Passage

by Connie Willis

  She lingered by the door, cradling her bandaged hand and looking unhappy, and then said, “What Joanna said-it might not have meant anything. People say all kinds of crazy things. I remember one old man who kept muttering, ‘The cashews are loose.’ And sometimes you think they’re trying to tell you one thing, and they’re actually trying to say something else. I had an ischemia patient one time who said, ‘Water,’ over and over, but when we’d try to give her a drink of water, she’d push it away. She was actually saying, ‘Walter.’ ”

  “And—what?” Richard asked bitterly. “Joanna was really saying ‘Suez’? Or ‘soy sauce’? You and I both know what she was trying to say. She was calling for help. She was trying to tell me she was on the Titanic.”

  He unplugged the EKG monitor. “That was what she’d come running down to the ER to tell me,” he said, winding up the cord, “in such a hurry she ran straight into a knife. That it wasn’t a hallucination. That it was really the Titanic.”

  “But how could it be? Near-death experiences are a phenomenon of the dying brain.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and sat down and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

  Vielle went away, but late that afternoon, or maybe the next day, she came again. “I talked to Patty Messner,” she said. “She ran into Joanna just as she came through the door of the ER, and she asked if Dr. Jamison was there. She said, ‘I have to find Dr. Wright. Do you know where he is?’ ”

  He must still have been harboring some hope that something, someone else had brought Joanna to the ER, because as she spoke, it was like hearing Tish telling him Joanna was dead all over again. He wondered numbly why Vielle had come up all this way to tell him that.

  “Patty said Joanna was in a hurry, that she was out of breath. I think you’re wrong,” Vielle said. “About what she was coming to tell you.”

  She paused, waiting for him to ask why, and then, when he didn’t, went on. “When I got shot, I didn’t tell Joanna because I knew what she’d say. She was always telling me I should transfer out of the ER, that I was going to get hurt. The last thing I wanted was for her to find out.” She looked expectantly at him.

  “And Joanna knew I’d accuse her of turning into a nutcase if she told me it was the Titanic, is that the point you’re trying to make?” Richard asked.

  “The point I’m trying to make is, I avoided Joanna for days so she wouldn’t see my bandage,” Vielle said. “The last thing Joanna would have done if it was really the Titanic was to have gone looking for you all over the hospital. Don’t you see?” she said earnestly. “What she’d found out must have been something good, something she thought you’d be happy about.”

  It was a nice try. It even made sense, up to a point. “She was in such a hurry she almost ran me over,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. And maybe she had been coming to tell him “something good,” something one of her NDEers had told her, but whatever it was, it had been overwhelmed by the reality of what was happening to her, the panic and terror of being trapped on board. “SOS,” she had called, and there was no mistaking what that meant, in spite of Vielle’s well-meaning rationalizations. It meant, “I am on the Titanic. We are going down.”

  “I think you should try to find out what it was, the thing she was coming to tell you,” Vielle said and went away, this time for good.

  But any number of other people came, bearing books and advice. Mrs. Dirksen from Personnel, proffering a copy of Seven Mourning Strategies. “It’s not healthy to sit here all by yourself. You need to get out and be with people, try not to think about it.”

  And Ann Collins with Words of Comfort for Trying Times: “God never sends you more than you can bear.” And somebody from Personnel Relations with a flyer for a Coping with Post-Trauma Stress Workshop the hospital had scheduled for Wednesday.

  And a fragile-looking young woman with short blond hair. Her frailness, her youth were somehow the last straw, and when she stammered, “I’m . . . I was a friend of Joanna Lander’s. My name’s Kit Gardiner, and I came—”

  He cut in angrily. “You tell me it isn’t my fault, there was nothing I could do? Or at least it was quick and she didn’t suffer? Or how about God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb? Or maybe all of the above?”

  “No,” she said. “I came to bring you this book. It—”

  “Oh, of course, a book,” he said viciously. “The answer to everything. What’s this one? Five Easy Steps to Forgetting?”

