair.

“Yes,” Kit was saying. “Can you tell us what you and Joanna talked about?”

“Are you sure you’re up to this, Carl?” Mrs. Aspinall asked anxiously, stepping between them. “I’m sure Dr. Wright and Ms. Gardiner would understand if—”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Stop fussing. Why don’t you go make us some tea?”

“They said they didn’t want any—”

“Well, I do,” he said. “Go make me a cup of tea and stop fussing over me like a mother hen.”

Mrs. Aspinall left, still looking anxious, and Carl smiled at Kit and said, “Now what were we discussing?”

“What you and Joanna talked about,” Kit said.

“Nothing very important,” he said. “She asked me how I felt. She told me she was glad to see I was awake and said I should get well. And that’s what I’ve been doing, resting, getting my strength back, doing what Dr. Cherikov says. Focus on the present, Dr. Cherikov says. Don’t think about what’s past. That’s over and done with. Think about getting well.”

“You mentioned being in the coma,” Richard said. “Did Joanna ask you what happened while you were in the coma? About having dreams?”

“They weren’t dreams.”

Richard’s heart leaped. “What were they?” he asked, his voice and face carefully impassive.

Mr. Aspinall looked toward the door, as if willing his wife to come back. “Mr. Aspinall, this is important,” Richard said. “Joanna tried to tell us something as she was dying. We think it has something to do with something you told her, something about what you saw when you were in the coma,” but Carl had stopped listening.

“I thought she died instantly,” he said accusingly. “The nurses told me she died instantly.”

Richard looked at him in surprise. What was going on here?

“You said she talked to you,” Carl said, his voice rising. “You said she tried to tell you something.”

“She did, but she didn’t live long enough to tell us. She died almost instantly.”

“There wasn’t anything anyone could have done,” Kit said.

He ignored her. “How did she die?”

Richard looked at Kit. She looked as bewildered as he felt. He wondered if they should call Mrs. Aspinall, but if they did, it would be an end to the interview. “How did she die?” Carl demanded.

“She was stabbed by a patient on drugs,” Richard said.

“Stabbed?” Carl said, and his hands clenched uncontrollably in his lap. “With what?”

“A knife,” Richard said, and, surprisingly, the answer was the right one. Carl’s fists unclenched and he leaned back into his chair. “And she died almost instantly,” he murmured. “She was only there a few minutes.”

“Where, Carl?” Richard said. “Where were you when you were in the coma?”

Carl’s hands clenched again, and his eyes strayed to the muted TV. Like Maisie’s when she didn’t want to talk. “You said it wasn’t a dream,” Richard said, leaning forward to put himself between Carl and the TV. “What was it? Was it a place?”

“A place,” he said and looked past them, at the dark, icy stream. What was he seeing, staring out at it? The water, creeping up the deck? Or roaring in through the injured side?

“You said Joanna was only there a few minutes,” Richard said. “Where? What were you afraid she’d been stabbed with?”

Carl’s fists tightened, the skin between the bruises white. His face under the tan had gone white, too. It looked sodden, like something pulled out of the water. “Where were you, Carl?” Richard repeated.

“Richard—” Kit said and put a restraining hand on his arm.

“Where were you?”

“I—” Carl said and took a wavering breath. “It—” This is it, Richard thought. He’s going to tell us.

Brring. The sound of the cell phone exploded into the silence like a bomb.

No! Richard thought, watching Kit scramble to get it out of her bag. Not now.

“I’m sorry,” Kit said, trying to shut off the ringing. “I didn’t know this was on.”

“Quite all right,” Carl said. His color had come back.

He looks like somebody who’s just heard the bugle call of the cavalry coming to rescue him, Richard thought. “Go ahead,” Carl said. “Take your call.”

Kit sent Richard an agonized glance and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

It will be Mrs. Gray, wanting to know where the sugar is, Richard thought. Or the mustard.

“Oh, hello, Vielle,” Kit said. “Yes, he’s here.” She handed Richard the cell phone.

“Excuse me,” Richard said and walked over to the fireplace. “Vielle—”

“What’s going on? I got this garbled message from one of the interns. Honestly, you’d think they could deliver a simple message—”

“I can’t talk now,” Richard said, his hand over the receiver. “I’ll call you back.”

“You’ll never get through,” Vielle said. “It’s a total disaster here. The fog—”

Richard switched the phone off. “Good-bye,” he said to the dial tone and handed the phone back to Kit. “Sorry,” he said, turning to Carl.

“Perfectly all right,” Carl said. “Where were we? Oh, yes, you were asking me what I remember of my coma, and I’m afraid the answer is, nothing at all.”

Damn you, Vielle, Richard thought. He was going to tell us. “The last thing I remember is my wife putting me in the car to go to the hospital,” Carl said. His hands on the arms of the chair were relaxed, steady. “She was having trouble getting my seat belt on, and the next thing I know this nurse I never saw before is opening the curtains, and this friend of yours comes in and talks to me for a few minutes, maybe five minutes at the most. She asked me how I was and we chatted a little, and then she stood up and said she had to go.” He smiled at Kit again.

“What did you chat about?” Richard said.

“I don’t really remember.” Carl shrugged. “I’m afraid there’s a lot I don’t remember about that first couple of days. The medications. I suppose that must be true for the dreams I had while I was in the coma, too.”

“You said they weren’t dreams,” Richard said.

“Did I?” Carl said easily. “I meant I didn’t remember having any dreams.”

You’re lying, Richard thought.

“Here’s your tea, Carl,” Mrs. Aspinall said, coming into the room. She handed him the mug. “And after you drink it, I think you should lie down. You look pale.” She laid her hand on his forehead. “And it feels like you’ve got a fever. I’m sure Dr. Wright and Ms. Gardiner will understand.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help you,” Carl said and turned to his wife. “You’re right, I am tired. I think I will lie down.”

“I’ll show Dr. Wright and Ms. Gardiner out,” Mrs. Aspinall said, “and then I’ll come back and get you settled.”

They stood up. “If you remember anything,” Kit said, “please call us.”

“I doubt if I’ll remember anything,” Carl said. “Dr. Cherikov said the more time has passed, the less I’ll remember about the whole thing.”

“Which is good,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “You need to forget about what’s past and concentrate on the present, and the future. Isn’t that right, Dr. Wright? I want to thank you for coming.”

End of interview. Mrs. Aspinall led them quickly down the hall to the front door and helped them into their coats, obviously anxious to get rid of them so she could get back to her husband. “It was so nice of you to come all this way,” she said, opening the door.

They went out onto the porch. “I’m sorry my husband couldn’t be more help,” she said.

“Maybe you can help us,” Richard said. “Your husband told Joanna something that put her on the right track. Something he remembered from his coma.”

“He told you, he doesn’t remember. His memory of his time in the hospital’s very hazy—”

“But he might have said something to you,” Kit said, “after he woke up. Made some reference to what he saw or—”

Richard interrupted. “Your husband said the things he saw weren’t dreams,” Richard said. “Did he say what they were?”

Mrs. Aspinall looked uncertainly down the hall toward the family room. “Please,” Kit said. “Your husband’s the only one who can help us. It’s so important.”

“What’s important is my husband’s recovery,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “He’s still very weak. His nerves—I don’t think you understand what a terrible ordeal he’s been through. He was this close to death. I couldn’t bear to lose him again. I have to think of his welfare—”

“You said Joanna was kind to you—” Richard said.

“She was,” Mrs. Aspinall said, and took her hand off the door.

“Did he say anything about where he was?” Richard said rapidly. “Did he mention a Grand Staircase?”

The loud thump of the walking stick sounded suddenly from the end of the hall. “My husband’s calling,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “I have to go get him settled for his nap.”

“He said, ‘She was only there for a few minutes,’ and the idea of her having been in the same place obviously frightened him,” Richard said over the thumping. “Did he say where he was or why it was frightening?”

“I have to go.”

“Wait,” Richard said, fumbling in his pocket. “Here’s my card. That’s my pager number. If you or your husband happen to remember anything—”

“I’ll call you. Thank you again for coming all this way,” she said politely, and shut the door in their faces.

53

Joanna sank.

She was suddenly in water and darkness. She couldn’t see, the rain on the windshield was suddenly a downpour, so heavy the wipers couldn’t keep up. She flicked them to high, but it was no use, the rain was turning to sleet, to ice. She was going to have to pull off the road, but she couldn’t even see the shoulder, she couldn’t feel the bottom. Her toes stretched desperately down, trying to feel sand, her head going under. Under. Flailing and gulping for air, swallowing, choking. Drowning.

“Drowning’s the worst way to die,” Vielle had said, but they were all terrible. Heart attack and kidney failure and beheading, drug overdoses and nicked aortas and being crushed by a falling smokestack. Joanna looked up, trying to see the Titanic, but there was only water above her. And darkness.

She reached up for the surface, but it was too far above her, and after a while she let her arms fall, and she fell. Her hair fanned out around her like Amelia Tanaka’s had, lying on the examining table, her dead hands drifting limp and open in the dark water.

I let go of the French bulldog, she thought, and knew that she could not have held on to him or onto his memory, or onto the memory of Ulla or the dog at Pompeii, struggling against its chain, or of the Titanic passenger letting the dogs out of their cages, because the falling was itself a letting go, and as she fell, she forgot not only the dog but the meaning of the word dog and of sugar and sorrow.

They fell away from her like snow, like ash, memories of saying, “Can you be more specific?” and eating buttered popcorn, of standing in the third-floor walkway, looking out at the fog, and sitting next to Mrs. Woollam’s bed, listening to her read passages from the Bible, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee,” and “Rosabelle, remember,” and “Put your hands on my shoulders and don’t struggle.”

Names fell away from her in drifting tatters, the names of her patients and of her best friend in third grade, of the movie star Vielle’s police officer had looked like and the capital of Wyoming. The names of the neurotransmitters and the days of the week and the core elements of the NDE.

The tunnel, she thought, trying to remember them, and the light, and the one Mr.—what was his name?—she had forgotten—was so insistent about. The life review. “There’s supposed to be a life review,” he had said, but he was wrong. It was not a review but a jettisoning, events and happenings and knowledge being tossed overboard one by one: numbers and dates and faces, the taste of Tater Torros, and the smell of crayons, Indian red and gold and sea green, the combination of her junior high locker and her Blockbuster password and the best way to get from Medicine to ICU.

Code alarms and Victory gardens and scraping snow off her windshield, and somewhere a fire, burning out of control, sending up billows of black acrid smoke. And the smell of fresh paint, the sound of Amelia Tanaka’s voice, saying, “I was in a tunnel.” A tunnel, Joanna thought, looking down at the water she was sinking into, the narrowing darkness.

But there was no light at the end of this tunnel, and no angels, no loved ones, and even if there were, she would have forgotten them, fathers and grandmothers and Candy Simons. Would have left the memory of all of them, relatives and friends, living and dead, behind in the water. Guadalupe and Coleridge and Julia Roberts. Ricky Inman and Mrs. Haighton and Lavoisier.

She had been falling a very long time. I can’t fall forever, she thought. The Titanic hadn’t fallen forever. It had come finally down to the bottom of the sea and settled into the soft mud, surrounded by chamber pots and chandeliers and shoes.

Will I be surrounded by shoes, too? she wondered, and could see them in the darkness: the red tennis shoe, jammed in the door, and Emmett Kelly’s huge, flapping clown shoes and the tiny shoe in the Monopoly game, and the abandoned shoes of the sailors, lined up along the deck of the Yorktown. The Yorktown had come to rest, too, and the Lusitania and the Hindenburg, and Jay Yates and Lorraine Allison and Little Miss 1565, having forgotten everything, even their names. Rest in peace.

What was the Latin for “Rest in peace”? “Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani,” she thought, but that wasn’t right. That was the Latin for something else. She had forgotten the Latin for “Rest in peace” and the words to “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Sound of Music.”

Everything she had learned by heart fell away from her, line after line, unraveling into the dark water like tape from a broken Blockbuster video, “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,” and “At a time like this, it’s every man for himself.” “Houston, we have a problem,” and “Oh, don’t you remember, a long time ago, there were two little children whose names I don’t know.”

The words trailed away into the water, carrying memory with them, of trailing electrode wires and lifejacket ties and yellow “Do Not Cross” tape. And yellow afghan yarn, yellow sneakers like the ones Whoopi Goldberg wore in Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Jack in the Beanstalk, Jack Phillips.

And that was important. There was something important about Jack Phillips. Something about a lab coat, or a blanket. Or a heater, shutting off. They’re shutting off, she thought, the receptors and transmitters and neurons, and this is just a symbol for it, a… but she had forgotten the word for metaphor. And for disaster. And for death.

Had forgotten the taste of Cheetos and the color of blood and the number fifty-eight, forgotten Mercy General and mercy everlasting, zeppelins and kissing, her dress size, her first apartment, where she’d put her car keys, the answer to number fifteen on Mr. Briarley’s final, the sound in the tunnel and her 1040 form.

My taxes. I didn’t send in my 1040. They’re due April fifteenth, she thought, and remembered that the Titanic had gone down on the night of the fourteenth. All those people, she thought, they didn’t file their income tax returns either. No, that was wrong. They didn’t have income tax back then. That was why they were all so rich. But there were other things they hadn’t done that they had intended to do: meet friends at the dock in New York, send a telegram announcing their safe arrival, marry, have children, win the Nobel Prize.

I never learned to play the piano, Joanna thought. I didn’t tell Mr. Wojakowski we couldn’t use him in the project, and now he’ll pester Richard. I didn’t transcribe Mr. Sage’s NDE.

It doesn’t matter, she thought. But I didn’t pay the gas bill, she thought. I forgot to water my Swedish ivy. I didn’t get the book from Kit. I promised I’d go pick it up. I promised I’d go see Maisie.

Maisie! she thought in horror. I didn’t tell Richard, I have to tell him, but could not remember what it was she had wanted to tell him. Something about the Titanic. No, not the Titanic. Mr. Briarley had been wrong, it wasn’t about the Titanic. It was something about Indians. And the Rio Grande. And a dog. Something about a dog.

No, that wasn’t right either. Fog, she thought, and remembered standing in the walkway, looking out at fog. It was cold and diffuse, like the water, like death. It blotted out everything, memory and duty and desire. Let it go, she thought, staring at nothingness. It’s not important. Let it go.

Progress reports and delivering the mail and regret. They aren’t important. Nothing’s important. Not proving it’s the Titanic or having a hall pass or avoiding Mr. Mandrake. None of it matters. Not Mr. Wojakowski or Mrs. Haighton’s never returning my calls or Maisie.

That’s a lie, she thought. Maisie does matter. I have to find Richard. I have to tell him. “Richard, listen,” she cried, but her mouth, her throat, her lungs, were full of water.

She kicked frantically, reaching up with her cupped hands, her arms. I have to tell him, she thought, clutching at the water as if it were the railing of a staircase, trying to pull herself up hand over hand. I have to get the message through. For Maisie.

She willed herself upward, kicking, stroking with her arms, trying to reach the surface.

And continued to fall.

54

“Boy, just like Ismay,” Maisie said when they told her what had happened with Carl. “How crummy!”

Leave it to Maisie to sum things up. Richard wondered if, clambering into the lifeboat, Ismay’s hands had been as white and clenched as Carl Aspinall’s, his face as sodden-looking.

“So what do we do now?” Vielle asked. She had called them on the way back, demanding to know what they’d found out, and Richard, unable to stand the prospect of telling it twice, had told her to meet them in Maisie’s room.

“We could talk to the lab technician who saw Carl and Joanna,” Richard said. “He may have heard what they were saying.”

“He didn’t,” Maisie said. “I asked him. He said they stopped talking when he came in the room.”

“He may have overheard something as he was coming in,” Richard said, “or leaving. Or he may have seen someone else going in. If there was a lab tech in the room taking blood, there may have been other staff going in to take tests,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. “Or nurses. Who was the one Mrs. Aspinall mentioned?”

“Guadalupe,” Kit said.

“I’ll talk to Guadalupe and the rest of the staff on five-east. Vielle, you keep looking for people who might have seen Joanna in the hallways, and don’t limit it to the professional staff. Talk to the volunteers and the kitchen help.”

“That’s supposed to be my job!” Maisie said, outraged.

“Your job is to rest and get strong so you’ll be ready for your new heart,” Richard said.

Maisie flung herself back against the pillows. “That’s no fair! I was the one who found out about Mr. Aspinall. Besides,” she said, “if I don’t have anything to do or think about, I’ll start worrying about my heart and how much the operation will hurt, and dying and stuff, and I might code.”

