Passage

by Connie Willis

  “Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “I asked him if Jo-Jo Powers, that’s the guy who said he was going to lay his bomb right on the flight deck, if he knew he did it. Hit the Shokaku, I mean. ’cause he’d already died when it hit. And Mr. Wojakowski said, ‘You bet he knew it! He was standing there at the pearly gates watching the whole thing.’ Do you think he was?”

  “Was standing at the pearly gates?” Richard said.

  “No, was telling the truth. It’s like a dream, right? The NDE? Vielle told me it’s like signals your brain is sending out to make your heart start, and you make the signals into a kind of dream. A symbol, Vielle said.”

  “That’s right,” Richard said.

  “So it’s not real.”

  “No,” he said. “It feels like it’s really happening, but it’s not.”

  Maisie thought about that. “I kind of figured that out ’cause of Pollyanna being there. She’s not a real person, and none of the animals really got loose. At the Hartford circus fire,” she said at his bewildered look. “That’s where I went. In my NDE.”

  My God. The Hartford circus fire.

  “And after the NDE, there’s nothing,” she said, “and you don’t even know you’re dead. ’cause of brain death.”

  He nodded.

  “But you don’t know that for sure. Joanna said nobody knows for sure what happens after you die, except people who’ve died, and they can’t tell you,” Maisie said, and then, following some private line of reasoning of her own, “and the thing the dream stands for is real, even if the dream isn’t.”

  “Maisie, did you see Joanna in your NDE?” he asked.

  “Hunh-unh,” she said, and then, “Mr. Mandrake says people who’ve died can tell us stuff. Do you think they can?”

  She wants Joanna to still be here, to be talking to her, he thought. And who can blame her? “They speak to us in our hearts,” he said carefully.

  “I don’t mean like that,” Maisie said. “I mean really.”

  “No.”

  Maisie nodded. “I told Mr. Mandrake they couldn’t ’cause if they could, Little Miss 1565 would have told them who she was.”

  And Joanna would have told me what her last words meant, Richard thought. But she had. Maisie was the living proof of that. And if he didn’t get her back to Dish Night, Kit and Vielle would have a fit. “We’d better get going so we can watch the movie,” he said and plunked the pink “Back from the Grave” hat on her head.

  Maisie nodded, but as he came around to push her wheelchair out of the room, she said, “Wait, we can’t go yet. When I said it wasn’t you who saved my life, I didn’t mean the kid who gave me my heart either.”

  “Who did you mean?”

  “Emmett Kelly.”

  So far out in left field there was no way to follow the ball. “Emmett Kelly?”

  “Yeah, you know,” Maisie said, “the sad-looking clown with the raggedy clothes and it looks like he didn’t shave. He saved this little girl at the Hartford circus fire. He told her to go stand in the Victory garden. And he told me to, too, and showed me how to get out of the tent, so that’s why I said he saved my life.”

  Richard nodded, trying to understand.

  “Only it wasn’t really him. It looked like him and everything, but it wasn’t. It was like how Vielle said the NDE was, and Emmett Kelly was a symbol for who it was really. But just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean it is.”

  “Who was it really, Maisie?”

  “But Joanna said just because you want it to be true doesn’t mean it isn’t, either,” she said, still following some private line of reasoning, “and I think it was real, even though Pollyanna and the fire and stuff wasn’t.”

  “Maisie, who saved you?”

  She gave him her it-is-so-obvious look. “Joanna,” she said.

  “Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be.”

  —C.S. LEWIS, WRITING ABOUT RESURRECTION IN LETTERS TO MALCOLM, CHIEFLY ON PRAYER

  LOOK,” HELEN SAID. She had been sitting close to Joanna, with the little French bulldog on her lap, untying the hair ribbon around its neck and then retying it, ignoring the steadily reddening sky, but now she looked up. “I think something’s happening.”

  The red’s getting darker, Joanna thought, looking fearfully up at the bloody sky. The light’s going, and this time it won’t be a night of clear and sparkling stars, but the color was not deepening, it was changing, the hue shifting from blood-red to carmine.

  “Not the sky,” Helen said, pointing down over the side of the piano. “The water!”

  Joanna looked down at the water, and it was carmine, too, the burning orange-red of flames. “ ‘But the fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire,’ ” Joanna thought, remembering her sister quoting from the Bible, “ ‘which is the second death.’ ”

  She reached to pull Helen closer, but Helen wriggled out of her arms and went over to the edge. She flopped down on her stomach, the little dog beside her, and trailed her hand in the water. “I think we’re unbecalmed,” she said, but the flame-red water was still as smooth as glass, so still Helen’s hand, trailing through it, left no wake at all.

  “We are too unbecalmed,” Helen said as if Joanna had spoken. “Look!” She bobbed her head toward the ice field, and she was right, because, even though the piano had not drifted, even though the water was still smooth and still, they were no longer surrounded by ice. The bergs lay far behind them, their sharp peaks copper against the burning sky.

  We’ve drifted out of the ice field, Joanna thought. They’ll never find us now.

  “I told you we were unbecalmed,” Helen said, and stood up, rocking the piano so the water lapped at its sides. “I bet whatever we were waiting for must have happened.”

