Still Lara didn’t answer.
Malcolm’s voice changed, from the tone he would take in a boardroom to the one he would have used to reassure a child at bedtime. “We haven’t given up,” he said again. Then he sat down beside her, like her father used to do, and put his arm around her. She leaned her head against his shoulder. And wept.
Jones stood by Sam’s bed. Sam was connected to a heart-lung machine that forced air in and out of his lungs and kept his heart beating.
Jones gripped the old man’s hand; but the hand was lifeless. Jones nodded his head once.
Stafford flipped the switch. The machine stopped.
Jones squeezed Sam’s hand again.
Sam’s hand twitched, just once, and then went still.
Jones, still wearing his hospital scrubs, sat alone on a park bench. Night was falling, and the sky was spitting snow, and the bleak cold made his desolation complete.
He squeezed his hands together into fists. He wanted to punch something—a wall, or himself. He wanted to break his hands—and the talent that had become for him nothing but a curse.
Two hours later he still sat on the bench, and his hands were trembling from the cold. Night had fallen fully, and alone in the frigid blackness of the night, Jones felt the anger and bitterness gnawing at him, more and more. So he stood and staggered away on frozen feet.
He walked by storefronts, past other pedestrians hurrying through the night, and he was blind to all of them. Icy rain pecked his face, and he felt nothing but his own pain.
He stopped in the light of a convenience store, out of strength, out of hope, out of purpose.
He started to walk again and nearly ran into a young mother, with her baby, entering the store. Jones didn’t recognize the mother. But he recognized the coat, and then the baby. It was the one whose life he had saved.
Jones stood in the cold darkness and watched the young mother inside the convenience store. She moved to the cooler, but it wasn’t beer or liquor she reached for, it was milk. On the way to the cash register she picked up cereal and a loaf of bread.
It was the most mundane of things, a woman buying food for her child. But for Jones, it was a miracle. He watched in reverence.
She finished paying and walked out, glancing up at Jones and not recognizing him.
She walked away, holding her baby close to her chest, nuzzling the infant’s cheek against her own, safe and warm.
Jones watched her go.
He turned and walked in the other direction, the emotions settling like dust from an explosion inside him, his thoughts tumbling, unforced, unfocused.
And then, suddenly, he understood.
19
Lara sat at her desk, but she was not working; she stared into the distance beyond her windows, as if looking toward the future and seeing nothing there. The sound of the door opening did not cause her to stir. But when she heard nothing else she said, “Just put them on the desk, Juliet. I’ll sign them later.”
When she heard no movement, she turned impatiently and began to say, “Just—”
As she turned she saw Jones, clear eyed, wearing a suit and tie, immaculate, focused, handsome. Without willing herself to move, she was suddenly standing.
He said, “I couldn’t figure it out, how we could be so connected, and then you could be so withdrawn. I thought it was me, the baggage I carry, the poison of having a gift I can’t use. I just came to the shocking realization that All Life is not about me. This is about you. The brain Roscoe is modeled after is yours.”
She brought herself to nod: Yes.
“How long have you known you had the condition?” he asked.
“Since Med School. My father had used his own equipment to scan me, once a year since I was a child. He told me it was to see inside my brain so he could tell if my thoughts were happy. Then he said it was to test his new machines. When I was in high school I began to suspect there was more to it. As soon as I could, I ordered a scan done, and there it was. It’s what my mother died of.”
“What your father invented surgeries and instruments to try to fix.”
“I told you I was selfish. It’s my own life I’ve been trying to save. And you know what’s sad? I haven’t had a life worth saving. I wanted to fix you—when I was the one who was broken.”
They had been standing ten feet away from each other; he moved past her and sat in a chair by the window. “And now you feel doomed,” he said.
She could not deny that.
He looked out at the skyline of Chicago and then turned to look at her. “You were hoping I could save you. If only I could operate again. If only I could see you as lifeless as Roscoe. Well… it’s far too late for that. I actually… I tried. I operated again. On Sam. And he… He didn’t make it.”
All of this—his love for her, the truth now open between them, the news of Sam’s loss and the knowledge of how much that had cost Andrew Jones—broke her free and sent her rushing to him, gripping him, pulling him into her arms, wanting to give him all the comfort of her heart.
He was emotional but wasn’t weeping; he was stronger than she thought. He had a plan he had come there to tell her. “I have an idea,” he said. “Something that we both need. Come back with me to Faith’s clinic. Let’s stop trying to save the world, or even save ourselves. Just help. One person, one at a time. Maybe that’s salvation.”
Then all Lara’s pain and all her worry fell away, and she smiled.
THE SURPRISE
20
It is their pale hue when seen from a distance that gives the Blue Ridge Mountains their name, but from the cabin nestled among them they were the mottled brown of weathered tree trunks, the gray of ancient granite, the deep green of deciduous leaves. All these colors showed vividly around the cabin. Jones opened the door for Lara and lingered on the porch as she stepped inside.
She found a long rectangular room with a plank floor, furnished in rustic simplicity. A hickory bedstead, with its feather mattress made up with quilts, stood near the hearth. “I stay overnight here sometimes,” Jones said. He pointed to the cabin’s bathroom, in an enclosure of pine-finished plywood. “The tub’s old, but the water’s hot. This place’ll be yours; I’ll take the cot out in the trailer.”
She set down her bag and looked around. “It’s almost… Amish,” she said.
“Mennonite carpenters built it,” Jones said, smiling. “There’s a community of them in the next valley, and nobody works in wood like they do. They’re related to the Amish, just a little more modern.”
Jones clearly loved the place and admired the men who had built it. And in fact it had been not only men; when the Mennonites had agreed to erect the cabin—donating their work because the clinic provided them emergency medical care—two gray-haired grandfathers had appeared to take measurements at the site; brown-bearded fathers had pre-cut all the wood in their home workshops and hauled it up in trucks; and then it was their sons, some of them as young as twelve years old, who had done the assembly. To most observers it was a nicely built cabin; to Jones it was a work of supreme craftsmanship. And Lara immediately spotted it as art.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. She stepped back out onto the porch and bathed her lungs in the mountain air, drenched with sunshine. She smiled at him, then saw one pickup, then another and another, pulling to a stop in front of the clinic trailer.
“Nell’s put out the word that we’re here,” Jones said. “Time to get busy.”