Passage

And Joanna would have told me what her last words meant, Richard thought. But she had. Maisie was the living proof of that. And if he didn’t get her back to Dish Night, Kit and Vielle would have a fit. “We’d better get going so we can watch the movie,” he said and plunked the pink “Back from the Grave” hat on her head.

Maisie nodded, but as he came around to push her wheelchair out of the room, she said, “Wait, we can’t go yet. When I said it wasn’t you who saved my life, I didn’t mean the kid who gave me my heart either.”

“Who did you mean?”

“Emmett Kelly.”

So far out in left field there was no way to follow the ball. “Emmett Kelly?”

“Yeah, you know,” Maisie said, “the sad-looking clown with the raggedy clothes and it looks like he didn’t shave. He saved this little girl at the Hartford circus fire. He told her to go stand in the Victory garden. And he told me to, too, and showed me how to get out of the tent, so that’s why I said he saved my life.”

Richard nodded, trying to understand.

“Only it wasn’t really him. It looked like him and everything, but it wasn’t. It was like how Vielle said the NDE was, and Emmett Kelly was a symbol for who it was really. But just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean it is.”

“Who was it really, Maisie?”

“But Joanna said just because you want it to be true doesn’t mean it isn’t, either,” she said, still following some private line of reasoning, “and I think it was real, even though Pollyanna and the fire and stuff wasn’t.”

“Maisie, who saved you?”

She gave him her it-is-so-obvious look. “Joanna,” she said.

60

“Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be.”

—C. S. Lewis, writing about resurrection in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

“Look,” Helen said. She had been sitting close to Joanna, with the little French bulldog on her lap, untying the hair ribbon around its neck and then retying it, ignoring the steadily reddening sky, but now she looked up. “I think something’s happening.”

The red’s getting darker, Joanna thought, looking fearfully up at the bloody sky. The light’s going, and this time it won’t be a night of clear and sparkling stars, but the color was not deepening, it was changing, the hue shifting from blood-red to carmine.

“Not the sky,” Helen said, pointing down over the side of the piano. “The water!”

Joanna looked down at the water, and it was carmine, too, the burning orange-red of flames. “ ‘But the fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire,’ ” Joanna thought, remembering her sister quoting from the Bible, “ ‘which is the second death.’ ”

She reached to pull Helen closer, but Helen wriggled out of her arms and went over to the edge. She flopped down on her stomach, the little dog beside her, and trailed her hand in the water. “I think we’re unbecalmed,” she said, but the flame-red water was still as smooth as glass, so still Helen’s hand, trailing through it, left no wake at all.

“We are too unbecalmed,” Helen said as if Joanna had spoken. “Look!” She bobbed her head toward the ice field, and she was right, because, even though the piano had not drifted, even though the water was still smooth and still; they were no longer surrounded by ice. The bergs lay far behind them, their sharp peaks copper against the burning sky.

We’ve drifted out of the ice field, Joanna thought. They’ll never find us now.

“I told you we were unbecalmed,” Helen said, and stood up, rocking the piano so the water lapped at its sides. “I bet whatever we were waiting for must have happened.”

No, Joanna thought. Please.

“What do you think will — ?” Helen said and stopped, looking back toward the ice field.

Joanna followed her gaze. She could no longer see the icebergs. On all sides, stretching out to an endless horizon, lay the still, burnished water.

“What do you think will happen now?” Helen said again.

“I don’t know.”

“I think we will find land soon,” Helen said, and sat down crosslegged in the center of the piano. She put her curled hands up to her eye as if they were a telescope and gazed earnestly at the horizon, searching for land. “Look!” she shouted and pointed to the east. “There it is!”

At first Joanna couldn’t see anything, but then she spotted a tiny speck on the horizon. She leaned forward, squinting. It’s a lifeboat, she thought, and strained to see, hoping it was Mr. Briarley and Mrs. Woollam, safe in Collapsible D.

“It’s a ship!” Helen shouted, and, as Joanna looked, the speck resolved itself into an oblong, like a smokestack. “It’s the Carpathia!” Helen said happily.

It can’t be, Joanna thought. It’s too far for her to come. And the Carpathia had steamed up from the southwest.

“I bet it is, though,” Helen said as if Joanna had spoken. “What else could it be?”