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  He looked once more at Lara. His face was changing; she could see the memory gathering itself again, back into that dark place where he tried to keep it hidden. He went on, the words flowing. “So that’s why I can’t help you, Dr. Blair. I can set a broken arm or sew a cut. I can still carve little statues. But I can’t use a surgical instrument on living flesh, because when I do I feel Faith dying.”

  There wasn’t any more for Lara to hear. And she had no words to speak, until they were driving down the mountain once again.

  10

  Jones, it seemed to Lara as she sat in the passenger seat beside him and he drove easily down the mountain, almost casually now, seemed more at peace than before. But Lara was haunted, even more than when they left the roadside ten minutes before. A shock had hit her and had grown rather than fading like the sting of any other blow might, and it wasn’t just the collapse of her agenda that she felt. She knew she had just come face to face with a force beyond her understanding, and it belonged to a realm beyond the questions of science that she did not yet know how to answer but would solve someday. This was a mystery that Lara knew she would never answer. Yet still she asked. “After that… how did you go on?”

  “I suppose some people could say I haven’t gone on. I put one foot in front of another, but most of the time it seems to me I’ve gone backwards. For a while,” he said, “I drank.” He stared at the road ahead, where the headlights bore into the darkness. It was an hour past midnight, and they seemed the only travelers on the face of the whole earth. When he spoke again, Lara wasn’t sure if was talking to her or just talking, just telling the truth. “Faith… had this belief—it seemed so original to her, but she always said it came from the Bible, though millions of people have read it and not come to the same conclusion she did. It was a method she saw, that something in her spirit saw, and she said it was a way to clean your soul and make life worth living. So I try it. Especially when times are the blackest. And it’s kept me going.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  “It’s easy to talk about, but it’s much harder to do, but you can’t think yourself through it, you just have to do it to know whether it works. She believed that the best way to do a good deed was to do it in secret. If you commit an act of charity and people know you did it, it drains away the true power of the deed. If someone unknown does evil to you, you start suspecting everyone around you of harboring hate, and you hate back. But if you’re on the receiving end of a truly anonymous act of love, you begin to suspect people around you, maybe even strangers, maybe the whole world, of caring for you. You learn to believe.”

  “Faith was the perfect name for her.”

  Jones looked at Lara, surprised by that haunting phrase. “Yes,” Jones said. “Yes, it was.”

  Lara thought about all the checks she had written to charities, and the praise they had given her, and the strange brew of annoyance, guilt, and obligation she felt each time they contacted her with more appeals. She thought about the way fund-raisers played to the egos of their donors: the silver circle of givers, the gold circle, the platinum circle, the Chairman’s Group. Lara’s name and that of her company appeared often on the honor rolls of many charities, all of them respectable groups (and all of them chosen carefully by Blair Bio-Med’s public relations director to enhance the company’s reputation as well as its political associations). But none of that kind of giving had ever infused Lara with a sense of personal connection to any kind of internal force. She found herself wanting to argue with the concept. “What about leadership?” she asked. “We need charities, many of them—probably most of them—do good work, and sometimes somebody’s got to step forward publicly and stir other people up to do the right thing by showing them how.”

  “Well, sure. Sometimes people are going to know who’s done something that they’re glad got done. It was Faith’s idea to build the clinic in the mountains, not mine. Everybody thought it was me because it was in my home town, next to the church my grandmother founded, on the ground my granddaddy gave. But it wasn’t my idea to put the trailer up there and drive there every weekend and see the people who were too afraid to go to doctors in the city, or too ashamed, or just plain too ignorant and poor. The clinic’s a good thing and it’s a public thing and I love it, and working there gives me the idea that I might be doing some good and the idea’s important. But when every hope you have is shattered and you don’t know where to find any, and you don’t want to live anymore because you can’t find love anywhere, that’s when you need more than an idea. That’s when you need to do something that no one else knows about, or will ever know. Something that you hope will matter, but you can’t even be sure of that. It’s got to be something that costs you—not just money or time, it costs you your own expectation of a reward. But you do that, you give up your pride, you give up your own secret demand that you are God and you make the rules of life, then you do get a reward: the experience that life is worth something, that it’s a gift, that someone else gave to you.”

