The Touch by Randall Wallace Page A

too afraid to go to doctors in the city, or too ashamed, or just plain too ignorant and poor. The clinic’s a good thing and it’s a public thing and I love it, and working there gives me the idea that I might be doing some good and the idea’s important. But when every hope you have is shattered and you don’t know where to find any, and you don’t want to live anymore because you can’t find love anywhere, that’s when you need more than an idea. That’s when you need to do something that no one else knows about, or will ever know. Something that you hope will matter, but you can’t even be sure of that. It’s got to be something that costs you—not just money or time, it costs you your own expectation of a reward. But you do that, you give up your pride, you give up your own secret demand that you are God and you make the rules of life, then you do get a reward: the experience that life is worth something, that it’s a gift, that someone else gave to you.”
    Jones took a deep breath. He let it out. He looked at Lara, and then he looked back at the road again. “She was right. There’s a price to faith. I’ve learned to pay it.”
    * * *
    The pink light of dawn fell faintly on the white wings of the Blair Bio-Med jet as Jones pulled up close to it, outside the private hangars beside the Charlottesville Airport runway. He stopped, stepped out quickly, and opened the door.
    All that we’ve gone through in the last twenty-four hours, Lara thought, and he’s still such a gentleman.
    Jones retrieved her bag from the truck and together they moved up to the step at the jet’s door; she turned to him, and not knowing anything better to do, she shook his hand. “Well. Thanks for . . . taking the time to talk with me,” she said.
    â€œNo. Thank you.” For a moment their eyes met, and his were steadier, stronger, more direct than they had been the first time they had looked at each other. She stepped up into the plane, turned to face him again, then backed away from the plane’s door as the flight attendant started to swivel it closed; but Jones interrupted, moving into the doorway. “Dr. Blair—that Lincoln carving. I gave it to the museum two days ago. You had time to look up my resume. But you couldn’t know about my taste for Russian literature, not in time to read up on it.”
    Not only Lara but also the flight attendant and the copilot of the jet were wondering what he was getting at.
    Jones, Lara was learning, never stopped thinking, and when he spoke it was because he was sure of something. His eyes boring into her, he said, “You act as if everything is a cold, calculated decision for you. But you’ve read Russian literature on your own. You must’ve, your name’s Lara—you’re named after a character in Doctor Zhivago ! You’re poetic and warm and . . . when you touch a baby something beautiful happens in your eyes. But you pretend as if life is business. Why is that?”
    She was still looking at him as the jet door closed.
    * * *
    The copilot of the Blair Bio-Med jet was a lanky young man who began his career as a mechanic in the Air National Guard, but the pilot was a woman named—delightfully, to Lara—Angelica. Angelica was forty and became a pilot by using the Blair Employee Education Program to pay for part of her flight training and work her way up from receptionist in the headquarters lobby. Lara herself had approved the unusual education request, saying that any woman named Angelica was destined to learn to fly, and since Angelica’s training began she had shown a special fondness for her boss. Whenever Lara took the company jet, Angelica kept the door into the cockpit open, and as the plane bored through the blue atmosphere and the feathery canyons of clouds between the sky and Virginia, she was glancing back at Lara in the mirror above the