  He didn’t know what he’d expected. That she would look hurt and surprised, tears welling up in her eyes, that she would slam the book down and tell him to go to hell?

  She did neither. She looked quietly at him, no trace of tears in her eyes, and then, in a conversational tone, said, “I slapped my aunt Martha. When my fiancé died. She told me God needed him in heaven, and I hauled off and slapped her, a sixty-year-old woman. They said I was half out of my mind with grief, that I didn’t know what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. People say unbelievable things to you. They deserve slapping.”

  He stared at her in relief. “They—”

  “—tell you you’ll get over it,” Kit said. “I know. And that it’s unhealthy to be so upset. And that you shouldn’t blame yourself, it wasn’t your fault—”

  “—there was nothing anybody could have done,” he said. “But that’s a lie. If I’d gotten there earlier, if I’d had my pager on—” He stopped, suddenly afraid she’d say, “You couldn’t have known,” but she didn’t.

  She said, “They all told me it wasn’t my fault. Except Uncle Pat.” She stopped, looking down at the book she held, and then went on, “It’s a terrible thing to be told it isn’t your fault when you know it is. Look,” she said, and started for the door. “I’ll come some other time. You’ve got enough to deal with right now.”

  “No, wait,” he said. “I’m sorry I was so rude. It’s just that—”

  “I know. My mother says it’s because they don’t know what to say, that they’re just trying to comfort you, but Uncle Pat says . . . said that’s no excuse for them telling you stupid things like you’ll get over it.” She looked up at him. “You don’t, you know. Ever. They tell you you’ll feel better, too. That isn’t true either.”

  Her words should have been depressing, but oddly, they were comforting. “ ‘You think things can’t get any worse,’ ” he said, quoting Vielle, “ ‘and then they do.’ ”

  Kit nodded. “I found this book Joanna had asked me for, the day she was killed,” she said. “I called and offered to bring it to her, but she said no, she’d pick it up later on.”

  And if you’d brought the book over to her, she might not have been down in the ER when the teenager pulled his knife, Richard thought, marveling at how everyone found some way to blame himself. If only the lookouts had seen the iceberg five minutes earlier, if only the Californian’s wireless officer hadn’t gone to bed, if only the Carpathia had been closer. It was amazing how much guilt and blame and “if only’s” there were to go around.

  But the fact remained, they were going too fast, they didn’t have enough lifeboats, he had turned his pager off. “It was my fault, not yours,” he started to say, but she was still talking.

  “I’d been looking for the book for her for weeks, and then when I found it, it was too late to be of any help to her. She wanted so much to find out what caused near-death experiences, how they worked. That’s why I brought the book to you. She didn’t get a chance to finish what she started, but maybe it’ll help you in your research.” She held the book out to him.

  He didn’t take it. “I’ve shut the research project down,” he said. And now she would say, “You only think you feel that way now.”

  She didn’t. “It’s the textbook they used in Joanna’s English class,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken. “My uncle was her English teacher in high school. Joanna asked me to look for it. She thought there might be something in it that made her NDEs take the form of the Titanic.” She held the book out.
/>   “I don’t need it,” he said. “I already know the answer.”

  “I talked to Vielle,” she said. “She told me about your theory, that you think she was really on the Titanic.”

  “Not think,” he said. “Know.”

  “Joanna didn’t think she was. She thought the Titanic was a symbol for something else. She was trying to find out what. That’s why she needed the book.” She laid it down on the examining table between them. “She was convinced something Uncle Pat had said in his English class had triggered the image of the Titanic, but he has Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember, so she asked me to help her. She was convinced there was some connection between it and the nature of the near-death experience, and that the book would help her find out why she was seeing the Titanic.”

  “I know why she was seeing it. Because it was real. I have outside verification.”

  “You mean because she said, ‘SOS’? That could mean lots of—”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Because I went after her.”

  She stared at him for a long minute. “After her? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I went under to try to save her.” He gestured at the RIPT scan, at the examining table between them. “I self-induced an NDE and went after her to try to bring her back.”

