The Touch Read online

  “Why didn’t you keep the horses?”

  “It wasn’t fair to them. I didn’t ride them anymore. I was too much like my father, caught up so much in the future that I couldn’t live now.… And you… uh… I just want to thank you for…” Suddenly she couldn’t speak.

  His eyes were shining. “No. I owe you,” he said. “My life is in the past. I won’t ever escape that. But you’ve given me a little piece of the present. I’m the one to thank you.”

  Surprised, disarmed, she smiled.

  “I guess I’d better get back to my hotel,” he said.

  “Yes. I’ll drive you.”

  They started toward the door, both of them sure the danger had passed.

  They were wrong. Neither moved first—they reached for each other’s hands—and the moment their fingertips touched it was explosive. They kissed.

  In that moment Lara could feel everything she’d ever wanted to feel. Then she stopped abruptly and turned away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so very sorry.”

  “What…?”

  “It’s not—it’s not right. I’ve used you. I’m sorry. I should never—” She pulled away from him; it was easy, his arms had gone numb.

  “Used me? How have you—”

  “I can’t love you. And you can’t love me. We have no future. This night was selfish of me… so selfish.”

  He tried to take her back into his arms, but she stepped completely away from him, pulling in breaths as if to sober herself from the intoxication of love, of life.

  Jones stood there watching her, not hurt, not angry, just mystified. “I don’t understand,” he said quietly.

  “I wish I didn’t. I’ll call you a cab.” Then she hurried out, leaving him alone… and desolate.

  17

  Jones flew home alone.

  Lara returned to her work in Chicago and spent endless hours staring blankly at new engineering plans and listening to Malcolm stalwartly trying to push ahead with their research.

  But she couldn’t keep from staring out the window, her mind in Virginia.

  Jones, the second night after he had returned to Charlottesville, took a detour as he walked home from his shift at the Emergency Room and found himself stopped outside the restaurant where he and Lara had first tried to have dinner. He stared through the glass at the table where they sat, and he watched as the maitre d’ seated a young couple at the romantic corner he and Lara had occupied, and their happiness burned Jones as he felt the loss of Lara’s presence.

  At the same time that Jones pulled himself away from the restaurant and walked on along the silent sidewalk, Lara stood at the veranda of her estate, looking out over the empty grounds.

  * * *

  Jones pulled his car to the shoulder of the mountain road and stopped. He stepped out, careful not to make noise. He lifted a large box from the passenger seat and walked through the foggy darkness of the mountain.

  He came upon a dark, silent house trailer tucked into the trees; a pickup truck sat beside it. Jones moved quietly to the bed of the pickup and left the new power saw he had bought that afternoon, down in Charlottesville.

  * * *

  In the mountain clinic, Jones clipped the ends of the stitches he had sewn into the arm of a teenager who had been bow hunting when he fell from a shooting stand and impaled his own bicep. The door of the clinic opened, and Allen appeared. “Doc… can we talk a minute?”

  Jones followed Allen outside to his rusting car; Sam sat in the passenger seat. Sam looked frail, but was in his regular overalls again. “Sam,” Jones greeted him gently. “What can I do for you?”

  “Operate on me.”

  Jones tried to find a way to respond and had no words.

  Sam said, “I know. I know there ain’t much hope. But that’s the point.” He gazed at Jones so directly, with eyes that had seen much truth and so many lies and held so much wisdom to distinguish between them, that Jones felt himself in the presence of something divine. But Sam was mortal, and that was his message. “Men like me, and Allen, and your daddy, we lived our whole lives without much hope. Can’t earn a living in the mountains, people said. The mines would close, crops would die, then your children would die. And all that happened. But we went on.” Sam’s gray eyes scanned the gray mountains. “When your daddy died, people said you wouldn’t turn out to be nothin’, but look at you. A doctor.”

