The Touch Page 15

  When they looked up again at Lara, their eyes were full of awe.

  * * *

  A low fire glowed in the cabin’s fireplace, scattering light across the rough sawn planks of the floor. Steam rose from the bathtub, where the water still sat because Lara had just been reaching to pull out the stopper when Jones had picked her up, towel and all, and carried her to the bed.

  Now Lara lay as limp on the bed as the damp towel lay on the floor, her head on Andrew’s chest, her eyes dreamy as he traced his fingertips across the landscape of her back. “Tired?” he whispered.

  “When was the last time I told you this has been the happiest day of my life?”

  “Yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that.” He loved the texture of her skin, and the thought floated through his mind that there is nothing in the world like the feeling of a woman’s back when she is dozing in the arms of a man she knows loves her.

  “Mmm…” she moaned. “You do have incredible hands.” She moved her cheek as if to snuggle deeper into his chest—but felt the shudder go through him, like a chill through his soul. She lifted her head. “What? What is it?”

  “Nothing, I—”

  “Andrew…?” Her eyes were open now, wide awake.

  “That… that was something Faith said to me.” He kept his arms around her, but now his fingers felt like peeled carrots, left too long out of the refrigerator.

  “Andrew. Don’t do that; you do-not-do-that! Don’t go to the past, you are not responsible for it. It’s not your fault, it’s not yours to change!” He tried to look away, and she wouldn’t let him. “Please look at me.” She tugged his chin until he looked in her direction. “I swore I’d never say this, but I have to. You didn’t kill Faith, you didn’t let her die, you did your best, and it wasn’t up to you. Good as you are, it was not up to you. And neither is the future. It’s not your fault, and it’s not yours to change either. Be here, with me, now. Be here, with me, now—”

  She was kissing him, willing him to her with all her heart, wanting to heal him not with her skill or her knowledge, but with her love.

  There are times in life when physical excitement swirls in the wake of fantasy or flirtation and slides in on the wave of a mighty mood, crashing and breaking and meaning no more than the breaking bubbles of sea foam that other waves leave behind.

  There are other times when intimacy rises like heat from the dark core of the earth, becoming fire in the surface air, hot enough to turn ancient stone into flowing magma, leaving behind mountains, islands, continents. What happened between Andrew and Lara then was that kind.

  23

  In six weeks, work was going on everywhere on the mountain. Carpenters were tearing away rotten boards from the old barn just up the road from the clinic and re-siding it with new timber; painters were at work on the house; surveyors were sighting, marking, driving stakes, laying out areas for the new construction. Nell had organized the country women into a cook crew, and their grandsons and nephews were setting up picnic tables for the food Nell’s sisters were roasting on outdoor fires. Jones, standing in the center of a grid of stakes and string, heard a truck pull up and looked to see Carl arrive with his family. The children ran to the play area; his wife kissed him and joined the cooking party.

  Jones watched as Carl moved to the rear of his truck and began to take out his carpentry tools. He glanced up to see Jones. Carl stopped what he was doing and said, “Oh. Hi, Doc. Look, uh… I know the stuff about the virus was bull. But it made me think.” Jones nodded. Carl touched his index finger to his cap in a salute to Jones, then lifted his new saw from the back of his pickup and headed toward the barn to join the work there.

  “Doctor Jones!” Nell called. Coming up the road was another pickup truck, carrying Mavis and her family.

  “Get Lara,” Jones said, and Nell ran to fetch Lara from the examination room. In a moment Lara stepped out into the sunshine, then walked up to stand beside Jones. Everyone—the surveyors, the carpenters, the women setting up the food at the picnic tables—stopped working and turned to watch. The truck tires crunched into the new gravel at the clinic turn-in, and the engine clattered to silence. The driver’s door squeaked open and Larry stepped out. The passenger side opened and Mavis stepped out too. And then, behind her, came Maggie. The hole was gone now, and in its place was nothing more than a faint line on a luminously beautiful face.

  For a moment everyone was silent. And then they were cheering. Maggie, not knowing quite what to do, stood beside her mother gripping her skirt until Mavis leaned down and told her it was all right to go to Lara; then Maggie ran to her and kissed her, then ran back to her mother.

  It took a moment for Lara to speak. When she did her voice was husky. “I’ve got to get the camera,” she said to Jones.

  “Yeah, you do that,” he said. He stood and watched it all, the happiness of the people, the congratulations of the farmers and carpenters to Mavis’s family. It would be easy for an outsider—a member of Lara’s management team from Chicago, for example, or even one of the medical school doctors from Charlottesville, less than a hundred miles away—to see the mountain people as one uniform society, but there were rankings among them as distinct as the social pecking order among socialites at a Manhattan soiree; the mountaineers, like the Manhattanites, knew who made money, knew who cheated on their spouse and who was faithful, knew who had children who were achieving something the others found admirable; in one place that achievement might be acceptance into an Ivy League school and in another it might be a Medal of Honor, but both recognized rank and that ranking created barriers. But as Jones’s eyes followed Maggie, and the way everyone around her took in her transformation and felt themselves somehow a part of the wretchedness of her previous rejection and the grace of her newness, all their separation fell away. In that moment, they were a family.

