Passage

Joanna had wanted to die like W. S. Gilbert, and the Titanic was full of Gilberts. Assistant Engineer Harvey and Edith Evans and Jay Yates. Daniel Buckley shepherding the girls he had promised to take care of up through the First-Class Dining Saloon, up the Grand Staircase, into the boats, Robert Norman giving his lifejacket to a woman and her child, John Jacob Astor plunking a flowered hat on a ten-year-old boy and saying, “Now he’s a girl and now he can go.” Captain Smith, swimming toward one of the boats with a baby in his arms. And Jack Phillips. And the band. And firemen, stokers, engineers, trimmers, working to keep the boilers going and the dynamos running and the wireless working, the lights on. So it wouldn’t get dark.

“Turn off the lights,” Vielle was saying. “We need to get this show on the road. It’s already four-thirty.”

“She has a date,” Maisie said wisely.

“How did you find out?” Vielle asked Maisie, her hands on her hips.

“You have a date?” Kit said. “Who with? Please tell me it’s not with Harvey the Embalmer.”

“It’s not,” Maisie said. “It’s with a cop.”

“The one who looks like Denzel Washington?” Kit asked. “You finally met him?”

Vielle nodded. “I called him to see if he could help me find the taxi Joanna took,” she said, “and just how did you find out, Little Miss Gossip?”

Maisie turned to Richard. “So I guess you and Kit will have to eat at the cafeteria, just the two of you,” she said.

“I think it’s time to start the movie,” Kit said, whacking Maisie with the Volcano box. She handed Vielle the video, and Vielle turned the TV on and slid the video into the slot.

“Wait! Don’t start yet! I forgot my ‘Back from the Grave and Ready to Party’ hat Eugene gave me,” Maisie said and added defensively, “I have to have it. It’s a party.”

“I’ll go get it,” Richard said.

“No,” Maisie said. “I have to get it,” and to Richard, “You don’t know where it is.”

“You could tell me,” Richard started to say and then got a look at Maisie’s face, innocent and determined. She obviously had a reason for wanting to go back to her room, even if it meant wheeling her monitor and IV pole back, too. “We’ll be right back,” Richard said and maneuvered her and her equipment back down the hall.

As soon as they got inside the room, Maisie said, “My hat’s under the pillow. Push me up to the nightstand.” She opened the drawer and brought out several tablet pages, folded into quarters. “It’s my NDE from when I coded,” she said, handing them to him. “I couldn’t write it down right away.”

“That’s all right,” Richard said, touched that she had written the whole thing down. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Joanna said you should always write it down right away,” Maisie said disapprovingly, “so you won’t confabulate.”

“That’s true,” Richard said, “but you can’t always. This will be very useful.”

Maisie looked mollified. “Do you think Mr. Wojakowski tells the truth?”

Out of left field. “The truth?” Richard said, stalling. He wondered if she had begun to catch Mr. Wojakowski in inconsistencies, like Joanna had.

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “I asked him if Jo-Jo Powers, that’s the guy who said he was going to lay his bomb right on the flight deck, if he knew he did it. Hit the Shokaku, I mean. ’Cause he’d already died when it hit. And Mr. Wojakowski said, ‘You bet he knew it! He was standing there at the pearly gates watching the whole thing.’ Do you think he was?”

“Was standing at the pearly gates?” Richard said.

“No, was telling the truth. It’s like a dream, right? The NDE? Vielle told me it’s like signals your brain is sending out to make your heart start, and you make the signals into a kind of dream. A symbol, Vielle said.”

“That’s right,” Richard said.

“So it’s not real.”

“No,” he said. “It feels like it’s really happening, but it’s not.”

Maisie thought about that. “I kind of figured that out ’cause of Pollyanna being there. She’s not a real person, and none of the animals really got loose. At the Hartford circus fire,” she said at his bewildered look. “That’s where I went. In my NDE.”

My God. The Hartford circus fire.

“And after the NDE, there’s nothing,” she said, “and you don’t even know you’re dead. ’Cause of brain death.”

He nodded.

“But you don’t know that for sure. Joanna said nobody knows for sure what happens after you die, except people who’ve died, and they can’t tell you,” Maisie said, and then, following some private line of reasoning of her own, “and the thing the dream stands for is real, even if the dream isn’t.”

“Maisie, did you see Joanna in your NDE?” he asked.

“Hunh-unh,” she said, and then, “Mr. Mandrake says people who’ve died can tell us stuff. Do you think they can?”

She wants Joanna to still be here, to be talking to her, he thought. And who can blame her? “They speak to us in our hearts,” he said carefully.

“I don’t mean like that,” Maisie said. “I mean really.”

“No.”

Maisie nodded. “I told Mr. Mandrake they couldn’t ’cause if they could, Little Miss 1565 would have told them who she was.”