Passage (105 page)

Richard stepped sideways, easing himself between her and the door. “What was it?” he asked, even though he already knew what it was. And she was right, there was nothing inherently frightening in the sight of people in old-fashioned clothes standing outside a door, in the sound of engines shutting down. “What’s happened?” Lawrence Beesley had asked his steward, and the steward had said, “I don’t suppose it’s much,” and Beesley had gone back to bed, not frightened at all.

“What was it, Amelia?” Richard said.

“I . . . it sounds so crazy, you’ll think . . . ”

That you’re Bridey Murphy? he thought, like I did Joanna. He said, “Whatever it is, I’ll believe you.”

“I know,” she said. “All right.” She took a deep breath. “I have biochem this semester. The class is in the daytime, but the lab’s at night, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in this old room. It’s long and narrow, with these dark wooden cabinets along the walls that they keep the chemicals in, so it looks like a tunnel.”

A long, narrow room with tall cupboards on either side. He wondered what it really was. The dispensary? He’d have to ask Kit where the dispensary on the
Titanic
was.

“It was the lab final,” Amelia said. “We were supposed to do this enzyme reaction, but I couldn’t get it to work, and it was really late. They’d already turned the lights off and were waiting for me to finish.”

“Who was?” Richard asked, thinking, lab final? Enzyme reaction?

“My professors,” Amelia said, and he could hear fear in her voice. “They were standing out in the hall, waiting. I could see them standing outside the door in their white lab coats, waiting to see if I passed the final.”

The biochem final and professors in lab coats. She’s had weeks to rationalize what she saw, he thought, to confabulate it into something that makes sense. Or at least more sense than the
Titanic.
“When did you realize it was the biochem lab you’d been in?” he asked.

She looked at him, bewildered. “What do you mean?”

“Was it a few days after your session or more recently?”

“It was right then,” Amelia said, “when I was having the NDE. I didn’t tell you and Dr. Lander because I was afraid you’d make me go under again. I said I saw the same things I’d seen before, the door and the light and the happy, peaceful feeling, but I didn’t. I saw the lab.”

It wasn’t the
Titanic
, Richard thought. She didn’t see the Titanic.

“It wasn’t really the lab, though,” Amelia said, “because the cabinets aren’t really locked, like they were in the NDE, and it wasn’t my biochem professor, it was Dr. Eldritch from anatomy and this director I had when I was majoring in musical theater. And I was so frightened.”

“Of what?” Richard asked.

“Of failing,” she said, and he could hear the fear in her voice. “Of the final.”

She wasn’t on the
Titanic
, he thought, trying to take this in. She was in her biochem lab. “What happened then?” he managed to ask.

“I started to look for the key. I had to find it. I had to get into the cabinet and find the right chemical. I looked under the lab tables and in all the drawers,” she said, her voice tightening, “but it was dark, I couldn’t see—”

The connection wasn’t the
Titanic.
And that was what Joanna had realized when she talked to Carl Aspinall.

“—and the labels on the drawers didn’t make any sense,” Amelia was saying. “There were letters on them, but they weren’t words, they were just letters and numbers, all strung together, like code. And I was so frightened . . . and then I was back in the lab, so I guess I found it and I guess I passed. I don’t know what grade I got.” She laughed embarrassedly. “I told you it sounded crazy.”

“No,” he said. “No, you’ve been very helpful.”

She nodded, unconvinced. “I have to go to my anatomy lab, but—” she took another deep breath, “—if you want me to, I’ll go under again. I owe it to Dr. Lander.”

“That may not be necessary,” he said, and, as soon as she was gone, called Carl Aspinall.

He was afraid Mrs. Aspinall would be the one to answer the phone, but she didn’t, and when Carl said, “Hello, Aspinalls’ residence,” Richard said, “Mr. Aspinall, this is Dr. Wright. No, wait, don’t hang up. I understand that you don’t want to talk about your experience. I just want you to answer one question. Did your experience take place on the Titanic?”

“The
Titanic?”
Carl said, and the astonishment in his voice told Richard all he wanted to know.

