Connie Willis - Passage

“Yes,” Vielle said, “but that can’t be who she went to see.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wasn’t in a position to tell her anything. He was in a coma.” A coma. “He muttered things sometimes,” Vielle explained, “and she had the nurses write down what he said.”

And that explained the disjointed words and phrases, the question marks after the words. They represented a nurse’s best guess at what Carl had mumbled. “Did you talk to your friend on the police force?”

“No,” she said, “but I talked to the crash team coordinator, and there were no codes that morning, so if she went to see an NDEer, it must have been one she’d interviewed befo—what?” she said to someone else, and then, “Shooting accident, gotta go.” She hung up.

“Dead end,” Richard said, putting down the receiver. “Carl’s in a coma.”

“Oh,” Kit said, disappointed. “Well, anyway, here are the names of the patients.” She started to hand the list to him and then took it back. “And one of them…” she ran her finger down the list, “mentioned fog. I thought that might be the source of her asking me if it had been foggy the night of the Titanic.” She found the name. “Maisie Nellis.”

Maisie.

“I think I know where Joanna went,” he said, starting for the door, and then stopped. He didn’t even know if Maisie was still in the hospital. “Hang on,” he said to Kit and picked up the phone and called the switchboard operator. “Do you have a Maisie Nellis listed as a patient?” he asked her.

“Yes—”

“Thanks,” he said and jammed the receiver down. “Come on, Kit,” he said.

He told her about Maisie on the way down to four-west. “She told me she’d seen fog in her NDE the first day I met her, and Joanna told me she saw fog in her second NDE, too.” They reached Peds.

The door to 422 was standing open. “Maisie?” he said, leaning in. The room was empty, the bed stripped, and folded sheets and a pillow at the foot of it. The tops of the nightstand and the bed table had been cleaned off, and the door to the closet stood open on emptiness.

She’s dead, he thought, and it was like Joanna all over again. Maisie’s dead, and I didn’t even know it was happening.

“Hi,” a woman’s voice said, and he turned around. It was Barbara. “I saw you go past and figured you were looking for Maisie,” she said. “She’s been moved. Up to CICU. She coded again, and this time there was quite a bit of damage. She’s been moved to the top of the transplant list.”

“The top of the list,” he said. “She gets the next available heart?”

“She gets the next available heart that’s the right size and the right blood type. Luckily Maisie’s Type A, so either a Type A or a Type O will work, but you know what a shortage of donors there is, particularly of children.”

“How long before a heart’s likely to become available?” Kit asked.

“There’s no way to tell,” Barbara said. “Hopefully, no more than a few weeks. Days would be better.”

“How’s her mother taking all this?” Richard asked.

Barbara stiffened. “Mrs. Nellis—” she started angrily and then stopped herself and said, “It’s possible to carry anything to extremes, even positive thinking.”

“Can Maisie have visitors?” Richard asked.

Barbara nodded. “She’s pretty weak, but I’m sure she’d love to see you. She asked about you the other day.”

“Do you know if Joanna was down here to see Maisie on the day she was killed?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t on that day. I know she’d been down to see her or called her or something the day before because Maisie was all busy looking up something for her in her disaster books.”

“You don’t know what it was, do you?”

“No,” Barbara said. “Something about the Titanic. That was Maisie’s latest craze. Do you know how to get to CICU?” She gave them complicated instructions, which Richard jotted down for his map, and they started toward the elevator.

“Dr. Wright, wait,” Barbara said, hurrying after them. “There’s something you need to know. Maisie doesn’t—” she said, and then stopped.

“Maisie doesn’t what?”

She bit her lip. “Nothing. Forget it. I was just going to warn you she looks pretty bad. This last episode—” she stopped again.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t—”

“No. I think seeing you is just what she needs. She’ll be overjoyed.” But she wasn’t. Maisie lay wan and uninterested against her pillows, a daunting array of monitors and machines crowded around her, nearly filling the room. Her TV was on, and the remote lay on the bed close to her hand, but she wasn’t watching the screen, she was staring at the wall below it. Her breath came in short, shallow pants.

There were at least six bags hanging from the IV pole. The tubing ran down to her foot, and when he looked at her hand, he could see why. It looked like she had been in a fight, the whole back of it covered in overlapping purple and green and black bruises. A metal ID tag hung around her neck.

“Hi, Maisie,” Richard said, trying not to let any of the horror he felt into his voice. “Remember me? Dr. Wright?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, but there was no enthusiasm in her voice.

“I’ve got somebody I want you to meet,” he said. “Maisie, this is Kit. She’s a friend of mine.”

“Hi, Maisie,” Kit said.

“Hi,” Maisie said dully.

“I told Kit you’re an expert on disasters,” Richard said. He turned to Kit. “Maisie knows all about the Hindenburg and the Hartford circus fire and the Great Molasses Flood.”

“The Great Molasses Flood?” Kit said to Maisie. “What’s that?”

“A big flood,” Maisie said in that same flat, uninterested tone. “Of molasses.”

He wondered if this was what Barbara had started to warn him about. If it was, he could see why she had changed her mind. He would never have believed it, that Maisie, no matter how sick she was, could be reduced to this dull, passive state. No, not passive. Flattened.

“Did people die?” Kit was asking Maisie. “In the Great Molasses Flood?”

“People always die,” Maisie said. “That’s what a disaster is, people dying.”

“Dr. Wright told me you were friends with Dr. Lander,” Kit said.

“She came to see me sometimes,” Maisie said, and her eyes strayed to the TV.

“She was a friend of mine, too,” Kit said. “When was the last time Dr. Lander came to see you, Maisie?”

“I don’t remember,” Maisie said, her eyes on the screen.

“It’s important, Maisie,” Kit said, reaching for the remote. She clicked off the TV. “We think Dr. Lander found out something important, but we don’t know what. We’re trying to find out where she was and who she talked to—”

“Why don’t you write and ask her?” Maisie said.

“Write and ask her?” Richard said blankly.

Maisie looked at him. “Didn’t she leave you a forwarding address either?”

“A forwarding address?”

“When she moved to New Jersey.”

“Moved to—? Maisie, didn’t anybody tell you?” Richard blurted.

“Tell me what?” Maisie asked. She pushed herself to a sitting position. The line on her heart monitor began to spike. Richard looked appealingly across the bed at Kit.

“Something happened to Joanna, didn’t it?” Maisie said, her voice rising. “ Didn’t it?”

Her mother, trying to protect her, had told her Joanna had moved away, had kept Barbara and the other nurses from telling her the truth. And now he had—Behind her head the line on her heart monitor was zigzagging sharply. What if he told her, and she went into V-fib from the shock of it? She had already coded twice.