Miracle (42 page)

Taken is right, Joanna thought. And now, whatever Mrs. Davenport actually experienced, she was convinced it was a buzzing and a tunnel and an Angel of Light.

There was no point in going on with this. “Thank you, Mrs. Davenport,” Joanna said. “I think I have enough.”

“But I haven’t told you about the life review yet,” Mrs. Davenport, no longer reluctant, said. “The Angel of Light made me look in this crystal, and it showed me all the things I’d ever done, both good and bad, my whole life.”

Which she will now proceed to tell me, Joanna thought. She sneaked her hand into her pocket and switched her pager back on. Beep, she willed it. Now.

“Mr. Mandrake said the out-of-body experience wasn’t really part of the core NDE experience, that it was the tunnel and the light and the life review that really mattered.”

Now that she wanted the beeper to go off, it remained stubbornly silent. She needed one with a button you could press to make it beep in emergencies. She wondered if Radio Shack had one.

“And then the light started to sparkle on and off,” Mrs. Davenport said, “and the Angel handed me a telegram, just like the one we got when Alvin was killed, and I said, ‘Does this mean you’re telling me I’m dead?’ and the Angel said, ‘No, it’s a message telling you you must return to your earthly life.’ Are you getting all this down?”

“Yes,” Joanna said, writing, “Cheeseburger, fries, large Coke.”

“And I said, ‘But I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here in heaven with you.’ And the Angel said, ‘It is not your time yet,’ and the next thing I knew I was back in the operating room. I’ll never forget it. The light was so beautiful.”

“If I don’t get out of here soon,” Joanna wrote, “the cafeteria will be closed, so please, somebody, page me.”

Her beeper finally, blessedly went off during Mrs. Davenport’s description of the light as “like shining prisms of diamonds and sapphires and rubies,” a verbatim quote from
Brushed by the Light.

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to go,” Joanna said, pulling the pager out of her pocket. “It’s an emergency.” She snatched up her tape recorder and switched it off.

“Where can I get in touch with you if I remember anything else about by NDE?”

“You can call me on my pager,” Joanna said, and fled.

She didn’t even check to see who was paging her till she was safely out of the room. It was a number she didn’t recognize, from inside the hospital. She went down to the nurses’ station to call it.

“Do you know whose this number is?” she asked Eileen, the charge nurse.

“Not off-hand,” Eileen said. “Is it Mr. Mandrake’s?”

“No,” Joanna said grimly. “I have Mr. Mandrake’s number. He managed to get to Mrs. Davenport before I did. That’s the third interview this week he’s ruined.”

“You’re kidding,” Eileen said sympathetically. She was still looking at the number on the pager. “It might be Dr. Wright’s. He was here looking for you earlier.”

“Dr. Wright?” Joanna said, frowning. “Can you describe him?”

“Tall, young, blonde—”

“Cute,” Tish, who’d just come up to the desk with a chart, said.

The description didn’t fit anybody Joanna knew. “Did he say what he wanted?”

Eileen shook her head. “He asked me if you were the person doing NDE research.”

“Wonderful,” Joanna said. “He probably wants to tell me how he went through a tunnel and saw a light, all his dead relatives, and Maurice Mandrake.”

“Do you think so?” Eileen said doubtfully. “I mean, he’s a doctor.”

“If only that were a guarantee against being a nut,” Joanna said. “You know Dr. Abrams from over at Mt. Sinai? Last week he suckered me into lunch by promising to talk to the head of internal medicine about letting me do interviews over there, and then proceeded to tell me about
his
NDE, in which he saw a tunnel, a light, and Moses, who told him to come back and read the Torah out loud to people. Which he did. All the way through lunch.”

“You’re kidding,” Eileen said.

“But this Dr. Wright was
cute,”
Tish put in.

“Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee either,” Joanna said, and then casually, “You don’t know if anybody from the ER tried to page me, do you?”

Eileen looked stern. “You turned your pager off again, didn’t you, Dr. Lander? You know that’s against hospital rules.”

“When it goes off, it distracts the interview subjects,” Joanna said defensively. “There aren’t supposed to be any outside influences.”

“You should get the kind that vibrates,” Tish said.

But then I couldn’t use it to escape from the Mrs. Davenports, Joanna thought, but she said, “That’s a good idea.” she glanced at her watch. The cafeteria would still be open, just barely. “I’m going to lunch,” she said. “If Dr. Wright shows up again, tell him it’s Mr. Mandrake he wants.”

