The Touch (20 page)

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.”

“How can you know?”

“I know because of what just happened, and you know it too. You're not going to make it to term.”

“Andrew, look at me. Look at me! I won't end this pregnancy.”

He moved over and sat down beside her, taking her into his arms. The rage had already passed through him, or maybe it was only the calm before the torrent, but his voice was still and calm as he said, “I know.”

24

The BoardRoom at Blair Bio-Medical could have held far more people, and yet it seemed full with Malcolm, Brenda, and the company lawyer gathered on one side of the conference table and Jones seated on the other. Lara sat at the head, in the chair of the board director. “This,” she began, “is no time to leave things unsaid. You three in my company have known what no one else has. And now I need to clear up what will happen when I'm gone.”

Brenda was already crying and shaking her head as if to rebuke reality so sternly that it would cease to be the truth; so Lara repeated, gently and firmly, “When I'm gone. Malcolm will run the company, with Brenda in expanded duties. My stock will be in a shared trust—administered by Malcolm, Brenda, and Dr. Andrew Jones. All profits and capital value from my stock will accrue to the Blair Foundation, with this change: All gifts will be made anonymously.”

She looked around the table. “That's all. Malcolm, you're in charge as of right now.”

Malcolm had to take a moment to find his voice, and when he found it he had to clear it. “Where will you be?”

“There's a little clinic in the mountains that needs an extra doctor. I'm going to go back there and look at every day as a day I'm living, not as a day I'm dying.”

Malcolm, Brenda, and even the company attorney were all having the same experience; each felt the moment in their own way, of course, but all of them floated in a sea of sadness and defeat.

But to Jones the moment was somewhat different; he felt torn. He felt as if there was something he should do, if only he could do it. As the others sat across the table from him and wept, Jones secretly slipped something from the inner fold of his wallet and glanced down at it.

It was the old postcard of Creation—wrinkled and stained.

Lara took a long and shaky breath. “This isn't a time to leave things unsaid. I love you all.”

She stood and left the room.

Jones looked at their tearful faces across the table from him, and then he stood and followed Lara.

* * *

He caught up with her at the far end of the hallway. She stopped, turned to him, and whispered, “I'm so sorry, Andrew. I told you I wanted to give you my now. I didn't know now would be so hard.”

He said, quietly but firmly, “If I could have a child who's part of you, I'd be grateful for every breath I took. Either way, I'll have you with me every day I live, no matter where you are.”

She thought she had steeled herself against any more tears, but they welled into her eyes now.

“It's all right if you cry,” he told her.

She said, “I have to tell you the truth; I've never been able to tell you anything but the truth. I wanted this baby. In whatever way I knew how to pray, I prayed for it. I didn't want a baby just for me. I wanted someone to love you the rest of your life, the way you deserve to be loved.”

They didn't embrace; they didn't have to.

Jones said, “There's a hospital down the block. And any equipment you have here could be transferred there, right?”

“No, Andrew. No. You can't try to change this. I can't leave you with that.”

“And would you have me live the rest of my life knowing that no one else could save you, and I didn't try? You were right about Faith. I did my best. I did all I could do. You're carrying our baby. You have to let me try.”

And she knew he was right.

25

Once they had made their decision, they wasted no time; there was no time to waste. They made their preparations, fired by an ever growing sense of urgency. Lara's group found a brand-new surgical suite in a hospital two blocks from their building and began to outfit it right away with gear from the Blair labs. The transporting, installing, and testing went on around the clock, and because the word of what they were doing and whom they were doing it for had spread quickly, not even the teamsters asked for overtime.

Malcolm and Brenda saw to it that Lara checked into the hospital with the attitude of a patient, not a physician, for doctors are notoriously bad patients. Brenda stayed with her constantly, obsessing about Lara's diet, rest, pre-op medications, and even the amount of light coming through the windows. Part of Jones's idea in allowing this was that if Brenda complained enough, Lara would keep insisting that everything was okay. The other part of the idea was that Brenda couldn't help herself, and if she stayed with Lara and saw to her perfect preparation, then Brenda couldn't interfere anywhere else.

