Deadly Design (9780698173613) (11 page)

I
'm almost back to the waiting room where Mom and Dad are. A door to the left opens, and Amber steps out. She's dressed in a green hospital gown and the same sweatpants she was wearing at the hotel. She's headed toward another room, where her clothes are waiting in a locker or maybe on a plastic chair.

She starts to open the door but must feel my eyes on her, because she turns. “Hey.” She smiles. Her hair is in a ponytail. There's a hint of gloss on her lips, probably ChapStick. “Come here.” She waves me toward her. “How are you?”

“Okay,” I say. “I just met James.”

Her eyes widen. “He's something, isn't he? I don't think I've ever seen a boy so . . . statuesque. Or beautiful. But . . .” She puts both hands on my chest and pushes me against the wall, next to a sign that says
CAUTION: OXYGEN MAY BE IN USE
.

Before I know it, her tongue is on mine again, but this kiss is different—not as urgent. She's not forcing me to experience a flavor. She's forcing me to experience . . . an experience. This kiss is sacred, like the kiss given to a soldier before he heads off to battle, or the kiss of lovers clinging to each other as the plane starts to plunge. It's the kiss of desperation and longing and hope and death. I kiss her back as intensely as I can because this kind of kiss deserves this intensity, and because only a few select people in life ever get to experience such sweet bitterness.

When the kiss ends, she doesn't move away. Instead, she lays her head against my chest.

“I can hear your heart beating,” she says. “I just saw mine on a little screen. It was pumping away.”

I remember the echocardiogram I had back in Wichita after Connor died. “Did your heart look like an alien?”

Amber gives a slight laugh and steps back, her hands lingering for a moment on my chest. “It did. And not the nice kind of alien either.”

“No E.T., huh?”

“No.” She shakes her head like the creature from
Alien
had reared its ugly head on the sonogram screen.

“Getting tired of being a guinea pig?”

“I don't mind. I just wish we'd move from the diagnosing stage to the actual fixing stage. Maybe they'll tell us something in our big meeting tomorrow.”

“I hope so.”

Amber puts her hand on the door. “My clothes are in here,” she says, matter-of-factly.

“Are they?”

“They are.” She turns the knob and opens the door a few inches. “Ever have sex in a hospital?” she asks, and I know she doesn't want to have sex in a hospital. She just doesn't want to die a virgin.

“You're in a heart hospital, Amber. You're going to be okay. And a girl's first time shouldn't be in some cold, sterile hospital. It should be someplace romantic. Like the backseat of a car.”

She laughs. “I don't suppose you have some roomy four-door parked outside do you?”

“My mom drives a minivan, but we flew down and took a taxi from the airport.”

“Bummer,” she says. “A minivan would have done nicely.”

“You deserve better than a minivan,” I say. I want to tell her that she deserves to be in love. She deserves a future, but it doesn't matter because Connor deserved a future, and so did Alexis and Triagon. What any of us deserves doesn't seem to matter.

I hear a sound behind me and turn. A woman is bent over, picking her cell phone off the tile floor. On her wrist is a charm bracelet—the same one the woman in the hotel was wearing. She looks up at me, gives me a slight smile, then casually stands and starts walking away.

“Hey,” Amber calls after me as I rush toward the woman and take hold of her arm.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

“Who are you?” I ask again. “You were at our hotel. I saw you in the lobby.”

“I don't know who or what you thought you saw, but it wasn't me,” she says. Her waist is thin, her hips narrow. She's wearing high-heeled shoes that make her body look even taller and sleeker than it is. Her blond hair is cut short. She looks like a character in a video game, like she should be holding a sniper rifle, and if I had a gun and could shoot her, her body would disappear and come back somewhere else in the video game arena.

“So you work for the hospital?” I ask.

Her red lips curve in a smile, but it's not a pleasant one. “I'd say that's obvious.”

“Then you won't mind showing me your hospital ID.”

She scoffs. “I don't have to show you anything. Now, would you mind letting me get back to work?” She starts walking away.