  Andrew—for he felt like a boy now, in Sam and Allen’s presence, not Dr. Jones but the boy who grew in and from these mountains, looking up to the men like the one who sat in the car beside him—said, “That’s all I am, a doctor. And not even a whole one.”

  “Boy,” Sam said, “ain’t nobody here impressed that you got learnin’. We’re impressed you’re here. You’re hope to me. And a man like me, I don’t need much hope. But I need a little. I’m worse than dead without it.”

  * * *

  The next day, Jones checked Sam into the hospital in Charlottesville and ordered a complete set of scans on his brain. When the scans were ready, he took them to his office, told Janet to hold every phone call, and began studying the scans obsessively.

  He used a tiny instrument to trace a route he might follow. He paused to look at his hand. It was rock solid.

  An hour later the Emergency Room nurse dropped by Jones’s office; Janet looked up and said, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” the nurse said, “I just—He’s seemed especially quiet the last couple of days.”

  “He has, hasn’t he.”

  “What’s he doing now?” the nurse wondered, looking toward Jones’s closed door. A closed door was unlike him, and Janet knew it too.

  Janet leaned closer to her and whispered, “I think he might be thinking of operating again.” The nurse locked eyes with Janet; both of them knew that news would spread through the whole hospital and the medical school, if it were true. “He admitted a patient from his clinic in the mountains this morning.”

  “He’s done that before. Why do you think that means he might operate?”

  “Because I peeked in on him a few minutes ago, when he hadn’t made a noise in an hour. And…” Janet said in a whisper, “he was praying.”

  * * *

  Stafford, the young surgeon Jones helped worked his way through his own operating room crisis, had not believed it when Jones first told him that morning, but the look in his eyes had removed all his doubts. Stafford was still thinking about that look when a nurse moved up to him in the hallway and asked, “Is it true?”

  “He’s gonna do it,” Stafford confirmed.

  Merrill, the anesthesiologist, had just seen the operating schedule; he came around the corner, spotted Stafford and the nurse, moved up to them and said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “I’m assisting. So are you,” Stafford told him.

  Then another surgical resident hurried up to them. “Did you guys hear Jones is going to operate?”

  * * *

  Sam sat quietly as the surgical prep assistant ran an electric clipper from the nape of his neck all the way to his front hairline. His old friend Allen sat beside Sam and watched the process with particular interest. Allen squinted at Sam’s shiny dome and said, “You look kindly like one of them fellers goin’ to the ’lectric chair.” Sam tried to smile.

  Jones walked in, and Sam looked up. “Why do they have to shave my head for an operation on my neck?”

  Jones sat down on the side of the bed. “Remember I told you about the possibility of a clot kicking loose and lodging in your brain? We have to be ready to take the clot out.”

  “I’ll be ready,” Sam said. “How about you?”

  * * *

  The surgical assistants had laid the instruments out with great care, but the lead surgical nurse checked them twice, and then Stafford checked them, before Jones entered and checked them all again. Then they wheeled Sam in for the surgery.

  Jones—gowned, capped, and masked—appeared to Stafford more focused than ever as he checked all the conne
ctors of the monitoring equipment, then glanced around at his whole team. The nurses adjusted the surgical draping, leaving the left side of Sam’s neck exposed. The rest of his body, except for his head, was covered. The anesthesiologist had given Sam a Valium an hour ago to be sure he was calm; Sam had already fallen asleep when they connected the IV drip to his arm and began to administer the fluids that would keep him sedated through the whole procedure. The anesthesia medications were toxins that temporarily poisoned the body into paralysis, but they would keep him still enough for the surgery; when he came around in the recovery room he would be nauseous for a while but he would remember nothing, and blood would be flowing easily to his brain. At least that was the plan.

  Jones moved closer to Sam’s side and then noticed that the seats above them in the observation booth were full of his surgical students.

  “Want me to get rid of them?” the head nurse asked.

  “Not now,” Jones said through his mask. “Let ’em stay.”

  He lifted the scalpel over the artery in Sam’s throat. He paused.

