The Touch Page 3

  4

  At the moment when the people at Blair Bio-Med in Chicago were trying to divine his softer qualities, the Dr. Jones in question was on a rugby field on the campus of the University of Virginia. The sky was slate gray and blended with the ground, where the previous night’s thin snow merged with the mud into a crusty sludge. Anyone out in this weather had to be crazy.

  And the rugby players seemed just that, scrambling around and banging unpadded bodies in the bitter cold. From a vantage point outside the game, it looked like chaos; from inside the scrum it was, well, chaos—colliding shoulders, banging heads, swinging elbows. A kicking foot punched the ball high into the air; it tumbled through the stony sky and fell into the gnarly arms of a runner, who plunged only a few steps before his opponents dragged him to the ground and the players bunched together again in another scrum, a melee of grunting men, all bloody knees and knuckles.

  The players had no real uniforms; they wore shirts of two basic colors, depending on which team they played for that day, and shorts of any color at all; mostly, that day, the dominant color was mud. None of them had particular team loyalty; when not enough players would show up on a particular day, enough guys would swap sides so they would field even numbers. They did this for fun.

  They shoved each other for a few seconds, until one of them got his foot into the scrum deep enough to rake the ball back to his team’s side, and as the ball tumbled out they scattered into formation, racing down the field shoveling lateral passes from player to player. An especially burly brute caught one of these passes and was charging down the sidelines when a blur—the thoughtful, sensitive, delicate Dr. Jones—streaked into him in a bone-banging collision. Heads bashed; the ball went flying. But nobody worried about the ball because of the impending fight; with several players spread around the ground like train cars in a railroad disaster, the runner’s teammate yelled at Jones, “Hey, man, this ain’t American football!”

  Jones jumped to his feet, and said, too close to his face, “It’s America, isn’t it? You think this sport is for wimps?”

  “Who you callin’ wimp?!” one of the other players barked, jumping up and shoving Jones as well as two more players nearby, all of whom had come out to wear T-shirts and shorts in the icy mud for exactly this sort of thing.

  “It was a clean hit!” Jones shouted, pushing back. As more players joined the melee Jones grabbed the arm of the burly guy he leveled and started to help him up when he saw the guy’s head was split open.

  “Hey, Jones,” somebody said, “you’re not supposed to tackle with your face.”

  “He does everything with his face!” somebody else said. “Just ask your girlfriend!” All the guys were laughing even as they were shoving.

  Jones prodded the gash on the head of the guy he had hit. “Come on, let me see, let me see. Hey, bring me my bag, will ya?”

  Three minutes later the muddy, bruised, bloody ruggers were clustered at the edge of the field, grimacing like six-year-old boys as they watched Jones sewing closed the gash on the guy’s forehead. “Don’t worry,” Jones said. “You’ll be pretty as ever! Scissors.”

  The biggest, gnarliest guy responded quickly because he was, in fact, a surgical assistant. He handed Jones the scissors from his medical bag—the one he always brought to the games because stitches on the field were as regular as cold beer afterwards—and Jones clipped the stitches and was returning the tools to his medical bag when he saw his cell phone flashing as he had programmed it to do when the hospital called him in an emergency.

  * * *

  Still in his muddy uniform, Jones walked into the hospital and called to Nancy, the Emergency Room nurse, “What’s up?”

  “We’ve got a newborn who’s not breathing right, and the new resident in the ER doesn’t have any pediatric experience.”

  With the hurried focus of emergency, Jones washed his hands as she slipped a hospital gown over his rugby clothes. Nancy was forty-five and had raised two daughters alone and was now raising two grandsons because one of her daughters was in rehab; Nancy was a natural caregiver but was also so tough that the joke around the Emergency Room was that if Hitler had had Nancy we’d all be speaking German. When Jones had started doing shifts in the ER as a resident eight years ago, she had treated him in the same way a general might treat a private, as if he knew absolutely nothing. Sometimes she still treated him that way. But when Nancy was on duty, no one ever died due to neglect, or because of a misdiagnosis by a rookie doctor. Jones preferred her over all the other nurses. “Is that your blood?” she snapped at him.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Twenty seconds later he was examining the baby, a trembling, boney mass that resembled a fetal bird more than a human child. “Looks like poor prenatal nutrition,” Jones told Nancy. “How’s her mother’s health?”

  “We didn’t get blood work on her,” Nancy said. “The baby was born on the gurney in the ER last night, while you were sewing up the drunk. The mother walked in out of the snowstorm and didn’t even have a coat. She walked out this morning.”

  “Her daughter’s frail, but she’s hanging on. If she sleeps, she just might turn the corner. I’ll watch her.”

  Jones pulled up a chair and settled down into it. Nancy looked down at his muddy, bloody knees, and he covered them with the surgical robe. “Did you sleep any?” she demanded, folding her arms across her chest and staring at him over the close-work glasses resting on the end of her nose. “You worked the last shift, you—”

  “I’ll be okay. Thanks.”

  She pushed the glasses up to the bridge of her nose with one finger, as if pointing to the spot where she would like to put a bullet between his eyes, and she left him.