He hadn’t been on the
Titanic.
And that was the revelation that had sent Joanna on her plunge down to the ER. It wasn’t what he’d told her about his NDE, it was the fact that he hadn’t seen the
Titanic
, and Joanna, realizing that that wasn’t the connection, that she had been on the wrong track, had seen what the real answer was, and run to tell him.

He had to make sure. He called Maisie. “When you had your NDEs, Maisie, were you on a ship?” he asked her when the nurse finally let him talk to her.

“A
ship?”
she said, and he could see the face she was making. “No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know,” Maisie said. “It didn’t feel
anything
like a ship.”

“What did it feel like?”

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “I told Joanna I thought it was inside, but I think it was outside, too. Someplace both inside and outside,” and the carefulness of her answer convinced him more than anything else that if she’d been on a ship she would have known it, and the answer lay elsewhere.

But where? It had to lie somewhere in the NDEs, in some common thread they all shared, even though neither Amelia’s nor Maisie’s, nor, presumably, Carl Aspinall’s, were anything like Joanna’s. “But it has to be there,” he told Kit on the phone, “because as soon as Joanna realized Carl hadn’t been on the
Titanic
, she knew what it was.”

“And it has to be something that’s in all of them,” Kit said. “Did you record what Amelia said just now?”

“No,” he said. “She was too nervous. I’ve transcribed everything I remember, though.”

“What about your own?” Kit said. “Have you transcribed it?”

“My own?” he said blankly. “But it was—”

“Related to the
Titanic,”
she said. “I know, but there might be a clue in it. I think you’re right. I think there’s got to be a common thread, and the more NDEs we have, the more apt we are to find it.”

She was right. He wondered if, if he called Carl Aspinall back and explained that his nightmares, whatever they were, were purely subjective, if he’d be willing to talk to him. He doubted it.

Which left Amelia’s NDE, and his own, and Maisie’s. And the vision of the crewman on the
Hindenburg.
He made a list of the elements in each of them. Joseph Leibrecht had seen snow fields, whales, a train, a bird in a cage, and his grandmother, and heard church bells and the scream of tearing metal. Amelia had seen enzymes, lab drawers, and her professors. Joanna had seen stairways and stationary bicycles, and he hadn’t seen any of the above.

Joseph’s was clearly dreamlike, with disconnected images rapidly succeeding one another, and completely unlike Joanna’s. Amelia’s was somewhere in between. There were no time or image jumps, but there were logic gaps, whereas in his own—

He realized he didn’t know whether there were incongruities, except for the toy zeppelin, in his own or not. He’d assumed it was real, that Joanna’s were real, and later, going through Kit’s uncle’s books, he’d focused on the
Titanic
itself.

He hauled the books out again. People had in fact gathered at the White Star offices and at
The New York Times
building, but not inside. They had milled around in the streets outside, waiting for news from the
Carpathia.
When it finally came, there had been no public reading of the list of survivors. A list had been posted at the
Times
-Mary Marvin’s mother, there with her son-in-law’s mother, had yelped joyfully when she located her daughter’s name on it, and then stopped, aghast, when she realized Daniel’s wasn’t next to it—but for the most part, relatives had gone into the White Star building one by one to inquire. John Jacob Astor’s son had come back out immediately, his face buried in his hands.

And there hadn’t been a wireless room in the White Star building. There had been one at the
Times
, but it was up on the roof. The wireless operator had put the deciphered messages in a box attached to a rope, shaken the rope against the metal walls of the shaft to signal the reporters below, and dropped the box down the shaft.

Which told him what? That he hadn’t really been in the White Star offices? He already knew that. That he’d confabulated his NDE out of images from the movies and Joanna’s NDEs. But not why. Not what the connection was.

He listed all the elements—his pager, the woman in the high-necked blouse speaking into the telephone, the man bent over the wireless, the clock on the wall, the stairs, the man with the newspaper under his arm—and then called Amelia and asked her to come over. “Are you sending me under again?” she asked, and he could hear the fear in her voice.

“No,” he said. “We just need to ask you some questions. Will tomorrow morning at nine work?”

“No, I have a psych test.” She’s making excuses, he thought, like she did that last time Joanna tried to schedule her before she quit, but after a pause, she said, “Would eleven o’clock work?” and, amazingly, showed up on time.