She was good, he had to admit that. “All right,” he said sternly, “you can help Vielle,” and she immediately said, “I had another idea who to ask, Vielle. The painter guys. I bet they see a lot of people. And the breathing therapy lady. Should I page you when I think of other people?”

“No paging Vielle all the time,” Richard jumped in. “She works in the ER, which is very busy. She’ll come see you when she can, and when she does, no stalling.” He turned to Vielle. “If Maisie finds out something, she’s not going to tell you the whole story of how she found out, because she knows you have to get back to the ER.”

“But—” Maisie said.

“Promise,” Richard said. “Cross your heart.”

“Okay,” she said grudgingly. She smiled at Vielle. “I’ll talk to the lady who empties the wastebaskets and the guy who runs the dust vacuum thing,” she said. “And rest,” she added hastily.

“And drink your Ensure,” Richard said.

“What if nobody else was in the room and heard them?” Maisie asked.

“Maybe Mrs. Aspinall will change her mind,” Kit said.

“That’s right,” Richard said, though he didn’t believe it for a moment. Her only concern was her husband, and his only concern was survival. And nothing, nothing could make him go back there, not even to save Joanna.

“But what if she doesn’t change her mind?” Maisie said.

“Then we have to hope the lab technician knows something,” Richard said. “Do you know his name, Maisie?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. “I saw it on his badge thing when he bent over to stick the needle in my IV line, and—”

“Maisie,” Richard said sternly. “No stalling. You promised.”

“I promised Vielle,” Maisie said, and at his look, “Okay. Rudy Wenck. But what if he doesn’t know anything?”

“Then we’ll find somebody who did,” he said.

“But what if there isn’t anybody?” Maisie persisted. “What if nobody else heard them talking?”

I don’t know, he thought. I don’t know. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said cheerfully, thinking, You sound just like Maisie’s mother.

And speak of the devil. Here she was, standing in the doorway with a yellow stuffed duck, a beribboned video-shaped package, and a blindingly bright smile. “Dr. Wright!” Mrs. Nellis said. “And Ms. Gardiner. Just the people I needed to see.” She beamed at Vielle. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“This is Nurse Howard,” Richard said.

“She works in the ER,” Maisie said.

“We were just leaving.” Kit and Vielle took the cue and started for the door.

“Oh, but you can’t go yet, Dr. Wright,” Mrs. Nellis said.

Well, now he knew where Maisie had gotten it from. He nodded at Kit and Vielle to keep going and said, “I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting.”

“This will only take a minute,” Mrs. Nellis said, setting the present and duck on the foot of the bed. She began rummaging through her purse. “I’ve got the project release forms and the minor-child permissions for you, all signed and notarized.” She pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to Richard. “My lawyer is working on a living will and resuscitation orders. Has he talked to you?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “I really have to go.”

“Can I open my present now?” Maisie piped up, and Mrs. Nellis, momentarily distracted, moved to get her the package.

Good girl, Richard thought, and ducked out, but not fast enough. Mrs. Nellis caught him just outside the door. “I wanted to ask you about Nurse Howard,” she said eagerly. “You said she worked in the ER, and I assume that means she’s an expert on coding procedures. Is she working with you on the treatment? Does that mean you’ve had a breakthrough?”

“No,” Richard said.

“But you’re getting close, right?”

“Mommy, come here!” Maisie said excitedly. “I can’t get my video open!” Mrs. Nellis glanced toward the room, and then back at Richard, hesitating. “Mommy! I want to watch it right away!”

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Nellis said and hurried into the room. Richard didn’t hesitate. He hotfooted it down the hall. Behind him he could hear Mrs. Nellis asking, “You like your video, sunbeam?” and Maisie saying, “I love it! Heidi is my favoritest movie in the whole world!”

Kit and Vielle were waiting for him outside the CICU. “We thought we were going to have to send the cavalry in after you,” Kit said.

“No, Maisie rescued me. At considerable sacrifice to herself.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Vielle asked.

“Kit, I want you to go through Carl Aspinall’s transcripts again and see if there’s anything in them about a sword or…” he cast around, trying to think of what else you could be stabbed with, “…a letter-opener or something. And then see if there’s any reference to a stabbing the night of the Titanic. Vielle, see if you can find out who all was on four-east that day. I’ll talk to Rudy Wenck.”

“I thought Maisie said he didn’t remember hearing anything,” Vielle said.

“She did,” Richard said, “but one thing I learned from Joanna is that people remember more than they think they do. And he has to have heard or seen something.”

But Rudy Wenck, even when pressed, didn’t remember anything. “He was scared of my drawing blood, that’s all I remember, like I was trying to kill him or something. He seemed kind of out of it.”

“Can you be more specific?” Richard asked.

“No, just, you know, kind of wild-eyed and scared.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No.”

“What about Dr. Lander? Did she say anything?”

“Yeah, she asked me if I wanted her to move, and I said, no, I could do it from that side.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“To me?”

“Or to Mr. Aspinall, anything at all.”

He shrugged. “She might have. I wasn’t really listening.”

“If you could try to remember,” Richard said, “it’s very important.”

He shook his head. “People are always talking when I’m in the room. I’ve learned to just shut it out.”

Guadalupe was even less helpful. “I didn’t know Joanna had even been in to see him,” she said.

“But you saw her on the floor that day?” Richard asked.

She nodded. “I’d paged her because we couldn’t find Mr. Aspinall’s wife and I thought Joanna might know where she was. She didn’t, but she came up to the floor, and I talked to her for a couple of minutes. She asked about Mr. Aspinall’s condition, and she suggested a couple of places his wife might be, and then I assumed she left.”

“But you didn’t see her leave?”

“No. Things were so crazy right then. We didn’t expect Co—Mr. Aspinall to regain consciousness. He’d been steadily sinking for several days, and then suddenly, he popped awake and we all started running around trying to find his wife and his doctor, so it’s entirely possible Joanna was here. Why is it important?”

He explained. “Did Mr. Aspinall say anything to you about what he experienced while he was in the coma?”

“No. I asked him, because he’d flailed around so much—”

Drowning, Richard thought. He was drowning.

“—and he’d cry out. Mostly it was after we’d had to do something, like redo his IV, and I wondered if he was aware of what we were doing, but he said, no, there wasn’t anybody else there, he was all alone.”

“Did he say where ‘there’ was?”

She shook her head. “Just talking about it seemed to upset him. I asked him if he’d had bad dreams—a lot of our coma patients remember dreaming—but he said no.”

Because it wasn’t a dream, Richard thought.

“Have you tried talking to Mr. Aspinall?” Guadalupe asked.

“He says he doesn’t remember anything.”

She nodded. “He was on a lot of drugs, which can really mess up your memory, and comas are funny. Some patients remember hearing voices and being aware of being moved or intubated, and then others can’t remember anything.”

And some of them remember and won’t tell, Richard thought bitterly, going through the list of people Vielle had come up with who’d been on four-east that day. They didn’t know anything either. “I was working the other end of the floor that day,” Linda Hermosa said, “and we had all these subs because of the flu.”

“Subs?” Richard asked. “Do you remember who they were?”

She didn’t, and neither did the nurse’s aides he questioned, but one of them said, “I remember one was really old and she must have worked on five-east because she kept yelling at me and saying, ‘That isn’t the way we do it up on fifth.’ I don’t think she worked that end of the floor, though.”

Richard went up to fifth and gave the charge nurse his sketchy description. “Oh, Mrs. Hobbs,” she said, “yes, she’s a retired LPN who subs sometimes when they can’t get anyone else.” She didn’t know her number. “Personnel takes care of all that.”

Richard thanked her and started down to Personnel. And what if Mrs. Hobbs, who didn’t sound promising, hadn’t been in Carl’s room either? What if, as Maisie said, there wasn’t anybody who’d heard them talking? It was entirely possible that Joanna had taken advantage of the general chaos to speak to Carl alone before his memory of his hallucinations faded and then gone off to find him and said nothing to anybody along the way. What then?

There has to be somebody, he thought, crossing the walkway to the west wing. He turned down the hall toward the elevators. The center one pinged, and a man with a Palm Pilot stepped out.

Shit. Maisie’s mother’s lawyer. The last person he wanted to see. He turned sharply around and walked quickly back down the hall, wishing he’d finished mapping this part of the hospital. Then at least he’d know where the stairways were.

There was one at the very end of the hall. He ducked into it and clattered down the stairs. It only went as far down as third, but at least he knew where the elevators were on third. He opened the door and started down the hall.

“Last night I had another vision,” a woman’s voice said, coming down the intersecting corridor toward him. “This time I saw my uncle Alvin standing at the foot of my bed, as real as you or I.”

Shit. He’d been wrong about Mrs. Nellis’s lawyer being the last person in the world he wanted to see. That honor belonged to Mrs. Davenport, and she was coming this way. Richard looked at the elevators, gauging the distance to them, and then at the floor numbers above their doors. Both of them were on eight. Shit. He turned around and headed for the nurses’ station.

“He was wearing his white sailor’s uniform, and a radiant light came from him,” Mrs. Davenport’s voice said. “And do you know what he said, Mr. Mandrake?”

Mandrake, too. Shit, shit, shit. Richard looked desperately around for an escape route, a stairway, a laundry chute, anything. Even a linen closet. But there was nothing except patient rooms.

“He said, ‘Coming home,’ ” Mrs. Davenport’s voice said, coming closer. “Just those two words. ‘Coming home.’ What can that mean, Mr. Mandrake?”

“He was sending you a message from the Other Side, telling you that the dead haven’t gone away,” Mandrake’s voice said, “that they are here with us, helping us, protecting us, speaking to us. All we have to do is listen—”

They were rounding the corner. Richard ducked through an unmarked door. A stairway. Great. And let’s hope this goes all the way down to the basement, he thought, rounding the landing, so I can take the—

He stopped. Two steps below the landing, yellow “Do Not Cross” tape stretched across the stairs, and, below it, pale blue steps shone wetly, though they could not possibly be wet. They had been painted over two months ago.

He wondered what had happened. Had the painters forgotten this stairway, or been unable to find it again in Mercy General’s maze of walkways and corridors and cul-de-sacs? And the techs and nurses, seeing the tape, thought it was still blocked and had found other routes, other shortcuts?

They must have, because the painted steps below the yellow tape were shiny and untouched, not a footprint on them, and the stairwell still smelled of paint. It was obvious no one had been in here since the day he and Joanna had ducked in here, hiding from Mandrake, since the day she’d sat on the steps eating his energy bar and complaining about the cafeteria never being open, and he’d tried to talk her into working with him on the project and she’d asked if it was dangerous, and he’d said, “No, it’s perfectly safe—”

He had suddenly no strength in his legs. He groped for the round metal railing and sat down on the third step above the landing, where they had sat, where he had plied Joanna with apples and bottled cappuccino.

“The dead haven’t gone away,” Mr. Mandrake had said, and if that were true, if Joanna were anywhere, it would be here, in the embalmed and empty air of this stairwell where no one had been in two months, where nothing had disturbed the echoes of her voice.

He wished suddenly that Mr. Mandrake were right, that Joanna would appear to him, standing on the pale blue steps, radiating light, and saying, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you what I’d found out. I was as bad as all those people in the movies. How were you supposed to know what ‘SOS’ meant? I’m surprised you didn’t say, ‘Can you be more specific?’ ” He could almost see her, pushing her glasses up on her nose, laughing at him.

Almost.

And that was what made people believe in angels and put frauds like Mandrake on the best-seller list, that desire to believe. But it didn’t bring them back. And it wasn’t the presence of the dead that haunted people, that made them imagine they saw them standing there in their NDEs. It was their absence. In places where they should have been.

Because Joanna wasn’t here, even in this place, where they had stood side by side, flattened against the wall, his arm stretched across her beating heart. There was nothing here, not even dust. She’s dead, he thought, and it was like coming face to face with it all over again.

He had somehow managed to deny it, in all his running around, making maps, graphing scans, questioning nurse’s aides, and he wondered now if that had been the point, if their obsession with Joanna’s last words had simply been another form of denial, their own private Grief Coping Strategies Seminar?

Because if they could decipher Joanna’s last words, it would make up for their having failed to save her. It would give the story a different ending. And how was that different from what Mandrake was trying to do?

He wondered suddenly if he had been just as deluded, if Joanna had murmured a few disjointed, delirious words, and he and Kit and Vielle had confabulated them into a message because it gave them something to think about, something to do besides grieving, besides giving way to despair, and Joanna’s words meant nothing at all.

No. “You were trying to tell me something,” he said to her, even though she wasn’t there. “I know you were.”

But she hadn’t succeeded. The machine had clicked off before she could finish. He thought of the message she had left on his answering machine. “A—” she had said, and he had played it over and over again, trying to decipher what she had started to say, but it was no use. There had been too many possibilities and not enough information. Like now, he thought, and knew, in spite of what he’d told Kit, that they would never find out.

In the movies they always found out who the murderer was, even though the victim died before she could tell them. In the movies, they always deciphered the message, solved the mystery, saved the girl. In the movies.

And maybe on the Other Side. But not on this side. On this side they never did find out what caused the Hartford circus fire or whether there was a bomb on the Hindenburg. On this side the doctor couldn’t stop the bleeding, help didn’t come in time, the message was too torn and stained to read.

“If anybody could have gotten a message through,” Joanna had said at Taco Pierre’s that night, “it was Houdini.” But that wasn’t true. If anybody could have gotten a message through, it was Joanna. She had tried, even when she was choking on her own blood, even when she should have been unconscious. If she could have come from where she was—in the grave or on the foundering decks of the Titanic or on the Other Side—to tell him her message, she would have.

But she couldn’t. Because she wasn’t anywhere. She’s gone, he thought, and buried his face in his hands.

He sat there a long time. His beeper went off once, startling in the silence, and he pulled it immediately out of his pocket, praying that it was Mrs. Aspinall calling to tell him Carl had changed his mind, but it was only Vielle, paging him to call her so she could report that she’d found another sub who’d worked the wrong end of the floor that day, or that she’d narrowed the cab Joanna had taken down to Yellow and Shamrock.

That wasn’t fair. Vielle had tried her best. They’d all tried their best. There were just too many pieces missing. The answer lay somewhere in the transcripts or the Titanic or the scans or English literature, but Joanna couldn’t tell them where, and Mr. Briarley, if he had ever known, could not remember. And Carl refused to tell.

And he, Richard, couldn’t figure it out. It was time to admit that. Time to face facts, pack it in, put on evening clothes and admit defeat.

Joanna would surely understand. She had watched the crash team trying CPR, norepinephrine, saline, paddles, one after the other. And she had been on the Titanic, which was all about trying and failing. The lookout hadn’t seen the iceberg in time, the Californian hadn’t heard the SOSs, hadn’t seen the Morse lamp’s signal, hadn’t understood the rockets. Assistant Engineer Harvey and the man he’d gone back to save had both drowned.

If there was any lesson to be learned from the Titanic, it was that attempts failed, rescue arrived too late, messages didn’t get through, and he knew, even as he thought it, that it wasn’t true.

The lesson of the Titanic was that people kept on trying even when they knew it was hopeless—tapping out SOSs, cutting the collapsibles free, going belowdecks and bringing the mail up, letting the dogs loose—all of them determined to save something, someone, even though they knew they couldn’t save themselves.

You can’t give up, Richard thought. Jack Phillips didn’t. Joanna didn’t.

“All right,” he said, and though he didn’t know it, his voice sounded just like Joanna’s on the answering machine.

He stood up. All right. Get Mrs. Hobbs’s number from Personnel. Find out who else was a patient on five-east that day. Find out who visited them. Go over the scans again, and the transcripts. Talk to Vielle. Talk to Bob Yancey. Go down trying.

He switched his pager back on and walked up the stairs, put out his hand to push the door open, and then ran back down to the landing. He tore the yellow tape free, ripping the trailing ends off the railing.

He carried the tangle of tape upstairs and out to the nurses’ station. A nurse was on the phone, her back to him. “The stairway down to second’s open. The paint’s dry,” he said, dumping the mass of tape on the counter. “Is Maurice Mandrake still in with Mrs. Davenport?”

“Hang on,” the nurse said into the phone. She half-turned and nodded at Richard.

“Thanks,” he said, and started down the hall toward the elevator.

“No, wait, Dr. Wright—” the nurse called, her hand over the mouthpiece, “—I didn’t realize it was you—” He came back to the nurses’ station. “Someone from the ER called looking for you. I didn’t realize you were on the floor or I would have come looking for you. It was just a few minutes ago—”

“Was it Vielle Howard?” he cut in.

