“You can’t,” Maisie said. “I haven’t told you about the Carpathia yet. And I have to ask you a question. How fast do ships go?”
“How fast?” The Titanic had been going much too fast for the ice warnings, she knew that, but how fast was that? “I don’t know.”
“’cause in my book it said the Carpathia came really fast, but this other book said it was fifty-eight miles away—”
“Fifty-eight?” Joanna said. “The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away?”
“Yeah,” Maisie said. “And it took her three hours to get there. The Titanic had already sunk ages before. So I don’t think it could’ve been very fast ’cause fifty-eight miles isn’t very far to come.”
“I believe it’s death.”
—DYING WORDS OF TCHAIKOVSKY
WHAT’S WRONG?” Maisie asked, looking at Joanna alertly. “Are you okay?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Joanna said. “You’re right. Fifty-eight miles doesn’t sound all that far. How far away was the Californian?” Fifty-eight miles. That day in the ER, he was talking about the Carpathia.
“You looked really funny when I told you how far away it was,” Maisie said. “Did one of your near-death people see the Carpathia?”
“No. How far away was the Californian?”
“It was really close,” she said, still looking suspicious. “It saw their rockets and everything, it could have saved them probably, only it turned off its wireless, so it didn’t hear any of their SOSs, and it didn’t even know what happened till the next morning.”
Joanna wasn’t listening. He was trying to tell me the Carpathia was too far away, that it would never get there in time.
“I don’t think they should’ve done that,” Maisie said. “Turned off their wireless. Do you?”
“No,” Joanna said. That’s why Greg’s words haunted me so, why I kept feeling I knew what they meant. They meant he was on the Titanic.
“It was really close,” Maisie said. “I mean, the people on the Titanic saw its lights. They told the lifeboats to try to row to it.”
“I need to go,” Joanna said, and stood up.
“I won’t talk about the Titanic anymore, I promise. I’ll just talk about the Hartford circus fire, okay?” Maisie went on rapidly, “The people tried to get out the main entrance, but the cage for the lions and tigers was in the way and they got all jammed up against it, and the ringmaster kept trying to tell them to go out the performers’ entrance—that’s where all the clowns and acrobats and stuff come in when it’s time for their acts—but they just kept trying to go out the way they came in.”
She’d convinced herself the Titanic wasn’t real, that it was a symbol for something, an image her mind had chosen because of something Mr. Briarley had said. But what if it wasn’t?
“The thing was, they didn’t have to go out the entrances,” Maisie said. “They could have just lifted up the tent and crawled under it.”
The mail room, the aft staircase, Scotland Road, were all in the right place. They all looked exactly the way they really had, even the red-and-blue arrows on the stationary bicycles. Because you were really there. Because it was really the Titanic.
But how can it be? Joanna thought desperately. The NDE isn’t a doorway into an afterlife or another time. It’s a chemical hallucination. It’s an amalgam of images out of long-term memory. But Greg had said, “Fifty-eight,” and it wasn’t an address, it wasn’t a blood pressure reading. It was miles, and he had been talking about the Carpathia.
I have to get out of here, Joanna thought. I have to get somewhere where I can think about this. She started blindly for the door.
“You can’t go yet,” Maisie pleaded. “I haven’t told you about the band yet.”
“I have to,” Joanna said, desperate, and like the answer to a prayer, her pager went off. “See? They’re paging me.”
“You can call them on my phone if you want,” Maisie said. “It might not be your patient. Or it might be them saying they have to go down to Radiology so you don’t need to come right now.”
Joanna shook her head. “I have to go, and you need to—”
“Rest,” Maisie said mockingly. “I hate resting. Can’t I do some research? Please? It doesn’t make me tired at all, and I promise I won’t—”
“All right,” Joanna said, and Maisie immediately leaned over and got her tablet and pencil out. “I need you to” —she cast about for something harmless—“make a list of all the wireless messages the Titanic sent.”
“You said you just wanted the names of the ships.”
“I did,” Joanna said, trying not to sound as desperate as she felt, “but now I want to know what the messages were.”
