The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 45

Ziggy watched his beautiful sister. Sun caressed her pale cheeks, and a light breeze lifted strands of blond hair off her neck. Her condition had pulled her face out of shape, but the ghost of her classic beauty lingered.

He’d wheeled her onto her rooftop garden and parked the chair facing Central Park so she could look out over the trees and appreciate the colors of the dying leaves. He glanced at the baby monitor in her lap. She used it to communicate with her nurse when the woman was out of the room. Ziggy had dismissed the nurse and left the receiver on so Joe Tesla could hear them, and they him, when he woke up. So far, the man hadn’t made a sound.

She shivered. The wind had picked up, and goose bumps ran along her bare arms. He arranged a blanket as yellow as a sunflower across her wasted shoulders. She loved the bright color, said it made her feel like a summer day. Maybe so, but he thought it made her look jaundiced.

“Warm enough?” he asked.

“The cold reminds me that I’m still alive, if only for a little while.” Her eyes were fixed hungrily on the far off park, as if she knew that she would never go there again.

He shot a glance over his shoulder and across the garden to the glass-fronted room where he had spent so many afternoons reading to her, playing chess with her, and combing her long hair. Tesla was sitting in a wheelchair parked against the back wall, a few feet from the warm band of afternoon sunlight that fell across the tiles. He had covered his eyes with his free arm but otherwise sat still. He shouldn’t be awake yet, but he’d already proved to be an outlier as a test subject for drugs. Ziggy touched a control in his pocket, opening the device he’d hidden in the air ducts.

She tried to see what he was looking at, but he knew that she wouldn’t be able to turn her head far enough. It was imperative that she only see what he wanted her to see, move where he wanted her to move. He had positioned her carefully.

“Key West was great.” He tried to think of something to distract her from the room behind them, and came up with a lie. “Great sunsets.”

“Lots of bikinis, too, I bet.” A hint of mischief danced at the edges of her smile.

“I saw a woman with a bikini made out of green paper. She went into the swimming pool, and we watched it dissolve.”

She laughed. “That must have been hell on the pool filter.”

“Nobody was thinking about the pool filter,” he said. “Trust me.”

Her blue eyes darkened. “Time was, I would have been the girl with the dissolving bikini.”

“I remember.” She’d had a bright red bikini when they were fourteen. He still dreamed about it sometimes and woke up slick with shame.

“My last bikini was velvet. And black.” She looked toward the faraway orange and gold trees. “That’s appropriate when you think about it. My bikini of mourning.”

He’d always lied to her in the past, made up some comforting nonsense, but he didn’t today. “Have you ever thought about taking it to your grave? Being buried in it?”

Those haunted blue eyes finally met his, and she saw that he was really asking about death, and if she wanted it.

“Every day,” she said. “But I can’t leave you alone.”

“What if you didn’t have to, Zag?” he asked.

Their father had called him Zig, her Zag—“Zig and Zag, together forever” was their motto. He hadn’t used her nickname in years.

“No, Ziggy,” she said.

“Ziggy alone?” He tucked the blanket in more tightly around her shoulder. “I can’t picture it.”

Her face contorted, and the blanket trembled. She was trying to move her arm, but she couldn’t. After a brief struggle, she grimaced. “Take my hand.”

He reached under the yellow blanket and held her hand. It was as cool and limp as if she were already dead.

“I don’t want you to die,” she said.

“I don’t want you to die, either,” he answered.

“You have things to do. For you. For me.”

He squeezed her hand. “Zig and Zag, together forever.”

“You need to take care of Joe for me,” she said.

Hot rage burned through him. How dare she bring that man into this?

“You’re hurting my hand,” she said.

He used her hand to pull her wheelchair around to face the floor-to-ceiling glass door that opened onto the rooftop. She drew in a quick breath of pain, but she said nothing.

She stared at the glass, blinked, and looked again. It must have taken her a moment to look across the garden, through the glass, and to make sense of the wheelchair and the figure sitting on it. Then her eyes widened, and she looked up at Ziggy. She’d recognized the man in the chair.

Ziggy watched him until he was certain. Tesla was awake. The man she wanted him to take care of.

He’d take care of him all right.