The Touch (2 page)

“Yeah, we're back!” he called over the noise of the snow tires singing over the blacktop. “. . . Faith? She's great! She's been strutting around in front of all the women in Charlottesville, bragging about how she captured me!”

Faith punched his shoulder, then reached down and took his hand. He squeezed it and said loudly into the phone, “We miss you already, Luca! . . . Of course you're invited to the wedding, I'll call you as soon as we set the date! . . . Sure, I'll give her a kiss for you! And she sends her love to you!” He hung up and smiled at her. “He says I should ask you about the project you were talking with him about while we were there, on the neurological effects of music.”

“Early studies are suggesting that playing classical music to kids makes their IQ scores go up. It started me thinking: if music impacts the brain—”

“Post-traumatic coma. It might help induce healing!”

“Bingo, big guy! See, I knew you weren't just another pretty face.”

“Why does it work? Soothing? Stimulating? Or that people get healthier when they're exposed to beauty?” He looked from the Michelangelo postcard on the dashboard to Faith's face. She had just switched on the headlights and they threw back soft reflections onto her skin.

“It's love. Art is an expression of devotion, a tangible proof that someone cared enough to make and share beauty. It may be that we doctors accomplish more just by the physical touching of patients, by showing them concern, than with our science.”

“Love heals?”

“Love heals.”

“Faith is the right name for you.”

She smiled at him; then her eyes flicked back to the road and filled with terror. She jerked the wheel and opened her mouth as if to scream. But there was no time even for that.

In an instant, everything changed for Andrew Jones—all that he hoped and thought, all that he believed of life.

In an instant, Faith was gone.

2

When Luca had come to Virginia from Rome to give his lecture on art and its interplay with religious belief, Faith and Jones had been undergraduates. Faith had told Jones she studied art to see naked men; Jones had said he liked to investigate the use of color. Jones claimed the truth was that he wanted to see pictures of naked women and Faith liked to investigate the interplay between what people believed as their spiritual doctrines and what they found beautiful.

So they had gone to the lectures of the young Italian genius they had heard about, this man who could lecture without notes and answer any question and talk for hours about art and life and beauty.

They were not disappointed. Luca Manzi was small yet exuded power, both in his physical presence and in his aura of intelligence. But more than brain strength oozed from the man; he had a great heart and it showed in his eyes. His hair was Italian black, his eyes a deep brown, his face handsome and covered in a five o'clock shadow no matter what time of day it was. Faith and Jones had found his class in the main rotunda building and eased into chairs in the back of the room and listened enraptured as Luca paced in front of the fifty students gathered there and spoke about art history from the first cave paintings to modern movies, the pictures that moved and carried sound and narrative with them. The compact Italian could carry all of that in his head; he saw it all and so could point it out and teach it.

When it was over they had walked up and asked him to go to dinner with them. Luca accepted; his eyes lit up and he laughed and then he said yes, he had not eaten and he would like to try American food. Faith insisted, over Jones's objections, that they take him to an Italian place but on the way Faith and Jones began to argue. “He'd like to sample what we call Italian here!” she whispered to Jones as they walked along.

“Our Italian won't compare to his!” Jones whispered back. “Virginia Italian isn't Italian Italian!”

Luca laughed and said, “The lovers are arguing, like lovers do! I wish I could paint you both!”

“You don't paint?” Faith wondered.

“I can't even draw well,” Luca said, his whole face lighting up as he smiled. “I teach art, I love art, I share art, but I cannot make it. I am fine with this. I did not make the world, either, and I love living, especially when I am with two young people who love each other so much as you two do, and who fight as if they don't love each other and who care about nothing so much as they care about what each other thinks.”

Now Faith and Jones were both smiling as brightly as Luca was. “So where would you like to eat?” Jones asked.

“I like Chinese,” Luca said. “Or a steak. Pizza I don't care for.”

