“They are. Except when you walk your ladder straight into a power line. Your metal ladder.” She grinned at Joanna. “He’s up in CICU—a little fried, but able to talk. You better get up there fast, though. Maurice Mandrake was just down here, looking for you, and I saw him talking to Christmas Lights Guy’s doctor.”
“Mr. Mandrake was looking for me?” Joanna asked. That was all she needed.
“Yeah. He said if I saw you, I was to tell you he was going up to your office. That was before Christmas Lights Guy, though, but if he did go up to your office, you might be able to beat him to the CICU.” She walked away.
Joanna followed her. “I didn’t come down to see if anyone’d coded,” she said. “Vielle, you remember the movie Titanic. Was there a scene in it where people were standing on deck trying to find out what had happened?”
“All I remember about Titanic was the two of them wading around in ice-cold water for two hours and not getting hypothermia. Do you know how long they really would have lasted in water that cold? About five minutes.”
“I know, I know,” Joanna said. “Try to remember. People standing out on deck, wondering what’s happened.”
“There’s that scene where the iceberg scrapes by, and people are out on the deck, throwing snowballs—”
“No, no,” Joanna said impatiently. “These people didn’t know they’d been hit by an iceberg. They were just standing there, some of them still in their nightclothes. The engines’ stopping woke them up, and they went out on deck to see what had happened. Do you remember a scene like that?”
Vielle shook her head. “Sorry.”
“I’ve got a favor to ask,” Joanna said. “Could you rent the video and see if there’s a scene like that in it?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to rent it yourself? You’re the one who knows what you’re looking for. If you want, we can watch it at Dish Night, so long as you fast-forward through that stupid ‘king of the world’ scene.”
“No,” Joanna said. “Look, I’ll pay for the rental and your gas. I just need you to see if the scene’s in there.” She fumbled in her cardigan pocket.
“You can pay for the videos on Dish Night,” Vielle said, eyes narrowing. “What’s this all about? It has something to do with your project, doesn’t it? Don’t tell me one of your subjects found themselves on the Titanic.”
“Shh,” Joanna said, glancing anxiously around. She had had no business asking Vielle where people could hear her.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Vielle said, dropping her voice. “One of your NDE subjects saw the Titanic when he went through the tunnel.”
“No, of course not,” Joanna said. “This is something Richard and I were talking about.” Well, it’s true, she thought defensively. We did talk about it, and Vielle asked me if my subjects had seen it, not if I’d seen it. And besides, it wasn’t the Titanic.
“Something you and Richard were talking about, huh?” Vielle said, her whole manner changing. “Well, at least you’re discussing something other than RIPT scans and endorphin levels, though why you picked Titanic, I don’t know.”
Joanna forced herself to smile and not look around to see if anyone else had heard them.
“Surely there are better movies you two could fight over,” Vielle said. “I thought you hated the movie. When I wanted to rent it, you had a fit about how some officer hadn’t shot himself—”
“Officer Murdoch,” Joanna said. Vielle was right. She had had a fit. The movie was full of historical inaccuracies. Not only was there no proof that Officer Murdoch had shot a passenger and then killed himself, but the movie had made Officer Lightoller look like a coward instead of the hero he’d been, unlashing the collapsible lifeboats on top of the officers’ quarters, keeping overturned Collapsible B afloat all night—
The memory can’t have come from the movie, she thought, because I already knew about the Titanic when I saw the movie. “Everyone knows about the Titanic,” Richard had said, but he was talking about the basic facts. Everyone knew it had sunk, they knew about the iceberg and the lack of lifeboats, and the band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the ship went down. Not about Murdoch. Or Collapsible B.
“Why don’t you just rent the movie, invite him over, and make some of my special deviled ham dip—?”
“It involves our memories of the movie,” Joanna said evasively. “So if you could rent it and see if there’s a scene like that in it, I’d appreciate it. You don’t have to watch the whole movie, just the part right after the iceberg.”
“Anything to help this romance along. Tell me again what I’m looking for.”
