Passage

by Connie Willis

  “He didn’t,” Maisie said. “I asked him. He said they stopped talking when he came in the room.”

  “He may have overheard something as he was coming in,” Richard said, “or leaving. Or he may have seen someone else going in. If there was a lab tech in the room taking blood, there may have been other staff going in to take tests,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. “Or nurses. Who was the one Mrs. Aspinall mentioned?”

  “Guadalupe,” Kit said.

  “I’ll talk to Guadalupe and the rest of the staff on five-east. Vielle, you keep looking for people who might have seen Joanna in the hallways, and don’t limit it to the professional staff. Talk to the volunteers and the kitchen help.”

  “That’s supposed to be my job!” Maisie said, outraged.

  “Your job is to rest and get strong so you’ll be ready for your new heart,” Richard said.

  Maisie flung herself back against the pillows. “That’s no fair! I was the one who found out about Mr. Aspinall. Besides,” she said, “if I don’t have anything to do or think about, I’ll start worrying about my heart and how much the operation will hurt, and dying and stuff, and I might code.”

  She was good, he had to admit that. “All right,” he said sternly, “you can help Vielle,” and she immediately said, “I had another idea who to ask, Vielle. The painter guys. I bet they see a lot of people. And the breathing therapy lady. Should I page you when I think of other people?”

  “No paging Vielle all the time,” Richard jumped in. “She works in the ER, which is very busy. She’ll come see you when she can, and when she does, no stalling.” He turned to Vielle. “If Maisie finds out something, she’s not going to tell you the whole story of how she found out, because she knows you have to get back to the ER.”

  “But—” Maisie said.

  “Promise,” Richard said. “Cross your heart.”

  “Okay,” she said grudgingly. She smiled at Vielle. “I’ll talk to the lady who empties the wastebaskets and the guy who runs the dust vacuum thing,” she said. “And rest,” she added hastily.

  “And drink your Ensure,” Richard said. “What if nobody else was in the room and heard them?” Maisie asked.

  “Maybe Mrs. Aspinall will change her mind,” Kit said.

  “That’s right,” Richard said, though he didn’t believe it for a moment. Her only concern was her husband, and his only concern was survival. And nothing, nothing could make him go back there, not even to save Joanna.

  “But what if she doesn’t change her mind?” Maisie said.

  “Then we have to hope the lab technician knows something,” Richard said. “Do you know his name, Maisie?”

  “Yeah,” Maisie said. “I saw it on his badge thing when he bent over to stick the needle in my IV line, and—”

  “Maisie,” Richard said sternly. “No stalling. You promised.”

  “I promised Vielle,” Maisie said, and at his look, “Okay. Rudy Wenck. But what if he doesn’t know anything?”

  “Then we’ll find somebody who did,” he said.

  “But what if there isn’t anybody?” Maisie persisted. “What if nobody else heard them talking?”

  I don’t know, he thought. I don’t know. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said cheerfully, thinking, You sound just like Maisie’s mother.

  And speak of the devil. Here she was, standing in the doorway with a yellow stuffed duck, a beribboned video-shaped package, and a blindingly bright smile. “Dr. Wright!” Mrs. Nellis said. “And Ms. Gardiner. Just the people I needed to see.” She beamed at Vielle. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “This is Nurse Howard,” Richard said.

  “She works in the ER,” Maisie said.

  “We were just leaving.” Kit and Vielle took the cue and started for the door.

  “Oh, but you can’t go yet, Dr. Wright,” Mrs. Nellis said.

  Well, now he knew where Maisie had gotten it from. He nodded at Kit and Vielle to keep going and said, “I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting.”

  “This will only take a minute,” Mrs. Nellis said, setting the present and duck on the foot of the bed. She began rummaging through her purse. “I’ve got the project release forms and the minor-child permissions for you, all signed and notarized.” She pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to Richard. “My lawyer is working on a living will and resuscitation orders. Has he talked to you?”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “I really have to go.”

  “Can I open my present now?” Maisie piped up, and Mrs. Nellis, momentarily distracted, moved to get her the package.