  “You went after her,” she said, struggling to understand. “Onto the Titanic?”

  “No,” he said bitterly. “I was too late for that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There are apparently several varieties of hell. Mine was to stand in a crowd in the White Star office and listen to an official read the names of the passengers who’d been lost.”

  “You were there?”

  “I was there. It really happened. She went down on the Titanic. And she called to me for help. And I came too late.” He had said it finally, and getting it all out, sharing, venting, was supposed to make you feel better, wasn’t it, according to Eight Great Grief Helps? It didn’t.

  And now that it was out, Kit would say-what? “You left her to drown?” or, “I am so sorry,” or, “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re half out of your mind with grief” ?

  None of the above. She said, “How do you know? That you were really in the White Star office?”

  “I know. It was a real place,” he said, and knew he sounded just like Mr. Mandrake’s nutcases, swearing they’d seen Jesus, but Kit only nodded.

  “Joanna said it felt real,” she said, “not like a dream. She said it was a very convincing hallucination.”

  She was offering him a way out, just like, “It wasn’t your fault,” and, “There’s a reason for everything,” only this one was even better: it was only acetylcholine and random synapses and confabulation. He had conjured the White Star office out of Joanna’s NDE accounts and the movie, created a unifying image out of panic and grief and temporal-lobe stimulation.

  It almost worked. Except that Joanna, dying, had called out to him for help: “SOS. SOS.” “No thanks,” he said and handed her back the book.

  And now she would say, “You owe it to Joanna to continue your research. It’s what she would have wanted.”

  But she didn’t. She said, “Okay,” and put the book in her bag and then walked over to his desk and wrote on a pad. “Here’s my phone number if you decide you need it.”

  She walked to the door, opened it, and then turned around. “I don’t know who else to tell this to,” she said. “Joanna saved my life. My uncle . . . living with someone . . . ,” she stopped and tried again. “I was going under, and she got me to go out, she convinced me to use Eldercare, she invited me to Dish Night. She told me,” she took a ragged breath, “she wished she could die saving somebody’s life. And she did. She saved mine.”

  She left then, but the head of the board came, to remind him of the Coping with Post-Trauma Stress Workshop, and Nurse Hawley with Practical Mourning Management, and an elderly volunteer with a copy of the Book of Mormon. And on Tuesday, Eileen and two other nurses from three-west, to take him to the funeral. “We won’t take no for an answer,” they said. “It’s not good to be alone at a time like this.”

  He supposed Tish had put them up to it, but although he had finally slept, he still felt bone-tired and unable to concentrate, unable to think of an excuse they would accept. And maybe this was a good idea, he thought, climbing into the cramped Geo. He wasn’t sure he was in any shape to drive.

  “I still can’t believe she’s dead,” one of the nurses said as soon as they had pulled out of the parking lot.

  “At least she didn’t suffer,” the other one said. “What was she doing down in the ER, anyway?”

  “Have you thought about grief counseling, Richard?” Eileen asked.

  “I’ve got a great book you should read,” the first nurse volunteered. “It’s called The Grief Workbook, and it’s got all these neat depression exercises.”

  There was a crowd at the church, mostly people from the hospital, looking odd out of their lab coats and scrubs. He saw Mr. Wojakowski and Mrs. Troudtheim. Joanna’s sister stood by the door of the narthex, flanked by two little girls. He wondered if Maisie would be there, and then remembered that her mother relentlessly shielded her from “negative experiences.”

  “Look, there’s the cute policeman who took all of our statements,” one of the nurses said, pointing to a tall black man in a dark gray suit.

  “I don’t see Tish anywhere,” the other one said, craning her neck.

  “She isn’t coming,” the nurse said. “She said she hates funerals.”

  “So do I,” the other one said.

  “It isn’t a funeral,” Eileen said. “It’s a memorial service.”

  “What’s the difference?” the first nurse asked.

  “There’s no body. The family’s having a private graveside service later.”

