Connie Willis - Passage

Kit nodded. “I found this book Joanna had asked me for, the day she was killed,” she said. “I called and offered to bring it to her, but she said no, she’d pick it up later on.”

And if you’d brought the book over to her, she might not have been down in the ER when the teenager pulled his knife, Richard thought, marveling at how everyone found some way to blame himself. If only the lookouts had seen the iceberg five minutes earlier, if only the Californian’s wireless officer hadn’t gone to bed, if only the Carpathia had been closer. It was amazing how much guilt and blame and “if only’s” there were to go around.

But the fact remained, they were going too fast, they didn’t have enough lifeboats, he had turned his pager off. “It was my fault, not yours,” he started to say, but she was still talking.

“I’d been looking for the book for her for weeks, and then when I found it, it was too late to be of any help to her. She wanted so much to find out what caused near-death experiences, how they worked. That’s why I brought the book to you. She didn’t get a chance to finish what she started, but maybe it’ll help you in your research.” She held the book out to him.

He didn’t take it. “I’ve shut the research project down,” he said. And now she would say, “You only think you feel that way now.”

She didn’t. “It’s the textbook they used in Joanna’s English class,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken. “My uncle was her English teacher in high school. Joanna asked me to look for it. She thought there might be something in it that made her NDEs take the form of the Titanic.” She held the book out.

“I don’t need it,” he said. “I already know the answer.”

“I talked to Vielle,” she said. “She told me about your theory, that you think she was really on the Titanic.”

“Not think,” he said. “Know.”

“Joanna didn’t think she was. She thought the Titanic was a symbol for something else. She was trying to find out what. That’s why she needed the book.” She laid it down on the examining table between them. “She was convinced something Uncle Pat had said in his English class had triggered the image of the Titanic, but he has Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember, so she asked me to help her. She was convinced there was some connection between it and the nature of the near-death experience, and that the book would help her find out why she was seeing the Titanic.”

“I know why she was seeing it. Because it was real. I have outside verification.”

“You mean because she said, ‘SOS’? That could mean lots of—”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Because I went after her.”

She stared at him for a long minute. “After her? What do you mean?”

“I mean, I went under to try to save her.” He gestured at the RIPT scan, at the examining table between them. “I self-induced an NDE and went after her to try to bring her back.”

“You went after her,” she said, struggling to understand. “Onto the Titanic?”

“No,” he said bitterly. “I was too late for that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There are apparently several varieties of hell. Mine was to stand in a crowd in the White Star office and listen to an official read the names of the passengers who’d been lost.”

“You were there?”

“I was there. It really happened. She went down on the Titanic. And she called to me for help. And I came too late.” He had said it finally, and getting it all out, sharing, venting, was supposed to make you feel better, wasn’t it, according to Eight Great Grief Helps? It didn’t.

And now that it was out, Kit would say—what? “You left her to drown?” or, “I am so sorry,” or, “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re half out of your mind with grief?

None of the above. She said, “How do you know? That you were really in the White Star office?”

“I know. It was a real place,” he said, and knew he sounded just like Mr. Mandrake’s nutcases, swearing they’d seen Jesus, but Kit only nodded.

“Joanna said it felt real,” she said, “not like a dream. She said it was a very convincing hallucination.”

She was offering him a way out, just like, “It wasn’t your fault,” and, “There’s a reason for everything,” only this one was even better: it was only acetylcholine and random synapses and confabulation. He had conjured the White Star office out of Joanna’s NDE accounts and the movie, created a unifying image out of panic and grief and temporal-lobe stimulation.

It almost worked. Except that Joanna, dying, had called out to him for help: “SOS. SOS.” “No thanks,” he said and handed her back the book.

And now she would say, “You owe it to Joanna to continue your research. It’s what she would have wanted.”

But she didn’t. She said, “Okay,” and put the book in her bag and then walked over to his desk and wrote on a pad. “Here’s my phone number if you decide you need it.”

She walked to the door, opened it, and then turned around. “I don’t know who else to tell this to,” she said. “Joanna saved my life. My uncle… living with someone…,” she stopped and tried again. “I was going under, and she got me to go out, she convinced me to use Eldercare, she invited me to Dish Night. She told me,” she took a ragged breath, “she wished she could die saving somebody’s life. And she did. She saved mine.”

She left then, but the head of the board came, to remind him of the Coping with Post-Trauma Stress Workshop, and Nurse Hawley with Practical Mourning Management, and an elderly volunteer with a copy of the Book of Mormon. And on Tuesday, Eileen and two other nurses from three-west, to take him to the funeral. “We won’t take no for an answer,” they said. “It’s not good to be alone at a time like this.”

He supposed Tish had put them up to it, but although he had finally slept, he still felt bone-tired and unable to concentrate, unable to think of an excuse they would accept. And maybe this was a good idea, he thought, climbing into the cramped Geo. He wasn’t sure he was in any shape to drive.

“I still can’t believe she’s dead,” one of the nurses said as soon as they had pulled out of the parking lot.

“At least she didn’t suffer,” the other one said. “What was she doing down in the ER, anyway?”

“Have you thought about grief counseling, Richard?” Eileen asked.

“I’ve got a great book you should read,” the first nurse volunteered. “It’s called The Grief Workbook, and it’s got all these neat depression exercises.”

There was a crowd at the church, mostly people from the hospital, looking odd out of their lab coats and scrubs. He saw Mr. Wojakowski and Mrs. Troudtheim. Joanna’s sister stood by the door of the narthex, flanked by two little girls. He wondered if Maisie would be there, and then remembered that her mother relentlessly shielded her from “negative experiences.”

“Look, there’s the cute policeman who took all of our statements,” one of the nurses said, pointing to a tall black man in a dark gray suit.

“I don’t see Tish anywhere,” the other one said, craning her neck.

“She isn’t coming,” the nurse said. “She said she hates funerals.”

“So do I,” the other one said.

“It isn’t a funeral,” Eileen said. “It’s a memorial service.”

“What’s the difference?” the first nurse asked.

“There’s no body. The family’s having a private graveside service later.”

But when they came into the sanctuary, there was a bronze casket at the front, with half of its lid raised and a blanket of white mums and carnations on the other half. “We don’t have to file past and look at her, do we?” the shorter nurse asked.