The Touch (11 page)

Most of the older churches in Virginia's wealthiest areas were Episcopal, a reflection of the time two hundred fifty years before, when it was illegal under the rules of the British government for anyone in the Commonwealth to be a member of any other denomination. But not far along the road Jones came to a Lutheran church, built by the descendants of the German immigrants who had brought their skills in mining, glassmaking, woodwork, and horsemanship into the fertile markets of the New World. The church was small yet stately, faced entirely with gray stone, beneath a tall slate roof. Jones had always found it quite beautiful.

He stopped on the paved roundabout that served as the church's parking lot, stopped his car, and got out. There was no one around this early in the morning, and no one passed on the road except a pickup truck full of hay bound in tight bales.

Jones walked toward the church, but instead of going in, he moved past the front door and kept walking to the short forest of stone monuments that made up the small cemetery that characterized every old church in Virginia. Without stopping, for he well knew the way, he approached a grave.

Faith's grave.

How her body had come to rest here, in the graveyard of a church she had never attended, was for Jones a curious story of pride mixed with baffling religious prejudice. Faith's father's family had attended a Lutheran church in Pennsylvania, and he had married her mother there; Faith's mother was not religious but—she later told her daughter—she had found the church to be a lovely setting for sprays of flowers and men in tuxedoes and a bride in a white wedding gown. (Jones had learned about all of this directly from Faith when they were dreaming of their own wedding.) Faith's mother had surprised everyone by wanting a traditional wedding—surprised them because she was given to talking about her life-changing experiences at Woodstock, and she wore beads and flowers in her hair long after Faith's father had earned his law degree and started wearing suits to work every day. But the mother was an artist; she formed uniquely shaped pottery and painted unusual picture frames, and Faith's father didn't mind her quirks.

He did mind, however, when his wife grew bored and tired of her life as a lawyer's wife and moved to California, the same month their daughter left home for college. Apparently there was another artist involved, a man Faith's mother talked about when she would phone her at the dormitory. That relationship did not last, for Faith and Andrew, when they traveled out to California to meet Faith's mother when they had returned from their Europe trip and had begun to plan their own wedding, did not meet the man and never heard him mentioned. But the mother remained in California.

Faith's father had died shortly after her graduation from college. When Faith told Andrew about this it was the only time he had ever seen her weep. She said she knew it was illogical but she had always believed that since her father's fondest dream was to see her safely set off into life—to see her “raise her sails,” he had told her—he had stayed alive despite the medical condition he had developed when he and Faith's mother had journeyed to India one summer when their daughter was away at a scholastic camp for academically gifted junior high schoolers. While Faith's mother had studied art, yoga, and transcendental meditation, he had worked on a Habitat for Humanity build site; somewhere along the way he contracted hepatitis; later they found liver cancer; a month after he saw his daughter lift her sails and toss her graduation cap into the June sky, he was dead.

They buried him in the graveyard of the Lutheran church he had attended as a boy in Pennsylvania. Faith's mother did not attend the funeral; but, she told Faith, she had performed a ceremony in celebration of her father's life with some friends in California who had never met her father but who were acquainted with his higher energies.

Jones kept these facts to himself; on their surface they would, he knew, make Faith's mother sound shallow and soulless to most of the people he knew. Sometimes, of course, she seemed exactly that way to him. She was the mother of the woman Jones loved; but it was not just respect for Faith that caused Jones to keep the facts about her mother private. Jones knew the woman did have a heart; he heard it break, on the terrible day when he had to make the phone call to California to tell her about the accident that had taken her daughter's life.

Faith's mother flew back from California, her first return to the East Coast since she had left her husband seven years before. When she saw Andrew she collapsed into his arms and wept, and it didn't matter then that Andrew had grown up hearing his grandmother sing “The Old Rugged Cross” and his almost-mother-in-law had spent the last decade chanting in an ashram; they grieved for the love of the same beautiful life, and the truth was that they leaned on each other.

It was when time came for them to choose Faith's final resting place that problems arose. Her mother favored cremation and the spreading of the ashes in some sacred grove—though she was not able to articulate just where that grove might be, or what would have made it sacred to Faith. Jones's preference was to have Faith laid to rest in the cemetery beside the church in the mountains, next to the clinic Faith had founded; it was where Jones intended to be buried someday. But his desires, no matter how deep and heartfelt, had no legal standing; he and Faith had not yet married, and her mother was the closest blood relative. She never fully insisted on a New Age sort of ceremony and a cremation after, but it was clear to Jones that the idea of Faith being interred in the ground of a church in Appalachia threatened every one of her mother's cultural assumptions. Her mother never used the word God, even to apply it as if it meant simply
a
god. She spoke of Spirit, and did not seem to feel that Spirit existed in the shadow of the evergreens up in hillbilly country.

They were at an impasse until one lonely night outside the funeral home, when Jones took her to dinner and Faith's mother confided to him that none of her friends from California were going to come out to join her for the ceremony. They sent their Highest Intentions and Celebrations, but they couldn't come. But some friends and relatives from Pennsylvania were coming. And Jones saw then in her face the agonies that she felt. Those people would not care for a mythical grove or a sacred circle and wishes to Spirit; they wanted something more familiar, more comforting to them; and yet Jones knew that this was a moment when Faith's mother could not be disregarded, no matter what he felt himself, because what he felt most was that Faith owned all his love, and she had loved her mother, so her mother's wishes mattered.