“People standing out on deck, wondering what’s happened and asking the steward why they’ve stopped, some of them in evening clothes and some of them looking like they just got out of bed. And not frightened or shouting, not trying to get up to the Boat Deck, just standing there.”
“Got it,” Vielle said. “I don’t remember anything like that in the movie.”
I don’t either, Joanna thought. “Can you watch it tonight?”
“No,” Vielle said. “It’ll have to be tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Oh, there’s a stupid meeting tonight,” Vielle said carelessly.
“What about?”
“I don’t know. ER safety or something. Apparently they didn’t think their memo was enough, so now they’re going to subject us to a seminar. ‘Be alert to your surroundings. Avoid sudden movements.’ I wonder if that includes jerking awake after you’ve nodded off during the seminar.”
“Don’t make jokes,” Joanna said. “The ER is dangerous. You have to ask for a transfer out of here.”
“Can’t,” Vielle said breezily. “I’m too busy watching videos for my friends.”
“I’m serious,” Joanna said. “You’re going to get killed one of these days if you stay down here. I think you should—”
“Yes, Mother,” Vielle said. “Now, what am I looking for again? People standing in the hall in their PJs talking about hearing the engines shut off?”
“Out on deck. Not in the passages. How soon do you think you can find out?”
“As soon as I can get out of here tomorrow night, get to Blockbuster, and fast-forward through the first two hours of Leo and Kate hanging out over the railing and saying lines like, ‘I’m so lucky to be on this ship,’ ” Vielle said, miming sticking a finger down her throat. “Eight o’clock?”
Eight o’clock tomorrow, Joanna thought, wishing it were sooner. “Call me as soon as you find out.”
“You’re sure one of your volunteers didn’t see the Titanic?” Vielle said, looking worried.
“I’m sure. Where did you say Christmas Lights Guy was?”
“CICU.”
“CICU,” Joanna said and left before Vielle could ask any more questions. She didn’t have any intention of interviewing Christmas Lights Guy till she had this figured out. She’d just asked where he was to get Vielle off the subject of the Titanic, though if she wanted to get his NDE she really needed to do it now, get it recorded before he’d confabulated the—
I haven’t recorded mine, she thought, appalled. She’d been so distracted by wanting to prove the images hadn’t come from the movie, she’d forgotten where she’d been going in the first place. And all this speculation about where the memory came from and what it meant would be useless if her NDE wasn’t documented.
I need to get it down now, she thought, before any more time goes by, and ran up to first to the cafeteria. Halfway there, Lucille from CICU stopped her in the corridor. “Did Maurice Mandrake find you?” she asked. “He was looking for you.”
“Where did you see him?” Joanna asked.
“Up in CICU. He came up to interview a patient.”
Of course, Joanna thought, and there goes Christmas Lights Guy. But at least if he was up there, he wasn’t in the cafeteria. She thanked Lucille and went on down. The cafeteria was closed.
Of course. Joanna yanked on the locked doubl
e doors and then stood looking through them at the red plastic chairs upended on the Formica tables, trying to think where else she could go. Not her office, obviously, and not the doctors’ lounge. She couldn’t run the risk of anyone overhearing her talking about the Titanic. The visitors’ lounge in outpatient surgery was usually empty this time of day, but she’d have to go through three corridors and two walkways to get there, increasing the risk of running into Mr. Mandrake.
I need someplace deserted where Mr. Mandrake won’t think to look for me, Joanna thought, which was where? My car, she thought, and fumbled in her cardigan pocket for her car keys. She didn’t have them. The only key she had was to her office. Her car keys were in her bag in the drawer of her desk, and her car was locked. And it was too cold to sit on the hood.
The stairway, she thought, remembering the blocked-off stairwell she and Richard had sat in the day they met. But surely they were finished painting it by now, and people were using it again. Still, it was comparatively private and out of the way.
