Passage (35 page)

Except that the ER staff didn’t wear white, they wore green
or blue or pink scrubs, and the trauma rooms weren’t numbered C8, C10, C12. C. What did C stand for?

Confabulation, she thought. Stop thinking about it. Get busy, which turned out to be easier than she thought. The torrent of NDEs continued for several days, and Joanna dutifully interviewed every one, though they didn’t prove all that useful. They were uniformly unable to describe what they’d experienced, as if ineffability had infected every aspect of their NDE: the length of time they’d been there, the manner of their return, the things they’d seen, including angels.

“They looked like angels,” Mr. Torres said irritably when Joanna asked him to describe the figures he’d seen standing in the light, and when she asked him if he could be more specific, “Haven’t you ever seen an angel?”

I need to talk to someone intelligent, Joanna thought, and went down to the ER, but they were swamped. “Head-on between a church bus and a semi,” Vielle said briefly and ran off to meet a gurney being brought in by the paramedics. “I’ll call you.”

“Forget about this one,” the resident said. “She’s DOA.”

Dead on arrival. Arrival where? Joanna wondered, and went up to see Mrs. Woollam. She’d promised her she’d visit again, and she wanted to ask her if she’d ever seen people in the garden or on the staircase.

Mrs. Woollam wasn’t there, and it was obvious she hadn’t been taken somewhere for tests. The bed was crisply made up, with a blanket folded across the foot and a folded hospital gown lying on top of it. Her insurance must have run out, Joanna thought, disappointed, and walked down to the nurses’ station. “Did you move Mrs. Woollam to another room, or did she go home?” she asked a nurse she didn’t know.

The nurse looked up, startled, and then reassured at the sight of Joanna’s hospital ID, and Joanna knew instantly what she was going to say. “Mrs. Woollam died early this morning.”

I hope she wasn’t afraid, Joanna thought, remembering her clutching her Bible to her frail chest like a shield. “She went very quietly, while she was reading her Bible,” the nurse was saying. “She had such a peaceful expression.”

Good, Joanna thought, and hoped she was in the beautiful,
beautiful garden. She went back to the door of the room and stood there, imagining Mrs. Woollam lying there, her white hair spread out against the pillow, the Bible lying open where it had fallen from her frail hands.

I hope it’s all true, Joanna thought, the light and the angels and the shining figure of Christ. For her sake, I hope it’s all true, and went back up to the lab. But Richard was busy working on Mrs. Troudtheim’s scans, and there were all those tapes to be transcribed and two NDEers she hadn’t interviewed. She got some blank tapes from her office and went down to see Ms. Pekish.

She was almost as uncommunicative as Mr. Sage, which was actually a blessing. The effort to get answers out of her kept her from thinking about Mrs. Woollam, alone somewhere in the dark. Not alone, she corrected herself. Mrs. Woollam had been sure Jesus would be with her.

“And then I saw my life,” Ms. Pekish said.

“Can you be more specific?” Joanna asked.

Ms. Pekish frowned in concentration. “Things that happened.”

“Can you tell me what some of those events were?”

She shook her head. “It all happened pretty fast.”

She was equally vague when it came to describing the light, and she wouldn’t even venture a guess as to the sound. Ms. Grant, at least, did. “It sounded like music,” she said, her thin face uplifted as if she were hearing it right then. “Heavenly music.”

Ms. Grant had coded during stem cell replacement therapy for her lung cancer. She was bald and had the drawn, concentration-camp look of late-stage cancer. Joanna was surprised she was willing to talk about her experience, but when Joanna handed her the release form—her last one, she needed to pick up some more from the office—she signed it eagerly.

“It was beautiful there,” she said before Joanna could ask her anything. “There was light all around me, and I felt no fear, just peace.”

She had obviously had the classic kind of positive NDE Mr. Mandrake claimed proved there was a heaven, and Joanna couldn’t help being glad.

“I was standing in a doorway,” Ms. Grant said, “and beyond it I could see a beautiful place, all white and gold and sparkling lights. I wanted to go there, but I couldn’t. A voice said, ‘You are not allowed on this side.’ ”

That was classic, too. NDEers frequently talked about wanting to ‘cross over’ and being told they couldn’t, or being stopped by a barrier—a gate or a threshold of some kind. Mrs. Jarvis, the first NDEer she had ever interviewed, had told her, “I knew the bridge divided the land of the living from the land of the dead,” and Mr. Olivetti had said, “I knew if I went through that gate, I could never come back.”

