“Hi, Stafford. What’s up?”
“I’ve got a patient, eighty-three years old, on life support. Her brain activity stopped this morning.”
Jones put down his carving tools. He looked at Stafford, liking him for caring enough to ponder such a question, to come and ask it. Jones moved him away from the residents, toward the counter where they left all the carved miniatures to dry, and said, “Somebody’s got to tell her family to turn off the machines. And the hospital wants you to do it.”
“Yeah.”
“And you want me to do it.”
“No. Yeah. No. I just… need some advice.”
“You take the weight off the family. Tell them there’s no hope if she stays on the machines, but if you turn them off there’s the tiniest chance that her body will come back on its own. Then you give the patient enough morphine that you’re sure, for the rest of your life, that she could feel no pain. And you turn off the machines… . Do you want me to do it?”
“No. I’ll do it.” Stafford started to walk away.
“Stafford.” Stafford stopped, and looked back to Jones. “Whenever you think back on it, remember the peace you gave them. And the price you paid to do it.”
Stafford nodded and walked away. Jones watched him go, and the weight of the moment, of what he had just felt and said, caused him to pause.
He sat down at one of the empty carving stations. He switched on the microscope light and picked up the carving instruments.
Lara walked out of the Blair Bio-Med Building, onto a Chicago sidewalk, the medical complex behind her and office buildings in the other three directions. She found herself squinting against the sunlight; it had been a while since she had been outside.
She walked alone down the street. She seemed to remember that there was a church somewhere in the neighborhood, a relic built more than a hundred years ago and spared for its architecture. Halfway down the block she found it—a small cathedral, now stained through years of neglect. She stood on the sidewalk and stared at it for a long moment. An ornamental iron fence surrounded it, but the gate was wide open, and Lara walked inside.
Lara was unfamiliar with the surroundings within the sanctuary; she looked around like any stranger might, taking it all in. The sanctuary was empty except for a few older women saying prayers and a couple of winos sleeping in the pews.
Not far from the rear doors was a box, marked “For the Poor.”
Lara moved up beside it. She glanced around to be sure no one was watching, then withdrew a large envelope from her purse and slipped it into the poor box.
Then she walked out, into the spring sunshine.
Lara walked back toward the Blair Bio-Med Building. There was something different about her—or was it that something was different about the world around her? She noticed the bustle, the people, the energy everywhere; she closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face.
As she reached the building, she noticed that in the planter boxes beside the entrance, the trees were budding, and there, on one, she saw the first blossom of spring.
She stopped to admire that first blossom, to appreciate it, like a prayer.
Just before sunset an old priest stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray beside the holy water and entered the sanctuary. Mechanically he tossed a new carton of candles onto the votive boxes and emptied its coin box, like any other broken-down vender making his rounds.
Working his way to the rear of the church, impatiently waving a drunk out of his way, he reached the poor box and unlocked it. He found the envelope, opened it… and stopped short. The envelope was full of thousand-dollar bills.
13
When Lara arrived at her headquarters building the next morning, she felt—felt before she thought it—that something was different around her. Everyone, from the wiry Salvadoran attendant who handled the jumble of cars in their underground parking structure, to Amos, the security guard who stood by the entrance into the main foyer, to the just-out-of-college interns who rode the elevator up with her—all of them seemed changed. Then it struck Lara that the change was in her. Ever since the night before, when she had left the envelope in the poor box, she had felt a surging thrill, had felt it from the moment the envelope had slid from her hand into the dark slit and thudded onto the wood of the bare bottom of the box. She had no name for this feeling; she had never known its sensations, or its perspectives. Last night the world was vivid, and she saw it with clarity. She had thought this to be a temporary elation, brought on by the adrenaline of a new adventure and the sense of the unknown that came with the gift.
Then she had slept with more peace than she had known in years. And now here she was this morning, feeling the same way; and the people around her did look happier, brighter, more optimistic, as if somehow, beyond some vast horizon, hope waited for them—all of them, for through some dynamic that Lara did not begin to understand, her gift, unknown to everyone in the world but her, had united her with everybody, even strangers. Hope. Lara had not known real hope for a long, long time. She did not know Hope’s true absence, until she felt its coming.
It was not just that Lara noticed something different about everyone else; everyone else noticed a change in her. The people at Blair Bio-Medical were like any other herd of humans; they drew their mood from their leader, and most of the time that process was subtle and unconscious, but this morning the transformation in Lara from the heaviness that had smothered her spirit in the last weeks to the lightness that lifted her along as she moved down the corridors was unmistakable. The girls at the clerical desks, most of whom dreamed of being like Lara someday, were the first to talk about it, but the men noticed it too and exchanged glances with each other after Lara had passed.
Lara went to her office and met with Malcolm and Brenda to discuss their agenda for the days ahead; it was not uncommon for any of them to show up for work with new suggestions, for all of them kept thinking of their shared goals even when they weren’t in the building, so when Lara said, “I’ve been thinking…” Malcolm and Brenda were not surprised.
But the internal qualities of that thinking, the way Lara now seemed to let thoughts develop rather than drive them forward—that did surprise them. She let her mind drift, and had they met Jones they might have recognized that the flow of Lara’s mental processes matched a feeling that had begun when she and Jones were walking beneath the stars in Virginia. “It seems to me…” Lara went on, slowly and inwardly, “that maybe we have more resources than we know.” Malcolm and Brenda glanced at each other, but Lara was not distracted by their lack of understanding—what resources is she talking about?—and accepted that her understanding was evolving, that it didn’t have to be perfectly formed and rigid. “What I mean is, maybe instead of seeing our inability to recruit Dr. Jones as some kind of failure—which it really isn’t, since if he couldn’t work for us, that’s not our fault or even his fault, it’s just a fact—we could see it as an opportunity.” Lara lifted her eyes to her friends, these people she knew—with absolutely certainty—loved her, and Lara’s eyes were full of light. “I learned something from him. I learned a lot from him. He showed me his approach, and he also showed me that I could draw from that approach. We need to make modifications. We need to try again. Malcolm, I want you to go assemble the whole design team down in the lab. The Roscoes can stay the same, but we’re going to change the equipment, the setting, and most of all our approach to the work. Things will be different because I’m going to be different.”