The Touch (10 page)

And he did see it: all the chaos after the wreck. His body on the side of the road. The trailer truck crumpled in the trees beyond him. A few cars that had stopped, their panicky owners darting about and shouting, a siren wailing in the distance.

“I found myself on the pavement, with people yelling, ‘Get a doctor!'” He paused again. “Get a doctor. I think that's what brought me around. Get a doctor.” He paused once more. “Faith was still in the car.”

Now the memories were at their most hellish. He saw the mangled mass that had been their jeep, and the headlights of the other cars shooting helter-skelter through the darkness around the wreckage as he wobbled to his feet, the Good Samaritans who had stopped to help trying to keep him down; but in his memory he pushed them away and struggled through the knot of people at the wreckage of the car. As the onlookers saw him, staggering and bloody, they tried to hold him back. And Jones commanded their compliance with the magic words that had worked for centuries: “I'm a doctor!” They parted, and he looked down in horror.

Lara listened, absolutely still, watching him as he stood there paler than the moonlight, the images flashing through his mind in a nightmare he could not wake from. His face grew whiter as the voice inside him—his own voice—rose louder: “Faith! Faith!” And Faith, lying sideways inside the upside-down car, did not respond, and he tried to compose himself and deal with the crisis.

Somehow the memory of this struggle enabled him to go on with telling the story aloud. “The first thing I became aware of, on a medical basis, was the volume of blood she had lost. She was cold from the shock, her larynx was crushed, and she couldn't breathe.” He saw himself grab at one of the onlookers and yell,
“A knife! I need a knife!”
One of the onlookers produced a large pocket knife. Jones snapped it open, and turned back to Faith, limp and bloody in the mangled car.

“She had to have a tracheotomy,” Jones told Lara.

At that moment they were interrupted as a pickup came rolling up the mountain, its headlights making them blink. Seeing them stopped at the side of the road, the driver slowed and rolled down his window. “You folks all right?” he called out.

“Just fine,” Jones called back. “Just taking a break. Thanks for checking.” The driver waved and pulled away again, and Lara welcomed the return of the quiet and the darkness.

“I tried to put everything out of my head except what I had to do,” Jones said, his voice steady enough, though Lara thought she felt—felt more than heard—it tremble. “I pushed in the knife . . . and just as I cut into her windpipe . . .”

In his memory Jones saw Faith's eyes spring open. And her eyes were fixed directly on him.

He stared at Lara—or stared toward her, for what he saw was Faith's eyes, looking so deeply into his own.

His voice lowered; it was barely higher than the sound of the wind drifting through the trees. He asked Lara, “Have you ever seen someone die?”

Lara nodded. “My mother,” she said. “And father.”

Jones nodded; that knowledge of Lara's, that awareness of what it was like to lose someone you love absolutely, was surely part of the reason he could tell her all he was telling her now. “It wasn't what I saw that haunts me. It's what I felt. Through the handle of that knife, I felt the life leave her body.”

Jones stopped talking then. His eyes were wet circles, but tears were not what blinded him; for the next two minutes all he saw was that other night at this same spot on this road, when he dropped the knife, knowing it and all his skill were useless now. In his memory he hugged Faith's limp form as her blood dripped upon the postcard of Creation, lying on the upended ceiling of the shattered car.

Lara was barely breathing herself. Jones seemed unaware that she was there; until that moment she had felt that he was talking directly and uniquely to her. When he spoke again it was as if he was talking only to himself. “I feel it still,” he muttered.

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, released 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.