Syndrome Read online

  Syndrome

  Thomas Hoover

  Thomas Hoover

  Syndrome

  "The potential [of stem cells] for saving lives. . may be unlimited. Given the proper signal or environment, stem cells, transplanted into human tissue, can be induced to develop into brain, heart, skin, bone marrow cells-indeed any specialized cells. The scientific research community believes that the transplanted stem cells may be able to regenerate dead or dying human tissue, reversing the progress of disease."

  Michael J. Fox, The New York Times (Op-Ed), November 1, 2000

  Chapter 1

  Sunday, April 5

  6:49a.m.

  Alexa Hampton was awakened by a sensation in her chest. The alarm wasn't set to go off for another eleven minutes, but she knew her sleep was finished.

  Not again! She rolled over and slapped the blue pillowcase.

  That little sound from her heart and the twinges of angina, that catchall for heart discomfort, was happening more and more now, just as Dr. Ekelman had warned her. But she wasn't going to let it stop her from living her life to the fullest as long as she could, and right now that meant having her morning run.

  She curled her legs around, onto the floor, reached for a nitroglycerin tab, and slipped it under her tongue. Known as a vasodilator, the nitro lowered the workload on her heart by expanding her veins. It should get her through the workout. ..

  That was when she felt a warm presence rub against her leg.

  "Hi, baby." Still sucking on the tab, she reached over and tousled Knickers' gray-and-white hair, then pushed it back from her dog's eyes. Her Old English sheepdog, a huge hirsute off-road vehicle, turned and licked her hand. Knickers was ready to hit the trail.

  She'd been dreaming of Steve when the chest tightness came, and maybe the emotion that stirred up had caused the angina. She still dreamed of him often, and it was always someplace where they had been together and loved, and they were ever on the brink of some disaster. That frequently caused her heart to race, waking her.

  This time it was the vacation they took six years ago, in the spring. They were sailing off Norman's Cay in the Bahamas. She was raising the jib, the salt spray in her hair, but then she looked up and realized they were about to ram a reef.

  She felt the dreams were her unconscious telling her to beware her current precarious condition. If, as is said, at the moment of your passing, your entire life flashes before your eyes, then the dreams were like that, only in slow motion. It was as though she were being prepared for something. The dreams were a premonition. She had a pretty good idea of what.

  Ally had had rheumatic fever when she was five, which went undetected long enough to scar a valve in her heart. The formal name was rheumatoid aortic stenosis, a rare, almost freakish condition that had shaped her entire life. The pediatrician at Mount Sinai had told her parents they should think twice about allowing her to engage in any vigorous activity. Her heart's function could be deceptively normal during childhood but when she got older. . Well, why stress that organ now and hasten the inevitable day when it could no longer keep up with the rest of her body?

  She had refused to listen. She'd played volleyball in grade school, basketball in high school, and she became a disciplined runner when she went to Columbia to study architecture. She wanted to prove that you could make your heart stronger if you believed hard enough and wanted to live hard enough.

  Now, though, it was all catching up. She'd had a complete checkup two weeks ago Thursday, including a stress test and

  Doppler echocardiogram, and Dr. Ekelman had laid out the situation, gazing over her half-lens glasses and pulling at her chin. The normal twinkle in her eyes was entirely absent.

  "Alexa, your condition has begun worsening. There's a clear aortic murmur now when your pulse goes up. How long can you go on living in denial? You really can't keep on stressing your heart the way you have been. You can have a normal life, but it's got to be low-key. Don't push your luck."

  "Living half a life is so depressing," she'd declared, not entirely sure she meant it. "It's almost worse than none at all."

  "Ally, I'm warning you. If you start having chest sensations that don't respond to nitro, call me immediately. I mean that. There's a new drug, Ranolazine, that temporarily shifts your heart over to using glucose as a fuel instead of fatty acids and provides more energy for a given amount of oxygen. It will make the pain back off, but I only want to start you on that as a last resort. That's the final stop before open-heart surgery and a prosthetic aortic valve."

  Day by day, the illusion of normality was getting harder and harder to maintain. She had been playing second violin in an amateur string quartet called the West Village Oldies, but a month ago she'd had to drop out. She didn't have the endurance to practice enough to keep up with the others. Blast. It was having to give up things you love that really hurt.

  Still, she was determined to keep a positive attitude. There was your heart, and then there was heart. You had to understand the difference.

  She lay back to wait for the alarm and try to compose her mind. This Sunday morning was actually the one day of the year she most dreaded.The anniversary.

  It had been back when Steve was still alive. They were living in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, in a brownstone town house they were renting. The rent was high, but they were doing all right. Steve was a political consultant, who had helped some fledgling candidates overcome the odds and win important elections. In between campaigns here, he also got work in the nominal democracies in Latin America.

  She was a partner in a small firm of architects who had all been at Columbia together and decided to team up after graduation and start a business. There were four of them-she was the only woman-and it was a struggle at the beginning. For the first three years they had to live off crumbs tossed their way by the big boys, subcontracts from Skidmore and other giants. They felt like they were a high-paid version of Manpower, Inc., doing grunt work, designing the interiors of shopping malls in the Midwest and banks in Saudi Arabia, while their prime contractors got to keep all the sexy, big-budget jobs that called for creativity, like a glass-and-steel office tower in L.A.