  The other doctors saw him hesitate, and they willed him on.

  Jones took a deep breath and slid the blade into Sam’s living tissue.

  * * *

  He was not surprised when the sensations first hit him; in fact it was exactly as he expected it would be, an impact in his memory as sudden and shattering as the jolt of the truck against the car on the night Faith died. What Jones had been unable to prepare himself for was the sickness in his gut, the rising impulse to vomit.

  He fought to keep his mind on what he was doing, on the sights and sounds and smells directly in front of him now, especially on the feeling in his hands; that was what he most feared losing, the Touch. But it was still there. He felt himself moving fluidly, gaining momentum.

  Then as he lifted another instrument and reached again to thread instruments into Sam’s carotid artery, another memory ripped through him. He felt the cold pavement under his body and the hot blood running down his face and heard voices shouting everywhere, “Get a doctor! Get a doctor!”

  He almost screamed aloud, there in the operating room, “I’m a doctor!” And he fought the memories off, his hands staying steady, and in a firm voice he asked for tools one by one: “Probe… forceps… scissors…”

  He worked steadily, his hands sure.

  “Doing great,” Stafford said beside him, sounding remarkably like Jones had sounded when Stafford needed steadying.

  Then suddenly the monitors begin to ping. “His heart rate’s dropping,” Merrill, the anesthesiologist, said. “Blood pressure’s in trouble.” He rechecked his monitors and his voice took on an anxious edge, behind his mask. “He’s having a heart attack. Get the paddles ready!”

  Jones sped up, his movements doubling in speed. In the gallery above him, one of the surgical students leaned to another and whispered, “His hands are awesome.”

  The monitors were flatlining. The anesthesiologist and the head nurse readied the paddles to slam Sam’s heart with the voltage that would reset his heart’s electrical patterns and get it beating again.

  “Done!” Jones shouted. “He’s closed!”

  “Clear!” the anesthesiologist called, and they shot voltage through Sam’s chest.

  But the monitors stayed flat.

  “Again!” Jones ordered.

  “Clear!” They jolted Sam again.

  “Got a pulse!” the anesthesiologist said. Then he looked toward the brain activity monitor.

  There was no activity at all.

  Jones didn’t need to look at the monitor. He already knew.

  * * *

  The hospital seemed empty; it was quiet, so they say, as a morgue.

  Jones sat outside the Critical Care Unit. He looked up as Stafford, on Angel of Death duty, stepped out into the hallway and moved up to him, with the decisive strides that Jones had taught him to take. “Dr. Jones,” Stafford said, “we’re… at a crossroads here. We—”

  Jones looked up and nodded.

  Stafford sat down next to him and said, “It had nothing to do with the operation. You worked faster and better than anyone any of us has ever seen. It just…”

  But there was nothing left to say.

  18

  Malcolm drove a Mercedes, the largest sedan they made. But it was six years old. Malcolm liked grandeur, but he was frugal too—at least that was how he saw himself. But most of all he liked the daughter of his best friend; he thought of Lara as the daughter he’d never had. He steered the car into the circle in front of the mansion, stepped out, and walked in the front door as if he owned the place. In a way he did; he had convinced Lara’s father to buy it, after he’d found it for him. Lara’s father was as driven a workaholic as she would become, and Malcolm had hoped a beautiful home outside the city would draw both of them into a life beyond work. Malcolm knew even then that he was wrong, but still he hoped.

  Mrs. Beasely, the housekeeper, heard him come in and moved out into the foyer to meet him. “Where is she?” Malcolm asked quietly.

  Mrs. Beasely turned her sad eyes to the dining room windows and the barn visible through them.

  Lara sat in the loft, staring out the hay door toward the horizon. She heard Malcolm climbing up to join her and knew who it was without turning around. “I know you’re not sleeping, but are you eating?” he said to her back.

  Lara still stared away from him and said nothing.

