“Good morning, ladies.” Barbara came over to look disapprovingly at Maisie’s uneaten breakfast. “Didn’t like the eggs, huh? Would you like some cereal?”
“I’m not very hungry,” Maisie said.
“You need to eat something,” Barbara said. “How about some oatmeal?”
Maisie made a face. “I don’t like oatmeal. Can’t I eat it later? I have to tell Dr. Lander something important.”
“Which can wait till after you finish breakfast,” Joanna said, immediately standing up and starting for the door.
“No, wait!” Maisie yelped. “I’ll eat it.” She picked up the triangle of toast and took another mouselike nibble. “I can eat while I’m talking to Dr. Lander, can’t I?”
“if you eat,” Barbara said firmly. She turned to Joanna. “Half the eggs, a whole piece of toast, and all the juice.”
Joanna nodded. “Got it.”
“I’ll be back to check,” Barbara said. “And no hiding things in your napkin.” She went out.
Maisie immediately pushed the bed table away and leaned over to open the drawer of the nightstand. “Whoa,” Joanna protested. “You heard what Barbara said.”
“I know,” Maisie said, “but I have to get something.” She reached in the drawer and pulled out a folded piece of lined tablet paper like the one she’d written the Hindenburg crewman’s name on and handed it to Joanna.
“What’s this?” Joanna asked.
“My NDE,” Maisie said. “I wrote the rest of it down after you left so I wouldn’t forget anything.”
Joanna unfolded the sheet. “The fog was gray-colored,” Maisie had written in her laboring round cursive, “and dark, like at night or if somebody turns out the lights. I was in this long narrow place with real tall walls.”
“I probably forgot some stuff,” Maisie said.
“Eat,” Joanna said. She pushed the bed table over in front of her and continued to read. Maisie picked up her fork and poked listlessly at her eggs.
“If you’re not going to eat, I guess I’ll have to come back another time,” Joanna said.
Maisie immediately scooped up a forkful of eggs and popped it in her mouth. Joanna watched until she’d chewed, swallowed, and taken a sip of her apple juice, and then sat down on the chair and read through the rest of the NDE. “I don’t know if there was a ceiling. It kind of felt like the place I was in was outside, but I don’t know for sure. It kind of felt like inside and outside at the same time.”
“The walls were tall?” Joanna asked.
Maisie nodded. “They went up really high on both sides.” She raised both arms to demonstrate. “I thought some more about the coming-back part. It was different from the other time. That time it wasn’t as fast. I wrote that down.”
Joanna nodded. “Can I take this paper with me?”
“Sure,” Maisie said, and Joanna folded it up and stuck it in her pocket. “But you can’t go yet, I have lots more stuff to tell you.”
“Then eat,” Joanna said, pointing at the eggs.
Maisie picked up her fork. “They’re cold.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Did you know they found eggs when they dug up Pompeii?” Maisie said. “They got covered up by the ash and turned into stone.”
“Four bites,” Joanna said, her arms folded. “And the juice.”
“Okay,” Maisie said and plodded through four minuscule bites, chewing laboriously.
“And the juice.”
“I am. I have to open the straw first.”
The Queen of Stallers, Joanna thought. She leaned back in the chair and watched Maisie peel the paper, stick the straw in the juice, sip daintily, waiting her out. Finally, Maisie finished, slurping to prove it was empty. “You know the dog that was chained up, and they don’t know its name ’cause it didn’t have a dog tag?” she asked. “Well, there was a little girl like that.”
“In Pompeii?”
“No,” Maisie said indignantly. “In the Hartford circus fire. She was nine years old. Anyway, that’s what they think, nobody knows, ’cause they don’t know who she was. She died from the smoke. She wasn’t burned at all, and they put her picture in the paper and on the radio and everything. But nobody ever came to get her.”
“Ever?” Joanna said. Someone would have had to identify her eventually. A child couldn’t just disappear without anyone noticing, but Maisie was shaking her blond head.
“Hunh-unh. They had this big room where they put all the bodies, and the mothers and fathers came and identified them, but nobody ever did her. And they didn’t know her name, so they had to give her a number.”