  But then interesting work finally started to trickle in, including a plum job to convert a massive parking garage in Greenwich Village into a luxury condominium. Through a wild coincidence (or luck) she had personally designed the apartment she later ended up buying for herself.

  Just when everything seemed to be turning around and going her way, an event happened that stopped her in her tracks. Five years ago on this very day, April 5, her mother, Nina, phoned her at six-thirty in the morning and, in a trembling voice that still haunted, announced that her father was dead.

  Arthur Wade Hampton was fifty-nine and he’d been cleaning his Browning shotgun for an early-morning hunting trip to Long Island-so he’d claimed the night before-and … she was awakened by the explosion of a discharge. A horrible accident in the kitchen of their co-op in the West Village.

  Like Hemingway. Thinking back, they both realized it was the wrong time of year to hunt anything-but they both also knew he wanted the world to think that. Moreover, it was precisely the kind of vital lie they'd need to get through the pointed questions and skeptical looks that lay ahead. It was a knowledge all the more palpable for being unspoken. There's no time like those first moments after a tragedy to create a special reality for yourself.

  It was only in the aftermath that she managed to unravel the reason. He owned and operated an interior-design firm in SoHo called CitiSpace, and he had mortgaged it to the hilt. He was on the verge of bankruptcy. (That was why Ally had not spoken to her younger brother, Grant, in the last 4 1/2 years.)

  She felt she had no choice but to try to salvage what was left of the busi
ness and her father's reputation. She left the architectural firm and took over CitiSpace. It turned out she was easily as good an interior designer as she had been an architect, and before long she had a backlog of work and was adding staff. She restructured and, eventually paid off the firm's debt; it was now on a sound financial footing.

  These days CitiSpace specialized in architectural rehabs in the Greenwich Village area, with as many SoHo and TriBeCa lofts as came her way. The work was mostly residential, but lately some lucrative commercial office jobs were beginning to walk through the door. Anything dependent on luxury real estate can be vulnerable in dicey times, but she'd been able to give everybody a holiday bonus for the past couple of years. She'd even given herself one this year, in the form of this new condo apartment, which she loved.

  Another major reason she'd taken over CitiSpace was to try to provide her mother some peace and dignity in her twilight years. But then, irony of ironies, Nina, who was a very lively sixty-six, was diagnosed eighteen months ago with early-onset Alzheimer's. Now her consciousness was rapidly slipping away.

  All the things that had happened over the last few years had called for a special kind of heart. She had known Steve Jensen, a freelance political consultant, for eight years, and they'd lived together for three of those, before they got married. He was warm and tender and sexy, and she'd envisioned them in rocking chairs forty years down the road. They'd been married for only six months when he got a job to help reelect the president of Belize. At first he was reluctant, concerned about human rights issues, but then he decided the other candidate, the alternative, was even worse. So he went.

  How many things can be destined to go wrong in your life? Exactly seven months after her dad died, she received a phone call from the American Embassy in Belmopan, Belize. Steve had been flying with the presidential candidate over a stretch of southern rain forest in a single-engine Cessna when a sudden thunderstorm came out of the Caribbean and the plane lost radio contact. That was the last, etc.

  She rushed there, but after two weeks the "rescue" officially became a "recovery" mission. Except there was never any recovery. After two months she flew back alone, the loneliest plane ride of her life.

  She still had his clothes in her closet, as though to keep hope alive. When you love someone so much you think you could never live without them-and then one day you're forced to-it resets your thinking. Her dad's death and then Steve's. .

  She wanted to love life, but life sometimes felt like it was asking more than she should have to give. She currently had no one special to spend her weekends with, but she hadn't given up, nor was she pushing it. All things in time, except time could be running out. .

  Brrrringwent the alarm and Knickers responded with a lively "Woof" She was anxious to get going.

  "Come on, baby," Ally said. "Time for a treat."

  She struggled up and made her way into the kitchen and got down a box of small rawhide chews. It would give Knickers something to occupy her mind for the few minutes it took to get ready.

  Since she lived at the west end of Barrow Street, right across the highway from the new Hudson River Park esplanade that defined that mighty river's New York bank, she had a perfect course for her morning runs. She usually liked to run down to the park at the rejuvenated Battery Park City and then back. She didn't know what the distance was exactly, maybe three-quarters of a mile each way, maybe slightly more, but it fit her endurance nicely. The weather was still cool enough in the mornings that Knickers could accompany her at full trot. In the heat of summer, however, they both had to cut back.

  She'd put on blue sweats, got her Walkman prepped with a Beethoven quintet, and was just finishing cinching her running shoes when the phone jangled.

  Sunday, April 5

  7:18a.m.

  Grant Hampton listened to the ringing and felt the sweat on his palms. For a normal person, this would be an insane time to call, but knowing his nutbag sister, she was probably already up and about to go out for her daily run. And this on a Sunday morning, for chrissake, when rational people were drinking coffee or having sex or doing something sensible like retrieving theTimesfrom the hallway and reading the columns in the Business section. He had left Tanya, his runway model live-in, to get her beauty sleep and had driven downtown at this unthinkable hour on a mission. He was chief financial officer of Bartlett Medical Devices, Inc., which was in imminent danger of going under and taking him with it.

