Passage (73 page)

One o’clock tomorrow. And until then . . . Joanna stuck Amelia’s disk in the computer and started through her transcript,
looking for clues. There weren’t any. Warmth, peace, a bright light, nothing at all about water or an up-curving floor or people standing out on the deck.

No, wait. She had said, when Joanna asked her if the light had been there all the time, “ . . . not till after they opened the door.” Later, she had amended it to, “I just assumed somebody had opened a door because of the way the light spilled in,” but Joanna wondered if the first version was the true one.

She read the rest of it. When she had asked Amelia her feelings, she had said, “Calm, quiet,” which might be a reference to the engines stopping, and she had complained after each session of being cold. All of which proved exactly nothing, except that you could find anything you tried to look for in an NDE, just like Mr. Mandrake.

She took out Amelia’s disk, put in one of last year’s interviews, printed out half a dozen files, and started through them with a yellow marker, highlighting words and phrases. “I was lying in the ambulance, and all of a sudden I was out of my body. It was like there was a porthole in my body, and my soul just shot out of it.” Joanna highlighted the word
porthole
in yellow.

“I felt like I was going on a long voyage.”

“ . . . light all around,” Kathie Holbeck had said, looking up at the ceiling, and spread her hands out like a flower opening. Or a rocket going off. Ms. Isakson had done that, too. Joanna looked up her file. “All spangled,” she’d said. Like the starburst of a rocket.

“My father was there, and I was so glad to see him. He was killed in the Solomons. On a PT boat.”

Joanna tapped her marker thoughtfully on that one, thinking about Mr. Wojakowski and all his
Yorktown
stories. Could he have been reminded of them because he’d been on a ship?

Mr. Wojakowski wasn’t reminded of anything, she thought. He made it all up. And even if he had been, it was hardly the sort of proof she could offer to Richard. She continued through the transcripts:

“I heard a sound, but it was funny, like not really a sound at all, you know what I mean?”

“It sounded exactly like something rolling over a whole bunch of marbles.” Marbles. She found Kit’s notes of the engines stopping. And there it was. “It was as if the ship had rolled over a thousand marbles,” passenger Ella White had said when asked what the iceberg sounded like.

Joanna started through the transcripts again. “I was traveling through the tunnel, very fast, but smooth, like being in an elevator.”

“I knew I was crossing the River Jordan.”

She hadn’t lied to Vielle when she’d said she wouldn’t get home before ten. At half-past nine she was still only halfway through the set of interviews. She shut the computer off, pulled on her coat, and then sat down, still in her coat, and switched it on again.

She saved all of her interviews from the past two years onto a single file and then typed in “water” and hit “global search” and “display,” and watched them come up.

“I felt like I was floating in the water.”

“The light was warm and glimmery, like being underwater.”

“ . . . being at the lake” (this from Pauline Underhill’s description of her life review), “where we used to go when I was little. I was in our old rowboat, and it was leaking, the water was coming in the side . . . ”

Rowing on the lake, Joanna thought, and called up Coma Carl’s file, with its long list of isolated words and (unintelligible)’s.

“Water,” and “placket” or “blanked out” or “black.” Or “blanket,” Joanna thought. She read through the rest of his file. “Dark” and “patches” and “cut the rope.” Cut the rope. The men up on top of the officers’ quarters, trying to cut the collapsibles loose as the water came up over the bow. She read on. “Water . . . cold? code? . . . oh, grand.” The Grand Staircase.

She quit at one o’clock, went home, and read
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
till she fell asleep, dog-earing pages that had NDEs that mentioned “water” and “voyage” and “darkness.”

In the morning, she went to see Coma Carl, hoping he might have begun talking again, but he had a feeding tube in
and an oxygen mask. “He’s not having a very good day,” Mrs. Aspinall whispered, which was putting it mildly. He was a corpselike gray, and his thin chest, his skeletal arms and legs, seemed to be sinking into the bed, into death itself.

“They can’t seem to keep his temperature down,” Mrs. Aspinall said, sounding near tears. She looked terrible, too. Dark gray shadows under her eyes and a general look of exhaustion. A pillow and a hospital blanket were stacked neatly on the windowsill, which meant that she was sleeping in the room. And getting no sleep at all.