“Yes, I think so. I asked the other nurses, but they didn’t think you’d been—”

“Did she say she wanted me to call her or come down to the ER?”

“She said there was someone waiting for you in your lab.”

“Man or woman?”

“Man,” the nurse said.

Carl Aspinall, he thought, and sprinted for the elevator. He changed his mind. He must have thought about what Kit said.

But when he got up to sixth, it wasn’t Carl standing outside the lab door.

It was Mr. Pearsall.

55

There were fireflies. They winked on and off in the darkness around her. I’m in Kansas, Joanna thought. This must be part of the Life Review. And she must be getting near the end of it if she was remembering her childhood, visiting her relatives in Kansas, running around in the dark with her cousins, a Mason jar in one hand to catch the fireflies in, and the brass lid in the other, ready to clap it on when you’d caught one, the grass wet against her ankles, the rich, sweet scent of peonies filling the evening air.

But it wasn’t evening—it was night. And no matter how late they had been allowed to stay up, it had never gotten completely dark like this. There had always been a bluish-purple cast to the sky, and even after the stars came out, you could still see the outlines of the houses, of the arching cottonwoods, against it. You could still see the grownups on the dark porch, and each other.

She could not see the grass that she was sitting on, or the house, or her own hand, which she held up in front of her face. It was utterly black, in spite of the fireflies. “The moon did not shine,” she said out loud, “and the stars gave no light.”

The stars. They were stars, shining clearly, steadily, in the black sky, and why had she thought they were fireflies? They were obviously stars, and they came down all the way, sharp and sparkling, to the horizon. The survivors of the Titanic had all remarked on that, how the stars hadn’t dimmed near the horizon, but had shone all the way down to the water.

The water. I have survived the sinking, she thought. I am floating on something from the Titanic, a deck chair. But deck chairs were slatted. The surface below her was wide and smooth. A piano. The grand piano in the A La Carte Restaurant.

But pianos didn’t float. In the movie The Piano, it had sunk like a stone, dragging her down with it into the cold, disintegrating water. Maybe it’s the aluminum piano on the Hindenburg, she thought. That only weighed 397 pounds.

It would still sink, she thought. And maybe it was sinking. “All ships sink sooner or later,” Mr. Wojakowski had said, and maybe this was sinking very slowly, because the ocean was so still. The survivors had all said the water was as smooth as glass that night, so still the stars’ reflections had been scarcely distorted at all.

Joanna reached her hand down over the edge of the piano, feeling for the keyboard and then for the water below it, and as she did, she realized she was holding onto something with her other hand, holding it tight against her in the crook of her arm.

The little French bulldog, she thought, I must have held onto it when I fell, though she remembered letting go of everything, everything in the water, though she remembered her open hands drifting emptily in the darkness.

The lifejacket, she thought, and felt for its dangling ties but could not find them. She bent over the little dog, trying to see it. It was too dark, but she could feel its silky head, feel its small body against her side. It did not move. “Are you all right, little dog?” she asked, bending closer to hear the sound of its panting, the beating of its little heart, but she could not hear anything.

Maybe it drowned, she thought anxiously, but as she thought that, it pressed itself closer against her side. “You’re all right,” she said. “Maisie will be so glad.”

Maisie, she thought, and remembered struggling up through the obliterating darkness, struggling to keep from forgetting until the message was sent. “As soon as we’re rescued,” she said to the little bulldog, “I have to send Richard a message.”

She looked out at the darkness. The Carpathia would be here in two hours. She scanned the horizon, looking for its lights, but there were only stars. She looked up at them, trying to find the Big Dipper. The Carpathia had come up from the southwest. If she could find the Big Dipper, she could follow the handle to the North Star and tell which direction it would come from.

They had looked for the Big Dipper, those summer nights in Kansas. They had run around in the cool grass, trying to catch fireflies in their cupped hands, and when a car turned down the street, they had called out, “Automobile!” and flopped down flat on their backs in the grass, motionless in the sweep of its headlights. Playing dead. And even after the car had passed, they had lain there, looking up at the stars, pointing out the constellations. “There’s the Big Dipper,” they had said, pointing. “There’s the Milky Way. There’s the Dog Star.”

There were no constellations. Joanna craned her neck, trying to find the pattern of the Archer, the long spilled splash of the Milky Way down the center of the sky. But there were only stars. And they sparkled brightly, clearly, all the way down to the water, which was so still she couldn’t hear it lapping against the sides of the piano, so still the stars’ reflections were not distorted at all. They sparkled steadily, clearly, as if they were not reflections at all, as if there were sky below her instead of water.

She hugged the dog to her. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto,” she said, and pulled her feet up under her, away from the edge.

They were not in the Atlantic, and the thing they huddled on was not a piano. It was something else, an examining table, or a drawer in the morgue. Or a metaphor for the shipwrecked survivors of her consciousness, floating on the wreckage of her body, for her final synapses flickering out like stars, like fireflies.

And the Atlantic was a metaphor for someplace else. The River Styx or the River Jordan or Mr. Mandrake’s Other Side. No, not an Other Side, Joanna thought. It’s someplace else altogether, with no connection to the world.

“The far country,” she thought, but that was not right either. It was not a country. It was a place so far away it was not even a place. A place so far away the Carpathia could not ever come, so far away there was no possibility of being rescued, of getting back. And from which nothing was ever heard, in spite of what Maurice Mandrake said, in spite of the messages he claimed he had had from the dead.

And even the last words of the dying were not messages at all, but only useless echoes of the living. Useless lies. “I will never leave you,” they said, and left forever. “I won’t forget you,” they said, and then forgot everything in the dark, disintegrating water. “We will be together again,” and that was the biggest lie of all. There were no fathers waiting on the shining shore. No prophets, no elders, no Angels of Light. No light at all. And they would never be together. She would never see them again, or be able to tell them where she had gone.

I left without saying good-bye, she thought, and felt a stab of pain, like a knife in the ribs. “Good-bye!” she shouted, but her voice didn’t carry across the water. “Good-bye, Vielle!” she shouted, “Good-bye, Kit! Good-bye, Richard!” trying to make them out, but they were too far away. Too far even for her to remember Richard’s face, or Maisie’s—

Maisie, she thought, and knew why she had thought the stars were fireflies. Morse-code bugs, they had called them back in Kansas. Winking on, winking off, sending coded messages in the dark. “I have to get the message to Richard,” she said, and stood up on the piano, setting it rocking wildly. “Richard!” she called, cupping her hands to her mouth like a megaphone, “the NDE’s the brain’s way of signaling for help!”

It was too far. It would never reach him. Houdini, calling out, “Rosabelle, answer, tell, pray!” to his wife across the void, could not make himself heard. And neither could she. “It’s an SOS!” Joanna called, but softly. “An SOS.”

The little French bulldog was whimpering at her feet, frightened at being left alone. Joanna sat back down and reached for it, unable to find it at first in the dark, putting both arms around it, pulling it close. “It’s no use,” she said, stroking the silky head she could not see. “It will never reach them.”

The little dog whimpered, heartbroken, a sound like a child’s crying. “It’s all right,” Joanna said, even though it wasn’t. “Don’t cry, I’m here. I’m here.”

I am here. Where are you? The fireflies, trapped in a Mason jar, caught in cupped hands from which no light could escape, went on sending messages, on and off, on and off, even though it was no use. And Jack Phillips, even though the Carpathia was too far away, even though there were no other ships to hear, had kept on sending, tapping out SOS, SOS, till the very end.

“SOS,” she called, willing her thoughts to Richard and Kit and Vielle like wireless messages, through the nothingness, through the vast, dark distances of death. “Good-bye. It’s all right. Don’t grieve.” The little bulldog quieted and slept, curled against her, but she continued to stroke its soft head. “Don’t cry,” she said, willing Maisie to hear, willing Richard to listen. “It’s an SOS.”

It will never reach them, she thought, but she sat on in the dark, holding tight to the little dog, surrounded by stars, sending out signals of love and pity and hope. The messages of the dead.

56

“Mr. Pearsall,” Richard said, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I wondered if you still needed me for your project,” he said. “I just got back from Ohio. I had to stay a lot longer than I thought I was going to. My father died,” he had to clear his throat before he went on, “and I had to settle his estate. I just got back yesterday.” He cleared his throat again. “I heard about Dr. Lander. I’m really sorry.”

That’s what Carl Aspinall said, Richard thought bitterly.

“It’s hard to believe,” Mr Pearsall said, clutching his hat in both hands. “One minute they’re there, and the next… I always thought near-death experiences were some kind of hallucination, but now I don’t know. Right before my dad went, he said—he’d had a stroke and had trouble talking, he just sort of mumbled, but he said this as plain as day—‘Well, what do you know!’ ”

Richard straightened alertly. “Did he say anything else?”

Mr. Pearsall shook his head. Of course, Richard thought.

“He said it like he’d just figured something important out,” Mr. Pearsall said, shaking his head again. “I’d like to know what it was.”

So would I, Richard thought.

“That’s why I thought if you still needed volunteers, I could—”

“The project’s been suspended.”

Mr. Pearsall nodded as if that was the answer he’d expected. “If you start it up again, I’d be glad to—”

“I’ll give you a call,” Richard said, showing him out. He shut the door and went over to his desk and the tapes, but he’d scarcely gotten started when someone knocked. And this won’t be Carl Aspinall either, he thought.

It was Amelia Tanaka. “Amelia,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

She stopped just inside the door and stood there, her coat and backpack on. Like the day she’d come to tell them she was quitting. “I came…” Amelia said, and took a deep breath. “Dr. Lander came to see me at the university.”

That’s where she went in the taxi, Richard thought, and wanted to ask her what day that was, but Amelia was having enough difficulty. He didn’t want to throw her off.

“I didn’t tell the truth about why I quit,” Amelia said. “Dr. Lander asked me if it was because I experienced something upsetting, and I told her no, but that wasn’t true. I did, and I was so scared I couldn’t face going under again, but then I heard she died, and I got to thinking about it happening to her, only she didn’t have a choice, she couldn’t back out.”

The words tumbled helplessly out of her, like tears. “I got to thinking about what a coward I’d been. She was always so nice to me. Once, when I asked her to do something for me, she did, and I—” She broke off, blushing. “She said it was important, my telling her what I saw. I shouldn’t have lied. I should have told her. How can I be a doctor, if I let my fear—?” She looked up at Richard. “It’s too late to tell her, but she said it was important, and you’re her partner—”

“It is important,” Richard said. “Here, take your coat off and sit down.”

She shook her head. “I can’t stay. I’ve got an anatomy makeup lab.” She laughed shakily. “I shouldn’t even have taken the time to come over here, but I had to tell you—”

“Okay,” Richard said, “you don’t have to take your coat off, but at least sit down,” but she shook her head.

And she’ll bolt if you push her, Richard thought. “What did you see that frightened you, Amelia?”

“The…” She bit her lip. “Have you ever had a scary dream that, when you tried to explain it, there wasn’t anything scary in it, like a slasher or—” She stopped, looking appalled. “I didn’t mean to say that. Honest, I—”

“You didn’t see any murderers or monsters,” Richard prompted, “but you were frightened anyway—”

“Yes,” Amelia said. “I was in the tunnel, like I had been the times before, only this time I realized it wasn’t a tunnel, it was…” She glanced longingly at the door.

Richard stepped sideways, easing himself between her and the door. “What was it?” he asked, even though he already knew what it was. And she was right, there was nothing inherently frightening in the sight of people in old-fashioned clothes standing outside a door, in the sound of engines shutting down. “What’s happened?” Lawrence Beesley had asked his steward, and the steward had said, “I don’t suppose it’s much,” and Beesley had gone back to bed, not frightened at all.

“What was it, Amelia?” Richard said.

“I… it sounds so crazy, you’ll think…”

That you’re Bridey Murphy? he thought, like I did Joanna. He said, “Whatever it is, I’ll believe you.”

“I know,” she said. “All right.” She took a deep breath. “I have biochem this semester. The class is in the daytime, but the lab’s at night, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in this old room. It’s long and narrow, with these dark wooden cabinets along the walls that they keep the chemicals in, so it looks like a tunnel.”

A long, narrow room with tall cupboards on either side. He wondered what it really was. The dispensary? He’d have to ask Kit where the dispensary on the Titanic was.

“It was the lab final,” Amelia said. “We were supposed to do this enzyme reaction, but I couldn’t get it to work, and it was really late. They’d already turned the lights off and were waiting for me to finish.”

“Who was?” Richard asked, thinking, lab final? Enzyme reaction?

“My professors,” Amelia said, and he could hear fear in her voice. “They were standing out in the hall, waiting. I could see them standing outside the door in their white lab coats, waiting to see if I passed the final.”

The biochem final and professors in lab coats. She’s had weeks to rationalize what she saw, he thought, to confabulate it into something that makes sense. Or at least more sense than the Titanic. “When did you realize it was the biochem lab you’d been in?” he asked.

She looked at him, bewildered. “What do you mean?”

“Was it a few days after your session or more recently?”

“It was right then,” Amelia said, “when I was having the NDE. I didn’t tell you and Dr. Lander because I was afraid you’d make me go under again. I said I saw the same things I’d seen before, the door and the light and the happy, peaceful feeling, but I didn’t. I saw the lab.”

It wasn’t the Titanic, Richard thought. She didn’t see the Titanic.

“It wasn’t really the lab, though,” Amelia said, “because the cabinets aren’t really locked, like they were in the NDE, and it wasn’t my biochem professor, it was Dr. Eldritch from anatomy and this director I had when I was majoring in musical theater. And I was so frightened.”

“Of what?” Richard asked.

“Of failing,” she said, and he could hear the fear in her voice. “Of the final.”

She wasn’t on the Titanic, he thought, trying to take this in. She was in her biochem lab. “What happened then?” he managed to ask.

“I started to look for the key. I had to find it. I had to get into the cabinet and find the right chemical. I looked under the lab tables and in all the drawers,” she said, her voice tightening, “but it was dark, I couldn’t see—”

The connection wasn’t the Titanic. And that was what Joanna had realized when she talked to Carl Aspinall.

“—and the labels on the drawers didn’t make any sense,” Amelia was saying. “There were letters on them, but they weren’t words, they were just letters and numbers, all strung together, like code. And I was so frightened… and then I was back in the lab, so I guess I found it and I guess I passed. I don’t know what grade I got.” She laughed embarrassedly. “I told you it sounded crazy.”

“No,” he said. “No, you’ve been very helpful.”

She nodded, unconvinced. “I have to go to my anatomy lab, but—” she took another deep breath, “—if you want me to, I’ll go under again. I owe it to Dr. Lander.”

“That may not be necessary,” he said, and, as soon as she was gone, called Carl Aspinall.

He was afraid Mrs. Aspinall would be the one to answer the phone, but she didn’t, and when Carl said, “Hello, Aspinalls’ residence,” Richard said, “Mr. Aspinall, this is Dr. Wright. No, wait, don’t hang up. I understand that you don’t want to talk about your experience. I just want you to answer one question. Did your experience take place on the Titanic?”

“The Titanic?” Carl said, and the astonishment in his voice told Richard all he wanted to know.

He hadn’t been on the Titanic. And that was the revelation that had sent Joanna on her plunge down to the ER. It wasn’t what he’d told her about his NDE, it was the fact that he hadn’t seen the Titanic, and Joanna, realizing that that wasn’t the connection, that she had been on the wrong track, had seen what the real answer was, and run to tell him.

He had to make sure. He called Maisie. “When you had your NDEs, Maisie, were you on a ship?” he asked her when the nurse finally let him talk to her.

“A ship!” she said, and he could see the face she was making. “No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know,” Maisie said. “It didn’t feel anything like a ship.”

“What did it feel like?”

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “I told Joanna I thought it was inside, but I think it was outside, too. Someplace both inside and outside,” and the carefulness of her answer convinced him more than anything else that if she’d been on a ship she would have known it, and the answer lay elsewhere.

But where? It had to lie somewhere in the NDEs, in some common thread they all shared, even though neither Amelia’s nor Maisie’s, nor, presumably, Carl Aspinall’s, were anything like Joanna’s. “But it has to be there,” he told Kit on the phone, “because as soon as Joanna realized Carl hadn’t been on the Titanic, she knew what it was.”

“And it has to be something that’s in all of them,” Kit said. “Did you record what Amelia said just now?”

“No,” he said. “She was too nervous. I’ve transcribed everything I remember, though.”

“What about your own?” Kit said. “Have you transcribed it?”

“My own?” he said blankly. “But it was—”

“Related to the Titanic,” she said. “I know, but there might be a clue in it. I think you’re right. I think there’s got to be a common thread, and the more NDEs we have, the more apt we are to find it.”

