The Touch

by Randall Wallace

  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.”

  Four hours later they were still in the clinic trailer, attending to an array of coughs, sprains, cuts, and pains. Lara was bandaging a boy’s arm, where she had just used four stitches to close a gash; Jones was finishing an examination of Allen, Sam’s old friend. Jones told him, “Your heart’s good. Even if it hurts.”

  “Yours too, Doc.” Allen looked out the trailer window, toward the cemetery beyond the church, where Sam’s grave lay beneath the red dirt, surrounded by fresh-cut wildflowers and sprigs of rhododendron that Nell had placed there that morning.

  Jones nodded and touched the old farmer on the shoulder, and as Allen stood and moved away Jones looked across at Lara; she was talking happily—the boy had just told her that he had wanted to try superglue on his cut but his mama had insisted he come to the clinic—and she was glowing. She caught him looking at her and smiled back.

  Nell brought up her next patient, an intensely pregnant mountain woman who held her belly and shuffled her feet, clad in slippers made of the same material as towels. “I’m Dr. Blair,” Lara said, shaking her hand.

  “Mavis.”

  “What are you, Mavis, six months along?”

  “More like seven.”

  “When was your last doctor’s visit?”

  “When my last young’un was born. Six year ago. I just want to make sure this one’s right.”

  Lara tried to keep all reaction from her face; she knew the statistics on the lack of prenatal care and its correlation to a high rate of birth defects and maternal mortality. She closed the curtains around her workspace and began an examination. After she had finished, Lara helped the deeply pregnant Mavis to her truck. A silent farmer sat at the wheel, with five children scattered like dogs around the truck bed. In fact there were four dogs with them in the bed of the pickup.

  As Mavis wobbled trying to get into the door—the man in the truck did not move to help—Lara steadied her and said, “Whoa! Easy, Mavis. You’re young and healthy, you’ll do fine, but you ought to see a doctor every couple of weeks.”

  “Sure!” Mavis said. “If I could leave this brood alone all day and the crops would grow themselves.”

  Lara steered Mavis into the passenger seat, then fished the seat belt from between the cushions and clipped it around her. Lara looked back at the load of kids.

  “You said you wanted this one to be right. Was something wrong last time?”

  “Maggie,” Mavis said, jerking a nod toward her youngest, a girl with blonde curls poking from beneath a hooded sweatshirt.

  As Mavis’s husband started the truck, Lara moved to the girl. “Hi, I’m Lara! Are you Maggie?”

  The girl lifted her face. There was a hole in the middle of it. The girl had a cleft palate. Everything else about her face—her eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, and chin—were as well formed as those of her siblings, but the hole in her face was all anyone could notice.

  Lara stood in silence and watched as the truck pulled away. Maggie sat in the back corner of the truck bed and did not lift her face again, even to her brothers and sisters.

  * * *

  The sunset that evening turned the mountain air pink and glorious. Lara and Jones sat in rockers on the cabin porch, Lara so animated she could hardly stop talking. “—And that old lady, she just kept hugging me like I was her daughter! And that old guy—”

  “Cletus?” Jones broke in, with the single word he had wedged into the conversation in the last thirty minutes.

  “Cletus! That’s right, Cletus! I just love the names here! Yeah, Cleee-tus! His chest has been burning for months, maybe years, and three dollars’ worth of reflux medicine will make him feel like a king!”

  Nell walked up from the trailer, took the tinfoil off two paper plates mounded with homemade food, and handed them up to the porch. “Eat ’em while they’re hot, would’ya?” Nell said.

  “Thanks, Nell.”

  “Ya’ll be good, now.” With a wink at Jones, she walked to her truck and drove away. Jones and Lara were left alone for the first time that day.

  Lara waved and smiled at Nell, but her enthusiasm spilled on uninterrupted. “You know how most doctors specialize and see the same ailment over and over and over? They prescribe the same two or three drugs, they perform the same surgical procedure for their entire careers? But we get to see people, Andrew! We get to put our hands on them and they give us so much back!”

  Jones nodded, rocking back and forth in the chair. In that moment he thought of Faith—and how she would have said exactly the same thing.

  “But Andrew…” Lara said, slowing for the first time. “That girl, with the cleft palate. Did you know about her?”

  “I heard about her from Nell.”

  “You know it’s fixable, completely fixable. A forty-five-minute operation.”

  “Yes. But it’s two days away from home, and the parents won’t go. And they won’t let anybody else take her. I think they’re ashamed of her—and of themselves, somehow.”

 
; Lara pushed a fork into the roasted pork and green beans Nell had brought. She took a mouthful, chewed it slowly, then stopped. “We could do it here. We could make a sterile room, bring in the equipment, an anesthesiologist. I could do the surgery, and you could guide me in the art. She could be beautiful, Andrew.”

  He looked at her for a long time. He nodded, feeling in that moment, surrounded by the dark shoulders of the Blue Ridge Mountains, that he was in a place as sacred as…

  As a cathedral.

  As the Vatican.

  As the Sistine Chapel.

  Lara beamed and dug into her food.

  * * *

  When night came they lit lanterns and kept rocking in their chairs on the porch, luxuriating in the peace of the mountains. Lara broke the silence. “Hey. Can you sing a hillbilly song?”

  “Sure,” he said. “And I’m way too smart to give you that kind of ammunition.”

  He stood and kissed her softly on the forehead. “They’ll start coming at dawn tomorrow.” He headed off toward the trailer.

  She called after him. “Dr. Jones? This has been the happiest day of my life.”

  He smiled and walked into the darkness. She stood and moved from lantern to lantern, dialing their wicks down until their flames went out.

  But then she settled back down into one of the chairs and sat rocking in the Appalachian darkness, and she thought.

  21

  No one came to the Clinic on Sundays unless it was an emergency, and there were no emergencies that morning so Jones left a walkie-talkie on the steps of the clinic trailer and put its mate into his pocket, and he and Lara took a walk deep into the hills. Half an hour later they found themselves standing in the middle of a footbridge of rope and wood, suspended over a gorge. A stream ran far below them; they stood suspended in the sky.

  “Can you hear that?” Lara asked, tipping her head as if her ears were sniffing the faint scent of sound in the air, beyond the delicious sweetness of the stream rushing over the rocks below them and the fragrance of the birdsong from the trees on either side of the rope bridge.

  “Church bells,” Jones told her. “On Sundays the people up here in the mountains hold services morning and evening—and think going to a doctor on the Sabbath is a sin.”

  “I want to tell you something… and ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “In the week I’ve been here, every day’s been happier than the last. The operating room we’re putting together for Mavis’s daughter? I want to make it permanent. Okay?”

  “Okay. Did you think I might say no?”

  “That wasn’t what I wanted to ask you.”

  “I can’t operate on you.”

  “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 hu
man 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.