Passage

by Connie Willis

  Yeah, trying to get away from you.

  “She was also sometimes too skeptical,” he said, and chuckled as if it were an amusing shortcoming. “Skepticism is an excellent quality . . . ”

  How would you know?

  “But Joanna often carried it to extremes and refused to believe the evidence that was so plainly before her, evidence that Death was not the end.” He smiled at the congregation. “You may have read my book, The Light at the End of the Tunnel.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Eileen muttered next to him. “He’s plugging his book at a funeral.”

  “If you’ve read it, you know that Death need hold no fears, that even though dying may seem painful, terrifying, to those of us left behind, it is not. For our loved ones await us, and an Angel of Light. We know that from the mouths of those who have seen that light, seen those loved ones, from the message they have brought back from the Other Side.”

  He cast a sickly smile in the direction of the casket. “Joanna didn’t believe that. She was a skeptic—she believed near-death experiences were hallucinations, caused by endorphins or lack of oxygen,” he waved them away with his hand. “Which is why her testimony, the testimony of a skeptic, is so compelling.”

  He paused dramatically. “I heard Joanna’s last words. She spoke them to me only moments before her death, as she was on her way down to that fateful encounter. Joanna was heading down a hallway to the elevator that would take her down to the emergency room. And do you know what she did?” He paused expectantly.

  She looked frantically around for a stairway, Richard thought, for a way out.

  “I’ll tell you what she did,” Mandrake said. “She stopped me and said, ‘Mr. Mandrake, I wanted to tell you, you were right about the near-death experience. It was a message from the Other Side.’ ”

  “ ‘You have seen what lies on the Other Side then?’ I asked her, and I could see the answer in her face, radiant with joy. She was a skeptic no longer. ‘You were right, Mr. Mandrake,’ she said. ‘It was a message from the Other Side.’ What more proof do we need of the afterlife that awaits us? Joanna herself has told us, with her last breath, her last words.”

  Her last words, Richard thought. “Why do people in movies always say things like ‘The murderer is . . . Bang!’ ” Joanna had said at Dish Night. “You’d think, if they had something that important to communicate, they’d say it first.”

  “Joanna used her last words to send a message from the Other Side,” Mr. Mandrake said. “How can we fail to heed that message? I for one intend to as I complete my new book, Messages from the Other Side.”

  “ ‘You’re doing it wrong,’ ” she had said. “ ‘Important words first.’ ” “ ‘Tell Richard . . . SOS.’ ”

  “Joanna had only a few minutes to live,” Mandrake said, “and how did she choose to spend it? By sharing her vision of the afterlife with us.”

  “She didn’t think it was the Titanic,” Kit had said. “She said she wished she could die saving somebody’s life.”

  Mandrake must have finished. The organ was playing “Shall We Gather at the River?” and people were starting to file out. Richard followed them into the aisle, and then stood there, staring at Joanna’s casket.

  “I don’t think that was what she was trying to tell you,” Vielle had said. “I think she was trying to tell you something good.”

  People filed out past him, talking about the flowers, the solo, the casket. “She can’t be gone,” Nina sobbed to a gangly resident, “I can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t believe it about fox, can you?” Davis’s message on the answering machine had said. “Warn me before it hits the star,” and Richard hadn’t understood the message at all. “She kept saying, ‘Water,’ ” Vielle had said. “She was really saying, ‘Walter.’ ”

  The minister laid a hand on his arm. “Do you wish to say good-bye to the departed?” he whispered. “They’re about to close the casket.” Richard looked up the aisle. Two men in black suits stood by the casket, hands folded in front of them.

  “There’ll be a luncheon in the fellowship hall downstairs,” the minister said. “We hope you’ll stay.” He gave Richard’s arm a gentle squeeze and walked up the aisle, nodding to the men as he went. They began moving the spray of flowers.

  “The best plan would be to decide in advance what you wanted your last words to be and then memorize them, so you’d be ready,” Joanna had said.

  The two men lowered the casket lid.

