They turned west just as the sun went down beyond the ridgeline and the gray fog of evening had begun to bathe the forest and rise from the road in wisps. Andrew was on his cell phone; he didn’t like to talk when they were in the jeep—their time together, away from the hospital, was too rare, and it was hard to hear in the jeep, but Luca had just called him and cell reception was spotty, so he answered, though his habit when traveling into the mountains with Faith was to turn his phone off altogether.
“Yeah, we’re back!” he called over the noise of the snow tires singing over the blacktop. “… Faith? She’s great! She’s been strutting around in front of all the women in Charlottesville, bragging about how she captured me!”
Faith punched his shoulder, then reached down and took his hand. He squeezed it and said loudly into the phone, “We miss you already, Luca!… Of course you’re invited to the wedding, I’ll call you as soon as we set the date!… Sure, I’ll give her a kiss for you! And she sends her love to you!” He hung up and smiled at her. “He says I should ask you about the project you were talking with him about while we were there, on the neurological effects of music.”
“Early studies are suggesting that playing classical music to kids makes their IQ scores go up. It started me thinking: if music impacts the brain—”
“Post-traumatic coma. It might help induce healing!”
“Bingo, big guy! See, I knew you weren’t just another pretty face.”
“Why does it work? Soothing? Stimulating? Or that people get healthier when they’re exposed to beauty?” He looked from the Michelangelo postcard on the dashboard to Faith’s face. She had just switched on the headlights and they threw back soft reflections onto her skin.
“It’s love. Art is an expression of devotion, a tangible proof that someone cared enough to make and share beauty. It may be that we doctors accomplish more just by the physical touching of patients, by showing them concern, than with our science.”
“Love heals?”
“Love heals.”
“Faith is the right name for you.”
She smiled at him; then her eyes flicked back to the road and filled with terror. She jerked the wheel and opened her mouth as if to scream. But there was no time even for that.
In an instant, everything changed for Andrew Jones—all that he hoped and thought, all that he believed of life.
In an instant, Faith was gone.
2
When Luca had come to Virginia from Rome to give his lecture on art and its interplay with religious belief, Faith and Jones had been undergraduates. Faith had told Jones she studied art to see naked men; Jones had said he liked to investigate the use of color. Jones claimed the truth was that he wanted to see pictures of naked women and Faith liked to investigate the interplay between what people believed as their spiritual doctrines and what they found beautiful.
So they had gone to the lectures of the young Italian genius they had heard about, this man who could lecture without notes and answer any question and talk for hours about art and life and beauty.
They were not disappointed. Luca Manzi was small yet exuded power, both in his physical presence and in his aura of intelligence. But more than brain strength oozed from the man; he had a great heart and it showed in his eyes. His hair was Italian black, his eyes a deep brown, his face handsome and covered in a five o’clock shadow no matter what time of day it was. Faith and Jones had found his class in the main rotunda building and eased into chairs in the back of the room and listened enraptured as Luca paced in front of the fifty students gathered there and spoke about art history from the first cave paintings to modern movies, the pictures that moved and carried sound and narrative with them. The compact Italian could carry all of that in his head; he saw it all and so could point it out and teach it.
When it was over they had walked up and asked him to go to dinner with them. Luca accepted; his eyes lit up and he laughed and then he said yes, he had not eaten and he would like to try American food. Faith insisted, over Jones’s objections, that they take him to an Italian place but on the way Faith and Jones began to argue. “He’d like to sample what we call Italian here!” she whispered to Jones as they walked along.
“Our Italian won’t compare to his!” Jones whispered back. “Virginia Italian isn’t Italian Italian!”
Luca laughed and said, “The lovers are arguing, like lovers do! I wish I could paint you both!”
“You don’t paint?” Faith wondered.
“I can’t even draw well,” Luca said, his whole face lighting up as he smiled. “I teach art, I love art, I share art, but I cannot make it. I am fine with this. I did not make the world, either, and I love living, especially when I am with two young people who love each other so much as you two do, and who fight as if they don’t love each other and who care about nothing so much as they care about what each other thinks.”
Now Faith and Jones were both smiling as brightly as Luca was. “So where would you like to eat?” Jones asked.
“I like Chinese,” Luca said. “Or a steak. Pizza I don’t care for.”
They all laughed again and found a steak house. And there they had one of the great conversations of their lives. Luca told them about his girlfriend, a young woman who sounded clearly brilliant and full of life; as he spoke of her, Luca’s eyes lit up. Her mother was an art dealer, and her father had been a film producer in Rome. When Faith asked if they were getting married, Luca shook his head sadly and said that she was too young but that he loved her more than any woman he’d ever known.
“So you’re having drama, then,” Jones said, and once more Luca’s face exploded with a smile and laughter leapt from his lungs.
“Yes, I have drama!” he said, his hands flying around in the air as he spoke. “I love drama, all Italians do! We cannot live without it!”
“Is that why you love art?” Jones wondered. “Because it is dramatic?”
“Life is dramatic! The very fact that we are here is dramatic! We have been made to live, and to be alive is to be in the presence of God!”
Faith had always been curious about the nature of belief. Jones had never felt her trying to convince anyone else to believe what she did; in fact it had always seemed to him that she was trying to deepen her own beliefs and wanted to know what was in the hearts of others. Believe, she had always told Jones, is a stronger word than know. So when Luca, who had just lectured so lovingly on the interplay between art and faith, so boldly declared that to be alive was to be in the presence of God, Faith lit up. “What do you think of God?” she asked. “You are Catholic, right? So how do you see the path to faith? Is it through morality, through grace, through ritual? How do you see it?”
Luca laughed again. “I see it in many different ways, every moment of every day. I believe, I doubt; I laugh, I cry.” He took a sip of wine, shook his head, got lost in thought and then said, “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to understand. Nobody does. There are only two things anyone must know: there is a God, and that God loves us. That is all we need to know.”