Passage (103 page)

“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.