Passage

  “You look tired,” Joanna said. “Would you like to go get a cup of coffee, or lie down in the waiting room? I’ll sit with him.”

  “No, he might . . . no,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “I’m fine. Thank you, though. It’s very kind of you.” She looked at Carl. “He’s stopped talking. Of course, he can’t talk with the feeding tube in, but he doesn’t even try to make sounds anymore. He just lies there,” her voice broke, “so still in the bed.”

  But he’s not in the bed, Joanna thought, and remembered standing beside his bed the day she’d met Richard, thinking he was somewhere far away. She wondered where. At the foot of the Grand Staircase, waiting for his boat to be called? Or in one of the lifeboats, rowing against the darkness and the cold?

  She moved around to the side of the bed. “Carl,” she said, and covered his poor, battered hand with hers. “I came to see how you were doing,” she said, and then stopped, unable to think of anything at all to say. “Get well” ? He obviously wasn’t going to. “The doctor says you’re doing fine” ?

  Maisie had said, “I think people should tell you the truth even when it’s bad.” Or even when they’re too far away to hear you. “Your wife’s here,” Joanna said. “The nurses are taking really good care of you. We all want you to come back to us.”

  Behind her, Mrs. Aspinall was fumbling in her purse for a Kleenex. Joanna leaned over and kissed him on his papery cheek. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, and went back up to her office and started through the transcripts again.

  “I don’t think it was the same tunnel,” Mrs. Woollam had said. “It was narrow, and the floor was uneven, so I had trouble walking.” And she had seen a stairway, and a dark open space with nothing around for miles.

  But she had also seen a garden, “green and white, with vines all around.” And there was Maisie, who hadn’t seen lights or people dressed in white, but fog.

  At half-past one, Joanna left for the university to see Amelia, leaving plenty of time to find the building and the room, remembering what a nightmare parking usually was, but the bad weather must have kept a lot of the students home. She found a parking place in the very first row.

  Movie parking, she thought, I’ll have to tell Vielle. But Vielle would ask, “What were you doing at the university?” And if I told her, Joanna thought, she’d accuse me of stalking Amelia. Which is what I’m doing, she thought, standing outside the door of the classroom, waiting for her to come out. Amelia quit the project, and she made it plain she didn’t want to talk to me. I have no right to be here.

  But when Amelia came out, toting her backpack, pulling on her mittens, Joanna went up to her and said, “Amelia? Is there somewhere we can talk for a few minutes?” before she could bolt. Which, after a terrified glance at Joanna, she had looked like she was going to do, taking a caged glance around as if trying to find a stairway to duck into. That’s what I look like whenever I see Mr. Mandrake, Joanna thought, and wondered if Amelia put her in the same category. Was that a possibility, that Amelia had quit not because she had seen something that frightened her, but because she thought of the project as pseudoscience?

  That might be it, because, when they got to the cafeteria, which was, astonishingly, open in the middle of the afternoon, and Joanna asked Amelia if she could get her a Coke or coffee, Amelia said, “I have a class in a few minutes,” which Joanna knew was a blatant lie.

  “This will only take a few minutes,” Joanna said, opening a notebook. “I just need to complete your exit interview,” which sounded, she hoped, official and required. “You were with the project how long?”

  “Four weeks,” Amelia said.

  Joanna wrote that down. “Reason for quitting?”

  “I told you, my classes are really hard this semester. I just didn’t have time.”

  “Okay,” Joanna said, as if consulting a list of questions. “The first session you had that I was there, that would be your third session, you said that you felt a sense of warmth and peace.”

  “Yes,” she said, but this time there was no half-smile as she remembered. Her hands clenched.

  “And your last session you said you could see more clearly, that you saw people standing in the light, but you couldn’t make them out.”

  “No, the light was too bright.”

  “Could you see anything of your surroundings?”

  “No,” she said, and her hands clenched again. She seemed to become aware of it and laid them in her lap.

  “How did you feel during that fourth session?”

