Turning Point

by Danielle Steel

  “Everybody must be home opening presents,” Tom said with a flirtatious glance at one of the younger nurses. “If you weren’t so young and beautiful, I’d invite you to my place to play, but your father or boyfriend would probably shoot me,” he teased her and she laughed. She was twenty-two and had just graduated from nursing school in June. Tom Wylie was attracted to women of every age. He thought they were all fair game, and his success rate was amazing.

  The banter stopped immediately when an unconscious six-year-old boy was airlifted in from a car accident. His mother and sister had been killed and his father was in serious condition and was taken to surgery, while Tom headed up a trauma team to examine the boy. He called in a pediatric neurosurgeon immediately, and assisted at three hours of surgery. The child’s condition remained critical but was stable after the surgery, and Tom advised the nurses’ station that he would be spending the night at the hospital to keep an eye on the boy. He went upstairs to reassure the child’s father, but discovered that he was still in surgery himself. Tom checked the little boy every fifteen minutes for the first hour, and then went to add some notes to the chart, and smiled at one of the older nurses at the desk when he did. She was used to his contradictory style of buffoon among the women, and serious, extremely attentive physician when needed by his patients.

  “I think you should come home with me when we get off duty,” he whispered to the nurse and she grinned at him.

  “Just say the word, anytime,” she whispered back, and he laughed and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Thank God somebody still wants me around here,” he said and turned his attention to the chart, relieved that he now felt fairly sure the boy would survive. The pediatric neurosurgeon had done his job well, to relieve pressure on the child’s brain without doing additional damage, which was a delicate procedure.

  Tom Wylie was a strange dichotomy of diligent medical practitioner alternating with Lothario. He was the handsome man that no woman would ever catch. His glib style got him all the women he wanted, but never a relationship that would last. Other than the funny stories, he never shared any personal information about his past. The women who had dated him knew as little about him as everyone else. He often said that marriage sounded like a nightmare to him, and that he much preferred life as a buffet, rather than a set menu every night. Some of the married doctors he worked with suspected that he might be right.

  Most of his colleagues liked working with him, he lightened the mood of what was at times a very hard job, and his medical skills were impressive. And it was obvious from his dedication how much he loved the work he did.

  * * *

  —

  Wendy Jones spent Christmas Eve and Day just as she had for the last six years, alone. It was part of the deal of loving a married man. She had known it would be like this when she fell in love with Jeffrey Hunter, renowned cardiac surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, where she worked in the trauma/surgical critical care program for adult and pediatric trauma patients. She’d met Jeff at the hospital, when one of his patients had come to the trauma center when she was on duty. She had fallen madly in love with Jeff from the first moment she saw him, and he had called her the next day. He was so brilliant that she found everything about him seductive, and was flattered when he called her.

  She’d gone to lunch with him, hesitantly, even though she knew he was married. He said his marriage had been dead for years, and they were planning to separate. According to him, his wife, Jane, was fed up with being the wife of a surgeon, married to a man she never saw, who cared more about his work and patients than he did about her or their children. They had four kids, and Jeff admitted himself that he was an inattentive husband and father. His work was very demanding, and his specialty was heart transplants. He couldn’t just drop everything and run to a school soccer game or a dinner party. His work was his priority. He said that he and his wife led separate lives, and he was planning to leave the marriage by the end of the year. Wendy had believed him, and in retrospect she thought he had believed himself. But six months into their relationship, his wife had convinced him that their children were still too young for them to divorce and they had come to a better understanding, so he stayed. And so had Wendy. From that moment on, she had known it wouldn’t be easy.

  Six years later, he was still married and his youngest child was eleven. The oldest had just left for college. He assured Wendy now that by the time his youngest son was in high school, he would feel comfortable leaving the family home. It was only three years away, but Wendy wondered if he would actually leave before his youngest was in college, or at all. She had promised herself she would end the affair a hundred times, but she never did. He always talked her into staying. His arguments were so convincing. And they loved each other.

  They were well suited. They were both physicians and graduates of Harvard. Her work in trauma was almost as stressful and high pressured as his. The men she went out with before had complained about her dedication to her work. Jeff always understood. She had done her residency at Mass General, after getting her undergraduate degree and MD at Harvard, and been offered an outstanding job at Stanford, which was the same career path Jeff had chosen. Jeff’s wife was the daughter of a highly respected surgeon, but she had said she didn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps with an absentee husband who was never around and hardly knew his own kids. And yet, it was exactly what she was doing, and had done since they married.

  Wendy frequently wondered if he made the same empty promises to his wife as to her, but things never changed. He worked too hard and had too many patients to be more attentive than he was to either of them. His first responsibility was to his patients, more than to either of the women in his life. He spent weekends at home, and attempted to spend time with his children. He was with his family for holidays, and he spent Wednesday nights at Wendy’s, when he had time and Wendy wasn’t working herself. He spent an hour with her on his way home from time to time and would drop by without warning. She enjoyed the time with him, their discussions, and their sex life, which made her fall even more deeply in love with him, but for the past few years, he’d stopped mentioning marriage or leaving his wife. Wendy no longer broached the subject with him, and it was on holidays like Christmas that she realized how little she had with him. All she had were Wednesday nights, when they were both available, and an hour here and there. Jeff compartmentalized everything in his life, and he had put her in a little box, where he expected her to stay.