  Jones took a deep breath. He let it out. He looked at Lara, and then he looked back at the road again. “She was right. There’s a price to faith. I’ve learned to pay it.”

  * * *

  The pink light of dawn fell faintly on the white wings of the Blair Bio-Med jet as Jones pulled up close to it, outside the private hangars beside the Charlottesville Airport runway. He stopped, stepped out quickly, and opened the door.

  All that we’ve gone through in the last twenty-four hours, Lara thought, and he’s still such a gentleman.

  Jones retrieved her bag from the truck and together they moved up to the step at the jet’s door; she turned to him, and not knowing anything better to do, she shook his hand. “Well. Thanks for… taking the time to talk with me,” she said.

  “No. Thank you.” For a moment their eyes met, and his were steadier, stronger, more direct than they had been the first time they had looked at each other. She stepped up into the plane, turned to face him again, then backed away from the plane’s door as the flight attendant started to swivel it closed; but Jones interrupted, moving into the doorway. “Dr. Blair—that Lincoln carving. I gave it to the museum two days ago. You had time to look up my resume. But you couldn’t know about my taste for Russian literature, not in time to read up on it.”

  Not only Lara but also the flight attendant and the copilot of the jet were wondering what he was getting at.

  Jones, Lara was learning, never stopped thinking, and when he spoke it was because he was sure of something. His eyes boring into her, he said, “You act as if everything is a cold, calculated decision for you. But you’ve read Russian literature on your own. You must’ve, your name’s Lara—you’re named after a character in Doctor Zhivago! You’re poetic and warm and… when you touch a baby something beautiful happens in your eyes. But you pretend as if life is business. Why is that?”

  She was still looking at him as the jet door closed.

  * * *

  The copilot of the Blair Bio-Med jet was a lanky young man who began his career as a mechanic in the Air National Guard, but the pilot was a woman named—delightfully, to Lara—Angelica. Angelica was forty and became a pilot by using the Blair Employee Education Program to pay for part of her flight training and work her way up from receptionist in the headquarters lobby. Lara herself had approved the unusual education request, saying that any woman named Angelica was destined to learn to fly, and since Angelica’s training began she had shown a special fondness for her boss. Whenever Lara took the company jet, Angelica kept the door into the cockpit open, and as the plane bored through the blue atmosphere and the feathery canyons of clouds between the sky and Virginia, she was glancing back at Lara in the mirror above the controls.

  Lara caught the glance. She snapped, “What?” But she knew what.

  “Nothing, Dr. Blair.” Angelica tried to look grim and hide her smirk.

  Lara turned her face back toward the window, and sitting there above the clouds, rele
ased from work and the world, she let her mind drift…

  And she dreamed. She was not asleep; she felt more wide awake than ever before. And floating through her mind was a vision. Her body, wrapped in wedding-gown lace, sailing slowly through a world of clouds; weightless, a buoyant ballet from the hidden recesses of Lara’s heart…

  At the beginning of her fantasy, she soared alone, amazed to find herself in her own heaven…

  But this being her heaven, she was not alone. As her body turned, there was now a baby snuggled against her chest—a baby with blue eyes like the girl at the clinic…

  And drifting through this cloudy nirvana with them was Andrew Jones. He held Lara’s outstretched hand, delicately, by the fingertips, swirling through the milky sunlight above the world. It was a scene like Michelangelo might paint.

  Lara, Jones, and the baby—their baby, for they are the mother and father—nestled in this bed of a dream sky…

  Lara stared out the window. She could see it now, those forms dancing across the irises of her eyes.

  She closed her eyes, pressing out the images, turning herself away. She had work to do, and she couldn’t do it drifting among the clouds.