  * * *

  Lara worked alone, hour after hour in the lab, poring over the video of the operation they did that day. She replayed the move she had made that set off all the alarms. She was stumped.

  Her father had once told her that all of his best ideas had sprung from a strange and unpredictable interplay between disciplined persistence and spontaneous inspiration. One had never come without the other, in his experience. There had been moments, he said, when ideas would appear in his head while he was driving to work and listening to music on the radio, his mind drifting to wherever the song took him; in those moments it seemed to him that the idea had ricocheted indirectly into his brain. In those times he would run into his lab and work for endless hours, inspired by the insight that had just come to him. Other times he would work for days, feeling he was doing nothing more than beating his head against a problem like a fly bouncing against a pane of glass; when finally he gave up and went home to let himself rest—when he truly let himself find release from the effort—a new potential solution just seemed to ooze into him like the warmth of a hot shower. He used that analogy because, literally, he had come up with the idea of one of his most profitable inventions while he was standing with his head under the beating jets of a shower after he had run for an hour on a treadmill.

  Her father never spoke of what he might consider the source of ideas. He was not religious, and Lara supposed—naturally, it seemed to her—that he believed such a question to be unanswerable, so he decided at some point in his life to waste no time on it. And yet he attacked other questions, mysteries that most others in his field believed could not be solved. He never expected Lara to be a surgeon, much less a researcher and inventor; when it became clear to him that she had both the talent and the determination to push forward in the same battle he was fighting, he taught her everything he knew, and part of that knowledge was the strategy for increasing knowledge. A cornerstone of that strategy was: Never be afraid to ask questions. What if? What if? Always ask, What if?

  He was a wonderful man, her father. He was kind and he was generous and it broke his heart when her mother died and that, more than anything else, was what brought the tears to Lara’s eyes on the lonely nights during holiday times, whenever she thought of the family she no longer had
, and in fact had never really experienced. She controlled great sums of money, she owned vast quantities of brain power, a great deal of it between her own ears, and she had friends she trusted—only Malcolm and Brenda, only two; but she could rely on them absolutely, and that was no small thing.

  But her father had seldom held her in his lap, or read to her at night, or taken her out under the stars to look up at the sky and wonder how all that brilliance got there, arrayed in the heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart. Her mother had done that with her, so long ago now. Her mother had used that phrase: the heavens of the heart. But now her mother was gone.

  And Lara was still stumped.

  No one in the company outside of Malcolm and Brenda knew how profoundly personal her father’s quest for discovery was, or that it was even more personal, if that was possible, for her. They were searching for ways to save lives; how could any work be more important than that?

  And yet, Lara thought, if we spend our lives trying so hard to hold on to life that we never live, never really allow ourselves the chance to dance and sing, what is the value—the wisdom, the use, the purpose, the importance—of that?

  Still she was stumped. She turned to the microscope, and looked through it; she saw the tiny, hand-carved statue. She shook her head, marveling at it. She heard someone moving up behind her and knew it was Malcolm.

  “Lara—” She didn’t turn around. “Maybe if you tried to rest,” he said, “and come at it fresh tomorrow…?”

  “There is no tomorrow, Malcolm.” Now she looked at him, and saw the sadness in his face. “Sorry. You’re right. I’ll walk you out.”

  Except for the security guards, Malcolm and Lara were the last to leave. As they stepped out of the elevator into the garage, a limo rolled up for Lara. But she waved it off, and the driver pulled back to his slot beside the guard shack. “Aren’t you going home?” Malcolm asked gently, pleading.

  “I’ll sleep here. I want to go over the replays again.”

  “Get some sleep! I had to tell your dad that all the time.”

  “Did he listen? Listen, the doctor who did that carving? I want a folder on him by 6 a.m.”

  “Whatever you say, boss. Are you sure you won’t go home?”

  “I am home.” She watched Malcolm walk to his car, then stepped back into the elevator and rode back up to the top floor, where no one was left but her.

  * * *

  The chair in the pediatric ward was metal and would not have been comfortable to most people, but the cast-off baby had fallen asleep, her monitors were all steady, and Jones was nodding off. As the first clouds of sleep seeped in upon him, he began to twitch and make the sharp low sounds of fear. Whatever he was dreaming, it was a nightmare. He began to moan…

  The terror of his dream grew. He began to struggle against the paralysis, the helplessness, of his dream. He was trying to scream, when he jerked, waking suddenly. He looked around and found himself still in the pediatrics nursery, silent except for the tiny bodies clinging to life.

  He rose from the metal chair, reached down and with his hand delicate as breath he touched the abandoned baby on the cheek. She still slept.

  Jones walked into the ER and found it calm; the young doctor on duty was asleep on a cot, visible through the open door of one of the examining stalls. Nancy, at the night-duty desk, spotted Jones and asked, “How is she?”

  “She’s gonna live long enough to need a name. And a mother. She leave an address?”

  Nancy fished in her records. “We got it between screams, while she was in labor. But it won’t matter much, she’s not coming back.” She handed Jones a slip of paper with a name and address. At that moment the door opened and a guy in motorcycle riding clothes—or half of them because his jacket had been sanded from his body by sliding across pavement—came in, assisted by two cops, one of whom was the guy Jones had sewed up at the rugby game.