And warmer than the parking lot, Joanna thought, taking the service elevator up to third. And if she sat in the middle of the landing, where she could see both doors, she could hear people coming in plenty of time to stop recording, so she wouldn’t be overheard.
The elevator door opened. Joanna leaned out cautiously, looking for signs of Mr. Mandrake, but there was no one in the corridor. She walked down the hall and across the walkway, turned the corner, and started through Medicine.
“ . . . and then my uncle Alvin said, ‘Come,’ ” a woman’s voice said from the half-open door of one of the rooms, “and he stretched out his hand to me and said, ‘There is naught to fear from death.’ ”
Oh, no, Joanna thought, stopping short of the door. She had thought Mrs. Davenport would have been discharged by now. What HMO did she have that would let her stay in the hospital this long? More important, who was she talking to, Mr. Mandrake? And would he suddenly emerge from the room?
But another woman’s voice—a nurse? Mrs. Davenport’s hapless roommate?—said breathlessly, “And then what happened?”
“Light came from his hand, and it sparkled like diamonds and sapphires and rubies.”
Mrs. Davenport was in full cry now, and, Joanna hoped, was looking at her audience and not at the door. She tiptoed quickly past and down toward the door marked “Staff Only.”
“And he took my hand and led me to a beautiful, beautiful garden,” Mrs. Davenport said, “and I knew what I was seeing wasn’t a dream or a hallucination, it was real. I was actually seeing the Other Side. And do you know what Alvin said then?”
Joanna didn’t wait to hear. She opened the stairwell door and ducked in. Nothing had changed since the last time she’d been in there. The yellow “Do Not Cross” tape still stretched between the railings, and below it, the pale blue steps still looked shiny and wet.
They weren’t, she determined with a careful finger. The paint was long since dry, but that didn’t matter. People obviously thought the stairway was still blocked, which meant she’d have it all to herself. She positioned herself on the left side of the landing, where she could see the door, and switched on her recorder.
“NDE account, Joanna Lander, session four, February 25,” she said and then stopped, staring at the pale blue steps, thinking about the collapsibles.
She had already known about them when she saw the movie, and about Lightoller and Murdoch. And Lorraine Allison, she thought. She remembered ranting, “Why didn’t they tell the stories of the real people who died on the Titanic, like John Jacob Astor and Lorraine Allison?” and Vielle asking, “Who was Lorraine Allison?” and her telling her, “She was six years old and the only first-class child to die, and her story’s a lot more interesting than dopey Jack and Rose’s!”
She had known about Lorraine Allison before the movie, so the memory couldn’t have come from Titanic, or from Maisie’s disaster books. It had to come from something earlier. A book, no, it wasn’t something she’d read, though there was a book involved somehow. Something someone had read to her, or said.
And what they had said was connected to why she was seeing the Titanic instead of a railroad tunnel or a hospital walkway. And it was important.
This was getting her nowhere. Record your account, she told herself. Describe what you saw and heard. She switched the recorder on and started again. “I was in the passage. It was dark.” She described the unheard sound, the light under the door, the people. “The bearded gentleman was in evening dress, with a long formal coat and a white tie and vest, and the woman had long white gloves and a beaded cream-colored dress.” And you have just described Kate Winslet’s gown, she told herself, clicking the recorder off. You’re starting to confabulate.
She rewound to “the woman” and started again. “She was wearing a long white gown or robe and a sparkling light seemed to come from her hand. She said, ‘Do you suppose there’s been an accident?’ and then the steward came up—”
No, that wasn’t right. The steward had been talking to the woman in the nightgown. She’d said, “I heard the oddest noise,” and he’d said, “Yes, ma’am,” and then the bearded man had come over, but that wasn’t right either, because the woman in the white gloves had been standing there, too . . .
She clicked off the recorder and pressed her fingers to her forehead, trying to remember where the bearded man had been standing, what the steward had said.
The woman in the nightgown had spoken to the steward and then gone over to the bearded man and said, “Did you hear it?” And the bearded man had said, “I shall see what’s happened,” and motioned the steward to come over. “What’s happened? Why have we stopped?” he asked the steward, and the steward said there was nothing to be alarmed about, and the bearded man said, “Go find Mr. Briarley. He will know what’s going on.”
