“I don’t want you to. I’m like Sam, the surgery would kill me. What I want is for you to give me now. What I mean is, give me now.” She placed her hand over his. “I can’t take away your past. I can’t take Faith out of your life, or all she means to you. I don’t want to. All of that is part of you. And I’m in love—with you.”
It was not as if he had not known this already; but there is something about those three words, when they are said aloud. Jones couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She gripped his hand tighter, and her eyes shifted toward the open mouth of the valley where the sound of the bells floated up into the wind, and the mountain village lay, and beyond that larger towns, and cities, and nations, and a vast world that went about its business and felt so important in doing it; but all that mattered to her was the truth that she had found while rocking on a cabin porch, the truth she was telling him right now. “You can’t change my future. You didn’t give it to me, it’s not yours to change. But I have right now. I want to give my now to you. And all I want from you is for you to give me your—”
He kissed her. And he did something strange, for someone who had just realized he could love again.
He wept.
They descended the mountainside on the same path they had taken to climb it; Jones was quiet, lost in thought. Then halfway down, at a spot where another track joined their path, he stopped and said, “This way.”
She knew it was not the route they had originally followed, but she came along beside him quietly, holding his hand. They passed beneath the canopy of deep green leaves, their feet rustling through the years of fallen loam until they emerged into a clearing where an unpainted house stood, its planks weathered the same color as the tree trunks. Sitting in a rocker on the front porch was Allen. Lara was sure he had heard them coming before he had seen them, for there was no surprise in his face as he watched them move up. She was sure he had sat there for a long time. A rifle leaned against the wall behind him, but it seemed more a fixture than a weapon, bullets and gophers far from Allen’s consciousness now. Tobacco juice lay in a brown crust around his lips, and the spit jar beside the curved runner of his rocker was dry too. Once the tears are past, grief is a desert.
Jones led Lara to the base of Allen’s porch, and Allen nodded. It was a short nod, but it was welcoming. “Allen,” Jones said, “I need to ask you a favor.”
“Naw, you don’t,” Allen said. “You need something from me, no need to ask, just tell me.”
“I want you to marry us,” Jones said.
Jones had climbed up onto the porch and whispered into Allen’s ear, and Allen had nodded and answered in kind, and the two of them had whispered back and forth with Lara standing there watching, until Allen had risen and stepped into his cabin, emerging a few moments later with a battered Bible.
They walked into the woods again, taking no clear path this time, but Allen seemed sure about where he was going. A hundred yards from Allen’s front porch they came to a stream where crystalline water tumbled over green rocks, and there Allen stopped and turned to them. “Bring your license?” he asked, then looked from Lara to Jones and back to Lara, staring straight into their eyes. “There it is,” he said.
He did not open the Bible, but Lara had the feeling he had, in his time, performed many weddings, and Jones would tell her later that Allen was both ordained and a justice of the peace. Jones, in his whispers on the porch, had given Allen his instructions, and Allen was comfortable with the program. “Say what you need to say,” he told them.
Jones took Lara’s hand and said, “I will love you my whole life. And I will be with you and no other, as long I live.”
It took her a moment to get her hands and her lips to move, but she gripped his hands in both of hers and said, “I will love you my whole life. And I will be with you and no other, as long as I live.”
Allen looked at them both, lifted the Bible toward them, and said, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Amen.”
In the glow of the cabin fireplace, they made love.
They did not hurry.
As their instincts began to scream for each other their bodies grew taut, but still their eyes were soft, and they faced each other, so that everything they did was together, and everything in their lives—the fear, the grief, the pains, the hopes, all that is sex and all that is love, came together in one moment.
22
All of them were nervous: the line of four children, then Mavis, then her husband, sitting in a line on the metal folding chairs against the wall in the clinic trailer. Mavis took her husband’s hand and squeezed it tight, until the tips of his fingers glowed red as fresh strawberries. She kept glancing toward the new operating room, visible through the trailer window.
The new operating room stood in what was just another kind of trailer, a long wooden box towed in on wheels and set up on a freshly poured concrete pad. It was a bit makeshift, but the equipment was state-of-the-art and the accessories immaculate. Maggie, Mavis’s fifth child, the girl with the cleft palate, lay on the table, looking up at Lara, and Jones, and the two surgical nurses they’d brought up from Charlottesville. Maggie’s eyes were blue, and they had fear in them, holding on the only uncovered human features she could, the eyes of the surgeons and nurses visible between their caps and masks. But Lara was sure she could see trust in Maggie’s eyes too, a recognition from somewhere beyond thought that the woman who was looking down at her now, the same woman who had spoken to her when she was in the back of the truck, was someone who brought a gift. Maggie’s parents had told her the doctors were going to make her “all better.” Maggie did not fully understand what that meant. She had never known a world in which people could look at her without something terrible happening on their faces, something that said: Go away; I would rather you did not exist at all.
Merrill, the anesthesiologist, who said he’d donate his time the moment they told him what they were doing, fed liquid through Maggie’s IV drip, and Lara lowered her face closer to the girl and said, “Just close your eyes, honey, and we’ll take care of you.” Maggie sank into a motionless slumber. Lara looked across at Jones, and they began.
Lara’s hands, from the first lift of the instruments, moved in a fluid ballet, her eyes intense and brilliant above her mask, never looking away from the task, yet tuned into Jones’s voice as he watched and spoke soft directions for the artistic shaping of the tissue. It was Jones, not Lara, who had to struggle to stay centered on the task; he had never seen her operate before, and her virtuosity both surprised and distracted him.
The time flowed as smoothly as Lara’s movements; even as focused as she was, when every fragment of the experience was burning itself into her memory, it seemed over almost as soon as it had begun. They wheeled the girl into their small recovery room at the other end of their new trailer, and as soon as she awoke Lara lifted her in her arms and carried her through the connecting hallway the Mennonites had just constructed and into the waiting room, where Mavis and her husband looked up and Lara placed Maggie into her father’s arms. He pulled back the covering from his daughter’s face, and he and Mavis froze.
When they looked up again at Lara, their eyes were full of awe.
A low fire glowed in the cabin’s fireplace, scattering light across the rough sawn planks of the floor. Steam rose from the bathtub, where the water still sat because Lara had just been reaching to pull out the stopper when Jones had picked her up, towel and all, and carried her to the bed.