Passage (69 page)

“I saw Mr. Briarley again.” She told him about the trip to the mail room, the rockets, the elevator. “And when he opened the door I stepped through it before I realized it was the passage,” she said. “That’s why I was afraid I’d kicked out, because it felt the same as last time.”

“And you didn’t feel any fear?”

“I did when I saw the water in Scotland Road and when I saw the mail room was awash,” she said, trying to remember. She had been so intent on finding Mr. Briarley and asking him what the NDE meant, she hadn’t felt much fear, certainly not when compared to what she’d felt when she’d looked at the stain from the mailbag, when she’d looked over the side of the ship down into nothingness.

“Was my cortisol higher than the last two times?” she asked.

“I haven’t looked at the neurotransmitter analysis yet, but
going by the scans, yes. You were more frightened those times?”

She thought of her panicked flight down the stairs, along the deck, into the passage. “Yes.”

“I was afraid of that,” he said and went over to the console.

Joanna dressed quickly. “I’m going to go record my account,” she said, “I’ll be back at three,” and hurried down to her office before he could ask her anything else. She needed to think about the NDE before she lost the feeling of almost, almost knowing the answer. It was something about the rockets, and Mr. Briarley setting them off.

She went through the scene again, trying to remember Mr. Briarley’s exact words. “Step back,” he had said, and the rocket had shot up and burst into white stars—

She recorded the scene and then went back to the beginning and did the whole NDE, trying to hold on to the feeling. Something about the rockets, though they weren’t a discrepancy, unless the ones she’d seen were different from the ones on the
Titanic.

She called Kit and asked her what the emergency rockets had looked like. “White fireworks,” Kit said. “I remember Uncle Pat saying white was the color of the international distress signal, and there was a scene of them being fired in the movie.”

Of course. She remembered it. The officer had leaned the cylinder against the railing. “Anything else?” Kit asked.

“Yes. I want to know if there was something called Scotland Road on the ship. It would have been a long passage down on” —she tried to think which deck it was on—“E or F Deck. And also whether there was a library on board. It would have been on the Promenade Deck, next to a bar. And anything about what the rockets looked like and where they were kept.”

“Scotland Road, library, rockets. Okay,” Kit said. “Oh, and if you have a minute, I’ve got a list of Ediths who were on board. I’ve found four. I’m not sure that’s all. The crew are only listed by an initial and a last name, and some of the passengers are only down as Mrs. Somebody.”

“How many were lost? Of the four?”

“Only Edith Evans.”

Joanna went back to the NDE. Not the rockets, but something in that part of the NDE. The elevator? That was definitely a discrepancy. They hadn’t had elevators in 1912, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have had one on board a ship. And she had murmured, “Elevator,” when she was coming out.

She called Kit again. The phone was busy. She glanced at her watch. A quarter past two. Not enough time to run over there before Mr. Sage’s session. But she needed to know
now
, before she lost the feeling. It would have to be Maisie.

She ran upstairs, hoping Maisie wasn’t down for tests. She was lying in bed, listlessly watching
Winnie the Pooh.
As soon as she saw Joanna, she pushed herself up higher against the pillows and said, “I found out about the
Carpathia.”

“Good,” Joanna said. “I need to ask you something. Did the
Titanic
have an elevator?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. “Don’t you remember, in the movie, they were running away from the bad guy and they got in the elevator and went down?”

“I thought your mother hadn’t let you see
Titanic.”

“I didn’t. My friend that I told you about that saw it, she told me about that part,” she said, and it was a very convincing story, even though Joanna didn’t believe it for a minute.

“Did your friend tell you what the elevator looked like?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. “It had one of those accordion things across it that you pull.” She demonstrated.

The grille. So the
Titanic
had had an elevator, and it wasn’t a discrepancy. She could imagine what Richard would say when he found out. She’d have to hope when she did her account, there was some other discrepancy in her NDE, and she’d better go do that now, before she forgot what Mr. Briarley said. “I gotta go, kiddo,” she said, patting the covers over Maisie’s knees.

“You
can’t,”
Maisie said. “I haven’t told you about the
Carpathia
yet. And I have to ask you a question. How fast do ships go?”

“How fast?” The
Titanic
had been going much too fast for the ice warnings, she knew that, but how fast was that? “I don’t know.”

“’cause in my book it said the
Carpathia
came really fast, but this other book said it was fifty-eight miles away—”

“Fifty-eight?” Joanna said. “The
Carpathia
was
fifty-eight
miles away?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. “And it took her three hours to get there. The
Titanic
had already sunk
ages
before. So I don’t think it could’ve been very fast ’cause fifty-eight miles isn’t very far to come.”

W
HAT’S WRONG
?” Maisie asked, looking at Joanna alertly. “Are you okay?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Joanna said. “You’re right. Fifty-eight miles doesn’t sound all that far. How far away was the
Californian?”
Fifty-eight miles. That day in the ER, he was talking about the
Carpathia.

“You looked really funny when I told you how far away it was,” Maisie said. “Did one of your near-death people see the
Carpathia?”

“No. How far away was the
Californian?”

“It was really close,” she said, still looking suspicious. “It saw their rockets and everything, it could have saved them probably, only it turned off its wireless, so it didn’t hear any of their SOSs, and it didn’t even know what happened till the next morning.”

Joanna wasn’t listening. He was trying to tell me the
Carpathia
was too far away, that it would never get there in time.

“I don’t think they should’ve done that,” Maisie said. “Turned off their wireless. Do you?”

“No,” Joanna said. That’s why Greg’s words haunted me so, why I kept feeling I knew what they meant. They meant he was on the
Titanic.