  Good girl, Richard thought, and ducked out, but not fast enough. Mrs. Nellis caught him just outside the door. “I wanted to ask you about Nurse Howard,” she said eagerly. “You said she worked in the ER, and I assume that means she’s an expert on coding procedures. Is she working with you on the treatment? Does that mean you’ve had a breakthrough?”

  “No,” Richard said.

  “But you’re getting close, right?”

  “Mommy, come here!” Maisie said excitedly. “I can’t get my video open!” Mrs. Nellis glanced toward the room, and then back at Richard, hesitating. “Mommy! I want to watch it right away!”

  “Excuse me,” Mrs. Nellis said and hurried into the room. Richard didn’t hesitate. He hotfooted it down the hall. Behind him he could hear Mrs. Nellis asking, “You like your video, sunbeam?” and Maisie saying, “I love it! Heidi is my favoritest movie in the whole world!”

  Kit and Vielle were waiting for him outside the CICU. “We thought we were going to have to send the cavalry in after you,” Kit said.

  “No, Maisie rescued me. At considerable sacrifice to herself.”

  “So, what’s the plan?” Vielle asked.

  “Kit, I want you to go through Carl Aspinall’s transcripts again and see if there’s anything in them about a sword or . . . ” he cast around, trying to think of what else you could be stabbed with, “ . . . a letter-opener or something. And then see if there’s any reference to a stabbing the night of the Titanic. Vielle, see if you can find out who all was on four-east that day. I’ll talk to Rudy Wenck.”

  “I thought Maisie said he didn’t remember hearing anything,” Vielle said.

  “She did,” Richard said, “but one thing I learned from Joanna is that people remember more than they think they do. And he has to have heard or seen something.”

  But Rudy Wenck, even when pressed, didn’t remember anything. “He was scared of my drawing blood, that’s all I remember, like I was trying to kill him or something. He seemed kind of out of it.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Richard asked.

  “No, just, you know, kind of wild-eyed and scared.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No.”

  “What about Dr. Lander? Did she say anything?”

  “Yeah, she asked me if I wanted her to move, and I said, no, I could do it from that side.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “To me?”

  “Or to Mr. Aspinall, anything at all.”

  He shrugged. “She might have. I wasn’t really listening.”

  “If you could try to remember,” Richard said, “it’s very important.”

  He shook his head. “People are always talking when I’m in the room. I’ve learned to just shut it out.”

  Guadalupe was even less helpful. “I didn’t know Joanna had even been in to see him,” she said.

  “But you saw her on the floor that day?” Richard asked.

  She nodded. “I’d paged her because we couldn’t find Mr. Aspinall’s wife and I thought Joanna might know where she was. She didn’t, but she came up to the floor, and I talked to her for a couple of minutes. She asked about Mr. Aspinall’s condition, and she suggested a couple of places his wife might be, and then I assumed she left.”

  “But you didn’t see her leave?”

  “No. Things were so crazy right then. We didn’t expect
Co—Mr. Aspinall to regain consciousness. He’d been steadily sinking for several days, and then suddenly, he popped awake and we all started running around trying to find his wife and his doctor, so it’s entirely possible Joanna was here. Why is it important?”

  He explained. “Did Mr. Aspinall say anything to you about what he experienced while he was in the coma?”

  “No. I asked him, because he’d flailed around so much—”

  Drowning, Richard thought. He was drowning.

  “—and he’d cry out. Mostly it was after we’d had to do something, like redo his IV, and I wondered if he was aware of what we were doing, but he said, no, there wasn’t anybody else there, he was all alone.”

  “Did he say where ‘there’ was?”

  She shook her head. “Just talking about it seemed to upset him. I asked him if he’d had bad dreams—a lot of our coma patients remember dreaming—but he said no.”

  Because it wasn’t a dream, Richard thought.

  “Have you tried talking to Mr. Aspinall?” Guadalupe asked.

  “He says he doesn’t remember anything.”