  What she had noticed in recent years were the things she no longer did because she couldn’t do them with him. The symphony, the opera, the ballet. What if he called and wanted to drop by? She didn’t want to miss a visit by not being there. She loved museums, but had stopped going. And she no longer saw her girlfriends because they had husbands and children, and she was a married man’s mistress and was ashamed.

  For six years she had followed his rules. She was thirty-seven years old, she had her work, and one night a week with a man who belonged to someone else. Her work was fulfilling, but the rest of her life wasn’t. Wendy felt like a car Jeff took out for special occasions, and left in the garage the rest of the time. She wanted to share so much more with him and couldn’t. There were no weekends or holidays in her arrangement with him. And every year, on Christmas, she thought about what a fool she was, as the truth hit her squarely in the face, again. Even if she promised herself she’d leave him, she knew now she wouldn’t. When the holidays were over, she’d go back to their weekly nights together, silently hoping something would change. She didn’t want to rock the boat and lose him. She was living on crumbs, and pretending to herself it was a meal.

  In Wendy’s eyes, no one measured up to him, no one was as smart, as capable, or appealed to her as much. He was a trap she had fallen into and couldn’t get out of, and didn’t even want to. She’d had a text message from him the night before, on Christmas Eve, t
hat said only, “Thinking of you, love, J.” And now he was with his wife and children, while she sat alone in her house in Palo Alto, wondering what she was doing with him. Little by little, she had given everything up for him and now all she had was her career and a Wednesday night date.

  She had been at the top of her medical school class at Harvard, and graduated cum laude, but what difference did it make? She was in good shape, a small, lithe, beautiful woman with dark hair and deep blue eyes. She had a successful career at Stanford, and every decision she made was influenced by her relationship with Jeff. She accepted no invitations in case he wanted to stop by on his way home without calling first, she didn’t want to miss a minute with him. Their Wednesday nights were sacred to her, and Jeff tried to be reliable about them, as best he could. But she had to fit into the tiny little space allotted to her. Jeff always set firm boundaries, and everything was on his terms. He controlled his world and hers. She could never call or email him, and could only text him during office hours. She often wondered what would happen if she had an emergency and needed to get hold of him, but she never had. She hated herself for how willing she was to give up her life, and how little she expected in return.

  She hadn’t put up a Christmas tree this year. There was no point, he’d never see it and it would only make her sad. She tried to ignore the holiday entirely. He had given her a narrow diamond bangle bracelet from Cartier, which she was wearing, but she would have traded it and everything she had to spend Christmas with him. Her every thought was filled with him, and she kept imagining him with his wife and children while she sat alone. At thirty-seven, she knew that she was giving up her chance to have children, and now she could see herself still with him at forty-five or fifty. She knew that next year, on Christmas, everything would be the same. She was too hooked to leave him, and Jeff relied on it. The situation they had created worked perfectly for him, but a lot less well for her.

  She was on call for Christmas Day and night, but her phone hadn’t rung. Things were obviously quiet in the ER. No big trauma cases had come in, or they would have called her. She was listening to Christmas carols, which depressed her, and thinking of Jeff. Six years with Jeff lay behind her, and the future was a blur. And she knew, as she did every year, that nothing was going to change. Jeff had her exactly where he wanted her.

  Chapter Two

  Tom Wylie was in the doctors’ lounge at Alta Bates, having a cup of coffee and chatting with one of the anesthesiologists, when he saw flames shooting out of a building on the TV screen behind the other doctor’s head. Someone had muted the TV, and he stared at the screen for a minute, wondering where the fire was, then a banner moved across the bottom, announcing the name of a hotel on Market Street in San Francisco. He picked up the remote on the table and turned the sound back on. The cameras showed Market Street closed to traffic, with fire trucks everywhere, hotel guests milling around in a cordoned area half a block away, and firefighters rushing past them into the hotel. The tall ladders had been set up against the building, and firemen were entering through windows on several floors. It was a five-alarm fire, and two hundred firefighters were on the scene. The reporter announced that several guests were being treated for smoke inhalation, and two firefighters had been injured. Due to their extensive conference rooms and grand ballroom for weddings, the reporter estimated that two thousand guests and several hundred employees were in the hotel. Both doctors stood and stared at the TV as the floor below the one on fire burst into flame and the windows exploded outward from the heat.

  There was silence in the room for a minute, then Tom commented, “Looks like we might get a flood of customers tonight.”

  “They’ll send them to SF General and Saint Francis’s burn center first,” the anesthesiologist responded, as they continued to watch the fire burning out of control on the news.

