Passage

She saved all of her interviews from the past two years onto a single file and then typed in “water” and hit “global search” and “display,” and watched them come up.

“I felt like I was floating in the water.”

“The light was warm and glimmery, like being underwater.”

“…being at the lake” (this from Pauline Underbill’s description of her life review), “where we used to go when I was little. I was in our old rowboat, and it was leaking, the water was coming in the side…”

Rowing on the lake, Joanna thought, and called up Coma Carl’s file, with its long list of isolated words and (unintelligible)’s.

“Water,” and “placket” or “blanked out” or “black.” Or “blanket,” Joanna thought. She read through the rest of his file. “Dark” and “patches” and “cut the rope.” Cut the rope. The men up on top of the officers’ quarters, trying to cut the collapsibles loose as the water came up over the bow. She read on. “Water… cold? code?… oh, grand.” The Grand Staircase.

She quit at one o’clock, went home, and read The Light at the End of the Tunnel till she fell asleep, dog-earing pages that had NDEs that mentioned “water” and “voyage” and “darkness.”

In the morning, she went to see Coma Carl, hoping he might have begun talking again, but he had a feeding tube in and an oxygen mask. “He’s not having a very good day,” Mrs. Aspinall whispered, which was putting it mildly. He was a corpselike gray, and his thin chest, his skeletal arms and legs, seemed to be sinking into the bed, into death itself.

“They can’t seem to keep his temperature down,” Mrs. Aspinall said, sounding near tears. She looked terrible, too. Dark gray shadows under her eyes and a general look of exhaustion. A pillow and a hospital blanket were stacked neatly on the windowsill, which meant that she was sleeping in the room. And getting no sleep at all.

“You look tired,” Joanna said. “Would you like to go get a cup of coffee, or lie down in the waiting room? I’ll sit with him.”

“No, he might… no,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “I’m fine. Thank you, though. It’s very kind of you.” She looked at Carl. “He’s stopped talking. Of course, he can’t talk with the feeding tube in, but he doesn’t even try to make sounds anymore. He just lies there,” her voice broke, “so still in the bed.”

But he’s not in the bed, Joanna thought, and remembered standing beside his bed the day she’d met Richard, thinking he was somewhere far away. She wondered where. At the foot of the Grand Staircase, waiting for his boat to be called? Or in one of the lifeboats, rowing against the darkness and the cold?

She moved around to the side of the bed. “Carl,” she said, and covered his poor, battered hand with hers. “I came to see how you were doing,” she said, and then stopped, unable to think of anything at all to say. “Get well"? He obviously wasn’t going to. “The doctor says you’re doing fine"?

Maisie had said, “I think people should tell you the truth even when it’s bad.” Or even when they’re too far away to hear you. “Your wife’s here,” Joanna said. “The nurses are taking really good care of you. We all want you to come back to us.”

Behind her, Mrs. Aspinall was fumbling in her purse for a Kleenex. Joanna leaned over and kissed him on his papery cheek. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, and went back up to her office and started through the transcripts again.

“I don’t think it was the same tunnel,” Mrs. Woollam had said. “It was narrow, and the floor was uneven, so I had trouble walking.” And she had seen a stairway, and a dark open space with nothing around for miles…

But she had also seen a garden, “green and white, with vines all around.” And there was Maisie, who hadn’t seen lights or people dressed in white, but fog.

At half-past one, Joanna left for the university to see Amelia, leaving plenty of time to find the building and the room, remembering what a nightmare parking usually was, but the bad weather must have kept a lot of the students home. She found a parking place in the very first row.

Movie parking, she thought, I’ll have to tell Vielle. But Vielle would ask, “What were you doing at the university?” And if I told her, Joanna thought, she’d accuse me of stalking Amelia. Which is what I’m doing, she thought, standing outside the door of the classroom, waiting for her to come out. Amelia quit the project, and she made it plain she didn’t want to talk to me. I have no right to be here.