Passage (111 page)

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.