She was right. He wondered if, if he called Carl Aspinall back and explained that his nightmares, whatever they were, were purely subjective, if he’d be willing to talk to him. He doubted it.

Which left Amelia’s NDE, and his own, and Maisie’s. And the vision of the crewman on the Hindenburg. He made a list of the elements in each of them. Joseph Leibrecht had seen snow fields, whales, a train, a bird in a cage, and his grandmother, and heard church bells and the scream of tearing metal. Amelia had seen enzymes, lab drawers, and her professors. Joanna had seen stairways and stationary bicycles, and he hadn’t seen any of the above.

Joseph’s was clearly dreamlike, with disconnected images rapidly succeeding one another, and completely unlike Joanna’s. Amelia’s was somewhere in between. There were no time or image jumps, but there were logic gaps, whereas in his own—

He realized he didn’t know whether there were incongruities, except for the toy zeppelin, in his own or not. He’d assumed it was real, that Joanna’s were real, and later, going through Kit’s uncle’s books, he’d focused on the Titanic itself.

He hauled the books out again. People had in fact gathered at the White Star offices and at The New York Times building, but not inside. They had milled around in the streets outside, waiting for news from the Carpathia. When it finally came, there had been no public reading of the list of survivors. A list had been posted at the Times—Mary Marvin’s mother, there with her son-in-law’s mother, had yelped joyfully when she located her daughter’s name on it, and then stopped, aghast, when she realized Daniel’s wasn’t next to it—but for the most part, relatives had gone into the White Star building one by one to inquire. John Jacob Astor’s son had come back out immediately, his face buried in his hands.

And there hadn’t been a wireless room in the White Star building. There had been one at the Times, but it was up on the roof. The wireless operator had put the deciphered messages in a box attached to a rope, shaken the rope against the metal walls of the shaft to signal the reporters below, and dropped the box down the shaft.

Which told him what? That he hadn’t really been in the White Star offices? He already knew that. That he’d confabulated his NDE out of images from the movies and Joanna’s NDEs. But not why. Not what the connection was.

He listed all the elements—his pager, the woman in the high-necked blouse speaking into the telephone, the man bent over the wireless, the clock on the wall, the stairs, the man with the newspaper under his arm—and then called Amelia and asked her to come over. “Are you sending me under again?” she asked, and he could hear the fear in her voice.

“No,” he said. “We just need to ask you some questions. Will tomorrow morning at nine work?”

“No, I have a psych test.” She’s making excuses, he thought, like she did that last time Joanna tried to schedule her before she quit, but after a pause, she said, “Would eleven o’clock work?” and, amazingly, showed up on time.

He had asked Vielle to sit in on the session. “Amelia, we want you to tell us everything you can remember about your NDEs, starting with the first one,” he said, and Vielle switched on Joanna’s minirecorder.

Amelia nodded. “I promised you I’d do anything you asked,” she said and launched into a detailed account, made even more detailed by his and Vielle’s questions.

“How many of your professors were in the office?” Vielle asked her.

“Four,” Amelia said. “Dr. Eldritch and my director and Mrs. Ashley, my high school English teacher, and my freshman chem lab professor. He wasn’t really a professor. He was a graduate student. I hated him. If you asked him a question, all he’d say was, ‘It’s something you need to figure out yourself.’ ”

“Your English teacher was there?” Richard asked, thinking of Mr. Briarley.

Amelia nodded. “I didn’t really have her, though. She died a month after school started.”

Vielle grilled her about the labels on the chemical bottles. “You know how in formulas, the numbers are below the line?” Amelia said. “These were all in a row.”

“Can you remember what any of the letters were?” Vielle asked.

She couldn’t. “Do you remember anything else that wasn’t right?” Vielle asked.

Amelia stared into space. “The coldness,” she said finally. “It’s always hot in that room. It has these old-fashioned heating vents. But in my NDE, it was freezing, like they’d left a door open somewhere.”

“Joanna talked about it being cold, too,” Vielle said after Amelia was gone. “Did Joseph Leibrecht?”

“He talked about seeing snow fields,” Richard said, “but he also talked about a boiling sea and being tossed in a fire. And there was nothing hot or cold in my NDE.”

“You and Amelia were both looking for something,” Vielle offered.

“Joanna was, too,” Richard said, “but Joseph Leibrecht wasn’t.”

“What about her English teacher being someone who’d died?”

He shook his head. “That’s one of the core elements.”

“There’s no chance you can convince Carl Aspinall to talk to you?” she asked.

“They’re not answering their phone.”

Vielle nodded wisely. “Caller ID. I don’t suppose it’s worth driving up there again?”

No, he thought, and that wasn’t where the answer lay anyway. It lay with Mr. Briarley, and he couldn’t get it out of him either. “It’s something you need to figure out for yourself,” the graduate assistant had said.

“Could you send Amelia under again?” Vielle asked as he walked her to the door of the lab.

“Maybe,” he said, “although the chances are she’ll have a repeat of the same unifying image.”

“Oh, good, you’re here,” a voice said, and Maisie’s mother came in, dressed in a sunny yellow suit. “Is this a bad time?”

“I was just leaving. I’ll work on it some more and call you,” Vielle said and scooted out.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Maisie’s mother said. “Here.” She handed him a small black box.

“What’s this?” he asked. It looked like a very small Palm Pilot.

“Your pager. You said a problem with implementing your procedure was that the window of opportunity was too short, only four to six minutes, you said.”

What I said was that irreversible brain death occurs in four to six minutes, he thought, but she can’t even bring herself to say the words or to admit that what she wants me to do is bring Maisie back from the dead.

“This pager solves that problem,” she said, looking pleased as punch.

“I already have a pager,” he said. And even if this one went off the second Maisie coded, he would still have to get to a phone and find out where she was. If anyone was bothering to answer the phone during an emergency.

“It isn’t an ordinary pager,” Mrs. Nellis said. “It’s a locational device. Maisie has one of these, and so do each of her doctors and nurses, and, in the case of a coding situation, they’ve been instructed to hit this button immediately,” she pointed to a red button on the end of the box, “and your pager will beep. It has a distinctive beep, so you won’t confuse it with your own pager.”

It probably plays “Put On a Happy Face,” he thought.

“As soon as you hear it beep,” Mrs. Nellis flowed on, “you press this button,” she indicated a black button on the side, “and the location in the hospital the signal was sent from will appear on this screen. It will say ‘Cardiac Intensive Care Unit’ or ‘west wing, fourth floor’ or wherever. Maisie will be in her room in the CICU most of the time, of course, but, as you said, she might be down for tests, or,” she crossed her fingers coyly, “in the OR, getting prepped for her new heart, and this way you’ll know exactly where she is. I wanted one that would also plot where you were and map out the shortest route, but the computer engineer who designed this said the technology didn’t exist yet.”

“The technology for reviving patients who’ve coded doesn’t exist yet either, Mrs. Nellis,” he said, trying to give her back the pager.

“But it will,” she said confidently, “and when it does, you won’t have to worry about the problem of locating her. I realize there’s still the problem of reaching her quickly, but I’ve got another programmer working on that.”

And I know the shortest route, Richard thought. I have the whole map of the hospital in my head, all the stairs, all the shortcuts. I could get to Maisie in time, if I had a way to revive her. If I knew what Joanna was trying to tell me.

“Of course, this is really just a precaution. Maisie’s doctors expect her to get a heart any day now, and she’s doing really well, they’re so pleased with her numbers. Now,” she said, putting the pager firmly in his hand, “I knew you’d want to see it in action, so Maisie’s going to activate her pager at two-ten so you can hear the beep and see how the locator screen works.”

“Two-ten?” Richard said.

“Yes, I suggested two o’clock so you’d know for certain it was a drill, but she insisted on two-ten. I have no idea why.”

I do, Richard thought. It’s a code. She’s found out something.

“They sometimes take her down for tests at two, and she may be thinking if she were somewhere other than her room, it would provide a better test. She’s such an intelligent child.”

That she is, Richard thought. “And where am I supposed to be at two-ten?”

“You’re not,” she said. “That’s the point. Wherever you are, the pager will beep you and tell you where she is. Unfortunately, I have to meet with my lawyer at one-thirty, so I won’t be there, but Maisie can probably answer any questions you have.”

Let’s hope so, he thought, watching Mrs. Nellis go down to the elevator. Maisie must have found someone else who’d seen Joanna in the elevator or one of the hallways. Or, if he was lucky, in the room with Carl Aspinall. Mrs. Nellis stepped in the elevator. Richard waited for the door to close and then took off for the CICU.

“I was worried you wouldn’t be able to figure it out,” Maisie said when he walked in her room. “I thought maybe I should have said two-twenty, when it went down, instead of when they sent the last wireless message.”

“What did you find out?” Richard asked.

“Eugene talked to this orderly who saw Joanna that day. On two-east. He said he saw her talking to Mr. Mandrake.”

Mandrake. Then he really had seen her, he hadn’t just invented the incident for his self-serving eulogy. He must have waylaid her as she was on her way up to see Dr. Jamison.

“Well?” Maisie was demanding.

Richard shook his head. “Joanna may have run into Mandrake, but she wouldn’t have told him anything. Did this orderly hear what Mandrake said?”

Maisie shook her head. “I asked Eugene. He said he was too far away, but Mr. Mandrake said a whole bunch of stuff, and so did she. He said she was laughing.”

“Laughing? With Mandrake?”

“I know,” Maisie said, making a face. “I don’t think he’s very funny either. But that’s what Eugene said he said.”

What Eugene said he said. It was a third-hand, no, fourth-hand, story, from someone too far away to overhear, and the chance that Joanna would have revealed anything substantive to Mandrake was nil, but Richard had promised Joanna he’d go down trying.

And you couldn’t go much lower than this. “I’ve been expecting you to call,” Mandrake said when Richard phoned him from the CICU’s front desk. “Mrs. Davenport told me she’d spoken with you about the messages she’s been receiving.”

I can’t do this, Richard thought, and almost hung up the phone. It’s betraying Joanna. She wouldn’t care, he thought suddenly. All she cared about was getting the message through to me. “I want to come see you,” he said. “Are you in your office?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid I have several appointments this afternoon, and my publisher—” There was a pause, presumably while he checked his schedule. “Would two o’clock… no, I have a meeting… and my publicist’s coming at three… would one o’clock work?”

“One o’clock,” Richard said and hung up, thinking, Hopefully in the next hour and a half the answer will come to me, and I won’t have to talk to him at all.

He started through Joanna’s transcripts again, making a list of everything they contained—swimming pool, Scotland Road, mail room, key—the key. What was the key?—rockets, gymnasium, mechanical bicycles, wireless shack, sacks of mail—looking for common elements with his and Amelia Tanaka’s. They had both talked about doors and bottles, a bottle of chemicals in Amelia’s and of ink in Joanna’s, but there hadn’t been any bottles in his. A key? He had had to turn the key to open the door to the hallway, Mr. Briarley had gone to the mailroom to get the key to the locker that contained the rockets, the sailor who’d operated the Morse lamp had said something about a key, and Amelia, in talking about the catalyst, had said, “I had to find the key.”

That’s pushing it, he thought, and Joseph Leibrecht hadn’t said anything about a key. And key wasn’t one of the words highlighted on the transcripts.

All right then, how about the words that were? Water? There was no water in either his or Amelia’s NDEs, and no fog. Time, he thought, remembering the clock on the wall of the White Star corridor. Amelia had been worried about finishing her final in time, and Joseph Leibrecht had mentioned hearing a church bell ring and knowing it was six o’clock. And the Titanic was all about running out of time.

And speaking of time, what time was it? Ten to one. Just enough time to go ask Vielle what similarities she’d found in the transcripts and then get over to Mandrake’s office.

He went down to third. The walkway had a big sandwich board with “Closed for Repairs” on it. They must have run out of yellow tape, he thought. He’d have to go down to the basement and outside. He started back down the hallway. The pager in his pocket began to beep, a high-pitched, urgent ringing. Maisie’s drill, he thought, pulling it out of his pocket. He pressed the red button. “Six-west,” it said, and under it, the time: 12:58.

Six-west. What’s she doing down there? he thought, and then, the readout sinking in, 12:58. “She said two-ten,” he said and took off running, up to third, across the walkway, up the service stairs.

He made it up to sixth in three minutes and nineteen seconds and flung himself, out of breath, against the nurses’ station. “Quick. Maisie Nellis. Where is she?”

“Down there, second door,” the surprised nurse said, and it still didn’t occur to him, tearing down the hall, that the nurse wouldn’t have been just standing there in an emergency, that there was no code alarm blaring.

He burst into the room, where Maisie lay quietly on a gurney, looking at her pager.

“Did you talk to Mr. Mandrake yet?” she asked eagerly.

“How—could—I?” he said, between panting breaths. “You paged—me. What’s the idea?” He slumped into a chair next to the wall.

“The drill,” she said.

“The drill was supposed to be at two-ten, not twelve fifty-eight.”

“The two-ten was a code,” she said. “They brought me here for some tests, and I thought it was a good idea to do the pager when you didn’t know where I was, to see if it worked or not.”

“Well, it worked,” Richard said, “so no more drills. I only want you paging me in a real emergency. Understand?”

“But shouldn’t we practice a few times?” she said, looking longingly at the pager. “So you could get faster?”

I was fast enough, he thought. I got here in under four minutes, from a point in the hospital almost as far away as there is. I made it in time. And had no way to save her when I got here. “No,” he said. “You page me if you code, and only if you code.”

“What if I think I’m going to code and then it turns out I don’t?”

“Then it had better not also turn out that you just wanted to see me to tell me about the Hartford circus fire. I mean it.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly.

“Okay.” He looked at his watch. One-ten. “I’m late for my appointment with Mandrake. And don’t say, ‘You can’t go yet.’ ”

“I wasn’t going to,” she said indignantly. “I was going to wish you good luck.”

It was going to take a lot more than luck, Richard thought, looking at Mandrake seated behind a polished expanse of desk. “I expected you at one,” Mandrake said, looking pointedly at his watch. “Now, I’m afraid I have another—”

The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Mandrake said and picked it up. “Maurice Mandrake here. A book signing? When?”

Richard looked around the office. It was even more sumptuous than he would have guessed. Huge maroon leather chair, huge mahogany desk, nearly life-sized portrait of himself hanging behind it, bookcase full of copies of The Light at the End of the Tunnel, Persian carpet. It would fit right in on the Titanic, Richard thought.

Mandrake hung up the phone. “I’m afraid we’d better make it another day. At two, I have—”

“This won’t take long,” Richard said and sat down. “You said in your eulogy you spoke to Jo—Dr. Lander the day she was killed.”

Mandrake folded his hands on the desk. “That day, and many times since,” he said.

I can’t do this, Richard thought.

“I see by your expression that you do not believe the dead communicate with the living,” Mandrake said.

If they did, Joanna would have told me what she discovered in Carl Aspinall’s room. “No,” he said.

“That is because you persist in believing only in what you can see on your RIPT scans,” Mr. Mandrake said, and his expression was a smirk. “Dr. Lander, fortunately, came to understand that the near-death experience possessed dimensions that science could never explain. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another appointment—” He started to stand up.

Richard stayed seated. “I need to know what she said that day.”

“Exactly what I said in my eulogy, that she had realized the NDE—or rather the NAE, for that is what she had come to realize it was—was not merely a physical hallucination, but instead a spiritual revelation of the Other Side.”

You’re lying, Richard thought. “What did she say? Her exact words.”

Mandrake leaned back in his chair, his hands on the padded arms. “Why? So you can dismiss her as a crank? I realize it must be difficult, having to face the fact that your partner had reached a different conclusion about the NAE from the one you tried so hard to convince her of.” Mandrake leaned forward. “Luckily, she was not fooled by your scientific,” he put an ugly emphasis on the word, “arguments and found the truth for herself.” He glanced at the door and then looked pointedly at his watch. “I’m afraid that’s all the time I have.” This time he did stand up.

Richard didn’t. “I need to know what she said.”

Mandrake glanced uneasily at the door again. I wonder who this appointment’s with, Richard thought. Obviously someone he doesn’t want me to see. Someone he’s trying to pump about the project? Mrs. Troudtheim? Tish?

“Joanna was on her way to the ER to tell me something,” Richard said. “I’m trying to find out what it was.”

“I should think it was obvious,” Mandrake said, but his eyes had flickered suddenly with something—fear? guilt?

He knows, Richard thought, and, although it made no sense, Joanna did tell him. “No,” he said slowly. “It’s not obvious.”

