THE TOUCH
By RANDALL WALLACE
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2011
Randall Wallace
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4143-4366-2
Chapter One
When Michelangelo finished painting the Sistine
Chapel, neither the Pope who hired him nor the glorified
artists of Rome took particular notice of the
depiction in the center of the ceiling, where God,
whom Michelangelo had the audacity to depict as a
Being resembling a human, stretches His divine hand
toward the first man, Adam, who is lolling in beautiful
yet limp perfection, awaiting The Touch that will
bring him Life.
The rich, the sophisticated, the high born, and
the well-bred appraised the Chapel in numerous private
viewings and judged it to be good work, perhaps
even worthy of praise. They thought Michelangelo
had displayed craft in handling the difficult curves of
the ceiling and the added challenge of painting plaster
while it was still drying. They critiqued individual figures
throughout the fresco, but no particular section
stood out in their notice.
It was not until they opened the Chapel to the hungry
eyes of commoners, who would lock on those two
fingertips, one Divine and one human, with Life about
to leap, that anyone within the Vatican or the learned
societies of Rome began to realize that The Touch was
something special.
Faith Thomas and Andrew Jones were two of those
commoners, among the centuries of tourists who had
lifted their gazes within the Sistine Chapel to find
themselves transfixed, open-mouthed, filled with wonder
and joy. Faith and Jones, as she called him, were not
in most ways what anybody would call typical; both
in their midtwenties, they were an attractive couple,
Faith with blue eyes and dark chestnut hair, and Jones
tall and sandy haired, his eyes green and fierce. Among
the tens of thousands of young Americans backpacking
through Europe in the summer they stood out and drew
as many glances as the statues and inlaid floors of the
palaces they visited.
Still they were common. Both were from Appalachia,
she from the coal fields of Pennsylvania and he from
the Blue Ridge in Virginia. They had met in medical
school. Now they were lying on their backs on the floor
of the great Chapel, gazing upward, necks resting on
their backpacks, each containing a battered copy of
Europe from $85 a Day. Faith was worried the Vatican
guards were going to tell them to get up, that lying in
the middle of the Sistine Chapel's floor was not allowed
on tour days or on any other days either, but Jones had
whispered something to one of them when they walked
in, and the guards seemed to ignore them after that.
Maybe because it was the last group allowed in before
the Vatican tours closed for the day.
The other tourists in their group had already gazed at
the ceiling; their eyes already wore the glaze that comes
from trying to capture and comprehend the greatness of
a work of art whose subject, as well as the technique in
depicting it, were beyond understanding. "The Divine
Touch" was something to ponder; every person who
lifted eyes toward it knew that looking at it was a privilege.
But Faith Thomas and Andrew Jones lay on their
backs below it and felt the thrill of a special privilege.
To lie on a floor where thousands, even millions, of feet
walked could have seemed unsanitary to their American
minds, but the sanctity of the place made even the floor
feel pristine.
"Is it the gift of life?" Jones wondered aloud to Faith,
as his eyes, in sync with hers, drifted from the fingertips
about to touch to the form of Eve depicted in God's
other hand as a partner created for Adam. "Or the gift
of love?"
"Both," she whispered back. "It says love and life are
the same thing." Without moving her eyes for a long
moment, she added, "You've got hands like that."
"Like Adam? Or like Michelangelo?" He was grinning;
she knew the cocking grin without turning to
look at it.
"Like the Big Guy with the white hair. Your touch
brings me to Life."
In duplication of the painting he stretched his hand
towards her; she extended her hand to him. But then
instead of brushing fingertips, he surprised her by gripping
her hand and pulling something from the coin
pocket of his jeans and slipping it onto her ring finger.
It was an engagement band.
She rolled onto her side, looked at her finger, then at
him. Suddenly they were kissing, and the whole room
full of tourists was applauding them, and the guards
were winking at Jones.
Even the painting directly above them seemed to
glow brighter.
* * *
There was no question in Faith's mind, of course,
that she would remember that moment in the Sistine
Chapel for the rest of her life, even if that life should
last another hundred years, even if she should live long
enough that she would sit drooling and could no longer
remember her own name, the glow of what had just
happened would nestle somewhere with her heart. As
she and Jones walked hand in hand through the Vatican
gates, she told him so.
He smiled, softly, and his eyes were bright with emotion,
and though she had thought she could never love
anyone more than she had loved him when he slipped
the ring onto her finger, she loved him even more now
than she had loved him ten minutes before. "You had all
of this planned!" she said. "How long have you known
you were going to do this?"
"Since I asked you if you wanted to backpack through
Europe with me."
"I ... I could've said no. I could've ... I could've
been too busy to come, I—"
"No, you couldn't," he broke in. "I wouldn't have
let you."
