He put the chain around her neck. “Now hurry,” he said. “The whole place is on fire.”
It was. Up above, the roof of the tent was one big flame, and the grandstands and the center ring and the bandstand were all burning, but the band was still playing, blowing on their trumpets and tubas in their red uniforms. They weren’t playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” though. They were playing a really slow, sad song. “What is that?” Maisie asked.
“ ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ ” Emmett Kelly said.
“Like on the Titanic,” Maisie said.
“Like on the Titanic,” he said. “It means it’s time to go.”
“I don’t want to,” Maisie said. “I want to stay here with you. I know a lot about disasters.”
“That’s why you have to go,” he said. “So you can become a disasterologist.”
“Why can’t you come, too?”
“I have to stay here,” he said, and she saw that he was holding a water bucket.
“And save people’s lives,” Maisie said.
He smiled under his painted-on, sad-looking expression. “And save people’s lives.” He squatted down and lifted up the canvas again. “Now go, kiddo. I want you to run lickety-split.”
Maisie ducked under the canvas and stood poised in the opening a moment, clutching her dog tags, and then looked back at him.
“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re not really Emmett Kelly, are you? That’s just a metaphor.”
The clown put his gloved finger up to his wide white mouth in a sh-shhing motion. “I want you to run straight for the Victory garden,” he said.
Maisie smiled at him. “You can’t fool me,” she said. “I know who you really are,” and ran into the darkness, as fast as she could.
59
“There! If the boat goes down, you’ll remember me.”
Two days after successfully reviving Maisie, Richard’s special pager went off again. This time, trying not to think of what the strain of two codes in three days might do to Maisie’s system or what deadly side effect the theta-asparcine might have produced, he made it up to CICU in three minutes flat.
Evelyn met him as he skidded into the unit, all smiles. “Her heart’s here,” she said. “Maisie’s in being prepped. I tried to call you.”
“My special pager went off,” he said, still not convinced there wasn’t a disaster, and Evelyn said, unruffled, “She was quite insistent that you and Vielle Howard be informed, and I guess she took matters into her own hands.”
She had, in more ways than one. After the transplant surgery, which took eight hours and went without a hitch, one of the attending nurses told him Maisie had taped her dog tags to the bottom of her foot and was furious that they’d been removed. “What if I’d died?” she’d demanded indignantly as soon as her airway was removed, and, in spite of the danger of infection due to the immunosuppressants she was taking, she was allowed to wear her dog tags, swabbed with disinfectant, wrapped around her wrist, “just in case.”
Maisie’s mother, absolutely impossible now that her faith in positive thinking had been confirmed, had, according to the nurse, tried to talk her out of them, to no avail.
“I need them,” Maisie had said. “In case I get complications. I might get a blood clot or reject my new heart.”
“You won’t do any such thing,” her mother had said. “You’re going to get well and come home and go back to school. You’re going to take ballet lessons”—something Richard could not in his wildest dreams imagine Maisie doing, unless a ballet-related flood or volcanic eruption was involved—“and grow up and have children of your own.” To which Maisie, ever the realist, had replied, “I’ll still die sometime. Everybody dies sooner or later.”
After a week of family only, Maisie was allowed visitors, provided they wore paper gowns, booties, and masks, and limited their visits to five minutes, and visited two at a time. That meant her mother was always present, which cramped Maisie’s style considerably, although she still told Richard plenty of grisly details about her surgery. “So then they crack your chest open,” she demonstrated, “and they cut your heart out and put the new one in. Did you know it comes in a cooler, like beer?”
“Maisie—” her mother protested. “Let’s talk about something cheerful. You need to thank Dr. Wright. He revived you after you coded.”
“That’s right,” Evelyn said, coming in to check the numerous monitors. “Dr. Wright saved your life.”
“No, he didn’t,” Maisie said.
“I know he didn’t do your transplant surgery, like Dr. Templeton,” Mrs. Nellis said, looking embarrassed, “but he helped by starting your heart again so you could get your new heart.”
“I know,” Maisie said, “but—”
“A lot of people worked together to get you your new heart, didn’t they?” Mrs. Nellis said. “Your Peds nurses and Dr.—”
“Maisie,” Richard said, leaning forward, “who did save your life?”
Maisie opened her mouth to answer, and Evelyn, adjusting her IV, said, “I know who she means. You mean the person who donated your heart, don’t you, Maisie?”
“Yes,” Maisie said after a moment, and Richard thought, That isn’t what she was going to say. “I wish they told you what their name was,” Maisie said. “They don’t tell you anything, not how they died or whether they were a boy or a girl or anything.”
“That’s because they don’t want you to worry about it,” Mrs. Nellis said. “You’re supposed to be thinking positive thoughts to help you get well.”
“It’s positive they saved my life,” Maisie said.
“Cheerful topics,” Mrs. Nellis admonished. “Tell Dr. Wright what Dr. Murrow brought you.”
Dr. Murrow had brought her a giant Mylar balloon with a heart on it. “It’s got helium in it, not hydrogen, so you don’t have to worry about it blowing up like the Hindenburg,” Maisie told him and had to be cautioned again about cheerful topics.
In the week that followed, the red heart balloon was joined by Mylar balloons with smiley-faces and teddy bears on them (no regular balloons allowed in CICU, and no flowers), and Maisie’s room filled up with dolls and stuffed animals and visitors. Barbara came up from Peds to see her and stopped by the lab afterward to tell Richard Maisie wanted to see him and to thank him. “You saved her life,” she said, and it reminded him of what Maisie had said, or, rather, not said, on his first visit.
He wondered if that was what she wanted to see him about. “Was her mother there when you visited her?” he asked Barbara.
“Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I wouldn’t go down there right now. Mr. Mandrake was going in as I was coming out. I’d steer clear of him if I were you. He’s in a foul mood these days, thanks to Mabel Davenport.”
“Mabel Davenport? You mean Mrs. Davenport?” Richard asked. “Why? What did she do?”
“You mean you haven’t heard?” She leaned confidentially toward him. “You will not believe what’s happened. His new book, Messages from the Other Side, is coming out next month,” she paused expectantly, “the twentieth, to be exact.”
“Wonderful,” Richard said, wondering what there was in that news to make her smile so smugly. “And?”
“And Communications from Beyond is coming out on the tenth. With a nationwide book tour and, rumor has it, an even bigger advance than Mr. Mandrake’s.”