Jones made his phone calls, and Angelica flew in his best team—Stafford, Merrill, and the two surgical nurses who assisted them in Virginia. Even before he let them check into their hotel rooms, Jones took them to the hospital and showed them the operating room setup, with Malcolm there with them to calm his own fears in turning Lara over to a group he didn't know. The newcomers, compulsive perfectionists by profession, frowned at the unfamiliar equipment surrounding them, but Jones calmed their concerns. “It's all for monitoring and reference, pure and simple,” he told them. “Everything else is the same.”

Jones's team took it all in. “Is there anything else you need?” Malcolm asked.

None of them could think of anything additional they could possibly need; the room was already packed. Malcolm took a deep breath, and then, as hard as it was for him, he left the OR and headed back to Lara's room, where he found it necessary to stave off the impending mutiny of the hospital's regular nursing staff, who were all threatening to resign if Brenda was allowed to keep prowling unmuzzled.

Jones gathered his friends around him; he had e-mailed them the basics of the procedure they were about to perform and had made sure the plane carried a complete set of scans and even a video monitor so that on the flight up they could study his trial run on Roscoe. He knew they were aware of everything of a technical nature that they could possibly need to know. Still, he waited for them to ask any questions they might have. They were silent.

Jones said, “If the aneurism bleeds before we can close it off, we induce coma, to shut the brain down until it can heal. We're not gonna let her die on the table. We are NOT going to let her die. Everyone understand?”

They did.

* * *

A nurse shaved Lara's head. She sat motionless as the locks fell off. She had thought that this would bother her more than anything else about the surgical preparation, but she was wrong; all of it seemed the same. As much concern as she had around her, as many people who cared, no one could take her place; she was alone now.

* * *

The operating room at the Chicago hospital down the street from her building had become a replica of the Blair Bio-Med lab, and technicians were in place at all the monitors behind the glass separation wall they had installed overnight. Lasers and reference cameras were aimed all over the surgical area; the tools—saws, drills, expanders, forceps, and the finer instruments too—were arranged beside the table. But there was no Roscoe now. And as yet there was no surgeon.

The University of Virginia surgical group was in the prep room, scrubbed up and waiting like a team before a championship match; but Jones was not there.

In the corridor outside the OR, Malcolm kept checking his watch. Brenda walked up, pale. “I've checked the doctor's lounge, the chapel, even called his hotel,” she said. “Where is he?”

Malcolm shook his head. “He walked through about ten minutes ago, looked into the surgical room, then walked out the front door. Said he needed some air. He must have—”

Brenda put an arm on his shoulder to stop him, as nurses pushed Lara, now on a gurney, toward the surgical holding room. As Lara passed Malcolm and Brenda she looked up at them and said, “He'll be here.”

But Malcolm wasn't sure; neither was Brenda.

* * *

While Lara lay on the gurney in the surgical holding room, and Malcolm and Brenda paced in the corridor, and the surgical team from Virginia checked the clock on the wall of the operating room, Jones walked the streets outside the Blair Bio-Med Building. He wandered, with no thought of where he was. Churning. Lost. Utterly alone.

He saw, across the street from the pub, an old and dingy cathedral.

Jones walked in. He moved slowly. Candles burned in the votive boxes, brightening the shadowy corners of the old sanctuary. A few people were scattered around praying, as well as a wino or two, asleep on the pews.

Jones took a seat in a pew, near the middle of the church. And he tried to pray. But he couldn't. He could not connect, could not feel a part of this place, could not find a channel to God. He gripped the back of the pew in front of him in frustration.

For the first time in his life, he felt his hands trembling.

Sitting not far from him was a gray-haired man in a worn black coat and a frayed white clerical collar. He was kneeling in prayer; he noticed Jones.