  “Whatever it was must’ve been important,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. “She was in such a hurry to tell you, she almost ran me down.”

  “Are you all right?” Eileen said, coming rapidly up the aisle to him.

  The men fastened the casket lid shut and began shifting the blanket of flowers so it lay in the center.

  “Look, we’re all going to go over to Santeramo’s and get a pizza,” Eileen said, taking his arm and leading him out of the sanctuary and over to the other two nurses. “Why don’t you come with us?”

  “No,” he said, looking around for Kit and Vielle. He couldn’t see them.

  “It’d do you good,” the nurse who had given him the pamphlet said. “It’d get your mind off it.”

  “You need to eat something,” the other nurse said.

  “I need to get back to the hospital. Vielle’s giving me a ride back,” he said firmly and set out through the crowd to find her and Kit.

  The minister and Joanna’s sister were standing with Mandrake. “—just acknowledging there’s an afterlife isn’t enough,” Joanna’s sister was saying stubbornly to Mandrake. “You have to confess your sins before you can be saved.”

  He couldn’t see Vielle anywhere, or Kit. They must have left, or else gone downstairs to the fellowship hall. He started across to the basement steps and ran into Mr. Wojakowski, holding forth to a circle of elderly ladies. “Hiya, Doc,” he said. “Sad, sad thing. I’ve seen a lot of funerals. On the Yorktown, they—”

  “When you saw Joanna, that last day,” Richard said, “did she say what she wanted to tell me?”

  “Nope. She was in too big a hurry. She didn’t even hear me the first coupla times I yelled at her. ‘Did somebody call battle stations?’ I asked her. At Midway, they’d call battle stations, and boy, did everybody scramble for their tin hats, ’cause they knew in about five minutes all hell’d be breaking loose. They’d run up those gangways so fast they didn’t even take time to put on their pants, scared as rabbits—”

  “Joanna was scared?” Richard asked. “She seemed frightened, upset?”

  “Joanna? Hell, no. She looked like my bunkmate Frankie Cocelli used to look during a battle. Little skinny guy, looked like you could snap him in two, but not afraid of anything. ‘Let me at ’em!’ he’d shout when the sirens went, and go tearing off like he couldn’t wait to get shot at. Did, too. Did I ever tell you how he got it? This Jap Zero—?”

  “And that’s how Joanna looked?” Richard persisted. “Eager? Excited?”

  “Yeah. She said she had to go find you, that she had something important to tell you.”

  “But she didn’t say what?”

  “Nope. So anyway, this Zero—”

  Richard spotted Vielle, just inside the door. “Excuse me,” he said and edged his way through the crowd to her. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

  “I was outside with Kit. She had to take her uncle home,” Vielle said. “He kept asking her who’d died, over and over.” She shook her head. “Poor man. Or maybe he’s the lucky one. At least he won’t remember this funeral.”

  “I need to talk to you,” Richard said. “I need to know exactly what Joanna said to you in the ER.”

  “If you’re worried about what Mandrake said, forget it. He’s lying,” Vielle said. “Joanna never voluntarily said two words to him in her life, let alone that NDEs were a message from the Other Side.”

  “I know that,” he said impatiently. “I need to know what she said to you.”

 
“There’s no point in torturing yourself over—”

  “The exact words. It’s important.”

  She looked curiously at him. “Did something happen?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. What did she say? Exactly.”

  “She said, ‘Tell Richard,’ ” Vielle said, squinting in her effort to remember. “ ‘It’s . . . ’ The resident was trying to start an airway, and she waved him away. And then, ‘SOS. SOS.’ ”

  He grabbed a pen out of his pocket and scribbled the words on the order of service. “ ‘Tell Richard . . . it’s . . . SOS, SOS,’ ” he said. “Is that all?”

  “Yes. No. Just before that, she grabbed for my hand and said, ‘Important.’ ”

  Important.

  “Are you okay?” Vielle said.

  “Yeah,” he said, staring at the order of service. Tell Richard it’s . . . what? What had she been trying to tell him when they interrupted her to put the airway in?

