The Zen Gene (16 page)

He laughed partly because he was amazed she had a sense of humour after a day like this. He also knew she could not have much energy left after working a full shift and with all the other things which happened she must be completely exhausted. He would try to go easy on her but they needed to cover a lot of ground. He knew this would have to be the end of the small talk. There were important decisions to be made and they had to be made tonight. “I’ve been trying to sort out what needs to be done,” he said.

“I need to find a good lawyer,” she said as she slumped lower on the couch. “If the Sergeant dies do you think they will charge Tyler with manslaughter?” she asked.

“I don’t know how the law looks at things like this but there is something else something potentially worse which you do not know about,” he said.

Her face went white and he watched her brace herself for the next salvo of bad news in a day of seemingly non-stop hits. Her eyes were wide with expectation and her bright irises were dilated with fear as she wondered what could possibly be worse than what already happened?

“When we were driving to the Emergency room, Lieutenant Hunter told me they found a corpse in the abandoned factory where Tyler has his lab,” he said. The sharp intake of breath was all he heard as her eyes closed, squeezed tight, in an effort to end this nightmare. “When I was talking to him downstairs he confirmed it but more importantly he told me how the person died,” he said.

“Who is it? Did he do it?” she whispered urgently, eyes closed, wanting to gather all the pain she knew was coming into a single survivable blow to get it over with, not daring for a moment to allow it to be true yet knowing full well it could be.

“No not directly. He said it was a street person who broke into the factory and he went into the lab he was using at the time and started opening stuff,” he said.

She cut him off, “This is all wrong, Lee. I need to call a lawyer and then the police. If he didn’t kill him then whatever happened to him was an accident. They’ll understand won’t they?” she pleaded.

“He did not directly kill the street person but, unfortunately, there is more to it,” he said.

“If the Sergeant dies his death was accidental and I’m sure it can be handled by a competent lawyer. The death of the person in the factory was also an accident but what he died of is the problem,” he said.

She stared at him, her face a mask of confusion, her eyes asking the question her mouth could not form.

“Tyler told me he died from exposure to anthrax,” he said.

The deep lines of fatigue and confusion on her face told him she was starting to sink from all the stress and bad news.

“Isn’t that—?” Her voice trailed off leaving the question unfinished.

“Tyler looked for and found anthrax spores at the farm across the road. He told me he was planning to use it as a delivery agent for his virus because he thought it was more virulent but he gave up on it after the homeless person broke into the lab and died from exposure to it. He could no longer safely enter the lab and he sealed the door with duct tape.

The problem is the authorities will not understand what he was trying to do when they discover the cause of death was anthrax. It is a big red flag for them because terrorist groups have used it as a weapon in the past. Do you remember stories about people receiving letters in the mail with anthrax inside back in the eighties?” he said.

She nodded. She vaguely remembered news stories about it.

“Luckily he gave up trying to use it when he witnessed first-hand how dangerous the spores are. The immediate problem we face is potentially much worse than his POrna virus. When the body is discovered the local authorities will notify the federal anti-terrorist unit in Ottawa. Anthrax is high up on their watch list.

They will not be convinced he was trying to do something positive for humanity and they will almost certainly demand he be tried as a terrorist.” He watched the growing look of horror on her face as the truth of what he was saying and what it might mean for their son sank in. She was absorbing it when he said “Here is my plan. POrna is potentially a much bigger issue but for all practical purposes the authorities do not know anything about it yet. This anthrax problem, on the other hand, cannot wait. It must be dealt with immediately. My plan is simple I will go into the lab tonight and clean it up and remove any traces of anthrax spores,” he said.

Her hand covered her mouth and her eyes were sunken and dark with worry. “Can you do that? I mean, what if it kills you too?” she said.

“I have the necessary training to handle hazardous agents and thanks to Hunter I have a high quality bio-suit to wear,” he said. He paused and sipped his beer giving her time to absorb what he said as he decided how to approach the next item they needed to discuss. They sat in silence together as the seriousness of the situation sank in. “There is one more thing we need to talk about,” he said.

“Oh my God. There’s more? What is it?” she said.

“Will you let Tyler go in with me?” he said.

Andi’s hand flew to her throat in a gesture which was instinctively defensive. He asked her to put her child in danger and to her shocked horror she was actually considering it. Too much was happening too quickly and she no longer felt in control of anything. Their lives had caught fire and there was no time to think about anything except putting out the flames threatening to devour their son. Lee came back into her life and it was wonderful and it felt right. Now he was asking her to do this and she was terrified. It felt like she was gambling with Tyler’s life and if she lost it meant she could lose both of them.

“I will go with you,” she said.

The desperation in her voice tore at his heart. What an awful situation I have put her in, he thought. But there was no other way.

“It has to be Tyler. He knows exactly where to find the virus and anthrax spores and what needs to be done to clean the lab. There is no other way to do it, if I could do this alone I would in a heartbeat, but it would take too long to find all the contamination and I could easily miss something which could identify him. Has Tyler ever been fingerprinted?” he said.

When he asked her this question the remaining thin strands of control slipped from her grasp and she let out a sob. Everything they talked about up to that point was in the abstract but fingerprinting and everything that implied made the danger to her son concrete and immediate. She envisioned him being forcefully fingerprinted and she lost what little control she had left.

