Full Circle (27 page)
Kayla said, “I thought I heard your voice.”
“Come on in.”
“I don't want to disturb.”
“You're not. Really.”
“Would you like a hot chocolate?”
“Sure.” He lifted the receiver. “Okay, Mom. I'm back.”
“Who was that?”
“A friend.”
“You've made friends already?”
“Yes. Good ones.”
“I'm so glad.”
“Have you had any more dreams?”
“Perhaps the time for dreaming is over.”
His next breath came with difficulty. “What makes you say that?”
Kayla must have heard the change, for she padded back into the room and rested her hand upon his shoulder.
His mother said, “I seem to come and go these days. I can hardly recall what we spoke about last time. The dreams, from where I lay, they seem like idle musings.”
“No, Mom. They were important.”
“Were they?”
“Very.”
“Then perhaps they were never intended for me at all.”
He felt a building pressure, a need to know so strong he pushed out the words, “Your first dream about me needing to travel to England came after I apologized. You said I needed to figure out why you sent meâ”
“I did not send you, Adam. I felt that you were being called to go. Only you refused to accept the
concept
of being called.”
Adam took a firmer hold of Kayla's hand. “I understand.”
“Do you really?”
“I think so.”
“Then everything is right in this old world of mine.” His mother's breathing came in soft puffs, as though each required a special effort. “I think I had better rest. I love you, Adam.”
When he looked up, Kayla's gaze held a depth and a calm as piercing as the night. She reached down and enfolded him in her arms. The quilted robe softened her embrace and blan-keted his vision.
K
ayla was lifted from dreamless slumber by Honor's soft knock upon the door. She rose and dressed and joined them downstairs in the kitchen. She could hear Adam's footsteps creaking the floor overhead. Her father and Honor gave her soft morning embraces and poured her a coffee. She wished her father a happy birthday and smiled as Honor told Peter of her birthday gift, a weekend getaway to Paris. She could see how hard her father tried to be pleased and grateful for his wife.
Adam came into the kitchen, his gaze still hollowed by the midnight conversation with his mother. Kayla found it the most natural thing in the world to walk over to him and fit herself into his arms. Her father and Honor looked over and smiled.
The morning service was a soft song of hope. When the prayers began, Adam slipped off the pew to kneel upon the cold stone floor. Kayla took one of the padded cushions off the little brass hook, set it on the floor, and knelt beside him. Her mind returned to the night before and the image of a strong man made weak. She prayed for Adam's mother. She prayed for Adam. She prayed for her father and for Honor and for the baby and for the business. Quick images of a phrase, a few words, flowing now from an overfull heart. Her single prayer for herself was equally brief, equally natural:
Help me hope again.
She stopped praying when her father's hand settled upon her shoulder, and she was filled with the sense that she truly, finally, had come home.
They opened their front door to the sound of the ringing phone. Her father lifted the receiver. “Hello? Ah, Sylvia. How very nice of you to phone.”
Kayla asked, “Is that Professor Beachley?”
Honor asked, “Who?”
Adam held up one hand. Wait.
Peter's breathing rasped loudly in the silent house. “No, I quite understand. According to what you told us yesterday, the lady and her companions have been badly scarred. They have every right to be concerned. Of course I'll travel down. Naturally Adam will accompany me. No, don't apologize. I am most grateful that you would seek to make this happen.”
He set down the receiver, coughed once more, then said to Adam, “Sylvia has managed to make us an appointment. But she does not hold out much hope.”
Kayla glanced at Adam and was surprised to see how his face reflected her father's expression, an equal mix of tension and expectation. Adam turned to her and said, “We might have a new deal in the works.”
Kayla said, “What you wouldn't tell us about last night.”
Adam waited through a half-dozen heartbeats. Peter's gaze remained steady on the younger man. Adam said, “There's a problem. We need to go into this meeting with our money at the ready. But the way things stand, there's a risk Joshua would block an outlay of more funds.”
Honor said, “That man again.”
Kayla understood. “You need my money.”
“It's a lot to ask. You have every right to say no.”
Kayla felt the past rise up to strike her anew. Another man wanting to take her last real chance of survival. She saw her father shake his head. Knew she could give voice to his gesture and be completely within her rights.
She asked, “How much?”
Adam's face was a mirror of her father's solemnity. “All of it.”
Though Reading was a mere half-hour's drive south of Oxford, the two cities could not have been any different. Reading was a city scourged by industrial neglect and poverty. Derelict mills sprouted from row after row of brownstone squalor. The central thoroughfare swept them past a Victorian prison of brick and fortress towers and hopelessness. The University of Reading occupied a cluster of buildings south of the city center. The traffic was sullen and aggressive. Adam finally gave up his hunt for a parking space and left the Mercedes in the faculty lot. A parking ticket was the least of this day's risks.
