The Zen Gene (10 page)

The Truth Hurts

6:30 pm

They were in the kitchen when he decided it was time to come clean and tell her why he was there. It was a confession he was not looking forward to making but he knew it would be worse if he let the deception continue.

“There is something I need to tell you. It’s about today. I didn’t run into you by accident,” he said.

She was already upset and she physically recoiled when he said this backing away from him with a look of shock on her face.

“I’m here because Tyler is in trouble,” he said.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she said.

The look of shock was turning to fear.

“I was contacted by the Canadian Forces Military Intelligence unit in Esquimalt. They are convinced Tyler is involved in some kind of terrorist activity,” he said.

Andi stopped with her arms folded across her chest facing him across the room.

”Is that supposed to be funny? I think you better leave,” she said.

“Andi, this isn’t a joke. It’s serious. I’m here to help Tyler,” he said.

“Help Tyler?” she said angrily. “You told me you didn’t know I had a son. Those were your exact words and now you tell me you’re here to help him?”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

”You lied to me today and now you’re telling me you work for Military Intelligence and Tyler’s in trouble. You call that helping?” she yelled.

“No, Andi you don’t understand. I don’t work for them. I’m an instructor at Lakehead College. They came and got me. My name came up in relation to you because we knew each other in Toronto. I agreed to come here to convince them that you and Tyler have nothing to do with it. There is no other reason. When they told me your name I knew I needed to help you. Colonel Western told me Tyler was involved in some kind of bio-terror attack on his troops,” he said.

“What are you talking about? What does Tyler have to do with bio-anything?” she said. She was angry but at least she was listening.

“They think he is somehow involved in terrorism,” he said lamely.

“Terrorism, what kind of idiot would think that? He’s sixteen years old and failing grade eight. What kind of terrorist does that make him? Does this have anything to do with him being on the computer all the time? Has he talked to someone online? Is that it?” she said.

“No. This is more serious than that,” he said.

“Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”

The hurt sound of accusation in her voice cut him deeply.

“Nothing, there is nothing in it for me. What should I have done? Walk away? Ignore the whole thing? I know what these guys are like, they believe Tyler is involved in something.”

“I would have told you!” she said.

“What was I supposed to tell you? That the Canadian Government thinks your son is a bio-terrorist? I would certainly believe that if it came from an old boyfriend who shows up out of nowhere. I was just going to forget the whole thing and tell Western to piss off but after I talked with Tyler I realized that he knows quite a lot about genetics and knowing that Julian Froste is his father….well I wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe Tyler is being used by him or… I didn’t know what to think,” he said.

Andi looked at him with tears in her eyes.

“His father?” she said and wiped them away before she continued. “You are his father.” There was hurt in her voice as she said it and she turned away from him and ran to her bedroom slamming the door behind her.

He was stunned. Emotion welled within him at this startling revelation. It started with disbelief, moved to wonder, and finally acceptance as the obvious truth of her words crystallized in his mind. The surprise of her revelation slowed his ability to comprehend the entirety of its meaning though he knew intrinsically, at a deep level, it was true. There was something familiar about Tyler, he felt it the moment he saw the boy.

A moment ago he understood his life completely. He knew the safe bounds of the loops and paths on which his life moved. It took only four words to shatter that illusion and slam him headlong into a new reality. It felt as though up to this point in life he had been living in slow motion and now, jolted awake, he arose from long stupor.

He drifted through the house to her bedroom door and stopped pale and shaken before it. His logical mind desperately fought to explain it away. This can’t be right, his brain argued, it makes no sense. If I am his father why didn’t she tell me? Before he had completely formed the question in his mind his heart revealed the answer. He whispered to the closed door reflexively holding onto the last shred of his former life.

“They told me his father was Julian Froste.”

His voice trailed off. The words he spoke served only to repeat what he now realized was a lie. He could not have named the exact emotion he was experiencing at that moment, but thinking about it later, he realized it was all of them.

He opened the bedroom door.

The
White Van

7:30 pm

Zen stormed around her bedroom picking things up and throwing them down again. She was looking for her blue and white top. She knew it was there somewhere in the tangle of clothes on the floor. She was increasingly frustrated looking for it and now in a full-on rage she was throwing anything she put her hands on. It was when she threw the iPod her grandpa gave her for her birthday on the floor that she gave up and flung herself onto the bed and began screaming into her pillow.

When she stopped she was surprised she felt better even if it was total drama queen stuff. She realized she was not upset about the missing top it was Tyler she was upset about. She had been frantic worrying about Katie until she got home and remembered seeing her at the mall recently. She was no longer concerned about her being sick but it bothered her that Tyler would do that to her.