She took the stairs, so she wouldn’t run into either of them in the elevator. Halfway to the cafeteria, she decided she’d better check to make sure it wasn’t Vielle who’d tried to page her, and went on down to the emergency room.

It was jammed, as usual, gurneys everywhere, a boy with a hand wrapped in a red-soaked dish towel sitting on an examining table, two women talking rapidly and angrily in Spanish to the admissions nurse, someone in one of the examining rooms screaming obscenities in English at the top of her lungs.

Joanna worked her way through the tangle of gurneys and IV poles and bloodwork charts, looking for Vielle’s black, worried-looking face. She always looked worried, whether she was responding to a code or removing a splinter, on-duty or off-, and Joanna often wondered what effect it had on her patients.

There she was, over by the copy machine in dark blue scrubs with a blue surgical cap over her black hair, looking worried. Joanna maneuvered past a wheelchair and a stack of blankets to get to her. “Did you try to page me?” she asked.

Vielle shook her blue-capped head. “It’s like a tomb down here.” she pulled a sheet out of the copy machine and opened the top to remove the original. “Literally. A gunshot, two overdoses, one AIDS-related pneumonia. All DOA except one of the overdoses, who tried to shoot one of the paramedics bringing him in before he died. He was on the new variety of PCP that’s making the rounds. He thought the paramedic was a Martian.” She pointed to a window that an attendant in pink scrubs was taping a piece of cardboard over. “It’s getting like a battle zone down here.”

“You’ve got to put in a request to transfer to Peds.”

Vielle shuddered. “Kids are even worse than overdoses. Besides, if I transferred, who’d notify you of NDEs before Mandrake got ahold of them?”

Joanna smiled. “You’re right. You’re my only hope. By the way, do you happen to know a Dr. Wright?”

“I’ve been looking for him for years,” Vielle said.

“Well, I don’t think this is the one,” Joanna said. “He wouldn’t be one of the interns or residents in the ER, would he?”

“I don’t know,” Vielle said. “We get so many through here, I don’t even bother to learn their names. I just call all of them ‘Stop that,’ or ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I’ll check.” She went over to the desk, grabbed a clipboard, and drew her finger down a list. “Nope. Does he work here?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said. “But if he comes looking for me, I’m up on seven-west.”

“And what about if an NDE shows up?”

Joanna grinned. “I’m in the cafeteria. You can page me.”

“Things should pick up this afternoon,” Vielle said.

“Why?”

“Heart attack weather,” she said, and at Joanna’s blank look, pointed toward the emergency room entrance. “It’s been snowing since nine this morning.”

Joanna looked wonderingly in the direction Vielle was pointing, though she couldn’t see the windows from here. “I’ve been in curtained rooms all morning,” she said. And in window-less offices and corridors and elevators.

“Slipping on the ice, shovelling snow, car accidents,” Vielle said. “We should have lots of business. Do you have your pager turned on?”

“Yes, Mother,” Joanna said, grinning. “And I’m wearing clean underwear.” She waved goodbye to Vielle, “I’ll be in the cafeteria,” and went up to first.

She was late enough that there wasn’t any line. She picked up a tray and started over toward the salads. And stopped short. Maurice Mandrake was over by the drinks machine, getting a
cup of coffee. Nope, thought Joanna, not right now. I’m liable to kill him.

She turned on her heel and walked swiftly down the hall. She dived in the elevator, pushed
CLOSE DOOR
, and then hesitated. She couldn’t leave the hospital, she’d promised Vielle she’d be within reach, and there was no restaurant for five blocks. They need to open a coffee shop across the street, she thought for the hundredth time. Maybe
she
should open one instead of talking to the just-back-from-the-dead and dying. It would at least be doing something useful.

She couldn’t go back to her office, either. Dr. Wright, if he was still looking for her, would definitely check there. And the vending-machine snack bar was over in the north wing. She could starve before she got there. They had popsicles up in Peds, but they were nothing but flavored ice. She wanted food.

Paula up on five-east usually had M&M’s. They were only marginally more substantial than popsicles, but they were something. She pressed the button for five.

Besides, she could use the excuse of checking on Coma Carl. That was what the nurses called him, even though he hadn’t ever been in a true coma except for the first two days after he’d been admitted with spinal meningitis. He was instead in a semi-drug-, semi-fever-induced state of unconsciousness, drifting in and out of the depths, dreaming sometimes, his eyes and arms twitching like a sleeping dog’s, and sometimes murmuring incomprehensibly. And sometimes speaking clearly.