“I suppose hospital security can tell me who you are.”

“Wow.” She stops. “Maybe I should call security and tell them that a patient with an obvious paranoia problem is running around the hospital, making wild accusations.”

It's time for my eyes to narrow. “What makes you think I'm a patient?” I lift my wrists to show that I'm not wearing a hospital bracelet; we only get issued those when we're about to have a test of some sort, and so far today, I'm test free. “Do I look like a patient? I mean, this is a heart hospital. How do you know I'm not visiting my grandfather or something?”

Our heads both turn at the same time. There wasn't any noise. No cry for help, no gasping for air. It was the movement, the way Amber had been standing there one minute, watching us, and falling to the floor the next that caught our attention.

“Amber!” I scream, running toward her. “Help! Somebody, help!”

Almost instantly there are people everywhere, pushing me out of the way and yelling for help. They pick her up and carry her into the room she'd just come from, and more people arrive pushing carts with machines on them.

A middle-aged couple comes running down the hall, the man's arms wrapped around the woman, like he's holding her up or he's using her stout figure to steady himself. The woman has red hair, not the same brilliant red as her daughter's, but red. That's the only similarity. Neither of Amber's parents is tall. Neither gives any hint of having been beautiful or handsome in their youth. But of course right now, they don't look their best. How could they when they know their daughter is dying or is already dead?

I look down the hall, toward the woman with the bracelet who had known I was a patient. She's on her phone, talking to someone as she steps into the elevator and disappears.

T
hey have us assembled in a meeting room with several round tables and a podium near a projector screen at the front of the room. I recognize Dr. Preston from the fertility clinic and one of the cardiologists who's examined me a couple of times since I got here. His name is . . . I can't remember, but I'm sure once things get rolling, he'll introduce himself.

James walks in with his parents. He and I look at each other, but not for long; it's too hard. We both kissed the same girl, the girl who died two weeks before her eighteenth birthday. It's so unfair. She was supposed to have two weeks left. At least that! Maybe it has to do with how brightly we burn, like James said. Amber was so beautiful, so exceptional that her energy, her light, went out faster than everyone else's. And if that's true, James can't live much longer. Unless they've come up with a cure.

Dr. Preston stands. “I know you've been patiently waiting for answers, so I won't draw this out. You've all met Dr. Fabos.”

Dr. Fabos. That's right. I remember thinking that his name seemed like a nickname, short for Fabulous, and I'd hoped he was fabulous. But with Amber gone, now I'm thinking he's not.

The middle-aged man with silver hair and black-framed glasses stands in front of us. “Let me start by saying how pained we are that we were unable to save our other patient. My staff and I didn't have the pleasure of knowing her for very long, but in that short period, she touched all of us.” He pauses respectfully for a moment. “Her autopsy results show no abnormalities of the heart, no blockage in the arteries. These findings are consistent with the other autopsy reports we've studied.” His voice is so mechanical, like he's reading off data to a group of investors. But then he catches himself. He isn't reading numbers or random lab results. One of the autopsies he's referring to is my brother's, and one report is from the patient he regrets not being able to save. Dr. Fabos looks at my parents, at James's, and I see a hint of an apology in his expression.

“Couldn't you have done something?” James asks. “For Christ's sake, she was here at the hospital! And you couldn't save her?” His large hands curl into fists.

Dr. Fabos looks at James. “We tried everything we could: CPR, defibrillation. We even placed her on a ventilator, but . . . Let me introduce Dr. Lee. He's an expert on genetics. He can tell you more.”

The medium-sized Asian man with glossy black hair stands and stares first at James, then at me, his expression a mixture of grief and fascination. He straightens his white coat and inhales deeply, as if readying himself to give a long speech.

“We completed mapping out the genetic sequences for each of the known children conceived during the period of time when Dr. Mueller was at the clinic. We were looking for a similar trait, a genetic sequence that you all have. Something that could explain why hearts that seem to be functioning normally just stop. And we think we found it.”