  “Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone right now,” Vielle said, “especially after that travesty of a funeral.” She glared across the room at Mandrake and Joanna’s sister. “Some of us from the ER are going to go get something to eat. Why don’t you come with us?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to the hospital.” He walked quickly out into the parking lot and caught a ride with Mrs. Dirksen from Personnel.

  “Wasn’t that a beautiful sermon?” she asked him. “I loved the music.”

  “Umm,” Richard said, not listening. Tell Richard it’s . . . Important. She had been trying to tell him something. Something important.

  But what if he was confabulating? Manipulating her words so he didn’t have to face the fact that she had called out to him for help? “The problem with NDEs is, there’s no way to obtain outside confirmation,” Joanna had said.

  “And Mr. Mandrake’s eulogy was just wonderful,” Mrs. Dirksen said. She pulled into the hospital parking lot. “Didn’t you think so?”

  “Thanks for the ride,” Richard said and dashed up the shortcut to the lab.

  He pushed a chair over against the cabinet, climbed up on it, and reached his arm over the edge, feeling far back. There was nothing there. He patted around the top of the cabinet with the flat of his hand and then reached all the way back to the wall and swept his hand along the edge.

  It was a piece of cardboard. He scooted it forward with his fingers till he could pick it up. It was a postcard of a tropical sunset, garish pink and red and gold, with palm trees silhouetted against the bright orange ocean. He turned it over, half afraid of what it would say, but it wasn’t Joanna’s handwriting.

  Up at the top someone had written in a clear, spiky hand, one under the other, “Pretty Woman, Remember the Titans, What Lies Beneath.” The other hand, not Joanna’s either, was a barely legible scrawl. He couldn’t read the signature, and he had a hard time reading the message. “Having a wonderful time,” it said. “Wish you were here.”

  A message from the dead.

  He got down off the chair, plugged in the phone, and found Kit Gardiner’s number. “Kit,” he said when she answered. “I need you to come to the hospital. And bring the book.”

  “Tell me if anything was ever done.”

  —LINE REPEATED OVER AND OVER IN LEONARDO DA VINCI’S NOTEBOOKS

  THEY MET in the cafeteria. Richard had called Vielle as soon as he hung up with Kit, and she had suggested it as being closer to the ER in case she was paged. “If it’s open,” she had added. “Which I doubt.”

  Amazingly, though, it was. Joanna would never believe this, Richard thought, and it was the first thought of her that didn’t feel like a punch in the stomach.

  The cafeteria was nearly empty. Because everyone assumes it’s closed, Richard thought, going through the deserted line for his coffee, but Vielle said, filling a paper cup with Coke, “Everybody’s at the Coping with Post-Trauma Stress Workshop.” They paid a put-out-looking cashier in a pink uniform and sat down at the table in the far corner where Kit was already waiting.

  “So,” Vielle said, setting her Coke down. “Where do we start?”

  “We reconstruct Joanna’s movements that day,” Richard said. “The last time I saw her was in her office. She was transcribing interviews. I went to tell her I was going to meet with Dr. Jamison at one, but that I’d be back in time for Mrs. Troudtheim’s session. That was at eleven-thirty. At a little after one she told Mr. Wojakowski she had something important to tell me, so important it couldn’t wait till I got back to the lab, even though I’d told her I’d be back before two.”

  “I talked to her on the phone around eleven-thirty, too,” Kit said. “It must have been either right before or right after you saw her. I called to tell her I’d found the book she asked me to look for.”

  “And how did she seem?” Richard asked.

  “Busy,” Kit said. “Distracted.”

  “But not excited?” Vielle put in.

  Kit shook her head.

  “Mr. Wojakowski says that when he saw her she was in a hurry, very excited,” Richard said. “And Diane Tollafson saw her then, too, going down the stairs to the ER, which leaves us with an hour and a half.”

  Vielle shook her head. “An hour. I talked to Susy Coplis. She says she saw Joanna getting into an elevator at ten to one, also in a hurry.”

  “And excited?” Richard asked.