  “I told you, I had a feeling of peace. Look, are there any more questions? I have a class I have to get to.”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “Were your classes the only reason you quit?”

  “I told you—”

  “I got the idea that you might have seen something in that last session that frightened you. Did you?”

  “No,” Amelia said, and stood up. “I told you, I’ve got really hard classes this semester. Is that all?”

  “I need you to sign this,” Joanna said, and pushed the paper and a pen at her. Amelia bent over the form, her long black hair swinging forward over her face. “If you did see something frightening, I need you to tell me. It’s important.”

  Amelia straightened. “All I saw was a light,” she said. She handed Joanna back the pen with an air of finality and picked up her backpack. “I felt warm and peaceful.” She slung the heavy backpack onto her shoulders and looked challengingly at Joanna. “There wasn’t anything frightening about it at all.”

  Which proved exactly nothing, Joanna thought, watching her make her way out of the crowded cafeteria, except that she didn’t want to talk to me. It certainly didn’t prove that she had seen the Titanic. But she had. And she was terrified at the prospect of being sent under again, which was why she had quit.

  But it was scarcely proof, and neither was a scattering of words and phrases in her interviews. “The word silver appears in the interviews, too,” she could hear Richard saying. “That doesn’t mean they saw the Hindenburg.” He was right. Even the Devil could quote Scripture, and sifting through interviews and taking only the parts that fit your theory was Mr. Mandrake’s modus operandi, not a reputable scientist’s, especially when there were things that didn’t fit at all, like Mrs. Woollam’s garden and Maisie’s fog.

  I need evidence, she thought. The testimony of witnesses, but there weren’t any—except herself—and Richard had already rejected that. Amelia refused to testify, Mrs. Troudtheim refused even to go under, and Carl Aspinall was in a coma. There was Mr. Briarley, but why on earth would Richard believe the ramblings of an Alzheimer’s patient, even if she could get Mr. Briarley to repeat them? There must be some outside confirmation she could get, like the facts about Midway and the Coral Sea that she had used to prove Mr. Wojakowski was lying.

  As if she had conjured him up, or, worse, was hallucinating, she saw Mr. Wojakowski coming toward her across the cafeteria, carrying his baseball cap in his hand and smiling broadly. “Hiya, Doc, what are you doing here?” he said. “Ain’t you supposed to be at the hospital?”

  “What am I doing here?” Joanna said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Art show,” he said and grimaced. “Damn modern stuff made out of wires and toilet seats. Aspen Gardens brought a bunch of us over in a van to see it.” He waved his cap in the direction of the serving line, where Joanna saw several blue-haired ladies getting coffee. “Did you get that schedule worked out yet?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “Not yet.”

  “I figured that. I been calling you and the doc all week. I was starting to feel like Norm Pichette. Thought I was going to have to get me a machine gun.”

  Joanna looked at him, startled, but he was grinning amiably at her.

  “I guess I never told you about how he got accidentally left behind when we abandoned the Yorktown. He was down in sick bay, and when he wakes up, there’s nobody on board but him and George Weise, who’s got a skull fracture and who’s out cold
. Well, everybody’s already been transferred to the Hammann and the Hughes.”

  He can’t be making it up, Joanna thought all over again. Not with all these details. Part of it has to be true.

  “He calls over to us, but we can’t hear him, we’re too far away. Well, he tries everything—he hollers and waves his arms.” Mr. Wojakowski demonstrated, waving his arms over his head like a semaphore. “He even gets a stew pot out of the galley and bangs on it, but we’re too far away and there’s too much going on. So there he is, on a ship that’s going down and no way to get a message to anybody.”

  “Mr. Wojakowski—” she said, but he was off again.

  “So what does he do? He takes a machine gun and fires it into the water. We’re too far away to hear it, but Meatball Fratelli sees the splashes in the water and shouts, ‘Sub!’ and everybody looks, but we can’t figure out what it is. It’s not a sub, and it doesn’t act like a depth charge, and then I look up, and there he is, standing on the port catwalk. Pretty smart of him, huh, figuring out a way to get a message to us like that?”