  Jones waved to the cop, and as the nurses moved to show the new patient into an admitting stall, Jones tucked the address into his pocket and headed toward the door. On his way out he stopped to wake the young resident. “Hey, Maestro, it’s show time.”

  The resident stood quickly; sleep was a half measure in an Emergency Room. “What’s up?” he wondered.

  “Looks to me like a guy went down on his Harley and lost about, oh, three thousand dollars worth of tattoos.” The resident was smiling as Jones left.

  Jones drove six blocks to an ATM and made a withdrawal. He used cash so that he left no trail.

  He found a surplus store, one he had used before; its neon sign advertised “Open 24 Hours.”

  * * *

  He drove along the cold wet roads into a part of town where no one had a credit card and what cash they had went to milk, bread, drugs, or sex. The sleeting rain had driven everyone else off the streets. A few young men watched from doorways, ready to move out and broker transactions. Jones stopped outside a block of welfare housing, and checked the address in his pocket.

  In the unit on the first floor, a fifteen-year-old girl was sitting by the grimy window, but she wasn’t looking out at the rain. She had sat there a long time, by the look of her. She was holding a cheap but old doll—a doll saved from her own childhood. Tears slid down her face like the rain on the window glass. There was no heat in the apartment; her breath showed in the air, and she cradled the doll as if to keep it warm—and in so doing, to keep herself from the cold.

  She was surprised by the tinny bong of the doorbell ringer. It disturbed her; who would be ringing her bell at this hour? She moved to the door and peered cautiously through the peephole. She saw nothing. Carefully she unlocked the door and opened it enough to peer out, with the chain catching. Seeing no one, she unchained the door and opened it for a better look.

  Leaning her head outside her doorway, she found the hallway clear in both directions. But at the foot of the door was a bag. She picked it up gingerly and took it inside, shutting the door and triple-locking it behind her.

  She opened the bag and withdrew its contents. An insulated, rainproof coat unfurled in her arms. At first she couldn’t comprehend it. What was this? Who left it? Was it a trick? It couldn’t be for her; no one in her life had given her anything—even the doll that was her only treasure was something she had stolen from a store. But the coat was in a bag—at her door. And someone had rung her bell. Could it really be for her?

  Four minutes later she was wearing the coat and looking into the mirror over her bathroom sink. The mirror was cracked, and the silver backing had flaked so that the image seemed clouded, but she could see herself—in the coat. It wasn’t rich; it looked like military surplus. But it was new, full length and heavy. She put her hands into the pockets and stared at herself in the mirror, embraced by the warmth and the mystery.

  Finding something in the pocket, she pulled her hand out, and discovered she was holding several hundred-dollar bills.

  * * *

  Jones returned to the pediatric ward and tossed his coat onto the metal chair. He was still wearing his hospital gown. He looked down at the baby. She was still resting quietly.

  He sat down in the chair again and fell sleep. This time he slept peacefully, without dreams.

  5

  Lara sat studying the eight-by-ten black-and-white prints that Malcolm had ordered done, photographic enlargements of the tiny sculpture their scouts had discovered. She, Brenda, and Malcolm were leaning over around the coffee table in Lara’s office, a spacious, elegant suite with an imposing desk of English oak; the office connected to a tiny bedroom where Lara slept most nights now. Malcolm had already seen the photo enlargements, so as she sat studying them, he sat studying her; he knew she had been in the lab all night—she still wore the lab coat and the caps they used to prevent hair from contaminating samples. Pink edges of sleeplessness rimmed her eyes, and her voice, when she had greeted him that morning, lacked the firm edge of determination she always showed the outer world. Malcolm had seen her father fray too, wh
en he had come to understand that never in his lifetime would he solve the problem he had dedicated his life to overcoming.

  Malcolm had been with Lara and her father on the night William Blair died. He had suffered from lung cancer. He had been a lifelong smoker—it was an irony that so many doctors who knew full well the destruction cigarettes could spread through the heart and lungs could still succumb to the habit—and despite many efforts to quit (once led by Malcolm, who had also smoked during college, and who offered to quit along with him; Malcolm had succeeded, but William went back to smoking after his wife died) had never been able to permanently shake the habit. When William lay in the hospital on what they all knew was the last night of his life, Malcolm whispered to him, “I wish we’d spent more time trying to beat cancer.”

  But William had smiled then—actually smiled, behind the mask of the ventilator that kept his chest rising and falling—and shook his head; then his eyes turned to Lara, sitting in the chair beside the bed, and Malcolm knew exactly what that look meant, and what he would do for his dying friend and for his living daughter, as long as he would live himself.

  Now Lara, seeing this new evidence of stupendous dexterity, tossed off the remainder of her lab gear and paced her office. Lara possessed the trait—some might call the affliction—of believing that if anything needed accomplishing, she had to acquire skill for it personally. But before her were the signs of a skill beyond any she could achieve herself; she knew that already, after a young lifetime of trying. She had never seen anything like the manual skill or the subtle artistry that the carvings demonstrated. The photo blow-ups made it even more evident than microscopic views of the carvings did.