Juliet stuck her head in the door. “Dr. Blair—”
“We’re having a discussion, Juliet!” Lara shouted.
“I know, Dr. Blair, but—”
“A private discussion!”
“I know, but—something just came for you that I thought you’d want to see right away.” She put the package on Lara’s desk. “It’s from Virginia.” Juliet drew out the name of the state: Vir-GIN-i-a!
Brenda gave Lara a look; and Juliet stayed put.
Lara glared at them both. “You’re just gonna stand there and watch me open it?”
“Well… yeah!” Brenda answered, without a trace of guilt.
Lara opened the box, with Brenda and Juliet looking on; the other secretaries watched through the slot of the door.
From the protective paper, Lara pulled a tiny display case, the kind that Jones used to hold his micro sculptures.
Lara placed the slide into the viewing slit of the microscope and dialed it into focus. Brenda and Juliet stood behind her, Brenda biting her lips and Juliet’s thumbs skimming back and forth across the ends of her fingers. She had typed and texted so much in her life that emotions radiated through her fingertips.
Through the twin eyepieces of the microscope, the new sculpture became visible for Lara. She saw a remarkably graceful carving… And as she worked the microscope dials to shift the microscope’s tray she realized it was a sculpture of a woman. She dialed again, scanning up to the face of the sculpture…
Lara pulled back sharply from the eyepieces.
“What?” Brenda sang, like a girl watching a favorite sister open a package on Christmas morning. “What is it?”
Lara did not answer, just stood back from the microscope, her eyes turned away and fixed on a far corner of the room, so Brenda and Juliet scrambled for a look themselves, each pulling at an eyepiece so both could view at once.
What they saw was a carving of Lara.
Jones had carved her holding a cellular phone up to her ear.
“It’s you!” Juliet said, her fingertips flying in all directions at once.
Brenda said nothing; she just pulled back from the eyepiece and looked smugly at Lara.
14
Jones, followed by two young medical residents, entered Sam’s hospital room, carrying the reports on all the tests Jones had ordered run on him. Jones held the folder easily in his left hand, and the ease was part of what he was teaching the students: What is on a paper may be data, it may be scientific numbers—but it is not fact. The only fact a patient cares about is whether they are going to live through whatever has brought them to the hospital, and that fact is influenced by how much confidence they have in their doctor, so always, always stay relaxed.
Sam was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, with his old buddy Allen at his bedside. When Jones entered, Allen was saying, “And since we been gone for a few days, all the fish in the lake will have got fatter, and they’ll be good eatin’. That’s right, Sam; that’s right. We’ll catch all of ’em. And the gophers will have got lazy, and we’ll shoot all of ’em. Things’ll be better’n ever, once we get you home.”
Allen was looking up at the ceiling too, as if he could see the images of home he was projecting there for Sam. Both mountaineers turned and looked at Jones as he moved to Sam’s bedside, and the residents stood respectfully behind him.
“All the tests have come back,” Jones said.
“Give it to me straight,” Sam said.
“You have what’s called—something in Latin. It’s a blockage in the main artery in your neck that feeds your brain.”
Allen slapped his right hand on his own knee and said, “I knew it. He ain’t been gettin’ blood up there for some time.”
Sam’s blue eyes, watery yet sharp, snapped in Allen’s direction. “I ain’t been gettin’ blood in a lot of places, but they ain’t fell off yet.”
“It will,” Allen answered, “just give it time.”
Jones sat down on the edge of the bed. The two residents shifted over by the window, where there sat a potted plant, grown in the window of the mountain clinic and sent down with Sam when Allen drove him down. “The blockage itself is operable,” Jones said. “The odds of surviving are actually pretty good.”
“There’s a but in there someplace,” Sam said, and in that moment he reminded Jones of every man he’d ever known from the mountains, the kind of men who didn’t want to know how you hoped something would be, but how it was. In that moment Jones missed his father.
“Your heart’s arrhythmic,” Jones answered, “it doesn’t beat just right. We can put you on machines for the operation, but that bounces your blood pressure, and that affects your third condition. It shows in the scans.” Jones opened the folder and took out a sheet of film, holding it up to the light so Sam could see. “These thin artery walls caused your little stroke. They’re ready to cause a big stroke.”
“Sounds like we ought’a go down to the bank, and you take out a biiiiiig loan,” Allen said, still squinting up at the ceiling even after Jones had put the film back into the folder.
“There’s not much anybody can do,” Jones said.
“Not much, or nothin’ a’tall?” Sam demanded.
Jones put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Always touch the patients, he had told the residents; people need human contact, especially when they’re old, especially when they’re sick. Don’t just tell them you care, let them feel it. “Let’s see if medication will help.”
A voice on the intercom called, “Dr. Jones, line four…”
Jones left the residents to confer with Sam about the medication and moved out into the hospital corridor, where he picked up a wall phone and said, “Jones.”
He heard Lara say, “The cell phone was a nice touch.” Her voice was softer, happier, more relaxed than he had ever heard it. He guessed that she was somewhere away from the office, because it wasn’t an office voice he heard at the other end of the line. In fact she had stepped into her private apartment to make the call.
“I thought you’d like that,” he said.
For a moment he heard only silence, but in that silence he heard—no, he felt, in the same way a patient felt a doctor’s true caring—her smiling. Then she said, “Dr. Jones, I think we may have a solution here. We’ve used scans of an actual patient coupled with mapping techniques we got from NASA to construct a model brain that mirrors precisely the condition we’re facing. We call it Roscoe. Now this replica contains microscopic sensors that alert us to any mistake. You with me so far?”
“You nearly lost me at Roscoe but I think I’m muddling through.”
“What if you did the operation on the model?”
“What good would it do? Even if you could duplicate my moves exactly—”
“That’s just it—we can! Roscoe’s sensors transmit to hard drives that collect every nuance of the surgeon’s movements—and that’s only half our equation. The other half is that we can replicate those movements with absolute precision.”
“Roscoe must have a lot of sensors,” Jones said into the phone, laughing.
“I think the scientific term for it is ‘oodles,’” Lara said. “Somewhere between ‘scads’ and ‘a truck load.’” Lara, leaning back on the white couch in her apartment in the office building, realized in that moment that she had not joked with anyone for a long, long time—for longer than she could remember. She looked out over the city beyond her windows, at the clouds above the city, at the sky above the clouds. How long had she been looking down? She ran her fingers over the silken fabric of the couch. Who buys a white couch, anyway? she thought. And when did my life become so sterile? She stood and walked to the window. “We do the operation until we get it right. Then we make our machine repeat it.”