Passage

Mr. Briarley was already walking rapidly along the Promenade Deck. “The line ‘there is no other’ has a double meaning. It alludes to the event of another’s death awakening us to our own mortality, and to the Resurrection, but it can also be taken literally. There is no other. Having had our first death, we cannot be killed by lightning or by heart disease—”

“Is Maisie here?” Joanna said.

“By tuberculosis or kidney failure, by Ebola fever or ventricular fibrillation.”

“Did Maisie die?” Joanna said desperately. “When Barbara told her I’d been killed? Did she go into V-fib?”

“You no longer need fear the gallows,” Mr. Briarley said. It was colder down here, even though this part of the Promenade Deck was glassed in. Joanna shivered. “Nor the guillotine.” He touched his neck gingerly. “Nor strychnine poisoning. Nor a massive stroke — ” and she was in a dark hallway, groping her way toward the phone that was ringing wildly, wrestling one arm into her robe, feeling for the light switch, and for the phone, nearly knocking the receiver off, her heart jangling, knowing what she was going to hear, “It’s your father—”

“What was that?” Joanna said. She was flattened against one of the windows, staring into her frightened reflection.

“What was what?” Mr. Briarley said irritably from halfway down the deck.

“Something just happened,” she said, afraid to move for fear it would happen again. “A memory or a…”

“It’s the cold,” Mr. Briarley said. “Come along, it’s warmer in the smoking room. There’s a fire.”

“A fire?” Joanna said. Smoke and a fire. The death of a child by fire. She turned away from the windows and caught up to him. “Please tell me Maisie isn’t here.”

“Fire’s another death you don’t have to fear,” Mr. Briarley said. “Nasty, lingering death. Joan of Arc, Archbishop Cranmer, Little Miss — Ah, here we are,” he said, and stopped in front of a dark wooden door.

45

“No lying in state anywhere… a simple service… no speaking… the body not embalmed…”

—Part of FDR’s instructions for his funeral, which were not found until afterward and which had been completely disregarded

Joanna’s funeral wasn’t till Tuesday. Vielle came up to tell him. “The sister doesn’t trust any of the local ministers to conduct the service. She insists on bringing in her own hellfire-and-damnation specialist from Wisconsin.”

“Tuesday,” Richard said. It seemed an eon away.

“At ten.” She gave him the address of the funeral home. “I just wanted to let you know. I’ve got to get back down to the ER,” but she didn’t leave.

She lingered by the door, cradling her bandaged hand and looking unhappy, and then said, “What Joanna said — it might not have meant anything. People say all kinds of crazy things. I remember one old man who kept muttering, ‘The cashews are loose.’ And sometimes you think they’re trying to tell you one thing, and they’re actually trying to say something else. I had an ischemia patient one time who said, ‘Water,’ over and over, but when we’d try to give her a drink of water, she’d push it away. She was actually saying, ‘Walter.’ ”

“And — what?” Richard asked bitterly. “Joanna was really saying ‘Suez’? Or ‘soy sauce’? You and I both know what she was trying to say. She was calling for help. She was trying to tell me she was on the Titanic.”

He unplugged the EKG monitor. “That was what she’d come running down to the ER to tell me,” he said, winding up the cord, “in such a hurry she ran straight into a knife. That it wasn’t a hallucination. That it was really the Titanic.”

“But how could it be? Near-death experiences are a phenomenon of the dying brain.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and sat down and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

Vielle went away, but late that afternoon, or maybe the next day, she came again. “I talked to Patty Messner,” she said. “She ran into Joanna just as she came through the door of the ER, and she asked if Dr. Jamison was there. She said, ‘I have to find Dr. Wright. Do you know where he is?’ ”

He must still have been harboring some hope that something, someone else had brought Joanna to the ER, because as she spoke, it was like hearing Tish telling him Joanna was dead all over again. He wondered numbly why Vielle had come up all this way to tell him that.

“Patty said Joanna was in a hurry, that she was out of breath. I think you’re wrong,” Vielle said. “About what she was coming to tell you.”