Passage

by Connie Willis

  Vielle frowned. “I didn’t tell her what I wanted it for. I didn’t even mention your name. She thinks I’m the one who wanted to know.”

  “But what if she saw you talking to me?”

  “What?” Vielle said, amazement in her voice. “You sound completely paranoid. I told you, Heidi works graveyard, and even if she did hear us, she wouldn’t think anything about it. She assumes everyone spends their time discussing Titanic.

  When I told her I had a question about it, I had to listen to a whole spiel on how wonderful Leo,” she said the word in a schoolgirl squeal, “was in The Beach, and how the critics don’t appreciate him, before I even got to ask it. And after I got my answer, she spent the rest of the break telling me how the Grand Staircase was an exact replica of the one on the Titanic, clock and skylight and all. Trust me, I don’t think she even remembered I’d asked a question, she was so glad to find somebody who’d let her talk about it.”

  I hope so, Joanna thought, but how many people had heard them talking? Gossip General—

  “I don’t understand why a bet between you and Richard has to be a state secret anyway, but if you’re worried about it, I can ask Heidi not to say anything about—”

  “No!” Joanna said. If Heidi wasn’t suspicious, this would definitely make her suspicious, and if she already was, it would make it worse. “No, that’s okay, it doesn’t matter,” she said, trying to sound casual. “I’m just worried that now every time you see her you’ll be subjected to how wonderful Leo is.” She tried to smile. “Did you make any headway with Officer Right at the meeting?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to,” Vielle said. “I’d been kind of hoping you wouldn’t bring my car back from wherever you went, and I could talk him into giving me a ride home. Speaking of which, where did you take off to in such a hurry?”

  “So my bringing your car back ruined your plan?” Joanna asked. “If I’d known—”

  “It wasn’t your fault. He left before the break. Where did you go?” The elevator opened on the ground floor. “And where are you going now?”

  “I’ve got an errand to run,” Joanna said. And the last thing she wanted to do was walk all the way to the ER with Vielle, on her way to the parking lot, and give her a chance to grill her. “I just remembered, I wanted second,” Joanna said, pressing “two.” “Tomorrow’s fine for Dish Night for me,” she said, wishing the door would close. “I’ll ask Richard if he can come.”

  Vielle stopped the closing door with her hand. “Are you all right? Yesterday you—”

  “I’m fine,” Joanna said. “Just awfully busy. There’ve been so many NDEs—”

  “Is that where you went in such a hurry yesterday? To interview an NDEer?” Vielle asked, and the door alarm began, blessedly, to buzz.

  “Is it your turn or mine to rent the movies?” Joanna shouted over the sound.

  “Yours,” Vielle said and reluctantly let go of the door. “You still haven’t—”

  The door began to close. “I’ll try to get something with Denzel Washington in it. What was the one about the Civil War called?”

  “Glory.”

  “Glory,” Joanna said and watched the door shut in Vielle’s worried face.

  “Wait till I have finished my problem.”

  —LAST WORDS OF ARCHIMEDES, TO THE ROMAN SOLDIER WHO ORDERED HIM TO FOLLOW HIM

  THE STREETS WERE NEARLY AS EMPTY of traffic as they had been the night before. Joanna made it over to Mr. Briarley’s in less than fifteen minutes. Now, if only the book Kit had found was it.

  It wasn’t. She knew as soon as Kit, barefoot and wearing a white spaghetti-strap top and jeans, led her into the library, explaining in a hushed voice, “Uncle Pat just lay down,” and showed her the book.

  It should have been the right one. It had a blue cover, gold lettering, a graceful clipper ship in full sail, its prow cutting sharply through blue-green waves, everything Joanna had described. But it wasn’t the book.

  “It wasn’t a clipper ship.” Joanna squinted at the cover. “It was one of those ships like Sir Francis Drake had, a caravel,” she said, the word suddenly coming to her from somewhere deep in long-term memory, “and it was smaller. I’m sorry.” She shook her head apologetically. “It’s exactly what I told you, I know.”