They all laughed again and found a steak house. And there they had one of the great conversations of their lives. Luca told them about his girlfriend, a young woman who sounded clearly brilliant and full of life; as he spoke of her, Luca's eyes lit up. Her mother was an art dealer, and her father had been a film producer in Rome. When Faith asked if they were getting married, Luca shook his head sadly and said that she was too young but that he loved her more than any woman he'd ever known.

“So you're having drama, then,” Jones said, and once more Luca's face exploded with a smile and laughter leapt from his lungs.

“Yes, I have drama!” he said, his hands flying around in the air as he spoke. “I love drama, all Italians do! We cannot live without it!”

“Is that why you love art?” Jones wondered. “Because it is dramatic?”

“Life is dramatic! The very fact that we are here is dramatic! We have been made to live, and to be alive is to be in the presence of God!”

Faith had always been curious about the nature of belief. Jones had never felt her trying to convince anyone else to believe what she did; in fact it had always seemed to him that she was trying to deepen her own beliefs and wanted to know what was in the hearts of others.
Believe
, she had always told Jones, is a stronger word than
know
. So when Luca, who had just lectured so lovingly on the interplay between art and faith, so boldly declared that to be alive was to be in the presence of God, Faith lit up. “What do you think of God?” she asked. “You are Catholic, right? So how do you see the path to faith? Is it through morality, through grace, through ritual? How do you see it?”

Luca laughed again. “I see it in many different ways, every moment of every day. I believe, I doubt; I laugh, I cry.” He took a sip of wine, shook his head, got lost in thought and then said, “But it doesn't matter. I don't need to understand. Nobody does. There are only two things anyone must know: there is a God, and that God loves us. That is all we need to know.”

At that moment, hearing those words and the way they were spoken, Andrew Jones felt joy. Not the kind of joy that makes a person weep, but the kind that makes one laugh. He felt happy, in love, affirmed in all he had hoped and dreamed. He looked at Faith and saw her smile radiating love to him, to the whole world. He glanced back at Luca and saw him grinning.

“I think,” Faith said, standing, “that says everything that ever needs to be said. So I'm going to take this opportunity to go to the Ladies' Room!” She kissed Jones on the lips, then kissed Luca on the crown of his head full of lustrous black hair. Both men watched her walk away.

Luca's eyes, deep brown and playful as a Labrador puppy, darted to Jones. “You are a blessed man,” the Italian said and lifted his wine glass in a toast.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Jones said quietly. He smiled again. “Women love you, Luca. They all light up when you're around, and Faith's already running through her whole list of friends for all the ones she wants to set you up with. Why aren't you married yet?”

Luca wiped his face top to bottom with the palm of his hand and shook his head with a great sigh. “Many times!” he said, throwing both hands into the air. “Many times I fall in love. But she is always too young for me, too old, too rich, too far away, too lost in her work, or I am too lost in mine. It is a disaster!”

To Jones it sounded as if Luca had said, “Eeet ees'a deeSAAAHster!” and he struggled not to smile—but he smiled anyway.

Luca smiled too. But then he studied Jones as he might look at a fresh painting from a young artist. “What did you do?” he asked. “How did you two make it work?”

Jones nodded at the sincerity of the question and pondered it a moment. “I didn't do anything,” he said. “What I mean is, I wasn't trying. I didn't have to try. I mean, at first. Because she wasn't trying. You know how you meet someone and they seem attractive and you think you'd like somebody like that so you try to be nice and right for them and you hope the magic happens. But soon you're trying more and the magic is less.”

Jones glanced toward the rear of the restaurant, where Faith was stepping from the doors leading to the restrooms. She had stopped to talk with one of the waitresses; apparently Faith had complimented her on her earrings, and the two of them were examining each other's jewelry and laughing and oohing like sisters. That was Faith's touch—she loved everybody, and everybody loved her. “At night, I stop sometimes and look up at the stars. Everybody does that, I guess, but the thoughts we have when we do it, they feel so much like ours alone. When I was getting to know Faith, she looked up at the stars one night and she said, ‘It's as if God made the universe and was so excited about it He just scattered sparkles of joy into the sky.'”

