“Me? No,” Jones said, never slowing.
“I mean someone with your skill, someone who possessed your ability. Could it be done?”
“Maybe,” Jones said, still not looking at her. “But it wouldn’t do much good.”
“But if you—if anyone could get a probe into that area—”
“It’s not just a probe; the thing has to be clipped. A tumor you can freeze, but an aneurism is a weak vein—”
“I know what an aneurism is.”
“Then you know what you’re talking about is impossible.” They turned a corner and were almost to the door of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Jones glanced at Lara, still following him, refusing to give up. “Nearly.”
“You’re hooked! Aren’t you!”
Jones banged through the door of the pediatric unit, Lara right behind, then scrambling alongside him and arguing to answer his unspoken protests, her voice both insisting and excited. “Yes, you are. Yes, you are!” But she stopped talking as his eyes, bright with concern, darted to an empty incubator.
Jones looked to the pediatric nurse, concern, almost panic, registering on his face, but she was calm, almost but not quite smiling.
For a moment to Lara, whose every sense and every instinct were fully charged to read Andrew Jones, he seemed out of sync, the nurse’s peace at odds with the sense of emergency that had driven him down the hallway. Then the nurse’s eyes directed his attention to the other side of the room.
There a fifteen-year-old mother, cradled in a new coat, was holding her baby as before she had held the doll, and was staring down at her real child.
Jones moved to the nurse. Lara stayed back, but she could hear the nurse whisper to him, “She walked in here this morning and said she wanted to hold her baby. I thought it was something you’d want to see.”
The baby emitted a feeble but healthy cry. The young mother looked up to the nurse, who had just warmed a bottle and now carried it over, showing the girl how to feed her baby.
Jones stood quite still and watched the girl tuck the bottle between the lips of her baby.
He looked at her in the same way he would look at sacred art, for though a mother feeding a newborn was something that happened millions of times a year throughout the world, there was something in this that was holy; Lara studied him, and she knew something out of the ordinary had happened there, though she could not have said what, she could not have known that something in this was even greater than what Jones had once seen at the Sistine Chapel, for this was alive, this was the Hand of God to Andrew Jones. But one can stare at the holy only for so long, and one cannot watch a fifteen-year-old mother for too long either, without making her feel uncomfortable. Jones glanced to Lara, and they moved back out into the corridor together, easily, as if they’d already found a bond.
“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry to dog you about this. Last year, worldwide, 128 people died of the condition I showed you. In three years that’s like a jumbo jet crash, and nobody else is working on the problem. We’re perfecting a computer-mechanical interface, we’ve created a practice environment—we’re so close! Just… before you say no, will you let me buy you dinner?”
She watched him, and the longer he hesitated, the better she felt.
“Can I take a shower first?” he asked.
Lara smiled—and it was the happiest smile that had played across her face since she was a child, before she knew her mother was dying, before she knew anyone, anywhere, ever had to die at all.
7
Lara had already picked the place and made a reservation for a quiet table for two in the restaurant of the Jeffersonian Hotel, Charlottesville’s finest. Starched white tablecloths and six wineglasses were already on the tables when she scouted the setup that afternoon, and she pointed out to the maitre d’ an area close enough to the fireplace to be cozy and not so close as to feel intentionally romantic. Lara had spent every day of her business life threading the needle through an ever-narrowing space between drawing men close enough to negotiate and keeping them far enough away to remain professional.
She had also booked a room for herself in the Jeffersonian and had her flight crew staying at the much more modern hotel out near the airport; they were always prepared to take off within an hour if Lara’s plans should change. Now her schedule was uncertain, but her plan was not: she was there to recruit Dr. Andrew Jones into her company, regardless of the effort, regardless of the cost, and her determination to succeed had grown with every minute she had been around him. She admired his focus, almost fierce in its intensity; yet he had a playful balance, and his grace under fire was downright inspiring. Her scouts had searched the world for a person who could do what she needed done, and here he was, just a short plane ride from Chicago—if only she could find a way to overcome whatever the demons were that had kept him from applying his great skill on living patients.
Lara was not prepared to take no for an answer. But there was something else she was not prepared for, and that was the effect Jones had on her secret self. Lara considered herself the ultimate pragmatist; she did not believe in a soul. She understood the word as a poetic concept, of course, a metaphor for the quiet and pleasant emotions she allowed herself to indulge in at the rarest of moments. She considered these lapses into peace and awe and a sense of being a part of something beyond the capacities of her intellect to be dangerous. Whenever she experienced such moments—a brush with unexpected beauty, a sense of a message of love coming to her when she heard no voice and believed in no Speaker—she accepted them absolutely, during the very moment when she felt them. But afterwards she always told herself she had felt nothing except her own longings, and those longings she considered pitiful at best and dangerous at worst. She tried to keep such longings—for connection, for union, for peace, and… yes, for love—out of her mind and out of her life. That’s why they were her secret self.
Something about Jones spoke to that secret self. And while Lara had always been careful to keep men far enough from her own attractiveness so that she could do business with them, she now felt she must keep herself far enough from Jones so that she would not do something stupid and even potentially disastrous, something like falling in love.
So she showered and washed her hair and brushed it back simply and kept the makeup to a minimum and wore a navy blue jacket with slacks and low heels and only a strand of pearls, the ones her father had brought back to her from a trip to Japan, and she told herself she was dressed in a thoroughly businesslike way; but she did look at herself in the mirror for a long time, and used a fingernail to perfect the lipstick at the corner of her mouth, and brushed her hair again and checked herself in the full-length mirror beside the door of her room before she headed downstairs.
When she stepped into the lobby, Jones surprised her by being there already, standing by the windows, looking out into the night. As he saw her reflection he turned to her and smiled. He had showered too—his hair still looked a bit damp—and now sporting a coat and tie, he looked great. “Hi. I…” she began, and for the first time since they met, she seemed unsure what to say next. But indecision never lasted long with Lara; she told him, “We have a few minutes before our reservation and I’ve been sitting most of the day. Do you mind if we walk around the block before dinner?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I could use some fresh air myself.”