“They looked like angels,” Mr. Torres said irritably when Joanna asked him to describe the figures he’d seen standing in the light, and when she asked him if he could be more specific, “Haven’t you ever seen an angel?”
I need to talk to someone intelligent, Joanna thought, and went down to the ER, but they were swamped. “Head-on between a church bus and a semi,” Vielle said briefly and ran off to meet a gurney being brought in by the paramedics. “I’ll call you.”
“Forget about this one,” the resident said. “She’s DOA.”
Dead on arrival. Arrival where? Joanna wondered, and went up to see Mrs. Woollam. She’d promised her she’d visit again, and she wanted to ask her if she’d ever seen people in the garden or on the staircase.
Mrs. Woollam wasn’t there, and it was obvious she hadn’t been taken somewhere for tests. The bed was crisply made up, with a blanket folded across the foot and a folded hospital gown lying on top of it. Her insurance must have run out, Joanna thought, disappointed, and walked down to the nurses’ station. “Did you move Mrs. Woollam to another room, or did she go home?” she asked a nurse she didn’t know.
The nurse looked up, startled, and then reassured at the sight of Joanna’s hospital ID, and Joanna knew instantly what she was going to say. “Mrs. Woollam died early this morning.”
I hope she wasn’t afraid, Joanna thought, remembering her clutching her Bible to her frail chest like a shield. “She went very quietly, while she was reading her Bible,” the nurse was saying. “She had such a peaceful expression.”
Good, Joanna thought, and hoped she was in the beautiful, beautiful garden. She went back to the door of the room and stood there, imagining Mrs. Woollam lying there, her white hair spread out against the pillow, the Bible lying open where it had fallen from her frail hands.
I hope it’s all true, Joanna thought, the light and the angels and the shining figure of Christ. For her sake, I hope it’s all true, and went back up to the lab. But Richard was busy working on Mrs. Troudtheim’s scans, and there were all those tapes to be transcribed and two NDEers she hadn’t interviewed. She got some blank tapes from her office and went down to see Ms. Pekish.
She was almost as uncommunicative as Mr. Sage, which was actually a blessing. The effort to get answers out of her kept her from thinking about Mrs. Woollam, alone somewhere in the dark. Not alone, she corrected herself. Mrs. Woollam had been sure Jesus would be with her.
“And then I saw my life,” Ms. Pekish said.
“Can you be more specific?” Joanna asked.
Ms. Pekish frowned in concentration. “Things that happened.”
“Can you tell me what some of those events were?”
She shook her head. “It all happened pretty fast.”
She was equally vague when it came to describing the light, and she wouldn’t even venture a guess as to the sound. Ms. Grant, at least, did. “It sounded like music,” she said, her thin face uplifted as if she were hearing it right then. “Heavenly music.”
Ms. Grant had coded during stem cell replacement therapy for her lung cancer. She was bald and had the drawn, concentration-camp look of late-stage cancer. Joanna was surprised she was willing to talk about her experience, but when Joanna handed her the release form—her last one, she needed to pick up some more from the office—she signed it eagerly.
“It was beautiful there,” she said before Joanna could ask her anything. “There was light all around me, and I felt no fear, just peace.”
She had obviously had the classic kind of positive NDE Mr. Mandrake claimed proved there was a heaven, and Joanna couldn’t help being glad.
“I was standing in a doorway,” Ms. Grant said, “and beyond it I could see a beautiful place, all white and gold and sparkling lights. I wanted to go there, but I couldn’t. A voice said, ‘You are not allowed on this side.’ ”
That was classic, too. NDEers frequently talked about wanting to ‘cross over’ and being told they couldn’t, or being stopped by a barrier—a gate or a threshold of some kind. Mrs. Jarvis, the first NDEer she had ever interviewed, had told her, “I knew the bridge divided the land of the living from the land of the dead,” and Mr. Olivetti had said, “I knew if I went through that gate, I could never come back.”
“And then I was back here,” Ms. Grant said, indicating her hospital bed, “and they were working on me.”
“You said you heard music,” Joanna said. “Can you be more specific? Voices? Instruments?”
“No voices,” Ms. Grant said, “just music. Beautiful, beautiful music.”
“When did you hear it?”
“It was there the whole time, till the very end,” Ms. Grant said, “all around me, like the light and the feeling of peace.”
“I think that’s everything,” Joanna said and shut her notebook. She reached to turn off the recorder.
“What have other people said they saw?” Ms. Grant asked.
Joanna looked up, wondering if she had another Mr. Funderburk on her hands, determined to get everything she was entitled to. “I don’t usually—”
“Have they seen a place like that, white and gold and full of lights?” Ms. Grant asked, and her voice was more agitated than eager. Joanna glanced at the IV bags, thinking, I need to check and see what drugs she’s on.
“Have they?” Ms. Grant insisted.
“Yes, some subjects have talked about seeing a beautiful place,” Joanna said carefully.
“Do they say what happens next if you don’t come back?” she asked, and it wasn’t agitation in her voice, it was fear. Joanna wondered if she should call the nurse. “Does anybody ever talk about bad things happening to them there?”
“Did you see something that frightened you?” Joanna asked.
“No,” she said, and then, as if Joanna’s question had reassured her, “No. It was all beautiful. The light and the music and the feeling of peace. I didn’t feel any fear at all while I was there, just calmness and peace.”
And, afterward, dread, Joanna thought, on her way back up to her office. “And how can we not be afraid of death?” Mrs. Woollam had said. Joanna pushed open the door to the third-floor walkway to the main building. It was dark out, the wide windows reflecting blackness. What time was it, anyway? She glanced at her watch. Six-thirty, and she still had all these NDEs to write up.
The glassed-in walkway was freezing. She pulled her cardigan around her and started across the walkway.
She stopped. Something about the walkway reminded her of the tunnel. What? Not the sound of a heater shutting off, since it obviously hadn’t been on in here all day, and anyway, there was a low hum from the hospital’s generating plant across the way.
And this feeling wasn’t the overwhelming sense of knowing she had had before. It was less intense, like seeing someone who reminded you of someone else. The walkway’s like the tunnel, she thought, but how? The walkway was wider and higher than the hallway and the hallway was lined with doors, not windows.
It’s something about the floor, Joanna thought, suddenly certain. But this one was nothing at all like the floor in the tunnel. It was tiled in nondescript gray tiles speckled with pink and yellow.
It’s not this walkway, she thought, squinting at the tiles, but it’s a walkway here in the hospital, a walkway I’ve been in. But none of the walkways had a wooden floor. The one on second was carpeted, and the ones that led over to the east wing were tiled, too. Only the Sloper Institute building was old enough that it had wooden floors, but the basement walkway that led under the street to it was all concrete.
But it’s one of them, she thought, hurrying the rest of the way across the walkway, through the door, and down the corridor to the elevator. It was just opening, and empty. She pressed “two” and leaned back against the wall, her eyes closed, trying to remember which one it was, trying to visualize their floors. The third-floor walkway had beige tile and was lower by half a step than the corridors at either end. The carpet in the second-floor walkway was blue, no, blue-green—