“Mr. Briarley,” she said. Her English teacher her senior year of high school.
She could see him standing in front of the blackboard in his gray tweed vest and bow tie, an eyebrow cocked ironically, hear him saying, “Well, Mr. Inman, can you tell us what happens in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’?” No answer. “Ms. Lander? Mr. Kennedy? Anyone?” Still nothing. “What’s that?” Mr. Briarley putting his hand behind his ear, listening, and then shaking his head. “I thought it was an answer, but it was only the band, playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ”
And how could she have forgotten that? Forgotten Mr. Briarley, who had talked about the Titanic constantly in class, who’d used it as a metaphor for everything. “Water up to the boilers,” he had written on an essay of hers, “Putting the women off in boats.” He was always telling them stories about the loading of the lifeboats and the lights going out, reading them long passages about the band and the Californian and the passengers. “I knew I hadn’t read it,” Joanna said out loud. “I heard Mr. Briarley say it.”
And he held the answer. He had said something about the Titanic, something in English class, and—“I have to find him,” Joanna said, jamming her recorder in her pocket. “I have to ask him what he said.”
She ran up the stairs to the nurses’ station. “I need a phone book,” she said breathlessly.
“White or yellow pages?” Eileen asked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Joanna said. “White.”
Eileen set the heavy phone book on the counter, and Joanna flipped rapidly through the B’s, trying to remember Mr. Briarley’s first name. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard it. He’d simply been Mr. Briarley, like all her teachers. Bo, Br—
A buzzer sounded. Eileen reached to turn it off. “Patient calling,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” Joanna murmured, running her finger down the list of Br’s. Braun. Brazelton.
“Okay,” Eileen said, “just stick the phone book on the desk,” and went off to answer the patient’s call.
Breen. Brentwood. Joanna hoped there weren’t dozens of Briarleys. Brethauer. She needn’t
have worried. There weren’t any. The list went straight from Brian to Briceno. He probably has an unlisted number, she thought, to keep students from making prank calls. I’ll have to talk to him at school.
She glanced at her watch. Three o’clock. School got out at three-fifteen, or at least it had when she was in high school, but the teachers had been required to stay till at least four. If she hurried, she might make it there by then. She shut the phone book and started quickly down the hall toward the elevator, fumbling for her car keys as she walked.
She didn’t have them. They were up in her office, where Mr. Mandrake, and probably Richard, lay in wait. I’ll have to borrow a car, she thought and ran back to the nurses’ station to ask Eileen, but she wasn’t there, and there wasn’t time to look for her. She’d have to borrow Vielle’s. She started back toward the elevator.
“Oh, good, Dr. Lander,” a familiar voice said, and Joanna looked up in horror to see Mrs. Davenport heading toward her in an orange-and-yellow-and-electric-blue-splotched robe. “You’re just the person I wanted to see.”
“Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.”
—LAST WORDS OF O. HENRY (WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER)
THIS IS WHAT YOU GET for not watching where you’re going, Joanna thought. “Be alert to your surroundings,” the hospital memo on protecting yourself from rogue-crazed ER patients had said. Joanna should have paid attention to it.
“I’ve remembered more details of my NDE,” Mrs. Davenport said, planting her multicolored self squarely between Joanna and the elevator. She looks just like an RIPT scan in that robe, Joanna thought. “After the Angel of Light showed me the crystal, my uncle Alvin led me over to a shimmering gray curtain, and when he drew it aside, I could see the operating room and all the doctors working over my lifeless body, and—”
“Mrs. Davenport,” Joanna interrupted, “I have an appointment—”
“—and Alvin said, ‘Here on the Other Side we know everything that happens on Earth,’ ” Mrs. Davenport went on as if Joanna hadn’t spoken, “ ‘and we use that knowledge to protect and guide the living.’ ”