THE HEART ATTACK hit like a sledgehammer. As Gabriel Michael Mannion carried the casket of his closest friend down the aisle of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral, his heart pounded against his chest, sweat beaded up on his forehead and at the back of his neck, and nausea caused his gut to clench and his head to spin. It took all his steely determination not to pass out.
Which he would not do. Not with Carter Kensington’s grieving wife number four—wearing a black dress that probably cost more than Gabe’s first car, and a pair of five-inch stiletto heels, suggesting that she was feeling a great deal steadier on her feet than he was at the moment—following behind with her three-year-old son. Gabe suspected that the blue coat the boy wore, which brought to mind the iconic photo of John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket, was not a coincidence.
And he couldn’t forget wives two and three seated in the pews, each with one of Carter’s four children. Wife number one, Carter’s college sweetheart and the mother of his eldest daughter, had chosen to remain in Santa Barbara. The daughter, Gabe remembered, was taking a gap year in Paris. All on Carter’s dime, which he’d bitched about to Gabe nonstop while tossing back manhattans at the Campbell Bar in Grand Central Station like they’d time traveled back to the 1950s Mad Men days. Finally, sufficiently fortified, he’d taken the Metro-North home to spend a suburban weekend with his former swimsuit model wife and toddler son in their pricey home nestled into one of the country’s wealthiest communities.
Despite having come from “old money,” as he’d always point out sometime before Gabe would put him onto the train, and despite a trust fund that would have allowed a normal guy to live a comfortable life, Carter had been an indefatigable force of nature. He’d worked hard, played hard and had, like a comet flaring out, died young. In the bed of one of a string of mistresses, a detail that hadn’t made it into his New York Times obituary.
Although Carter Kensington had readily acknowledged his many flaws, he’d been a boss, mentor and friend to Gabe. With the ink from his Columbia Business School MBA diploma still wet, Gabe had followed the yellow brick road to Wall Street when, on his first day of interviews, Carter had taken him under his wing.
“You’ve got the Midas touch, son,” Carter had told him as he’d handed out a bonus in the high six figures at the end of Gabe’s first year. Which was more zeroes than Gabe had ever seen written out on a check. Despite his small-town Pacific Northwest roots, he’d proven a natural at trading, and reveled in the take-no-prisoners, roller coaster 24/7 lifestyle.
Though he had to wonder, what good had the one-point-eight billion dollars Carter had taken home last year from Harborstone Advisors Group done for him in the end?
Dealing with more pressing issues at the moment, Gabe avoided that question. As he’d been doing for months.
You can do this, he instructed himself. You will not drop a twenty-thousand-dollar casket. Although his vision was blurred by vertigo and the sweat dripping into his eyes, his mind created a slow-motion video of the casket bouncing on the stone floor, breaking open, allowing Carter, dressed in his favorite James Bond Brioni suit and handmade Brunello Cucinelli shoes, to fall out and roll down the aisle of the Gothic stone church while the choir belted out “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
The church had eight steps leading down to the sidewalk. Although they were wide and not all that steep, standing at the top of them was like looking down into the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, he and Douglas Fairfield, the managing company’s sixty-year-old managing partner, were the first to tackle them.
You can do this.
As little black dots swam in front of his eyes like a cloud of gnats, Gabe grasped the brass side rail even tighter and lifted his end to help keep the casket level and prevent the body sliding downward and upsetting the balance even more. The six pallbearers managed to get Carter onto the sidewalk and into the waiting white hearse. Then in a group, they moved to the side, allowing Carter’s parents, wife and son to make their way to their limo. It was only while Gabe was walking toward the car designated by the funeral home for the pallbearers that he felt himself folding to the ground like a cheap suit.
Then everything went black.
HE CAME TO in the back of an ambulance, siren wailing, while an EMT stuck an aspirin beneath his tongue, took his vital signs and assured him that he’d be okay.
“Nobody’s ever died in my ambulance,” she said.