  “If it’s not the right one, it’s not the right one,” Kit said philosophically. She waved her hand around at the rows of books lining the library. “I have only just begun to look. The book was smaller?” she asked, pointing at Voyages and Voices.

  “No, the book’s the right size, but I remember the picture as smaller.”

  “What about the color? Was it light or dark blue?”

  “Dark, I think,” Joanna said. “I’m not sure. I’m sorry I’m being so vague. I’d know it if I saw it.”

  Kit nodded, putting the book back on the shelf. “I called the high school this morning on the off-chance they were still using the same book in their English classes, but I couldn’t get them to give me any information. You’d have thought I was trying to steal highly classified documents or something.”

  Joanna nodded, remembering the woman in the office. “I didn’t mean for you to go to all this trouble.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Kit said cheerfully. “It gives me something to think about besides-it’s kind of fun,” she amended, “a sort of treasure hunt.”

  “Well, I really appreciate it,” Joanna said, moving toward the door. “And if I remember anything more specific, I’ll call you.”

  “Oh, you’re not leaving yet, are you?” Kit said, and sounded just like Maisie. “I was hoping you’d have time to stay for a cup of tea.”

  Joanna glanced at her watch. “I have to be back by one,” she said doubtfully.

  “It’ll only take a minute to heat up the water,” Kit said, leading the way down the hall past the stairs to the kitchen. “I made cookies this—oh, no!”

  “What is it?” Joanna said, trying to see past Kit into the kitchen.

  “I thought he was asleep,” Kit said as if she hadn’t heard Joanna and hurried back past her through the hall and up the stairs. “Excuse me a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  Joanna looked into the kitchen, afraid of what she might see. An empty plate with some crumbs sat on the table. Next to it was a skillet and two saucepans, and, on the red-and-white tiled floor, more pans and lids and muffin tins, cookie sheets, pie tins, and a big roasting pan.

  Kit pattered back down the stairs. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact now. She went into the kitchen and began to pick up the pans. “He is asleep now. He must have come down while we were in the other room.” She stacked two small saucepans inside a larger one and stuck them down in a cupboard next to the sink. “Taking things out of drawers and cupboards is a common behavior with Alzheimer’s,” she said, putting a skillet away.

  And a nightmare for the people who live with them, Joanna thought. “Can I help?” she asked.

  “No, I’ve got it,” Kit said, taking the lid off a Dutch oven and pulling out two books. She reached up and set them on the table. “Sit down. I’ll start the tea.”

  She got two mugs out of an upper cupboard, filled them with water, and stuck them in the microwave, punching in the code. “The problem is he’s sleeping less and less,” she said, setting sugar and teabags on the table. “He used to sleep a couple of hours during the day,” she got out two spoons, “but now it’s hardly any, even at night. Now, the question is,” she said, looking around the room, her hands on her hips, “where did he put the cookies?” She looked in the refrigerator, the freezer, the wastebasket.

  “Would he have eaten them?” Joanna asked, thinking, I can’t believe we’re talking about Mr. Briarley, who knew all about Dylan Thomas and Henry the Eighth’s wives and Restoration drama, like this.

  “He doesn’t usually take food,” Kit said. “He has almost no appetite.” She opened drawers one after the other, and then stood looking speculatively around the kitchen. “The
re’s usually a logic in what he does and says, even though sometimes it’s hard to figure out the connection.”

  She walked swiftly over to the oven and opened it. “Ah, here we are,” she said, pulling out the top rack, on which sat the cookies, arranged in neat rows on the wire rack. She grabbed the cookie plate and began putting the cookies on it. “Luckily, it wasn’t the dishwasher,” she said, setting the plate on the table. The microwave dinged, and Kit took the mugs out and handed one to Joanna and sat down opposite her.

  “How long has Mr. Bri—your uncle been like this?” Joanna asked.

  “Taking things out of the cupboards, or the Alzheimer’s? The cupboards, only a couple of months. The Alzheimer’s was diagnosed five years ago, but I started noticing things two years before that.”

  That surprised Joanna. She’d thought from what Kit said before that she’d moved in with her uncle when they’d found out he had Alzheimer’s, but apparently she’d been living with him before that. While she went to school? she wondered, remembering the photo of Kit in front of University Hall. DU was only a few blocks from here.