Joanna was suddenly afraid to ask. Not fifty-eight, she thought. Don’t tell me it’s fifty-eight.
“1565,” Maisie said, “’cause that was the number of her body. She should have had a name tag or put her name in her clothes or something, like Mr. Astor.”
“Who?” Joanna said, sitting up straight.
“John Jacob Astor. He was on the Titanic. His face got all smashed in when one of the smokestack things fell on him, so they couldn’t tell who he was, but he had his initials inside of his shirt” —she reached around to the back of her hospital gown and grasped the neck of it to demonstrate—“J. J. A., so they were able to figure it out.”
“You know about the Titanic, Maisie?” Joanna asked.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s like the best disaster that ever happened. Lots of children died.”
“I never heard you talk about it.”
“That’s ’cause I read about it before, when I was in the other hospital. I wanted to see the movie, but my mother wouldn’t let me watch the video because it had . . . ” she leaned forward and dropped her voice to a whisper, “S-E-X in it. But this girl Ashley who had her appendix out said it didn’t, just naked people. She said it was really cool, especially when the ship went up in the air and everything started falling down, all the dishes and furniture and pianos and stuff, with this big enormous crash. Did you know the Titanic had five pianos?”
“Maisie—” Joanna said, sorry she had brought this up.
“I know all about it,” Maisie said, oblivious. “They had all these dogs. A Pekingese and an Airedale and a Pomeranian and this really cute little French bulldog, and their owners would take them for walks on the deck, only most of the time they had to be kept in this kennel down in the hold, except for this little tiny dog Frou-Frou, he got to stay in the cabin—”
“Maisie—” Joanna said, but Maisie didn’t even hear her.
“—and after it hit the iceberg, this passenger, I don’t know his name, went down to the kennel and—”
“Maisie—”
“—let out all the dogs,” Maisie finished. “They all still drowned, though.”
“You can’t tell me about the Titanic,” Joanna said. “I’m doing some research—”
“Do you want me to help you?” Maisie said eagerly. “Ms. Sutterly could bring me some books, and I know lots of stuff already. It didn’t really hit the iceberg, it just sort of scraped along the side. It wasn’t even a very bad cut, but the watertight compartments—”
She had to put a stop to this. “Dr. Wright told me they found the body of a dog in Pompeii,” she said.
“Yeah,” Maisie said. She told her about the chain and it trying to climb on top of the ash. “Dr. Wright told me all the Pompeii dogs were named Fido, but I don’t think so. How would they know to come when their master called if they all had the same name?”
“I think Dr. Wright was kidding,” Joanna said. “Did you know Fido means ‘faithful’ in Latin?”
“No,” Maisie said, appeased. “That would have been a good name for this one dog they found.” She pulled the book out from under the covers and began flipping through it till she found another of the photos. “It was trying to save this little girl.” She showed the picture to Joanna. The plaster casts of the long-muzzled dog and the little girl lay huddled against a wall, their limbs tangled together.
“But he couldn’t. They both died.”
She took the book back. “It didn’t have any dog tags either,” she said and then suddenly lunged for her book again.
Joanna looked toward the door. Maisie raised the blankets to stick the book under them, and then stopped and laid it back on the bed as the black orderly came in. “Hi, Eugene,” she said, picking up her tray and handing it to him.
“Hi, Eugene,” Joanna said. “You have to leave the tray. Maisie’s supposed to finish her eggs.”
“He’s supposed to take all the trays back at the same time,” Maisie said.
“No, that’s all right,” Eugene said, setting the tray back down. “I can come back for it later.” He winked at Joanna.
“Thanks,” Joanna said. Eugene went out. Joanna stood up. “I’ve got to go, too.”
“You can’t. You promised you’d stay as long as I wanted. I have to show you this one picture.”
She showed her at least twenty pictures before she finally let Joanna go—excavated ruins, reconstructed Roman baths, a gold bracelet, a silver mirror, paintings of people in white togas running terrified from a red-and-gold-spewing volcano, of people cowering in ash-darkened colonnades. And if I don’t see Vesuvius this time, Joanna thought, going back up to her office, then Richard’s theory’s got to be wrong.
