Passage

“Wait!” Joanna said and ran after it, grabbing for the end of the leash. She caught the little dog up in her arms. “There, there,” she said. “It’s all right.” It looked up at her with its bulging brown eyes, panting hard. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’ve got—”

There was a sound. Joanna looked up. Greg stood on the top step of the crew stairway, looking down into the darkness. He took a step down. “Don’t go down there!” Joanna cried. She thrust the little dog under her arm and ran toward the door. “Wait!” she cried, but the door had already shut behind him. “Wait!”

She grabbed the doorknob with her free hand. It wouldn’t turn. She hastily set the dog down, looping the end of the leash over her wrist, and tried the doorknob again. It was locked. “Greg!” she shouted through it. “Open the door!”

She put her whole weight against the door and pushed. “Open the door!” Pounding on the glass of the door, shouting, “What kind of hospital cafeteria is this?” Beating so hard the glass rattled, the cardboard sign that said “11 a.m. to 1 p.m.” shook, trying to make the woman inside look up from setting out the dishes of red Jell-O, shouting, “It’s not even one yet!” pointing to her watch in proof, but when she looked at it, it didn’t say ten to one, it said twenty past two.

She was on her knees, holding on to one of the empty lifeboat davits. The little bulldog huddled at her feet, looking up at her, shivering. His leash trailed behind him on the slanting deck. I let go of it, she thought in horror. I can’t let go of it.

She wrapped the leash tightly around her wrist twice, and clutched it in her fist. She scooped the little dog up in her arms, staggering against the rail as she straightened. The deck was slanting steeply now. “I’ve got to get a lifejacket on you,” she said and set off with the dog in her arms, climbing the hill of the deck, trying to avoid the deck chairs that were sliding down, the birdcages, the crash carts.

I’m in the wrong wing, she thought, I have to get to the Boat Deck, and heard the band. “The band was on the Boat Deck,” Joanna said, and climbed toward the sound.

The musicians had wedged the piano into the angle of the Grand Staircase and the funnel. They stood in front of it, their violins held to their chests like shields. As Joanna reached them, the bandleader raised his baton, and the musicians tucked their violins under their chins, raised their bows, began to play. Joanna waited, the bulldog pressed against her, but it was a ragtime tune, sprightly, jagged.

“It’s not the end yet,” Joanna said to the dog, climbing past them, past the first-class lounge. “We still have time, it isn’t over till they play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ”

And here was the chest. Joanna rolled an IV pole out of the way, and a gurney, trailing a white sheet, and grabbed a lifejacket. She stood the little dog on the white chest to put the lifejacket on him, wrapping it around his squat body and pulling his front legs through the armholes. She reached for the dangling ties, clutched — “ ‘Come, let me clutch thee!’ ” Mr. Briarley intoned from Macbeth. “ ‘I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou a dagger of the mind…?’ ” Ricky Inman tilted back and forth in his chair, Joanna watching him, fascinated, waiting for him to overbalance. “ ‘…a false creation, proceeding from the oppressed brain?’ ” and Ricky toppled over backward, grabbing at the wall, at the light switch, as he went over, Mr. Briarley saying, as the light went out, “Exactly, Mr. Inman, ‘put out the light and then put out the light,’ ” and the whole class laughing, but it wasn’t funny, it was dark. “It was dark,” Mrs. Davenport said, pausing between every word, Joanna, bored, uncaring, asking, “Can you describe it?” and Mr. Briarley answering, “ ‘The sun did not shine and the stars gave no light.’ ”