Turning Point

by Danielle Steel

  It was a concept she wanted to explore with the others. They were all warriors in a cold, lonely world, fighting for each life they saved, more than in other specialties. Wendy had been challenged by the severity of the injuries they dealt with during her residency, and loved the work, but she hadn’t understood the high price they themselves paid until later. And few of their patients made full recoveries, which was disheartening. Most were just too damaged. Even when they saved patients, quality of life afterward was an issue, especially with head injuries. It was serious business. But she still loved being pushed to the maximum of her abilities, and the successes they had. They all did, which was why they stayed in it. She couldn’t imagine doing any other kind of work, and Bill had said the same during dinner. It was a victory every time they saved a life.

  Wendy wasn’t even sure she wanted children anymore. She had given up the idea a few years before, because of the Jeff situation, but maybe having them wouldn’t have been right for her anyway. She wondered if you needed a nonmedical partner to have a family and do it successfully. Bill had admitted that his ex-wife was a good mother to their daughters. And he spent less than two months with them every year, although he would have seen more of them if they’d lived in San Francisco. He seemed like a good dad to Wendy.

  There was a lot to think about when she went to bed that night. Then her mind drifted to Jeff again, in Aspen with Jane, and her heart sank as it always did when she imagined them together. She had become the willing outcast in his life, the dark secret. It was a role she didn’t want to play anymore, and she was sure of that now. She hadn’t told Bill her boyfriend was married because she was ashamed of it. All she had to do now was tell Jeff. That was the hard part. And then walk away, which was going to be the hardest part of all.

  Chapter Eight

  Feeling very Parisian, the four Americans rode rented Vélib’ bikes to their COZ meeting on Monday morning, to start their second informative week. Wendy and Stephanie complained that they weren’t wearing helmets, and Tom and Bill brushed it off, as they watched for cars and motorbikes in the erratic traffic patterns.

  “It would be embarrassing if we end up brain damaged while on our mission here,” Stephanie grumbled, pedaling as fast as the men with her long legs. Wendy had to work harder to keep up, and Bill occasionally slowed down for her to make sure she didn’t get lost on the way.

  “No one on bicycles wears helmets here,” Tom reminded Stephanie. “Pretend you’re French.” The traffic was insane, particularly at that hour of the morning, but despite Stephanie’s concerns, they got to the office safely in time for the meeting, as the others filed in. Wendy had already said she would go home on the Metro at the end of the day, and Marie-Laure came over to talk to the two women to ask how the weekend was. She said two of her children had been sick and she had been stuck at home. They told her about shopping at the Galeries Lafayette and their visit to the Louvre.

  “Maybe you should visit some of the smaller boutiques,” Marie-Laure suggested. “We get a lot of threats on the department stores now. I don’t feel comfortable shopping there myself.” It had occurred to Wendy, but Stephanie had insisted they’d be okay, and the bargains were great. There were sales everywhere, and they had both gotten some things they loved. Stephanie was wearing a new red V-neck sweater, which Gabriel noticed immediately when he arrived. He smiled at her, dropped his briefcase next to a chair, and walked over to her with the same intense expression that had haunted her all weekend. He kissed her on both cheeks, and just standing next to him gave her the same thrill as when he’d kissed her. Everyone in the room was aware of their mutual attraction, which Stephanie found embarrassing, but he didn’t mind at all.

  Valérie was the last to come in, and smiled with a particularly wry glance at Tom, who felt weak at the sight of her.

  “I had a very hard day yesterday, thanks to you,” he scolded her as she approached, and she was puzzled. “Paul and I visited every bar in St. Germain on Friday and Saturday night. I had a splitting headache all day. If you’d had dinner with me, I wouldn’t have been forced to check out every bar on the Left Bank, where I was shamelessly overserved by evil waiters.” They had progressed from red wine to tequila shots to scotch, and most of Saturday night was a blur when he woke up on Sunday.

  “So that was my fault?” she asked, amused. Paul looked rough too. Neither of them had shaved before the morning meeting, but both were handsome men and could get away with it, and it was the current trend in Paris as well as the States. Bill had shaved and looked fresh and relaxed after his weekend with his children. His activities had been more wholesome than theirs.

  Paul had wound up going home with some Brazilian girl from the last bar, which he barely remembered. She was an exotic dancer the bar had hired with a samba troupe for the evening. Tom had a vague recollection of dancing on the bar with a half-naked girl wearing a G-string made of feathers. He was sure they’d had fun, what he recalled of it, and had found the G-string in the pocket of his jacket when he woke up in his apartment on Sunday morning. He wasn’t sure if the girl had been there or not, but kept the G-string as a souvenir of a very entertaining evening in Paris. He had other mementos like it at home.

  “It sounds like you deserve the headache you got,” Valérie commented, and the others laughed as they sat down at the conference table and got down to business, looking at the schedule for the week. Gabriel sat next to Stephanie and whispered to her occasionally as they studied statistics and descriptions of the hospitals they’d be visiting. They went over a lot of paperwork, and Valérie handed out a synopsis of their post-trauma programs, how they were run, and how quickly they were set up after the incident. The systems in place sounded very efficient, and they had a two-year follow-up program with free therapy for as long as it was needed, and it could be extended on request.

