Passage

Not yet, she thought. I almost had it. Something about the rockets, about Mr. Briarley — “Joanna?” Richard was saying above her. “Joanna?”

She opened her eyes. Tish had already taken her IV out and was checking her vitals. “Did I kick out again?”

“No,” Richard said, and he looked as worried as Vielle did in the ER. “Are you all right?”

I said something coming out, she thought. I made him promise he’d come and get me again.

“I’m fine,” she said brightly. “How long was I under?”

“Four minutes and ten seconds,” Tish said, lifting her arm up to remove the foam pads.

“Were you frightened during your NDE?”

Leading, she thought irrelevantly. I asked him to come and get me again. He thinks I think it’s real, and he won’t send me under again, and he has to. I almost had it.

“Frightened?” she said, smiling. “Why? Did I say something?”

“Yes,” Tish volunteered. ” ‘Elevator.’ ”

“Elevator?” Joanna said, relieved and surprised. Why had she said “elevator” when it was the rockets — ?

“You have the most boring NDEs,” Tish said, standing over her and looking at her watch as she waited out the monitoring period. “First a post office and now an elevator? Don’t you ever see anything exciting?”

She checked Joanna’s pulse and blood pressure one last time, noting them on the chart, and then said to Richard, “Can I leave now? I need to go see somebody before Mr. Sage comes at three.”

He nodded and, as soon as she was out of the room, asked again, “Were you afraid during your NDE?”

“Why?” Joanna asked. “Did I sound frightened when I said ‘elevator’?”

“No, but your scans showed an extremely high level of cortisol. What happened during your NDE?”

“I saw Mr. Briarley again.” She told him about the trip to the mail room, the rockets, the elevator. “And when he opened the door I stepped through it before I realized it was the passage,” she said. “That’s why I was afraid I’d kicked out, because it felt the same as last time.”

“And you didn’t feel any fear?”

“I did when I saw the water in Scotland Road and when I saw the mail room was awash,” she said, trying to remember. She had been so intent on finding Mr. Briarley and asking him what the NDE meant, she hadn’t felt much fear, certainly not when compared to what she’d felt when she’d looked at the stain from the mailbag, when she’d looked over the side of the ship down into nothingness.

“Was my cortisol higher than the last two times?” she asked.

“I haven’t looked at the neurotransmitter analysis yet, but going by the scans, yes. You were more frightened those times?”

She thought of her panicked flight down the stairs, along the deck, into the passage. “Yes.”

“I was afraid of that,” he said and went over to the console.

Joanna dressed quickly. “I’m going to go record my account,” she said, “I’ll be back at three,” and hurried down to her office before he could ask her anything else. She needed to think about the NDE before she lost the feeling of almost, almost knowing the answer. It was something about the rockets, and Mr. Briarley setting them off.

She went through the scene again, trying to remember Mr. Briarley’s exact words. “Step back,” he had said, and the rocket had shot up and burst into white stars—

She recorded the scene and then went back to the beginning and did the whole NDE, trying to hold on to the feeling. Something about the rockets, though they weren’t a discrepancy, unless the ones she’d seen were different from the ones on the Titanic.

She called Kit and asked her what the emergency rockets had looked like. “White fireworks,” Kit said. “I remember Uncle Pat saying white was the color of the international distress signal, and there was a scene of them being fired in the movie.”

Of course. She remembered it. The officer had leaned the cylinder against the railing. “Anything else?” Kit asked.

“Yes. I want to know if there was something called Scotland Road on the ship. It would have been a long passage down on” — she tried to think which deck it was on — “E or F Deck. And also whether there was a library on board. It would have been on the Promenade Deck, next to a bar. And anything about what the rockets looked like and where they were kept.”

“Scotland Road, library, rockets. Okay,” Kit said. “Oh, and if you have a minute, I’ve got a list of Ediths who were on board. I’ve found four. I’m not sure that’s all. The crew are only listed by an initial and a last name, and some of the passengers are only down as Mrs. Somebody.”

“How many were lost? Of the four?”

“Only Edith Evans.”

Joanna went back to the NDE. Not the rockets, but something in that part of the NDE. The elevator? That was definitely a discrepancy. They hadn’t had elevators in 1912, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have had one on board a ship. And she had murmured, “Elevator,” when she was coming out.