  * * *

  Jones drove through the Virginia countryside in his old station wagon. He headed north of Charlottesville, out into the rolling hill country where people wealthy enough to buy indulgence properties had invested in horse farms; in recent years many Hollywood figures had found themselves drawn to the area and some even lived there full time. Like most things in Virginia, the history of the place worked its way into the bones of even the newly rich, and their homes of stone and timber blended well with the brick colonial houses that echoed Williamsburg and Monticello. The sun was over the horizon now, and bright, but it was still early and there were no cars on the road lined with oaks and hickories, leafless in November.

  Most of the older churches in Virginia’s wealthiest areas were Episcopal, a reflection of the time two hundred fifty years before, when it was illegal under the rules of the British government for anyone in the Commonwealth to be a member of any other denomination. But not far along the road Jones came to a Lutheran church, built by the descendants of the German immigrants who had brought their skills in mining, glassmaking, woodwork, and horsemanship into the fertile markets of the New World. The church was small yet stately, faced entirely with gray stone, beneath a tall slate roof. Jones had always found it quite beautiful.

  He stopped on the paved roundabout that served as the church’s parking lot, stopped his car, and got out. There was no one around this early in the morning, and no one passed on the road except a pickup truck full of hay bound in tight bales.

  Jones walked toward the church, but instead of going in, he moved past the front door and kept walking to the short forest of stone monuments that made up the small cemetery that characterized every old church in Virginia. Without stopping, for he well knew the way, he approached a grave.

  Faith’s grave.

  How her body had come to rest here, in the graveyard of a church she had never attended, was for Jones a curious story of pride mixed with baffling religious prejudice. Faith’s father’s family had attended a Lutheran church in Pennsylvania, and he had married her mother there; Faith’s mother was not religious but—she later told her daughter—she had found the church to be a lovely setting for sprays of flowers and men in tuxedoes and a bride in a white wedding gown. (Jones had learned about all of this directly from Faith when they were dreaming of their own wedding.) Faith’s mother had surprised everyone by wanting a traditional wedding—surprised them because she was given to talking about her life-changing experiences at Woodstock, and she wore beads and flowers in her hair long after Faith’s father had earned his law degree and started wearing suits to work every day. But the mother was an artist; she formed uniquely shaped pottery and painted unusual picture frames, and Faith’s father didn’t mind her quirks.

  He did mind, however, when his wife grew bored and tired of her life as a lawyer’s wife and moved to California, the same month their daughter left home for college. Apparently there was another artist involved, a man Faith’s mother talked about when she would phone her at the dormitory. That relationship did not last, for Faith and Andrew, when they traveled out to California to meet Faith’s mother when they had returned from their Europe trip and had begun to plan their own wedding, did not meet the man and never heard him mentioned. But the mother remained in California.

  Faith’s father had died shortly after her graduation from college. When Faith told Andrew about this it was the only time he had ever seen her weep. She said she knew it was illogical but she had always believed that since her father’s fondest dream was to see her safely set off into life—to see her “raise her sails,” he had told her—he had stayed alive despite the medical condition he had developed when he and Faith’s mother had journeyed to India one summer when their daughter was away at a scholastic camp for academically gifted junior high schoolers. While Faith’s mother had studied art, yoga, and transcendental meditation, he had worked on a Habitat for Humanity build site; somewhere along the way he contracted hepatitis; later they found liver cancer; a month after he saw his daughter lift her sails and toss her graduation cap into the June sky, he was dead.

  They buried him in the graveyard of the Lutheran church he had attended as a boy in Pennsylvania. Faith’s mother did not attend the funeral; but, she told Faith, she had performed a ceremony in celebration of her father’s life with some friends in California who had never met her father but who were acquainted with his higher energies.

  Jones kept these facts to himself; on their surface they would, he knew, make Faith’s mother sound shallow and soulless to most of the people he knew. Sometimes, of course, she seemed exactly that way to him. She was the mother of the woman Jones loved; but it was not just respect for Faith that caused Jones to keep the facts about her mother private. Jones knew the woman did have a heart; he heard it break, on the terrible day when he had to make the phone call to California to tell her about the accident that had taken her daughter’s life.

