Passage (50 page)

She took off running, the sound of the Morse lamp steadily scraping, down, up, down, reaching all the way down the deck. And please let the door be open, she prayed, racing up the metal stairs. Still let my shoe be in it.

It was, and there was no time to retrieve it. She flung the door open and was down the stairs. One flight. Two. Past the dining room, with its glittering crystal and piano. Three. Please let it not be flooded, she prayed, and pushed through the door.

The deck was dry, but because of the curve, she couldn’t see all the way to the passage. She ran past the locked doors, around the curve. And there it was, the black rectangle of the passage door, still open, still above water. She pelted toward it, her bare foot slapping an awkward rhythm with her remaining shoe as she ran.

Down the deck, which was still-thank God-dry, past the deck chairs, her reflection flickering in the glass of the windows as she sped past. Past the light. Into the passage, and into darkness.

And more darkness. What happened? Joanna thought, panic clutching at her. Why didn’t I go back? And realized she was back, her sleep mask still on, the IV tugging at the inside crease of her elbow, white noise playing in her ears. “Tish?” she said and pulled the headphone down off her ear with her left hand.

“ . . . pulse just spiked,” Tish was saying. “Pulse 95, BP 130 over 90. Wait, she’s awake.”

“Good,” Richard said, and she could hear his footsteps as he came over to the examining table. She felt Tish removing the electrodes along her scalp, and then the sleep mask was off, and she was looking up at Richard.

“Well?” he said.

She shook her head against the pillow. “I didn’t have a different vision, like you expected,” she said, and tried to sit up. “It was—”

“Stay put,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“But I need to tell you,” Joanna said, lying back, “it was definitely—”

“Hang on,” Richard said. “Don’t say anything until I get
the recorder started.” He began pushing buttons randomly on the minirecorder. The tape feed popped open. He took the tape out and examined both sides. What was he doing? He’d watched her put a new tape in right before they started. “Tish, can you get Joanna a blanket?” he said. “She’s shivering.”

No, I’m not, Joanna thought, and realized he was stalling until Tish moved away so she wouldn’t hear what she said.

“Sure,” Tish said, and went over to the supply cabinet.

“Tell me what you saw,” Richard said as soon as she was out of earshot.

“The
Titanic.”

“You’re sure? You had the same vision as last time? The passage and the people milling around beyond the door?”

“Yes, but this time I went out on deck, and—” She stopped as Tish came back with the blanket.

“I’m going to wait on recording the account till after you’ve done monitoring her,” Richard said to Tish. “Go ahead and finish unhooking the electrodes.” He went back over to the console without another look at Joanna and started going through the scans. And what would he say when Tish left? Joanna wondered, watching Tish spread the blanket over her legs and pull it up to cover her shoulders. Would he accuse her of being Bridey Murphy again for seeing the
Titanic?

I can’t help it, she thought. It
was
the
Titanic.
She went over the NDE in her mind again while Tish unhooked the electrodes and checked her pulse and BP so she wouldn’t forget any of the details-the stairway, the First-Class Dining Saloon, the door to the Boat Deck—

I left my shoe in the door, she thought, and sat up. It’s still on the ship.

“Whoa, what are you doing?” Tish said.

“I—” Joanna said, and stared at her navy-stockinged feet sticking out below the blanket. But I was barefoot, she thought.

“I haven’t got your IV out yet,” Tish said, and Joanna obediently lay back down. It had felt so real. She could remember her bare foot on the icy deck, could remember taking her shoe off and wedging it in—She started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Tish asked, taping a piece of cotton over the site of the needle.

“My shoe—”

“They’re in the dressing room,” Tish said, “but you’re not going anywhere yet. I need to take your vitals one more time.” She did and then said, “So what’s so hilarious about your shoes?”

Nothing, Joanna thought. They weren’t what I was wearing.

“Come on, tell me, what’s the joke?” Tish said.

I can’t, Joanna thought, you wouldn’t understand. Because the shoe she’d left behind, wedged in the door, was a red tennis shoe, just like the one the patient had supposedly seen outside on the ledge when she floated up above the operating table.