He had asked Vielle to sit in on the session. “Amelia, we want you to tell us everything you can remember about your NDEs, starting with the first one,” he said, and Vielle switched on Joanna’s minirecorder.

Amelia nodded. “I promised you I’d do anything you asked,” she said and launched into a detailed account, made even more detailed by his and Vielle’s questions.

“How many of your professors were in the office?” Vielle asked her.

“Four,” Amelia said. “Dr. Eldritch and my director and Mrs. Ashley, my high school English teacher, and my freshman chem lab professor. He wasn’t really a professor. He was a graduate student. I hated him. If you asked him a question, all he’d say was, ‘It’s something you need to figure out yourself.’ ”

“Your English teacher was there?” Richard asked, thinking of Mr. Briarley.

Amelia nodded. “I didn’t really have her, though. She died a month after school started.”

Vielle grilled her about the labels on the chemical bottles. “You know how in formulas, the numbers are below the line?” Amelia said. “These were all in a row.”

“Can you remember what any of the letters were?” Vielle asked.

She couldn’t. “Do you remember anything else that wasn’t right?” Vielle asked.

Amelia stared into space. “The coldness,” she said finally. “It’s always hot in that room. It has these old-fashioned heating vents. But in my NDE, it was freezing, like they’d left a door open somewhere.”

“Joanna talked about it being cold, too,” Vielle said after Amelia was gone. “Did Joseph Leibrecht?”

“He talked about seeing snow fields,” Richard said, “but he also talked about a boiling sea and being tossed in a fire. And there was nothing hot
or
cold in my NDE.”

“You and Amelia were both looking for something,” Vielle offered.

“Joanna was, too,” Richard said, “but Joseph Leibrecht wasn’t.”

“What about her English teacher being someone who’d died?”

He shook his head. “That’s one of the core elements.”

“There’s no chance you can convince Carl Aspinall to talk to you?” she asked.

“They’re not answering their phone.”

Vielle nodded wisely. “Caller ID. I don’t suppose it’s worth driving up there again?”

No, he thought, and that wasn’t where the answer lay anyway. It lay with Mr. Briarley, and he couldn’t get it out of him either. “It’s something you need to figure out for yourself,” the graduate assistant had said.

“Could you send Amelia under again?” Vielle asked as he walked her to the door of the lab.

“Maybe,” he said, “although the chances are she’ll have a repeat of the same unifying image.”

“Oh, good, you’re here,” a voice said, and Maisie’s mother came in, dressed in a sunny yellow suit. “Is this a bad time?”

“I was just leaving. I’ll work on it some more and call you,” Vielle said and scooted out.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Maisie’s mother said. “Here.” She handed him a small black box.

“What’s this?” he asked. It looked like a very small Palm Pilot.

“Your pager. You said a problem with implementing your procedure was that the window of opportunity was too short, only four to six minutes, you said.”

What I said was that irreversible brain death occurs in four to six minutes, he thought, but she can’t even bring herself to say the words or to admit that what she wants me to do is bring Maisie back from the dead.

“This pager solves that problem,” she said, looking pleased as punch.

“I already have a pager,” he said. And even if this one went off the second Maisie coded, he would still have to get to a phone and find out where she was. If anyone was bothering to answer the phone during an emergency.

“It isn’t an ordinary pager,” Mrs. Nellis said. “It’s a locational device. Maisie has one of these, and so do each of her doctors and nurses, and, in the case of a coding situation, they’ve been instructed to hit this button immediately,” she pointed to a red button on the end of the box, “and your pager will beep. It has a distinctive beep, so you won’t confuse it with your own pager.”

It probably plays “Put On a Happy Face,” he thought.

“As soon as you hear it beep,” Mrs. Nellis flowed on, “you press
this
button,” she indicated a black button on the side, “and the location in the hospital the signal was sent from will appear on this screen. It will say ‘Cardiac Intensive Care Unit’ or ‘west wing, fourth floor’ or wherever. Maisie will be in her room in the CICU most of the time, of course, but, as you said, she might be down for tests, or,” she crossed her fingers coyly, “in the OR, getting prepped for her new heart, and this way you’ll know exactly where she is. I wanted one that would also
plot where you were and map out the shortest route, but the computer engineer who designed this said the technology didn’t exist yet.”