“You were in Arizona,” she began, intending to ask, “Do you remember being anywhere else?”
“No!” he shouted, shaking his head vehemently. “It wasn’t Arizona. I thought it was, because of the red sandstone. But it wasn’t.”
“Where was it?” Joanna asked.
“Someplace else. I was really here, though, the whole time,” he said as if to reassure himself. “It was just a dream.”
“Did you have other dreams?” she asked. “Were you other places besides Arizona?”
“There wasn’t any other place,” he said simply.
“You said, ‘Oh, grand.’ ”
He nodded. “I could see telegraph poles off in the distance. I thought they must be next to a railroad line. I thought if I could reach it before the train came through—” he said, as if that were an explanation.
“I don’t understand.”
“I thought I could catch the Rio Grande. But there weren’t any tracks. Just the telegraph wires. But I could still send a message. I could climb one of the poles and send a message.”
She was only half-listening. Rio Grande. Not Grand Staircase. Rio Grande.
“…and it was too far to ride on horseback,” Carl was saying, staring straight ahead, “but I had to get it through.” As he spoke, he jogged gently up and down, his arms bent as if he were holding on to reins.
This is what Guadalupe thought was rowing, Joanna thought, even though it didn’t look like rowing. It looked like what it was, Carl riding a horse. He wasn’t humming, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” she thought. It was probably “Home on the Range.”
And Mrs. Woollam had been in a garden. Mrs. Davenport had seen an angel. But she had wanted it to be a woman in a nightdress. She had wanted it to be the Verandah Café and the Grand Staircase. To fit her theory. So she had twisted the evidence to fit, ignored the discrepancies, led the witnesses, and believed what she wanted to. Just like Mr. Mandrake.
She had been so set on her idea she’d refused to accept the truth—that Carl had gotten his desert, his Apaches, from the Westerns his wife read to him, incorporating them into the red expanse of his coma the way she’d incorporated Mr. Briarley’s Titanic stories into hers. Because they happened to be there in long-term memory.
And the imagery meant nothing. It wasn’t universal. It was as random, as pointless, as Mr. Bendix’s seeing Elvis. And the feeling of something significant, something important, came from an overstimulated temporal lobe. And meanwhile, she had bullied Amelia Tanaka, she had harassed a man just out of a coma and possibly endangered his health, breaking rules right and left. Acting like a nutcase.
“…before it got dark,” Carl was saying, “but when I got closer, I saw the Apaches were already there.”
Joanna put the bluebird greeting card and the pen in her pocket and stood up. “I should go,” she said. Before Guadalupe catches me in here. Before the review board finds out you didn’t sign a waiver. Before anyone finds out how I’ve acted. She patted the covers. “You need to get some sleep.”
“Are you leaving?” he said, and his hand lunged for her wrist like a striking snake. “Don’t leave.” He gripped it tightly. “I’m afraid I’ll go back there, and it’s getting dark back there. It’s getting redder.”
“It’s all right, Carl,” Joanna said soothingly. “It was just a dream.”
“No. It was a real place. Arizona. I knew it was, because of the mesas. But it wasn’t. And it was. I can’t explain it.”
“You knew Arizona was a symbol for something else.”
“Yes,” he said, and she thought, It does mean something. The NDE isn’t just random synapses firing, random associations. “What was it a symbol for, Carl?” she asked, and waited, breath held, for his answer.
“They scalped Cody. Took the top of his skull right off, and I could see his brain. It was all red,” he said. “I had to get out, before it got dark. I had to get the mail through.”
The mail. The letters floating in the ankle-deep water of the mail room, the names on their envelopes blurred and unreadable, and the mail clerk putting them onto higher and higher racks, dragging them up the carpeted stairs.
“The mail?” Joanna asked, her chest tight.
“For the Pony Express,” he said. “Cody was the regular rider, but they killed him, and I didn’t have any way to get the mail through. It was too far to ride on a horse, and the Apaches had cut the wires.”
And the Carpathia was too far away, Joanna thought. The Californian wasn’t answering. She thought of Mr. Briarley writing a postcard to Kit, sending up rockets, trying to send out messages. And none of them getting through.
“The mesa was a long way,” Carl was saying, “and I was afraid there wouldn’t be anything up there to make a fire with.”
“A fire?” Joanna said, thinking of Maisie.
“For the smoke signal. I got the idea from the Apaches. You hold the blanket down over the fire and then yank it back, and the smoke goes up.” He pulled back on an imaginary blanket, his hands holding its imaginary sides, a sharp backward motion with both hands. Like rowing. Like rowing.
“I didn’t know any Apache,” he said. “All I knew was Morse code.”
The sailor working the Morse lamp, and Jack Phillips, bent tirelessly over the wireless key, tapping out CQD, SOS—“SOS,” she said. “You sent an SOS.”
“And as soon as I did, the nurse was opening the curtains and I was back here.”
“You were back here,” Joanna said, remembering Mr. Edwards saying, “The light started to flash, and I knew I had to go back, and all of a sudden I was in the operating room.” Remembering Mrs. Woollam saying, “I was in the tunnel, and then all of a sudden I was back on the floor by the phone.” Remembering Richard saying, “Something just kicks them out.”
Out in the hall, a voice said excitedly, “We found her!”
Joanna glanced at the door, the half-open door she had forgotten to shut. “Finally,” Guadalupe’s voice said, and then, “Where were you? We’ve been looking all over for you.”
Looking all over. The steward, heading up the aft staircase to the Promenade Deck, checking the smoking room, the gymnasium, looking for Mr. Briarley. And Mr. Briarley, running down to G Deck, along Scotland Road, into the mail room, looking for the key. The key.
“Oh, my God!” Joanna breathed. “I know what it is!” She put her hand up to her mouth. “I remember what Mr. Briarley said!”
39
“Well, Wiley’s got her warmed up. Let’s go.”
“What?” Carl said, alarmed. “What do you mean, you know what it is?” but Joanna didn’t hear him.
I have to tell Richard, she thought. I have to tell him I’ve figured it out.
She stood up. “You’re not leaving, are you?” Carl said, reaching for her wrist again. “You know what what is? What Arizona is?”
“He’s sitting up talking,” Guadalupe’s voice said out in the hall.
They’re coming this way, Joanna thought. She stood up and jammed the scribbled-on greeting card in her pocket. “Your wife’s here,” she said, and hurried toward the door before Carl could protest.
And how was she going to explain her being here? she wondered, peering out the door. Mrs. Aspinall was standing next to the nurses’ station, Guadalupe and the aide bent comfortingly over her. “You shouldn’t cry now,” the aide was saying, “it’s all over.”