  Faith’s mother flew back from California, her first return to the East Coast since she had left her husband seven years before. When she saw Andrew she collapsed into his arms and wept, and it didn’t matter then that Andrew had grown up hearing his grandmother sing “The Old Rugged Cross” and his almost-mother-in-law had spent the last decade chanting in an ashram; they grieved for the love of the same beautiful life, and the truth was that they leaned on each other.

  It was when time came for them to choose Faith’s final resting place that problems arose. Her mother favored cremation and the spreading of the ashes in some sacred grove—though she was not able to articulate just where that grove might be, or what would have made it sacred to Faith. Jones’s preference was to have Faith laid to rest in the cemetery beside the church in the mountains, next to the clinic Faith had founded; it was where Jones intended to be buried someday. But his desires, no matter how deep and heartfelt, had no legal standing; he and Faith had not yet married, and her mother was the closest blood relative. She never fully insisted on a New Age sort of ceremony and a cremation after, but it was clear to Jones that the idea of Faith being interred in the ground of a church in Appalachia threatened every one of her mother’s cultural assumptions. Her mother never used the word God, even to apply it as if it meant simply a god. She spoke of Spirit, and did not seem to feel that Spirit existed in the shadow of the evergreens up in hillbilly country.

  They were at an impasse until one lonely night outside the funeral home, when Jones took her to dinner and Faith’s mother confided to him that none of her friends from California were going to come out to join her for the ceremony. They sent their Highest Intentions and Celebrations, but they couldn’t come. But some friends and relatives from Pennsylvania were coming. And Jones saw then in her face the agonies that she felt. Those people would not care for a mythical grove or a sacred circle
and wishes to Spirit; they wanted something more familiar, more comforting to them; and yet Jones knew that this was a moment when Faith’s mother could not be disregarded, no matter what he felt himself, because what he felt most was that Faith owned all his love, and she had loved her mother, so her mother’s wishes mattered.

  Then he remembered that Faith’s mother and father had married in a Lutheran church. At dinner he did an Internet search on his cell phone and found the stone church in the horse country. He suggested they ask the parishioners if they might find a spot in their hearts and their cemetery for girl who had lost her life while driving into the mountains to give medical care to strangers; something told Jones they were sure to say yes.

  “But Andrew,” Faith’s mother had muttered, her voice shaking as she sat at the formica table of a Waffle House and wrapped her trembling fingers around her coffee cup, “I never took her to a Lutheran church. I never took her to any church at all.”

  Jones reached out and took her fingers from the coffee cup and held them in his hands and looked into her frightened, anguished eyes. “But somehow,” he said quietly, “she came to believe in what they taught there. And every night, she prayed for you.”

  Now Jones sat down on the stone bench at the foot of her plot. The air was sharply colder than the day before, and he didn’t seem to notice.

  * * *

  When Lara had sent the text message telling her inner circle that she would be staying overnight, a sense of excitement had spread from them through the Blair Bio-Med command team; something was happening, they could all feel it. Brenda called Malcolm at home to ask if Lara had called him or sent any further word; Malcolm told her he had heard nothing else and he was sure if Lara wanted to confide anything of a feminine nature then she would do it to Brenda, not to him. Brenda insisted she had been thinking only of business; didn’t Malcolm interpret her delay as promising? They speculated for a while, with Brenda musing about how much good a relationship would do for Lara and how Dr. Jones seemed on paper to be exactly the kind of man whom she could both respect and admire, the kind of man who would intrigue her. Malcolm countered that whoever people seemed to be on paper usually had little to do with how they were in person, and besides all that, the crucial issue was whether or not he could perform the surgical techniques they were searching for so desperately. Brenda answered that Lara could tell in a heartbeat the difference between Dr. Jones’s resume and his personal presence and something was promising about him; why else would Lara have stayed?! On and on they went, knowing nothing, wondering everything.