Passage. Part 73

"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-Cla.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 t.i.tanic 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 gla.s.sed in. Joanna shivered. "Nor the guillotine." He touched his neck gingerly. "Nor strychnine poisoning. Nor a ma.s.sive 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.

"No lying in state anywhere... a simple service... no speaking... the body not embalmed..."

-Part of FDR's instructions for his funeral, which were not found until afterward and which had been completely disregarded.

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 h.e.l.lfire-and-d.a.m.nation 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 t.i.tanic."

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 t.i.tanic."

"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 toPatty 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 t.i.tanic, 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 t.i.tanic 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 t.i.tanic. 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: "G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l?

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 fiance died. She told me G.o.d 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 cla.s.s," 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 t.i.tanic." 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 t.i.tanic."

"Not think," he said. "Know."

"Joanna didn't think she was. She thought the t.i.tanic 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 cla.s.s had triggered the image of the t.i.tanic, 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 t.i.tanic."

"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 t.i.tanic?"

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

"I don't understand."

"There are apparently several varieties of h.e.l.l. Mine was to stand in a crowd in the White Star office and listen to an official read the names of the pa.s.sengers who'd been lost.""You were there?"

"I was there. It really happened. She went down on the t.i.tanic. 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.