Jones took a deep breath. He let it out. He looked at Lara, and then he looked back at the road again. “She was right. There’s a price to faith. I’ve learned to pay it.”
The pink light of dawn fell faintly on the white wings of the Blair Bio-Med jet as Jones pulled up close to it, outside the private hangars beside the Charlottesville Airport runway. He stopped, stepped out quickly, and opened the door.
All that we’ve gone through in the last twenty-four hours, Lara thought, and he’s still such a gentleman.
Jones retrieved her bag from the truck and together they moved up to the step at the jet’s door; she turned to him, and not knowing anything better to do, she shook his hand. “Well. Thanks for… taking the time to talk with me,” she said.
“No. Thank you.” For a moment their eyes met, and his were steadier, stronger, more direct than they had been the first time they had looked at each other. She stepped up into the plane, turned to face him again, then backed away from the plane’s door as the flight attendant started to swivel it closed; but Jones interrupted, moving into the doorway. “Dr. Blair—that Lincoln carving. I gave it to the museum two days ago. You had time to look up my resume. But you couldn’t know about my taste for Russian literature, not in time to read up on it.”
Not only Lara but also the flight attendant and the copilot of the jet were wondering what he was getting at.
Jones, Lara was learning, never stopped thinking, and when he spoke it was because he was sure of something. His eyes boring into her, he said, “You act as if everything is a cold, calculated decision for you. But you’ve read Russian literature on your own. You must’ve, your name’s Lara—you’re named after a character in Doctor Zhivago! You’re poetic and warm and… when you touch a baby something beautiful happens in your eyes. But you pretend as if life is business. Why is that?”
She was still looking at him as the jet door closed.
The copilot of the Blair Bio-Med jet was a lanky young man who began his career as a mechanic in the Air National Guard, but the pilot was a woman named—delightfully, to Lara—Angelica. Angelica was forty and became a pilot by using the Blair Employee Education Program to pay for part of her flight training and work her way up from receptionist in the headquarters lobby. Lara herself had approved the unusual education request, saying that any woman named Angelica was destined to learn to fly, and since Angelica’s training began she had shown a special fondness for her boss. Whenever Lara took the company jet, Angelica kept the door into the cockpit open, and as the plane bored through the blue atmosphere and the feathery canyons of clouds between the sky and Virginia, she was glancing back at Lara in the mirror above the controls.
Lara caught the glance. She snapped, “What?” But she knew what.
“Nothing, Dr. Blair.” Angelica tried to look grim and hide her smirk.
Lara turned her face back toward the window, and sitting there above the clouds, released from work and the world, she let her mind drift…
And she dreamed. She was not asleep; she felt more wide awake than ever before. And floating through her mind was a vision. Her body, wrapped in wedding-gown lace, sailing slowly through a world of clouds; weightless, a buoyant ballet from the hidden recesses of Lara’s heart…
At the beginning of her fantasy, she soared alone, amazed to find herself in her own heaven…
But this being her heaven, she was not alone. As her body turned, there was now a baby snuggled against her chest—a baby with blue eyes like the girl at the clinic…
And drifting through this cloudy nirvana with them was Andrew Jones. He held Lara’s outstretched hand, delicately, by the fingertips, swirling through the milky sunlight above the world. It was a scene like Michelangelo might paint.
Lara, Jones, and the baby—their baby, for they are the mother and father—nestled in this bed of a dream sky…
Lara stared out the window. She could see it now, those forms dancing across the irises of her eyes.
She closed her eyes, pressing out the images, turning herself away. She had work to do, and she couldn’t do it drifting among the clouds.
Jones drove through the Virginia countryside in his old station wagon. He headed north of Charlottesville, out into the rolling hill country where people wealthy enough to buy indulgence properties had invested in horse farms; in recent years many Hollywood figures had found themselves drawn to the area and some even lived there full time. Like most things in Virginia, the history of the place worked its way into the bones of even the newly rich, and their homes of stone and timber blended well with the brick colonial houses that echoed Williamsburg and Monticello. The sun was over the horizon now, and bright, but it was still early and there were no cars on the road lined with oaks and hickories, leafless in November.
Most of the older churches in Virginia’s wealthiest areas were Episcopal, a reflection of the time two hundred fifty years before, when it was illegal under the rules of the British government for anyone in the Commonwealth to be a member of any other denomination. But not far along the road Jones came to a Lutheran church, built by the descendants of the German immigrants who had brought their skills in mining, glassmaking, woodwork, and horsemanship into the fertile markets of the New World. The church was small yet stately, faced entirely with gray stone, beneath a tall slate roof. Jones had always found it quite beautiful.
He stopped on the paved roundabout that served as the church’s parking lot, stopped his car, and got out. There was no one around this early in the morning, and no one passed on the road except a pickup truck full of hay bound in tight bales.
Jones walked toward the church, but instead of going in, he moved past the front door and kept walking to the short forest of stone monuments that made up the small cemetery that characterized every old church in Virginia. Without stopping, for he well knew the way, he approached a grave.
Faith’s grave.
How her body had come to rest here, in the graveyard of a church she had never attended, was for Jones a curious story of pride mixed with baffling religious prejudice. Faith’s father’s family had attended a Lutheran church in Pennsylvania, and he had married her mother there; Faith’s mother was not religious but—she later told her daughter—she had found the church to be a lovely setting for sprays of flowers and men in tuxedoes and a bride in a white wedding gown. (Jones had learned about all of this directly from Faith when they were dreaming of their own wedding.) Faith’s mother had surprised everyone by wanting a traditional wedding—surprised them because she was given to talking about her life-changing experiences at Woodstock, and she wore beads and flowers in her hair long after Faith’s father had earned his law degree and started wearing suits to work every day. But the mother was an artist; she formed uniquely shaped pottery and painted unusual picture frames, and Faith’s father didn’t mind her quirks.