  They left with an armload of paperwork at the end of the day. Stephanie already had a stack of papers on her desk at the apartment at the end of the first week, and so did the others. She and Wendy went back to the Left Bank by Metro, and the boys rode home on the Vélib’ bicycles. The four of them had dinner together at the closest bistro to the apartment, and made it an early night. Tom still looked a little rough and suggested he might have a brain tumor as they all laughed at him. Bill thought it might be the tequila shots he had imbibed heavily on both weekend nights. Tom told them about the feathered G-string he’d found in his pocket and they laughed. He was running true to form, and hitting his stride in Paris.

  Gabriel had wanted to have dinner with Stephanie that night, but she declined and said she wanted to have dinner with her team. He called her three times during the meal and sent her several texts. He was continuing to pursue her at the same intense pace, and Stephanie was half uncomfortable and half excited by it. No one had ever courted her so avidly, but she didn’t want to stop it either, and was feeling confused about him.

  “What are you going to do?” Wendy whispered after one of his texts. Stephanie looked flushed and mildly embarrassed.

  “Nothing. I’m married,” she said with determination, but she sounded like she was trying to convince herself. Other than his dogged pursuit of her, he seemed like a sane person. He was incredibly smart and fatally attractive. He was a hard man to brush off, and she didn’t want to, which was what scared her about him. He had a powerful effect on her, almost like a drug.

  “Your being married doesn’t seem to slow him down,” Wendy suggested cautiously. “I’m sure you can handle it, and you’ll know what you want to do, but be careful of married men. They’re probably not much different here than in the States. That’s a hard game to win,” she said wistfully, thinking of Jeff. “Sooner or later everyone gets hurt. I don’t know many stories of married men leaving their wives for another woman. I actually don’t know any. It just doesn’t seem to happen. They’re comfortable where they are, and the two women wind up complementing each other,
which just makes the guy’s marriage work better.”

  “You sound like you’ve been there,” Stephanie said gently, and saw the look on Wendy’s face as she nodded but didn’t explain. There was nothing unusual about her story, except that it was happening to her.

  “Just be careful. And don’t throw your life out the window for him yet.” Stephanie nodded. She barely knew Gabriel, it had only been a week since they met, although he made it feel like she’d known him for years.

  She talked to her children that night before she went to bed. Andy sounded tired and sad when they talked for a few minutes afterward. He didn’t ask what she was doing and didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t interested in the medical details of what she was learning, only in the fact that she wasn’t there. It made it hard to share her activities with him, and she could hardly tell him about Gabriel. But he had become a big part of the experience in Paris for her, and she couldn’t share that with Andy either. There was nothing left for them to talk about except the kids, which happened to them at home too. Whatever interests they had shared before seemed to have disappeared. Seven years of marriage was beginning to feel like the Sahara Desert, which she had admitted to Gabriel over dinner. He said he had experienced the same thing, and only their children had kept him and his wife together. But his children were older and he had less reason to hang on now. Ryan and Aden were four and six, and needed them both, or so Stephanie thought. And she couldn’t manage them alone with her work. But it seemed like a poor reason to stay married. Even Andy had suggested they take a break, before she left, which had sounded extreme to her at the time but less so now that she had met Gabriel. Maybe it was what she needed. Time away from Andy to figure things out when she went back. Or maybe the time in Paris would do that. She had never felt so torn and confused in her life. Gabriel had already upset the apple cart in a major way, and it had only been a week.

  She set her alarm for seven o’clock, and it was cold and rainy when she woke up. They all took the Metro together to their meeting. At ten o’clock, both the French and American teams were going to visit one of the major public health hospitals, where trauma victims were taken after mass casualty incidents like the recent attacks. All their intake and triage procedures had been changed in the last four years to keep up with public events. Their systems were working, but Gabriel explained that they still needed improvement, and they were working on it diligently. He hoped to pick up some new ideas in the States.

  They all rode in a van to the hospital they were visiting, talking animatedly about recent studies and actual events. It was a subject they were all passionate about. Tom walked into the building with Valérie, while Bill discussed some of their procedures at SF General with Gabriel.

  They started their tour of the hospital promptly, and noticed that some things were vastly different from how they were done in the States, others seemed more efficient here. Their street triage was very different, and they frequently treated victims right at the scene before moving them, getting them stable where they lay, which wasn’t done in the States. It wasn’t possible in either place if the dangers were still present and the area was under fire or at risk of a bombing. The street treatment model was more adapted to single nonviolent incidents than to terrorist attacks.

  They had just finished touring the surgical floor shortly before noon, and were talking with admiration about the state-of-the-art equipment, when Marie-Laure got a call on her cellphone and moved away from the group to speak to the caller in terse rapid French. Stephanie saw Gabriel react immediately to what he overheard, and walk over to Marie-Laure, frowning. She ended the call and conferred seriously with Gabriel and then they returned to the others, who sensed that something was wrong from the look on their faces.