  Come on, Ally. Pick up the frigging phone.

  He gazed out the windshield of his blue Porsche, now parked directly across the street from Alexa's lobby, and tried to calms pulse. He hadn't entirely worked out the pitch, but that was okay because he wanted to sound spontaneous. Who was it said, "Sincerity, if you can just fakethat, you've got it made?" That was what-

  "Hello."

  Thank God she's picked up.

  "Hi, sis, remember the sound of my voice? Long time, right?" Come on, he thought, give me an opening here. There was a pause that Grant Hampton thought lasted an eternity.

  "You picked a funny time to call."

  Is that all she has to say? Four and a half frigging years she shuts me out of her life, blaming me, and then. .

  "Well, Ally, I figured there's gotta be a statute of limitations on being accused of something I didn't do. So I decided to take a flier that maybe four years and change was in the ballpark."

  "Grant, do you know what time it is? This is Sunday and-“

  “Hey, this is the hour you do your Sunday run, right? If memory serves. So I thought I might drive down and keep you company."

  He didn't want to let her know that he was already there. That would seem presumptuous and probably tick her off even more. But by God hehadto get to her.

  Again there was a long pause. Like she was trying to collect and marshal her anger.

  "You want to come toseeme?Now?That's a heck of a-"

  "Look, there's something really important I need to talk to you about. It's actually a big favor for you, sis. You've surely heard of Winston Bartlett?"

  "I've also heard of Donald Trump. So?"

  "Well, he's got a clinic out in New Jersey that-"

  "Grant, I know you're a big shot in his medical conglomerate or whatever it is, but I'm not interested in whatever you're peddling. I'm going out to run now."

  He heard the sound of the phone clicking off, without so much as a good-bye.

  Jesus,he thought, she really is ticked. This is going to be harder than I thought.

  Okay, here goes Plan B.

  He started the Porsche and slowly backed to the corner of Washington Street, where he parked again and then hunkered down, loving the smell of the new leather seat. Ally was going to come charging out of the front door in about two minutes, with that damned sheepdog that Steve gave her, assuming it was still around.

  Grant Hampton was three years younger than Alexa and he lived in a different world. Whereas she'd never wanted to be anything but an architect, he had aimed directly for NYU School of Business. After that, he had gone to Wall Street and gotten a broker's license and begun an extremely lucrative career as a bond trader for Goldman Sachs. He discovered he had the nerves, as well as a gift for handling big numbers in his head. Soon he had a duplex co-op on the twenty-sixth floor of a new building on Third Avenue in the East Sixties. He loved the money and the pad He also liked how easy it was to pick up models at downtown clubs if you had your own co-op, a Porsche, and were six feet tall with a designer wardrobe.

  That was where he met Tanya, also six feet tall, a striking (natural) redhead who did a lot of runway work for Chloe.

  He thought he was making a lot of money, but Tanya, who could order a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Dom Perignon to have something to pass the time while the hors d'oeuvres were being whipped up at Nobu, taught him he was just barely getting by. She was accustomed to screwing men who had some depth to their money.

  But when he tried a financial endeavor on the side, it turned into a disaster. T
ime to move on. He sent around his resume and managed to get an interview with BMD, which was looking for someone to help them hedge their exposure in foreign currencies. The next thing he knew, he was trading bonds for Winston Bartlett's personal account.

  When Bartlett's CFO died of a heart attack at age forty-nine (while undergoing oral sex in the backseat of a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car), Grant Hampton got temporarily drafted to take over his responsibilities. That was two years ago. He was aggressive enough that there was never a search for a replacement. He had made the big time, and he had done it before he was thirty-five.

  But now it all hung in the balance. If this didn't work out, he could end up cold-calling widows out of Dun amp; Bradstreet, hawking third-rate IPOs. Tanya would be gone in a heartbeat.

  Ally, work with me for chrissake.

  Sunday, April 5

  7:57a.m.

  As Alexa stepped out of the lobby, the morning was glorious and clear. Spring had arrived in a burst of pear and cherry blossoms in the garden of St. Luke's Church, up the street, but here by the river the morning air was still brisk enough to make her skin tingle. The sun was lightening the east, setting a golden halo above the skyscrapers of mid-town. Here, with the wind tasting lightly of salt, the roadways were Sunday-morning silent and it was a magic time that always made her feel the world was young and perfect and she was capable of anything.

  This was her private thinking time-even dreaming time-and she shared it only with Knickers, who was trotting along beside her now, full of enthusiasm. Ally suspected that her sheepdog enjoyed their morning runs along the river even more than she did.

  As she headed south, toward Battery Park City, she pondered the weird phone call she'd just gotten from Grant Seth Hampton. That was his full name. She called him Grant, but her mother, Nina, always called him Seth. Unfortunately, by whatever name, Grant Seth Hampton, an unremitting hustler, was still her brother. She wished it were not so, but some things couldn't be changed.