Passage

“No,” Maisie said, appeased. “That would have been a good name for this one dog they found.” She pulled the book out from under the covers and began flipping through it till she found another of the photos. “It was trying to save this little girl.” She showed the picture to Joanna. The plaster casts of the long-muzzled dog and the little girl lay huddled against a wall, their limbs tangled together. “But he couldn’t. They both died.”

She took the book back. “It didn’t have any dog tags either,” she said and then suddenly lunged for her book again.

Joanna looked toward the door. Maisie raised the blankets to stick the book under them, and then stopped and laid it back on the bed as the black orderly came in. “Hi, Eugene,” she said, picking up her tray and handing it to him.

“Hi, Eugene,” Joanna said. “You have to leave the tray. Maisie’s supposed to finish her eggs.”

“He’s supposed to take all the trays back at the same time,” Maisie said.

“No, that’s all right,” Eugene said, setting the tray back down. “I can come back for it later.” He winked at Joanna.

“Thanks,” Joanna said. Eugene went out. Joanna stood up. “I’ve got to go, too.”

“You can’t. You promised you’d stay as long as I wanted. I have to show you this one picture.”

She showed her at least twenty pictures before she finally let Joanna go — excavated ruins, reconstructed Roman baths, a gold bracelet, a silver mirror, paintings of people in white togas running terrified from a red-and-gold-spewing volcano, of people cowering in ash-darkened colonnades. And if I don’t see Vesuvius this time, Joanna thought, going back up to her office, then Richard’s theory’s got to be wrong.

She unlocked her office, went in, and checked her answering machine. The light was blinking almost hysterically. “You have twenty-three messages,” it said when she pressed the button. And all from Mr. Mandrake and none from Kit or Kerri Jakes, she thought, hitting “play.”

Not all. Three were from Maisie, one from Richard, and four from Vielle, all trying to find her yesterday afternoon. “Hi, you remember you’ve got my car, don’t you?” Vielle’s last one began. “I’m leaving now. When you get back, just leave my keys with the admitting nurse. I think I’ll rent Gone in Sixty Seconds or Grand Theft Auto for our next Dish Night.”

There was a pause, and then Vielle gasped, “Oh, my God, you won’t believe who just walked in. Do you remember that cute police officer who came in to tell us about the nail gunner, the one who looks just like Denzel Washington? Well, he’s here, and it looks like he’s going to be at the meeting. Officer Right, here I come!”

Joanna grinned and hit “delete” and “next message.”

“Hi, this is Kerri Jakes. Do I remember the name of our high school English textbook? Are you kidding? I barely remember high school. What do you need to know for? Don’t tell me you didn’t really graduate and they’re making you take senior English over. Anyway, no, I don’t remember the name of the book, and the only one I remember being in second period was Ricky Inman because I had this awful crush on him, and I used to hang around Mr. Briarley’s door before third period, waiting for him to come out.”

Kerri was right. She didn’t remember high school. Joanna hit “next message.” “This is Elspeth Haighton. I’m trying to reach Dr. Lander. The session we set up won’t work. I have a Junior League meeting that day. Please call me and reschedule.”

Fat chance, Joanna thought, but she dialed Mrs. Haighton’s number. It was busy. How can it be busy? Joanna thought, she’s never home, and went back to listening to messages.

There were three in a row from Mr. Mandrake, all beginning, “You never answer your pages, Dr. Lander,” and wanting to talk to her about some astonishing new details Mrs. Davenport had remembered, “which are so vivid and authentic that they cannot fail to convince you that what is being experienced during the NDE is, in fact, real.”

But it’s not, Joanna thought, even though he’s right about the details being vivid and authentic. She could see the lace insets on the young woman’s nightgown, the frightened expression on her face, the filigreed light sconces in the passage. But it wasn’t the actual Titanic, in spite of the reality of the vision. It was something else.

“…not only Mrs. Davenport’s uncle Alvin, but the spirits of Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc, waiting to welcome her to the Other Side,” Mr. Mandrake was saying.