transplant.”
“Or rib cages. Or beer coolers,” Vielle said. “Rule Number Two, only movie food can be eaten.”
“Dr. Templeton said no popcorn yet,” Kit said. “We’ll have that at our next Dish Night. For now he said you could have a snow cone.” She produced a cone of shaved ice and two bottles of syrup. “Red or blue?”
“Blue!” Maisie said.
Richard leaned against the door, watching them. The bandage on Vielle’s arm had been taken off, though she still had the one on her hand, and the bruised, beaten look was gone from her eyes. Kit was in nearly as high spirits as Maisie. She was still very thin, but there was color in her cheeks. He remembered her standing in the lab, pale and determined, clutching the textbook, saying, “Joanna saved my life.”
She saved all our lives, Richard thought, and wondered if that was what Maisie had meant when she said he hadn’t been the one who saved her life, if she realized it had been Joanna’s last words that had saved her life.
“Rule Number Three, no Woody Allen movies,” Kit said.
“And no Kevin Costner,” Vielle said.
“And
Richard watched them, thinking about Joanna that first Dish Night, laughing, saying, “This is a
“There’s a reason I’m seeing the
Joanna had wanted to die like W. S. Gilbert, and the
“Turn off the lights,” Vielle was saying. “We need to get this show on the road. It’s already four-thirty.”
“She has a date,” Maisie said wisely.
“How did
“You have a date?” Kit said. “Who with? Please tell me it’s not with Harvey the Embalmer.”
“It’s not,” Maisie said. “It’s with a cop.”
“The one who looks like Denzel Washington?” Kit asked. “You finally met him?”
Vielle nodded. “I called him to see if he could help me find the taxi Joanna took,” she said, “and just how did you find out, Little Miss Gossip?”
Maisie turned to Richard. “So I guess you and Kit will have to eat at the cafeteria, just the two of you,” she said.
“I think it’s time to start the movie,” Kit said, whacking Maisie with the
“Wait! Don’t start yet! I forgot my ‘Back from the Grave and Ready to Party’ hat Eugene gave me,” Maisie said and added defensively, “I have to have it. It’s a party.”
“I’ll go get it,” Richard said.
“You could tell me,” Richard started to say and then got a look at Maisie’s face, innocent and determined. She obviously had a reason for wanting to go back to her room, even if it meant wheeling her monitor and IV pole back, too. “We’ll be right back,” Richard said and maneuvered her and her equipment back down the hall.
As soon as they got inside the room, Maisie said, “My hat’s under the pillow. Push me up to the nightstand.” She opened the drawer and brought out several tablet pages, folded into quarters. “It’s my NDE from when I coded,” she said, handing them to him. “I couldn’t write it down right away.”
“That’s all right,” Richard said, touched that she had written the whole thing down. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Joanna said you should always write it down right away,” Maisie said disapprovingly, “so you won’t confabulate.”
“That’s true,” Richard said, “but you can’t always. This will be very useful.”
Maisie looked mollified. “Do you think Mr. Wojakowski tells the truth?”
Out of left field. “The truth?” Richard said, stalling. He wondered if she had begun to catch Mr. Wojakowski in inconsistencies, like Joanna had.
“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
“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