  “The memory loss probably started several years before that,” Kit was saying, dipping her teabag. “It takes a while for symptoms to develop, and Alzheimer’s patients learn to cover really well.”

  Joanna thought about Mr. Briarley muttering, “Coleridge. Overrated Romantic,” the day before. She wondered if he even remembered who Coleridge was.

  “I don’t know how much you know about the disease,” Kit said, offering Joanna a cookie. “The first symptoms are little things, forgetting appointments, misplacing things—Uncle Pat kept losing his grade book and a couple of times he forgot a faculty meeting—the kind of things you put down to age or stress.” She put sugar in her tea and stirred it. “It was funny, you mentioning the Titanic yesterday, because that was how I realized there was something really wrong. I went to see the movie, which, having listened to Uncle Pat talk about the disaster for years, I hated.”

  “I did, too,” Joanna said.

  “Oh, good, then you know what I mean. Well, anyway, I came home and told Uncle Pat how the movie made everyone look like cowards, even Lightoller and Molly Brown, and how they’d gotten all kinds of facts wrong—like Murdoch shooting a passenger!—and he was furious, just like I knew he would be. He said he was going to write a stinging letter to James Cameron in the morning, and when I went up to bed, he had all his Titanic books out, looking things up so he could quote them exactly.”

  She took a sip of tea. “The next morning I asked him if he’d written the letter yet,” she said, and all the despair of Amelia Tanaka and Greg Menotti was in her voice. “He didn’t have any memory of the letter or our conversation, not even of my having gone to the movie. He didn’t even know who Lightoller was.”

  And yesterday I came blundering in, Joanna thought, not only talking about the Titanic, but asking Mr. Briarley if he remembered what he’d said in class. “Kit, I am so sorry,” she said. “If I’d known—”

  “Oh, no, it’s okay. I just wanted you to know that was why I acted so peculiar yesterday, asking you if my mother had sent you and everything. My mother and I have a difference of opinion regarding Uncle Pat’s care. She’s always sending people over to try to talk me into putting him into a care facility. She thinks taking care of him is too much for me.”

  I can see why she thinks that, Joanna thought, looking at Kit’s painfully thin collarbones, her shadowed eyes. She had said Mr. Briarley wasn’t sleeping. Joanna would bet she wasn’t either.

  “I know Uncle Pat will have to be institutionalized someday,” Kit said, “but I want him to be able to stay here as long as he can. He was very kind to me, and-anyway, when you said you worked at Mercy General, I assumed—what do you do at Mercy General?” she asked curiously.

  “I’m a cognitive psychologist,” Joanna said and wondered if she should let it go at that, but Kit reminded her of Maisie in more ways than one, and Maisie hated not being told the truth. “I’m working on a research project involving near-death experiences,” she said. “You know, the tunnel-and-light phenomenon?”

  Kit nodded. “I read The Light at the End of the Tunnel. My cousin made me read it after—” She stopped, her cheeks red with anger or embarrassment.

  And what could be worse than discovering your uncle had Alzheimer’s? Joanna thought. Having your cousin comfort you by inflicting Maurice Mandrake on you.

  “You don’t work with Mr. Mandrake, do you?” Kit asked challengingly.

  “No,” Joanna said.

  “Good. I thought it was a horrible book. ‘Don’t worry, the dead aren’t really dead, and they aren’t really gone. They can still send messages to you from the Other Side.’ ”

  “I know. I work with Dr. Wright. He’s a neurologist. We’re trying to figure out what near-death experiences are and why the dying brain experiences them.”

  “The dying brain?” Kit said. “Does that mean everyone has them? I thought they were something only a few people had.”

  “No, about sixty percent of revived patients report having a near-death experience, and those are concentrated in certain kinds of deaths—heart attacks, hemorrhaging, trauma.”

  “You mean like car accidents?” Kit asked.

  “Yes, and stabbings, industrial accidents, shootings. Of course there’s no way to tell how many people who aren’t revived have them.”

  “But they’re pleasant, for the ones who do have them, I mean?” Kit said. “They’re not frightening?”