  Several more doctors and some nurses wandered in to watch, as Tom tossed his paper cup into the wastebasket and went to check his young patient again. The boy was still heavily sedated but doing well, and Tom was pleased. He was back five minutes later. He looked at the fire again, and saw a line of ambulances arrive, paramedics rushing toward the scene to confer with the police.

  “That’s some hell of a fire,” Tom said somberly as the announcer said it was believed that lights on some of the Christmas trees may have caused it, but arson had not been ruled out yet. Two floors of the enormous hotel were in flames. You could hear the explosions in the background, as the windows continued to blow out and the fire moved to other floors. The hotel had been evacuated immediately, and several additional units of firefighters were now on the scene.

  The doctors from the ER were conferring, trying to guess if some of the injured would be sent to the East Bay, and the consensus was they’d be sending people to the city hospitals first, but it was a reasonable possibility that Alta Bates might get some victims of the blaze that night. Tom went to speak to the head nurse in the ER to have her check their burn supplies. He wanted everything ready to receive critically injured burn victims, who might even be sent over by helicopter. Anything was possible and he needed to be sure they were prepared. There was no joking around now.

  It was five P.M., and the streets were already dark. Floodlights had been set up on Market Street, and they were shooting water from high-powered hoses into the hotel, with no effect on the blaze so far.

  * * *

  —

  At San Francisco General, Bill Browning and his team were watching the same broadcast, and he dispatched everyone to check supplies, and had the nurses at the desk start texting all the physicians on call that night. He wanted their full complement of staff on-site to deal with all the injured and burn victims the police sent them. SF General was in the front lines, and in less than an hour, they were at full staff, and all the supplies were ready as the ER staff crowded around the TVs. The fire had gotten worse and six floors were involved now, ladders were set up all along the front of the hotel. Firefighters had come from Marin and the East Bay to join the forces in the city. All of Market Street had been closed off, the smoke from the fire hung heavily in the air, and the stunned hotel guests had been moved back a block. The reporter said you could feel the intense heat in the street.

  “How many do you think we can handle?” Bill asked one of the doctors who had come in. They had two hundred and eighty-four beds with the new facility, and they weren’t at capacity that night.

  “Sixty easily. Close to a hundred if we have to.” They had recently had training for terrorist attacks, which would serve them well in dealing with large numbers of victims. Bill went to call their contact at the police department, to give him an idea of how many people they could handle comfortably, and at what point to start sending them to UCSF.

  “We’re sending you twenty now, mostly older hotel guests suffering from smoke inhalation. We’re treating minor injuries at an EMT station we set up. The Department of Emergency Management guys are here, they’re doing triage right now. Get ready. We’re going to have a busy night. They just sent a dozen firefighters to Saint Francis.” Saint Francis had the best burn unit in the city, and Bill was sure they were prepared too.

  Stephanie had just arrived at UCSF when the fire started, and after she saw the three patients they had called her in for, she joined the others at the TV. At five-thirty, they saw the first ambulances leave the scene.

  The ambulances arrived at SF General ten minutes later, with the first smoke inhalation cases, and a pregnant woman Bill sent up to labor and delivery. She was having a panic attack and worried about her baby.

  More ambulances showed up after the first ones, with minor injuries, including a broken leg that had happened when a hotel guest fell down the stairs during the evacuation. Eight badly burned firemen came in next, as Bill did triage at the ambulance entrance to the ER, and paramedics brought the injured in on gurneys, victims with soot on their faces and some of them stil
l gasping from the smoke. They reached their limit faster than Bill had expected, and he called his police contact again, asking him to send the next group to UCSF, to give SF General a chance to organize their teams, and deal with the burn victims.

  The ambulances went to UCSF after that, and Stephanie did triage along with two other trauma doctors. They had two heart attacks, more injured firemen, a number of children with their parents, and the fire hadn’t been stopped yet. The damage was being estimated on TV at a hundred million dollars, including structural damage, and by then two of the firefighters had died on the scene, one of them a twenty-four-year-old rookie and the other a veteran fireman who had gotten trapped in the building. It was a scene of major carnage, and at the same time the victims were arriving at UCSF, the authorities started sending ambulances to Alta Bates, and another dozen victims to the Stanford trauma unit by helicopter. Wendy was waiting for them at Stanford, and their entire ER and trauma staff had been called in.

  The news broadcasts said it was the worst fire in the history of the city since the 1906 earthquake, and by eight o’clock that night, the uninjured guests, who were now homeless, had been sent to other hotels in the city. Those who took them in were using their ballrooms and conference centers to set up food and cots for them, once they ran out of rooms. Everyone was rallying to help and do what they could. And the Emergency Operations Center, directed by the Department of Emergency Management, were working closely with the police and fire department.

  It was two in the morning when the fire stopped growing, and was considered contained within the hotel, although it wasn’t under full control yet. Every hospital had patients on gurneys in the halls, and additional nursing staff had been brought in to help. It was a disaster of major proportions. The mayor and governor were surveying the scene together, and planned to visit victims in the hospitals later that day.