“You look tired,” Joanna said. “Would you like to go get a cup of coffee, or lie down in the waiting room? I’ll sit with him.”

“No, he might . . . no,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “I’m fine. Thank you, though. It’s very kind of you.” She looked at Carl. “He’s stopped talking. Of course, he can’t talk with the feeding tube in, but he doesn’t even try to make sounds anymore. He just lies there,” her voice broke, “so still in the bed.”

But he’s not in the bed, Joanna thought, and remembered standing beside his bed the day she’d met Richard, thinking he was somewhere far away. She wondered where. At the foot of the Grand Staircase, waiting for his boat to be called? Or in one of the lifeboats, rowing against the darkness and the cold?

She moved around to the side of the bed. “Carl,” she said, and covered his poor, battered hand with hers. “I came to see how you were doing,” she said, and then stopped, unable to think of anything at all to say. “Get well” ? He obviously wasn’t going to. “The doctor says you’re doing fine” ?

Maisie had said, “I think people should tell you the truth even when it’s bad.” Or even when they’re too far away to hear you. “Your wife’s here,” Joanna said. “The nurses are taking really good care of you. We all want you to come back to us.”

Behind her, Mrs. Aspinall was fumbling in her purse for a Kleenex. Joanna leaned over and kissed him on his papery cheek. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, and went back up to her office and started through the transcripts again.

“I don’t think it was the same tunnel,” Mrs. Woollam had said. “It was narrow, and the floor was uneven, so I had trouble
walking.” And she had seen a stairway, and a dark open space with nothing around for miles.

But she had also seen a garden, “green and white, with vines all around.” And there was Maisie, who hadn’t seen lights or people dressed in white, but fog.

At half-past one, Joanna left for the university to see Amelia, leaving plenty of time to find the building and the room, remembering what a nightmare parking usually was, but the bad weather must have kept a lot of the students home. She found a parking place in the very first row.

Movie parking, she thought, I’ll have to tell Vielle. But Vielle would ask, “What were you doing at the university?” And if I told her, Joanna thought, she’d accuse me of stalking Amelia. Which is what I’m doing, she thought, standing outside the door of the classroom, waiting for her to come out. Amelia quit the project, and she made it plain she didn’t want to talk to me. I have no right to be here.

But when Amelia came out, toting her backpack, pulling on her mittens, Joanna went up to her and said, “Amelia? Is there somewhere we can talk for a few minutes?” before she could bolt. Which, after a terrified glance at Joanna, she had looked like she was going to do, taking a caged glance around as if trying to find a stairway to duck into. That’s what I look like whenever I see Mr. Mandrake, Joanna thought, and wondered if Amelia put her in the same category. Was that a possibility, that Amelia had quit not because she had seen something that frightened her, but because she thought of the project as pseudoscience?

That might be it, because, when they got to the cafeteria, which was, astonishingly, open in the middle of the afternoon, and Joanna asked Amelia if she could get her a Coke or coffee, Amelia said, “I have a class in a few minutes,” which Joanna knew was a blatant lie.

“This will only take a few minutes,” Joanna said, opening a notebook. “I just need to complete your exit interview,” which sounded, she hoped, official and required. “You were with the project how long?”

“Four weeks,” Amelia said.

Joanna wrote that down. “Reason for quitting?”

“I told you, my classes are really hard this semester. I just didn’t have time.”

“Okay,” Joanna said, as if consulting a list of questions. “The first session you had that I was there, that would be your third session, you said that you felt a sense of warmth and peace.”

“Yes,” she said, but this time there was no half-smile as she remembered. Her hands clenched.

“And your last session you said you could see more clearly, that you saw people standing in the light, but you couldn’t make them out.”

“No, the light was too bright.”

“Could you see anything of your surroundings?”

“No,” she said, and her hands clenched again. She seemed to become aware of it and laid them in her lap.

“How did you feel during that fourth session?”

“I told you, I had a feeling of peace. Look, are there any more questions? I have a class I have to get to.”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “Were your classes the only reason you quit?”

“I
told
you—”

“I got the idea that you might have seen something in that last session that frightened you. Did you?”