“Okay. What else?”
What else? “And where the swimming pool was.”
“Swimming pool? On a ship?”
“Yes. I want to know what deck it was on.” While Maisie was writing it down, she made it to the door.
“All the wireless messages or just the ones calling for help?” Maisie asked.
“Just the ones calling for help. Now I have to answer my page,” she said and went out. And since it was impossible to get anything past Maisie, she walked down to the nurses’ station and called the switchboard to see who’d paged her.
“You have four messages,” the operator said. “Mr. Mandrake wants you to call him, it’s very important. Dr. Wright wants you to call him about Mr. Sage’s session. Vielle Howard wants you to call her when you have time, she’s in the ER, and Kit Gardiner wants you to call her right away. She says it’s urgent. Do you want me to connect you with Mr. Mandrake’s office?”
“No,” Joanna said and pressed down the button to break the connection. She didn’t want to be connected with anyone, least of all Mr. Mandrake. But not Vielle either, or Richard-oh, God, Richard! What would he say if she told him Greg Menotti had been on the Titanic?
I have to get somewhere where I can think about all this, she thought, and started to put down the receiver, and then thought, Kit said it was urgent. What if Mr. Briarley had hurt himself again? She dialed Kit’s number. “Hi, Kit?”
“I am so glad you called,” Kit said. “I’ve got it!”
“Got it?”
“The book! Mazes and Mirrors. I’m sure it’s the right one,” she said excitedly. “It has a homework assignment in it dated October 14, 1987. You’ll never guess where I found it. Inside the pressure cooker. I think that was why Uncle Pat kept taking everything out of the cupboards. I can’t wait for you to see it. Can you come over this afternoon?”
No, Joanna thought. Not until I’ve figured this out. “I’m pretty busy,” she said.
“Oh,” Kit said, sounding disappointed. “I’d bring it over to the hospital, but Uncle Pat’s having a bad day—”
“No, I don’t want you to have to do that. I’ll come by tonight,” she said and hung up quickly. She’d call Kit later and make some excuse for why she couldn’t come.
I can’t come because I’ve been traveling back in time to a sinking ship, she thought wildly. Or how about, I can’t come because I’ve turned into an NDE nutcase?
“Oh, Dr. Lander, you are here,” a nurse’s aide she vaguely recognized said. “Mr. Mandrake’s looking for you. Barbara said you weren’t on the floor, and that’s what I told him.”
Bless Barbara, Joanna thought, looking anxiously in the direction of the elevator. “When was he here?” she asked.
“About ten minutes ago. He said if I saw you, to tell you to call him immediately, that he’d found proof that near-death experiences are real.”
So have I, Joanna thought bleakly. “Did he say where he was going?” she asked the aide.
“Hunh-unh. I can page him,” she said, reaching for the phone.
“No! That’s okay,” Joanna said. “It’ll be faster just to go up to his office,” she said, and started toward the door to the stairs.
“Those stairs don’t go up to seventh,” the aide called after her.
/> “Shortcut,” Joanna said, pushing open the door.
“Oh,” the aide nodded, and Joanna made her escape. But to where? she thought, clattering down the steps. She couldn’t go back to her office or the lab, and with him roaming the halls, nowhere was safe. And I cannot, cannot stand to see him right now, she thought, and listen to him prattling on about heaven and happily ever after.
She ran down the steps to third and then stopped, her hand on the door. To get to the parking lot from here, she’d have to take the walkway and go through Medicine and past Mrs. Davenport, and Mr. Wojakowski was on second.
She let go of the door and ran all the way down to first and outside. A taxi, she thought, there are always taxis out front. If I’ve got money, she thought, fumbling in her pocket. She came up with two dollars, a quarter, and three pennies. She ran down to the basement, past the morgue, and outside.
It was freezing and the leaden sky looked like it might snow any minute. She pulled her cardigan close and hurried past the generating plant and around to the front. There was a single battered-looking Yellow Cab directly in front of the glass lobby doors. Joanna ducked into the backseat. “Where to?” the cabbie asked.