“Can you fix them?” Dad demands. “If you know where the mutations are, can you fix them?”

We all stare, breaths held.

“You have to understand—”

“Can you fix them?” Dad says again. His words are hard and exact, but no one could fail to hear the fragility in his voice.

“Not exactly,” Dr. Lee says.

“Please.” It's Mrs. Monroe, James's mother. She's a small woman. Her delicate features seem even more delicate for the word she's saying. She seems hollow somehow, and if the doctors can't fix her son, her one healthy son, she'll collapse into something small enough for the wind to carry away. “Can't you just . . . manipulate them back?”

“Genes are made up of DNA. DNA is made up of sequences of chemicals. It's these chemicals that have somehow mutated into something I've never seen before. Science has mapped out the entire human genome. We've identified sequences for left-handedness, depression, certain types of cancer. There's even a genetic sequence associated with being a serial killer, but
this
is something we've never seen before. We think that for some reason, this particular strand of DNA causes sudden and catastrophic heart failure at approximately the age of eighteen.”

“Then take it out.” This time it's my mom pleading for a solution.

“I'm afraid it's not possible, Mrs. McAdams.”

“But Dr. Mueller took out the bad genes,” she says. “Take out this one.”

Dr. Lee smiles sympathetically. “When Dr. Mueller modified your son's genetic makeup, he was a fertilized egg—a zygote—consisting of a few cells. As a fully-formed human, he consists of approximately forty trillion cells. Every cell, except certain blood cells, carries a person's genetic makeup, their DNA. To get rid of this sequence means changing the DNA of every cell in the body. I'm afraid that's impossible. If we had Dr. Mueller's notes, if we knew exactly what he'd done to manipulate so many genes, we might be able to find a way to ‘turn off' the sequence. But we don't.”

“Dr. Lee,” James says, “where did this sequence come from? And if you can't change it or turn it off, can you save us?”

“Yes,” Dr. Lee says. “I'll let Dr. Fabos explain that in a moment, but as far as knowing where the sequence came from, our best hypothesis is that it's some form of a mutation caused by the number of genetic manipulations Dr. Mueller performed on each of you. Simply removing a gene for sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis would most likely not have caused such a mutation, but he wasn't merely removing genes, he was manipulating them, designing all of you to have specific traits.”

“However,” Dr. Fabos says, stepping forward, “just because we can't change the genetic structure doesn't mean we can't do
something.
”

“What?” James's father stands now. “What are you going to do?”

Dr. Fabos lifts his hands in what is meant to be a calming gesture. “We insert a pacemaker. It will regulate the heart's electrical system, and when this genetic sequence tells the heart to stop, the pacemaker will send a precise electrical signal to the heart to keep it going.”

“How dangerous is it?” Mom asks.

“It's a minimally invasive surgery, just local anesthesia. It takes less than an hour to perform, and believe me, dozens of these operations are performed every day here at the hospital. A small incision is made next to the collarbone. Using an X-ray, a wire is inserted through a vein and guided into the heart. The wire is attached to a small computer called a generator. We use the incision to form a pocket that holds the generator. Close up the incision, and it's done. Once the”—he stumbles for the right word—“critical period is over, we can decide whether or not the pacemaker needs to remain, based on monitoring the information from the device. This can be done at your cardiologist's office, or even using a phone that has a special transmitter attached to it. You just hold the phone up to the generator, and it will transfer information using the internet.”

“So it will keep my heart from stopping or get it going again if it does stop?” James asks.

“That's the idea,” Dr. Fabos says.

James's back stiffens. He looks at his parents, at the petite woman who gave birth to him. Then he looks at his father, who by normal standards is tall and broad and handsome for his age. But next to his extraordinary son, Mr. Monroe is unimpressive.

“And if it doesn't work?” James asks.

I'm the only one looking at James. No one else will meet his eyes, not even his parents. We all know the answer to his question. If this doesn't work, if the generator doesn't provide enough electricity or doesn't provide it at the exact moment when it's needed, he'll die.