  “We’re going out to the other surgeons again. We’re going to find somebody who can do this,” Malcolm insisted, as he had insisted so many times before, to Lara and to her father before her.

  Still Lara didn’t answer.

  Malcolm’s voice changed, from the tone he would take in a boardroom to the one he would have used to reassure a child at bedtime. “We haven’t given up,” he said again. Then he sat down beside her, like her father used to do, and put his arm around her. She leaned her head against his shoulder. And wept.

  * * *

  Jones stood by Sam’s bed. Sam was connected to a heart-lung machine that forced air in and out of his lungs and kept his heart beating.

  Jones gripped the old man’s hand; but the hand was lifeless. Jones nodded his head once.

  Stafford flipped the switch. The machine stopped.

  Jones squeezed Sam’s hand again.

  Sam’s hand twitched, just once, and then went still.

  * * *

  Jones, still wearing his hospital scrubs, sat alone on a park bench. Night was falling, and the sky was spitting snow, and the bleak cold made his desolation complete.

  He squeezed his hands together into fists. He wanted to punch something—a wall, or himself. He wanted to break his hands—and the talent that had become for him nothing but a curse.

  Two hours later he still sat on the bench, and his hands were trembling from the cold. Night had fallen fully, and alone in the frigid blackness of the night, Jones felt the anger and bitterness gnawing at him, more and more. So he stood and staggered away on frozen feet.

  He walked by storefronts, past other pedestrians hurrying through the night, and he was blind to all of them. Icy rain pecked his face, and he felt nothing but his own pain.

  He stopped in the light of a convenience store, out of strength, out of hope, out of purpose.

  He started to walk again and nearly ran into a young mother, with her baby, entering the store. Jones didn’t recognize the mother. But he recognized the coat, and then the baby. It was the one whose life he had saved.

  Jones stood in the cold darkness and watched the young mother inside the convenience store. She moved to the cooler, but it wasn’t beer or liquor she reached for, it was milk. On the way to the cash register she picked up cereal and a loaf of bread.

  It was the most mundane of things, a woman buying food for her child. But for Jones, it was a miracle. He watched in reverence.

  She finished paying and walked out, glancing up at Jones and not recognizing him.

  She
walked away, holding her baby close to her chest, nuzzling the infant’s cheek against her own, safe and warm.

  Jones watched her go.

  He turned and walked in the other direction, the emotions settling like dust from an explosion inside him, his thoughts tumbling, unforced, unfocused.

  And then, suddenly, he understood.

  19

  Lara sat at her desk, but she was not working; she stared into the distance beyond her windows, as if looking toward the future and seeing nothing there. The sound of the door opening did not cause her to stir. But when she heard nothing else she said, “Just put them on the desk, Juliet. I’ll sign them later.”

  When she heard no movement, she turned impatiently and began to say, “Just—”

  As she turned she saw Jones, clear eyed, wearing a suit and tie, immaculate, focused, handsome. Without willing herself to move, she was suddenly standing.

  He said, “I couldn’t figure it out, how we could be so connected, and then you could be so withdrawn. I thought it was me, the baggage I carry, the poison of having a gift I can’t use. I just came to the shocking realization that All Life is not about me. This is about you. The brain Roscoe is modeled after is yours.”

  She brought herself to nod: Yes.

  “How long have you known you had the condition?” he asked.

  “Since Med School. My father had used his own equipment to scan me, once a year since I was a child. He told me it was to see inside my brain so he could tell if my thoughts were happy. Then he said it was to test his new machines. When I was in high school I began to suspect there was more to it. As soon as I could, I ordered a scan done, and there it was. It’s what my mother died of.”

  “What your father invented surgeries and instruments to try to fix.”

  “I told you I was selfish. It’s my own life I’ve been trying to save. And you know what’s sad? I haven’t had a life worth saving. I wanted to fix you—when I was the one who was broken.”

  They had been standing ten feet away from each other; he moved past her and sat in a chair by the window. “And now you feel doomed,” he said.