Passage. Part 79

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 aroundher, 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 Mola.s.ses Flood."

"The Great Mola.s.ses Flood?" Kit said to Maisie. "What's that?"

"A big flood," Maisie said in that same flat, uninterested tone. "Of mola.s.ses."

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, pa.s.sive state. No, not pa.s.sive. Flattened.

"Did people die?" Kit was asking Maisie. "In the Great Mola.s.ses 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.

"The executioner is, I believe, an expert, and my neck is very slender. Oh, G.o.d, have pity on my soul, oh, G.o.d, have pity on my soul..."

-Anne Boleyn's last words, spoken just before her beheading.

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 doork.n.o.b, 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 doork.n.o.b.

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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage, 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 doorslammed. 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 t.i.tanic, it's-"

He climbed onto a deck chair, still grasping her wrist, pulling her up after him onto the chair, onto a windla.s.s. He reached across to a stanchion, stretching, and let go of her wrist. Joanna didn't wait. She jumped down off the windla.s.s, 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.

"We are 157-337 running north and south. Wait listening on 6210."

-Last radio message from Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.

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 t.i.tanic?" Maisie asked.

Richard looked across the bed at Kit. "What makes you say that?"

"She was always asking me about the t.i.tanic. 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, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 t.i.tanic, 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 Cafe 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."