Mandrake’s eyes flickered again. “She was trying to tell you what she has since told me and Mrs. Davenport, speaking from that afterlife you refuse to believe in, that there are more things in heaven and earth, Dr. Wright, than are dreamt of in your RIPT scans.” He walked around the desk and over to the door. “I’m afraid I can’t give you any more time, Dr. Wright. A gentleman is scheduled—”

A gentleman? Mr. Sage? Good luck getting anything out of him about the project. Or anything else. “I need to know exactly what she said to you,” Richard repeated.

Mandrake opened the door. “If you’d care to make an appointment for another day, we could—”

“Joanna died trying to tell me what it was,” Richard said. “I need to know. It’s important.”

“Very well.” He closed the door and went back to his desk and sat down. “If it’s so important to you.”

Richard waited.

“She said, ‘You were right all along, Mr. Mandrake. I realize it now. The NAE is a message from the Other Side.’ ”

“You bastard,” Richard said, coming out of his chair.

There was a knock on the door, and Mr. Wojakowski leaned in, wearing his baseball cap. “Hiya, Manny,” he said to Mandrake, and then to Richard, “Well, hiya, Doc. Sorry to bust in like this, but I—”

“We’re all finished here,” Mandrake said.

“That’s right,” Richard said. “Finished.” He strode out of the office, past Mr. Wojakowski and down the hall.

“Wait up, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said, catching up to him. “You’re just the guy I wanted to see.”

“It doesn’t look like it,” Richard said, jerking his thumb in the direction of Mandrake’s door. “It looks like he’s the guy you wanted to see, Mr. Wojakowski.”

“Ed,” he corrected. “Yeah, he called me the other day, said he wanted to talk to me about your project. I said I hadn’t worked on it for a while, but he said that didn’t matter, he wanted to talk to me anyway, so I said okay, but I had to talk to you first and see if it was okay, sometimes the docs don’t want you blabbing about their research, and I’ve been trying ever since to get in touch with you.”

He slapped his knee. “Boy, you sure are a hard guy to get ahold of. I been trying every way I could think of so I could ask you if it was okay. I know you’ve had other stuff on your mind, what with poor Doc Lander and all, but I was about to give up hope of ever getting ahold of you. Like Norm Pichette. Did I ever tell you about him? Got left behind when we abandoned the Yorktown, down in sick bay, and when he comes to, here he is on a ship that’s going down, so he hollers at the Hughes,” he said, cupping his hands around his mouth, “but she’s too far away to hear him, so he tries to think of some way to signal them. He waves his arms like crazy, he screams and whistles and hollers, but nothing works.”

Richard thought of Maisie, trying to signal him, trying to get Nurse Lucille to page him, to let her call, bribing Eugene to carry a message, finally telling her mother about the project as a last resort.

“So then he tries to use the radio,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying, “but the door to the radio room’s locked. Can you imagine that? Locking the doors on a sinking ship? Who do they think’s gonna get in?”

Locked. Himself, yanking frantically at the locked door, kicking at it, trying to get back to the lab, and Joanna, trying the door to the aft stairway and finding it locked, going down to the mail room to get the key to the locker with the rockets in it. The key. Amelia saying, “I had to find the key.”

“Pichette went all over that ship,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “looking for something he can get their attention with.”

All over the ship. Joanna going up to the Boat Deck, down to the Promenade Deck, along Scotland Road. Running all over. Up to the tab to tell him about Coma Carl, and, when he wasn’t there, up to Dr. Jamison’s office, down to the ER.

And he and Kit and Vielle, running all over, too. Up to Timberline and over to four-east, asking nurses and taxi drivers, mapping stairways, trying to find out where Joanna had gone, who she had talked to. Going over the transcripts and through Mazes and Mirrors, graphing the scans, searching the hospital and their memories and the Titanic, trying everything they could think of.

“Pichette tries everything he can think of,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “He even takes off his shirt and waves it like a flag, but that doesn’t work either, and the ship’s sinking. He’s gotta think of some way to signal ’em before it’s too late.”

Some way to signal them. Mr. Briarley sending up rockets. The quartermaster working the Morse lamp. The wireless operator tapping out messages to the Carpathia and the Californian and the Frankfurt. Messages. The bearded man sending the steward with a message to Mr. Briarley, and the mail clerk dragging sacks of wet letters up to the Boat Deck, and J. H. Rogers writing a note to his sister.

“Messages,” Richard murmured. “It’s about messages.” His NDE had been full of them: the wireless operator taking down the names of the survivors, and the secretary with the telephone to her ear and Joanna’s number on his pager.

Mr. Sage heard a telephone ringing, he thought suddenly. And Mrs. Davenport got a telegram, telling her to come back. “There’s got to be some common thread between all these NDEs,” Kit had said, and this must be it. Messages. The NDEs were all about messages.

But there hadn’t been any telegrams in Amelia Tanaka’s NDE, or rockets, or telephones. There weren’t any messages in it at all, just a test and a locked cupboard full of chemicals. And she had tried one key after another, one chemical after another, trying to find the one that would work.

Like Joanna—he had a sudden vision of the crash team working over her, trying CPR, paddles, epinephrine, trying technique after technique. Looking for something that would work, he thought, and had the feeling Joanna had described, of almost, almost knowing.

“I know it has something to do with the Titanic,” Joanna had said. The Titanic, which had sent up rockets, lowered lifeboats, tapped out Morse code, looking for something that would work.

“So, anyway, I’m standing on the deck of the Hughes, looking down in the water,” Mr. Wojakowski said, but Richard shut his voice out, trying to hold on to the knowledge he nearly had, that was almost within reach.

Morse code. Code. “It was like the labels were written in code,” Amelia had said. And Maisie, gleefully telling him why she’d set the time at two-ten, “I sent it in code.” Code. Chemical formulas and metaphors and “some strange language.” Dots and dashes and “Rosabelle, remember.” Code.

“Tell Richard it’s… SOS,” Joanna had said, and he had thought she’d tried to tell him something and failed. But she hadn’t. That was the message. “It’s an SOS.”

An SOS. A message sent out in all directions in the hope that somebody hears it. A message tapped out by the dying brain to the frontal cortex, the amygdala, the hippocampus, trying to get somebody to come to the rescue.

“Pretty damned ingenious, huh?” Mr. Wojakowski was saying.

“What? I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I didn’t hear how he finally got their attention.”

“Sounds like you’re the one needs to sign up for that hearing study,” he said, and slapped Richard on the shoulder. “With a machine gun. See, I’m standing there on the Hughes looking down at the water for Jap subs, and all of a sudden I see these little fountains. ‘Sub!’ I shout, and the lieutenant comes over and looks at it and says, ‘A sub doesn’t make the water fly up like that. That’s a depth charge,’ but I’m looking at the splashes and they don’t look like a depth charge either, they’re in a straight line, and I look to see where they’re coming from, and there’s a guy up on the catwalk, leaning over the railing and firing a machine gun into the water. I can’t hear it, it’s too far, and he knows that, he knows he’s gotta—”

Too far, and the way’s blocked. Half of the synapses have already shut down from lack of oxygen, half the pathways are locked or have “Closed for Repair” signs on them. So the temporal lobe tries one route after another, one chemical after another, carnosine, NPK, amiglycine, trying to find a shortcut, trying to get the signal through to the motor cortex to start the heart, the lungs. “It was really late,” Amelia had said. “All I wanted was to find the right chemical and go home,” and Mrs. Brandeis’s angel had said, “You must return to earth. It is not yet your time.”

“The command to return is in over sixty percent of them,” Joanna had said, but it wasn’t a command. It was a message that had finally gotten through, a chemical that had finally connected, a synapse that had finally fired, like a key turning over in the ignition. The NDE’s a survival mechanism, Richard thought, a last-ditch effort by the brain to jump-start the system. The body’s version of a crash team.

He looked blindly at Mr. Wojakowski, who was still talking. “So we take a boat over to get him and throw him up a ladder,” he said, “but he won’t come, he keeps shouting something down at us, only we can’t hear over the motor. We think he must be in too bad a shape to climb down the ladder, so the first mate sends me up after him, and he is in bad shape, shot in the gut and lost a lot of blood, but that isn’t what he was trying to tell us. Seems there’s another guy down in sick bay, and he’s really in bad shape, unconscious from a skull fracture.” He shook his head. “He’d ’a been a goner if Pichette hadn’t thought of that machine gun.”

Down the hall, a door opened. Richard looked up and saw Mandrake coming. And knew suddenly what Joanna had said to Mandrake. The orderly had said Joanna had laughed, and of course she had. “You were right,” she’d told him. “The NDE is a message.”

But not from the Other Side. From this side, as the brain, going down, made a last valiant effort to save itself, trying everything in its arsenal: endorphins, to block out the pain and fear and clear the decks for action, adrenaline to strengthen the signals, acetylcholine to open up pathways and connectors. Pretty damned ingenious.

But the acetylcholine had a side effect. It increased the associative abilities of the cerebral cortex, too, and long-term memory, struggling to make sense of the sensations and sights and emotions pouring over it, turned them into tunnels and angels and the Titanic. Into metaphors that people mistook for reality. But the reality was a complex system of signals sent to the hippocampus to activate a neurotransmitter that could jump-start the system.

And I know what it is, Richard thought in a kind of wonder. I’ve been looking right at it all this time. That’s why it was in all of Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs and the one where Joanna kicked out. I was looking for an inhibitor, and I was right, theta-asparcine’s not an inhibitor. It’s an activator. It’s the key.

“What are you telling my subject, Dr. Wright?” Mandrake demanded. “That NDEs aren’t real, that they’re nothing but a physical phenomenon?” He turned to Mr. Wojakowski. “Dr. Wright doesn’t believe in miracles.”

I do, Richard thought, I do.

“Dr. Wright refuses to believe that the dead communicate with us,” Mandrake said. “Is that what he was telling you?”

“He wasn’t telling me anything,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “I was telling the doc here about this time on the Yorktown—”

“I’m sure Dr. Wright will let you tell him some other time,” Mandrake said. “I have a very busy schedule, and if we’re going to meet—”

Mr. Wojakowski turned to Richard. “Is it okay if I talk to him, Doc?”

“It’s fine. You tell him anything you want,” Richard said and started for the elevator. He needed to set up tests to see if theta-asparcine could bring subjects out of the NDE-state on its own, or whether it was the combination of theta-asparcine and acetylcholine and cortisol. I need to call Amelia, he thought. She said she’d be willing to go under.

He punched the “up” button on the elevator. I need to look at the scans, and talk to Dr. Jamison. And Maisie’s mother, he thought, and looked back down the hall. Mr. Wojakowski and Mandrake were almost to his office. Richard sprinted after them. “Mr. Wojakowski. Ed,” he said, catching up to them. “What happened to him?”

“Dr. Wright,” Mr. Mandrake said, “you have already taken up more than half of my appointment time with Mr. Wojakowski here—”

Richard ignored him. “What happened to the sailor, the one who fired the machine gun?” he said to Mr. Wojakowski.

“Norm Pichette? Didn’t make it.” He shook his head.

Didn’t make it.

“Dr. Wright,” Mandrake said, “if this is your way of undermining my research—”

“Peritonitis,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Died the next day.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“Dr. Wright,” Mandrake bellowed.

“The one out cold in sick bay? George Weise?” Mr. Wojakowski said. “He recovered fine. Got a letter about him from Soda Pop Papachek the other day.”

“You mean a message,” Richard said gaily. “You were right, Mandrake, it is a message.”

Mandrake pursed his lips. “What are you talking about?”

Richard clapped him on the shoulder. “You wouldn’t understand. There are more things in heaven and earth, Manny, old boy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And you’re about to find out what they are.”

57

After a long time, the darkness seemed to diminish a little, the blackness taking on a tinge of gray, the stars beginning to dim. “The sun is coming up,” Joanna said to the little French bulldog, though she still couldn’t see him, and began to scan the sky to the east for a telltale pallor along the horizon. But she could not make out the horizon, and the light, if that was what it was, leaked evenly from all directions into the sky, if that was what it was.

It grew light so slowly that Joanna thought she had been mistaken, that she had only imagined the diminishing of the blackness, but after an endless time, the stars went out, not one by one, but all together, and the sky turned charcoal and then slate. A little wind came up, and the night took on an early-morning chill.

It’s four o’clock, Joanna thought. That was when the Carpathia had steamed up, having come fifty-eight miles in three hours at pushing, punishing speed. The people in the lifeboats had seen it in the black-gray of near dawn, first her light and then the tall stack, streaming smoke. But though Joanna stared, squinting, toward the southwest, there was no light, no smoke.

There’s nothing out there at all, she thought, but as the darkness continued to diminish, she could make out a jagged horizon, as of distant mountains. The Blessed Realm, she thought, hope fluttering up in her. Or the Isle of Avalon.

“Maybe we’re saved after all,” she said, looking down at the dog, and when she did, she saw that it was not the French bulldog she was holding after all, but the little girl from the Hartford circus fire, Little Miss 1565. Her face was smudged with soot, and ash had caught in her sausage curls.

“I never had a dog,” the little girl said. “What’s his name?” and Joanna saw that the little girl was holding the French bulldog in her arms.

Joanna brushed a flake of ash from the little girl’s hair. “I don’t know,” she said.

“I will give you a name then,” the little girl said to the dog, holding him up, her smudged hands clutching it around its fat middle. “I will call you Ulla.”

Ulla. “Who are you?” Joanna asked, “what’s your name?” and waited, afraid, for the answer. Not Maisie. Please don’t let it be Maisie.

“I don’t know,” the little girl said, dandling the dog by its paws. “Can you do tricks, Ulla?” she said, and then to Joanna, “The dog at the circus could jump through a hoop. He had a purple collar. That color.”

She pointed, and Joanna saw that the sky had turned a pale, lovely lavender, and all around them, lavender-pink in the growing light, were glittering icebergs. “The ice field,” Joanna murmured, and looked down at the hyacinth water.

They were sitting on the grand piano from the A La Carte Restaurant, the wide walnut top with its curving sides floating steadily on the surface. A piece of sheet music still stood open against the music stand. “I guess pianos do float, after all,” Joanna said, and saw that the keyboard was underwater, the keys shimmering pale pink and black through the lavender water.

“There was a tuba at the circus,” the little girl said. “And a big drum. Is the Carpathia going to come save us?”

No, Joanna thought. Because this isn’t the Atlantic, in spite of the water, in spite of the icebergs, and even if it were, it was too late. The Carpathia had steamed up well before dawn.

The sun would be up any minute, staining the sky and the ice and the water rose-pink, and then flooding the east with light. The icebergs would flare into snowy brilliance. Maybe that’s what Mr. Mandrake’s subjects saw, Joanna thought. They believed it was an Angel of Light, but it wasn’t. It was the ice field, glittering like diamonds and sapphires and rubies in the blinding light of the sun.

“Jump!” the little girl commanded. She circled her arms into a hoop. “Jump!”

The bulldog looked curiously at her, his head to one side.

The little girl dropped her arms. “What will happen when the Carpathia gets here?” she asked.

The Carpathia isn’t coming, Joanna thought. It’s too far for her to come, too far for anyone or anything to come and save us.

“They check your name off on a list when you go on board,” the little girl said. She had taken off her hair ribbon and was tying it around the dog’s neck. “What’ll I tell them when they say, ‘What’s your name, little girl?’ ” She tied the hair ribbon into a bow. It was singed at the ends. “If you don’t know your name, they don’t let you on.”

It doesn’t matter, it isn’t coming, Joanna thought, but she said, “How about if I give you a name, like you named Ulla?”

The little girl looked skeptical. “What name?”

Not Maisie, Joanna thought. The name of some child who had been on the Titanic. Lorraine. But Lorraine Allison had gone down, the only child in First Class who had not been saved. Not Lorraine. Not the name of any child who’d died on the Titanic. Not Beatrice Sandstrom or Nina Harper or Sigrid Anderson.

The little girl who had been on the Lusitania who had gotten separated from her mother—what was her name?—the little girl the stranger had saved. “He threw her into the boat,” she could hear Maisie’s voice saying, “and then he jumped in, and they were both saved.”

Helen. Her name had been Helen. “Helen,” Joanna said. “I’m going to call you Helen.”

The little girl picked up the dog’s front paw. “How do you do?” she said. “My name is Helen.” She dropped her voice to a gruff bass. “How do you do? My name’s Ulla.” She let go of his paw. “Roll over, Ulla!” she commanded, “Play dead!”

