Passage

“I think it might be a good idea for you to talk to somebody,” she said. “There’s a really good doctor on staff here. Dr. Ainsworth. She’s a psychiatrist who specializes in cases like this.”

Like what? he wondered. Cases of abandonment? Of betrayal? He thought of Tish, standing over him, tears running down her mascara-stained cheeks. “I’m sorry I frightened you,” he said into the phone.

“I know,” Tish said, and her voice quavered. “I couldn’t bring you out of it…” Her voice broke. “I thought you were dead.”

“Tish,” he said, but she’d recovered herself.

“Dr. Ainsworth’s extension is 308,” she said steadily. “She specializes in posttraumatic stress disorders. I really think you should call her.”

Richard lasted two days with the pager on. Carla from Oncology called to tell him about a wonderful book called Dealing with Tragedy in the Workplace, and Dr. Ainsworth, and a police officer. “I just need to ask you a few questions,” he said. “Just for the record. Were you there when the incident occurred?”

“No,” Richard said, “I wasn’t there.” I was in the White Star offices in New York, too stupid to tell the difference between an office building and a ship, too late to be of any use.

“Oh, sorry,” the police officer said. “I’d been told you witnessed the murder.”

“No,” Richard said.

The officer hung up, and Richard unplugged the phone. And turned his pager off. But that only made it worse. When they couldn’t get him on the phone, they came. Eileen from Medicine, to bring him a wonderful book called The Healing Help Book, and Maureen from Radiology with Nine Steps to Recovering from Personal Tragedy, and Dr. Jamison.

She had a book, too. The Idiots’ Guide to Mourning? Richard wondered, but it was a medical journal. “This is that study I called you about,” she said. “I’ve found concentrating on your work is the best way to get through a loss.” She tried to hand him the journal. “It’s the article by Barstow and Skal. They did a study of aspartate endorphins, and theta-asparcine—”

“The project’s canceled.”

Her face went maddeningly sympathetic. “I understand how you feel, but in a week or two—”

She left the journal on the desk. Richard shut the door behind her, but that didn’t stop anyone either. Tara from Ob-Gyn knocked timidly and then opened the door as if he were one of her patients, and the resident who’d been on duty in the ER didn’t knock at all.

“I thought you’d want to know the results of the autopsy,” and Richard wondered for one long, awful moment if he would say, “They found water in her lungs.”

“The cause of death was acute hemorrhage leading to hypovolemic shock,” the resident said. “It was just bad luck that the knife happened to hit the aorta. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the knife would have hit a rib, or, at the very worst, punctured a lung. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He flipped up a sheet. “She bled out in under two minutes. There wasn’t anything anybody could’ve done.” I could have kept my pager on, Richard thought. I could have gone under two minutes earlier. In time to make it to the Titanic.

“We got the results on Calinga, too,” he said.

Calinga? That must be the teenager. He’d never heard his name.

“Enough rogue to kill an elephant.” The resident shook his head. “Sixteen years old.” He slapped the file shut. “Well, anyway, I thought you’d want to know Dr. Lander didn’t suffer.” He started for the door. “She would have lost consciousness in under a minute. She probably didn’t even have time to realize what had happened.”

That afternoon Vielle came up. “I came…” she said and then hesitated.

“To bring me a copy of The Dummies’ Guide to Grieving!” Richard said bitterly.

“I know,” she said. “Dr. Chaffey gave me a copy of Coping with the Death of a Colleague. A colleague!” She looked like she hadn’t been home either. She was still wearing the same rumpled dark blue scrubs and surgical cap. Her eyes were red and swollen, with maroon smudges under them, like bruises, and her hand and her arm were both bandaged. “You keep thinking it can’t get any worse, and then it does,” she said.

“I know,” he said and pulled out a chair for her.

She sank down onto it. “I came because… I keep seeing her there in the ER, I keep thinking about what she must have been going through those last few… There was this guy in the ER who’d had a myocardial infarction. Joanna interviewed him, and right before he died, he said, ‘Too far away for her to come,’ and Joanna said he was trying to tell her something, she kept talking about it, and then she…” She looked up at Richard. “I know this’ll sound like I’m crazy, and I guess I am a little. I keep seeing her running up to me and him whirling around, and the knife—” she said, and he realized that, rumpled as they were, they couldn’t be the same scrubs. Those were covered with blood.

“I just stood there,” Vielle said, staring blindly ahead of her. “I didn’t do anything. I should have—”

“What?” Richard said. “Tried to stop him? He was on rogue.”

“I could have warned her,” she said. “If I’d shouted at her, told her not to come any closer… I didn’t even see her till she was right next to him. I was looking at the knife he was holding, and by the time I saw her… she just walked right into it.”

And why didn’t she see what was going on? he wondered. Why hadn’t she noticed the charged silence, the frightened expressions on their faces?

Vielle blew her nose. “Anyway, I keep going over everything in my mind, what she… and I have to ask you, even if it does sound crazy. When Joanna underwent the NDE experiments, what did she see?”

He stared at her.

“Did she see the Titanic?” she asked, and before he could answer, she rushed on tearfully, “The reason I’m asking is, she asked me all these questions about the movie, about this one scene, and when I asked her why we didn’t just rent it and watch it again, she said she couldn’t, and then yesterday Kit told me Joanna was having her do all this research on the Titanic, and she’d seemed so preoccupied and worried these last few weeks… Is that what she saw in her NDE? The Titanic?”

“Yes,” he said, and watched her face go rigid with horror.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “Oh, God, I just stood there. I—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It was mine.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, anguished. “She wanted me to transfer up to Peds.” She stood up. “She said the ER was dangerous. Dangerous!”

He reached for her hand. “Vielle, listen to me. It wasn’t your fault. I had my pager turned off. I—”

She shook his hand off angrily. “She wouldn’t even have been in the ER if I’d listened to her. She came down there to talk to me about Dish Night, about a stupid movie!” she said, and flung herself out of the room and down the hall.

“Vielle, wait!” he said and started after her, but she’d already disappeared into the elevator.

He punched the “down” button impatiently, and the other elevator opened.

“Oh, good,” a middle-aged woman in a green dress said. “I was coming to see you. I’m Sally Zimmerman from Surgery. I just wanted to drop this by.” She held out a book. The orange-and-yellow cover read Eight Great Grief Helps. “It’s really helpful,” she said. “It has all kinds of mourning exercises and closure activities.”

“You keep thinking it can’t get any worse,” Richard murmured.

“That’s in there, too,” she said, taking the book back from him and thumbing through it. “Here it is. ‘How to Raise Your Hope Quotient.’ ”

The next day Mr. Wojakowski came. “I’m sorry I went on about Joanna like that,” he said. “Nobody’d told me what happened.” He shook his head. “Gone just like that! You never get used to it. One minute they’re standing next to you on the gunnery deck and the next, gone! Bucky Tobias, my bunkmate. Nineteen years old. ‘Think the Japs know where we are?’ he said to me, and ten seconds later, wham! half the deck’s gone and nothing left! I heard he was on drugs,” he said, and for a moment Richard thought he was talking about his bunkmate on the Yorktown.