Jones’s mind clawed its way out of the nightmare. He gulped air, sweating, his eyes darting as he reconnected with the waking world.
He didn’t say anything; what could he say? He settled back again, and she drove on, silent for a long moment, until she said, “No wonder you don’t like to sleep.”
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.