She was not exactly sure what he did but it was probably dangerous and definitely wrong of him to do anything to anyone. She knew herself well enough to know it would drive her crazy if she did not do something about it but the only thing she could think to do was talk to Tyler. She could not tell Andi about it because she would go nuts on him and he would never trust her again for ratting on him. It was frustrating trying to have a conversation with him but she knew she had to try. She wanted to talk him out of doing any more of his weird experiments before he made someone sick or got into real trouble. She was so angry it made her cry to even think about him; she was angry and worried something bad will happen to him.

This couldn’t wait. She pulled her blue hoodie on and stormed out the back door. There were no lights on in his room in the basement and she didn’t bother to check upstairs. She didn’t want to talk to Andi. The lights upstairs were off and she figured she stayed late to work overtime and that was why he was able to go out in the first place.

She leaned over the fence and scanned the backyard but she did not see his bike anywhere. Grabbing her bike off the back porch she rode to the old factory figuring he might be there playing with his germs. She rode fast spurred on by equal parts anger and worry for him. She rode past the fence behind Layton’s Junkyard and shook her head at her silly mistake. It was dark he wouldn’t be there.

She set off for the old factory dreading the idea of entering it through the vent. She decided to pound on the door until he answered. When she crossed over the train tracks across from the factory she stopped dead. A white van was parked outside the building and two people in green coveralls and clear plastic facemasks where carrying Tyler’s things out of the building. She dropped to the ground with her bike and squatted low in the weeds. She watched as they loaded lab equipment into the van.

“Holy shit.”

She assumed they were the police, though she could not see any markings on the van. She waited for the moment when they were both inside the building and crept forwards to look for his bike where he usually stashed it. She was relieved to see it was not there, but she was too afraid to look inside the van to see if they had him locked inside. She crept back to her bike and dragged it along the ground until she was around the corner of the next building. She rode back to his house praying he had returned home.

She was worried about the police and what kind of trouble he might be in. Seeing those people in coveralls and facemasks scared her and she was panicked wondering where he was. She could not stop herself from imagining him locked up in the white van and she was sobbing by the time she rolled through the front gate of his yard.

Bad Choices

Andi’s bedroom was unlit she was sitting on the edge of her bed with a wad of tissue in her hand. Her nose was red and eyes puffy.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said her voice soft; calm now her anger replaced by sadness, “it was all wrong, the wrong time… for everything,” she sobbed into the clump of tissues.

“What was more important than telling me I was a father?” he said.

His voice was low; the words he spoke held no judgment in them. There was no anger or accusation in the question he simply wanted to know what it was about him that made her decide not to tell him about his son.

She shrugged her shoulders. She felt stupid and worthless in his eyes. Looking back now it was easy to see that she made bad choices and reacted badly to the whole thing. She was twenty-one when she got pregnant and she believed that having a baby would destroy both of their lives. If she had the baby, and they stayed together because of it, she knew they would end up hating each other just like her parents.

She did not want that for herself or for Lee and she decided on her own to have an abortion. She did not tell him about the pregnancy because she did not want him to be involved in the decision. It was hers alone. She convinced herself she was doing the right thing for both of them. She would take care of the problem and things would go back to the way they were but it did not work out that way. When the time came to have the abortion she could not go through with it, she ran from the clinic in tears. It was the loneliest time of her life. She felt like she was stuck, she could not go back to Lee and she could not go through with the abortion so she did the only thing she could think of, she ran away.

She traveled to Montreal to have the baby and after he was born she held onto the fantasy that Lee would come and find her and they would make a life together. It was a silly childish fantasy. Lee had no idea where she was or even why she left him. After a while that fantasy faded when she realized it would never happen. She became reckless and dispirited drinking too much and bedding anyone who came along in an attempt to ease her pain and fill the emptiness she felt.

She bounced from one toxic relationship to another until the day she woke up in the ICU at Montreal General Hospital with a concussion. When she regained consciousness and did not know where she was. She could not see, her eyes would not focus, and that experience frightened her, but much worse than that, when her vision cleared, there was a hard-eyed social worker from the Child Protection Agency waiting to talk to her. The teenage babysitter she left Tyler with for a few hours called the Ministry when she had not returned after three days.

The social worker took him into custody and he was living in a foster home. He was not yet two years old and the Ministry woman was threatening to make application to the court to take him away from her permanently. There were papers laid out on the hospital rolling table ready for her to sign to give him up. She screamed at the woman and pushed the table violently away. She lied and told the doctor that she was assaulted which she probably was though she had no memory of it.

After telling the lie she told the social worker she was calling her lawyer and threatened to go to the media with her story if the ministry did not back off. Three days later the same woman returned Tyler to her with a warning she would be watching the situation. As soon as she could arrange it she and Tyler got on a bus and left Montreal for good. It had been a turning point in her life.