  Then Jones heard a faint crash in the cabin, what he immediately knew was the sound of a camera lens breaking. Then he heard a wooden chair knocked over onto the plank floorboards.

  He ran to the cabin door and was the first one inside. He found Lara staggering, her left arm dangling lifeless at her side; before he could reach her, her legs buckled and she stumbled to her knees, falling sideways as her right leg fought to stay straight and her left gave way completely.

  * * *

  Carl drove them in his pickup down to Charlottesville; Jones refused to wait for an ambulance and was too shaken to drive himself; Nell found it striking that he knew Carl would be the safest of all at the wheel.

  In two hours Lara was in a hospital bed. She was sitting up and seemed fine when Jones walked in with a folder full of test results and scans. “You shouldn’t have brought me here,” she said, before he could tell her anything. “We should’ve stayed at the clinic.”

  “We don’t have cerebral scanning equipment at the clinic. How do you feel?”

  “Normal. Ischemic attack, right?”

  “Yeah. There was a swelling around the aneurism, but no rupture.” He showed her the scan so she could see for herself. “The increased blood volume in your body is putting pressure on the weak vein wall.”

  “Increased…?”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  She nodded, oddly contained and silent.

  “You’re not surprised,” Jones said.

  “I’m a doctor, and a woman. Something was different. I’d even started thinking I might make it all the way to motherhood because pregnancy does things to a woman’s body, it makes her stronger and more resilient. And what a gift it would be if you and I, without meaning to, had made something more miraculous than anything our minds and our talent could ever invent.”

  For any other patient, Jones would have sat beside the bed; now he began to pace. The emotions rising in him were like thunderheads colliding in the sky, certain to bring a storm. “The pregnancy isn’t having that effect,” he said, almost angrily. “The pressure on the aneurism is going to make it rupture.”

&nb
sp; “How can you know?”

  “I know because of what just happened, and you know it too. You’re not going to make it to term.”

  “Andrew, look at me. Look at me! I won’t end this pregnancy.”

  He moved over and sat down beside her, taking her into his arms. The rage had already passed through him, or maybe it was only the calm before the torrent, but his voice was still and calm as he said, “I know.”

  24

  The BoardRoom at Blair Bio-Medical could have held far more people, and yet it seemed full with Malcolm, Brenda, and the company lawyer gathered on one side of the conference table and Jones seated on the other. Lara sat at the head, in the chair of the board director. “This,” she began, “is no time to leave things unsaid. You three in my company have known what no one else has. And now I need to clear up what will happen when I’m gone.”

  Brenda was already crying and shaking her head as if to rebuke reality so sternly that it would cease to be the truth; so Lara repeated, gently and firmly, “When I’m gone. Malcolm will run the company, with Brenda in expanded duties. My stock will be in a shared trust—administered by Malcolm, Brenda, and Dr. Andrew Jones. All profits and capital value from my stock will accrue to the Blair Foundation, with this change: All gifts will be made anonymously.”

  She looked around the table. “That’s all. Malcolm, you’re in charge as of right now.”

  Malcolm had to take a moment to find his voice, and when he found it he had to clear it. “Where will you be?”

  “There’s a little clinic in the mountains that needs an extra doctor. I’m going to go back there and look at every day as a day I’m living, not as a day I’m dying.”

  Malcolm, Brenda, and even the company attorney were all having the same experience; each felt the moment in their own way, of course, but all of them floated in a sea of sadness and defeat.

  But to Jones the moment was somewhat different; he felt torn. He felt as if there was something he should do, if only he could do it. As the others sat across the table from him and wept, Jones secretly slipped something from the inner fold of his wallet and glanced down at it.

  It was the old postcard of Creation—wrinkled and stained.

  Lara took a long and shaky breath. “This isn’t a time to leave things unsaid. I love you all.”

  She stood and left the room.

  Jones looked at their tearful faces across the table from him, and then he stood and followed Lara.

  * * *

  He caught up with her at the far end of the hallway. She stopped, turned to him, and whispered, “I’m so sorry, Andrew. I told you I wanted to give you my now. I didn’t know now would be so hard.”

  He said, quietly but firmly, “If I could have a child who’s part of you, I’d be grateful for every breath I took. Either way, I’ll have you with me every day I live, no matter where you are.”

  She thought she had steeled herself against any more tears, but they welled into her eyes now.

  “It’s all right if you cry,” he told her.

  She said, “I have to tell you the truth; I’ve never been able to tell you anything but the truth. I wanted this baby. In whatever way I knew how to pray, I prayed for it. I didn’t want a baby just for me. I wanted someone to love you the rest of your life, the way you deserve to be loved.”

  They didn’t embrace; they didn’t have to.

  Jones said, “There’s a hospital down the block. And any equipment you have here could be transferred there, right?”

  “No, Andrew. No. You can’t try to change this. I can’t leave you with that.”

  “And would you have me live the rest of my life knowing that no one else could save you, and I didn’t try? You were right about Faith. I did my best. I did all I could do. You’re carrying our baby. You have to let me try.”

  And she knew he was right.

