The Touch (9 page)

8

An hour later the mists were rising from the forest floor and the station wagon was crossing the bridge over a mountain river, entering a hillbilly hamlet: a post office, a store, a church, all shuttered against the foggy night. There were a few wooden houses, but most of the dwellings were house trailers.

Jones, wide awake since his nightmare, told her, “Just before the church.”

Lara turned in at an unpaved driveway through a bare patch of ground next to the white wooden sanctuary, where a handpainted sign nailed into the dirt like a real estate marker said: CLINIC. The clinic was contained in what people of Lara's social circle in Chicago would call “manufactured housing.” In Virginia they referred to it as a “double-wide.” It was a house trailer.

Lara Blair, in her entire life, had never been to any place like this one. A bare lightbulb burned beneath the tin disk of its rain shield, suspended over the cinder blocks that served as steps in front of the clinic's metal door, once painted white and now a rusty beige in the blare of the bulb. Behind the church was a small cemetery; Lara had seen the gravestones, their stark shadows swinging around them from the headlights of the station wagon as she turned in beside the clinic. The church itself was simple, three arched windows along the side that faced the clinic and—Lara assumed—three more on the opposite side. No stained glass, just clear panes, dark now; but the church must have been busy on Sunday mornings, at least, for the path to its front door was worn bare of grass, and its paint seemed to be the most recent of any other she could see. On up the hill, farther up the road they had just turned off of, stood a store with gas pumps outside, and across the road from that was a shed surrounded by cars in various stages of repair or dismantling, Lara could not tell which. Beyond the store and the shed she could see a couple of houses, and nothing she saw except the church had worn new paint in years.

They parked and stretched; Lara had kept herself trim through treadmills and Pilates and all the exercises an executive can do in isolation; now the stiffness in her limbs reminded her that the chores of everyday people, tasks as simple as driving for hours on end instead of being driven, were more demanding than people in boardrooms and penthouses understood.

Jones led Lara up the cinder-block stairs and through the rusted door, into the makeshift clinic. More bare lightbulbs glared from the metal ceiling. By the entrance a two-hundred-pound woman sat beside a metal table. She wore the kind of hose that are designed to reach the bottom of her knees; she had them rolled to her ankles. “Nell,” Jones greeted her easily. “This is Dr. Blair.”

“Ma'am.” Nell nodded to Lara and appraised her quickly—the mountain people clearly were particular about who stepped into their space, and Lara felt they were particularly particular about any woman near Dr. Jones. To Jones, Nell said, “I wouldn'ta called except—”

“It's okay; what've we got?”

Nell nodded toward two old farmers on a bench near the door; one had a dangling arm. Nell said, “Allen went by Sam's and found him on the porch, limp as a dishrag.” Then Nell's eyes—surrounded by pockets of fat but deep green and bright in the glow of the bulbs, shifted toward the shadows at the far end of the room, where a mountain girl no more than seventeen held a crying baby; a second toddler daughter clung to her leg. “And Mona . . . it was Carl again.”

Jones moved to the farmers seated against the wall; Lara followed and stopped behind him, close enough to hear, far enough not to intrude. “Mr. Sam?” Jones said.

The farmer did not look up, and his buddy beside him said, “He's scared.”

“I ain't,” Sam, the farmer, said. Jones gently probed Sam's lifeless hand, and shined a light into his eyes.

“He's 'fraid he's gonna die like Dalton,” the buddy, Allen, said.

This prompted Sam to explain, “Dalton fell dead in his lettuce patch. And the dad-gum gophers et off his dad-gum
parts
!”

Nell barked from across the room, “You and Allen hush up that cussin', Sam!”

Lara bit her cheeks to keep from laughing and watched as Sam mouthed in silent emphasis to Jones, “. . . 
his dad-gum parts
!
” and Allen, who was not cussing but clearly was an accomplice in Nell's mind, nodded gravely in confirmation.

Jones opened his medical bag for his instruments to continue examining Sam, and Lara's gaze fell on the toddler clinging to her mother's skirts at the far end of the room. The toddler had yellow hair and blue eyes that stared like a lost doll's. Lara moved over, sat down in the metal folding chair beside the mother, and ran her fingers through the toddler's hair.