  She nodded. “He was on a lot of drugs, which can really mess up your memory, and comas are funny. Some patients remember hearing voices and being aware of being moved or intubated, and then others can’t remember anything.”

  And some of them remember and won’t tell, Richard thought bitterly, going through the list of people Vielle had come up with who’d been on four-east that day. They didn’t know anything either. “I was working the other end of the floor that day,” Linda Hermosa said, “and we had all these subs because of the flu.”

  “Subs?” Richard asked. “Do you remember who they were?”

  She didn’t, and neither did the nurse’s aides he questioned, but one of them said, “I remember one was really old and she must have worked on five-east because she kept yelling at me and saying, ‘That isn’t the way we do it up on fifth.’ I don’t think she worked that end of the floor, though.”

  Richard went up to fifth and gave the charge nurse his sketchy description. “Oh, Mrs. Hobbs,” she said, “yes, she’s a retired LPN who subs sometimes when they can’t get anyone else.” She didn’t know her number. “Personnel takes care of all that.”

  Richard thanked her and started down to Personnel. And what if Mrs. Hobbs, who didn’t sound promising, hadn’t been in Carl’s room either? What if, as Maisie said, there wasn’t anybody who’d heard them talking? It was entirely possible that Joanna had taken advantage of the general chaos to speak to Carl alone before his memory of his hallucinations faded and then gone off to find him and said nothing to anybody along the way. What then?

  There has to be somebody, he thought, crossing the walkway to the west wing. He turned down the hall toward the elevators. The center one pinged, and a man with a Palm Pilot stepped out.

  Shit. Maisie’s mother’s lawyer. The last person he wanted to see. He turned sharply around and walked quickly back down the hall, wishing he’d finished mapping this part of the hospital. Then at least he’d know where the stairways were.

  There was one at the very end of the hall. He ducked into it and clattered down the stairs. It only went as far down as third, but at least he knew where the elevators were on third. He opened the door and started down the hall.

  “Last night I had another vision,” a woman’s voice said, coming down the intersecting corridor toward him. “This time I saw my uncle Alvin standing at the foot of my bed, as real as you or I.”

  Shit. He’d been wrong about Mrs. Nellis’s lawyer being the last person in the world he wanted to see. That honor belonged to Mrs. Davenport, and she was coming this way. Richard looked at the elevators, gauging the distance to them, and then at the floor numbers above their doors. Both of them were on eight. Shit. He turned around and headed for the nurses’ station.

  “He was wearing his white sailor’s uniform, and a radiant light came from him,” Mrs. Davenport’s voice said. “And do you know what he said, Mr. Mandrake?”

  Mandrake, too. Shit, shit, shit. Richard looked desperately around for an escape route, a stairway, a laundry chute, anything. Even a linen closet. But there was nothing except patient rooms.

  “He said, ‘Coming home,’ ” Mrs. Davenport’s voice said, coming closer. “Just those two words. ‘Coming home.’ What can that mean, Mr. Mandrake?”

  “He was sending you a message from the Other Side, telling you that the dead haven’t gone away,” Mandrake’s voice said, “that they are here with us, helping us, protecting us, speaking to us. All we have to do is listen—”

  They were rounding the corner. Richard ducked through an unmarked door. A stairway. Great. And let’s hope this goes all the way down to the basement, he thought, rounding the landing, so I can take the—

  He stopped. Two steps below the landing, yellow “Do Not Cross” tape stretched across the stairs, and, below it, pale blue steps shone wetly, though they could not possibly be wet. They had been painted over two months ago.

  He wondered what had happened. Had the painters forgotten this stairway, or been unable to find it again in Mercy General’s maze of walkways and corridors and cul-de-sacs? And the techs and nurses, seeing the tape, thought it was still blocked and had found other routes, other shortcuts?

  They must have, because the painted steps below the yellow tape were shiny and untouched, not a footprint on them, and the stairwell still smelled of paint. It was obvious no one had been in here since the day he and Joanna had ducked in here, hiding from Mandrake, since the day she’d sat on the steps eating his energy bar and complaining about the cafeteria never being open, and he’d tried to talk her into working with him on the project and she’d asked if it was dangerous, and he’d said, “No, it’s perfectly safe—”

  He had suddenly no strength in his legs. He groped for the round metal railing and sat down on the third step above the landing, where they had sat, where he had plied Joanna with apples and bottled cappuccino.

