“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.
“So, do you want me to look up something for you?” Maisie said.
“I think right now I want you to just read about the Titanic, so when I have questions, you’ll be ready to answer them. And I want you resting and doing everything the doctors and nurses tell you.” She began stacking up the books. “Where do you want these?”
“In my Barbie bag in the closet,” she said, “except for this one.” She grabbed a tall red book called The Child’s Titanic.
Joanna put the rest in the pink duffel bag and shoved it out of sight on the side of the closet. “Now I’ve got to go see my patient,” she said. “I’ll come see you soon, kiddo,” and started out of the room.
“Wait!” Maisie said before she’d taken two steps. “I have to ask you something.” She paused for breath, and Joanna heard the wheezing catch in her breath again. “What happens if your bracelet gets too tight?” She held out her puffy wrist with the plastic ID bracelet on it.
“Barbara will just cut it off and make a bigger one,” Joanna said. Was she worried about getting puffier? The bracelet wasn’t even snug, let alone pressing into the flesh.
“What if after they cut it off something bad happens,” Maisie said, “like a disaster, and they can’t put another one on?”
Had she been thinking about the abandoned gold bracelet they’d found in the ruins of Pompeii? “There won’t be a disaster,” Joanna started to say, and then decided not to. “I’ll tell Barbara if she has to cut this one off, she should put the new one on first,” she said. “All right?”
“Did you know the firemen go visit her grave every year?” Maisie said.
“Who?”
“The little girl,” Maisie said, as if it were obvious. “From the Hartford circus fire. They go put flowers on it every year. Do you think maybe her mother died?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said. The mother’s dying in the fire, too, would explain why no one had come forward to identify the little girl, but all the other bodies had been identified, and if someone had identified the mother, why not the child? “I don’t know.”
“The firemen buried her in the cemetery, and every year they go put flowers on her grave,” Maisie said. “They put up a tombstone and everything. It says ‘Little Miss 1565’ on it and the year she died and stuff, but it’s not the same as a name.”
“No,” Joanna said. “It’s not.”
“I mean, at least all the little kids on the Titanic, they knew who they were, Lorraine Allison and Beatrice Sandstrom and Nina Harper and-is Sigrid a boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
“And Sigrid Anderson. Of course they didn’t have tombstones, but if they did—”
“Maisie—”
“Can you put in a video?” Maisie said, lying back against the pillows.
“Sure. Which one? Winnie the Pooh?” Joanna said, reading out titles. “The Wizard of Oz? Alice in Wonderland?”
“The Wizard of Oz,” Maisie said.
“That’s a good one,” Joanna said, sliding it in and pushing “play.”
Maisie nodded. “I like the tornado.” Of course, Joanna thought. What was I thinking?
“And the part where the hourglass is running out,” Maisie said, “and they don’t have much time left.”
“See you in the morning.”
—LAST WORDS OF JOHN JACOB ASTOR TO HIS BRIDE, AS HE PUT HER INTO ONE OF THE TITANIC’SLIFEBOATS
JOANNA DIDN’T MAKE IT UP to Coma Carl’s. By the time she escaped from Maisie’s room-Maisie insisted on telling her a few choice details about the 1953 Waco, Texas, tornado first—it was four.
Guadalupe will already have gone home, Joanna thought. It was just as well. She wanted to talk to Barbara and ask her about Maisie’s condition and find out what all this talk about her hospital wristband was about. But Barbara was in with a three-year-old boy with advanced leukemia, trying unsuccessfully to get an IV started.
Joanna went back up to her office and spent the rest of the afternoon working on the list of people who’d had more than one NDE. They seemed to be split evenly between people who’d seen radically different scenes and people who’d seen the same thing each time. Mr. Tabb had seen by turns an opening with a light coming through it and “bright figures beyond,” a stairway, a reddish darkness, and a feeling of intense warmth, while Ms. Burton, a brittle diabetic who’d coded four separate times, had had the exact same vision each time, “which is how I know it’s real.”
