“What should they have had?” Joanna said, almost afraid to ask.
Maisie gave her a withering look. “F is for French bulldog. You know, the one I told you about. Did you know there was this little girl who played with it on the Promenade Deck all the time?”
“Maisie—”
“There’s a Titanic pop-up book, too,” Maisie said. “I made Ms. Sutterly take those back to the library, but these have lots of stuff in them, so now if you need me to help with your research, I can,” she said, still breathless. With the exertion of digging for the books? Or with something else? Not only was she retaining fluid, but her lips looked bluer than usual, and when she inhaled, Joanna could hear a faint catch, like the beginning of a wheeze. She’s getting worse, Joanna thought, watching her leaf through the book.
“So, do you want me to look up something for you?” Maisie said.
“I think right now I want you to just read about the Titanic, so when I have questions, you’ll be ready to answer them. And I want you resting and doing everything the doctors and nurses tell you.” She began stacking up the books. “Where do you want these?”
“In my Barbie bag in the closet,” she said, “except for this one.” She grabbed a tall red book called The Child’s Titanic.
Joanna put the rest in the pink duffel bag and shoved it out of sight on the side of the closet. “Now I’ve got to go see my patient,” she said. “I’ll come see you soon, kiddo,” and started out of the room.
“Wait!” Maisie said before she’d taken two steps. “I have to ask you something.” She paused for breath, and Joanna heard the wheezing catch in her breath again. “What happens if your bracelet gets too tight?” She held out her puffy wrist with the plastic ID bracelet on it.
“Barbara will just cut it off and make a bigger one,” Joanna said. Was she worried about getting puffier? The 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.”
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.