The biochemistry lab was a charmless redbrick structure over a hundred years old. Alongside it was an unfinished structure of mirrored glass and concrete and construction clamor. Inside the old building a sign announced that the single elevator was broken. Following Dr. Beachley's instructions, they took the stairs to the third floor. Fluorescent lights hung from crumbling ceilings. Glass-fronted labs revealed state-of-the-art machinery resting on antique lab tables. Students flowed about them in a noisy din.
Their destination was a lab crammed into the far northeast corner. Two of the windows did not shut completely, so the first sound that greeted their arrival was a faint whistling draft. No one spoke as Peter knocked on the partly open door. Three white-coated scientists worked in a chaotic tangle. Boxes were piled everywhere.
Peter asked, “Dr. Hao Ping?”
A diminutive Asian in a lab coat straightened from piling papers into a carton. “You're Mr. Austin?”
A woman with skin the color of strong tea and a lilting Indian accent said, “We happen to be very busy here today.”
The third person, a woman with a rat's nest of red hair and thick glasses, protested, “Dr. Beachley said this was important.”
“She said it might possibly be important,” Hao Ping corrected.
The Indian lady typed upon the computer keyboard with unnecessary force. “I am pushing extremely hard, trying to finish these calculations before we are shut down.”
The redheaded scientist said, “If what Dr. Beachley told us is correctâ”
“Dr. Beachley, Dr. Beachley, it's all I hear from you these days.”
“âyour rushing about might not be necessary anymore.”
“If we could rely on this Dr. Beachley, she would have found us space at Oxford.”
The redheaded lady sighed and went back to packing her box.
The young man turned to his two cohorts. “So do we speak with them or not?”
“Not,” the lady at the computer said. “You let these people in the door, and soon they are prying away at secrets we do not need to be sharing.”
The young man looked uncertain. The redhead kept pack-ing her box.
Peter said gently, “Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to determine the difference between what is real hope and what is just another failure in the making.”
The Indian lady slowed her furious typing. The redheaded scientist turned from her box.
“But that is what makes for successful science, does it not? Pursuing in the face of repeated failure, until the winning for-mula has been realized.”
The Indian lady remained staring into the screen. Her fea-tures slackened into an expression of weary resignation.
The redheaded scientist said, “Let them in, Hao.”
They gathered in an office scarcely large enough for the desk, the crates, and two straight-backed chairs. They somehow man-aged to cram everyone inside, but only by having the two lady scientists lean against the windowsill, flanking Hao Ping, who was seated behind the desk. The English scientist asked, “How much do you know?”
“Dr. Beachley explained that you were being denied both funding and the chance to continue your research here at Reading.”
“They're using the transfer to the new labs as an excuse to shut us down,” Hao Ping confirmed.
“Might I ask your names?”
“This is Ms. Kamuran and Ms. Haine. They should both be postdocs by now, but their theses have been turned down by the university review board.”
The Indian scientist demanded, “Didn't your precious Sylvia tell you about that too?”
“Orla,” the other woman said. “Please.”
“She mentioned that there had been a problem with your thesis adviser,” Peter confirmed. “And that in her opinion the entire affair was a monstrous injustice.”
Ms. Haine motioned to a pair of boxes beneath the con-stantly whistling window. “Our latest results are in those three boxes.”
The Indian lady was not so easily mollified. “This data can't leave the office.”
“Orla, you can't ask them toâ”
“This whole thing is a charade. It's just more people I don't know, mucking about with my life's work.”
“Our work,” the young man corrected. “I've been here the whole time, remember?”
The Indian lady did not respond.
Ms. Haine went on, “Hao has lost his lectureship defend-ing us and our theses.”
Hao said to them, “Seven years we've been working on this project.”
The Indian lady said, “The data stays here.”
Ms. Haine sighed and looked out the window.
Peter's chair creaked as he shifted his weight. “Let me see if I have this in proper perspective. Seven years ago, you began work with sea snails. Why? Because their secretions are so strong their prey remain utterly relaxed and dormant, even while the snail's digestive juices literally eat them alive. The enzyme responsible had been studied before, and right here in this very university.”
Adam marveled at this man. Peter's breathing was a harsh testimony to months of burdens and worries. His features were aged and puffy. Yet his essential goodness came through, such that the three scientists gradually emerged from behind their hostile barriers.
Hao said, “This initial work was done by the head of our department.”