Tish was still waiting for her to explain what was so funny. “Nothing, I’m sorry,” Joanna said. “I think I’m still a little disoriented,” and lay still while Tish took the foam cushions out from under her arms and legs. I need to tell Richard about this, she thought. I wonder if this counts as an out-of-body experience.

But Richard wasn’t interested in which core elements she’d had or what she’d seen. He was only interested in whether or not she’d seen the
Titanic.

“You had the same vision this time?” he asked as soon as Tish was gone.

“No,” Joanna said, sitting up. “Not the exact same vision.” Richard looked both pleased and relieved. “But it was still the same place, and it is the
Titanic.”

“How do you know?”

Joanna told him about the dining room and the Boat Deck. “It had to be the
Titanic.
They were signaling the
Californian
with a Morse lantern.”

“Dr. Wright?” Tish said from the door. Joanna wondered how long she’d been standing there. “I forgot to ask you before I left, are you interested?”

“In what?” Richard asked.

“Seeing Tommy Lee Jones’s new movie.”

“Oh,” he said, and it was clear from his tone that he had no
idea at all what she was talking about. “Uh, no, Joanna and I have to go over her account, and I have to analyze the scans. It’ll probably be pretty late.”

“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” she said, and then, before he could give her another excuse, “I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes. Mr. Sage. At ten?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Right. Mr. Sage. See you then.”

“Wait,” Joanna said. “What about Mrs. Troudtheim? Doesn’t she have a session at three?”

“She called and canceled,” Richard said.

“While you were under,” Tish added helpfully.

“She said she thinks she’s coming down with the flu and she’ll call and reschedule when she’s feeling better,” Richard said; and to Tish, still lingering in the door, “Tomorrow at ten.”

Tish left, and he turned back to Joanna. “Did they say it was the
Californian
they were signaling?”

“No, but they said they were taking on water and that the
Baltic
and the
Frankfurt
were coming. And the dining room had to be the First-Class Dining Saloon—”

“Tell me about the beginning. Was it the same?”

“Yes,” she said, “except for the young man in the sweater.” She told him about the bearded man telling him the area was restricted and the young man replying that he’d heard a noise and come to investigate.

“But the noise was the same?”

“Yes,” Joanna said.

“And the passage, and the door? And the light?”

“Yes,” Joanna said, puzzled.

“And the unifying image was the same,” he murmured. “Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

Joanna wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, slid down off the examining table, and followed him over to the console. He’d already called up her scans.

“This is the NDE you just experienced,” he said, and typed rapidly. All the areas went black except the frontal cortex. “What you’re looking at now is the long-term-memory activity.”
He typed some more. “This is fast-forward,” he said, and the scans shifted rapidly, small scattered areas winking on and off, orange, red, and then back to blue, exploding across the screen like fireworks in a complex pattern.

“Okay,” he said, freezing the screen and putting another scan up beside it, “this is Tuesday’s NDE.” He went through the same process. “Now I’m going to superimpose the two,” he said and did. “Today’s is the darker shades, Tuesday’s is the lighter.”

Joanna watched the colors blink on and off, blue to orange, then red and back to blue-green, lighting randomly and going out again in different spots, at different speeds. “They don’t look anything like each other.”

“Exactly,” Richard said. “The L+R is completely different, which should indicate a completely different experience and a completely different memory as a unifying image. There’s not a single point of congruity, and yet you say you experienced the same images and the same central image.” He stared at the screen. “Maybe the frontal-cortex activity is random, after all, and it’s the temporal lobe that’s dictating the experience.”

He turned to her. “I’d like you to record as detailed an account as possible. Put down exactly what you saw and heard.” He stared at the scans. “When you had patients who’d coded more than once, did they have the same NDE each time?”

“No,” Joanna said. “Mrs. Woollam saw a garden one time, and a stairway, and a dark, open place. She did see that more than once, and she said she had been in a tunnel twice.”

He nodded. “Have you had other patients with more than one NDE?”

“Yes,” she said, trying to remember. “I’ll have to look up their accounts.”