The French bulldog sat, his ear cocked, not understanding. The wind that had sprung up as it grew light died down, and the water, already smooth as glass, became even smoother, but the sky did not change. It remained pink, reflecting its rosy light on the water and the ice and the polished walnut of the piano. “Stay!” Helen said to the unmoving dog, and they all obeyed, the sky and the water and the sea.

An eon went by. Helen stopped trying to teach the dog tricks and took him onto her lap. The wind that had sprung up as it grew light, died down, and the water stilled even more, till it was imperceptible from the pink sky. But the sun did not come up. And no ship appeared on the horizon.

“Is this still the NDE?” Helen asked. She had set the dog down and was leaning over the side of the piano, staring down into the water.

“I don’t know,” Joanna said.

“How come we’re just sitting here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet we’re becalmed,” Helen said, trailing her hand lazily back and forth in the still water. “Like in that poem.”

“What poem?”

“You know, the one with the bird.”

“ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’?” Joanna said and remembered Mr. Briarley saying, “ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is not, contrary to the way it is popularly taught, a poem about similes and alliteration and onomatopoeia. Neither is it about albatrosses and oddly spelled words. It is a poem about resurrection.”

And Purgatory, Joanna thought, the ship eternally becalmed, the crew all dead, “alone on a wide, wide sea,” and wondered if that was what this was, a place of punishment and penance. In ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ a rain had come, and a breeze, washing away sin, setting them free. Joanna scanned the sky, but there were no clouds, no wind. It was still as death.

“How come we’re becalmed?” Helen asked.

“I don’t know,” Joanna said.

“I bet we’re waiting for somebody,” Helen said.

No, Joanna thought, not Maisie. Don’t let it be Maisie we’re waiting for.

“We have to be waiting for something,” Helen said, trailing her hand lazily back and forth in the pink water. “Otherwise something would happen.”

Something was happening. The light was changing, jagged peaks of ice going from pink to peach, the sea turning from rose to coral. The sun’s going down, Joanna thought, though there had been no sun, only the pink, even light.

“What’s happening?” Helen asked, creeping closer to Joanna.

“It’s getting dark,” Joanna said, thinking hopefully of the clear, shining stars.

Helen shook her head, her dark curls bobbing. “Hunh-unnh,” she said. “It’s getting red.”

It was, staining the water the red of sandstone mesas, the red of canyons. “It got red in the big top,” Helen said. “All around.”

Joanna put her arm around her, around Ulla, pulling them close, shielding them from the sky. “Don’t let it be Maisie,” she whispered. “Please.”

The sky continued to redden, till it was the color of fire, the color of blood. The red of disaster.

58

Maisie was really good. She didn’t push the button on her pager, even though Dr. Wright didn’t come see her for a really long time.

After a whole week, she started worrying that maybe something had happened to him, like Joanna, and she asked Nurse Lucille to call him, she had a question about her pager she had to ask him, and Nurse Lucille told her he couldn’t come right now, he was busy working on something important, and asked her if she wanted to watch a video.

Maisie said no, but Nurse Lucille put in The Sound of Music anyway. She always put in The Sound of Music, every time. It was her favorite video, probably because she looked just like the wrinkly old nuns.

Finally, Kit came. She looked really pretty and excited. “Did Dr. Wright talk to Mr. Mandrake?” Maisie asked her.

“Yes,” Kit said. “This is a present from Richard—Dr. Wright. He said it’s to thank you for telling him about Mr. Mandrake.” She handed Maisie a package wrapped in red paper that looked like a video.

“What did Mr. Mandrake say?” Maisie said. “He did talk to Joanna that day, didn’t he? Did she tell him the thing Dr. Wright was trying to find out?”

“Open your present, and then I’ll tell you everything.” Kit walked swiftly to the door and pulled the curtains together. “Dr. Wright said to open it and get it put away before your mother comes back.”

“Really? What is it?” She began ripping the paper off. “The Hindenburg!” she said, looking happily at the picture of the flaming zeppelin on the box.

“Dr. Wright said to warn you the movie’s not exactly like the real Hindenburg crash. He says they changed the ending so the dog survives.”

“I don’t care!” Maisie said, clasping the video to her chest. “It’s perfect!”

“Where do you want me to put it?” Kit asked.

“Get one of my videos on the bottom of the nightstand No, not The Secret Garden. Nurse Evelyn loves The Secret Garden. She puts it in every time she’s on shift.”

“How about Winnie the Pooh?”

“Yeah, that’s good.”

Kit handed her the plastic video case. Maisie handed her The Hindenburg. “Here, open this,” she said, opened Winnie the Pooh, and took the video out.

Kit tore the cellophane off The Hindenburg and handed it back to Maisie, and she slid it out of its box, put it in the Winnie the Pooh box, and handed Kit the Winnie the Pooh video. “Put it on the bottom,” she said.

Kit slid it under the bottom video of the stack. “And I suppose you want me to take this home with me?” she asked, holding out the Hindenburg box. Maisie nodded. “You know, Maisie,” Kit said seriously, “after you get your new heart, you’re going to have to stop lying and tricking your mother.”

“What did Mr. Mandrake say?” Maisie said. “Did he tell Dr. Wright what Joanna said?”

“No,” Kit said, “but Richard found out anyway. Joanna was trying to tell us the NDE was a kind of SOS. It’s a message the brain sends out to the different chemicals in the brain to find one that will signal the heart to start beating and the patient to start breathing.”

“After they code,” Maisie said.

“Yes, and now that Richard knows what it is, he can design a method to send those same chemicals to—”

“He really does have a coding treatment?” Maisie asked excitedly. “I just made that up.”

Kit shook her head. “Not yet, but he’s working on it. He’s developed a prototype, but it still has to be tested,” her face got real serious, “and even if it works—”

“He might not do it in time,” Maisie said, and was afraid Kit was going to lie and say, “Of course he will,” but she didn’t.

“He said to tell you that, no matter what happens, you did something important,” Kit said. “You helped make a discovery that may save lots and lots of lives.”

A few days later Richard came and asked the nurses a whole bunch of questions about what she weighed and stuff. He hardly talked to Maisie at all, except right when he was leaving, he looked up at the TV and he said, “Seen any good movies lately?”

“Yes!” she said, “this really good movie, except for they made the dog a dalmatian instead of a German shepherd. And they left out the guy who had the NDE, but the rest is pretty good. I love the part where the guy goes and lets the dog out.”

She watched it over and over. She had the meal guy put it in for her when he came to get her supper tray and had the night shift nurse’s aide take it out before she went to sleep.

Sometimes she didn’t feel like watching TV or anything. It was hard to breathe, and she got all puffed up in spite of the dopamine. Her heart doctors came in and told her they were going to put her on dobutamine, and after that she felt a little better and felt like talking to Kit when she came to see her.

“Do you still have your pager?” Kit asked.

“Yes,” Maisie said and showed her how she had it clipped to her dog tags chain.

“It’s very important that you wear it all the time,” Kit said. “If you start to feel like you did before you coded, or if you hear your monitor start to beep, you push the button. Don’t wait. Push it right away.”

“What if then I don’t code?” Maisie asked. “Will I get in trouble?”

“No,” Kit said, “not at all. You push it, and then you try to hang on. Dr. Wright will come right away.”

“What if he’s not in the hospital?”

“He’ll be in the hospital.”

“But what if he’s a long way away, like the Carpathia?” Maisie persisted. “It’s a really big hospital.”

“He knows all the shortcuts,” Kit said.

Dr. Wright came again with three of Maisie’s heart doctors and her mom’s lawyer, and they asked her how she was feeling and looked at her monitors and then went out in the hall. Maisie could see them talking, though they were too far away for her to hear what they were saying. Dr. Wright talked for a little while, and then her heart doctor talked a lot, and then the lawyer talked for a really long time and handed them a lot of papers, and everybody left.

A couple of days after that, Vielle came to see her. She was wearing a pager, too. “They won’t let me work in the ER until my hand gets better,” she said, looking mad only not really, “so they sent me up here to take care of you.” Vielle looked up at the TV. “What is that?” She made a face. “The Sound of Music? I hate The Sound of Music. I always thought Maria was way too cheerful. Don’t you have any good videos around here? I can see I’m going to have to bring in some of mine.”

She did, but Maisie didn’t get to watch them because her mom had started staying in her room all the time, even at night. It didn’t matter. Most of the time she was too tired to even watch The Sound of Music and she just lay there and thought about Joanna.

They kept having to take her down to have echocardiograms and one of the times when they were getting her into position, the button on her pager got pressed, and Vielle and a crash cart and about a hundred doctors and nurses showed up, and a couple of minutes later Dr. Wright came running in, all panting and out of breath, and after that she didn’t feel so worried, but she still felt terrible. It was hard to breathe, even with the oxygen mask, and her head hurt.

Her heart doctors came in and told her they were going to put a special pump in that would help her heart do its work. “An L-VAD or a bivad?” she asked.

“An L-VAD,” they said, but then they didn’t.

“They’ve decided to wait till you’re feeling better,” her mom said. “And, anyway, your new heart’s going to be here any day now.”

“When they put a new heart in,” Maisie asked Vielle the next time she came in to check her vitals, “do they cut your chest open?”

“Yes,” Vielle said, “but it won’t hurt.”

“And your arms have IVs in them and stuff?” Maisie said.

“Yes, but you’ll be under the anesthetic. You won’t feel a thing.”

“Can I have some adhesive tape?” Maisie asked. “And some scissors?” and when her mom went down to the cafeteria for dinner, Maisie took her dog tags off and went to work.

The next day her mom said, “You have to think positive thoughts, sweetie. You have to say to yourself, ‘My new heart’s going to come in just a few days, and then this will all be over, and I’ll forget all about feeling uncomfortable. I’ll get to go to school again and play soccer!’ ”

And a little while later, Vielle came in and said, “You just have to hang on a little longer, honey,” but she couldn’t. She was too tired, even, to push the button on her special pager, and then she was in the tunnel.

There was no smoke this time, and no light either. The tunnel was totally black. Maisie put her hand out, trying to feel the wall, and touched a narrow metal strut. Next to it there was nothing for a little ways and then another metal strut, at a different angle, and another.

“I’ll bet this is the Hindenburg,” she said. “I’ll bet I’m up inside the zeppelin.” She looked up, trying to see the inside of the big silver balloon far overhead, but it was too dark, and the floor she was walking on wasn’t a metal catwalk, it was soft, and too wide. Even when she took hold of the metal strut and stretched out both arms as far as they would reach, she couldn’t feel anything but space on the other side of the tunnel.

So it must not be the Hindenburg, she thought, but she didn’t dare let go of the strut for fear it was and she would fall.

She worked her way along, walking carefully along the soft floor and holding on to one strut and then the next one, and after a few minutes the struts on the side she was on disappeared, and there was nothing to hold on to on either side of her. I must be at the end of the tunnel, she thought, peering into the darkness.

A light shone suddenly, mercilessly, in her eyes. She put up her hand to protect her eyes, but it was too bright. “The explosion!” she thought.

The light swung suddenly away from her. She could see its long beam as it swung, like the beam from a flashlight. There were little specks of dust in it. It swung around in a big arc, lighting the struts behind her as it went, and she could see they were the underneath part of a grandstand, full of people. Up above the tunnel where she had been standing was a big red-and-gold sign that said “Main Entrance.”

The light swung in front of her and then stopped and shone on a man standing on a round box dressed all in white. Even his boots were white, and his top hat. The light made a circle around him. “La-deez and gentlemen!” he said, really loud. “Kindly direct your attention to the center ring!”

“I like this part the best,” someone said. Maisie turned. A little girl was standing next to her. She had on a white dress and a big blue sash. She was holding a fluffy pink puff of cotton candy on a paper cone. “My name’s Pollyanna,” the little girl said. “What’s yours?”

“Maisie.”

“I love the circus, don’t you, Mary?” Pollyanna said, eating cotton candy.

“Not Mary,” Maisie said. “Maisie.”

“Ladeez and gentlemen!” the ringmaster said, real loud, “we now present, for your entertainment, an act so sensational, so stupendous, so amazing, it has never been attempted anywhere!” He pointed his whip with a flourish, and the spotlight swung again so that its smoky beam shone straight up at a little platform at the top of a narrow ladder. There were people standing on it, dressed in fancy white leotards.

Maisie stood staring up at them, her mouth open. They looked like Barbie dolls, they were such a long way up. Their leotards sparkled in the smoky bluish light of the spotlight. “…those wizards of the tent top,” the ringmaster was saying, “those heroes of the high wire!”

A band struck up a fanfare, and Maisie looked across the ring to see where the band was. They were sitting in a big white bandstand, wearing bright red jackets with gold decorations on their shoulders. One of them had a tuba.

“Look!” Pollyanna said, pointing up with her cotton candy. Maisie looked up again. The people on the platform were bowing and smiling, waving one of their arms in big wide swoops and hanging on to the ladder with the other one.

“We proudly present,” the ringmaster was saying, “the daring, the dazzling, the devil-may-care…” He paused, and the band played another fanfare. “…death-defying… Wallendas!”

“Oh, no,” Maisie said.

The band started playing a slow, pretty song, and one of the girl Wallendas picked up a long white pole and stepped onto the end of the high wire. She had short blond hair like Kit’s. “You have to get down!” Maisie shouted up to her.

The girl Wallenda started out across the high wire, holding her pole in both hands. “There’s going to be a disaster!” Maisie shouted. “Go back! Go back!”

The girl continued to walk, placing her feet in their flat white shoes carefully, carefully. Maisie tilted her head back, trying to see the top of the tent. She could see the Wallendas, waiting for their turns to go out on the high wire, but everything above them was black, like there wasn’t a tent above them at all, just sky.

If it was the sky, there’d be stars, she thought, and just then she saw one. It glittered, a tiny white point of light, high above the Wallendas’ heads. So maybe it’s all right, Maisie thought, looking at the star. It glittered again, and then flared brightly, brighter even than the spotlight, and turned red.

“Fire!” Maisie shouted, but the Wallendas didn’t pay any attention. The girl Wallenda reached the middle of the wire, and a man Wallenda started out toward her.

Maisie ran as hard as she could across the center ring, her feet sinking in the sawdust, over to the bandstand. “The big top’s on fire!” she shouted, but the band didn’t pay any attention to her either.

She ran over to the conductor. “You have to play the duck song!” she cried, “the song that means the circus is in trouble! ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever!’ ” but he didn’t even turn around. “See!” Maisie said, yanking on his sleeve and pointing up at the fire. It was burning a line down the roof of the tent now, making a jagged red tear.

“Get down!” she shouted to the Wallendas, pointing, and one of the Wallendas saw the fire and started climbing down the ladder. The girl Wallenda who looked like Kit was still out in the middle of the wire. One of the men Wallendas threw her a rope, and she dropped her white pole and grabbed it. She wrapped her legs around it, and slid down.

“Fire!” somebody shouted in the grandstand, and all the people looked up, their mouths open like Maisie’s had been, and began to run down off the grandstand.

The fire burned along the high wire, along the rigging, moving lines of flame. Like messages, Maisie thought. Like SOSs. Somebody grabbed Maisie’s arm. She turned around. It was Pollyanna. “We have to get out of here!” Pollyanna said, tugging Maisie back across the ring toward the main entrance.

“We can’t get out that way!” Maisie said, resisting. “The animal run’s in the way.”

“Hurry, Molly!” Pollyanna said.

“Not Molly,” Maisie said. “Maisie!” but the band had started playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and Pollyanna couldn’t hear her.

“Look,” Maisie said, reaching inside the neck of her hospital gown. “My name is Maisie. It’s all written right here, on my dog tags.”

They weren’t there. She fumbled wildly at her neck, searching for her dog tags. They must have fallen off, back there while she was standing in the entranceway, looking up at the Wallendas.

“Well, Margie or whatever your name is, we better get out of here,” Pollyanna said. She took Maisie’s hand…

“No!” Maisie said, wrenching it away from her. “I have to find them!” She ran wildly back across the center ring. “I have to,” she shouted over her shoulder as she ran, “or they won’t know who I am when they find my body.”

“I thought you said we can’t get out that way,” Pollyanna called to her. “I thought you said it wasn’t clear.”

“Clear,” her heart doctor said, and the jolt jerked her really hard, but it must not have worked. The heart monitor was still whining.

“All right,” her heart doctor said. “If you’ve got anything, now’s the time to try it,” and Dr. Wright said, “Start the theta-asparcine. Start the acetylcholine.”

“Hang on, honey,” Vielle said. “Don’t leave us,” but she had to find her dog tags. They weren’t in the main entrance. She dropped to her knees and dug in the sawdust, sifting it in her hands.