  “Mr. Wojakowski, I have a question I need to ask you.”

  “Ed.”

  Why am I asking this? she thought. It will just remind him of another Yorktown story, and even if he did answer it, Richard would hardly believe someone who was a compulsive liar.

  “Go ahead, Doc, shoot,” Mr. Wojakowski said.

  “Mr. Wo—Ed,” she said, “during your interviews, you talked a lot about World War II. Was there something in your NDEs that made you think of your war experiences?”

  “On the Yorktown, you mean?” He took off his baseball cap and scratched his freckled head. “Not that I can think of.”

  The one time I want him to come up with a story, she thought, and he lets me down.

  “Nothing in particular, Doc,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” she said and gathered up her belongings. “I just wondered.”

  He put his baseball cap back on. “You mean besides that I was on a ship, right?”

  “I must go in, the fog is rising.”

  —EMILY DICKINSON’S LAST WORDS

  YOU WERE ON A SHIP?” Joanna said carefully. “What ship?”

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Not the Yorktown. I knew every inch of her, and this was an alleyway I’d never seen before. And the door wasn’t like the ones we had. It was more like the door you’d see on the captain’s cabin. Which reminds me of the time I went to ask the captain somethin’, and who do I see coming out of his cabin but Stinkpot Malone. Now, Stinky can’t be up to anything but no good, he’s the biggest stool pigeon in the whole U.S. Navy, and that’s going some. So, anyway, Stinky sees me and he says—”

  “What makes you think it was a ship?” Joanna cut in.

  “You ever been on board?” he said. “Once you have, you can’t mistake that feeling for anything else. You’d know it even if you was blindfolded and had earplugs on. Which, come to think of it, I guess I was.”

  “But you couldn’t tell what ship?”

  “Nope,” he said. “It was a navy ship, that’s all I know, ’cause I could see sailors outside the door.”

  “You could see sailors?”

  “People, anyway. I thought they were sailors. The light was too bright to make out much, but I could see they had their dress whites on, so I figured they must be sailors.”

  A ship, and people outside the door, dressed all in white.

  “You said it felt like you were at sea. Were the engines going?”

  “The engines?” he said, surprised. “No,” and the blue-haired ladies came up, looking determined.

  “The van is waiting, Edward,” one of them said, glaring at Joanna.

  “Be right with you,” Mr. Wojakowksi said. “You gals go on. I gotta say good-bye to my girlfriend here.” He winked at Joanna. The ladies moved off a few steps and then stood there, waiting impatiently. “What other questions you got, Doc?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Well, I’ll tell ya, I didn’t want to just yammer on like Edgewise Eggleton. Did I ever tell you about him? We called him that ’cause when you were around him you couldn’t ever get a word in edgewise, and—”

  “You’d better go,” Joanna said, indicating the ladies, who looked like they were about to have a stroke. “You don’t want the van to go without you.”

  “I’d never hear the end of it,” he said and sighed. “You call me as soon as you get that schedule set, Doc. I can come in anytime.” He sauntered over to the women and then came back. “I just got to thinking. It might’ve been the Franklin. I don’t know how she went down, though.”

  “Went down?”

  “No, come to think of it, it couldn’ta been the Hammann, because her back got broken. And not the Wasp because she went belly up, and the Lexington was clear over on her side, and this ship, whatever she was, was going down by the head.”

  And there it was, her outside confirmation. It wouldn’t convince Richard. It wouldn’t convince anyone, not with Mr. Wojakowski’s record, but it was still evidence that she was on the right track. And where there was some evidence, there was more. She just had to find it.

  She drove back to the hospital and spent the rest of the day and all of the next barricaded in her office, going through the transcripts. She switched her pager off, but kept the phone on and let the answering machine pick up, mostly so she could keep track of Mr. Mandrake.