“And then I was back here,” Ms. Grant said, indicating her hospital bed, “and they were working on me.”

“You said you heard music,” Joanna said. “Can you be more specific? Voices? Instruments?”

“No voices,” Ms. Grant said, “just music. Beautiful, beautiful music.”

“When did you hear it?”

“It was there the whole time, till the very end,” Ms. Grant said, “all around me, like the light and the feeling of peace.”

“I think that’s everything,” Joanna said and shut her notebook. She reached to turn off the recorder.

“What have other people said they saw?” Ms. Grant asked.

Joanna looked up, wondering if she had another Mr. Funderburk on her hands, determined to get everything she was entitled to. “I don’t usually—”

“Have they seen a place like that, white and gold and full of lights?” Ms. Grant asked, and her voice was more agitated than eager. Joanna glanced at the IV bags, thinking, I need to check and see what drugs she’s on.

“Have they?” Ms. Grant insisted.

“Yes, some subjects have talked about seeing a beautiful place,” Joanna said carefully.

“Do they say what happens next if you don’t come back?” she asked, and it wasn’t agitation in her voice, it was fear. Joanna wondered if she should call the nurse. “Does anybody ever talk about bad things happening to them there?”

“Did you see something that frightened you?” Joanna asked.

“No,” she said, and then, as if Joanna’s question had
reassured her, “No. It was all beautiful. The light and the music and the feeling of peace. I didn’t feel any fear at all while I was there, just calmness and peace.”

And, afterward, dread, Joanna thought, on her way back up to her office. “And how can we not be afraid of death?” Mrs. Woollam had said. Joanna pushed open the door to the third-floor walkway to the main building. It was dark out, the wide windows reflecting blackness. What time was it, anyway? She glanced at her watch. Six-thirty, and she still had all these NDEs to write up.

The glassed-in walkway was freezing. She pulled her cardigan around her and started across the walkway.

She stopped. Something about the walkway reminded her of the tunnel. What? Not the sound of a heater shutting off, since it obviously hadn’t been on in here all day, and anyway, there was a low hum from the hospital’s generating plant across the way.

And this feeling wasn’t the overwhelming sense of knowing she had had before. It was less intense, like seeing someone who reminded you of someone else. The walkway’s like the tunnel, she thought, but how? The walkway was wider and higher than the hallway and the hallway was lined with doors, not windows.

It’s something about the floor, Joanna thought, suddenly certain. But this one was nothing at all like the floor in the tunnel. It was tiled in nondescript gray tiles speckled with pink and yellow.

It’s not this walkway, she thought, squinting at the tiles, but it’s a walkway here in the hospital, a walkway I’ve been in. But none of the walkways had a wooden floor. The one on second was carpeted, and the ones that led over to the east wing were tiled, too. Only the Sloper Institute building was old enough that it had wooden floors, but the basement walkway that led under the street to it was all concrete.

But it’s one of them, she thought, hurrying the rest of the way across the walkway, through the door, and down the corridor to the elevator. It was just opening, and empty. She pressed “two” and leaned back against the wall, her eyes closed, trying to remember which one it was, trying to visualize
their floors. The third-floor walkway had beige tile and was lower by half a step than the corridors at either end. The carpet in the second-floor walkway was blue, no, blue-green—

I shouldn’t be doing this, Joanna thought, opening her eyes, I should go straight up to the lab. Richard said if I had the feeling of significance again to go right to the lab so he could capture it on the RIPT. She reached forward to press the button for six, and then let her hand fall. The numbers above the door blinked “two,” and she walked quickly down the corridor to the walkway. She knew instantly, looking at the well-worn carpet, which was dark plum, that it wasn’t the right one either.

Yes, well, and you knew the carpet was blue-green, too, she thought, retracing her steps, and how do you know that this compulsion to find out isn’t the result of temporal-lobe stimulation? But when the elevator came, she pressed “three” and got out at third to go look at the west-wing walkway.