A lady ran by, kicking sawdust onto Maisie’s hands. “Don’t—” she said, and a big girl ran by, and a man carrying a little boy. “Stop it,” she said. “You’re mashing it! I have to find my dog tags!”

But they didn’t listen. They ran past her into the darkness of the tunnel. “You can’t get out that way!” Maisie said, grabbing at the big girl’s skirt. “The animal run is in the way.”

“It’s on fire!” the big girl said and yanked the tail of her skirt away so hard it tore.

“You have to go out the performers’ entrance!” Maisie said, but the big girl had already disappeared into the darkness, and a whole bunch of people were running after her, kicking the sawdust all over, trampling it, stepping on Maisie’s hands.

“You’re messing it all up,” Maisie said, cradling her bruised fingers in her other hand. She struggled to her feet. “This isn’t the way out!” she shouted, holding up her hands to make the people stop, but they couldn’t hear her. They were screaming and shrieking so loud she couldn’t even hear the band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” They were stumbling against her, shoving her, pushing her into the tunnel.

It was dark in the tunnel and full of smoke. Somebody shoved Maisie, still on one knee, and she fell forward, her hands out, and came up against hard metal bars. The animal run, she thought, and tried to pull herself up to standing, but they were pressing her flat against the bars, mashing her chest.

“Open the cage!” somebody shouted.

“No! The lions and tigers will get out,” she tried to shout, but the smoke was too thick, her ribs were being crushed into the bars of the cage, and if she didn’t get out of there they were going to push her chest right through the bars.

She started to climb up the side of the run, pulling up with one hand and then the other, trying to get above the pushing people. If she could get up on top of the animal run, maybe she could crawl over it to the door.

But it was too high. She climbed and climbed, and there were still bars. She pulled herself up hand over hand, away from the screaming people, and now she could hear the band. They were playing a different song. A German song, like the one in The Sound of Music, only it wasn’t the band, it was a piano with a light, tinny sound, like the one on the Hindenburg.

She had been wrong. It was the Hindenburg, after all. It wasn’t the animals’ run, she was in the rigging inside the balloon, and she had to hold on tight or she would fall out of the sky. Like Ulla.

Far below her, in New Jersey, the children piled up against the cage, screaming. “You can’t get out that way,” she shouted down to them. The fire was all around her, the roaring flames like snowy fields, so bright you couldn’t look at them, and she knew if she let go, she would fall and fall, and they wouldn’t know her name.

“My name is Maisie,” she said, “Maisie Nellis,” but there was no air left in her lungs, only the smoke, thick as fog, and the bars were hot, she couldn’t hold on much longer, they were melting under her hands. The snowy fields under her got brighter, and she saw it wasn’t snow, it was apple blossoms. Beautiful, soft white apple blossoms.

If I fell onto them, it wouldn’t hurt at all, she thought. But she couldn’t let go. They wouldn’t know who she was. They would bury her in a grave that only had a number on it, and nobody would ever know what had happened to her. “Joanna!” she shouted. “Joanna!”

“Nothing,” Maisie’s heart doctor said.

“Increase the acetylcholine,” Dr. Wright said.

“It’s been four minutes,” the heart doctor said. “I think it’s time.”

“No,” Dr. Wright said, sounding mad. “Come on, Maisie, you’re a whiz at stalling. Now’s the time to stall.”

“Hang on, honey,” Vielle said, holding tight to her white, lifeless hand. “Hang on.”

“Let go,” somebody down below her said. Maisie looked down. She couldn’t see anything but smoke.

“Just let go,” the voice said, and a hand reached up through the smoke, a hand with a white glove on.

“It’s too far,” Maisie said. “I have to wait till the Hindenburg gets closer to the ground.”

“There isn’t time,” he said. “Let go.” He reached his gloved hand up farther, and she could see a raggedy black sleeve.

Maisie scrunched her eyes up, trying to see him through the smoke, trying to see if he had a red nose and a banged-up black hat. “Are you Emmett Kelly?” she called down to him.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, kiddo,” he said. “I’ll catch you.” He stretched his white-gloved hand up really far, but it was still a long way underneath. “We have to get you out of here.”

“I can’t,” she said, clinging to the burning bars. “When they find me, they won’t know who I am.”

“I know who you are, Maisie,” he said, and she let go. And fell and fell and fell.

“No pulse,” Vielle said.

“Her heart was just too damaged,” her heart doctor said. “It just couldn’t stand the strain.”

“Clear,” Dr. Wright said. “Again. Clear.”

“It’s been five minutes.”

“Increase the acetylcholine.”

He caught her. She couldn’t see him for the smoke, but she could feel his arms under her. And then all of a sudden the smoke cleared, and she could see his face—the red nose, the brown painted-on beard, the white down-turned mouth. “You are Emmett Kelly,” she said, squinting at him, trying to see his real face-under the clown makeup. “Aren’t you?”

He put her down so she was standing in the sawdust, and tipped his banged-up hat and made a funny bow. “There isn’t much time,” he said. He took her hand in his white gloved one, and started running across the big top toward the performers’ entrance, dragging Maisie with him.

The whole roof was on fire now, and the poles holding up the tent, and the rigging. A big piece of burning canvas came crashing down right in front of the band, and the man playing the tuba made a funny “bla-a-a-t-t-t” and then went on playing.

Emmett Kelly ran with Maisie past the band, his big clown shoes making a flapping up-and-down noise. A clown in a funny fireman’s hat ran past them dragging a big fire hose. An elephant ran past, and a German shepherd.

Emmett Kelly led her between them, pulling Maisie out of the way of a white horse. Its tail was on fire. “There’s the performers’ entrance,” he said, pointing at a door with a black curtain across it as he ran. “We’re almost there.”

He suddenly stopped, pulling Maisie up short. “Why’d you do that?” Maisie asked, and one of the on-fire poles came crashing down, bringing the performers’ entrance crashing down with it, and the ladder the Wallendas had stood on. The roof of the tent came down on top of all of it, on fire, covering it up, and smoke boiled up.

The clown in the funny fireman’s hat shouted, “There’s no way out!”

“Yes, there is, kiddo,” Emmett Kelly said. “And you know what it is.”

“There isn’t any way out. The main entrance is blocked,” she said. “The animal run’s in the way.”

“You know the way out,” he said, bending down and gripping her by the shoulders. “You told me, remember? When we were looking at your book?”

“The tent,” Maisie said. “They could’ve got out by crawling under the tent.”

Emmett Kelly led Maisie, running, back across the ring to the far side of the tent. “There’s a Victory garden on the far side of the lot,” he said as they ran. “I want you to go over there and wait till your mother comes.”

Maisie looked at him. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

He shook his head. “Women and children only.”

They reached the side of the tent. The canvas was tied down with stakes. Emmett Kelly squatted down in his funny, too-big pants and untied the rope. He lifted up the canvas so Maisie could go under. “I want you to run to the Victory garden.” He raised the canvas up higher.

Maisie looked out under the canvas. It was dark outside, darker even than the tunnel. “What if I get lost?” she said and started to cry. “They won’t know who I am.”

Emmett Kelly stood up and reached in one of his tattered pockets and pulled out a purple spotted handkerchief. He started to wipe Maisie’s eyes with it, but it wouldn’t come all the way out of his pocket. He yanked on it, and the end of it came out in a big knot, tied to a red bandanna. He pulled on the bandanna, and a green handkerchief came out and then an orange one, all knotted together.

Maisie laughed.

He pulled and pulled, looking surprised, and a lavender handkerchief came out, and a yellow one, and a white one with apple blossoms on it. And a chain with Maisie’s dog tags on the end of it.

He put the chain around her neck. “Now hurry,” he said. “The whole place is on fire.”

It was. Up above, the roof of the tent was one big flame, and the grandstands and the center ring and the bandstand were all burning, but the band was still playing, blowing on their trumpets and tubas in their red uniforms. They weren’t playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” though. They were playing a really slow, sad song. “What is that?” Maisie asked.

“ ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ ” Emmett Kelly said.

“Like on the Titanic,” Maisie said.

“Like on the Titanic,” he said. “It means it’s time to go.”

“I don’t want to,” Maisie said. “I want to stay here with you. I know a lot about disasters.”

“That’s why you have to go,” he said. “So you can become a disasterologist.”

“Why can’t you come, too?”

“I have to stay here,” he said, and she saw that he was holding a water bucket.

“And save people’s lives,” Maisie said.

He smiled under his painted-on, sad-looking expression. “And save people’s lives.” He squatted down and lifted up the canvas again. “Now go, kiddo. I want you to run lickety-split.”

Maisie ducked under the canvas and stood poised in the opening a moment, clutching her dog tags, and then looked back at him.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re not really Emmett Kelly, are you? That’s just a metaphor.”

The clown put his gloved finger up to his wide white mouth in a sh-shhing motion. “I want you to run straight for the Victory garden,” he said.

Maisie smiled at him. “You can’t fool me,” she said. “I know who you really are,” and ran into the darkness, as fast as she could.

59

Two days after successfully reviving Maisie, Richard’s special pager went off again. This time, trying not to think of what the strain of two codes in three days might do to Maisie’s system or what deadly side effect the theta-asparcine might have produced, he made it up to CICU in three minutes flat.

Evelyn met him as he skidded into the unit, all smiles. “Her heart’s here,” she said. “Maisie’s in being prepped. I tried to call you.”

“My special pager went off,” he said, still not convinced there wasn’t a disaster, and Evelyn said, unruffled, “She was quite insistent that you and Vielle Howard be informed, and I guess she took matters into her own hands.”

She had, in more ways than one. After the transplant surgery, which took eight hours and went without a hitch, one of the attending nurses told him Maisie had taped her dog tags to the bottom of her foot and was furious that they’d been removed. “What if I’d died?” she’d demanded indignantly as soon as her airway was removed, and, in spite of the danger of infection due to the immunosuppressants she was taking, she was allowed to wear her dog tags, swabbed with disinfectant, wrapped around her wrist, “just in case.”

Maisie’s mother, absolutely impossible now that her faith in positive thinking had been confirmed, had, according to the nurse, tried to talk her out of them, to no avail.

“I need them,” Maisie had said. “In case I get complications. I might get a blood clot or reject my new heart.”

“You won’t do any such thing,” her mother had said. “You’re going to get well and come home and go back to school. You’re going to take ballet lessons”—something Richard could not in his wildest dreams imagine Maisie doing, unless a ballet-related flood or volcanic eruption was involved—“and grow up and have children of your own.” To which Maisie, ever the realist, had replied, “I’ll still die sometime. Everybody dies sooner or later.”

After a week of family only, Maisie was allowed visitors, provided they wore paper gowns, booties, and masks, and limited their visits to five minutes, and visited two at a time. That meant her mother was always present, which cramped Maisie’s style considerably, although she still told Richard plenty of grisly details about her surgery. “So then they crack your chest open,” she demonstrated, “and they cut your heart out and put the new one in. Did you know it comes in a cooler, like beer?”

“Maisie—” her mother protested. “Let’s talk about something cheerful. You need to thank Dr. Wright. He revived you after you coded.”

“That’s right,” Evelyn said, coming in to check the numerous monitors. “Dr. Wright saved your life.”

“No, he didn’t,” Maisie said.

“I know he didn’t do your transplant surgery, like Dr. Templeton,” Mrs. Nellis said, looking embarrassed, “but he helped by starting your heart again so you could get your new heart.”

“I know,” Maisie said, “but—”

“A lot of people worked together to get you your new heart, didn’t they?” Mrs. Nellis said. “Your Peds nurses and Dr.—”

“Maisie,” Richard said, leaning forward, “who did save your life?”

Maisie opened her mouth to answer, and Evelyn, adjusting her IV, said, “I know who she means. You mean the person who donated your heart, don’t you, Maisie?”

“Yes,” Maisie said after a moment, and Richard thought, That isn’t what she was going to say. “I wish they told you what their name was,” Maisie said. “They don’t tell you anything, not how they died or whether they were a boy or a girl or anything.”

“That’s because they don’t want you to worry about it,” Mrs. Nellis said. “You’re supposed to be thinking positive thoughts to help you get well.”

“It’s positive they saved my life,” Maisie said.

“Cheerful topics,” Mrs. Nellis admonished. “Tell Dr. Wright what Dr. Murrow brought you.”

Dr. Murrow had brought her a giant Mylar balloon with a heart on it. “It’s got helium in it, not hydrogen, so you don’t have to worry about it blowing up like the Hindenburg,” Maisie told him and had to be cautioned again about cheerful topics.

In the week that followed, the red heart balloon was joined by Mylar balloons with smiley-faces and teddy bears on them (no regular balloons allowed in CICU, and no flowers), and Maisie’s room filled up with dolls and stuffed animals and visitors. Barbara came up from Peds to see her and stopped by the lab afterward to tell Richard Maisie wanted to see him and to thank him. “You saved her life,” she said, and it reminded him of what Maisie had said, or, rather, not said, on his first visit.

He wondered if that was what she wanted to see him about. “Was her mother there when you visited her?” he asked Barbara.

“Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I wouldn’t go down there right now. Mr. Mandrake was going in as I was coming out. I’d steer clear of him if I were you. He’s in a foul mood these days, thanks to Mabel Davenport.”

“Mabel Davenport? You mean Mrs. Davenport?” Richard asked. “Why? What did she do?”

“You mean you haven’t heard?” She leaned confidentially toward him. “You will not believe what’s happened. His new book, Messages from the Other Side, is coming out next month,” she paused expectantly, “the twentieth, to be exact.”

“Wonderful,” Richard said, wondering what there was in that news to make her smile so smugly. “And?”

“And Communications from Beyond is coming out on the tenth. With a nationwide book tour and, rumor has it, an even bigger advance than Mr. Mandrake’s.”

“Communications from Beyond?”

“By Mabel R. Davenport. Mr. Mandrake says she made the whole thing up. She says he tried to make her remember things she never saw and he’s got it all wrong, there’s no Angel of Light, no Life Review, just a golden aura that confers psychic powers, which Mrs. Davenport claims she has. She says she’s been in contact with Houdini and Amelia Earhart. I can’t believe you haven’t heard about this. It’s been all over the tabloids. Mr. Mandrake’s furious. So I’d wait till this afternoon before I went down to see Maisie.”

He did, but when he went down Ms. Sutterly was there, and he had the feeling Maisie wanted to speak to him in private, so he merely waved at her from the door and went back that evening, but then, and for the next several days, her room was jammed with people, in spite of the two-visitors rule, and he was busy, too, meeting with the head of research and the grant proposals people about further research on theta-asparcine. He had to settle for keeping tabs on Maisie by calling CICU.

The nurses’ reports were almost as optimistic as Maisie’s mother’s. Maisie was showing no signs of rejection, the fluid in her lungs was steadily diminishing, and she was beginning to eat (this last reported by Eugene, who, being in charge of her menus, took a personal responsibility for her appetite).

When Richard went down Monday, the entire Peds staff was there, and Tuesday and Wednesday, her mother. Finally, on Friday, he ran into Mrs. Nellis leaving the CICU, pulling her mask and gown off as she went. “Oh, good, Dr. Wright, you’re here,” she said hurriedly. “I have to meet with Dr. Templeton, and I was nervous about leaving Maisie with—” she shot a glance back toward Maisie’s room, “but I know I can trust you to keep the conversation upbeat and positive.”

He went in, curious to see who he was supposed to be protecting Maisie from, and hoping it wasn’t Mandrake. It wasn’t. It was Mr. Wojakowski, in a mask and baseball cap. “—and he did it, he laid that bomb right on the flight deck of the Shokaku,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying.

“And he was already dead?” Maisie said, her eyes wide with excitement.

“He was already dead. But he did it.” Mr. Wojakowski looked up. “Hiya, Doc. I was just telling Maisie here about Jo-Jo Powers.”

“I didn’t know you two knew each other,” Richard said.

“Mr. Wojakowski made me my dog tags that Joanna gave me,” Maisie said. “He was on the Yorktown. He tells the best stories.”

That he does, Richard thought, and he has found the perfect audience. Someone should have thought of this before. “I can’t stop,” he said. “I just came to see how you’re doing.”

“Really good,” Maisie said. “Nurse Vielle brought me a Charlie’s Angels poster, and my mom’s lawyer brought me that balloon,” she pointed to a Mylar balloon with a butterfly on it, “and Eugene brought me this,” Maisie said, pulling a bright pink baseball cap out from under her pillow. “Back from the Grave and Ready to Party” was written on it in purple letters. Richard laughed.