  No, Joanna thought. Please.

  “What do you think will—?” Helen said and stopped, looking back toward the ice field.

  Joanna followed her gaze. She could no longer see the icebergs. On all sides, stretching out to an endless horizon, lay the still, burnished water.

  “What do you think will happen now?” Helen said again.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think we will find land soon,” Helen said, and sat down crosslegged in the center of the piano. She put her curled hands up to her eye as if they were a telescope and gazed earnestly at the horizon, searching for land. “Look!” she shouted and pointed to the east. “There it is!”

  At first Joanna couldn’t see anything, but then she spotted a tiny speck on the horizon. She leaned forward, squinting. It’s a lifeboat, she thought, and strained to see, hoping it was Mr. Briarley and Mrs. Woollam, safe in Collapsible D.

  “It’s a ship!” Helen shouted, and, as Joanna looked, the speck resolved itself into an oblong, like a smokestack. “It’s the Carpathia!” Helen said happily.

  It can’t be, Joanna thought. It’s too far for her to come. And the Carpathia had steamed up from the southwest.

  “I bet it is, though,” Helen said as if Joanna had spoken. “What else could it be?”

  The Mackay-Bennett, Joanna thought, watching the ship steam toward them. Coming out from Halifax with a minister and a hold full of ice to pick up the corpses, to bury them at sea. It must be near the end, Joanna thought, looking across the water at the ship. The sky was changing again, darkening, yellowing, like decaying flesh.

  The last neurons must be dying, the last cells of the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus and the amygdala going out, shutting down, the synapses flickering faintly, failing to arc. V . . . V . . . and then what? Irreversible brain death, she thought, and the Mackay-Bennett.

  “If it’s the Carpathia, then we’re saved,” Helen said happily, and gathered the little bulldog up as if she were collecting her luggage, getting ready to disembark.

  The sky had turned a dull, uneasy brass. The Mackay-Bennett’s stack stood out blackly against it. They won’t know who we are, Joanna thought, a
nd looked for her hospital ID, but it had fallen off in the water. I should have had Mr. Wojakowski make me a set of dog tags, too, she thought.

  They had known John Jacob Astor by the initials embroidered inside his collar. She fumbled in her pockets, looking for a pen to write Helen’s name in the collar of her dress, but there was nothing at all in her pockets, not even a coin for Charon the boatman.

  “I think you were right,” Helen said, “it doesn’t look at all like the Carpathia.”

  Joanna looked up, bracing herself to see the deck stacked with coffins, the embalmer standing ready. The ship was still a long way off, but its shape was clearly defined against the brassy sky. What she had first thought was its smokestack was instead its central island, spiky with masts and antennas, and under it the broad, flat deck and the incurving triangular prow.

  “Is it the Carpathia?” Helen asked.

  “No,” Joanna said wonderingly. “It’s the Yorktown.”

  “The Yorktown?” Helen said. “I thought the Yorktown sank in the Coral Sea.”

  “It did,” Joanna said. She could see the wireless shack now, high up on the island, and the antennas, shaped like crosses. And was raised again in three days.

  “What’s it doing here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know it’s the Yorktown, if you can’t read the name?” Helen said, but there was no mistaking it now. She could see the planes. Sailors lined the railing of the flight deck, their white uniforms blindingly bright.

  “Do you think they’ll see us?” Helen asked. “Maybe we should signal them or something.”

  “We have,” Joanna said. “SOS. SOS.” She stood up and faced the ship as if it were a firing squad.

  “Are we saved?” Helen asked, looking up at Joanna.

  “I don’t know,” Joanna said. This could be some final synapse firing, some last attempt to make sense of dying and death, some final metaphor. Or something else altogether. She looked up at the sky. It was changing again, deepening, brightening to gold. The Yorktown plowed toward them, impossibly huge, impossibly fast, its narrow prow cutting like a knife through the shining water.

  “Are you scared?” Helen asked.

  The Yorktown was nearly upon them. Flags were flying from the tower and the masts and the antennas, and on the flight deck, sailors stood at the railing, waving. In the center, the captain, all in white, held up a pair of binoculars and looked toward them, the lenses glinting gold.

  “Are you?” Helen demanded.

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “No. Yes.”

  “I’m scared, too,” Helen said.

  Joanna put her arm around her. The sailors were shouting from the railing, waving their white hats in the air. Behind them, above the tower, the sun came out, blindingly bright, gilding the crosses and the captain.

  “What if it sinks again?” Helen asked fearfully. “The Yorktown went down at Midway.”

  Joanna smiled down at her, at the little bulldog, and then looked back at the Yorktown. “All ships sink sooner or later,” she said, and raised her hand to wave in greeting. “But not today. Not today.”

  Connie Willis has won major awards for her novels and short stories. Her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other works include Doomsday Book, Lincoln’s Dreams, Bellwether, Impossible Things, Remake, Uncharted Territory, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Miracle and Other Christmas Stories. Ms. Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family.

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  PASSAGE

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published April 2001

  Bantam mass market edition/January 2002

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 by Connie Willis

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00–068052.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-57372-8

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