“I’d like to have a list of them with what they saw each time, especially if it was the same thing.” He went back to looking at the screens. “There’s got to be a clue in here somewhere as to why you’re still seeing the
Titanic.”

There is, Joanna thought, but it’s not in the scans. It’s in something Mr. Briarley said in class, or read to us out of a blue book with a caravel on it, and wondered if Kit had found the book yet.

That was hardly likely. She’d only had a few hours to look, and Joanna hadn’t exactly given her helpful clues, but she checked her answering machine anyway. Mr. Mandrake had called, and Guadalupe. “Do you still want us to write down what Carl Aspinall says?” her voice asked.

Yes, Joanna thought, feeling guilty. She hadn’t been over to five-east in nearly two weeks. Guadalupe probably thought she’d forgotten all about him. She thought about running down right then, but it had already been over an hour since she’d come out of the NDE. She’d better get her account down before she forgot anything. Oh, and she’d promised to contact Eldercare and put them in touch with Kit.

She did, and then recorded her account, putting it directly on the computer to save time. She printed it out and ran it up to Richard, who was on the phone, then went down to talk to Guadalupe, taking the stairs down to fifth and cutting through Pathology to the walkway.

The painters had been here, too. The walkway doors were swathed in yellow “Do Not Cross” tape, and someone had jammed a metal bar through the door handles for good measure. She would have to go down to third, which meant going straight past Mrs. Davenport’s room. An unacceptable risk.

She went down to second, crossed the walkway, and took the service elevator up to fifth. And ran into the painters themselves, working on the hallway ceiling. “You can’t come through here,” the nearest one said, pointing off to her left with a paint roller. “You need to go down to fourth and take the visitors’ stairs.” Which would take her through Peds and right past Maisie’s, but better Maisie than Mrs. Davenport, and maybe she was watching one of her videos and wouldn’t notice.

Fat chance. “Joanna!” Maisie called the second she started past the door, and when Joanna leaned in and said, “Hi, kiddo,” she said breathlessly, “I’ve got something to show you.”

The fluid retention was back. Her arms and legs were swollen, and her face was puffy.

“I can only stay a minute,” she said. “I have to go see a patient.”

“It’ll just take a minute,” Maisie said, hauling books out
from under her covers. “I had Ms. Sutterly bring me a whole bunch of
Titanic
books. Look!” She held up a large picture book. On the cover was the familiar picture of the
Titanic
, its stern out of the water, propellers dripping and unlikely smoke still coming out of her funnels, poised for the final plunge, her lights still blazing.

“Did you know the band played right up till the very end?” Maisie asked.

“Yes,” Joanna said, thinking, I never should have mentioned the
Titanic
to her. “They played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ”

“Huh-unh,” Maisie said. “Nobody knows for sure what they played. Some people think it was ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ and some people think it was this other song, ‘Autumn.’ But nobody knows for sure, ’cause they all died.”

“Your teacher brought you all these books?” Joanna asked to change the subject.

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said, digging under the covers again. “She brought me a lot more, but some of them were little-kids’ books. Did you know there’s a
Titanic
ABC book?” she said, disgusted.

“No,” Joanna said, glad that it was possible to offend even Maisie’s sensibilities. She wondered what the letters stood for. I is for Iceberg? L is for Lorraine Allison? D is for Drowning?

“Do you know what they had for F?” Maisie said contemptuously. “First-Class Dining Saloon.”

“What should they have had?” Joanna said, almost afraid to ask.

Maisie gave her a withering look. “F is for
French bulldog.
You know, the one I told you about. Did you know there was this little girl who played with it on the Promenade Deck all the time?”

“Maisie—”

“There’s a
Titanic
pop-up book, too,” Maisie said. “I made Ms. Sutterly take those back to the library, but these have lots of stuff in them, so now if you need me to help with your research, I can,” she said, still breathless. With the exertion of digging for the books? Or with something else? Not only was she retaining fluid, but her lips looked bluer than usual, and
when she inhaled, Joanna could hear a faint catch, like the beginning of a wheeze. She’s getting worse, Joanna thought, watching her leaf through the book.