The possibility of losing him scared her and she worked hard to clean herself up and get her life back on track. She landed in Winnipeg for a week and stayed with her aunt and while she was there she decided to move to British Columbia. They traveled west in an old campervan and toured around the province looking for a home but it was not until they took the ferry to Vancouver Island that she felt safe. Vancouver Island was as far away from her troubles as she could be and still live in Canada. The Island was a place where no one knew her and she was unlikely to ever run into anyone from her past. She had long ago given up looking for a mate.

Fatherhood

He was still standing at the threshold of her bedroom looking in when she began to speak. He had not seen her room before but he would have recognized it, she had a way of turning a room into an extension of her self. He saw the bits and pieces of history strewn about like landmarks of a life constantly lived and oft renewed. His eyes came to rest upon a photograph in a silver frame on her dresser and he recognized it immediately.

He felt the air in his lungs thicken as he was awash in feelings. It was a picture of them taken at Niagara Falls and even from across the room he could see the happy smiles on their faces. He recalled how Andi had asked a teenage girl to take their picture while they kissed. They kissed dramatically and passionately and the girl was enthralled and forgot to take the picture.

They were deeply in love and laughed and posed for her again while smiling and holding hands. They laughed when the girl’s mother dragged her away giving them a nervous look and a wide berth for the rest of the weekend. It was a wonderful memory rich with remembered feelings. Looking at the photo sent him all the way back to that time when he could experience joy and had the expectation of a happy life. It made him sad to consider how little happiness he experienced in the years since that photo.

Andi watched him through her tears as he gazed at the picture. She kept it all these years and sometimes felt foolish, ashamed, and angry for being such a sentimental fool. Ten years ago in a fit of anger she threw it into the garbage but fished it out again when she was overcome with emptiness and loss. She looked at his sad down-turned face and saw tears form in his eyes and it surprised her. She convinced herself long ago that he did not feel anything for her because he never tried to find her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He sat on the bed beside her and sadness welled up within him for all that had gone by. Regret remained his most faithful servant attending to the pain and loss, sidestepping the possibility of the present. No wound or scar or deep regret came to his heart as painfully as the love he had known and lost for this woman. That is what he regretted most and his arms ached to hold her and undo the hurt. He wondered why she rejected him as father to their child. When the word “father” appeared in his mind he broke down and wept covering his face with his hands.

She watched his shoulders slump and felt his deep sadness. She pulled his hands away from his face to look into his eyes and only then did she realize what she’d done to him, to both of them.

”I am so sorry Lee, I didn’t know,” she said.

They sat side by side and grieved for the lives they could have had but for fear and pride.

“I thought you met someone,” he said.

She shook her head sadly and her eyes bore the look of someone gazing inward. She tried to give him that impression at the time but now she could not remember why. It was more of her dismal thinking she realized. When she found out she was pregnant it affected her mind in odd ways and the worst was her unreliable judgment and a tendency to make disastrous snap decisions.

“I missed you for so many years after,” he said. “I was deeply in love with you.”

She heard the emotion in his voice and knew the words he spoke were true and this knowledge broke her. Her shoulders trembled as she sobbed and he put his arm around her and held her with great tenderness.

In her youth, though she knew by most standards she was attractive, she had a hard time believing anyone could love the person she was inside. This belief grew in her mind until she assumed anyone who said they loved her was suspect in motive or simply blind to her true ugliness. She created an impenetrable loop of self-defeating logic which kept her from being hurt but also kept her from accepting love. It worked well until she met Lee and it only took a month for her to fall deeply in love with him. The depth of her love for him scared her but she hid her insecurities from him and risked it all on his heart.

What Lab?

7:50 PM

The house was dark when Zen knocked on the front door and she was startled when a man opened it. She had never seen him before and fear made her back away. She thought he was connected with the police and the white van. She took another step backwards and was about to turn and run when she saw Andi. It was a relief to see her until she realized Andi had been crying and this scared her even more because Andi never cried.

What’s wrong, Zen?” Andi said. She was alarmed by the appearance of the girl. She could see she had been crying. Her eyes and face were red and puffy and there were wet smudges on her cheeks. She was balanced on one foot on the bottom step of the porch ready to bolt.

“Where’s Tyler?” Zen blurted.

“I don’t know, down in his room. Why? Is there something wrong, Zen?” she said.

The pitch of Andi’s voice was climbing higher with worry, matching Zen’s pitch.

“I need to talk to him,” she said.

“What’s wrong? Why do you need to talk to him?” she said.

“Nothing,” she said and she turned to leave. “It’s nothing.”

“Zen, wait,” she said.

She ran out into the yard and grabbed the girl by the arm.

“Do you know something? Has something happened? You have to tell me!” she yelled.

He watched the exchange between them. At first the girl cowered under Andi’s verbal assault but then she stiffened and it looked to him like she might deck Andi if she did not let go of her arm.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I need to see him. That’s all,” Zen said. He could see the girl was barely holding it together and she would not look at either of them.