As Jones hung his head, the old priest moved over and sat beside him. “Are you in trouble?” the old priest asked.

“I think you could say that.”

“Do you want to pray?”

“I can't connect, I can't pray . . .”

“Then I will pray for you. What do you need?”

“A miracle,” Jones told him, as honest as he had ever been.

The priest reached into his robes for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, right there in the old cathedral, and offered the pack to Jones. Jones declined.

“Good for you. I'm quitting—have been for sixty years. So . . . you need a miracle.” He took a long drag on the cigarette, blew smoke up toward the gothic arches of the ceiling high above them, and nodded his head. “Want to hear mine?”

Jones didn't answer, but the priest went on anyway. “I have been a priest for fifty-seven years. I've seen this parish go from the center of the community, where the rich and powerful came to worship, to the fringes. Did you know that Jesus was crucified at a garbage dump?”

“No, I didn't know that.” Jones knew it was called Golgotha, but if they had told him in Sunday school that it was a garbage dump, Jones had forgotten it.

The priest shrugged. “I thought that was interesting. Anyway, as this church grew less important to the community, I grew less important to myself. They didn't value me, and I ceased to love them. I can tell you truly that for the last twenty years, I have felt no love at all. And I could not remember my last honest prayer, when I had a connection. Until just a few weeks ago.”

Now the priest stopped and waited. Waited until Jones gave him a look to tell him to finish his story and go away. “I was collecting from the poor box,” the priest said. “The few coins that people toss in, most of them trying to buy luck, I imagine. But on this day I found a large envelope, full of money. More money than I had ever seen, certainly more than I ever held. No name. No note—except the words
For the Poor
on the envelope. I went back to my room and counted it. It was a million dollars.” He took another drag from his cigarette. “I took it to the bank, and they said it was real, not counterfeit. I called the police to find out if some amount like that had been stolen recently, but they knew of nothing. Somehow I was already sure it wasn't stolen. That it really was intended for the poor.” He looked at Jones. “I see I have your attention now.”

“So the money was your miracle,” Jones asked, only half certainly.

“No. The money was the miracle for the poor. My miracle was what that act of charity did to me. Someone, capable enough in the ways of the world to have such a sum, decided that the best way they could think of to pass their charity to the poor was to hand it . . . to me. Why? Did they choose what was nearby? Comfortable? Convenient? Who knows? They chose. And suddenly my life was not wasted. Suddenly I was a priest again. I could pray. For them.” He glanced around at the poor, scattered here and there in cathedral. Then he looked back at Jones. “And for you.”

The priest looked up at the stained glass windows, darkened by decades of airborne grime. He looked at the cross above the altar. Then once again he looked at Jones and said, “You offer your hand to God. Whether He uses it—whether your hand becomes His hand—is up to Him.”

* * *

All the Blair Bio-Med equipment was switched on and fully functional, the beams of lasers criss-crossing through the air, the sensors ready to feed data to the computers and screens in the newly connected monitoring room, where the technicians sat, their eyes reflecting the glow of the pixels.

Only this time the patient was not made of molded polymers. She was a young woman of flesh and blood and spirit, Lara Blair, lying on her back on the padded table. Jones moved to her. Her eyes were half-open, dreamy.

Jones looked at the anesthesiologist, Merrill. “Ready?” Merrill nodded. Hearing Jones's voice, Lara whispered, “Jones . . . ?” He leaned to her, putting his ear close to her lips. “This is not a drill,” she said. Then she reached up, squeezed his hand, and closed her eyes.

26

Jones lifted a surgical saw and began.

Tears rolled down Brenda's face, and sweat rolled down the faces of the technicians. Lara, sedated and strapped down so firmly that there was no chance of movement, lay like a corpse. Malcolm trembled. But Jones did not. His hands were sure, as he kept going, deeper, deeper . . .