Free The Touch by Randall Wallace Page B

from the mountain.” She handed Jones a message slip, and as he read it she added, “I’ve called one of the orderlies to drive you.”
    â€œNo, I can do it,” he said in that eye-of-the-storm voice already familiar to Lara. He turned to her and said, “I’m sorry to cut the evening short, Dr. Blair—”
    The ER nurse told Jones, “By my count you haven’t been to bed in forty-eight hours.”
    â€œI can do it, Carolyn.”
    But Nurse Carolyn was tough enough to argue—with patients, with hospital administrators, and especially with a doctor she admired enough to pray for every night, right after the AA meetings she’d been going to for the last seventeen years. “Dr. Jones—”
    â€œI’m fine, Nurse, thank you.”
    The nurse shoved a packed medical satchel across the desk for him. As Jones took it he patted her on the hand, then moved quickly toward the double doors leading to the parking lot. Lara was still at his side. When he looked at her she said, “Let me drive you.”
    He paused for a moment; even in his hurry, he paused; and Lara knew he was doing more than just considering her offer. “That won’t be necessary,” he said with a gentleness that struck Lara as almost . . . sad.
    â€œI’m not going home until we’ve finished our talk.”
    Jones paused another moment, taking in her determination.
    * * *
    The twenty-year-old station wagon waddled down 29-South from Charlottesville, curling toward the mountains, the headlights soaked up in the heavy darkness of tree-lined turns and rises and dips where the road disappeared. The station wagon was Jones’s, but Lara was at the wheel, the rumble of open highway feeling both unaccustomed and welcome to the palms of her hands. When they first left the parking lot Jones watched her carefully to see how she handled the weight and sway of the old suspension, but he saw quickly that Lara was comfortable, even delighted, to be driving, and slowly he began to relax.
    He directed her to an exit that sent them right, toward the Blue Ridge, and told her, “Just stay on this road south till you hit Greenstone Mountain Road.”
    The night was quiet, the heater warm and humming. The edge of anxiety about the agenda that brought her here had begun to melt away, and Lara found herself settling into this moment, strangely free from the past and unconcerned with the future. It was a peace she had not felt since . . . since she did not remember when, and she did not try to remember; she did not want this peace to fade.
    Beside her, Jones seemed to feel it too. His body had been taut in the hospital; now he swayed easily with the turns of the road.
    And Lara found herself wanting not so much to recruit him as to know him. From that place of ease she asked, “You teach, work double shifts . . . and you still travel?”
    â€œI’m their doctor,” he said, his eyes directed toward the range of western mountains, a rolling layer of black beneath the star-flecked sky.
    â€œYou haven’t been to bed in two days?”
    â€œI don’t like to sleep much.”
    â€œJust listen to the tires sing. Maybe you can get a nap.” As she said this she noticed how soothing her voice had become. She had always liked Jones’s voice, resonant like a cello, with Southern softness in his accent; now Lara realized that her own voice had become gentle, even caring. She had not heard those qualities in her voice in a very long time.
    Jones rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. “You okay?”
    â€œI love to drive.” She smiled, looking up through the windshield at the barren tree branches stretching out from the roadside and mingling with the stars. “Once, coming back from college, I took a turn that I knew wasn’t the way home and just drove. Blacktop and trees and me at the wheel. Going nowhere, feeling I was going everywhere.