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.
And he did see it: all the chaos after the wreck. His body on the side of the road. The trailer truck crumpled in the trees beyond him. A few cars that had stopped, their panicky owners darting about and shouting, a siren wailing in the distance.
“I found myself on the pavement, with people yelling, ‘Get a doctor!’” He paused again. “Get a doctor. I think that’s what brought me around. Get a doctor.” He paused once more. “Faith was still in the car.”
Now the memories were at their most hellish. He saw the mangled mass that had been their jeep, and the headlights of the other cars shooting helter-skelter through the darkness around the wreckage as he wobbled to his feet, the Good Samaritans who had stopped to help trying to keep him down; but in his memory he pushed them away and struggled through the knot of people at the wreckage of the car. As the onlookers saw him, staggering and bloody, they tried to hold him back. And Jones commanded their compliance with the magic words that had worked for centuries: “I’m a doctor!” They parted, and he looked down in horror.