She unlocked her office, went in, and checked her answering machine. The light was blinking almost hysterically. “You have twenty-three messages,” it said when she pressed the button. And all from Mr. Mandrake and none from Kit or Kerri Jakes, she thought, hitting “play.”
Not all. Three were from Maisie, one from Richard, and four from Vielle, all trying to find her yesterday afternoon. “Hi, you remember you’ve got my car, don’t you?” Vielle’s last one began. “I’m leaving now. When you get back, just leave my keys with the admitting nurse. I think I’ll rent Gone in Sixty Seconds or Grand Theft Auto for our next Dish Night.”
There was a pause, and then Vielle gasped, “Oh, my God, you won’t believe who just walked in. Do you remember that cute police officer who came in to tell us about the nail gunner, the one who looks just like Denzel Washington? Well, he’s here, and it looks like he’s going to be at the meeting. Officer Right, here I come!”
Joanna grinned and hit “delete” and “next message.”
“Hi, this is Kerri Jakes. Do I remember the name of our high school English textbook? Are you kidding? I barely remember high school. What do you need to know for? Don’t tell me you didn’t really graduate and they’re making you take senior English over. Anyway, no, I don’t remember the name of the book, and the only one I remember being in second period was Ricky Inman because I had this awful crush on him, and I used to hang around Mr. Briarley’s door before third period, waiting for him to come out.”
Kerri was right. She didn’t remember high school. Joanna hit “next message.” “This is Elspeth Haighton. I’m trying to reach Dr. Lander. The session we set up won’t work. I have a Junior League meeting that day. Please call me and reschedule.”
Fat chance, Joanna thought, but she dialed Mrs. Haighton’s number. It was busy. How can it be busy? Joanna thought, she’s never home, and went back to listening to messages.
There were three in a row from Mr. Mandrake, all beginning, “You never answer your pages, Dr. Lander,” and wanting to talk to her about some astonishing new details Mrs. Davenport had remembered, “which are so vivid and authentic that they cannot fail to convince you that what is being experienced during the NDE is, in fact, real.”
But it’s not, Joanna thought, even though he’s right about the details being vivid and authentic. She could see the lace insets on the young woman’s nightgown, the frightened expression on her face, the filigreed light sconces in the passage. But it wasn’t the actual Titanic, in spite of the reality of the vision. It was something else.
“ . . . not only Mrs. Davenport’s uncle Alvin, but the spirits of Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc, waiting to welcome her to the Other Side,” Mr. Mandrake was saying.
Joanna erased him, and went on through the rest of the messages, jotting them down and promptly forgetting them, except the one from Mr. Wojakowski, who had ostensibly called to tell her the hearing research was going to last eight weeks and after that he’d be available for the project again, but really to tell her the story of the Yorktown’s sinking and the men lining their shoes up along the deck all over again. That one she didn’t jot down. She deleted it and hit “next message,” wondering how long before she got to the end of the messages.
“This is Kit Gardiner. I’m trying to reach Joanna Lander,” Kit’s voice said. “I think I’ve found the book.”
In the background, Mr. Briarley’s voice said, “Joanna? Bride,” and then he must have moved away from the phone because Joanna only caught part of what he said. “—wasn’t . . . the key . . . ”
“It’s blue with gold lettering, and it’s called Voyages and Voices,” Kit continued. “Does that ring a bell?”
It didn’t, but the title did begin with a V, like Joanna had remembered.
“I’m pretty sure it’s the right one. It has a ship on the cover. Uncle Pat,” Kit dropped her voice, “usually takes a nap from eleven to one, so that would be a good time.”
“ ‘The bride hath paced into the hall,’ ” Mr. Briarley’s voice said. “ ‘Red as a rose is she.’ Have you seen my grade book, Kit?”
“I’d better go,” Kit said. “’ye.” The machine beeped the end of the message.