“I know,” Maisie said. “I think it’s really cool, but my mom won’t let me wear it. She says I’m supposed to be thinking about positive things, not graves and stuff. Everybody’s been to see me except Kit. She couldn’t come ’cause she has to take care of her uncle, but she said tomorrow you’re all bringing me a surprise.”

We are? Richard thought.

“What is it?” Maisie demanded, and then appraisingly, “I think I already have enough balloons. And teddy bears.”

“It’s a surprise. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” he said. He’d better call Kit and find out what this was about.

“It looks like you two have a lot of visiting to do, so I’ll be moseying along,” Mr. Wojakowski said.

“No, wait!” Maisie protested. “You have to tell me about the time the Yorktown got all shot up.” She turned back to Richard. “The Japanese thought they’d sunk her, and they had to fix her really fast.”

“In three days flat,” Mr. Wojakowski said, sitting down again. “And the ship’s carpenter says, ‘Three days!’ and threw his hammer so hard it went right through the bulkhead, and the harbormaster says, ‘That’s just one more hole you’re gonna have to fix,’ and—” They didn’t even notice Richard leaving. A match made in heaven.

He called Kit as soon as he got back to the lab. “Maisie told Vielle she’d always wished she could go to Dish Night,” Kit said, “so we’re setting it up for her. The nurses are letting us hold it in the CICU conference room tomorrow at four, after considerable negotiations, and I was wondering if you could pick up the videos. Vielle thought maybe Volcano or The Towering Inferno.”

“What about Maisie’s mother?” Richard asked.

“Not a problem. She has a meeting with Daniels, Dutton, and Walsh at four. She’s fighting to get Maisie into a clinical trial for a new antirejection drug.”

He rented Volcano and, since The Towering Inferno was checked out, Twister. “Disasters, huh?” the short kid who waited on him said. “You should rent Titanic.”

“I’ve seen it,” Richard said.

When he got up to CICU, Kit and Vielle were already in Maisie’s room in their masks and gowns, and Maisie was higher than her Mylar balloons. “He’s here!” she said the second he walked in. “They said I had to wait till you got here to find out what the surprise is. So what is it?”

“We’ll tell you when we get there,” Vielle said, bringing in a wheelchair. Evelyn came in to get Maisie’s heart monitor and IVs ready to go. Richard and Kit helped her into the wheelchair, and Richard wheeled her three doors down to the conference room.

“Dish Night!” Maisie said when she saw the movie posters.

“Not only Dish Night,” Kit said, “but a Disaster Double Feature.” Richard held up the videos.

“Actually, Dr. Templeton says you can only watch one today,” Evelyn said.

“Then we’ll have to watch the other one at our next Dish Night,” Kit said, “after you get out of the hospital.”

“I get to go to a real Dish Night?” Maisie said, transported, and Richard hoped this wasn’t too much excitement for her. He handed her the videos, and Kit and Vielle bent over her, one on each side, discussing which one to watch and explaining the rules of Dish Night.

“Rule Number One, no talking about work,” Kit said. “For you that means no talking about your transplant.”

“Or rib cages. Or beer coolers,” Vielle said. “Rule Number Two, only movie food can be eaten.”

“Dr. Templeton said no popcorn yet,” Kit said. “We’ll have that at our next Dish Night. For now he said you could have a snow cone.” She produced a cone of shaved ice and two bottles of syrup. “Red or blue?”

“Blue!” Maisie said.

Richard leaned against the door, watching them. The bandage on Vielle’s arm had been taken off, though she still had the one on her hand, and the bruised, beaten look was gone from her eyes. Kit was in nearly as high spirits as Maisie. She was still very thin, but there was color in her cheeks. He remembered her standing in the lab, pale and determined, clutching the textbook, saying, “Joanna saved my life.”

She saved all our lives, Richard thought, and wondered if that was what Maisie had meant when she said he hadn’t been the one who saved her life, if she realized it had been Joanna’s last words that had saved her life.

“Rule Number Three, no Woody Allen movies,” Kit said.

“And no Kevin Costner,” Vielle said.

“And no Disney movies,” Maisie said vehemently.

Richard watched them, thinking about Joanna that first Dish Night, laughing, saying, “This is a Titanic-free zone.”

“There’s a reason I’m seeing the Titanic,” she’d told him, and she was right. The Titanic had been the perfect metaphor for the brain’s distress calls sent out frantically in all directions, by every method available, but he wondered, leaning against the door and looking at Maisie and Vielle and Kit, if that was the only connection. Because the Titanic wasn’t primarily about messages. It was about people who had, in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the night, put forth a superhuman effort to save wives, sweethearts, friends, babies, children, dogs, and the first-class mail. To save something besides themselves.

Joanna had wanted to die like W. S. Gilbert, and the Titanic was full of Gilberts. Assistant Engineer Harvey and Edith Evans and Jay Yates. Daniel Buckley shepherding the girls he had promised to take care of up through the First-Class Dining Saloon, up the Grand Staircase, into the boats, Robert Norman giving his lifejacket to a woman and her child, John Jacob Astor plunking a flowered hat on a ten-year-old boy and saying, “Now he’s a girl and now he can go.” Captain Smith, swimming toward one of the boats with a baby in his arms. And Jack Phillips. And the band. And firemen, stokers, engineers, trimmers, working to keep the boilers going and the dynamos running and the wireless working, the lights on. So it wouldn’t get dark.

“Turn off the lights,” Vielle was saying. “We need to get this show on the road. It’s already four-thirty.”

“She has a date,” Maisie said wisely.

“How did you find out?” Vielle asked Maisie, her hands on her hips.

“You have a date?” Kit said. “Who with? Please tell me it’s not with Harvey the Embalmer.”

“It’s not,” Maisie said. “It’s with a cop.”

“The one who looks like Denzel Washington?” Kit asked. “You finally met him?”

Vielle nodded. “I called him to see if he could help me find the taxi Joanna took,” she said, “and just how did you find out, Little Miss Gossip?”

Maisie turned to Richard. “So I guess you and Kit will have to eat at the cafeteria, just the two of you,” she said.

“I think it’s time to start the movie,” Kit said, whacking Maisie with the Volcano box. She handed Vielle the video, and Vielle turned the TV on and slid the video into the slot.

“Wait! Don’t start yet! I forgot my ‘Back from the Grave and Ready to Party’ hat Eugene gave me,” Maisie said and added defensively, “I have to have it. It’s a party.”

“I’ll go get it,” Richard said.

“No,” Maisie said. “I have to get it,” and to Richard, “You don’t know where it is.”

“You could tell me,” Richard started to say and then got a look at Maisie’s face, innocent and determined. She obviously had a reason for wanting to go back to her room, even if it meant wheeling her monitor and IV pole back, too. “We’ll be right back,” Richard said and maneuvered her and her equipment back down the hall.

As soon as they got inside the room, Maisie said, “My hat’s under the pillow. Push me up to the nightstand.” She opened the drawer and brought out several tablet pages, folded into quarters. “It’s my NDE from when I coded,” she said, handing them to him. “I couldn’t write it down right away.”

“That’s all right,” Richard said, touched that she had written the whole thing down. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Joanna said you should always write it down right away,” Maisie said disapprovingly, “so you won’t confabulate.”

“That’s true,” Richard said, “but you can’t always. This will be very useful.”

Maisie looked mollified. “Do you think Mr. Wojakowski tells the truth?”

Out of left field. “The truth?” Richard said, stalling. He wondered if she had begun to catch Mr. Wojakowski in inconsistencies, like Joanna had.

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “I asked him if Jo-Jo Powers, that’s the guy who said he was going to lay his bomb right on the flight deck, if he knew he did it. Hit the Shokaku, I mean. ’Cause he’d already died when it hit. And Mr. Wojakowski said, ‘You bet he knew it! He was standing there at the pearly gates watching the whole thing.’ Do you think he was?”

“Was standing at the pearly gates?” Richard said.

“No, was telling the truth. It’s like a dream, right? The NDE? Vielle told me it’s like signals your brain is sending out to make your heart start, and you make the signals into a kind of dream. A symbol, Vielle said.”

“That’s right,” Richard said.

“So it’s not real.”

“No,” he said. “It feels like it’s really happening, but it’s not.”

Maisie thought about that. “I kind of figured that out ’cause of Pollyanna being there. She’s not a real person, and none of the animals really got loose. At the Hartford circus fire,” she said at his bewildered look. “That’s where I went. In my NDE.”

My God. The Hartford circus fire.

“And after the NDE, there’s nothing,” she said, “and you don’t even know you’re dead. ’Cause of brain death.”

He nodded.

“But you don’t know that for sure. Joanna said nobody knows for sure what happens after you die, except people who’ve died, and they can’t tell you,” Maisie said, and then, following some private line of reasoning of her own, “and the thing the dream stands for is real, even if the dream isn’t.”

“Maisie, did you see Joanna in your NDE?” he asked.

“Hunh-unh,” she said, and then, “Mr. Mandrake says people who’ve died can tell us stuff. Do you think they can?”

She wants Joanna to still be here, to be talking to her, he thought. And who can blame her? “They speak to us in our hearts,” he said carefully.

“I don’t mean like that,” Maisie said. “I mean really.”

“No.”

Maisie nodded. “I told Mr. Mandrake they couldn’t ’cause if they could, Little Miss 1565 would have told them who she was.”

And Joanna would have told me what her last words meant, Richard thought. But she had. Maisie was the living proof of that. And if he didn’t get her back to Dish Night, Kit and Vielle would have a fit. “We’d better get going so we can watch the movie,” he said and plunked the pink “Back from the Grave” hat on her head.

Maisie nodded, but as he came around to push her wheelchair out of the room, she said, “Wait, we can’t go yet. When I said it wasn’t you who saved my life, I didn’t mean the kid who gave me my heart either.”

“Who did you mean?”

“Emmett Kelly.”

So far out in left field there was no way to follow the ball. “Emmett Kelly?”

“Yeah, you know,” Maisie said, “the sad-looking clown with the raggedy clothes and it looks like he didn’t shave. He saved this little girl at the Hartford circus fire. He told her to go stand in the Victory garden. And he told me to, too, and showed me how to get out of the tent, so that’s why I said he saved my life.”

Richard nodded, trying to understand.

“Only it wasn’t really him. It looked like him and everything, but it wasn’t. It was like how Vielle said the NDE was, and Emmett Kelly was a symbol for who it was really. But just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean it is.”

“Who was it really, Maisie?”

“But Joanna said just because you want it to be true doesn’t mean it isn’t, either,” she said, still following some private line of reasoning, “and I think it was real, even though Pollyanna and the fire and stuff wasn’t.”

“Maisie, who saved you?”

She gave him her it-is-so-obvious look. “Joanna,” she said.

60

“Look,” Helen said. She had been sitting close to Joanna, with the little French bulldog on her lap, untying the hair ribbon around its neck and then retying it, ignoring the steadily reddening sky, but now she looked up. “I think something’s happening.”

The red’s getting darker, Joanna thought, looking fearfully up at the bloody sky. The light’s going, and this time it won’t be a night of clear and sparkling stars, but the color was not deepening, it was changing, the hue shifting from blood-red to carmine.

“Not the sky,” Helen said, pointing down over the side of the piano. “The water!”

Joanna looked down at the water, and it was carmine, too, the burning orange-red of flames. “ ‘But the fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire,’ ” Joanna thought, remembering her sister quoting from the Bible, “ ‘which is the second death.’ ”

She reached to pull Helen closer, but Helen wriggled out of her arms and went over to the edge. She flopped down on her stomach, the little dog beside her, and trailed her hand in the water. “I think we’re unbecalmed,” she said, but the flame-red water was still as smooth as glass, so still Helen’s hand, trailing through it, left no wake at all.

“We are too unbecalmed,” Helen said as if Joanna had spoken. “Look!” She bobbed her head toward the ice field, and she was right, because, even though the piano had not drifted, even though the water was still smooth and still; they were no longer surrounded by ice. The bergs lay far behind them, their sharp peaks copper against the burning sky.

We’ve drifted out of the ice field, Joanna thought. They’ll never find us now.

“I told you we were unbecalmed,” Helen said, and stood up, rocking the piano so the water lapped at its sides. “I bet whatever we were waiting for must have happened.”

No, Joanna thought. Please.

“What do you think will—?” Helen said and stopped, looking back toward the ice field.

Joanna followed her gaze. She could no longer see the icebergs. On all sides, stretching out to an endless horizon, lay the still, burnished water.

“What do you think will happen now?” Helen said again.

“I don’t know.”

“I think we will find land soon,” Helen said, and sat down crosslegged in the center of the piano. She put her curled hands up to her eye as if they were a telescope and gazed earnestly at the horizon, searching for land. “Look!” she shouted and pointed to the east. “There it is!”

At first Joanna couldn’t see anything, but then she spotted a tiny speck on the horizon. She leaned forward, squinting. It’s a lifeboat, she thought, and strained to see, hoping it was Mr. Briarley and Mrs. Woollam, safe in Collapsible D.

“It’s a ship!” Helen shouted, and, as Joanna looked, the speck resolved itself into an oblong, like a smokestack. “It’s the Carpathia!” Helen said happily.

It can’t be, Joanna thought. It’s too far for her to come. And the Carpathia had steamed up from the southwest.

“I bet it is, though,” Helen said as if Joanna had spoken. “What else could it be?”

The Mackay-Bennett, Joanna thought, watching the ship steam toward them. Coming out from Halifax with a minister and a hold full of ice to pick up the corpses, to bury them at sea. It must be near the end, Joanna thought, looking across the water at the ship. The sky was changing again, darkening, yellowing, like decaying flesh.

The last neurons must be dying, the last cells of the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus and the amygdala going out, shutting down, the synapses flickering faintly, failing to arc. V… V… and then what? Irreversible brain death, she thought, and the Mackay-Bennett.

“If it’s the Carpathia, then we’re saved,” Helen said happily, and gathered the little bulldog up as if she were collecting her luggage, getting ready to disembark.

The sky had turned a dull, uneasy brass. The Mackay-Bennett’s stack stood out blackly against it. They won’t know who we are, Joanna thought, and looked for her hospital ID, but it had fallen off in the water. I should have had Mr. Wojakowski make me a set of dog tags, too, she thought.

They had known John Jacob Astor by the initials embroidered inside his collar. She fumbled in her pockets, looking for a pen to write Helen’s name in the collar of her dress, but there was nothing at all in her pockets, not even a coin for Charon the boatman.

“I think you were right,” Helen said, “it doesn’t look at all like the Carpathia.”

Joanna looked up, bracing herself to see the deck stacked with coffins, the embalmer standing ready. The ship was still a long way off, but its shape was clearly defined against the brassy sky. What she had first thought was its smokestack was instead its central island, spiky with masts and antennas, and under it the broad, flat deck and the incurving triangular prow.

“Is it the Carpathia?” Helen asked.

“No,” Joanna said wonderingly. “It’s the Yorktown.”

“The Yorktown?” Helen said. “I thought the Yorktown sank in the Coral Sea.”

“It did,” Joanna said. She could see the wireless shack now, high up on the island, and the antennas, shaped like crosses. And was raised again in three days.

“What’s it doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you know it’s the Yorktown, if you can’t read the name?” Helen said, but there was no mistaking it now. She could see the planes. Sailors lined the railing of the flight deck, their white uniforms blindingly bright.

“Do you think they’ll see us?” Helen asked. “Maybe we should signal them or something.”

“We have,” Joanna said. “SOS. SOS.” She stood up and faced the ship as if it were a firing squad.

“Are we saved?” Helen asked, looking up at Joanna.

“I don’t know,” Joanna said. This could be some final synapse firing, some last attempt to make sense of dying and death, some final metaphor. Or something else altogether. She looked up at the sky. It was changing again, deepening, brightening to gold. The Yorktown plowed toward them, impossibly huge, impossibly fast, its narrow prow cutting like a knife through the shining water.

“Are you scared?” Helen asked.

The Yorktown was nearly upon them. Flags were flying from the tower and the masts and the antennas, and on the flight deck, sailors stood at the railing, waving. In the center, the captain, all in white, held up a pair of binoculars and looked toward them, the lenses glinting gold.

“Are you?” Helen demanded.

“Yes,” Joanna said. “No. Yes.”

“I’m scared, too,” Helen said.

Joanna put her arm around her. The sailors were shouting from the railing, waving their white hats in the air. Behind them, above the tower, the sun came out, blindingly bright, gilding the crosses and the captain.

“What if it sinks again?” Helen asked fearfully. “The Yorktown went down at Midway.”

Joanna smiled down at her, at the little bulldog, and then looked back at the Yorktown. “All ships sink sooner or later,” she said, and raised her hand to wave in greeting. “But not today. Not today.”