Passage

He stood up. All right. Get Mrs. Hobbs’s number from Personnel. Find out who else was a patient on five-east that day. Find out who visited them. Go over the scans again, and the transcripts. Talk to Vielle. Talk to Bob Yancey. Go down trying.

He switched his pager back on and walked up the stairs, put out his hand to push the door open, and then ran back down to the landing. He tore the yellow tape free, ripping the trailing ends off the railing.

He carried the tangle of tape upstairs and out to the nurses’ station. A nurse was on the phone, her back to him. “The stairway down to second’s open. The paint’s dry,” he said, dumping the mass of tape on the counter. “Is Maurice Mandrake still in with Mrs. Davenport?”

“Hang on,” the nurse said into the phone. She half-turned and nodded at Richard.

“Thanks,” he said, and started down the hall toward the elevator.

“No, wait, Dr. Wright — ” the nurse called, her hand over the mouthpiece, ” — I didn’t realize it was you — ” He came back to the nurses’ station. “Someone from the ER called looking for you. I didn’t realize you were on the floor or I would have come looking for you. It was just a few minutes ago—”

“Was it Vielle Howard?” he cut in.

“Yes, I think so. I asked the other nurses, but they didn’t think you’d been—”

“Did she say she wanted me to call her or come down to the ER?”

“She said there was someone waiting for you in your lab.”

“Man or woman?”

“Man,” the nurse said.

Carl Aspinall, he thought, and sprinted for the elevator. He changed his mind. He must have thought about what Kit said.

But when he got up to sixth, it wasn’t Carl standing outside the lab door.

It was Mr. Pearsall.

55

“A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night.”

—Last words of Crowfoot, a Blackfoot Indian chief

There were fireflies. They winked on and off in the darkness around her. I’m in Kansas, Joanna thought. This must be part of the Life Review. And she must be getting near the end of it if she was remembering her childhood, visiting her relatives in Kansas, running around in the dark with her cousins, a Mason jar in one hand to catch the fireflies in, and the brass lid in the other, ready to clap it on when you’d caught one, the grass wet against her ankles, the rich, sweet scent of peonies filling the evening air.

But it wasn’t evening — it was night. And no matter how late they had been allowed to stay up, it had never gotten completely dark like this. There had always been a bluish-purple cast to the sky, and even after the stars came out, you could still see the outlines of the houses, of the arching cottonwoods, against it. You could still see the grownups on the dark porch, and each other.

She could not see the grass that she was sitting on, or the house, or her own hand, which she held up in front of her face. It was utterly black, in spite of the fireflies. “The moon did not shine,” she said out loud, “and the stars gave no light.”

The stars. They were stars, shining clearly, steadily, in the black sky, and why had she thought they were fireflies? They were obviously stars, and they came down all the way, sharp and sparkling, to the horizon. The survivors of the Titanic had all remarked on that, how the stars hadn’t dimmed near the horizon, but had shone all the way down to the water.

The water. I have survived the sinking, she thought. I am floating on something from the Titanic, a deck chair. But deck chairs were slatted. The surface below her was wide and smooth. A piano. The grand piano in the A La Carte Restaurant.

But pianos didn’t float. In the movie The Piano, it had sunk like a stone, dragging her down with it into the cold, disintegrating water. Maybe it’s the aluminum piano on the Hindenburg, she thought. That only weighed 397 pounds.

It would still sink, she thought. And maybe it was sinking. “All ships sink sooner or later,” Mr. Wojakowski had said, and maybe this was sinking very slowly, because the ocean was so still. The survivors had all said the water was as smooth as glass that night, so still the stars’ reflections had been scarcely distorted at all.

Joanna reached her hand down over the edge of the piano, feeling for the keyboard and then for the water below it, and as she did, she realized she was holding onto something with her other hand, holding it tight against her in the crook of her arm.

The little French bulldog, she thought, I must have held onto it when I fell, though she remembered letting go of everything, everything in the water, though she remembered her open hands drifting emptily in the darkness.