  “The dead haven’t gone away,” Mr. Mandrake had said, and if that were true, if Joanna were anywhere, it would be here, in the embalmed and empty air of this stairwell where no one had been in two months, where nothing had disturbed the echoes of her voice.

  He wished suddenly that Mr. Mandrake were right, that Joanna would appear to him, standing on the pale blue steps, radiating light, and saying, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you what I’d found out. I was as bad as all those people in the movies. How were you supposed to know what ‘SOS’ meant? I’m surprised you didn’t say, ‘Can you be more specific?’ ” He could almost see her, pushing her glasses up on her nose, laughing at him.

  Almost.

  And that was what made people believe in angels and put frauds like Mandrake on the best-seller list, that desire to believe. But it didn’t bring them back. And it wasn’t the presence of the dead that haunted people, that made them imagine they saw them standing there in their NDEs. It was their absence. In places where they should have been.

  Because Joanna wasn’t here, even in this place, where they had stood side by side, flattened against the wall, his arm stretched across her beating heart. There was nothing here, not even dust. She’s dead, he thought, and it was like coming face to face with it all over again.

  He had somehow managed to deny it, in all his running around, making maps, graphing scans, questioning nurse’s aides, and he wondered now if that had been the point, if their obsession with Joanna’s last words had simply been another form of denial, their own private Grief Coping Strategies Seminar?

  Because if they could decipher Joanna’s last words, it would make up for their having failed to save her. It would give the story a different ending. And how was that different from what Mandrake was trying to do?

  He wondered suddenly if he had been just as deluded, if Joanna had murmured a few disjointed, delirious words, and he and Kit and Vielle had confabulated them into a message because it gave them something to think about, somethi
ng to do besides grieving, besides giving way to despair, and Joanna’s words meant nothing at all.

  No. “You were trying to tell me something,” he said to her, even though she wasn’t there. “I know you were.”

  But she hadn’t succeeded. The machine had clicked off before she could finish. He thought of the message she had left on his answering machine. “A—” she had said, and he had played it over and over again, trying to decipher what she had started to say, but it was no use. There had been too many possibilities and not enough information. Like now, he thought, and knew, in spite of what he’d told Kit, that they would never find out.

  In the movies they always found out who the murderer was, even though the victim died before she could tell them. In the movies, they always deciphered the message, solved the mystery, saved the girl. In the movies.

  And maybe on the Other Side. But not on this side. On this side they never did find out what caused the Hartford circus fire or whether there was a bomb on the Hindenburg. On this side the doctor couldn’t stop the bleeding, help didn’t come in time, the message was too torn and stained to read.

  “If anybody could have gotten a message through,” Joanna had said at Taco Pierre’s that night, “it was Houdini.” But that wasn’t true. If anybody could have gotten a message through, it was Joanna. She had tried, even when she was choking on her own blood, even when she should have been unconscious. If she could have come from where she was—in the grave or on the foundering decks of the Titanic or on the Other Side—to tell him her message, she would have.

  But she couldn’t. Because she wasn’t anywhere. She’s gone, he thought, and buried his face in his hands.

  He sat there a long time. His beeper went off once, startling in the silence, and he pulled it immediately out of his pocket, praying that it was Mrs. Aspinall calling to tell him Carl had changed his mind, but it was only Vielle, paging him to call her so she could report that she’d found another sub who’d worked the wrong end of the floor that day, or that she’d narrowed the cab Joanna had taken down to Yellow and Shamrock.

  That wasn’t fair. Vielle had tried her best. They’d all tried their best. There were just too many pieces missing. The answer lay somewhere in the transcripts or the Titanic or the scans or English literature, but Joanna couldn’t tell them where, and Mr. Briarley, if he had ever known, could not remember. And Carl refused to tell.