I shouldn’t be doing this, Joanna thought, opening her eyes, I should go straight up to the lab. Richard said if I had the feeling of significance again to go right to the lab so he could capture it on the RIPT. She reached forward to press the button for six, and then let her hand fall. The numbers above the door blinked “two,” and she walked quickly down the corridor to the walkway. She knew instantly, looking at the well-worn carpet, which was dark plum, that it wasn’t the right one either.
Yes, well, and you knew the carpet was blue-green, too, she thought, retracing her steps, and how do you know that this compulsion to find out isn’t the result of temporal-lobe stimulation? But when the elevator came, she pressed “three” and got out at third to go look at the west-wing walkway.
This part of the hospital was all newly carpeted in heather gray, with color-coded lines showing the way to outpatient surgery and the urology clinic and X-ray, down the length of the long hallway. “Just follow the yellow brick road,” she’d heard a nurse tell a patient one day when she was taking a shortcut up to Coma Carl’s. She followed the red line—how appropriate!—to outpatient surgery and turned left, hoping the recarpeting hadn’t extended as far as the walkway.
It hadn’t, but the painting had. The half-open door to the walkway was blocked off not only by yellow crime-scene tape, but also by two orange traffic cones, and, when she sidled around them to look through the door, its entire length was swathed in plastic drop cloths. “You can’t get through that way,” a passing orderly told her. “You have to go up to fifth and over.”
Good old Mercy General, Joanna thought. You can’t get there from here. The nearest elevator was all the way down at the end of outpatient surgery. She took the stairs instead, hoping she didn’t encounter any more paint or tape. She didn’t, and, amazingly, Maintenance wasn’t doing both walkways at the same time.
She opened the door and went in. She knew before she’d come five steps that it wasn’t this one either. The floor was tiled with alternating black and white squares, like a checkerboard, and the angle where they met at the bottom of the door was perfectly square. But so was the one in the tunnel, she thought, stepping back to look at the end of the walkway. It didn’t curve. Why did I think it curved? Perspective caused the rows of black and white tiles to seem to narrow at the far end, making the walkway appear longer than it was. Like the tunnel? It had seemed impossibly long, but could that have been some trick of perspective?
She squatted down, squinting at the place where the door and the tiles met. Was it something about the wooden boards as the perspective narrowed them that made the floor look curved? No, not curved—
“Lose something?” someone said, standing over her.
She looked up. It was Barbara. “Just my mind,” Joanna said and stood up, dusting off her hands. “What are you doing over here?”
Barbara held out two cans of Pepsi and a Snickers bar. “The vending machines in our wing are all out. This is dinner. I’m glad I ran into you. I wanted to tell you Maisie Nellis went into V-fib again this afternoon—”
“Is she all right?” Joanna cut in.
Barbara nodded, and Joanna’s heart started beating again. “She was only out a few seconds, and it doesn’t look like there was any major damage. I left a message on your answering machine.”
“I haven’t been in my office since early this morning.”
“I figured as much,” Barbara said. “I’d have paged you if it looked bad.”
I had my pager off, Joanna thought guiltily.
“Anyway, Maisie’s up in CICU, and she wants to see you. I have to get back,” she said, twisting the hand holding the two Pepsis around so she could see her watch.
“I’ll come with you,” Joanna said, pushing the walkway door open for her. “Can she have visitors?”
“If she’s still awake.”
“What time is it?” Joanna said, looking at her watch as they started down the hall. A quarter to nine. She’d been stalking obsessively around the hospital for nearly two hours, oblivious to everything and everybody, while Maisie—
The feeling of nearly knowing washed over her abruptly, almost sickeningly, and she glanced instinctively at the floor, at the end of the hall, but there was no door there, only a bank of telephones. And that wasn’t it. It was something to do with what she’d just been thinking, about her being oblivious to what was happening, and having her pager off, and—
“Are you all right?” Barbara said, looking at her worriedly, and she realized she’d stopped short, her hand to her stomach. “Maisie’s okay, really. I didn’t mean to scare you like that. I know how attached you are to her. She’s fine. She was regaling Paula with stories about Mount Vesuvius when I left. I’ll bet you didn’t have dinner either. Here.” Barbara popped open one of the Pepsis and handed it to her. “Your blood sugar’s probably even lower than mine. That cafeteria should be taken out and shot.”
It was gone, as suddenly as it had come, and if she went straight up to the lab right now, the traces would surely show up on her RIPT, it had been so strong. But she had already let Maisie down once today. She wasn’t about to do it again.
She took a grateful swig of the Pepsi. “You’re right,” she said. “I haven’t had anything since this morning.” She immediately felt better. And maybe it was just low blood sugar, she thought as they went down to Peds, combined with worry over Maisie.
And there was certainly reason to worry. “The doctors can’t keep her stabilized,” Barbara told her in the elevator. “They’ve put her on stronger and stronger antiarrhythmics, which all have serious liver and kidney side effects, but nothing seems to be working. Except in Mrs. Nellis’s mind, where everything’s wonderful, Maisie’s getting better every day, and her coding is just a little blip. That’s what she called it,” she said disgustedly. “A little blip.”
Which on the Yorktown would have meant a Japanese Zero, Joanna said silently, thinking of Mr. Wojakowski. Or a torpedo.
She went up to the CICU. Maisie was asleep, an oxygen line under her nose, electrodes hooked to her chest, her IV hooked to almost as many bags as Ms. Grant’s had been. Joanna tiptoed a few inches into the partly darkened room and stood there watching her a few minutes. And there was no need to wonder where the sense of dread came from this time. Because it was one thing to simulate dying and another altogether to be staring it in the face.
What did you see, kiddo, when you coded? Joanna asked her silently. A partly opened door, and people in white, saying, “What’s happened?” Saying, “It’s so cold”? I hope you saw a beautiful place, Joanna thought, all golden and white, with heavenly music playing, like Ms. Grant. No, not like Ms. Grant. Like Mrs. Woollam. A garden, all green and white.
Joanna stood in the dark a long time, and then went back up to her office, telling Barbara, “I’ll be around at least till eleven. Page me,” and typed in interviews until after midnight, waiting for her pager to go off, for the phone to ring.
But in the morning Maisie was as chirpy as ever. “I get to go back to my regular room tomorrow. I hate these oxygen things,” she told Joanna. “They don’t stay in your nose at all. Where were you yesterday? I thought you said you were supposed to tell what you saw in your NDE right away so you wouldn’t forget or confabulate stuff.”
“What did you see?” Joanna asked.