The Timer Game (14 page)

On television, the show’s intro started and she blinked and refitted the lid, stowing the box back on the shelf. Her body felt cold, the way it always did afterward, and she crawled into bed and pulled the quilt up, adjusting the sound.

Mac was standing in front of the Center for BioChimera. Tall, big through the shoulders, nose broken and healed crooked, his gold hair still thick and unruly, he was several lifetimes removed from stringer bylines for AP. Now he had real time slots as a CNN science reporter and blurbs in the gossip columns about the starlets he was bedding.

His voice was strong. “There’s a dirty little secret about heart transplants nobody wants to discuss. Donor hearts die. They wear out. The meds used to keep a heart from being rejected eventually kills it. The meds might buy a patient ten good years if he’s lucky. That’s great if you’re a sixty-year-old man. But what if you’re a four-year-old kid? What then? The transplant gives out before you even get through high school. Or learn to drive or fall in love. If you’re lucky enough to get a heart.”

On screen there were shots of sick kids in hospital beds as Mac said, “This is about one kid who got lucky. But in an unexpected way.”

The visual changed to a shot of a yellow-skinned, glassy-eyed kid about Katie’s age, covered in chest bandages. “A story about Eric Bettles, a kid with a bad heart living—and dying day-by-day—in Poway, California.”

Lee Bentley, her shining blond braid dancing, leaned over a bioreactor. She was wearing a lab jacket over soft cream-colored silk suit, cut short, exposing tanned legs as Mac said, “And it’s the story of a brilliant San Diego researcher willing to take chances, working on something so out there it sounds like science fiction. A heartin-a-box. A heart created out of a patient’s own cells. A heart that never needs toxic antirejection drugs to keep it alive. Science fiction, except to the kid who’s had one in his chest for a complete year.”

A tight shot now of a healthy Eric Bettles in baggy shorts, a five-year-old with his dad playing catch in his backyard. “To Eric Bettles and his parents, it doesn’t sound strange, it sounds like a miracle.”

Mac was good. Grace had to give him that. Her mind wandered as Eric talked about his life, how he could play now. And then a two-shot of his parents, bubbling with gratitude.

Replaced by shots in a lab with researchers.
“
Within the last year, scientists have grown human bladders in labs and successfully transplanted them into patients. Within the last decade, they’ve grown skin, teeth, ears, nose cartilage, thumb bones, heart valves.”

On screen, doctors leaned over a patient’s opened chest and Grace closed her eyes to steady the nausea that flared now when she glimpsed hearts. Mac continued: “Over fifty universities have tissue-engineering programs. The field is exploding into a multibillion-dollar enterprise. But the big one is, and has always been, building a human heart.”

On camera, Lee opened a stainless steel drawer and Grace glimpsed a stack of objects wrapped in transparent sterile packages. Lee took one out and closed the drawer. With a shock, Grace realized the object in Lee’s hand was shaped like a small human heart. Lee said earnestly, “The problem is—well, there were several, but the most difficult was figuring out how to grow the blood supply. Without arteries, capillaries, veins, oxygen only goes down a few hundred micrometers into tissue. That’s what was killing off the first hearts we tried to grow—they didn’t have the oxygen. Most cells can’t live more than thirty minutes without it.”

“And that’s not a problem easily solved,” Mac said. On screen, a wave smashed onto a beach. “Dr. Bentley took long walks along the La Jolla shoreline, trying to clear her mind. Then it came to her; the answer had been there, all along.”

“Seaweed,” Lee said. “That stuff is tossed around under the water but still gets the nutrients it needs to grow. I needed to build a scaffold—that’s what this is,” she hefted the object in her hand, “just like that seaweed. Porous on the inside. And you don’t even want to know how we came up with this.”

“But she did it. Working with a team around the globe, she created this small, airy, porous scaffold capable of growing cells. On the inside, it looks like this.” On screen, a 3-D model of a heart split open, revealing a spidery network as eerily transparent as a jellyfish. Grace wiped her mouth.

Lee unwrapped the sterile protective covering and now the spongy scaffold lay exposed in her hand. It was small as an apricot. She blinked twice, just enough times, Grace thought, to emphasize her long eyelashes. She raised her eyes. Her pupils were dilated.

“It’s made of biodegradable collagen,” Mac said.

