Now Lara lay as limp on the bed as the damp towel lay on the floor, her head on Andrew’s chest, her eyes dreamy as he traced his fingertips across the landscape of her back. “Tired?” he whispered.
“When was the last time I told you this has been the happiest day of my life?”
“Yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that.” He loved the texture of her skin, and the thought floated through his mind that there is nothing in the world like the feeling of a woman’s back when she is dozing in the arms of a man she knows loves her.
“Mmm…” she moaned. “You do have incredible hands.” She moved her cheek as if to snuggle deeper into his chest—but felt the shudder go through him, like a chill through his soul. She lifted her head. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing, I—”
“Andrew…?” Her eyes were open now, wide awake.
“That… that was something Faith said to me.” He kept his arms around her, but now his fingers felt like peeled carrots, left too long out of the refrigerator.
“Andrew. Don’t do that; you do-not-do-that! Don’t go to the past, you are not responsible for it. It’s not your fault, it’s not yours to change!” He tried to look away, and she wouldn’t let him. “Please look at me.” She tugged his chin until he looked in her direction. “I swore I’d never say this, but I have to. You didn’t kill Faith, you didn’t let her die, you did your best, and it wasn’t up to you. Good as you are, it was not up to you. And neither is the future. It’s not your fault, and it’s not yours to change either. Be here, with me, now. Be here, with me, now—”
She was kissing him, willing him to her with all her heart, wanting to heal him not with her skill or her knowledge, but with her love.
There are times in life when physical excitement swirls in the wake of fantasy or flirtation and slides in on the wave of a mighty mood, crashing and breaking and meaning no more than the breaking bubbles of sea foam that other waves leave behind.
There are other times when intimacy rises like heat from the dark core of the earth, becoming fire in the surface air, hot enough to turn ancient stone into flowing magma, leaving behind mountains, islands, continents. What happened between Andrew and Lara then was that kind.
23
In six weeks, work was going on everywhere on the mountain. Carpenters were tearing away rotten boards from the old barn just up the road from the clinic and re-siding it with new timber; painters were at work on the house; surveyors were sighting, marking, driving stakes, laying out areas for the new construction. Nell had organized the country women into a cook crew, and their grandsons and nephews were setting up picnic tables for the food Nell’s sisters were roasting on outdoor fires. Jones, standing in the center of a grid of stakes and string, heard a truck pull up and looked to see Carl arrive with his family. The children ran to the play area; his wife kissed him and joined the cooking party.
Jones watched as Carl moved to the rear of his truck and began to take out his carpentry tools. He glanced up to see Jones. Carl stopped what he was doing and said, “Oh. Hi, Doc. Look, uh… I know the stuff about the virus was bull. But it made me think.” Jones nodded. Carl touched his index finger to his cap in a salute to Jones, then lifted his new saw from the back of his pickup and headed toward the barn to join the work there.
“Doctor Jones!” Nell called. Coming up the road was another pickup truck, carrying Mavis and her family.
“Get Lara,” Jones said, and Nell ran to fetch Lara from the examination room. In a moment Lara stepped out into the sunshine, then walked up to stand beside Jones. Everyone—the surveyors, the carpenters, the women setting up the food at the picnic tables—stopped working and turned to watch. The truck tires crunched into the new gravel at the clinic turn-in, and the engine clattered to silence. The driver’s door squeaked open and Larry stepped out. The passenger side opened and Mavis stepped out too. And then, behind her, came Maggie. The hole was gone now, and in its place was nothing more than a faint line on a luminously beautiful face.
For a moment everyone was silent. And then they were cheering. Maggie, not knowing quite what to do, stood beside her mother gripping her skirt until Mavis leaned down and told her it was all right to go to Lara; then Maggie ran to her and kissed her, then ran back to her mother.
It took a moment for Lara to speak. When she did her voice was husky. “I’ve got to get the camera,” she said to Jones.
“Yeah, you do that,” he said. He stood and watched it all, the happiness of the people, the congratulations of the farmers and carpenters to Mavis’s family. It would be easy for an outsider—a member of Lara’s management team from Chicago, for example, or even one of the medical school doctors from Charlottesville, less than a hundred miles away—to see the mountain people as one uniform society, but there were rankings among them as distinct as the social pecking order among socialites at a Manhattan soiree; the mountaineers, like the Manhattanites, knew who made money, knew who cheated on their spouse and who was faithful, knew who had children who were achieving something the others found admirable; in one place that achievement might be acceptance into an Ivy League school and in another it might be a Medal of Honor, but both recognized rank and that ranking created barriers. But as Jones’s eyes followed Maggie, and the way everyone around her took in her transformation and felt themselves somehow a part of the wretchedness of her previous rejection and the grace of her newness, all their separation fell away. In that moment, they were a family.
Then Jones heard a faint crash in the cabin, what he immediately knew was the sound of a camera lens breaking. Then he heard a wooden chair knocked over onto the plank floorboards.
He ran to the cabin door and was the first one inside. He found Lara staggering, her left arm dangling lifeless at her side; before he could reach her, her legs buckled and she stumbled to her knees, falling sideways as her right leg fought to stay straight and her left gave way completely.
Carl drove them in his pickup down to Charlottesville; Jones refused to wait for an ambulance and was too shaken to drive himself; Nell found it striking that he knew Carl would be the safest of all at the wheel.
In two hours Lara was in a hospital bed. She was sitting up and seemed fine when Jones walked in with a folder full of test results and scans. “You shouldn’t have brought me here,” she said, before he could tell her anything. “We should’ve stayed at the clinic.”
“We don’t have cerebral scanning equipment at the clinic. How do you feel?”
“Normal. Ischemic attack, right?”
“Yeah. There was a swelling around the aneurism, but no rupture.” He showed her the scan so she could see for herself. “The increased blood volume in your body is putting pressure on the weak vein wall.”
“Increased…?”
“You’re pregnant.”
She nodded, oddly contained and silent.
“You’re not surprised,” Jones said.
“I’m a doctor, and a woman. Something was different. I’d even started thinking I might make it all the way to motherhood because pregnancy does things to a woman’s body, it makes her stronger and more resilient. And what a gift it would be if you and I, without meaning to, had made something more miraculous than anything our minds and our talent could ever invent.”
For any other patient, Jones would have sat beside the bed; now he began to pace. The emotions rising in him were like thunderheads colliding in the sky, certain to bring a storm. “The pregnancy isn’t having that effect,” he said, almost angrily. “The pressure on the aneurism is going to make it rupture.”