  Joanna thought of the young woman, standing out on deck, asking the steward, “What’s happened?” her voice filled with fear. And Amelia, saying, “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

  “Are they frightening?” Kit asked. “Uncle Pat has hallucinations sometimes. He sees people standing at the foot of his bed or in the door.”

  In the door. Joanna would have to tell Richard that. Alzheimer’s was caused by a malfunctioning of neurochemicals. Maybe there was a connection.

  “ . . . and sometimes the things he’s saying seem to indicate he’s reliving past events,” Kit was saying.

  L+R, Joanna thought. “Most people who’ve had near-death experiences report feeling warm and safe and loved,” she said reassuringly. “Dr. Wright’s found evidence of elevated endorphin levels, which supports that.”

  “Good,” Kit said and then shook her head. “Uncle Pat’s are almost always upsetting or frightening things. It’s like he can’t forget them and can’t remember them at the same time, and he goes over and over them. It’s like he’s trying to make sense of them, even though his memory of them is gone.” She put her hands over her face for a moment. “The books say not to confront him or contradict him, but not to go along with the hallucination either, which is hard.”

  “It sounds like it’s all hard,” Joanna said.

  Kit smiled wryly. “I thought a sudden death was the worst thing that could possibly happen, and now it’s obvious it’s not.” She sat up. “I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear all this. I didn’t mean to go on like that. It’s just that I hardly ever get to talk to anybody about this, and when I do, I—” She made a face. “I obviously need to get out more.”

  “You should come to Dish Night tomorrow night,” Joanna said impulsively.

  “Dish Night?”

  “Yes. It’s not an organized event or anything, just a casual get-together. Dr. Wright comes, and my friend Vielle-you’d love her. We get together and watch movies on video and eat and talk. Mostly talk. We use it as a safety valve, and it sounds like you could use one, too. Do you like movies?”

  “Yes. I haven’t seen one in a long time. Uncle Pat confuses what’s happening on the screen with reality. That’s a common occurrence with Alzheimer’s patients, too. It would be wonderful to watch a movie, but . . . ” She shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Is it because you don’t have anyone to stay with him?”

  “Oh, no, my mother comes over when I h
ave to go to the grocery store, but—” She was looking at the pan cupboard, and Joanna could guess what she was thinking. If Mr. Briarley took all the pans out again, her mother would use it as ammunition for putting Mr. Briarley in a care facility.

  “Have you ever used Eldercare?” Joanna asked. “Mercy General has a program where the caregivers come to your home. They’re very good. I know one of the people who works with the program. I’d be glad to call her.”

  “But if Dish Night is tomorrow night?”

  “They have a twelve-hour emergency program,” Joanna said. “They know the people who call them are usually at the end of their rope. They have caregivers specifically trained in Alzheimer’s,” she said, but Kit was already shaking her head.

  “They sound wonderful, but I’m always afraid something will happen while I’m gone, and if I call home to check, that can upset him,” she said. “So thank you for inviting me, but I’d better not.”

  “You should get a pager,” Joanna said, pulling hers out of her pocket to show her. “Or a cell phone. That way they could reach you wherever you are.” Unless she left it in the car while she ran into the grocery store, like Greg Menotti’s girlfriend.

  “A cell phone,” Kit said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll have to see . . . you think they could come by tomorrow night?”

  Joanna nodded. “If you want to come, I could pick you up.”

  “I don’t know . . . can I call you tomorrow and let you know?”

  “Sure,” Joanna said.

  “Or sooner, if I find the book. If Uncle Pat stays asleep for a while, I’ll go down to the basement and start in on those books—”

  “Oh, you made cookies,” Mr. Briarley said, coming into the kitchen.

  “I thought you were lying down, Uncle Pat,” Kit said.

  “I was, but I heard voices, and I thought Kevin was here. Oh, hello,” he said to Joanna.

  “Hello, Mr. Briarley,” she said.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Kit asked, reaching for a china cup and saucer.

  “No, I’m rather tired. I think I’ll go lie down. It was nice meeting you,” he said to Joanna, and started down the hall.