Joanna leaned forward. “The hospital parking lot,” she said.
“Is this some kind of joke?” he said, peering at her in the rearview mirror.
“No. I need you to take me to my car. It’s parked there.”
He squinted at her as if she were a nutcase. Well, and wasn’t she? Fleeing Mr. Mandrake as if he were a monster instead of a nuisance? Believing the unbelievable? “I intended to walk over to my car,” she said, “but it’s too cold.”
The explanation made no sense, and she waited for him to say, “Why don’t you go back inside and walk across?” but he grunted, “Two-buck minimum,” put the car in gear, and pulled out of the driveway. And why shouldn’t he believe her explanation? She believed she and Greg Menotti had been transported back to the Titanic. The cabbie tapped the meter. “Two-ten,” he said.
Joanna handed him all her money, said, “Thank you. You saved my life,” and walked out to her car, half-expecting Mr. Mandrake to be standing next to it, waiting for her.
He wasn’t. Or at the parking lot gate. She turned south on Colorado Boulevard, west on Sixth Avenue, south again on University, as if she were a character in a Sylvester Stallone movie, trying to throw the bad guy off the track. A fire truck roared toward her, sirens wailing and honking, and she pulled off to the side of the street, and then just sat there, gripping the steering wheel with both hands and staring into space.
Greg Menotti had been on the Titanic. She had seen him there, she had assumed that he was there, that Mr. Briarley was there, because she had constructed them out of memory and wishful thinking. But what if the Titanic was real, and they were really there, Mr. Briarley caught in some hideous limbo between two worlds, part of him already dead, and the place you went after you died wasn’t heaven but back in time to the decks of the Titanic?
You can’t believe this, she thought, and realized she didn’t. It made no sense, not even if the NDE was a spiritual experience. Heaven, the Elysian Fields, Hades, Valhalla, even Mr. Mandrake’s Hallmark Card Other Side, were more logical than this. Why, even if the dead were sent back in time in a bizarre sort of reverse reincarnation, would they be sent to the Titanic? Was it some kind of punishment? Or were the dead supposed to be sunk in the depths of the Atlantic, and the Titanic just happened to be in the way?
And it isn’t the Titanic, she thought. She had never once, even in that first rush of recognition, thought it was the actual ocean liner. It was something else, for which the Titanic was only the metaphor, not just for her, but, hard as it was to believe, for Greg Menotti, too. And how could it be?
Maybe he went to Dry Creek High School and heard Mr. Briarley give the same lecture. No, she remembered him saying he had just moved out here from New York.
All right, then, maybe he was a Titanic buff, just like Mr. Briarley. Are you kidding? she thought. He worked out at a health club three times a week. But, as Richard had said, movies and books and TV specials about the Titanic were everywhere, any one of them could have mentioned the Carpathia’s being fifty-eight miles away—
If it was fifty-eight miles away. You only have Maisie’s word for it, and you heard her, she said the Titanic had sunk hours before the Carpathia got there. She could have been exaggerating, or gotten the number wrong, it could have been fifty-seven miles away, or sixty, and you’re getting yourself into a state for nothing, like that night you kept seeing fifty-eight on license plates and McDonald’s signs.
No, she thought, staring blindly through the windshield at the snow that was beginning to fall, it was fifty-eight. She had known the minute she heard Maisie say it. Like you knew Mr. Briarley was dead, and went tearing down to the ER? she asked herself. Outside confirmation. You need to at least double-check your facts, make Maisie show you the book, or ask Kit.
Kit. She had asked her to come over and look at the textbook.She could ask her to look it up, to verify it. It would only take a few minutes.
She started the car and pulled out from the curb, and realized that she was nearly there. In her panicked flight she had driven almost all the way to DU. She drove the rest of the way to Mr. Briarley’s, thinking, I won’t even have to explain. I’ll tell her I came over to look at the book. I’ll pretend this is just another piece of information I need.
Only after she was on the porch, had rung the bell and was standing there shivering in her cardigan, did she remember that Kit had said Mr. Briarley was having a bad day. I shouldn’t have come, she thought, but Kit had already opened the door.