She squeezed his hand and hugged her head against
his shoulder as they strolled together through the warm
and crowded streets, still filled with the sunlight of
summer. Their hotel was two miles away, but they loved
walking and would find a place to stop for dinner, a
small restaurant with candles on the tables and singing
from the streets outside. Faith adored the way Italians
sang as naturally as they breathed.
Then another thought hit her. "Did you have that
arranged? With the guard?"
"Sort of. Luca knew him."
Luca was an Italian friend they'd first met back in
Virginia when he had come over from Rome to give a
lecture called
Art and the Voice of God. They had taken
Luca to dinner after his lecture and the three of them
had become fast friends; now Luca was waiting for
them at a restaurant to surprise Faith again with a dinner
to celebrate the engagement that Jones had planned.
Luca would be bringing friends, none of whom Faith
or Jones had ever met; but Luca promised that in an
instant they would all feel like family, they would be
family. Love did that, made families where before only
strangers had been.
* * *
Four months later, in the middle of a Virginia autumn,
the two of them were driving into the mountains, a
postcard of The Divine Touch taped to the dashboard
of Drew's old jeep. Faith was at the wheel; after days in
classrooms and clinics and twenty-four-hour shifts in
Emergency Rooms she was always eager to feel the sway
and the bounce of the road into the Blue Ridge, jostling
up through the worn-out seats and humming through
the steering column into the palms of her hands. That
she felt such things, was aware of them, relished in the
connection they gave her to the physical world, made
Andrew surrender the wheel, though he enjoyed driving,
just not as much as she did. He would watch her as
she drove, and he would smile and shake his head and
think of how lucky he was.
They had left the University in late afternoon and
had taken 29-South into Nelson County, Virginia's
poorest region. The road, however, was one of the most
beautiful drives in the state, rolling and winding through
farmland where houses and churches and stores selling
antiques sat on ground that Thomas Jefferson had ridden
past two hundred years before, on his way from
Charlottesville down to Lynchburg to visit the summer
house he had built there in a place called Poplar
Forest. Jones loved history, so each time they drove this
road he thought of Jefferson, the relentless builder, who
designed Monticello and the University of Virginia
and clocks and silver cups and—not coincidentally—was
a designer of the United States. Faith would smile
patiently as Jones reflected aloud about such things; she
found them mildly interesting but rather curious, for
Faith was much more interested in what was
now, in
those houses they passed where the Christmas lights
would be still up in May or in October, and in the
families who lived in them. Was someone sick? Why
would they not take the lights down, so that putting
them up again would be special? Faith and Andrew were
two different people—and life between them was richer
for those differences.
They turned west just as the sun went down beyond
the ridgeline and the gray fog of evening had begun to
bathe the forest and rise from the road in wisps. Andrew
was on his cell phone; he didn't like to talk when they
were in the jeep—their time together, away from the
hospital, was too rare, and it was hard to hear in the
jeep, but Luca had just called him and cell reception
was spotty, so he answered, though his habit when traveling
into the mountains with Faith was to turn his
phone off altogether.
"Yeah, we're back!" he called over the noise of the
snow tires singing over the blacktop. "... Faith? She's
great! She's been strutting around in front of all the
women in Charlottesville, bragging about how she captured
me!"
Faith punched his shoulder, then reached down and
took his hand. He squeezed it and said loudly into the
phone, "We miss you already, Luca! ... Of course you're
invited to the wedding, I'll call you as soon as we set the
date! ... Sure, I'll give her a kiss for you! And she sends
her love to you!" He hung up and smiled at her. "He
says I should ask you about the project you were talking
with him about while we were there, on the neurological
effects of music."
"Early studies are suggesting that playing classical
music to kids makes their IQ scores go up. It started me
thinking: if music impacts the brain—"
"Post-traumatic coma. It might help induce healing!"
"Bingo, big guy! See, I knew you weren't just another
pretty face."
"Why does it work? Soothing? Stimulating? Or that
people get healthier when they're exposed to beauty?"
He looked from the Michelangelo postcard on the
dashboard to Faith's face. She had just switched on the
headlights and they threw back soft reflections onto
her skin.
"It's love. Art is an expression of devotion, a tangible
proof that someone cared enough to make and share
beauty. It may be that we doctors accomplish more just
by the physical touching of patients, by showing them
concern, than with our science."
"Love heals?"
"Love heals."
"Faith is the right name for you."
She smiled at him; then her eyes flicked back to the
road and filled with terror. She jerked the wheel and
opened her mouth as if to scream. But there was no
time even for that.
In an instant, everything changed for Andrew Jones—all
that he hoped and thought, all that he believed of life.
In an instant, Faith was gone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE TOUCH
by RANDALL WALLACE
Copyright © 2011 by Randall Wallace.
Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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