The White Lilac
Page 14
Chapter Fourteen: Kai
Kai tried to catch the boy’s body as it slipped off of the chair and Kai’s fork dropped onto the floor.
“Jackson!” Melissa cried.
Chairs scrapped along the floor as everyone stood up.
“Here,” Doc said. “We need to take him down to my office.”
Kai scooped up Jackson’s limp form and followed Doc to the stairs. He could hear footsteps as the others crowded behind him, but not close enough to get in his way. He walked sideways through the door on the basement’s first floor and entered an open room with several padded tables lined against the wall. A large wooden desk faced toward them covered with loose stacks of papers and an incomplete DNA model of various sized and colored balls connected with sticks, each ball glowing internally with some math or chemical formula.
“Place him on this table here,” Doc said, motioning to a table in the middle of the room nearest the desk and door. In three long strides Kai was there, laying Jackson down feet first. Mrs. Hubbard placed a small pillow on the table before Kai had let go of Jackson’s head and he let it roll gently onto the pillow.
“Is he breathing?” Sara asked.
Doc rushed over with a stethoscope and several other gadgets in his hands, most Kai didn’t know the purpose of. Doc began by scanning the boy with a small gray box that beeped and then Doc felt the boy’s wrist. Jackson’s chest rose slowly on its’ own, but the rhythm was off somehow. The breathing was automatic and shallow almost as if it was artificial.
“Help me get his shirt off so I can listen to his lungs better,” Doc said.
Mrs. Hubbard moved first to comply.
Kai tried to back away from the table to give her more room, but he almost stepped onto Melissa’s foot as she was trying to see around him. He caught himself in time and then tried to slide down to the foot of the table. The Doc’s desk blocked part of the way, but if he turned sideways he thought he could squeeze between Caryn and the desk. He was halfway there when he felt some papers move. They’re just papers, he thought and pushed through.
A loud clatter made everyone jump, and then the sound of beads bouncing all over the floor filled the silence. Everyone turned to look at the multi-colored sticks, beads and balls from the model rolling around.
I’m sorry. Kai wanted to say, but he couldn’t open his mouth. He just stared at the mess like everyone else.
Doc sighed. “Nobody move. That was my hydracisus molecule model and I’ll need every piece to finish it. Elaine,” Doc turned to his wife. “I want you to get a complete nutrient drip out of the back fridge and start it at 30 milliliters an hour. He’s in a coma and there’s not much more we can do for him right now.”
Mrs. Hubbard disappeared into a room in the back and Doc began picking up the fallen pieces. Kai and the girls watched as he bent down near the wall and doorway to scoop up the balls. He placed everything in a plastic bucket.
Just then the doorbell rang.
Doc set the bucket down and left the room. Within the minute he returned followed by another man carrying a young girl. Her face was pale and she was coughing. Doc directed the man to set her down on one of the other padded tables and he began to go through the same steps he had with his son.
A large blue ball rolled to a stop almost under the desk and Kai picked it up before it could continue to go out of reach. Doc was in professional mode now and doing all he could to answer the questions the other man kept firing at him. The little girl was coughing so hard she didn’t have time to breathe in and her face was a bright red. Doc yelled for Mrs. Hubbard to grab something quick, but Kai was no longer paying attention to what was going on.
He could see a diagram for the model and the equations for creating it. He walked around the desk to look at the diagram straight on, instead of upside-down. Normally he hated reading, but these equations were different. Each ball had a code glowing inside of it and together all the codes equaled the equation, like a story made up of individual sentences and all he had to do was put them together in the right order and the story would make sense.
He picked up another ball, a smaller red one and held it up to the blue. They would fit. Together their equations made sense and he zeroed in on the spot where they would go on the diagram. All it took was one look at the medium yellow ball on the table for Kai to see that it would not connect to the two in his hand. It needed something else, something to go between them.
In a daze Kai walked over to the bucket and picked up the rest of the scattered pieces from the floor. Then he sat down by the desk and began combining the pieces as he thought they should fit. The blue ball he had picked up had been the key piece and he quickly attached the right length sticks to it with the right size and color balls on the end. Kai would glance at the diagram and the equations, but soon stopped looking at the diagram as the story the balls made became clearer. He didn’t always connect the right ones together, but it was easy to tell where he was going wrong and to change the order of the balls.
There was one section where the diagram called for two yellow balls to connect to one small green ball and Kai didn’t see the reason for doing it that way. The story the balls were telling would be out of order. Instead he switched out one of the yellow balls to keep it from being redundant and moved the small green ball to the other side of the remaining yellow ball which would be a better support for the integrity of the whole structure. The leftover balls he placed back into the bucket.
It all worked beautifully. Kai couldn’t help sitting back to admire his work.
“Where did you learn how to do that?” Caryn’s voice came over his shoulder. She sounded as amazed as Kai felt now that he was looking at the whole model and not just the pieces. Over the desk, he could see Doc turning to look at them and then leave the girl, now sleeping, to have a closer look.
“What are you doing?” Doc asked. His tone was abrupt and his eyebrows pressed low. He touched the model lightly with his fingers as if hoping to touch where it might be wrong. Then he picked up the diagram and the equations.
“Look,” Doc said, after a moment, as he placed the pages down. “I’m sure you were just trying to help, but this model doesn’t match the equations and I need to finish this on my own.”
“Sure,” Kai said. He got up out of the chair and walked away from the desk, part of him glad to be away from the model and the look in Doc’s eyes, the other part hating to leave. For a brief moment his whole world had made sense. Everything had been reduced to balls and equations that meant more to him than words ever did. He had known where each ball should fit in this new world and it was a world he could belong in.
“We should probably get going,” Caryn said. “It’s late.”
Doc nodded, but didn’t turn around. He was looking at the model, turning it first one way and then the other.
“Do--do you need me to take you to a hotel?” Doc asked, still unable to take his eyes off the model.
“You’re busy and I’m sure Kai knows somewhere. Thanks for offering though.”
Doc glanced their way and nodded.
With a small tug on his sleeve, Kai turned and followed Caryn back up the stairs. The front door opened for them and standing in the doorway were a man and a woman both holding small children.
“Is the doctor in?” the woman asked. The child in her arms coughed.
“Yes,” Kai said, after waiting a moment to see if Caryn would answer, but she only had eyes for the child. “He’s down these stairs in the first basement.”
The couple rushed past them and Kai led Caryn out into the street. He was a bit surprised to see that both suns had already set and the sky was dark.
“Is there somewhere you’d like to stay?” he asked.
“I hadn’t really thought about it.” Her voice was soft, too quiet to echo off the buildings.
“A hotel would probably be nice,” Kai suggested.
“Yes, whichever one is closest will do.” She yawned and Kai turned left toward
Old Highton’s street of hotels. As he did, he thought he saw a shadow leap out of the corner of his eye. When he looked closer at the dark space he thought the shadow had come from, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He was probably just tired, he thought, but he double checked each building they passed.