Passage

He took the elevator and turned right and yes, there was Peds. He could tell by the charge nurse, who was wearing a smock covered with clowns and bunches of balloons.

“I’m looking for Dr. Lander,” he said to her.

The nurse shook her head. “We paged her earlier, but she hasn’t come up yet.”

Shit. “But she is coming?”

“Uh-huh,” a voice from down the hall piped, and a kid in a red plaid robe and bare feet appeared in the door of one of the rooms. The — boy? girl? he couldn’t tell — looked about nine. He? she? had cropped dark blond hair, and there was a hospital gown under the plaid robe. Boy. Girls wore pink Barbie nightgowns, didn’t they?

He decided not to risk guessing. “Hi,” he said, walking over to the kid. “What’s your name?”

“Maisie,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Wright,” he said. “You know Dr. Lander?”

Maisie nodded. “She’s coming to see me today.”

Good, Richard thought. I’ll stay right here till she does.

“She comes to see me every time I’m in,” Maisie said. “We’re both interested in disasters.”

“Disasters?”

“Like the Hindenburg,” she said. “Did you know there was a dog? It didn’t die. It jumped out.”

“Really?” he said.

“It’s in my book,” she said. “Its name was Ulla.”

“Maisie,” a nurse — not the one who’d been at the desk — said. She came over to the door. “You’re not supposed to be out of bed.”

“He asked me where Joanna was,” Maisie said, pointing at Richard.

“Joanna Lander?” the nurse said. “She hasn’t been here today. And where are your slippers?” she said to Maisie. “You. Into bed,” she said, not unkindly. “Now.”

“I can still talk to him, right, though, Nurse Barbara?”

“For a little while,” Barbara said, walking Maisie into the room and helping her into the bed. She put the side up. “I want you resting,” she said.

“Maybe I should — ” Richard began.

“What’s an Alsatian?” Maisie asked.

“An Alsatian?” Barbara said blankly.

“That’s what Ulla was,” Maisie said, but to Richard. “The dog on the Hindenburg.”

The nurse smiled at him, patted Maisie’s foot under the covers, and said, “Don’t get out of bed,” and went out.

“I think an Alsatian’s a German shepherd,” Richard said.

“I’ll bet it is,” Maisie said, “because the Hindenburg was from Germany. It blew up while it was landing at Lakehurst. That’s in New Jersey. I have a picture,” Maisie said, putting the side of the bed down and scrambling out and over to the closet. “It’s in my book.” She reached in a pink duffel bag — there was Barbie, on the side of the duffel bag — and hauled out a book with a picture of Mount St. Helens on the cover and the title Disasters of the Twentieth Century. “Can you carry it over to the bed? I’m not supposed to carry heavy stuff.”

“You bet,” Richard said. He carried it over and laid it on the bed. Maisie opened it up, standing beside the bed. “A girl and two little boys got burned. The girl died,” she said, short of breath. “Ulla didn’t die, though. See, here’s a picture.”

He leaned over the book, expecting to see a picture of the dog, but it was a photo of the Hindenburg, sinking in flames. “Joanna gave me this book,” Maisie said, turning pages. “It’s got all kinds of disasters. See, this is the Johnstown flood.”

He obediently looked at a photo of houses smashed against a bridge. A tree stuck out of the upstairs window of one of them. “So, you and Dr. Lander are good friends?”

She nodded, continuing to turn pages. “She came to talk to me when I coded,” she said matter-of-factly, “and that’s when we found out we both liked disasters. She studies near-death experiences, you know.”

He nodded.

“I went into V-fib. I have cardiomyopathy,” she said casually. “Do you know what that is?”

Yes, he thought. A badly damaged heart, unable to pump properly, likely to go into ventricular fibrillation. That accounted for the breathlessness.

“When I coded I heard this funny sound, and then I was in this tunnel,” Maisie said. “Some people remember all kinds of stuff, like they saw Jesus and heaven, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see hardly anything because it was dark and all foggy in the tunnel. Mr. Mandrake said there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but I didn’t see any light. Joanna says you should only say what you saw, not what anybody else says you should see.”

“She’s right,” Richard said. “Mr. Mandrake interviewed you, too?”

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said, and rolled her eyes. “He asked me if I saw people waiting for me, and I said, ‘No,’ because I couldn’t, and he said, ‘Try to remember.’ Joanna says you shouldn’t do that because sometimes you make up things that didn’t really happen. But Mr. Mandrake says, ‘Try to remember. There’s a light, isn’t there, dear?’ I hate it when people call me ‘dear.’ ”

“Dr. Lander doesn’t do that?”

“No,” she said, her emphaticness making her breathe harder. “She’s nice.”