Passage

She called Kit again. The phone was busy. She glanced at her watch. A quarter past two. Not enough time to run over there before Mr. Sage’s session. But she needed to know now, before she lost the feeling. It would have to be Maisie.

She ran upstairs, hoping Maisie wasn’t down for tests. She was lying in bed, listlessly watching Winnie the Pooh. As soon as she saw Joanna, she pushed herself up higher against the pillows and said, “I found out about the Carpathia.”

“Good,” Joanna said. “I need to ask you something. Did the Titanic have an elevator?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. “Don’t you remember, in the movie, they were running away from the bad guy and they got in the elevator and went down?”

“I thought your mother hadn’t let you see Titanic.”

“I didn’t. My friend that I told you about that saw it, she told me about that part,” she said, and it was a very convincing story, even though Joanna didn’t believe it for a minute.

“Did your friend tell you what the elevator looked like?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. “It had one of those accordion things across it that you pull.” She demonstrated.

The grille. So the Titanic had had an elevator, and it wasn’t a discrepancy. She could imagine what Richard would say when he found out. She’d have to hope when she did her account, there was some other discrepancy in her NDE, and she’d better go do that now, before she forgot what Mr. Briarley said. “I gotta go, kiddo,” she said, patting the covers over Maisie’s knees.

“You can’t,” Maisie said. “I haven’t told you about the Carpathia yet. And I have to ask you a question. How fast do ships go?”

“How fast?” The Titanic had been going much too fast for the ice warnings, she knew that, but how fast was that? “I don’t know.”

“ ’Cause in my book it said the Carpathia came really fast, but this other book said it was fifty-eight miles away—”

“Fifty-eight?” Joanna said. “The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. “And it took her three hours to get there. The Titanic had already sunk ages before. So I don’t think it could’ve been very fast ’cause fifty-eight miles isn’t very far to come.”

35

“I believe it’s death.”

—Dying words of Tchaikovsky

“What’s wrong?” Maisie asked, looking at Joanna alertly. “Are you okay?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Joanna said. “You’re right. Fifty-eight miles doesn’t sound all that far. How far away was the Californian?” Fifty-eight miles. That day in the ER, he was talking about the Carpathia.

“You looked really funny when I told you how far away it was,” Maisie said. “Did one of your near-death people see the Carpathia?”

“No. How far away was the Californian?”

“It was really close,” she said, still looking suspicious. “It saw their rockets and everything, it could have saved them probably, only it turned off its wireless, so it didn’t hear any of their SOSs, and it didn’t even know what happened till the next morning.”

Joanna wasn’t listening. He was trying to tell me the Carpathia was too far away, that it would never get there in time.

“I don’t think they should’ve done that,” Maisie said. “Turned off their wireless. Do you?”

“No,” Joanna said. That’s why Greg’s words haunted me so, why I kept feeling I knew what they meant. They meant he was on the Titanic.

“It was really close,” Maisie said. “I mean, the people on the Titanic saw its lights. They told the lifeboats to try to row to it.”

“I need to go,” Joanna said, and stood up.

“I won’t talk about the Titanic anymore, I promise. I’ll just talk about the Hartford circus fire, okay?” Maisie went on rapidly, “The people tried to get out the main entrance, but the cage for the lions and tigers was in the way and they got all jammed up against it, and the ringmaster kept trying to tell them to go out the performers’ entrance — that’s where all the clowns and acrobats and stuff come in when it’s time for their acts — but they just kept trying to go out the way they came in.”

She’d convinced herself the Titanic wasn’t real, that it was a symbol for something, an image her mind had chosen because of something Mr. Briarley had said. But what if it wasn’t?

“The thing was, they didn’t have to go out the entrances,” Maisie said. “They could have just lifted up the tent and crawled under it.”

The mail room, the aft staircase, Scotland Road, were all in the right place. They all looked exactly the way they really had, even the red-and-blue arrows on the stationary bicycles. Because you were really there. Because it was really the Titanic.