Passage

bed table toward her when Barbara came in.

“Good morning, ladies.” Barbara came over to look disapprovingly at Maisie’s uneaten breakfast. “Didn’t like the eggs, huh? Would you like some cereal?”

“I’m not very hungry,” Maisie said.

“You need to eat something,” Barbara said. “How about some oatmeal?”

Maisie made a face. “I don’t like oatmeal. Can’t I eat it later? I have to tell Dr. Lander something important.”

“Which can wait till after you finish breakfast,” Joanna said, immediately standing up and starting for the door.

“No, wait!” Maisie yelped. “I’ll eat it.” She picked up the triangle of toast and took another mouselike nibble. “I can eat while I’m talking to Dr. Lander, can’t I?”

“If you eat,” Barbara said firmly. She turned to Joanna. “Half the eggs, a whole piece of toast, and all the juice.”

Joanna nodded. “Got it.”

“I’ll be back to check,” Barbara said. “And no hiding things in your napkin.” She went out.

Maisie immediately pushed the bed table away and leaned over to open the drawer of the nightstand. “Whoa,” Joanna protested. “You heard what Barbara said.”

“I know,” Maisie said, “but I have to get something.” She reached in the drawer and pulled out a folded piece of lined tablet paper like the one she’d written the Hindenburg crewman’s name on and handed it to Joanna.

“What’s this?” Joanna asked.

“My NDE,” Maisie said. “I wrote the rest of it down after you left so I wouldn’t forget anything.”

Joanna unfolded the sheet. “The fog was gray-colored,” Maisie had written in her laboring round cursive, “and dark, like at night or if somebody turns out the lights. I was in this long narrow place with real tall walls.”

“I probably forgot some stuff,” Maisie said.

“Eat,” Joanna said. She pushed the bed table over in front of her and continued to read. Maisie picked up her fork and poked listlessly at her eggs.

“If you’re not going to eat, I guess I’ll have to come back another time,” Joanna said.

Maisie immediately scooped up a forkful of eggs and popped it in her mouth. Joanna watched until she’d chewed, swallowed, and taken a sip of her apple juice, and then sat down on the chair and read through the rest of the NDE. “I don’t know if there was a ceiling. It kind of felt like the place I was in was outside, but I don’t know for sure. It kind of felt like inside and outside at the same time.”

“The walls were tall?” Joanna asked.

Maisie nodded. “They went up really high on both sides.” She raised both arms to demonstrate. “I thought some more about the coming-back part. It was different from the other time. That time it wasn’t as fast. I wrote that down.”

Joanna nodded. “Can I take this paper with me?”

“Sure,” Maisie said, and Joanna folded it up and stuck it in her pocket. “But you can’t go yet, I have lots more stuff to tell you.”

“Then eat,” Joanna said, pointing at the eggs.

Maisie picked up her fork. “They’re cold.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Did you know they found eggs when they dug up Pompeii?” Maisie said. “They got covered up by the ash and turned into stone.”

“Four bites,” Joanna said, her arms folded. “And the juice.”

“Okay,” Maisie said and plodded through four minuscule bites, chewing laboriously.

“And the juice.”

“I am. I have to open the straw first.”

The Queen of Stallers, Joanna thought. She leaned back in the chair and watched Maisie peel the paper, stick the straw in the juice, sip daintily, waiting her out. Finally, Maisie finished, slurping to prove it was empty. “You know the dog that was chained up, and they don’t know its name ’cause it didn’t have a dog tag?” she asked. “Well, there was a little girl like that.”

“In Pompeii?”

“No,” Maisie said indignantly. “In the Hartford circus fire. She was nine years old. Anyway, that’s what they think, nobody knows, ’cause they don’t know who she was. She died from the smoke. She wasn’t burned at all, and they put her picture in the paper and on the radio and everything. But nobody ever came to get her.”

“Ever?” Joanna said. Someone would have had to identify her eventually. A child couldn’t just disappear without anyone noticing, but Maisie was shaking her blond head.

“Hunh-unh. They had this big room where they put all the bodies, and the mothers and fathers came and identified them, but nobody ever did her. And they didn’t know her name, so they had to give her a number.”

Joanna was suddenly afraid to ask. Not fifty-eight, she thought. Don’t tell me it’s fifty-eight.

“1565,” Maisie said, “ ’cause that was the number of her body. She should have had a name tag or put her name in her clothes or something, like Mr. Astor.”

“Who?” Joanna said, sitting up straight.

“John Jacob Astor. He was on the Titanic. His face got all smashed in when one of the smokestack things fell on him, so they couldn’t tell who he was, but he had his initials inside of his shirt”—she reached around to the back of her hospital gown and grasped the neck of it to demonstrate—“J. J. A., so they were able to figure it out.”

“You know about the Titanic, Maisie?” Joanna asked.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s like the best disaster that ever happened. Lots of children died.”

“I never heard you talk about it.”

“That’s ’cause I read about it before, when I was in the other hospital. I wanted to see the movie, but my mother wouldn’t let me watch the video because it had…” she leaned forward and dropped her voice to a whisper, “S-E-X in it. But this girl Ashley who had her appendix out said it didn’t, just naked people. She said it was really cool, especially when the ship went up in the air and everything started falling down, all the dishes and furniture and pianos and stuff, with this big enormous crash. Did you know the Titanic had five pianos?”

“Maisie—” Joanna said, sorry she had brought this up.

“I know all about it,” Maisie said, oblivious. “They had all these dogs. A Pekingese and an Airedale and a Pomeranian and this really cute little French bulldog, and their owners would take them for walks on the deck, only most of the time they had to be kept in this kennel down in the hold, except for this little tiny dog Frou-Frou, he got to stay in the cabin—”

“Maisie—” Joanna said, but Maisie didn’t even hear her.

“—and after it hit the iceberg, this passenger, I don’t know his name, went down to the kennel and—”

“Maisie—”

“—let out all the dogs,” Maisie finished. “They all still drowned, though.”

“You can’t tell me about the Titanic,” Joanna said. “I’m doing some research —”

“Do you want me to help you?” Maisie said eagerly. “Ms. Sutterly could bring me some books, and I know lots of stuff already. It didn’t really hit the iceberg, it just sort of scraped along the side. It wasn’t even a very bad cut, but the watertight compartments—”

She had to put a stop to this. “Dr. Wright told me they found the body of a dog in Pompeii,” she said.

“Yeah,” Maisie said. She told her about the chain and it trying to climb on top of the ash. “Dr. Wright told me all the Pompeii dogs were named Fido, but I don’t think so. How would they know to come when their master called if they all had the same name?”

“I think Dr. Wright was kidding,” Joanna said. “Did you know Fido means ‘faithful’ in Latin?”

“No,” Maisie said, appeased. “That would have been a good name for this one dog they found.” She pulled the book out from under the covers and began flipping through it till she found another of the photos. “It was trying