  “We have a situation,” Marie-Laure said quietly, “at a school. It just started twenty minutes ago. I don’t have all the details. We’re not sure yet if there is one shooter or several. There are hostages, and already a number of victims, both children and teachers. The police are there. I have to go immediately. It’s up to you whether or not you want to come.” She looked tense and they could see that her mind was racing. Her cellphone was ringing again as they followed her rapidly to the elevator. All four members of the American team wanted to go with her. This was what they had come to learn about, but they had hoped to study past events, not new ones.

  The fact that it was a school made the situation even worse. Marie-Laure didn’t know how many victims there were, but had been told that there were several. There was no metal detector at the entrance to the school, and the shooter had a sack full of weapons, and used a Kalashnikov automatic weapon when he began shooting. Guns weren’t easily obtainable in France, but the bad guys always seemed to have them, and this one was no different. The police hadn’t contacted the hostage taker yet, and their information on-site told them that the hostages, possibly several hundred, some adults but mostly students, were being held in the school gym, and the police were hearing gunfire from the street. Two teachers inside the building had contacted the police and said there was only one shooter that they could see.

  Within minutes all eight of them were in the van with Gabriel at the wheel. He stepped on the gas, took backstreets, ran through red lights, went well over the speed limit as Marie-Laure spoke to her police contact on her cellphone. Valérie listened carefully, and translated for the others. They made it to the school in just under ten minutes. It was a lycée, a public school in a good residential neighborhood, with students from five to eighteen years of age. It was in an area where there had never been any trouble, and there wasn’t expected to be. It was the first incident of its kind and precisely what the government had dreaded, an attack on a school or any facility for young children. They had just been told at the hospital they visited that one of the weaknesses in their current systems was inadequate pediatric surgical equipment should an attack occur involving large numbers of young victims. Pediatric surgical instruments were in short supply, and they were planning to correct that soon. Maybe not soon enough now.

  They jumped out of the van when Gabriel stopped it and drove onto the sidewalk where the police lines were, half a block from the school. Two men in CRS riot gear, with helmets and bulletproof shields, approached them immediately and Marie-Laure showed them her badge and accounted for the others. Valérie and Paul had their own ID badges, and Gabriel had a high government clearance and a card that showed it, so he didn’t need a badge. Marie-Laure explained the presence of the Americans, who all had their passports on them, and that all four were physicians who specialized in trauma of the nature they were facing at the school.

  The riot police allowed them to go behind police lines and they could plainly hear gunfire from the Kalashnikov the hostage taker was using. Two teachers had escaped, with six kindergarten students, moments before, and the terrified children were pale and wide-eyed as they were led away by police. The two teachers told police what they knew as SWAT teams began to arrive and CRS riot police in full armor circled the area.

  The teachers explained that the gunman had shot into several classrooms before anyone could warn the teachers, so the rooms weren’t locked according to their emergency procedures. Most of the teachers were women, he was heavily armed, and no one had tried to tackle him or stop him, for fear of being shot. He had ordered everyone into the gym at gunpoint and got on the PA system. It was the time of the daily assembly for the middle and upper school, which he seemed to know, so most of the students and teachers were there, and he demanded that the younger students be brought in so they could watch their classmates and teachers get punished. No one had known then for certain if he was alone or not, but it seemed that way. The police had to assume there might be others. But no one had been seen except the single shooter so far.

  One of the teachers estimated that at least thirty people had been shot before he reached the gym, and they had managed to escape with the six kinder
garten students through the kitchen, which they said was a viable escape route. The workers from the kitchen were already hiding in a back alley, and police were dispatched to find them as they heard another round of shots from inside. There had been many so far.

  Marie-Laure and Gabriel joined the conversation with the teachers and asked additional questions as the other six stood to one side, not wanting to interfere with the tense exchange. Both teachers were women, and shaking from the shocking experience they’d just been through. One of them said that two of her kindergarteners had been shot and were dead when they left the classroom. She cried as she reported it to the police and the other teacher put an arm around her, as Valérie came to stand beside her and speak gently to her. The police allowed Valérie to lead the two teachers away at a short distance, so they would remain available for further information, but for now they had told the police enough to be extremely helpful.

  One SWAT team was deployed to the back of the school, and the homes around the perimeter were evacuated so neighboring residents wouldn’t get shot by random bullets when the SWAT teams stormed the school. The question was when that would happen, and how. They didn’t want to wait too long, or go in before they were fully prepared. And inevitably, there would be casualties when they went in. At the request of the police, Marie-Laure, Gabriel, and Paul walked to a police bus parked half a block away and got in to confer with the senior officer in charge. Bruno Perliot was the captain coordinating the SWAT teams and responsible for police response. They were planning their entry attack as the others waited outside, cringing every time they heard gunshots again.