It seemed to Joanna that its always being exactly the same thing would more likely be proof that it was a prerecorded experience, played over and over again by the brain like a record stuck in a groove. She wished she’d asked Ms. Burton exactly what she meant by “real,” wished she’d asked all of her patients if it had seemed like an actual place, if it seemed to them like they had really gone there.
Because that was how it felt, even though Joanna knew intellectually that it was a hallucination and that she hadn’t gone anywhere, that she had really been lying on an examining table in her stocking feet while Tish monitored her blood pressure and flirted with Richard. But it felt as real, as three-dimensional, as her office with its Swedish ivy and shoe box full of interviews she hadn’t transcribed yet.
Joanna went over Ms. Burton’s separate accounts, and they did in fact seem to have been exactly the same, but Mr. Rutledge’s varied slightly from NDE to NDE, even though he said his were the same, too.
She found Mrs. Woollam’s two interviews. Joanna had told Richard she’d been in the tunnel twice, but Mrs. Woollam had said she didn’t think it was the same one, that the second time the tunnel had been narrower and the floor more uneven. Apparently the “dark, open place” she’d been in the remaining four times had been the same place, but, looking at Mrs. Woollam’s account, Joanna wondered. She had said it was too dark to see anything. The same went for Maisie’s fog. And several people who’d been completely blinded by the light.
Joanna worked till after seven, compiling a partial list, and then put on her coat and took the list to the lab. Richard was still there, staring at the scans, his chin in his hands. When she gave him the list, he barely grunted an acknowledgment.
“We’re having Dish Night tomorrow night. Can you come?”
“Sure,” he said, and turned back to the scans.
Well, it’s not exactly wild enthusiasm, Joanna thought, going out into the hall, but at least he didn’t turn me down. Down the hall, the elevator dinged, and Joanna ran to catch it. It opened, and Mr. Mandrake stepped out. “Oh, good, Dr. Lander,” he said. “I’m glad you’re still here. I’ve been trying to reach you for two days.” He pursed his lips.
“Mr. Mandrake, I’m afraid this isn’t a good time to talk,” she said, knowing it was hopeless. She was obviously on her way home, so she couldn’t claim she had an appointment. A date? No, he’d simply say, “This will only take a few minutes.”
“This will only take a few minutes,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about these NDEs of yours.”
He knew she’d been under! How had he found out? Tish? She’d been upset that Richard wouldn’t go out with her. Had she told another nurse about the scene and accidentally revealed that Joanna was the subject,
and then the nurse had spread it through the rest of Gossip General? Or had Heidi seen her and Vielle talking and somehow figured it out, and he knew about the Titanic, too? “NDEs of mine?” she said, glancing anxiously toward the door of the lab.
“And of Dr. Wright, of course,” Mr. Mandrake said. “That is, assuming that you have succeeded in producing these so-called NDE simulations with your subjects. Have you?”
“Yes,” Joanna said in her relief that he didn’t know, and was instantly sorry.
“And the subjects have experienced the tunnel, the light, and the dead waiting for them?”
Yes, Joanna thought, and the Boat Deck and a Morse lamp and a red tennis shoe. “The NDEs have varied,” she said.
“Which means they haven’t experienced those things. As I expected. Have they experienced the Life Review and the Revelation of the Mysteries of the Cosmos?”
“No.”
“And the Bestowing of Powers?”
“Bestowing of Powers?” Joanna said. That was a new one.
“Yes, many of my subjects display enhanced paranormal abilities after their return: clairvoyance, telepathy, communications from the dead. I don’t suppose any of your subjects have evidenced such abilities?”
No, Joanna thought, because if I had, I’d be using them to send a telepathic message to Richard to come and save me.
“I take it your silence means they haven’t, which is not surprising. No laboratory stimulation of the brain could do any more than create physical sensations and the NDE is not physical, it is spiritual. It shows us the world that lies beyond death, the Reality beyond reality, and a number of my subjects have been in touch with that reality. Mrs. Davenport . . . ”
Maybe I do have telepathic powers, Joanna thought. I knew we’d get around to Mrs. Davenport sooner or later.