“Polymer,” Lee corrected. “I took cells—endothelial cells that live on the inside of blood vessels—and grew clusters in a Petri dish. I’d etched an outline of blood vessels—like a road map—onto silicon wafers, and added the cells I’d grown. Before long, I had 3-D capillaries, so tiny they were one-tenth the size of a human hair.”

Lee flicked her braid over her shoulder and it caught the light.

“I grew heart muscle cells, too, in a dish, and then I seeded those cells onto this polymer scaffold. Squirting what amounts to a soup of living cells and nutrients onto this scaffold so they’d have a chance of growing.”

Lee turned and moved down the aisle and Mac trotted after her. Grace had made that identical trip earlier in the day, and she took a steadying breath as Lee said, “Then I took the scaffold and put it into a vat fed by nutrients, and waited as cells multiplied and the polymer frame itself disintegrated, leaving behind”—Lee pulled off the lid—“this,” she finished simply.

Inside the bioreactor, a small tan-colored heart pulsed gently, the same heart Grace had seen, floating in a soupy mix that looked like red Kool-Aid. Grace dug her nails into her palms and took a slow, steadying breath.

“But not everybody’s a true believer,” Mac continued, and the screen filled with a fat, aggrieved scientist from La Jolla, Dr. Newt Poundstone, director of a lab called In/Or/Gann Inc.

He looked greasy compared with Lee, and when he spoke, his voice was shrill.

“Did Dr. Bentley tell you what happened to the model she let us see? The lab heart pulverized, unable to withstand the violent pressure of real blood pounding through veins. What’s going to happen long-term to these kids? She’s never let anybody in behind that steel door. She could be doing anything in that lab.”

Back with Eric throwing the ball to his dad, Mac wrapping things up. Eric’s folks defending Lee. Their proof was there, playing ball.

Then a reference to a second child, a poor Indian girl. Mac closed with a shot of that second patient’s parents in a remote site under a star-swept sky, the house ramshackle and broken down, the girl a small gray body limp in a tangle of sheets.

The parents bracing themselves for surgery that would remove Hekka’s diseased heart, replace it with a second heartin-a-box
,
grown from her own cells, the heart Grace had seen in Lee’s lab. The father was graying and exhausted; the mother had dark, fearful eyes. Both hoped a year from now, Hekka Miasonkopna would have the same story to tell as Eric Bettles.

Mac talking about how eight other kids, waiting for the same miracle, would soon be added to the program. A tight shot now of Eric Bettles blowing out the candles on his one-year anniversary, his parents clapping.

Grace clicked it off and turned off the light. In the dark, she got up and pulled the sheers back from the windows, letting in the harbor lights. She stood silently staring out across the dark shadows of bobbing boats. She could still smell a trace of lilies. Across the bay, downtown San Diego stood in sparkling relief.

She thought about the CNN report, laying out the pieces in her mind, rearranging them. What did Mac’s report about hearts-in-a-box have to do with Eddie Loud warning her about the Spikeman? Or about Warren getting the threatening postcard? Nothing that she could see.

When she finally slept, she dreamed of talons and teeth and a long braid swinging.

Chapter 15

Saturday, 10:44 a.m.

The blue-colored package sat on the redwood table in the backyard amid a small array of perfectly wrapped gifts.

Later, Grace tried to remember exactly when she’d first seen it, clumsily wrapped in clown paper and tied in loose string, but by then it was too late.

She’d worked hard since early that morning getting ready. The party version of the Timer Game involved advance heavy lifting, requiring Grace to invent two different sets of eight clues, hiding the clues, squirreling away sugar treats in unexpected surprise places as rewards, getting two timers that worked, as well as blowing up balloons, checking the oven to see if the cake was falling, putting out the treat bags, all the while Katie asking if it was time yet and could she please have a meal that involved actual preparation, not just one out of a can.

Now crepe paper and balloons flapped smartly in the breeze along the redwood fence, separating the yard from the runners jogging along the path by the boats. It was late Saturday morning, and the air was filled with children’s squeals, the banter of weekend boaters, and the rich smells of barbecued meat.

Grace was so tired she felt as if she’d been clubbed by a mallet; ever since Katie was born, she’d been tired; she couldn’t remember ever being rested, alert, on top of things. That was another country, one she couldn’t visit anymore; she’d misplaced that passport under a load of clothes to be washed and papers to be filed and more recently, locked doors that had to be rechecked late at night.

