Passage

And how could she have forgotten that? Forgotten Mr. Briarley, who had talked about the Titanic constantly in class, who’d used it as a metaphor for everything. “Water up to the boilers,” he had written on an essay of hers, “Putting the women off in boats.” He was always telling them stories about the loading of the lifeboats and the lights going out, reading them long passages about the band and the Californian and the passengers. “I knew I hadn’t read it,” Joanna said out loud. “I heard Mr. Briarley say it.”

And he held the answer. He had said something about the Titanic, something in English class, and — “I have to find him,” Joanna said, jamming her recorder in her pocket. “I have to ask him what he said.”

She ran up the stairs to the nurses’ station. “I need a phone book,” she said breathlessly.

“White or yellow pages?” Eileen asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Joanna said. “White.”

Eileen set the heavy phone book on the counter, and Joanna flipped rapidly through the B’s, trying to remember Mr. Briarley’s first name. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard it. He’d simply been Mr. Briarley, like all her teachers. Bo, Br—

A buzzer sounded. Eileen reached to turn it off. “Patient calling,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Joanna murmured, running her finger down the list of Br’s. Braun. Brazelton.

“Okay,” Eileen said, “just stick the phone book on the desk,” and went off to answer the patient’s call.

Breen. Brentwood. Joanna hoped there weren’t dozens of Briarleys. Brethauer. She needn’t have worried. There weren’t any. The list went straight from Brian to Briceno. He probably has an unlisted number, she thought, to keep students from making prank calls. I’ll have to talk to him at school.

She glanced at her watch. Three o’clock. School got out at three-fifteen, or at least it had when she was in high school, but the teachers had been required to stay till at least four. If she hurried, she might make it there by then. She shut the phone book and started quickly down the hall toward the elevator, fumbling for her car keys as she walked.

She didn’t have them. They were up in her office, where Mr. Mandrake, and probably Richard, lay in wait. I’ll have to borrow a car, she thought and ran back to the nurses’ station to ask Eileen, but she wasn’t there, and there wasn’t time to look for her. She’d have to borrow Vielle’s. She started back toward the elevator.

“Oh, good, Dr. Lander,” a familiar voice said, and Joanna looked up in horror to see Mrs. Davenport heading toward her in an orange-and-yellow-and-electric-blue-splotched robe. “You’re just the person I wanted to see.”

21

“Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

—Last words of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

This is what you get for not watching where you’re going, Joanna thought. “Be alert to your surroundings,” the hospital memo on protecting yourself from rogue-crazed ER patients had said. Joanna should have paid attention to it.

“I’ve remembered more details of my NDE,” Mrs. Davenport said, planting her multicolored self squarely between Joanna and the elevator. She looks just like an RIPT scan in that robe, Joanna thought. “After the Angel of Light showed me the crystal, my uncle Alvin led me over to a shimmering gray curtain, and when he drew it aside, I could see the operating room and all the doctors working over my lifeless body, and—”

“Mrs. Davenport,” Joanna interrupted, “I have an appointment—”

“—and Alvin said, ‘Here on the Other Side we know everything that happens on Earth,’ ” Mrs. Davenport went on as if Joanna hadn’t spoken, “ ‘and we use that knowledge to protect and guide the living.’ ”

“I have to be on the other side of town by four,” Joanna said, looking pointedly at her watch.

“ ‘All you have to do is listen, and we will speak to you,’ Alvin said, and he was right,” Mrs. Davenport said. “Just the other day he told me where my pearl earring that I’d lost was.”

I wonder if he can tell me how to get away from his niece, Joanna thought. “I wish I could stay, Mrs. Davenport, but I have to go.”

“And two nights ago, in the middle of the night, I heard him say, ‘Wake up,’ and when I looked at the time, it was 3 a.m.”

Mrs. Davenport was never going to let her go. She was simply going to have to walk around her. She did. Mrs. Davenport followed her, still talking. “And then I heard him say, just like he was there in the room, ‘Turn on the TV,’ and I did, and do you know what was on?”

A Ronco infomercial? Joanna thought. She hit the elevator “down” button. “A show on paranormal experiences,” Mrs. Davenport said, “which is proof that those who have passed over are in communication with us.”

The elevator opened and Joanna practically jumped in, praying Mrs. Davenport wouldn’t follow her. “And just this morning I heard Alvin say—”