“ . . . received a message from her great-grandmother last night, a message she knew to be authentic. Do you know what that message was?”
“ ‘Rosabelle, believe?’ ” Joanna said.
Mr. Mandrake glared at her.
“She said, ‘There is no fear here,’ ” Mr. Mandrake intoned, “ ‘and no regret.’ Have any of your subjects spoken to the dead? Of course not, because these so-called simulations of the NDE are just that, mere physical imitations. Mrs. Davenport has also received messages from a number of . . . ”
Joanna looked longingly at the door, and Richard, impossibly, emerged with an armful of scan printouts and file folders. “Oh, Dr. Lander, there you are,” he said, bending to lock the lab door. “I was afraid you’d forgotten.”
“Forgotten?” Joanna said.
“Our meeting.”
“Oh, our meeting,” Joanna said, clapping her hand over her mouth, “with Dr. Tabb. I did forget. You’re lucky you caught me. I was just on my way home. I’m sorry, Mr. Mandrake. Dr. Wright and I have a meeting—”
“Ten minutes ago,” Richard said, looking pointedly at his watch. “And you know how Dr. Tabb is about punctuality.” He took Joanna’s arm.
Mr. Mandrake pursed his lips. “This is extremely—”
“We’re late. If you’ll excuse us,” Richard said to Mandrake. He led Joanna rapidly toward the stairs and through the door.
“Thank you,” Joanna said, racketing down the stairs beside him. “In another minute he’d have had me going down to see Mrs. Davenport, who is now receiving messages from the dead. How did you know we were out there?”
“Telepathy,” he said, grinning. “And Mandrake’s piercing voice. Who’s Dr. Tabb?”
“Mr. Tabb is a patient I interviewed two years ago. I didn’t want to name a real doctor for fear he’d go try to get information out of him.”
“Well, hopefully he’ll spend the next few days searching for Dr. Tabb instead of paging us.” They’d reached the bottom of the stairs. “Which way are we least likely to run into him?”
“This way,” Joanna said, leading him through the oncology ward to a service elevator. “I can get out to the parking lot from here,” she said, “oh, but you can’t go back to the lab, can you? Not if we’re supposed to be in a meeting.”
“That’s okay. I wanted to talk to you anyway. Shall we go get something to eat?”
“That’d be great,” Joanna said, feeling inordinately pleased, “but I’d imagine the cafeteria’s closed.”
It was. “Is it ever open?” Richard asked as they stared through the locked glass doors.
“No,” Joanna said. “What now? You don’t have any food in your lab coat, do you?”
He made a search and came up with a Mountain Dew and half a Hostess cupcake. “I need to restock,” he said. “How does Taco Pierre’s sound? Oh, wait,” he rummaged through his pockets again, “I don’t have my keys.”
“I’ve got mine,” Joanna said, “but you don’t have a coat.”
“Taco Pierre’s has hot sauce, and your car does have a heater, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Joanna said.
She cranked it all the way up to high as soon as they got in and handed him her mittens, but he was shivering by the time they got to Taco Pierre’s, and he ordered two coffees with his tacos. “One for each hand,” he explained, and picked up six packets of extra hot sauce on the way to the table.
The dining area was littered with taco wrappings and straw papers. Joanna had to wipe off their table with a napkin before they sat down. “Somebody has got to open a restaurant closer to the hospital,” Richard said.
“A nice restaurant,” Joanna whispered, smiling at him. The place was a mess, the blond, tattooed kid behind the counter looked like the mug shot of the nail gunnee, and it wasn’t exactly a romantic setting, but it was warm, and deserted. And it’s a date of sorts, Joanna thought, Vielle will be so pleased, and felt pleased herself, taking a bite of a Tater Torro that had been fried at least a week ago. “At least it’s warm in here,” she said.
“And the coffee’s cold. So what did Mandrake have to say? I missed the first part.”