“It was
really
close,” Maisie said. “I mean, the people on the
Titanic
saw its lights. They told the lifeboats to try to row to it.”

“I need to go,” Joanna said, and stood up.

“I won’t talk about the
Titanic
anymore, I promise. I’ll just talk about the Hartford circus fire, okay?” Maisie went on rapidly, “The people tried to get out the main entrance, but the cage for the lions and tigers was in the way and they got all jammed up against it, and the ringmaster kept trying to tell
them to go out the performers’ entrance—that’s where all the clowns and acrobats and stuff come in when it’s time for their acts—but they just kept trying to go out the way they came in.”

She’d convinced herself the
Titanic
wasn’t real, that it was a symbol for something, an image her mind had chosen because of something Mr. Briarley had said. But what if it wasn’t?

“The thing was, they didn’t have to go out the entrances,” Maisie said. “They could have just lifted up the tent and crawled under it.”

The mail room, the aft staircase, Scotland Road, were all in the right place. They all looked exactly the way they really had, even the red-and-blue arrows on the stationary bicycles. Because you were really there. Because it was really the
Titanic.

But how can it be? Joanna thought desperately. The NDE isn’t a doorway into an afterlife or another time. It’s a chemical hallucination. It’s an amalgam of images out of long-term memory. But Greg had said, “Fifty-eight,” and it wasn’t an address, it wasn’t a blood pressure reading. It was miles, and he had been talking about the
Carpathia.

I have to get out of here, Joanna thought. I have to get somewhere where I can think about this. She started blindly for the door.

“You can’t go
yet
,” Maisie pleaded. “I haven’t told you about the band yet.”

“I have to,” Joanna said, desperate, and like the answer to a prayer, her pager went off. “See? They’re paging me.”

“You can call them on my phone if you want,” Maisie said. “It might not be your patient. Or it might be them saying they have to go down to Radiology so you don’t need to come right now.”

Joanna shook her head. “I have to go, and you need to—”

“Rest,”
Maisie said mockingly. “I hate resting. Can’t I do some research? Please? It doesn’t make me tired at all, and I promise I won’t—”

“All right,” Joanna said, and Maisie immediately leaned over and got her tablet and pencil out. “I need you to” —she cast about for something harmless—“make a list of all the wireless messages the
Titanic
sent.”

“You said you just wanted the names of the
ships.”

“I did,” Joanna said, trying not to sound as desperate as she felt, “but now I want to know what the messages were.”

“Okay. What else?”

What else? “And where the swimming pool was.”

“Swimming pool? On a
ship?”

“Yes. I want to know what deck it was on.” While Maisie was writing it down, she made it to the door.

“All the wireless messages or just the ones calling for help?” Maisie asked.

“Just the ones calling for help. Now I
have
to answer my page,” she said and went out. And since it was impossible to get anything past Maisie, she walked down to the nurses’ station and called the switchboard to see who’d paged her.

“You have four messages,” the operator said. “Mr. Mandrake wants you to call him, it’s very important. Dr. Wright wants you to call him about Mr. Sage’s session. Vielle Howard wants you to call her when you have time, she’s in the ER, and Kit Gardiner wants you to call her right away. She says it’s urgent. Do you want me to connect you with Mr. Mandrake’s office?”

“No,” Joanna said and pressed down the button to break the connection. She didn’t want to be connected with anyone, least of all Mr. Mandrake. But not Vielle either, or Richard-oh, God, Richard! What would he say if she told him Greg Menotti had been on the
Titanic?

I have to get somewhere where I can think about all this, she thought, and started to put down the receiver, and then thought, Kit said it was urgent. What if Mr. Briarley had hurt himself again? She dialed Kit’s number. “Hi, Kit?”

“I am so glad you called,” Kit said. “I’ve got it!”

“Got it?”

“The book!
Mazes and Mirrors.
I’m sure it’s the right one,” she said excitedly. “It has a homework assignment in it dated October 14, 1987. You’ll never guess where I found it. Inside the pressure cooker. I think that was why Uncle Pat kept taking everything out of the cupboards. I can’t wait for you to see it. Can you come over this afternoon?”

No, Joanna thought. Not until I’ve figured this out. “I’m pretty busy,” she said.

“Oh,” Kit said, sounding disappointed. “I’d bring it over to the hospital, but Uncle Pat’s having a bad day—”

“No, I don’t want you to have to do that. I’ll come by tonight,” she said and hung up quickly. She’d call Kit later and make some excuse for why she couldn’t come.

I can’t come because I’ve been traveling back in time to a sinking ship, she thought wildly. Or how about, I can’t come because I’ve turned into an NDE nutcase?

“Oh, Dr. Lander, you
are
here,” a nurse’s aide she vaguely recognized said. “Mr. Mandrake’s looking for you. Barbara said you weren’t on the floor, and that’s what I told him.”

Bless Barbara, Joanna thought, looking anxiously in the direction of the elevator. “When was he here?” she asked.

“About ten minutes ago. He said if I saw you, to tell you to call him immediately, that he’d found proof that near-death experiences are real.”

So have I, Joanna thought bleakly. “Did he say where he was going?” she asked the aide.

“Hunh-unh. I can page him,” she said, reaching for the phone.

“No! That’s okay,” Joanna said. “It’ll be faster just to go up to his office,” she said, and started toward the door to the stairs.

“Those stairs don’t go up to seventh,” the aide called after her.

“Shortcut,” Joanna said, pushing open the door.

“Oh,” the aide nodded, and Joanna made her escape. But to where? she thought, clattering down the steps. She couldn’t go back to her office or the lab, and with him roaming the halls, nowhere was safe. And I cannot,
cannot
stand to see him right now, she thought, and listen to him prattling on about heaven and happily ever after.