Connie Willis - Passage

They weren’t, she determined with a careful finger. The paint was long since dry, but that didn’t matter. People obviously thought the stairway was still blocked, which meant she’d have it all to herself. She positioned herself on the left side of the landing, where she could see the door, and switched on her recorder.

“NDE account, Joanna Lander, session four, February 25,” she said and then stopped, staring at the pale blue steps, thinking about the collapsibles.

She had already known about them when she saw the movie, and about Lightoller and Murdoch. And Lorraine Allison, she thought. She remembered ranting, “Why didn’t they tell the stories of the real people who died on the Titanic, like John Jacob Astor and Lorraine Allison?” and Vielle asking, “Who was Lorraine Allison?” and her telling her, “She was six years old and the only first-class child to die, and her story’s a lot more interesting than dopey Jack and Rose’s!”

She had known about Lorraine Allison before the movie, so the memory couldn’t have come from Titanic, or from Maisie’s disaster books. It had to come from something earlier. A book, no, it wasn’t something she’d read, though there was a book involved somehow. Something someone had read to her, or said.

And what they had said was connected to why she was seeing the Titanic instead of a railroad tunnel or a hospital walkway. And it was important.

This was getting her nowhere. Record your account, she told herself. Describe what you saw and heard. She switched the recorder on and started again. “I was in the passage. It was dark.” She described the unheard sound, the light under the door, the people. “The bearded gentleman was in evening dress, with a long formal coat and a white tie and vest, and the woman had long white gloves and a beaded cream-colored dress.” And you have just described Kate Winslet’s gown, she told herself, clicking the recorder off. You’re starting to confabulate.

She rewound to “the woman” and started again. “She was wearing a long white gown or robe and a sparkling light seemed to come from her hand. She said, ‘Do you suppose there’s been an accident?’ and then the steward came up—”

No, that wasn’t right. The steward had been talking to the woman in the nightgown. She’d said, “I heard the oddest noise,” and he’d said, “Yes, ma’am,” and then the bearded man had come over, but that wasn’t right either, because the woman in the white gloves had been standing there, too…

She clicked off the recorder and pressed her fingers to her forehead, trying to remember where the bearded man had been standing, what the steward had said.

The woman in the nightgown had spoken to the steward and then gone over to the bearded man and said, “Did you hear it?” And the bearded man had said, “I shall see what’s happened,” and motioned the steward to come over. “What’s happened? Why have we stopped?” he asked the steward, and the steward said there was nothing to be alarmed about, and the bearded man said, “Go find Mr. Briarley. He will know what’s going on.”

“Mr. Briarley,” she said. Her English teacher her senior year of high school.

She could see him standing in front of the blackboard in his gray tweed vest and bow tie, an eyebrow cocked ironically, hear him saying, “Well, Mr. Inman, can you tell us what happens in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’?” No answer. “Ms. Lander? Mr. Kennedy? Anyone?” Still nothing. “What’s that?” Mr. Briarley putting his hand behind his ear, listening, and then shaking his head. “I thought it was an answer, but it was only the band, playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ”

And how could she have forgotten that? Forgotten Mr. Briarley, who had talked about the Titanic constantly in class, who’d used it as a metaphor for everything. “Water up to the boilers,” he had written on an essay of hers, “Putting the women off in boats.” He was always telling them stories about the loading of the lifeboats and the lights going out, reading them long passages about the band and the Californian and the passengers. “I knew I hadn’t read it,” Joanna said out loud. “I heard Mr. Briarley say it.”

And he held the answer. He had said something about the Titanic, something in English class, and—“I have to find him,” Joanna said, jamming her recorder in her pocket. “I have to ask him what he said.”

She ran up the stairs to the nurses’ station. “I need a phone book,” she said breathlessly.

“White or yellow pages?” Eileen asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Joanna said. “White.”

Eileen set the heavy phone book on the counter, and Joanna flipped rapidly through the B’s, trying to remember Mr. Briarley’s first name. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard it. He’d simply been Mr. Briarley, like all her teachers. Bo, Br—

A buzzer sounded. Eileen reached to turn it off. “Patient calling,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Joanna murmured, running her finger down the list of Br’s. Braun. Brazelton.

“Okay,” Eileen said, “just stick the phone book on the desk,” and went off to answer the patient’s call.

Breen. Brentwood. Joanna hoped there weren’t dozens of Briarleys. Brethauer. She needn’t have worried. There weren’t any. The list went straight from Brian to Briceno. He probably has an unlisted number, she thought, to keep students from making prank calls. I’ll have to talk to him at school.

She glanced at her watch. Three o’clock. School got out at three-fifteen, or at least it had when she was in high school, but the teachers had been required to stay till at least four. If she hurried, she might make it there by then. She shut the phone book and started quickly down the hall toward the elevator, fumbling for her car keys as she walked.

She didn’t have them. They were up in her office, where Mr. Mandrake, and probably Richard, lay in wait. I’ll have to borrow a car, she thought and ran back to the nurses’ station to ask Eileen, but she wasn’t there, and there wasn’t time to look for her. She’d have to borrow Vielle’s. She started back toward the elevator.

“Oh, good, Dr. Lander,” a familiar voice said, and Joanna looked up in horror to see Mrs. Davenport heading toward her in an orange-and-yellow-and-electric-blue-splotched robe. “You’re just the person I wanted to see.”

This is what you get for not watching where you’re going, Joanna thought. “Be alert to your surroundings,” the hospital memo on protecting yourself from rogue-crazed ER patients had said. Joanna should have paid attention to it.

“I’ve remembered more details of my NDE,” Mrs. Davenport said, planting her multicolored self squarely between Joanna and the elevator. She looks just like an RIPT scan in that robe, Joanna thought. “After the Angel of Light showed me the crystal, my uncle Alvin led me over to a shimmering gray curtain, and when he drew it aside, I could see the operating room and all the doctors working over my lifeless body, and—”

“Mrs. Davenport,” Joanna interrupted, “I have an appointment—”

“—and Alvin said, ‘Here on the Other Side we know everything that happens on Earth,’ ” Mrs. Davenport went on as if Joanna hadn’t spoken, “ ‘and we use that knowledge to protect and guide the living.’ ”

“I have to be on the other side of town by four,” Joanna said, looking pointedly at her watch.

“ ‘All you have to do is listen, and we will speak to you,’ Alvin said, and he was right,” Mrs. Davenport said. “Just the other day he told me where my pearl earring that I’d lost was.”