Passage

He had asked Vielle to sit in on the session. “Amelia, we want you to tell us everything you can remember about your NDEs, starting with the first one,” he said, and Vielle switched on Joanna’s minirecorder.

Amelia nodded. “I promised you I’d do anything you asked,” she said and launched into a detailed account, made even more detailed by his and Vielle’s questions.

“How many of your professors were in the office?” Vielle asked her.

“Four,” Amelia said. “Dr. Eldritch and my director and Mrs. Ashley, my high school English teacher, and my freshman chem lab professor. He wasn’t really a professor. He was a graduate student. I hated him. If you asked him a question, all he’d say was, ‘It’s something you need to figure out yourself.’ ”

“Your English teacher was there?” Richard asked, thinking of Mr. Briarley.

Amelia nodded. “I didn’t really have her, though. She died a month after school started.”

Vielle grilled her about the labels on the chemical bottles. “You know how in formulas, the numbers are below the line?” Amelia said. “These were all in a row.”

“Can you remember what any of the letters were?” Vielle asked.

She couldn’t. “Do you remember anything else that wasn’t right?” Vielle asked.

Amelia stared into space. “The coldness,” she said finally. “It’s always hot in that room. It has these old-fashioned heating vents. But in my NDE, it was freezing, like they’d left a door open somewhere.”

“Joanna talked about it being cold, too,” Vielle said after Amelia was gone. “Did Joseph Leibrecht?”

“He talked about seeing snow fields,” Richard said, “but he also talked about a boiling sea and being tossed in a fire. And there was nothing hot or cold in my NDE.”

“You and Amelia were both looking for something,” Vielle offered.

“Joanna was, too,” Richard said, “but Joseph Leibrecht wasn’t.”

“What about her English teacher being someone who’d died?”

He shook his head. “That’s one of the core elements.”

“There’s no chance you can convince Carl Aspinall to talk to you?” she asked.

“They’re not answering their phone.”

Vielle nodded wisely. “Caller ID. I don’t suppose it’s worth driving up there again?”

No, he thought, and that wasn’t where the answer lay anyway. It lay with Mr. Briarley, and he couldn’t get it out of him either. “It’s something you need to figure out for yourself,” the graduate assistant had said.

“Could you send Amelia under again?” Vielle asked as he walked her to the door of the lab.

“Maybe,” he said, “although the chances are she’ll have a repeat of the same unifying image.”

“Oh, good, you’re here,” a voice said, and Maisie’s mother came in, dressed in a sunny yellow suit. “Is this a bad time?”

“I was just leaving. I’ll work on it some more and call you,” Vielle said and scooted out.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Maisie’s mother said. “Here.” She handed him a small black box.

“What’s this?” he asked. It looked like a very small Palm Pilot.

“Your pager. You said a problem with implementing your procedure was that the window of opportunity was too short, only four to six minutes, you said.”

What I said was that irreversible brain death occurs in four to six minutes, he thought, but she can’t even bring herself to say the words or to admit that what she wants me to do is bring Maisie back from the dead.

“This pager solves that problem,” she said, looking pleased as punch.

“I already have a pager,” he said. And even if this one went off the second Maisie coded, he would still have to get to a phone and find out where she was. If anyone was bothering to answer the phone during an emergency.

“It isn’t an ordinary pager,” Mrs. Nellis said. “It’s a locational device. Maisie has one of these, and so do each of her doctors and nurses, and, in the case of a coding situation, they’ve been instructed to hit this button immediately,” she pointed to a red button on the end of the box, “and your pager will beep. It has a distinctive beep, so you won’t confuse it with your own pager.”

It probably plays “Put On a Happy Face,” he thought.

“As soon as you hear it beep,” Mrs. Nellis flowed on, “you press this button,” she indicated a black button on the side, “and the location in the hospital the signal was sent from will appear on this screen. It will say ‘Cardiac Intensive Care Unit’ or ‘west wing, fourth floor’ or wherever. Maisie will be in her room in the CICU most of the time, of course, but, as you said, she might be down for tests, or,” she crossed her fingers coyly, “in the OR, getting prepped for her new heart, and this way you’ll know exactly where she is. I wanted one that would also plot where you were and map out the shortest route, but the computer engineer who designed this said the technology didn’t exist yet.”

“The technology for reviving patients who’ve coded doesn’t exist yet either, Mrs. Nellis,” he said, trying to give her back the pager.