Something happened in Lara's face as she touched the toddler with one hand and squeezed the swaddled baby's foot with the other. Jones glanced at her; their eyes met for a moment. Lara became self-conscious and turned her attention to the young mother, Mona. She was trying to keep her face turned away from everyone, even her children; but feeling the steadiness of Lara's look, Mona lifted her face enough for Lara to see the bloody contusion on her cheek. It was the kind of bruise a fist makes.

Lara winced, involuntarily. Then she reached out. Mona recoiled, more ashamed than hurt. But Lara persisted, and Mona allowed her to probe the damage to her cheek. Lara stepped to Jones's medical bag and found what she needed to clean and bandage the wound.

Jones had come to a conclusion with Sam; he knelt to be eye to eye with the old mountaineer. “Mr. Sam, you've had a stroke,” he said.

“Will it kill me?” Sam asked, unflinching.

Just as plainly Jones answered, “Hasn't yet. I need you to come to Charlottesville.”

“I ain't goin' to no hospital.”

“I'll be there with you,” Jones said. “Hey, it's either me or the gophers.”

“Allen'll drive me,” Sam answered, and in those few words Lara heard exactly how deeply these people trusted Jones.

“Nell,” he said, “call the hospital and tell 'em to admit Mr. Sam here for a full cranial scan.”

As Nell was picking up the phone, the door banged open and a lean redneck stained with beer and motor oil clomped into the room. He snapped at Mona, and presumably at the children too, though to Lara it seemed he didn't notice them at all, “Ya'll come on.” To Lara he barked, “Leave her alone, she ain't hurt! Come on!” He pulled at Mona, who shied back from him.

When he reached again, Lara stood. “Get away from her,” she said, quietly and clearly.

The confrontation, the look in Carl's eyes, or maybe the look in Lara's, frightened Mona. Carl saw her fear, and it confirmed his sense of power. What Carl did not worry about was Jones, who seemed to be ignoring him, simply drawing a syringe and vial from his bag. Carl barked out to the whole place, as if to defy the contempt in their faces, “She let the kids run in the yard! They pulled the tarp off my tools, and it rained on my power saw! Made it short out!”

“So you hit her,” Lara said quietly, her eyes more still than they ever were in the boardroom.

Carl, staring at Lara as if to dare her to challenge him, advanced toward Mona, talking to her through his clenched teeth even as he kept his eyes on Lara. “Come on, I done told you! Come— Ow!” He reacted to the jab of the hypodermic into the muscle where his neck met his back and jerked around to see Jones holding the dripping syringe like a dagger. Before the surprise of the injection had left his mind, a reaction began to flood through his body. “What . . . what . . . ?” Carl muttered. Sweat suddenly beaded on Carl's face; it began pouring from him. And he backed to the door, spun to get his head outside, and began retching.

Jones moved up behind him and said matter-of-factly, “It's a virus I took from a cadaver at the University morgue.”

Carl retched harder, painfully.

“A cadaver—you know, a dead body. It was full of pus, died from a virus. Right now that virus is working its way into your bones, and no other doctor in this whole world knows the cure except me.”

“You're lying!” Carl sputtered, more pleading than insisting. He straightened himself against the pain, gripping his chest where his heart hammered against his ribs; sweat poured from his face and soaked his shirt, and Carl felt hotter than he would have with malarial fever.

Jones still spoke casually. “Six months from now, if she tells me you've been good, I'll give you the antidote. You hurt her again and I'll let your whole brain turn to pus.” Carl lurched out the door and flopped down the steps like a trout on a creek bank, then staggered on rubbery legs halfway to his pickup truck, where he fell again.

Everyone in the clinic was stone quiet.

Nell broke the silence, lifting a brown paper sack toward Jones. “These cakes are for you,” she said.

9

Jones insisted on driving back, and on the winding road down the mountain Lara spoke for the first time since they left the clinic. “Adrenaline, right?” she said.

Jones nodded.

“I've never seen nausea like that.”

“With a gut full of liquor, a jolt of adrenaline nearly always makes you puke. I've had some experience with drunken fistfights.”

