Passage

The old man began to gasp and wheeze. “Have to… tell you…” he choked out, and everyone, including the nurse, leaned forward. “…my will…”

“This would never happen,” Vielle said. “They’d have called 911 by now, and the whole bunch of them would be enacting this little scene in the middle of my ER.”

“Oh, that’s right, you work in the ER,” Richard said to Vielle. “I heard about the incident this afternoon.”

“What incident?” Joanna asked sharply.

“You’re breaking Dish Night Rule Number One,” Vielle said. “No discussing work.”

Joanna turned to Richard. “What did you hear?”

“Just that a woman high on this new drug rogue came in and was waving a razor around,” Richard said.

“A razor,” Joanna said. “Vielle, you have got to—”

“Finish making my dip.” She waved the knife at them. “Go on. Watch the movie. I’ll be right back.” She disappeared.

“Excuse me for a minute,” Joanna said and followed her into the kitchen. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?” she demanded.

“It’s Dish Night,” Vielle said, stirring chiles into the dip. “Besides, it was nothing. Nobody got hurt.”

“Vielle—”

“I know, I know, I’ve got to get out of there. Do you think we need a knife, or should we just dip?”

“We don’t need a knife,” Joanna said, giving up. Vielle handed her the plate of crackers and picked up the dip, and they went back into the living room.

“What’d we miss?” Vielle asked, setting the dip on the coffee table.

“Nothing,” Richard said. “I paused it.” He picked up the remote and pointed it at the screen.

“I’ve gathered… you here…,” the old man, lying against his multiple pillows, gasped. “…Don’t have long to live…” The family leaned forward like a pack of vultures. “Made a new will… hid it in… the…” He flung his arms out and fell back peacefully against the pillows, his eyes closed. The family exchanged glances.

“Is he gone?” one of the women said, sniffing phonily and dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief.

“Movie dying,” Vielle sniffed, dipping a cracker in the deviled ham dip. It broke off.

“Movie dying?” Richard asked, scooping up dip with a cracker. It broke off, too.

“Meaning totally unrealistic,” Joanna said. “Like movie parking, where the hero is always able to find a parking place right in front of the store or the police station.”

“Or movie lighting,” Vielle said, digging cracker pieces out of the dip.

“Let me guess,” Richard said. “Being able to see in the middle of a cave in the middle of the night.”

“We should add a new category for this kind of thing,” Joanna said, gesturing at the screen, where the relatives were bickering across the old man’s body. “I mean, why do people in movies always say things like, ‘The secret is—arggghh!’ Or ‘The murderer is—’ Bang! You’d think, if they had something that important to communicate, they’d say that first, that they wouldn’t say, ‘The will is in the oak tree,’ they’d say, ‘Oak tree! Will! It’s in there!’ If I were dying, I’d say the important part first, so I wouldn’t run the risk of going ‘…argghh!’ before I managed to get it out.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Vielle said, “because you wouldn’t be saying something like that in the first place. They only talk about secrets and clues in the movies. In the six years I’ve been in the ER, I’ve never had a patient whose last words were about a will or who the murderer is. And that includes murder victims.”

“What are their last words?” Richard asked curiously.

“Obscenities, a lot of them, unfortunately,” Vielle said. “Also, ‘My side hurts,’ ‘I can’t breathe,’ ‘Turn me over.’ ”

Joanna nodded. “That’s what Walt Whitman said to his nurse. And Robert Kennedy said, ‘Don’t lift me.’ ”

Vielle explained, “As if talking to patients about their NDEs isn’t bad enough, in her spare time Joanna researches famous people’s last words.”

“I wanted to know if there are similarities between what they say and what people report in their NDEs,” Joanna explained.

“And are there?” Richard asked.

“Sometimes. Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s beautiful over there,’ but he was sitting by a window. He may just have been looking at the view. Or maybe not. John Wayne said, ‘Did you see that flash of light?’ But Vielle’s right. Mostly they say things like ‘My head hurts.’ ”

“Or, ‘I don’t feel good,’ ” Vielle said, “or, ‘I can’t sleep,’ or, ‘I’m cold.’ ”

Joanna thought of Amelia Tanaka asking for a blanket. “Do they ever say, ‘Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no’?” she asked.

Vielle nodded. “A lot of them, and a lot of them ask for ice,” she said, taking a swig of Coke, “or water.”

Joanna nodded. “General Grant asked for water, and so did Marie Curie. And Lenin.”

“That’s funny,” Richard said. “You’d expect Lenin’s last words to be ‘Workers, arise!’ or something.”

Vielle shook her head. “The eternal verities aren’t what’s on people’s minds when they’re dying. They’re much more concerned with the matter at hand.”

“ ‘Put your hands on my shoulders and don’t struggle,’ ” Joanna murmured.

“Who said that?” Richard asked.

“W. S. Gilbert. You know, of Gilbert and Sullivan. Pirates of Penzance. He died saving a young girl from drowning. I’ve always thought that if I could choose, that’s how I’d like to die.”

“By drowning?” Vielle said. “No, you don’t want to drown. That’s a terrible way to die, trust me.”

“Gilbert didn’t drown,” Joanna said. “He had a heart attack. I meant, I’d like to die saving somebody else’s life.”

“I want to die in my sleep,” Vielle said. “Massive aneurysm. At home. How about you, Dr. Wright?”

“I don’t want to die at all,” Richard said, and they all laughed.

“Unfortunately, that’s not an option,” Vielle sighed, breaking off another cracker in the stiff dip. “We all die sooner or later, and we don’t get to choose the method. We have to take what we get. We had an old man in the ER this afternoon, final stages of diabetes, both feet amputated, blind, kidney failure, his whole body coming apart. His last words were, as you might expect, ‘Leave me alone.’ ”

“Those were Princess Di’s last words, too,” Joanna said.

“I thought she asked someone to take care of her sons,” Richard said.

“I think I’d believe the first one,” Vielle said. “ ‘Tell Laura I love her’ is for romantic movies like Titanic. The patients we get in the ER hardly ever have messages for anybody. They’re too busy concentrating on what’s happening to them, although I suppose Joanna knows of some famous people who sent last messages to their loved ones. Right, Joanna?”

Joanna wasn’t listening. As Vielle was talking she’d had it again, that teasing sense that she knew what “fifty-eight” meant. “Right, Joanna?”

“Oh. Yes. Tchaikovsky and Queen Victoria and P. T. Barnum. Anne Bronte said, ‘Take courage, Charlotte, take courage.’ This dip is not a dip. We do need a knife after all,” she said and escaped into the kitchen.

What had they been talking about that had triggered the feeling? Princess Di? Diabetes? No, it must have been something that echoed their earlier conversation. Joanna took a table knife out of the silverware drawer and then stood there with it in her hand, trying to reconstruct the scene in her head. They’d been talking about movie options, and—

“Can’t you find the knives?” Vielle called from the living room. “They’re in the top drawer next to the dishwasher.”

“I know,” Joanna said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Could there be a movie with the number fifty-eight in the title? Or a song? Vielle had mentioned “Tell Laura I love her—”

“Joanna,” Vielle called, “you’re missing the movie!”

This was ridiculous. Greg Menotti hadn’t been trying to say anything. He’d been echoing the nurse’s reciting of his blood pressure, and she had only thought it meant something because of a fifty-eight in her memory, a fifty- eight their conversation had triggered. A line from a movie or a number out of her past, her grandmother’s address, her high school locker number—