Connie Willis - Passage

“Did he say anything?”

“No.”

“What about Dr. Lander? Did she say anything?”

“Yeah, she asked me if I wanted her to move, and I said, no, I could do it from that side.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“To me?”

“Or to Mr. Aspinall, anything at all.”

He shrugged. “She might have. I wasn’t really listening.”

“If you could try to remember,” Richard said, “it’s very important.”

He shook his head. “People are always talking when I’m in the room. I’ve learned to just shut it out.”

Guadalupe was even less helpful. “I didn’t know Joanna had even been in to see him,” she said.

“But you saw her on the floor that day?” Richard asked.

She nodded. “I’d paged her because we couldn’t find Mr. Aspinall’s wife and I thought Joanna might know where she was. She didn’t, but she came up to the floor, and I talked to her for a couple of minutes. She asked about Mr. Aspinall’s condition, and she suggested a couple of places his wife might be, and then I assumed she left.”

“But you didn’t see her leave?”

“No. Things were so crazy right then. We didn’t expect Co—Mr. Aspinall to regain consciousness. He’d been steadily sinking for several days, and then suddenly, he popped awake and we all started running around trying to find his wife and his doctor, so it’s entirely possible Joanna was here. Why is it important?”

He explained. “Did Mr. Aspinall say anything to you about what he experienced while he was in the coma?”

“No. I asked him, because he’d flailed around so much—”

Drowning, Richard thought. He was drowning.

“—and he’d cry out. Mostly it was after we’d had to do something, like redo his IV, and I wondered if he was aware of what we were doing, but he said, no, there wasn’t anybody else there, he was all alone.”

“Did he say where ‘there’ was?”

She shook her head. “Just talking about it seemed to upset him. I asked him if he’d had bad dreams—a lot of our coma patients remember dreaming—but he said no.”

Because it wasn’t a dream, Richard thought.

“Have you tried talking to Mr. Aspinall?” Guadalupe asked.

“He says he doesn’t remember anything.”

She nodded. “He was on a lot of drugs, which can really mess up your memory, and comas are funny. Some patients remember hearing voices and being aware of being moved or intubated, and then others can’t remember anything.”

And some of them remember and won’t tell, Richard thought bitterly, going through the list of people Vielle had come up with who’d been on four-east that day. They didn’t know anything either. “I was working the other end of the floor that day,” Linda Hermosa said, “and we had all these subs because of the flu.”

“Subs?” Richard asked. “Do you remember who they were?”

She didn’t, and neither did the nurse’s aides he questioned, but one of them said, “I remember one was really old and she must have worked on five-east because she kept yelling at me and saying, ‘That isn’t the way we do it up on fifth.’ I don’t think she worked that end of the floor, though.”

Richard went up to fifth and gave the charge nurse his sketchy description. “Oh, Mrs. Hobbs,” she said, “yes, she’s a retired LPN who subs sometimes when they can’t get anyone else.” She didn’t know her number. “Personnel takes care of all that.”

Richard thanked her and started down to Personnel. And what if Mrs. Hobbs, who didn’t sound promising, hadn’t been in Carl’s room either? What if, as Maisie said, there wasn’t anybody who’d heard them talking? It was entirely possible that Joanna had taken advantage of the general chaos to speak to Carl alone before his memory of his hallucinations faded and then gone off to find him and said nothing to anybody along the way. What then?

There has to be somebody, he thought, crossing the walkway to the west wing. He turned down the hall toward the elevators. The center one pinged, and a man with a Palm Pilot stepped out.

Shit. Maisie’s mother’s lawyer. The last person he wanted to see. He turned sharply around and walked quickly back down the hall, wishing he’d finished mapping this part of the hospital. Then at least he’d know where the stairways were.

There was one at the very end of the hall. He ducked into it and clattered down the stairs. It only went as far down as third, but at least he knew where the elevators were on third. He opened the door and started down the hall.

“Last night I had another vision,” a woman’s voice said, coming down the intersecting corridor toward him. “This time I saw my uncle Alvin standing at the foot of my bed, as real as you or I.”

Shit. He’d been wrong about Mrs. Nellis’s lawyer being the last person in the world he wanted to see. That honor belonged to Mrs. Davenport, and she was coming this way. Richard looked at the elevators, gauging the distance to them, and then at the floor numbers above their doors. Both of them were on eight. Shit. He turned around and headed for the nurses’ station.

“He was wearing his white sailor’s uniform, and a radiant light came from him,” Mrs. Davenport’s voice said. “And do you know what he said, Mr. Mandrake?”

Mandrake, too. Shit, shit, shit. Richard looked desperately around for an escape route, a stairway, a laundry chute, anything. Even a linen closet. But there was nothing except patient rooms.

“He said, ‘Coming home,’ ” Mrs. Davenport’s voice said, coming closer. “Just those two words. ‘Coming home.’ What can that mean, Mr. Mandrake?”

“He was sending you a message from the Other Side, telling you that the dead haven’t gone away,” Mandrake’s voice said, “that they are here with us, helping us, protecting us, speaking to us. All we have to do is listen—”

They were rounding the corner. Richard ducked through an unmarked door. A stairway. Great. And let’s hope this goes all the way down to the basement, he thought, rounding the landing, so I can take the—

He stopped. Two steps below the landing, yellow “Do Not Cross” tape stretched across the stairs, and, below it, pale blue steps shone wetly, though they could not possibly be wet. They had been painted over two months ago.

He wondered what had happened. Had the painters forgotten this stairway, or been unable to find it again in Mercy General’s maze of walkways and corridors and cul-de-sacs? And the techs and nurses, seeing the tape, thought it was still blocked and had found other routes, other shortcuts?

They must have, because the painted steps below the yellow tape were shiny and untouched, not a footprint on them, and the stairwell still smelled of paint. It was obvious no one had been in here since the day he and Joanna had ducked in here, hiding from Mandrake, since the day she’d sat on the steps eating his energy bar and complaining about the cafeteria never being open, and he’d tried to talk her into working with him on the project and she’d asked if it was dangerous, and he’d said, “No, it’s perfectly safe—”

He had suddenly no strength in his legs. He groped for the round metal railing and sat down on the third step above the landing, where they had sat, where he had plied Joanna with apples and bottled cappuccino.

“The dead haven’t gone away,” Mr. Mandrake had said, and if that were true, if Joanna were anywhere, it would be here, in the embalmed and empty air of this stairwell where no one had been in two months, where nothing had disturbed the echoes of her voice.

He wished suddenly that Mr. Mandrake were right, that Joanna would appear to him, standing on the pale blue steps, radiating light, and saying, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you what I’d found out. I was as bad as all those people in the movies. How were you supposed to know what ‘SOS’ meant? I’m surprised you didn’t say, ‘Can you be more specific?’ ” He could almost see her, pushing her glasses up on her nose, laughing at him.