She was wearing jeans and a lace midriff top and a pair of ballet slippers. It must really be cold, Joanna thought irrelevantly. She’s actually wearing shoes.
“Hi!” Kit said, her face lighting up. “I thought you said you couldn’t come today.”
“I was able to get away after all,” Joanna said. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
“No, it’s great!” Kit said. “I can’t wait to show you the book. I knew it was the right one the minute I saw it. You know how sometimes you just know? And you know how you said different people thought it had different things on the cover. Well, they were all right. Geez, it’s cold out here,” she said and shivered in her midriff top. She opened the door wide. “How come you’re not wearing a coat?”
Joanna had no idea how to answer that, but Kit didn’t seem to require an answer. “Let me go get the book,” she said, and went into the library. She was back out in less than a minute, quietly closing the door behind her. “Uncle Pat’s dozing,” she whispered, motioning Joanna to follow her down the hall to the kitchen. “He’ll wake up again in a few minutes. I want to let him sleep if he can. He had a bad night last night.”
A bad night. He had dismantled the kitchen again, more completely than before. Dishes and silverware were everywhere, and the entire contents of the refrigerator sat on the floor. A full roll of paper towels was draped over, under, among the canisters and cookie sheets and china. A smashed bottle of ketchup lay on the counter, leaking red into the sink. A dustpan of broken glass sat on the table, and the wastebasket was nearly full of it.
“Uncle Pat was looking for the book,” Kit said, taking two teacups off a tottering stack. “I think he must have had a vague memory of having put it somewhere in the kitchen, and that’s why he kept doing this.”
She stepped over a head of lettuce to the sink to fill the two cups. “I’m so glad you were able to come over. I’m positive this time it’s the right book. It’s blue, just like you said, and it’s got all the things you said it had on it.” She put the cups in the microwave and punched buttons. “They’re inside these gray panels that I think are supposed to be mirrors—”
Mazes and Mirrors, Joanna thought, and could see the mirrors, set at an angle, with different pictures in each one—a bottle of ink and a quill pen, and Queen Elizabeth, whom Ric
ky Inman had drawn a mustache and glasses on, and the carved prow of the caravel, plowing through the blue water.
Kit said, looking under a pile of potholders, “One of them has a ship, just like you said, and a—”
“—castle and a crown on a red velvet pillow,” Joanna said. “It’s definitely the right one.”
“Oh, good!” Kit clapped her hands. “Now, if I can do as good a job finding the teabags . . . ” She looked under an unsteady tower of cereal boxes and spices.
“How far away was the Carpathia from the Titanic?” Joanna said.
“The ship that came to the Titanic’s aid?” Kit asked. “I don’t know. I’ll look it up.” She set a tin of cinnamon down and started for the door, stepping over a broiler pan, a jar of olives, and a carton of eggs. “Be right back.”
She pattered down the hall and up the stairs and back down almost immediately, carrying a stack of books. “I checked on Uncle Pat. He’s still asleep,” she said, clearing a space on the table to set the books down. “Let’s see,” she said, opening the top book to the index. “Carpathia, Carpathia. Here it is, fifty-eight miles.”
“Are you sure?” Joanna said. And of course she was sure. You knew it the minute Maisie said it. You were kidding yourself that you needed outside confirmation.
“It’s right here,” Kit said. “ ‘Fifty-eight miles southwest of the Titanic when she received its first SOS,’ ” she read, “ ‘the Carpathia came at full steam, but arrived too late to take passengers off the ship.’ ” She closed the book to look at the cover. “That’s The Titanic: Symbol for Our Time. Do you want me to double-check it in something else?”
“No,” Joanna said. “No.”
“What is it? Are you all right, Joanna?”
“No.”
“This has something to do with your NDE,” Kit said anxiously, “doesn’t it?”
“No,” Joanna said. “With somebody else’s.”
She told her about Greg Menotti’s last words, and the nagging feeling that she should know what they meant, about Maisie telling her. “He was talking about the Carpathia,” she said.