“This is so great, Andrew! I—” And in an instant, as she forgot the vastness of the microscope’s magnification, the blade decapitated the statue. She winced and pulled back from the lenses. “I jerked,” she said softly.
“No, you didn’t. Your hand was steady. It was your heart. It beat faster and changed your rhythm. Not much. Just enough to cut off Red Wing’s head.”
Their eyes were locked on each other.
Then Jones’s beeper went off.
Lara kept pace with him now, at his shoulder as Jones strode quickly into the Emergency Room; they found it strangely quiet, with the ER nurse at her desk. Her name tag said “Carolyn” and her hair was gray, and still she looked as if she could wrestle a three-hundred-pound drunk onto an examination table. “You page me?” Jones asked her.
“A call came in from the mountain.” She handed Jones a message slip, and as he read it she added, “I’ve called one of the orderlies to drive you.”
“No, I can do it,” he said in that eye-of-the-storm voice already familiar to Lara. He turned to her and said, “I’m sorry to cut the evening short, Dr. Blair—”
The ER nurse told Jones, “By my count you haven’t been to bed in forty-eight hours.”
“I can do it, Carolyn.”
But Nurse Carolyn was tough enough to argue—with patients, with hospital administrators, and especially with a doctor she admired enough to pray for every night, right after the AA meetings she’d been going to for the last seventeen years. “Dr. Jones—”
“I’m fine, Nurse, thank you.”
The nurse shoved a packed medical satchel across the desk for him. As Jones took it he patted her on the hand, then moved quickly toward the double doors leading to the parking lot. Lara was still at his side. When he looked at her she said, “Let me drive you.”
He paused for a moment; even in his hurry, he paused; and Lara knew he was doing more than just considering her offer. “That won’t be necessary,” he said with a gentleness that struck Lara as almost… sad.
“I’m not going home until we’ve finished our talk.”
Jones paused another moment, taking in her determination.
The twenty-year-old station wagon waddled down 29-South from Charlottesville, curling toward the mountains, the headlights soaked up in the heavy darkness of tree-lined turns and rises and dips where the road disappeared. The station wagon was Jones’s, but Lara was at the wheel, the rumble of open highway feeling both unaccustomed and welcome to the palms of her hands. When they first left the parking lot Jones watched her carefully to see how she handled the weight and sway of the old suspension, but he saw quickly that Lara was comfortable, even delighted, to be driving, and slowly he began to relax.
He directed her to an exit that sent them right, toward the Blue Ridge, and told her, “Just stay on this road south till you hit Greenstone Mountain Road.”
The night was quiet, the heater warm and humming. The edge of anxiety about the agenda that brought her here had begun to melt away, and Lara found herself settling into this moment, strangely free from the past and unconcerned with the future. It was a peace she had not felt since… since she did not remember when, and she did not try to remember; she did not want this peace to fade.
Beside her, Jones seemed to feel it too. His body had been taut in the hospital; now he swayed easily with the turns of the road.
And Lara found herself wanting not so much to recruit him as to know him. From that place of ease she asked, “You teach, work double shifts… and you still travel?”
“I’m their doctor,” he said, his eyes directed toward the range of western mountains, a rolling layer of black beneath the star-flecked sky.
“You haven’t been to bed in two days?”
“I don’t like to sleep much.”
“Just listen to the tires sing. Maybe you can get a nap.” As she said this she noticed how soothing her voice had become. She had always liked Jones’s voice, resonant like a cello, with Southern softness in his accent; now Lara realized that her own voice had become gentle, even caring. She had not heard those qualities in her voice in a very long time.
Jones rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. “You okay?”
“I love to drive.” She smiled, looking up through the windshield at the barren tree branches stretching out from the roadside and mingling with the stars. “Once, coming back from college, I took a turn that I knew wasn’t the way home and just drove. Blacktop and trees and me at the wheel. Going nowhere, feeling I was going everywhere. Three days. I wanted to keep going. But my father was worried and my mother was…” She hesitated; she didn’t tell people about her mother. But Jones was different. She glanced to him—
And she saw he had nodded off. For a minute she drove along in a deep silence. Then she found herself smiling.
The road wound higher into the mountains. Lara shifted the steering wheel with smooth grace, and the old station wagon floated peacefully. Jones’s head, heavy with sleep, rolled with the winding road.
It seemed to Lara that every memory of this road was programming his subconscious—she thought of people as systems to be fixed when they were broken, machines to be refined—and she told herself that his falling asleep was a compliment because it indicated his reliance on her. She knew he did not rely on many people, because the people close to him—Janet in his office, Carolyn in the Emergency Room—were both strong and confident, the kind of people you could trust to get things done. Lara hoped he was coming to trust her, or she would never convince him to come to work for her company.
Still, Lara was a woman, and she found Jones attractive, and his falling asleep when alone with her scraped at the edges of her ego. She liked to pretend that the human mechanical system named Lara Blair was not plagued by feminine vanities and especially not by romantic desires, but as she drove Jones’s station wagon into the deepening darkness of the mountains she found feelings rising within her that she could neither accept nor explain.
And there was one more feeling in the stew beginning to bubble inside Lara, in the soul of this woman who did not believe she had a soul. She felt joy. She did not try to find a name for the feeling, and that was part of its wonder: it took root and grew in her because she made no attempt to label or control it. But it was there; she, Lara Blair, principal owner and CEO of Blair Bio-Medical Engineering, had found herself somewhere she had never expected to be: in a decrepit station wagon, driving into hillbilly country, next to a surgeon who would not operate, a doctor with skinned knees and grass stains on his elbows, and she found every moment with him to be intensely exciting and he, on the other hand, had fallen asleep the moment he felt the quiet and the steady rhythm of the road into the mountains. Lara smiled again. Here in Virginia, she was smiling often.
Maybe it was the air. Or the stars. Or the hum of the road. She could understand why Jones slept; it was peaceful here.
Jones opened his eyes and tried to rub the sleep from them. He glanced over at Lara just as she was nodding off.
Before he could speak to her or grab at the wheel, he heard the blast of a truck horn and saw the glare of the headlights. Lara woke, screamed, jerked the wheel, but it was too late. A tractor-trailer truck blasting along the other side of the highway had swung too wide on a turn and was surging across the center line into their lane. Impossibly it went airborne… . For a moment, the huge truck seemed to pause in the air; then it flew down and slammed into them with a flash.
Inside the station wagon, Jones’s scream ripped into the night—
Lara, sitting peacefully at the wheel, jumped, startled by Jones’s shout—but she kept the station wagon perfectly steady on the otherwise empty road. He’d been dreaming.