“That’s good to hear. So, I don’t need to go to the hospital.” Trading didn’t stop just because one billionaire died. It kept ticking along, and every minute Gabe wasn’t working was another opportunity missed and money lost, not just for him, but for the firm.
“There’s always a first time,” the woman said, her musical Jamaican accent at odds with her stern tone. “You don’t get to choose a plan B. Once you hit that pavement, you handed the reins over to me.”
“You don’t understand. I have things I have to do.”
“Yeah, I get a lot of guys who tell me that.” She strapped an oxygen mask over his face, effectively shutting him up. “But here’s the thing. In this case, you’ll be glad that I’m the decider.”
That said, she went back to monitoring his vital signs while the guy sitting next to the driver was letting the hospital know their ETA.
AN HOUR LATER, on what was turning out to be one of the most screwed-up days of his life, Gabe was lying behind a curtain, listening to what sounded like chaos in the ER. He was thinking that the hum, buzz, chatter and fast-talking reminded him of his summer internship days on the trading floor, when a different doctor from the one who’d examined him on arrival pulled back the white curtain and entered the cubicle.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Mannion,” he said. “I’m Doctor David Kaplan and I have good news for you.” He came to the side of the gurney and took Gabe’s pulse. “Unless you get hit by an ambulance leaving the hospital, you’re not going to die anytime soon.”
“That’s encouraging.” What he guessed was an attempt at medical humor from a kid who looked as if he’d just graduated medical school had Gabe feeling a million years old. Which, given that Wall Street years were a lot like dog years, maybe he was. “So, my heart’s okay?”
“It’s still pumping. It wasn’t a heart attack.”
“Then what was it?”
“An anxiety attack. Or another term might be a panic attack.”
“No. Way.” You didn’t survive in his business by being the kind of wuss who panicked.
Doogie Howser gave him a long look that suggested he’d heard that denial before. “The EMT said you’re a trader.”
“At Harborstone Advisors Group. It’s a hedge fund,” Gabe tacked on, realizing the name probably didn’t mean anything to anyone outside the investment world.
He was wrong. The doctor whistled under his breath as he made a note on the chart attached to the clipboard he was carrying. “Small pond, big fish.”
Which was exactly how Carter had described it the morning Gabe had interviewed.
“My brother worked there for a time,” the doctor said. “It didn’t suit him. Elliott missed the floor, which surprised me, because whenever I see trading floors on the news, they look a lot like what I’ve always imagined Bedlam to be.”
“Says the doctor who chose to work in an emergency department,” Gabe said dryly.
“Believe it or not, I’ve always found a well-run ED to be poetry in motion,” Kaplan responded. “But we all respond to different stressors. The same way patients view ERs differently than medical staff working in them, Harborstone didn’t match up well with Elliott’s risk DNA. Also, my brother had lost all sense of any life outside The Street. Which is how I recognize the same signs in you.”
That pissed Gabe off. “You don’t know me.”
“I know that your blood pressure is higher than it should be.”
“Like you said, we all have our stressors.”
“True, and landing in an emergency room could cause anyone’s blood pressure to spike. White-coat hypertension is a well-documented condition. However, the other pallbearers told the ambulance crew that you were already having symptoms of an attack before landing here. They first noticed them midway down the aisle when you got out of step.”
“I did not.” Gabe was sure of that. He thought.
The doctor’s only response was a shrug. “Your cholesterol is also in the high range. I’m guessing from living on takeout.”
Gabe couldn’t deny that. “Contrary to what people might believe, my business doesn’t allow for three-hour, three-martini lunches.”
“Mine neither. Which is too bad. Not that I’m in favor of the three-martini lunches, but despite this being a hospital, the cafeteria food here is largely made up of carbs, sugars and fats, and Americans all need to take more time to eat.
“The French and the Italians have the right idea. They’re not grabbing a bagel and coffee from a food truck, then gulping it down while checking their email. They walk to a café, drink coffee from a cup that isn’t cardboard, and spend time talking with a friend. They’re careful about what they eat, they walk more and believe in a slower pace of life with more time off. Which is why they live longer.”