  But when they came into the sanctuary, there was a bronze casket at the front, with half of its lid raised and a blanket of white mums and carnations on the other half. “We don’t have to file past and look at her, do we?” the shorter nurse asked.

  “Well, I’m not,” Eileen said and slid into a pew. The other two nurses sat down next to her. Richard stood a moment looking at the casket, his fists clenched, and then walked up the aisle. When he got to the casket, he stood there a long moment, afraid to look down, afraid Joanna’s terror and her panic might be reflected in her face, but there was no sign of it.

  She lay with her head on an ivory satin pillow, her hair arranged around her head in unfamiliar curls. The dress she was wearing was unfamiliar, too, high-necked, with lace ruffles, and around her neck was a silver cross. Her white hands lay folded across her chest, hiding the slashed aorta, the Y incision.

  A gray-haired woman had come up beside him. “Doesn’t she look natural?” she said. Natural. The mortician had set her glasses high on the bridge of her nose, and put rouge on her white cheeks, dark red lipstick on her bloodless lips. Joanna had never worn lipstick that color in her life. In her life.

  “She looks so peaceful,” the gray-haired woman said, and he looked earnestly into Joanna’s face, hoping it was true, but it wasn’t. Her ashen, made-up face held no expression at all.

  He continued to stand there, looking blindly down at her, and after a minute Eileen came up and led him back to the pew. He sat down. The nurse who had recommended Ten Steps reached across Eileen and handed him a pamphlet. It was titled “Four Tips for Getting Through the Funeral.” The organist began playing.

  Kit came in, leading a tall, graying man. Vielle was with them. They sat down several rows ahead. “Who’s getting married?” the man said, and Kit bent toward him, whispering, and no wonder she hadn’t been shocked by what he’d told her. She witnessed horrors every day.

  And the funeral was one of them. A soloist sang, “On Jordan’s Banks I Stand,” and then the minister preached a sermon on the necessity of being saved “while there is yet time, for none knows th
e day or the hour when we will suddenly come face to face with God’s judgment.

  “As it says in the Holy Scriptures,” he intoned, “when that judgment comes, those who have confessed their sins and taken Jesus Christ as their personal savior shall enter life eternal, but those who have not accepted Him shall go away into everlasting punishment. Now, will you please turn to Hymn 458 in your hymnals?”

  Hymn 458 was “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” I can’t stand this, Richard thought, looking wildly around for a way out, but there was a whole row of people on either side.

  The minister brought down his hands in a broad gesture. “You may be seated. And now, Joanna’s colleague and dear friend would like to say a few words about her life,” he said and nodded at Mandrake. Mandrake stood up, holding a sheaf of papers, and started for the front. As he came near the casket, he turned to smile comfortingly at Joanna’s sister.

  And if Richard had needed any proof that Joanna wasn’t there, that she was oceans, years away, trapped on the Titanic, this was it.

  Because if she’d been there, even though she was dead, she would never have lain there passively on the shirred satin, eyes closed, hands composed, with Mandrake coming. She would have been out of the casket and sprinting for the choir loft, making a dash for the side door, saying the way she had that first day, “If I talk to him I’m liable to kill him.”

  She didn’t move. Mandrake went up to the casket, looked down at her, still with that disgusting smile, and bent to kiss her forehead. Richard must have made a sound, must have made a move to stand up, because Eileen reached over and put a hand on his arm, grasping it firmly, holding him down.

  Mandrake walked to the pulpit and then stood there, his hands on the sides of the pulpit, smiling oilily at the congregation. “I was Joanna Lander’s friend,” he said, “perhaps her best friend.”

  Richard looked ahead at Vielle. Kit had her hand clasped firmly in Vielle’s.

  “I say that,” Mandrake said, “because I not only worked with her, as many of you did, but because I shared a common goal with her, a common passion. Both of us had devoted our lives to discovering the mystery of Death, a mystery that is a mystery to her no longer.” He smiled gently in the direction of the casket. “Of course we all have our faults. Joanna was always in a hurry.”