“I'll watch your whole brain turn to pus?” She was laughing, shaking her head.

He grinned. “That was a good touch, huh? You hungry? Open that sack.”

She opened the sack and pulled out chocolate brownies. “They pay you in brownies?”

“That land the church and clinic are on was once part of a little farm my great-grandparents owned. My grandmother gave the land to build the church. My parents died when I was in high school. When I went off to college those old farmers like Sam worked the land so I could go to school without selling the only thing my folks could leave me.”

Lara stared out the passenger side window. The moon was rising, half full and stark white, and it followed them through the passing tree tops. “So how many brownies do I need to give you to come to work for us?” she said. For a long moment she did not speak, just felt his stillness beside her; then she turned to him. “You come to work for my company and I'll fund that clinic. Give them a doctor.”

“They've got a doctor.”

“Two doctors—full time. Permanent buildings. Nurses. Just tell me what you want, and you've got it.”

Jones stared at the dark road, as if he hadn't heard. Then, as if it was an answer, he said, “It's right up here.”

* * *

Jones pulled off the pavement at a spot where the road curved, almost doubling back on itself. He stopped the station wagon and got out. Lara, intrigued, followed him as he walked along the road shoulder until he paused and stared out where the asphalt caught the silvery cast of the moon.

“Her name was Faith,” he said. “We met in Med School. The last summer of our surgical residencies we did Europe on eighty-five dollars a day, and I proposed to her there. We were going to get married in the fall.”

Jones knew there was so much of the story he was leaving out; an endless well of details and stories about Faith flooded through his soul and surged now, wanting him to spill them out: the way he had first noticed her hair, reddish brown like the mane of a chestnut horse, shining two rows in front of him as he sat in the lecture hall of their first class together; the way dimples flanked her mouth and caused him always to feel her face was just about to break into a smile; the way her eyes were always so still when anyone else was talking—a distinguished medical school lecturer, a friend, a waitress, a truck driver, a sick patient, or that patient's worried family member—Faith listened to all of them with the same care and the same intensity. But Jones tried now to focus on the barest bones of the story because he couldn't tell the story of what had happened at this spot without seeing it all again with his memory, as vividly as he saw it with his eyes: the car rolling along the highway, Faith driving, Jones finishing his call on the cell phone. That's why he didn't talk about it, why he hadn't brought anyone with him to this place or explained it like he was doing now. But Lara Blair had something about her, a kind of ruthlessness when it came to facts. She had the guts to tell him what she wanted and how determined she was to get it. Jones couldn't give her what she wanted; he had been conscious of that from the beginning. And after this night he expected never to see her again. All of this, he understood. Still he admired her, and he wanted to tell someone—to tell
her
. And why that was, he did not understand.

He forced himself forward with his story. “The clinic was Faith's idea. We were on this road, driving up for the weekend.”

Lara listened, seeing the whole thing through Jones's eyes.

“You know how people in an accident often have no memory of it?” he asked and waited for Lara to nod; he needed to know she was grasping it all as he went, for he wasn't sure he could keep going if he lost momentum and had to sink into the event rather than simply describe its surface. “Well, sometimes I wish that's how it could be for me. I remember everything, even the moments leading up to it. I was feeling like I owned the world—the young surgeon with a touch like no one else's . . .” And then Jones actually shuddered as he remembered Faith smiling at him that night, when he took her hand. “And . . .” he went on, “with a love like no one else's.”

At that moment in Jones's exquisitely detailed memory, an airborne tractor trailer truck flew out of nowhere and smashed into Faith's side of the car. He saw the windshield breaking, her hands gripping the wheel; he even saw in his memory what he could not imagine he had seen with his eyes, yet it was all so vivid: those dimples freezing at the edges of that mouth that loved to smile so much and would never smile again. He saw the world start tumbling, in a tumult of grinding, screaming metal.

He looked hard at Lara now, to see her face instead of the memories. “They told me later that they thought the truck driver had swerved to avoid a deer and had lost control, then jumped the center divider. From just over there.” He pointed to the spot. He stood there taking deep slow breaths, and Lara knew he could still see it all.