The Touch (19 page)

He kissed her. And he did something strange, for someone who had just realized he could love again.

He wept.

* * *

They descended the mountainside on the same path they had taken to climb it; Jones was quiet, lost in thought. Then halfway down, at a spot where another track joined their path, he stopped and said, “This way.”

She knew it was not the route they had originally followed, but she came along beside him quietly, holding his hand. They passed beneath the canopy of deep green leaves, their feet rustling through the years of fallen loam until they emerged into a clearing where an unpainted house stood, its planks weathered the same color as the tree trunks. Sitting in a rocker on the front porch was Allen. Lara was sure he had heard them coming before he had seen them, for there was no surprise in his face as he watched them move up. She was sure he had sat there for a long time. A rifle leaned against the wall behind him, but it seemed more a fixture than a weapon, bullets and gophers far from Allen's consciousness now. Tobacco juice lay in a brown crust around his lips, and the spit jar beside the curved runner of his rocker was dry too. Once the tears are past, grief is a desert.

Jones led Lara to the base of Allen's porch, and Allen nodded. It was a short nod, but it was welcoming. “Allen,” Jones said, “I need to ask you a favor.”

“Naw, you don't,” Allen said. “You need something from me, no need to ask, just tell me.”

“I want you to marry us,” Jones said.

* * *

Jones had climbed up onto the porch and whispered into Allen's ear, and Allen had nodded and answered in kind, and the two of them had whispered back and forth with Lara standing there watching, until Allen had risen and stepped into his cabin, emerging a few moments later with a battered Bible.

They walked into the woods again, taking no clear path this time, but Allen seemed sure about where he was going. A hundred yards from Allen's front porch they came to a stream where crystalline water tumbled over green rocks, and there Allen stopped and turned to them. “Bring your license?” he asked, then looked from Lara to Jones and back to Lara, staring straight into their eyes. “There it is,” he said.

He did not open the Bible, but Lara had the feeling he had, in his time, performed many weddings, and Jones would tell her later that Allen was both ordained and a justice of the peace. Jones, in his whispers on the porch, had given Allen his instructions, and Allen was comfortable with the program. “Say what you need to say,” he told them.

Jones took Lara's hand and said, “I will love you my whole life. And I will be with you and no other, as long I live.”

It took her a moment to get her hands and her lips to move, but she gripped his hands in both of hers and said, “I will love you my whole life. And I will be with you and no other, as long as I live.”

Allen looked at them both, lifted the Bible toward them, and said, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Amen.”

* * *

In the glow of the cabin fireplace, they made love.

They did not hurry.

As their instincts began to scream for each other their bodies grew taut, but still their eyes were soft, and they faced each other, so that everything they did was together, and everything in their lives—the fear, the grief, the pains, the hopes, all that is sex and all that is love, came together in one moment.

22

All of them were nervous: the line of four children, then Mavis, then her husband, sitting in a line on the metal folding chairs against the wall in the clinic trailer. Mavis took her husband's hand and squeezed it tight, until the tips of his fingers glowed red as fresh strawberries. She kept glancing toward the new operating room, visible through the trailer window.

The new operating room stood in what was just another kind of trailer, a long wooden box towed in on wheels and set up on a freshly poured concrete pad. It was a bit makeshift, but the equipment was state-of-the-art and the accessories immaculate. Maggie, Mavis's fifth child, the girl with the cleft palate, lay on the table, looking up at Lara, and Jones, and the two surgical nurses they'd brought up from Charlottesville. Maggie's eyes were blue, and they had fear in them, holding on the only uncovered human features she could, the eyes of the surgeons and nurses visible between their caps and masks. But Lara was sure she could see trust in Maggie's eyes too, a recognition from somewhere beyond thought that the woman who was looking down at her now, the same woman who had spoken to her when she was in the back of the truck, was someone who brought a gift. Maggie's parents had told her the doctors were going to make her “all better.” Maggie did not fully understand what that meant. She had never known a world in which people could look at her without something terrible happening on their faces, something that said:
Go away; I would rather you did not exist at all.

Merrill, the anesthesiologist, who said he'd donate his time the moment they told him what they were doing, fed liquid through Maggie's IV drip, and Lara lowered her face closer to the girl and said, “Just close your eyes, honey, and we'll take care of you.” Maggie sank into a motionless slumber. Lara looked across at Jones, and they began.

Lara's hands, from the first lift of the instruments, moved in a fluid ballet, her eyes intense and brilliant above her mask, never looking away from the task, yet tuned into Jones's voice as he watched and spoke soft directions for the artistic shaping of the tissue. It was Jones, not Lara, who had to struggle to stay centered on the task; he had never seen her operate before, and her virtuosity both surprised and distracted him.

The time flowed as smoothly as Lara's movements; even as focused as she was, when every fragment of the experience was burning itself into her memory, it seemed over almost as soon as it had begun. They wheeled the girl into their small recovery room at the other end of their new trailer, and as soon as she awoke Lara lifted her in her arms and carried her through the connecting hallway the Mennonites had just constructed and into the waiting room, where Mavis and her husband looked up and Lara placed Maggie into her father's arms. He pulled back the covering from his daughter's face, and he and Mavis froze.

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.”