Joanna glanced at her watch. Eleven-thirty. She grabbed up her bag, keys, and coat and went up to the lab. Richard was at the console, his chin in his hand, staring at scans. “I have something I need to check on,” she said. “I’ll be back by one.”
He nodded without turning around, and she went out and down to the elevator. “Wait!” Richard called, sprinting after her, and she thought, watching him come toward her, He really is cute. “I wanted to talk to you before Tish gets here. I don’t think we should talk about the Titanic in front of her. If you see the Titanic, which I don’t think you will,” he said. “I’m increasing the dosage, which should change the temporal-lobe stimuli, particularly the initial stimulus, and I think it will produce a totally different L+R pattern.”
“But just in case I do see it, you want me to record my account in my office.”
“Or on the other side of the lab. I know you need to record it as soon as possible after the NDE,” he said and looked sheepish. “It’s not that I think Tish would go tell Mr. Mandrake, but—”
“Loose lips sink ships,” Joanna said.
“In this case, literally,” Richard said, grinning. “You said you’ll be back by one?”
Joanna nodded.
“Great,” he said, starting back to the lab. “Did you have a chance to look at those multiple NDEs?”
“Not yet,” she said, pushing the “down” button. “I’ll start them as soon as I get back. Oh, and Mrs. Haighton called. She can’t come Thursday.”
“I knew it was too good to be true,” he said. “See you at one.” He nodded, waving good-bye to her over his shoulder. The elevator opened. Joanna stepped in. And found herself face to face with Vielle. She was in her scrubs and surgical cap and was wearing sterile booties over her shoes.
This is what you get for not taking the back way, Joanna thought. “Vielle, what are you doing up here?” she said. “You haven’t had another incident, have you?”
“Incident?”
“Yes, you know, crazy druggie on rogue trying to stab people. Like the last incident, which you neglected to tell me about. Vielle, you have got to transfer out of—”
“I know, I know,” Vielle said, waving her hand dismissively. “You’ll have to lecture me some other time. I’m on break. I have to get back, and I came up here to tell you three things. Are you going down?” she asked, looking at Joanna’s coat and bag.
She obviously was. “Yes,” she said and pushed “G.” “What three things?”
br /> “One,” Vielle said, “tomorrow night will work for Dish Night if it will work for you and Richard. Two, Dr. Jamison was down in the ER the other day—she’s working with one of the interns on some project—and you don’t have anything to worry about. She’s sixty if she’s a day. And three, I found out what you asked me about.”
“About Dr. Jamison?” Joanna said, confused.
“No, about the movie. You asked me if there was a scene in it with people out on deck after the engines stopped? There’s not. There’s a scene where people are sticking their heads out of their cabins and the stewards are telling them to go up to the Boat Deck and there’s another scene where Kate Winslet’s mother and her creepy fiancé are standing around in lifejackets next to the Grand Staircase waiting for their lifeboat to be called.”
“But I thought you said your meeting went till eleven-thirty,” Joanna said, confused. Vielle surely hadn’t gone out after the meeting and rented the video.
“It did,” Vielle said. “I would’ve called you last night and told you, but it was so late. There’s a scene out on deck where passengers are playing with pieces of ice, and one where they’re letting the steam off, and it’s so deafening nobody can hear anything, but Heidi says she doesn’t remember anything with people just standing around not knowing what happened.”
“Heidi?” Joanna said sharply.
“Yeah, during one of the potty breaks at the meeting I saw Heidi Schlagel. She’s an LPN, works graveyard, but she used to work the three-to-eleven, and she has the world’s biggest crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. She used to drive us all crazy talking about Titanic. She saw it about fifty times. I figured if anybody knew the answer to your question, it’d be Heidi, and she did,” Vielle said, smiling, and obviously pleased at having been so clever.
“I asked you to rent the video,” Joanna said, glancing anxiously at the floor indicator, hoping no one got on in the middle of this.
“I know,” Vielle said, looking surprised, “but I knew I wouldn’t be able to watch it till tonight, and you sounded like you needed it right away.”
If Mr. Mandrake got hold of this—“I told you not to tell anyone.”