She told him while they ate. “And now Mrs. Davenport’s receiving messages from the dead.” She sipped thoughtfully at her Coke. “I wonder if they’re in code.”
“In code?” Richard asked, drinking his cold coffee.
“Yes, like the message Houdini promised to try and send his wife after he died,” Joanna said, taking a bite of taco.
“ ‘Rosabelle, believe,’ he told her, but the message was really ‘Rosabelle answer, tell, pray-answer, look, tell, answer-answer, tell.’ The words stood for the letters in ‘believe.’ It was the code they’d used in their old mind-reading act.”
“Did he succeed?”
“No, and if anybody could have gotten a message through, it was Houdini,” Joanna said, taking a drink of her Coke, “though doubtless in a couple of days Mrs. Davenport will announce that she’s spoken to him personally and he’s told her,” she affected a sepulchral voice, “ ‘There is no fear here, and no regret.’ ”
“ ‘And no daring underwater escapes,’ ” Richard said in the same ghostly tone. “Why does the afterlife always sound like the most boring place imaginable?”
“Boring might be good,” Joanna said, thinking of the empty darkness beyond the bridge, of the officer saying, “There’s water on D Deck.”
“You mean as opposed to the Titanic,” Richard said, as if he were telepathic. He crumpled up the papers his burrito had been wrapped in. He took the tray over to the trash. “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He rummaged through the file folders on the seat next to him and pulled out the transcript of her NDE. “You keep saying it’s the Titanic,” he said. “How do you know it is?”
So much for this being a date, Joanna thought. “I’m not claiming it’s the actual Titanic,” she said patiently. “I explained that before. It isn’t the historical ship that went down in 1912. It’s—I don’t know—some sort of Titanic of the mind.”
“I know,” Richard said. “That’s not what I’m asking. How do you know what you’re seeing is
the Titanic?”
“How do I know it is?” she said. “I heard the engines stop and saw the passengers out on deck. I saw them signaling the Californian.”
“Correction,” Richard said, looking through her stapled account, “you saw them signaling something. No mention was made of the Californian. You assumed that.” He took a sip of coffee. “There’s no mention by any of these people you saw of an iceberg or a collision. In fact, the steward says he thinks it was a mechanical problem.”
“But the young woman in the nightgown heard it,” Joanna said.
Richard shook his head. “She heard a sound like a cloth tearing. That could be any number of things.”
“Like what?”
“A collision, an explosion, the mechanical problem the steward described. Did you see anything that identified the Titanic by name? Something with SS Titanic written on it?”
“RMS,” Joanna corrected. “She was a royal mail ship.”
“All right, with RMS Titanic on it.” He flipped through the stapled pages of her account. She could see that a number of lines had been marked with yellow highlighter. “You said you saw the lifeboats. Was there a name on the side of them?”
“They had canvas covers over them,” Joanna said, trying to remember if she’d seen the Titanic’s name anywhere. Had the steward’s white jacket had an insignia on it? Or the officer’s cap? She couldn’t remember. What else would have had an insignia on it, or the Titanic’s name?
The life preservers, she thought, trying to remember if she’d seen one on the Boat Deck. No, but it seemed like one had been on the inside wall of the deck just outside the passage next to the deck light, with RMS Titanic stenciled on it in red.
You’re confabulating, she told herself sharply. That’s an image from the movie, and if it was next to the deck light, you wouldn’t have been able to see it for the glare. “No,” she said, “I didn’t see anything with Titanic on it.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said. “I’m not sure it is the Titanic. I’ve been going over your transcript.” He turned to a page halfway through, heavily marked in yellow, and read, “ ‘Isn’t anyone coming?’ ‘The Baltic, but she’s over two hundred miles away.’ ‘What about the Frankfurt?’” He looked at her. “It was the Carpathia who came to her aid. And, as you say yourself in your account,” he said, looking back through the pages, “the Californian was the ship that didn’t answer, not the Frankfurt.”