  He called at two-hour intervals, becoming more and more irritated that he couldn’t corner her. “If you can’t make time to return my calls,” he huffed and puffed, “you should at least go hear what Mrs. Davenport has to say about the visions she’s been having. They prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that messages can be sent from beyond the grave.”

  Joanna erased the message, taped black paper along the bottom of the door so light couldn’t be seen from the outside, and went back to reading transcripts:

  “I was traveling down through a long, sloping tunnel.”

  “The feeling was warm, like being wrapped in a blanket.”

  “A woman and a little girl were standing in the doorway, and I knew it must be my mother and my little sister who died when she was six, even though it didn’t really look like them. The little girl took my hand and led me into a beautiful garden.”

  The garden again. Joanna did a global search. “I was in a sort of garden.”

  “Elijah was standing in the Garden of Eden.” “Beyond the doorway I could see a garden.”

  Gladys Meers had been the most specific. “There were trees all around, and white trellises with vines growing up them. ‘Pray be seated,’ the angel said, and I sat down in a white wicker chair, the kind they have on patios.”

  There couldn’t possibly have been a garden on the Titanic, Joanna thought, and wished she could believe that, but it had had a swimming pool, it had had a Turkish bath. Maybe it had had a garden, too.

  She called Kit, but the line was busy. She printed out the list of garden references and then went to see Maisie. She was lying in bed, watching TV, but her shallow breathing and flaring nostrils gave her away. She just jumped into bed, Joanna thought, wondering what book she’d just hidden, and then saw that there were wires leading under her Barbie pajama top to the heart monitor.

  “I didn’t find out the wireless messages yet,” Maisie said when she saw Joanna. She pointed her remote at the TV and turned it off. “I’m in A-fib again. I’m not supposed to read even. I found out two.” She took a couple of panting breaths before she went on. “They’re in the drawer,” turning her head to indicate the nightstand. “I’ll look up the others as soon as I feel better.”

  Joanna opened the drawer and took out Maisie’s tablet. On the first page was written, “Sinking. Cannot hear for noise of steam.” And under it, “Come quick. Our engine-room flooded up to the boilers.”

  Like you, Joanna thought, and tried not to think of Maisie on the listing decks of the Titan
ic, on the slanting steps of the Grand Staircase. But she saw fog, Joanna thought, and the night the Titanic sank, it was clear. And if there wasn’t a garden on the Titanic, then Mr. Briarley’s wrong.

  “Maisie,” she said. “Did the Titanic have a garden?”

  “A garden?” Maisie said, incredulous. “On a ship?”

  “Or something that looked like a garden, with flowers and trees,” but Maisie was shaking her head. And if there were one, Joanna thought, she would have known about it.

  “I never heard of a garden,” Maisie said. “I bet if there was, though, there’d be a picture of it in my Titanic Picture Book.” She pushed the covers off and sat up.

  “No,” Joanna said. “No looking things up till you’re out of A-fib.”

  “But—”

  “Promise me, or I’ll fire you as my research assistant.”

  “Okay,” Maisie said grudgingly. “I promise,” and, at Joanna’s skeptical look, “Cross my heart.”

  Which isn’t worth a damn, Joanna thought. “You get some rest, kiddo,” she said, picking up the remote and switching it on, “and I’ll come see you soon.”

  “You can’t go yet,” Maisie said. “I haven’t told you this neat thing I found out about the Mackay-Bennett.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Two minutes, and then you have to rest. What’s the Mackay-Bennett?”

  “It was this ship they sent out to pick up the bodies.”

  “I thought the bodies all sank,” Joanna said.

  “I did, too, but some of them were wearing lifejackets, so they floated.” She laid her head back against the pillows, arms outstretched, mouth open in a grotesque imitation of a floating corpse. “And they were afraid people on other ships would see them, so they sent the Mackay-Bennett out to get them. It had all these coffins and a minister. What’s an embalmer?”

  “It’s a person who prepares bodies for burial. To keep them from spoiling.”

  “Oh,” Maisie said. “Well, they had an embalmer, and all this ice. That was to keep them from spoiling, too, right?”