“No,” Amelia said, and stood up. “I told you, I’ve got really hard classes this semester. Is that all?”

“I need you to sign this,” Joanna said, and pushed the paper and a pen at her. Amelia bent over the form, her long black hair swinging forward over her face. “If you did see something frightening, I need you to tell me. It’s important.”

Amelia straightened. “All I saw was a light,” she said. She handed Joanna back the pen with an air of finality and picked up her backpack. “I felt warm and peaceful.” She slung the heavy backpack onto her shoulders and looked challengingly at Joanna. “There wasn’t anything frightening about it at all.”

Which proved exactly nothing, Joanna thought, watching her make her way out of the crowded cafeteria, except that she didn’t want to talk to me. It certainly didn’t prove that she
had seen the
Titanic.
But she had. And she was terrified at the prospect of being sent under again, which was why she had quit.

But it was scarcely proof, and neither was a scattering of words and phrases in her interviews. “The word
silver
appears in the interviews, too,” she could hear Richard saying. “That doesn’t mean they saw the
Hindenburg.”
He was right. Even the Devil could quote Scripture, and sifting through interviews and taking only the parts that fit your theory was Mr. Mandrake’s modus operandi, not a reputable scientist’s, especially when there were things that didn’t fit at all, like Mrs. Woollam’s garden and Maisie’s fog.

I need evidence, she thought. The testimony of witnesses, but there weren’t any—except herself—and Richard had already rejected that. Amelia refused to testify, Mrs. Troudtheim refused even to go under, and Carl Aspinall was in a coma. There was Mr. Briarley, but why on earth would Richard believe the ramblings of an Alzheimer’s patient, even if she could get Mr. Briarley to repeat them? There must be some outside confirmation she could get, like the facts about Midway and the Coral Sea that she had used to prove Mr. Wojakowski was lying.

As if she had conjured him up, or, worse, was hallucinating, she saw Mr. Wojakowski coming toward her across the cafeteria, carrying his baseball cap in his hand and smiling broadly. “Hiya, Doc, what are you doing here?” he said. “Ain’t you supposed to be at the hospital?”

“What am
I
doing here?” Joanna said. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Art show,” he said and grimaced. “Damn modern stuff made out of wires and toilet seats. Aspen Gardens brought a bunch of us over in a van to see it.” He waved his cap in the direction of the serving line, where Joanna saw several blue-haired ladies getting coffee. “Did you get that schedule worked out yet?”

“No,” Joanna said. “Not yet.”

“I figured that. I been calling you and the doc all week. I was starting to feel like Norm Pichette. Thought I was going to have to get me a machine gun.”

Joanna looked at him, startled, but he was grinning amiably at her.

“I guess I never told you about how he got accidentally left behind when we abandoned the
Yorktown.
He was down in sick bay, and when he wakes up, there’s nobody on board but him and George Weise, who’s got a skull fracture and who’s out cold. Well, everybody’s already been transferred to the
Hammann
and the
Hughes.”

He can’t be making it up, Joanna thought all over again. Not with all these details. Part of it has to be true.

“He calls over to us, but we can’t hear him, we’re too far away. Well, he tries everything—he hollers and waves his arms.” Mr. Wojakowski demonstrated, waving his arms over his head like a semaphore. “He even gets a stew pot out of the galley and bangs on it, but we’re too far away and there’s too much going on. So there he is, on a ship that’s going down and no way to get a message to anybody.”

“Mr. Wojakowski—” she said, but he was off again.

“So what does he do? He takes a machine gun and fires it into the water. We’re too far away to hear it, but Meatball Fratelli sees the splashes in the water and shouts, ‘Sub!’ and everybody looks, but we can’t figure out what it is. It’s not a sub, and it doesn’t act like a depth charge, and then I look up, and there he is, standing on the port catwalk. Pretty smart of him, huh, figuring out a way to get a message to us like that?”

“Mr. Wojakowski, I have a question I need to ask you.”

“Ed.”

Why am I asking this? she thought. It will just remind him of another
Yorktown
story, and even if he did answer it, Richard would hardly believe someone who was a compulsive liar.

“Go ahead, Doc, shoot,” Mr. Wojakowski said.