Passage

bracelet wasn’t even snug, let alone pressing into the flesh.

“What if after they cut it off something bad happens,” Maisie said, “like a disaster, and they can’t put another one on?”

Had she been thinking about the abandoned gold bracelet they’d found in the ruins of Pompeii? “There won’t be a disaster,” Joanna started to say, and then decided not to. “I’ll tell Barbara if she has to cut this one off, she should put the new one on first,” she said. “All right?”

“Did you know the firemen go visit her grave every year?” Maisie said.

“Who?”

“The little girl,” Maisie said, as if it were obvious. “From the Hartford circus fire. They go put flowers on it every year. Do you think maybe her mother died?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said. The mother’s dying in the fire, too, would explain why no one had come forward to identify the little girl, but all the other bodies had been identified, and if someone had identified the mother, why not the child? “I don’t know.”

“The firemen buried her in the cemetery, and every year they go put flowers on her grave,” Maisie said. “They put up a tombstone and everything. It says ‘Little Miss 1565’ on it and the year she died and stuff, but it’s not the same as a name.”

“No,” Joanna said. “It’s not.”

“I mean, at least all the little kids on the Titanic, they knew who they were, Lorraine Allison and Beatrice Sandstrom and Nina Harper and—is Sigrid a boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

“And Sigrid Anderson. Of course they didn’t have tombstones, but if they did—”

“Maisie—”

“Can you put in a video?” Maisie said, lying back against the pillows.

“Sure. Which one? Winnie the Pooh?” Joanna said, reading out titles. “The Wizard of Oz? Alice in Wonderland?”

“The Wizard of Oz,” Maisie said.

“That’s a good one,” Joanna said, sliding it in and pushing “play.”

Maisie nodded. “I like the tornado.” Of course, Joanna thought. What was I thinking?

“And the part where the hourglass is running out,” Maisie said, “and they don’t have much time left.”

26

“See you in the morning.”

—Last words of John Jacob Astor to his bride, as he put her into one of the Titanic’s lifeboats

Joanna didn’t make it up to Coma Carl’s. By the time she escaped from Maisie’s room—Maisie insisted on telling her a few choice details about the 1953 Waco, Texas, tornado first—it was four.

Guadalupe will already have gone home, Joanna thought. It was just as well. She wanted to talk to Barbara and ask her about Maisie’s condition and find out what all this talk about her hospital wristband was about. But Barbara was in with a three-year-old boy with advanced leukemia, trying unsuccessfully to get an IV started.

Joanna went back up to her office and spent the rest of the afternoon working on the list of people who’d had more than one NDE. They seemed to be split evenly between people who’d seen radically different scenes and people who’d seen the same thing each time. Mr. Tabb had seen by turns an opening with a light coming through it and “bright figures beyond,” a stairway, a reddish darkness, and a feeling of intense warmth, while Ms. Burton, a brittle diabetic who’d coded four separate times, had had the exact same vision each time, “which is how I know it’s real.”

It seemed to Joanna that its always being exactly the same thing would more likely be proof that it was a prerecorded experience, played over and over again by the brain like a record stuck in a groove. She wished she’d asked Ms. Burton exactly what she meant by “real,” wished she’d asked all of her patients if it had seemed like an actual place, if it seemed to them like they had really gone there.

Because that was how it felt, even though Joanna knew intellectually that it was a hallucination and that she hadn’t gone anywhere, that she had really been lying on an examining table in her stocking feet while Tish monitored her blood pressure and flirted with Richard. But it felt as real, as three- dimensional, as her office with its Swedish ivy and shoe box full of interviews she hadn’t transcribed yet.

Joanna went over Ms. Burton’s separate accounts, and they did in fact seem to have been exactly the same, but Mr. Rutledge’s varied slightly from NDE to NDE, even though he said his were the same, too.

She found Mrs. Woollam’s two interviews. Joanna had told Richard she’d been in the tunnel twice, but Mrs. Woollam had said she didn’t think it was the same one, that the second time the tunnel had been narrower and the floor more uneven. Apparently the “dark, open place” she’d been in the remaining four times had been the same place, but, looking at Mrs. Woollam’s account, Joanna wondered. She had said it was too dark to see anything. The same went for Maisie’s fog. And several people who’d been completely blinded by the light.

Joanna worked till after seven, compiling a partial list, and then put on her coat and took the list to the lab. Richard was still there, staring at the scans, his chin in his hands. When she gave him the list, he barely grunted an acknowledgment.

“We’re having Dish Night tomorrow night. Can you come?”

“Sure,” he said, and turned back to the scans.

Well, it’s not exactly wild enthusiasm, Joanna thought, going out into the hall, but at least he didn’t turn me down. Down the hall, the elevator dinged, and Joanna ran to catch it. It opened, and Mr. Mandrake stepped out. “Oh, good, Dr. Lander,” he said. “I’m glad you’re still here. I’ve been trying to reach you for two days.” He pursed his lips.

“Mr. Mandrake, I’m afraid this isn’t a good time to talk,” she said, knowing it was hopeless. She was obviously on her way home, so she couldn’t claim she had an appointment. A date? No, he’d simply say, “This will only take a few minutes.”

“This will only take a few minutes,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about these NDEs of yours.”

He knew she’d been under! How had he found out? Tish? She’d been upset that Richard wouldn’t go out with her. Had she told another nurse about the scene and accidentally revealed that Joanna was the subject, and then the nurse had spread it through the rest of Gossip General? Or had Heidi seen her and Vielle talking and somehow figured it out, and he knew about the Titanic, too? “NDEs of mine?” she said, glancing anxiously toward the door of the lab.

“And of Dr. Wright, of course,” Mr. Mandrake said. “That is, assuming that you have succeeded in producing these so-called NDE simulations with your subjects. Have you?”

“Yes,” Joanna said in her relief that he didn’t know, and was instantly sorry.

“And the subjects have experienced the tunnel, the light, and the dead waiting for them?”

Yes, Joanna thought, and the Boat Deck and a Morse lamp and a red tennis shoe. “The NDEs have varied,” she said.

“Which means they haven’t experienced those things. As I expected. Have they experienced the Life Review and the Revelation of the Mysteries of the Cosmos?”

“No.”

“And the Bestowing of Powers?”

“Bestowing of Powers?” Joanna said. That was a new one.

“Yes, many of my subjects display enhanced paranormal abilities after their return: clairvoyance, telepathy, communications from the dead. I don’t suppose any of your subjects have evidenced such abilities?”

No, Joanna thought, because if I had, I’d be using them to send a telepathic message to Richard to come and save me.