Then he remembered that Faith's mother and father had married in a Lutheran church. At dinner he did an Internet search on his cell phone and found the stone church in the horse country. He suggested they ask the parishioners if they might find a spot in their hearts and their cemetery for girl who had lost her life while driving into the mountains to give medical care to strangers; something told Jones they were sure to say yes.

“But Andrew,” Faith's mother had muttered, her voice shaking as she sat at the formica table of a Waffle House and wrapped her trembling fingers around her coffee cup, “I never took her to a Lutheran church. I never took her to any church at all.”

Jones reached out and took her fingers from the coffee cup and held them in his hands and looked into her frightened, anguished eyes. “But somehow,” he said quietly, “she came to believe in what they taught there. And every night, she prayed for you.”

Now Jones sat down on the stone bench at the foot of her plot. The air was sharply colder than the day before, and he didn't seem to notice.

* * *

When Lara had sent the text message telling her inner circle that she would be staying overnight, a sense of excitement had spread from them through the Blair Bio-Med command team; something was happening, they could all feel it. Brenda called Malcolm at home to ask if Lara had called him or sent any further word; Malcolm told her he had heard nothing else and he was sure if Lara wanted to confide anything of a feminine nature then she would do it to Brenda, not to him. Brenda insisted she had been thinking only of business; didn't Malcolm interpret her delay as promising? They speculated for a while, with Brenda musing about how much good a relationship would do for Lara and how Dr. Jones seemed on paper to be exactly the kind of man whom she could both respect and admire, the kind of man who would intrigue her. Malcolm countered that whoever people seemed to be on paper usually had little to do with how they were in person, and besides all that, the crucial issue was whether or not he could perform the surgical techniques they were searching for so desperately. Brenda answered that Lara could tell in a heartbeat the difference between Dr. Jones's resume and his personal presence and something was promising about him; why else would Lara have stayed?! On and on they went, knowing nothing, wondering everything.

There was no further word until they checked their cell phones first thing the next morning and found text messages telling them their boss was flying back. Both of them drove straight to work. As soon as Brenda learned that Lara had arrived in the building she hurried down the corridor to her office.

As she reached the door Malcolm, just coming out, passed her, muttering.

Brenda entered the reception area of Lara's office and walked by Juliet, Lara's secretary; they exchanged conspiratorial glances, and Juliet shook her head. Brenda moved on into Lara's main office and found her at her desk, trying to lose herself in brain scans and schematics for machine designs. Brenda bounced in and plopped down in a chair. “Soooo? How'd it go?”

Lara did not look up. “He can't do it.”

“Can't? Or won't?”

“Won't, can't, what's the difference?” Lara said flatly, still sorting through her paperwork.

“So what's he like?”

Lara shot her an impatient look. “I wasn't there to find out what he was like. I was there to recruit him for our surgical development program.”

“You were there a long time.” Brenda waited, but got no response. “You look tired. Was the hotel bad? Because I tried to call you several times through the night, and they said you weren't there.”

“We were in a car.”

“In a car.”

“On a drive. Out in the country . . .”

“Out in the country! Sounds like a wonderful time! Sounds romantic. Sounds like a date!”

“No, it—he can't do it, Brenda. He can't. Now if you'll excuse me, we have experiments to set up.” Lara strode out of the room.

11

Two weeks after Lara Blair came to Virginia and drove up into the mountains to visit the Blue Ridge clinic with Jones, old Sam finally came down from the mountains and showed up at the Charlottesville hospital.

Sam had lived for the last fifty years in an Appalachian valley—the locals called it a holler—so isolated that he had no electricity and no running water; in all that time he had not journeyed to what he call the flatlands. Jones welcomed him and arranged for him to be admitted, though the paperwork was an issue since Sam had never filed for anything from the government and their only records of his life were a driver's license and the records he had filled out when he joined the Army in World War II. Jones found a place for Allen to stay—Allen said he would be content with the couch in Jones's office, since he planned to spend every moment making sure his oldest and only friend was not poisoned or poked to death by a nurse—and the hospital staff immediately began running tests on Sam.

It was the MRI that scared Sam the most; to be strapped to a moving slab and slid into a coffinlike space that rattled and screamed like the mouth of hell did not comfort Sam; when Jones dropped in to see him just before the procedure, Sam told him, “I don't want to see the Immer Eye.”

Jones realized Sam thought the doctors had been talking about something monstrous and tried to reassure him, saying, “Sam, I know the Immer Eye . . . the MRI . . . it sounds bad but there's not a thing this machine can do that will hurt you.”

“The feller that wheeled me down here from the room told me to leave my watch cause the Immer Eye would jerk it right outer my pocket and even if it didn't my watch wouldn't never work again if it even got in the same room with the Immer Eye.”

“It won't hurt you, Sam. I promise.” When Jones saw Sam's eyes, watery and blue like a mountain sky on a foggy morning, look up into his, Jones patted the old man's boney shoulder and said, “Trust me, Sam. I won't let anyone hurt you.”

Jones stood and watched as they wheeled Sam into the scanning room. As the door closed Jones was left alone, and his thoughts drifted. To Lara.

* * *

At the moment that Sam was being slid into the Immer Eye and was yelling out to Allen, waiting for him in the control room, that to him it looked more an Immer Anus, Lara was working at her lab.