Passage. Part 82

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 ma.s.sive 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 reallyhappening, 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 doork.n.o.b 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 doork.n.o.b 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 gla.s.s of the door, shouting, "What kind of hospital cafeteria is this?" Beating so hard the gla.s.srattled, 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-cla.s.s lounge. "We still have time, it isn't over till they play 'Nearer, My G.o.d, 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 cla.s.s 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 cartslid past them, picking up speed. A tiger, its striped fur red and black in the dimming light, loped by.

Joanna pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 t.i.tanic 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.

"Standby."

-Wireless message from the Frankfurt to the t.i.tanic.

"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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body'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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 bypa.s.s, 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 afew 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'show 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 n.a.z.i 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."