  Vielle shook her head. “She only saw Joanna from the back, but Susy was headed for the same elevator, and she was in a hurry, too, because she was late getting back from lunch, but Joanna was in so much of a hurry that by the time Susy got to the elevator, the doors had already closed.”

  “Did she see which floor Joanna was going to?”

  “Yes,” Vielle said, pleased, “because she had to stand there and wait for it to come back. She said it went straight up to eight.”

  “What’s on eight?” Kit asked.

  “Dr. Jamison’s office,” Richard said. “She obviously went up there looking for me and found the note Dr. Jamison had left on her door, saying she’d gone down to the ER, and assumed I’d gone there, too.”

  “So that she was on her way there when she ran into Mr. Wojakowski,” Kit put in.

  “Yes,” Richard said. “What floor was Susy on when she saw her?”

  “Three-west,” Vielle said.

  “The ICU’s in the west wing, isn’t it?” Richard asked, and when Vielle nodded, “Did you call Joanna with any patients who’d coded that morning?”

  “No, we didn’t have any codes in the ER that day . . . that morning,” Vielle corrected herself, and Richard knew she was thinking of the code alarm buzzing as they worked over Joanna.

  He said rapidly, “But a patient could have coded after they were sent upstairs? Did you have any coronaries that morning? Or strokes?”

  “I don’t remember. I’ll check to see if we had any life-threatenings,” she said, jotting it down. “And I’ll find out if anyone coded in the ICU or CICU that day. If they did, one of the nurses might have phoned her.”

  “And when she interviewed them they told her something,” Kit said.

  “Yes,” Richard said. “Is there a way to find out who coded that day, and not just in the ICU and CICU?” he asked Vielle.

  She nodded. “Couldn’t Joanna also have talked to a patient she’d interviewed before,” Kit asked, “and they told her something new? Or she found something in the transcript and went to ask them about it? You said she was transcribing interviews when you saw her.”

  Richard nodded. He asked Vielle, “Do you know if any of her previous subjects are still in the hospital?”

  “Mrs. Davenport,” Vielle said, but Richard doubted very much if Joanna would have voluntarily gone to see Mrs. Davenport, or believed anything she had to say if she had. Who else had she mentioned? Mrs. Woollam. No, Mrs. Woollam had died. He would have to check her transcripts for their names. It was unlikely any of the ones she’d interviewed in recent weeks were st
ill in the hospital in this age of HMOs, but he made a note to check the transcripts for their names.

  “We’ve still got an hour unaccounted for,” Richard said. “Vielle, you haven’t found anyone else who saw Joanna during that time?”

  “Not yet,” Vielle said.

  “What about Maurice Mandrake?” Kit asked. Richard and Vielle both turned to look at her.

  “At the funeral, he said he talked to Joanna.”

  “He was lying,” they both said together.

  “I know he lied about what Joanna said,” Kit said, “but isn’t there a possibility he was telling the truth about having seen her?”

  “She’s right,” Vielle said. “Joanna might have run into him accidentally, and if that’s the case, he might be able to tell us which part of the hospital she was in and which direction she was headed.”

  Away from Mandrake as fast as she could, Richard thought. “Okay,” he said.

  “Joanna might have found something in the transcripts,” Vielle said, “and gone to ask someone about it, but couldn’t she have just found something in them and gone to look for you, in which case the answer would be in the transcripts?”

  Richard shook his head. “She would have gone to the lab and then up to Dr. Jamison’s office on eighth, not down to three-west.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Vielle said. “Wait, Kit said she’d called and told Joanna she’d found a book. Joanna could have started over there to get it and gone down to the parking lot and then thought of something she’d seen in the transcripts. No, that wouldn’t have taken her to the west wing either.”

  “And she told me she didn’t think she could come get the book till after work.”

  “She might have changed her mind,” Vielle said, but Kit was shaking her head again.

  “She didn’t show any interest in the book at all,” Kit said. “The first time I found it she was excited, she said she’d come right over. This time I got the idea she didn’t even care.”