“Wow,” Luca said.

“Yes. Wow. And I would've never said that, but it expressed exactly the wonder and the joy I was feeling. I knew then she was the one I wanted. Always.”

Faith made her way back to the table. “What are you boys talking about?” she asked, her eyes bright with happiness.

“Nothing,” Jones said.

“And everything,” Luca added.

There is a God, and that God loves us. That is all we need to know.
Jones had thought of those words a few times before Faith's death and almost every day afterwards. The words made him angry. The words made him sad. But he could not let go of them, not because he believed them, but because Faith did.

Jones needed to believe those words, though he did not realize how much or how soon he would need to believe them, and that they would mean, literally, everything.

3

Blair Bio-Medical Engineering owned its own high-rise building, surrounded by some of the finest real estate in Chicago. They were a relatively young company, compared to the other businesses headquartered nearby, but in their field they were one of the oldest, their founder having been a pioneer in the development of machines that would make impossible surgeries not only possible but practical.

From the outside the building looked unremarkable, a tower of glass and steel with enough stonework to give it the stateliness of a business based on heritage, like a bank or an insurance company. But inside the building, where the labs and engineering workrooms formed the true heart of the company, Blair Bio-Med was a dazzling dance of lights, crisscrossed by lasers, encircled by computer screens, even sparkling with arc welders as their design teams not only devised but built the original prototypes of their inventions.

Those research rooms occupied the upper-central core of the buildings, and they were the building's heart. And in the very core of the research center was Dr. Blair's Surgical Sciences Suite. Dr. Blair—not the old Dr. Blair, who had founded the company, for he had passed away several years ago, but the new Dr. Blair, who had inherited all of his talents and all of his drive to succeed, not to mention all of the company he had founded—worked in these rooms every day and most every night. Dr. Blair was brilliant, and Dr. Blair was driven. And Dr. Blair was a woman.

Everyone who worked at the company—and there were some brilliant people at Blair Bio-Med—knew who the boss was, and they understood she was the boss not because the legal documents of her father's will but because of the force of her own will and her ability to turn will into action. They watched every action she made, as they watched now, when she lifted her gloved hand and signaled for an experiment to begin.

Technicians in the control room, separated by a double wall of glass from the surgical research table where Dr. Blair stood, ran their fingers over banks of buttons that sent power into lasers, shooting micro-thin beams in precisely aimed crisscrosses, an intricate maze of intense light that seemed to scan every particle of air in the space around the doctor and the work in front of her. Monitors on the wall directly beyond the surgical table displayed data updated thousands of times per second.

A human hand—Dr. Blair's delicate, feminine hand, made ghostlike by a surgical glove—slipped liquidly into a precision sleeve that fit like a second skin, containing sensors that recorded every movement of her arm, wrist, knuckles, fingertips.

She flexed her fingers. The microscopic sensors imbedded in both the surgical glove and the matching sleeve, spewed data that flashed onto the monitor screens and poured onto the computer hard drives arranged to collect it.

The woman at the center of all this was Lara Blair. Lara, without a “u.” Her mother, a poet, had seen the film
Doctor Zhivago,
featuring a character named Lara whose lover was both doctor and poet. The new Lara had lost her mother early and had become a doctor, like her father. Now she wore full surgical attire: gown, mask, cap, clear medical goggles. Her eyes were striking—deadly serious, intense.

“I'm ready,” she said, the words puffing against her mask.

An unseen technician's reply came to her through a speaker. “We are go.”

Droplets of sweat glistened around the sockets of Lara's eyes. What she was doing had the gravity of life and death. She lifted a probe with a chiseled, razor point. She pressed her face into a set of surgical magnifiers that mimicked her movements and brought microscopic vision to her eyes. Using both hands to steady the probe, she threaded it through the matrix of lasers . . . and moved it down . . . down . . .