“Maybe it just seems longer,” Gabe shot back.
Kaplan’s half smile was more a smirk, suggesting that this was not the first time he’d heard this argument. “Six months after returning to the trading floor, my brother moved his family to Grenoble. He teaches skiing at a small resort at Les Deux Alpes during the winter and spring. Although the glacier there allows year-round skiing, he takes his entire summer off, then gives fall tours of the area before returning to skiing. From what I saw while visiting this past Christmas, his family is happier than they’ve ever been. And it didn’t take a doctor to see how much healthier he is.”
“I’m happy for your brother. But I’m not into skiing.” He hadn’t taken the time to go to any mountains since college.
“Neither am I, but that wasn’t my point. An anxiety attack won’t kill you, Mr. Mannion. But it should be seen as a flashing yellow warning light. When you’re anxious, your body reacts in ways that put extra strain on your heart that could lead to eventual heart disease.”
“Thanks for the PSA.” Gabe looked down at his wrist to where his Rolex Submariner should be and found it missing.
“It’s in the bag with your other things,” the doctor said before he could ask. “Along with your cell phone, which I suspect you could use a break from.”
“I need to get back to work.”
“And I need to do my job. Which is to prescribe regular exercise, a better diet and a proper amount of quality sleep.”
“I get all I need,” Gabe said. Okay, so maybe he worked a hundred-plus-hour week, and maybe he was so jazzed when he got back to his apartment he’d need a couple or three drinks to chill enough to sleep, but that was the life he’d chosen.
“Given that you work at Harborstone, I seriously doubt that,” the doctor said, writing something else on Gabe’s chart. “And when was the last time you connected with your family and friends?”
“My family’s across the country in Washington State.” All except for his quarterback brother, who also lived in Manhattan. Burke, being far more social than Gabe himself was, had insisted on monthly catch-up dinners during his football off-season.
“Last I heard, planes flew west across the Hudson. When was the last time you hung out with friends outside work?”
“Earlier today.”
“But the guest of honor at that party wasn’t there. Because he happened to be dead.”
“You know what, Doc?”
“What?”
“You’ve got one helluva smart-ass bedside manner.”
“Thank you. It took several years to hone it. Your friend, and I assume he was a close one for you to be a pallbearer, died, according to what one of the other pallbearers at the scene told the EMT, at the age of forty-six. Given that the life expectancy of a male with his birth year is sixty-seven-point-four years, it suggests that while working on Wall Street may make you a very wealthy man, the lifestyle can kill you before you have time to enjoy it.”
“Carter Kensington’s life was excessive,” Gabe argued. “Mine isn’t.”
“Being a workaholic is excessive in its own way,” Kaplan said.
The damn guy just wouldn’t let up. “You do realize that arguing my lifestyle probably isn’t good for my blood pressure.”
“Yet you feel the need to defend it,” the doctor said mildly.
“To a guy who probably works the same hours.”
“My work’s not nine-to-five. But I’m going out tonight with my wife to watch our daughter’s ballet recital. She’s excited because her tutu has sequins and she gets to wear a sparkly tiara. Which she’s going to wear afterward, when we go out for pizza. Because that’s her favorite thing. Even if she does insist on pineapple on it. I blame that slight flaw in judgment on her mother.
“You’re obviously an intelligent man, Mr. Mannion. Perhaps you ought to consider using some of your brainpower to come up with a way to achieve a better work-life balance. Before I see one of your friends having worried about dropping your casket thirteen years from now.”
“Ouch. Mic drop.”
Kaplan’s lips quirked, giving Gabe the impression that the sadistic son of a bitch was actually enjoying this. “You’re free to leave,” he said. “But, seriously, you don’t have to turn into a ski instructor. Why don’t you try figuring out something that gives you pleasure, and make time for it? While you still have that option. Because I’d rather not see you back in my emergency room anytime soon.”
With that he was gone.