Ken made his face blank and managed to sound nonchalant. “Terri Mendez’s cousin, Naomi Whitehorse, is a photographer. That’s an invitation to her exhibit.”
Lissa’s eyes widened slightly. “Really? I’ve heard of her… I think. Sounds interesting. Do you want to go?”
He tried not to look wary. “If you do.”
“Sure. I’d hate to disappoint Terri.”
She sat down on the arm of the sofa and circled his neck with her arms. “So, what’s for dinner, O Domestic God?”
His shoulders sagged. “Oh, yeah, it’s my night, isn’t it?”
She looked at his face and laughed. “Never mind. I ll go stick a pin in the phone book.”
“Bad for the display,” he said, and she laughed again.
Bemusement tickled him. Lissa was going to an art gallery. He couldn’t imagine how that could be a traumatic experience. The more he thought about it, the more he thought Petra Genoa must have overreacted. Still, he had to allow, he was impressed. He supposed Dr. Genoa could have discovered the connection between his editorial assistant and the photographer, could have assumed he would receive an invitation to the exhibition and would include his wife, could have made her prediction as a way of manipulating a potential detractor. But Occam’s Razor cut against such Machiavellian intrigue where simple coincidence would suffice.
It was the week from hell. The weird dreams continued, leaving her tired and listless. Fatigue made her angry with herself and, habitually, she transformed her anger into zeal. She composed a sharply skeptical, tongue-in-cheek piece about the Chinese healer, but the Pascale NDE, though met with equal zeal, yielded only frustration. Her interviews with the doctors, nurses and medical attendants on duty during the eight-year-old episode corroborated Julie’s account of the scene in ER. All agreed that the girl could not have been physically aware of what was going on around her.
“How can you be so certain?” she’d asked Dr. Harris.
“She was dead, Ms. Shaw.”
“Evidently not.”
The old man had raised a mottled eyebrow. “Then perhaps we need to redefine death.”
Julie’s mother was the one to whom she had first described her experience. It was there Lissa expected to find her angle; she hoped to surprise a confession from Mrs. Joyce Delaney that she had relayed facts to her daughter rather than the other way around. She was disappointed. Arms folded across her chest, looking uncomfortable in her own living room, the older woman insisted she recalled, vividly, the day of Julie’s return to wakeful consciousness.
JD: She told me. The words that were said, the actions that were taken, the medications they gave, even the amounts.
LS: After eight years, you’re still convinced of this?
JD: Ms. Shaw, I realize people like you—people in your line of work, I mean—have a vested interest in making people like Julie look foolish and weak-minded, but I couldn’t have told her some of that stuff. I wasn’t listening to dosages and chemical compositions; my daughter was dying right before my eyes. She died right before my eyes on that boat dock.
LS: I have no desire to make Julie look foolish or weak-minded, Mrs. Delaney, and the only thing 1 have a vested interest in is the truth. Isn’t it more likely that you simply absorbed more of what you were hearing than you thought, and that Julie gleaned what she “remembered” from the ER from you and other visitors?
JD: I did not put ideas into my daughter’s head, Ms. Shaw.
LS: Yet, Julie told me she had some brain damage that necessitated her relearning how to write and speak. How could she have relayed so much information to you?
JD: She had trouble with some words, some sounds—like her tongue was uncoordinated—but she obviously knew what had happened to her, and she spoke well enough to communicate it.
LS: Were the two of you alone when she first told you her story?
JD: Yes. Does that make a difference?
The artless question made Lissa embarrassed and angry in turns—embarrassed because it did make a difference, angry because she hated embarrassment.
The ER nurse, Evelyn Yamaguchi, was Lissa’s next interview. The woman was nearly as quakingly amazed in retrospect as she had been at the time of the incident.
LS: In your estimation, how accurate was Ms. Pascale’s account of what happened in the ER while she was… unconscious?
EY: She wasn’t unconscious, dear, she was dead. Accurate—oh, my, yes—she was accurate (rubs her arms)! It still gives me chills, just to think about it. The conversation between Dr. Mead and Dr. Harris was practically word for word; the instructions to the nurses (shakes her head)… unbelievable.
LS: Yes. You were one of the trauma nurses, then.
EY: (nodding vigorously) I was with Julie from the time she came into ER until she left ICU.
LS: Think about this for a moment, Mrs. Yamaguchi. UCD is a teaching institution. Isn’t it possible Julie Pascale overheard a team of doctors going over her case history as she was regaining consciousness in ICU?
EY: Her case history—very possibly. But not the conversations and arguments that took place in the ER. No, ma’am. Doctors don’t hash over arguments on rounds. They discuss treatment, progress, prognosis.
LS: What about the nurses?
EY: I don’t know if you’ve ever been in intensive care, Ms. Shaw, but nurses don’t gossip in the patient’s rooms. That only happens in soap operas.
There was only one other person Lissa could interview who might throw some light on the Pascale story—Dr. Petra Genoa. She resisted doing that interview for the simple reason that Petra Genoa was not a reliable witness. Her credentials as a psychologist, however good they might look on paper, were contaminated by her work in parapsychology. They would still be impressive to the average reader—if someone of that stature could believe in life after death, the logic went, then might it not be true? Human beings were nothing if not enamored of possibilities.
That nagged Lissa as she attempted to compile her notes late on a Thursday evening. She knew the article wouldn’t be complete without Genoa’s input, but she couldn’t bring herself to face another immersion into the true believer mentality. It helped not at all when Ken came home puzzling over the results of his tenure as Genoa’s project monitor.
“I have to ask myself if there isn’t something here, Liss,” he said, half to himself. “Something more than can be attributed to chance and unfalsifiable predictions. With most of the subjects it’s six of one—half-dozen of the other. But this Victor Chin—his predictions have been remarkably accurate. This is fascinating. I’m hoping that when Dr. Genoa’s BPM is installed we’ll get some idea of the brain activity involved when she receives precognitive impressions.”
God, if he could only hear himself—“received precognitive impressions”! He was beginning to sound like he believed in this stuff.
“Coming to bed, Liss?”
“Huh?” She roused out of a tangle of thought and glanced at the staircase. “Uh, not just yet.”