“But he’s not having a near-death experience,” Guadalupe, one of his nurses, had said when Joanna had asked them to write down everything he said. “I mean, he’s never coded or anything. He’s always had vitals, even when he was in the coma.”

“The circumstances are similar,” Joanna had said, without specifying how. And he’s one subject Maurice Mandrake can’t get to, she thought.

Nothing could get to him, even though the nurses pretended
he could hear them, being careful not to use the name Coma Carl or discuss his condition when they were in the room, encouraging Joanna to talk to him. “There have been studies that show coma patients can hear what’s said in their presence,” Paula had told her, offering her some M&M’s.

But I don’t believe it, she thought, waiting for the elevator door to open on Four. He doesn’t hear anything. He’s somewhere else altogether, beyond our reach.

The elevator door opened, and she went down the corridor to the nurses’ station. Paula wasn’t there. A strange nurse with blond hair and no hips was at the computer.

“Where’s Paula?” Joanna asked.

“Out sick,” the pencil-thin nurse said, looking curiously at her. “Can I help you, Doctor …” She looked at Joanna’s ID. “Lander?”

It was no use asking her for food. She looked like she’d never eaten an M&M in her life, and from the way she was staring at Joanna’s body, like she didn’t approve of Joanna’s having done so.

“No. Thanks,” Joanna said coolly, and realized she was still carrying the tray from the cafeteria. She must have had it the whole time in the elevator and never been aware of it, and no wonder the nurse was looking at her strangely.

“This needs to go back down to the kitchen,” she said briskly, and handed it to the nurse. “I’m here to see Com—Mr. Aspinall,” she said and started down the hall to Carl’s room.

The door was open, and Guadalupe was on the far side of the bed, hanging up an IV bag.

“How’s he doing today?” Joanna whispered, approaching the bed.

“Much better,” Guadalupe said cheerfully, and then in a whisper, “His fever’s back up.” She unhooked the empty IV bag and carried it over to the window. “It’s dark in here,” she said. “Would you like some light, Carl?” She pulled the curtains open.

Vielle had been right. It was snowing. Big flakes out of a leaden gray sky.

“It’s snowing, did you know that, Carl?” Guadalupe said.

No, Joanna thought, looking down at the man on the bed. His slack face under the oxygen tubes was pale and expressionless in the gray light from the window, his eyes not quite closed, a slit of white showing beneath the heavy lids, his mouth half-open.

“It looks cold out there,” Guadalupe said, going over to the computer. “Is it building up on the streets yet?”

It took Joanna a moment to realize Guadalupe was talking to her and not Carl. “I don’t know,” she said, fighting the impulse to whisper so as not to disturb him. “I came to work before it started.”

Guadalupe poked at icons on the screen, entering Carl’s temperature and the starting of the new IV bag, and then came over to the bed.

“Has he said anything this morning?” Joanna asked.

“Not a word,” Guadalupe said. “I think he’s boating on the lake again.” She transferred the IV bag to her left hand and with her right hand straightened the covers on the bed. “He was humming earlier.”

“Humming?” Joanna said. “Can you describe it?”

“You know, humming,” Guadalupe said, pulling the covers up over Carl’s taped and tubed arm, over his chest. “Like a tune, only I couldn’t recognize it. There you are, all tucked in nice and warm,” she said and started for the door with her empty IV bag, “You’re lucky you’re in here and not out in that snow, Carl,” and went out.

But he’s not in here, Joanna thought, looking at him lying there passively under the covers. He’s somewhere else, far beyond the reach of our voices and the gray light from the window. Where have you gone? she wondered, looking at the unseeing slits of his eyes. “Where are you, Carl?” she asked. “Are you boating on the lake?”

Boating on the lake was one of the scenarios the nurses had invented out of his murmurings. He made motions with his arms sometimes that might have been rowing, and once he had said clearly, “the paddles,” and at those times he was never agitated or cried out, which was why they thought it was something idyllic.

There were several scenarios: The Bataan Death March, during which he cried over and over, “Water!,” and Running for the Bus, and one each of the nurses had a different name for—Burned at the Stake and Viet Cong Ambush and The Torments of Hell—during which he flailed wildly at the tangled covers, yanked out his IV, blacked Guadalupe’s eye when she tried to restrain him. “Maylmuss,” he had screamed over and over, and once, in a tone of panicked dread, “Cut the knot.”