“Wait! That one!” Jones said when she dialed across a honky-tonk dance tune.
“You’re kidding me.”
“No! Here, do what I do!” He took her hand and led her through the simple movements of a western line dance.
Lara struggled her way into the rhythm. “This is great! How am I doing?”
“You dance like a doctor. But… that’s a good thing!”
She switched the radio dial and found an oldie ballad.
And without embarrassment, as naturally as breathing, they began to dance, holding each other close.
Encirled within each other’s arms, they felt love rising, not just its lofty emotion but its earthly, physical trance. Both of them sensed it; they broke apart immediately. Jones looked around for anything else to focus on, anything besides her yes, and spotted the barn. He struggled to make conversation. “That’s the nicest barn I’ve ever seen,” he said. “But I don’t smell horses.”
“No. They’re all gone. My father built that barn.”
They walked together, side by side but not touching, out of the dome of light around the gardens and into the unlit night, to the broad mouth of the barn. Lara reached for the switch on the wall and illuminated a lane of cedar chips between green- and white-painted walls, with stables carpeted in clean hay, all empty. It wasn’t an extravagant showcase, it was a practical, working barn. Lara said, “He worked so hard to control life and health. He saw horses as wild and liberating.”
Jones took a few steps down the lane between the horse stalls, then stopped. She watched him as he looked around, breathing in the spirit of the place. “He built this barn for you, didn’t he,” Jones said. Not a question but a statement.
“You know, you scare me sometimes, what you see.”
“Why didn’t you keep the horses?”
“It wasn’t fair to them. I didn’t ride them anymore. I was too much like my father, caught up so much in the future that I couldn’t live now.… And you… uh… I just want to thank you for…” Suddenly she couldn’t speak.
His eyes were shining. “No. I owe you,” he said. “My life is in the past. I won’t ever escape that. But you’ve given me a little piece of the present. I’m the one to thank you.”
Surprised, disarmed, she smiled.
“I guess I’d better get back to my hotel,” he said.
“Yes. I’ll drive you.”
They started toward the door, both of them sure the danger had passed.
They were wrong. Neither moved first—they reached for each other’s hands—and the moment their fingertips touched it was explosive. They kissed.
In that moment Lara could feel everything she’d ever wanted to feel. Then she stopped abruptly and turned away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so very sorry.”
“What…?”
“It’s not—it’s not right. I’ve used you. I’m sorry. I should never—” She pulled away from him; it was easy, his arms had gone numb.
“Used me? How have you—”
“I can’t love you. And you can’t love me. We have no future. This night was selfish of me… so selfish.”
He tried to take her back into his arms, but she stepped completely away from him, pulling in breaths as if to sober herself from the intoxication of love, of life.
Jones stood there watching her, not hurt, not angry, just mystified. “I don’t understand,” he said quietly.
“I wish I didn’t. I’ll call you a cab.” Then she hurried out, leaving him alone… and desolate.
17
Jones flew home alone.
Lara returned to her work in Chicago and spent endless hours staring blankly at new engineering plans and listening to Malcolm stalwartly trying to push ahead with their research.
But she couldn’t keep from staring out the window, her mind in Virginia.
Jones, the second night after he had returned to Charlottesville, took a detour as he walked home from his shift at the Emergency Room and found himself stopped outside the restaurant where he and Lara had first tried to have dinner. He stared through the glass at the table where they sat, and he watched as the maitre d’ seated a young couple at the romantic corner he and Lara had occupied, and their happiness burned Jones as he felt the loss of Lara’s presence.
At the same time that Jones pulled himself away from the restaurant and walked on along the silent sidewalk, Lara stood at the veranda of her estate, looking out over the empty grounds.
Jones pulled his car to the shoulder of the mountain road and stopped. He stepped out, careful not to make noise. He lifted a large box from the passenger seat and walked through the foggy darkness of the mountain.
He came upon a dark, silent house trailer tucked into the trees; a pickup truck sat beside it. Jones moved quietly to the bed of the pickup and left the new power saw he had bought that afternoon, down in Charlottesville.
In the mountain clinic, Jones clipped the ends of the stitches he had sewn into the arm of a teenager who had been bow hunting when he fell from a shooting stand and impaled his own bicep. The door of the clinic opened, and Allen appeared. “Doc… can we talk a minute?”
Jones followed Allen outside to his rusting car; Sam sat in the passenger seat. Sam looked frail, but was in his regular overalls again. “Sam,” Jones greeted him gently. “What can I do for you?”
“Operate on me.”
Jones tried to find a way to respond and had no words.
Sam said, “I know. I know there ain’t much hope. But that’s the point.” He gazed at Jones so directly, with eyes that had seen much truth and so many lies and held so much wisdom to distinguish between them, that Jones felt himself in the presence of something divine. But Sam was mortal, and that was his message. “Men like me, and Allen, and your daddy, we lived our whole lives without much hope. Can’t earn a living in the mountains, people said. The mines would close, crops would die, then your children would die. And all that happened. But we went on.” Sam’s gray eyes scanned the gray mountains. “When your daddy died, people said you wouldn’t turn out to be nothin’, but look at you. A doctor.”
Andrew—for he felt like a boy now, in Sam and Allen’s presence, not Dr. Jones but the boy who grew in and from these mountains, looking up to the men like the one who sat in the car beside him—said, “That’s all I am, a doctor. And not even a whole one.”
“Boy,” Sam said, “ain’t nobody here impressed that you got learnin’. We’re impressed you’re here. You’re hope to me. And a man like me, I don’t need much hope. But I need a little. I’m worse than dead without it.”
The next day, Jones checked Sam into the hospital in Charlottesville and ordered a complete set of scans on his brain. When the scans were ready, he took them to his office, told Janet to hold every phone call, and began studying the scans obsessively.
He used a tiny instrument to trace a route he might follow. He paused to look at his hand. It was rock solid.
An hour later the Emergency Room nurse dropped by Jones’s office; Janet looked up and said, “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” the nurse said, “I just—He’s seemed especially quiet the last couple of days.”
“He has, hasn’t he.”
“What’s he doing now?” the nurse wondered, looking toward Jones’s closed door. A closed door was unlike him, and Janet knew it too.
Janet leaned closer to her and whispered, “I think he might be thinking of operating again.” The nurse locked eyes with Janet; both of them knew that news would spread through the whole hospital and the medical school, if it were true. “He admitted a patient from his clinic in the mountains this morning.”