This part of the hospital was all newly carpeted in heather gray, with color-coded lines showing the way to outpatient surgery and the urology clinic and X-ray, down the length of the long hallway. “Just follow the yellow brick road,” she’d heard a nurse tell a patient one day when she was taking a shortcut up to Coma Carl’s. She followed the red line—how appropriate!—to outpatient surgery and turned left, hoping the recarpeting hadn’t extended as far as the walkway.

It hadn’t, but the painting had. The half-open door to the walkway was blocked off not only by yellow crime-scene tape, but also by two orange traffic cones, and, when she sidled around them to look through the door, its entire length was swathed in plastic drop cloths. “You can’t get through that way,” a passing orderly told her. “You have to go up to fifth and over.”

Good old Mercy General, Joanna thought. You can’t get there from here. The nearest elevator was all the way down at the end of outpatient surgery. She took the stairs instead, hoping she didn’t encounter any more paint or tape. She didn’t, and, amazingly, Maintenance wasn’t doing both walkways at the same time.

She opened the door and went in. She knew before she’d
come five steps that it wasn’t this one either. The floor was tiled with alternating black and white squares, like a checkerboard, and the angle where they met at the bottom of the door was perfectly square. But so was the one in the tunnel, she thought, stepping back to look at the end of the walkway. It didn’t curve. Why did I think it curved? Perspective caused the rows of black and white tiles to seem to narrow at the far end, making the walkway appear longer than it was. Like the tunnel? It had seemed impossibly long, but could that have been some trick of perspective?

She squatted down, squinting at the place where the door and the tiles met. Was it something about the wooden boards as the perspective narrowed them that made the floor look curved? No, not curved—

“Lose something?” someone said, standing over her.

She looked up. It was Barbara. “Just my mind,” Joanna said and stood up, dusting off her hands. “What are you doing over here?”

Barbara held out two cans of Pepsi and a Snickers bar. “The vending machines in our wing are all out. This is dinner. I’m glad I ran into you. I wanted to tell you Maisie Nellis went into V-fib again this afternoon—”

“Is she all right?” Joanna cut in.

Barbara nodded, and Joanna’s heart started beating again. “She was only out a few seconds, and it doesn’t look like there was any major damage. I left a message on your answering machine.”

“I haven’t been in my office since early this morning.”

“I figured as much,” Barbara said. “I’d have paged you if it looked bad.”

I had my pager off, Joanna thought guiltily.

“Anyway, Maisie’s up in CICU, and she wants to see you. I have to get back,” she said, twisting the hand holding the two Pepsis around so she could see her watch.

“I’ll come with you,” Joanna said, pushing the walkway door open for her. “Can she have visitors?”

“If she’s still awake.”

“What time is it?” Joanna said, looking at her watch as they started down the hall. A quarter to nine. She’d been stalking
obsessively around the hospital for nearly two hours, oblivious to everything and everybody, while Maisie—

The feeling of nearly knowing washed over her abruptly, almost sickeningly, and she glanced instinctively at the floor, at the end of the hall, but there was no door there, only a bank of telephones. And that wasn’t it. It was something to do with what she’d just been thinking, about her being oblivious to what was happening, and having her pager off, and—

“Are you all right?” Barbara said, looking at her worriedly, and she realized she’d stopped short, her hand to her stomach. “Maisie’s okay, really. I didn’t mean to scare you like that. I know how attached you are to her. She’s fine. She was regaling Paula with stories about Mount Vesuvius when I left. I’ll bet you didn’t have dinner either. Here.” Barbara popped open one of the Pepsis and handed it to her. “Your blood sugar’s probably even lower than mine. That cafeteria should be taken out and shot.”

It was gone, as suddenly as it had come, and if she went straight up to the lab right now, the traces would surely show up on her RIPT, it had been so strong. But she had already let Maisie down once today. She wasn’t about to do it again.

She took a grateful swig of the Pepsi. “You’re right,” she said. “I haven’t had anything since this morning.” She immediately felt better. And maybe it was just low blood sugar, she thought as they went down to Peds, combined with worry over Maisie.

And there was certainly reason to worry. “The doctors can’t keep her stabilized,” Barbara told her in the elevator. “They’ve put her on stronger and stronger antiarrhythmics, which all have serious liver and kidney side effects, but nothing seems to be working. Except in Mrs. Nellis’s mind, where everything’s wonderful, Maisie’s getting better every day, and her coding is just a little blip. That’s what she called it,” she said disgustedly. “A little blip.”