***

Zen turned off the kitchen light and walked through the darkened house to her bedroom. She turned on the ceiling light but did not go in, something had made her pause, and she stood in the doorway gazing in. The room looked different somehow; it seemed unfamiliar, like it belonged to someone else, someone much younger. It did not give her the feeling of safety it usually did. She felt like the things inside belonged to a former life, one she no longer lived.

It was not just what Tyler did to her that made her feel this way this feeling had been coming for a long time. The things in her room were from childhood. Her stuff was scattered everywhere and she did not know why but the sight of it scattered about made her feel ashamed. She began to pick up the clothes she’d thrown on the floor. They were everywhere and she felt embarrassed for her lack of caring as one by one she picked them up and put them into the laundry basket.

She was confused and uneasy about everything that happened today and as she straightened the shade on her Princess Jasmine bedside lamp she frowned at the thick layer of dust.

She was thinking about Tyler because he was confusing, she wondered if Dr. Mann was right about him? She supposed that in his own weird way he did love her. She thought she saw something in his face today when he looked at her while they stood in the sunbeam together.

She lifted the lid on her jewelry box and looked at the baubles and girl stuff inside, and she picked up a pink plastic hair comb. She could recall the day she bought it at Zellers and how cool she thought it was though now she could not recall the name of the cartoon character embossed on it. She dropped the comb into the garbage can beside her desk.

Nothing felt the same anymore she thought as she dug into the box and found the item she was looking for. A rusty metal bottle cap the old-fashioned kind with the pointy edges and the faded word “Coke” on top. It was the kind you needed to have a bottle opener to remove. She turned it over and read the words printed inside.

I LOVE YOU

When she showed it to her mom she said it was probably from a contest or something. She never told her mom that Tyler gave it to her. It was summer and Andi was at work and she was babysitting him. They rode their bikes to the airport and they were lying together on the grass watching planes take off. She was dozing, half asleep in the warm sun, when he took her hand and placed the bottle cap on her palm and closed her fingers one at a time over it. He was eleven and she was thirteen.

She was jarred from the memory by the sound of the kitchen door opening and before she could call out Tyler was standing in her bedroom doorway.

“Are you upset?” he said.

She looked at him and tears formed in her eyes. Yes, she was upset but he would not understand why so what good would it do to tell him?

“No,” she said.

“Want sandwiches?” he said.

“No,” she said.

He turned to leave.

”Wait Ty I want to talk to you,” she said.

He stopped and turned around and sat on her bed holding the tray of sandwiches on his knees. With one hand he started to fish around under the covers looking for her remote control.

“No Tyler no TV I want to talk,” she said.

She took the tray of food from him and set it down on her dresser. She turned around and stared at him and he looked uncomfortable like he knew he was in trouble.

“Okay,” he said and immediately began fidgeting. He noticed her iPod on the floor but he did not reach for it like he normally would.

“Why did you do that to me, give me that virus? It made me sick. I trusted you,” she said finishing with a chin-trembling sob.

“For a baby,” he said thinking that was enough to explain it to her but then he remembered what Andrea said about not talking about babies and he risked a quick look to see what the word baby did to her face.

“Do you even know what that means?” she said through her tears.

He glanced up at her eyes again and then away. She sat down beside him on her bed and roughly pushed his shoulder toppling him over. He was not expecting it and he fell completely over but quickly righted himself and braced himself for more. He watched her stomach muscles to see if her weight shifted so he would know if she tried to do it again.

“Tyler, you don’t even know what that means. You think a baby is like your stinky iguana. You think you can get one and then do whatever you want to it like some lab rat. It does not work that way. Babies are forever. You were a baby, I was a baby, and you can’t do weird stuff to a baby,” she said.

Her voice was high and exasperated and he knew she was upset but when she said iguana he began thinking about the sequence of lizard DNA which coded for a tongue flick. He could see all of them in order in his mind but he read only the letters at the three end of sequence. This kept his mind busy as he tried to decipher why she was upset and the meaning of the words she said.

She turned and looked at his face to see if he was listening to what she was saying and he flinched under her gaze.

“Who would take care of it?” she said.

“What?”

“A baby.”

She was trying to think of something meaningful to get through to him. She remembered he let his pet lizard loose in the field next door because he did not want to take care of it.

“Andrea,” he said certain it would be a safe answer.

“You’d give our baby to your mom to take care of?”

She shouted the words in disbelief and he saw her muscles tighten and he braced again certain she was going to try to push him over but she did not. He was confused by her reaction. He thought it was a safe answer because that is what Andrea does.

“Wait a minute. What am I saying?” she said. There was a comical look of bewilderment on her face but he missed it. “How did this get so freaking twisted?” she said. She laughed at her own crazy reaction to letting his mom take care of the baby she did not have. This whole thing is insane she thought as she looked at him. She turned to him and lifted his chin and studied his open innocent features and his intense grey eyes.

They were cast downward she knew because he found it hard to meet her gaze and then she realized he had absolutely no clue what she was talking about. Of course it was natural he would expect Andrea to take care of their baby. In his experience she is the mother unit and that’s what she does. She continued to look at him and lifted his chin higher so he would have to look at her face. “Tyler do you love me?” she said. Her voice was low and questioning but also conveyed a tone of challenge.

“Yes,” he said. He spoke without hesitation and although she had asked the question she was not prepared for the impact his direct simple response had on her. It brought fresh tears to her eyes and now it was her turn to look away.