  25

  Once they had made their decision, they wasted no time; there was no time to waste. They made their preparations, fired by an ever growing sense of urgency. Lara’s group found a brand-new surgical suite in a hospital two blocks from their building and began to outfit it right away with gear from the Blair labs. The transporting, installing, and testing went on around the clock, and because the word of what they were doing and whom they were doing it for had spread quickly, not even the teamsters asked for overtime.

  Malcolm and Brenda saw to it that Lara checked into the hospital with the attitude of a patient, not a physician, for doctors are notoriously bad patients. Brenda stayed with her constantly, obsessing about Lara’s diet, rest, pre-op medications, and even the amount of light coming through the windows. Part of Jones’s idea in allowing this was that if Brenda complained enough, Lara would keep insisting that everything was okay. The other part of the idea was that Brenda couldn’t help herself, and if she stayed with Lara and saw to her perfect preparation, then Brenda couldn’t interfere anywhere else.

  Jones made his phone calls, and Angelica flew in his best team—Stafford, Merrill, and the two surgical nurses who assisted them in Virginia. Even before he let them check into their hotel rooms, Jones took them to the hospital and showed them the operating room setup, with Malcolm there with them to calm his own fears in turning Lara over to a group he didn’t know. The newcomers, compulsive perfectionists by profession, frowned at the unfamiliar equipment surrounding them, but Jones calmed their concerns. “It’s all for monitoring and reference, pure and simple,” he told them. “Everything else is the same.”

  Jones’s team took it all in. “Is there anything else you need?” Malcolm asked.

  None of them could think of anything additional they could possibly need; the room was already packed. Malcolm took a deep breath, and then, as hard as it was for him, he left the OR and headed back to Lara’s room, where he found it necessary to stave off the impending mutiny of the hospital’s regular nursing staff, who were all threatening to resign if Brenda was allowed to keep prowling unmuzzled.

  Jones gathered his friends around him; he had e-mailed them the basics of the procedure they were about to perform and had made sure the plane carried a complete set of scans and even a video monitor so that on the flight up they could study his trial run on Roscoe. He knew they were aware of everything of a technical nature that they could possibly need to know. Still, he waited for them to ask any questions they might have. They were silent.

  Jones said, “If the aneurism bleeds before we can close it off, we induce coma, to shut the brain down until it can heal. We’re not gonna let her die on the table. We are NOT going to let her die. Everyone understand?”

  They did.

  * * *

  A nurse shaved Lara’s head. She sat motionless as the locks fell off. She had thought that this would bother her more than anything else about the surgical preparation, but she was wrong; all of it seemed the same. As much concern as she had around her, as many people who cared, no one could take her place; she was alone now.

  * * *

  The operating room at the Chicago hospital down the street from her building had become a replica of the Blair Bio-Med lab, and technicians were in place at all the monitors behind the glass separation wall they had installed overnight. Lasers and reference cameras were aimed all over the surgical area; the tools—saws, drills, expanders, forceps, and the finer instruments too—were arranged beside the table. But there was no Roscoe now. And as yet there was no surgeon.

  The University of Virginia surgical group was in the prep room, scrubbed up and waiting like a team before a championship match; but Jones was not there.

  In the corridor outside the OR, Malcolm kept checking his watch. Brenda walked up, pale. “I’ve checked the doctor’s lounge, the chapel, even called his hotel,” she said. “Where is he?”

  Malcolm shook his head. “He walked through about ten minutes ago, looked into the surgical room, then walked out the front door. Said he needed some air. He must have—”

  Brenda put an arm on his shoulder to stop him,
as nurses pushed Lara, now on a gurney, toward the surgical holding room. As Lara passed Malcolm and Brenda she looked up at them and said, “He’ll be here.”

  But Malcolm wasn’t sure; neither was Brenda.

  * * *

  While Lara lay on the gurney in the surgical holding room, and Malcolm and Brenda paced in the corridor, and the surgical team from Virginia checked the clock on the wall of the operating room, Jones walked the streets outside the Blair Bio-Med Building. He wandered, with no thought of where he was. Churning. Lost. Utterly alone.

  He saw, across the street from the pub, an old and dingy cathedral.

  Jones walked in. He moved slowly. Candles burned in the votive boxes, brightening the shadowy corners of the old sanctuary. A few people were scattered around praying, as well as a wino or two, asleep on the pews.

  Jones took a seat in a pew, near the middle of the church. And he tried to pray. But he couldn’t. He could not connect, could not feel a part of this place, could not find a channel to God. He gripped the back of the pew in front of him in frustration.

  For the first time in his life, he felt his hands trembling.

  Sitting not far from him was a gray-haired man in a worn black coat and a frayed white clerical collar. He was kneeling in prayer; he noticed Jones.

  As Jones hung his head, the old priest moved over and sat beside him. “Are you in trouble?” the old priest asked.

  “I think you could say that.”

  “Do you want to pray?”

  “I can’t connect, I can’t pray…”

  “Then I will pray for you. What do you need?”

  “A miracle,” Jones told him, as honest as he had ever been.

  The priest reached into his robes for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, right there in the old cathedral, and offered the pack to Jones. Jones declined.