Not that she wanted to trade her life for one without Katie. Just one with a little sleep.

She rubbed her arms against the sudden chill; San Diego was famous for small, damp shifts in temperature. She’d never get Katie into a sweater over her costume, or the others, either, even though their parents had hurled sweatshirts into a pile in their rush to get away. Grace thought that’s how you could tell a true friend: at kids’ parties, they stayed behind to help.

“How many are there?” Jeanne sloshed a pitcher of lemonade onto the picnic table, next to the packages. She was wearing shorts that exposed flaccid thighs and a green gauze top that revealed part of a wrinkly heart tattoo, done decades ago, when only bikers and drunks sat for the needle. She’d come late, after a sleepless night from her bad knee, and gotten right to work in the kitchen, mixing juice and tidying up.

“Two teams of four. Seven girls, one boy. One team’s inside, Katie’s is here. They only look like more with Helix yipping between them.” Helix was dancing up and down with such force, his fake leg sounded like a tent stake being driven into the ground.

Jeanne reached for a paper cup, filling it with lemonade. “That mutt’s going to break that thing one of these days.”

“Can you do the burgers next and be the clue reader for Katie’s team?” Grace’s timer had less than sixty seconds left before it went off again.

“If you find the briquettes. They’re not under the sink. I’m done walking for the day.”

Leaning against the redwood table was the walking stick called Willa that Jeanne used for bad days. Made out of oak, it was topped with a knot that resembled an eye and ended in a froth of yellow woody fiber that looked like a bad hair day.

“And take that timer with you. That dinging is making me crazy.”

Grace grabbed the timer and dashed for the sliding door. Other mothers she knew didn’t run back and forth like a demented party planner on speed. But other mothers she knew had husbands and nannies and calm children—medicated perhaps, at times, it was true, but whatever it took—with straight teeth and shiny hair who appreciated the color choices their mommies laid out for them. Grace had Katie, mouth open like a shrilly demanding bird,
feed me, entertain me,
and a brown and white yappy dog pounding across the living room floor.

The other team of girls spilled into the family room. They were four girls Katie played soccer with—tall compared to Katie—skinny and blond. They’d marry well and stay in Point Loma and fifty years from now scientists would study them for articles about inbreeding.

And Grace really needed to stop passing along her deep-seated animosity toward skinny tall blond girls who just happened to be perfect, and get a life.

She took a breath.

The blond team of girls swarmed into the kitchen and out again, through the family room and into the living room, pale, giggling blurs in sequined Spandex costumes, as remote as sparkly fish. They were busy taking the cushions off the sofa, monitored by Marcie and Frank. Marcie was half a head taller than Frank and swung their team’s timer like a javelin.

“Sixty more seconds, girls.” Marcie wore a loose midnight blue sweater that fell over one shoulder and a plum-colored skirt. Frank was in dark maroon slacks with a blue sweater, and as Marcie leaned into her husband, Grace realized their colors matched completely, their sweaters, hair, even their eyes. Everything matched. The world was going two by two into some great twinkly beyond, color coordinated and cheerful, and Grace alone would be left behind, scraping gum off the bottom of the picnic table.

She found the charcoal bag in the kitchen, shoved behind the overflowing trash bin, and she pawed through a drawer and discovered matches, running them outside and slapping them down on the table next to the package. Something had stained the clown’s smile on the blue wrapping paper so that his teeth looked discolored. Grace hoped whatever was inside wasn’t already broken. Returning broken presents wasn’t high on her list of ways to relax.

Helix nosed her, licked her hand and wagged his fluffy tail, growling deep in his throat as if he were in grave sexual pain. Great. The only male in her life who understood her completely drooled and bounced on four legs. Three, if she didn’t count the fake one. Which, now that she was staring at it, she could clearly see was beginning to splinter along some invisible doggie fault line.

Along the fence, Katie and her teammates turned over rocks and checked bushes. Katie was wearing her Velcro sneakers under her princess costume. The good thing about taking time off from the crime lab was that it gave Grace the chance to actually make a costume. They’d gone together to a fabric store and Katie had hand-picked silk ribbons and pink organza and hot pink satin, her faith in Grace’s ability to sew never wavering, despite the fact that the sewing machine was four years old and still in its original plastic wrapper. They’d had a perfect afternoon, Katie stretched on the floor, her arms out like a snow angel, as Grace outlined her body onto the fabric with a pencil and cut around it.