Turning Point

by Danielle Steel

  They spent two hours at Marie-Laure’s and then went back to their apartments while she went to join Valérie to see how things were going with the post-trauma counseling. They had a huge number of parents and families to console, of the fallen teachers as well. It was overwhelming, but had been handled with the utmost professionalism. The four American trauma doctors had immense respect for what they’d seen.

  Andy had called Stephanie on her cell the minute he had seen it on the news. He’d been up late watching TV, and demanded she come home. He said there was no reason for her to be there, and she belonged with her children, not risking her life in France.

  “I was never at risk,” she said calmly, in a sad voice. “We weren’t in the school. And there is every reason for me to be here. We have a lot to learn from them, and information to share. I’m here because of situations like this in both our countries.”

  “Get your ass home, dammit!” he shouted at her out of his own fears.

  “I love you, but I’m staying,” she said quietly, and he hung up on her a minute later. She could hear how frightened he had been for her.

  Jeff called Wendy when she was on her way home in the van. She was surprised to hear from him, although she knew he stayed up late. “Are you all right?” he asked in a matter-of-fact voice, as though she were a colleague or an old friend, and she suspected that Jane might be near him, from the impersonal tone.

  “I’m fine, but it was heartbreaking,” she said, breaking down.

  “I’m sure it was,” he said quietly. “I was concerned about you. I just wanted to check in. I’m glad you’re okay. See you when you get back.” And with that he hung up, and she was left starving for more, and some tenderness and comfort. It would have been nice to hear the words “I love you.” But that wasn’t Jeff. He hadn’t said those words to her in a long time, maybe because he didn’t love her anymore, or didn’t think he had to say them. Or maybe he thought he wasn’t cheating on his wife if he didn’t say he loved her.

  Bill had overheard the conversation, and looked over at her. He could see how disappointed she was. “Surgeons are like that. All heart,” he commented and she smiled. She didn’t want to say that his wife was probably with him.

  They were all shattered when they got home, and wished that there was more they could do for the injured. Tom wanted to go to the school where Valérie’s trauma teams were working, but he didn’t want to intrude. Instead he knocked on Bill’s door with a bottle of scotch, and they had a drink together, and Stephanie joined them a few minutes later.

  “I could use some of that,” she said. Tom poured her a drink, and Bill knocked on Wendy’s door to invite her to join them and she had some too. It had been a smooth operation in many ways, but a hell of a day. And parents would be mourning their children. Bill turned on CNN on the TV and the reporter said there would be a candlelit vigil at Notre Dame that night at 9 P.M., to honor the victims. The four of them agreed to go. And in their own way, they were each glad they had been there to do what they could. It seemed so little with so many children dead, but this was what they had chosen to dedicate their lives to. And all four of them knew that they’d been right to come to France. This was confirmation of it. They were meant to be here, and this grueling, agonizing job was what they’d been born to do, even if it broke their hearts.

  Chapter Nine

  The team from San Francisco met in the hallway outside their apartments, dressed in warm clothes, at a quarter to nine that night. Stephanie and Wendy were wearing wool beanies, and they’d called a cab to take them to Notre Dame. They had to stop a few blocks away and walked from there. The area was filled with silent people, carrying candles and flowers, walking solemnly toward the cathedral. Their eyes met and then they looked at the army of strangers who had come to mourn the students, young lives cut too short, and the teachers, many of whom were young as well. It was a way of facing it together with people they didn’t even know. They felt a powerful bond, deploring the madness of one lone gunman who had changed so many lives forever, on a mission of revenge spawned in his twisted mind. There was no way to understand it. No one did. He had killed so many.

  The school had been shut down, and on the news they had said that it would not reopen until the next semester. The students would be dispersed to other lycées in the area and the teachers put on leave, after being severely traumatized. New tighter security measures would be put in place in all the schools, too late for those who had died and been injured that day. Two more of the injured children had died since the shooting, which brought the death toll to a hundred and sixty-three, more victims than in the November shootings four years before. That tragedy had been carefully planned and executed. This incident had been haphazard, and carried out impulsively, by a man misguidedly mourning his wife and blaming the school for her death. He had made students and teachers alike pay for it. They all knew that his orphaned daughter would never be the same again.

  There had been a photograph of Solange in the newspaper that night, as she mounted the steps of the police bus to talk to her father on the phone, but her back was turned and you couldn’t see her face. She looked like any schoolgirl with her backpack and her hair in a braid. If the press chose to single her out, they would be punishing her too.

  Gabriel somehow managed to find Stephanie in the crowd outside Notre Dame, which was nearly impossible, but he had combed the crowd until he found her. Thousands of people had lit their candles and left small bunches of flowers on the steps of the church. A priest on the balcony said a blessing over them, as the bells tolled one hundred and sixty-three times, ringing in everyone’s heads and reverberating in their hearts. Gabriel said nothing to Stephanie when he found her, he stood next to her with an arm around her shoulders, and the other holding the candle he had brought.

  Marie-Laure and Paul were there as well, and found them by calling Wendy’s cellphone. It felt good to be together, they stayed until eleven o’clock, and then went home. Tom left them afterward and went to find Valérie at the school where she was working, counseling families before they went home, and speaking quietly and respectfully to groups of parents about what to expect from their children and how to help them in the coming days. There would be nightmares and tears, panic attacks and night terrors as the reality of what they’d been through settled in and had to be processed. The meetings with parents and children were poignant and heart-wrenching, and what the children had been through showed on their faces as they clung to their parents, or threw themselves into their arms, seeking some semblance of safety. But Valérie knew it would be a long time before any of them felt safe again. They would relive the horror of that day for years.

  Tom waited for Valérie to take a break, and they went to get a cup of coffee at a station that had been set up for everyone, and there was food for those who wanted it. Some of the children weren’t even able to talk, and Valérie told their parents reassuringly that they might not for a while.

  “I keep wondering how that little girl is doing,” Tom said sadly, thinking about her again as he sipped his coffee. “She might not have made it. We managed to stop the bleeding in the ambulance, but she’d already lost a lot.”

  “Do you know where they took her?” Valérie asked him.

  “Necker.”

  “We can check on her tomorrow.” She had new respect for him as a doctor and a man after seeing what he’d done, his race to save the child and the others he had helped when he got back from taking her to the hospital. He had been tireless on the scene, ingenious in the methods he used, highly skilled and dedicated. He had done everything he humanly could to save each child he worked on. He wasn’t the buffoon she had thought him to be. She had seen not only his competent side, but the flood of compassion he had emanated. “You’re a fantastic doctor,” she said, as they finished their coffee. And the other three Americans had been impressive too, and the French medical teams as well. “I
try to be a decent doctor,” he replied. “But it’s not always possible,” he said simply, hoping the little girl he had run with didn’t fall into the category of those he couldn’t save.

  He left Valérie at two in the morning, and didn’t attempt to talk to her counselees or their parents. Valérie knew much better than he what to say to heartsick, broken parents. He went back to his apartment then, and didn’t even bother to undress. He collapsed onto the bed, too exhausted to move, and just lay there and cried until he fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  They all came to the meeting the next morning, looking rough and ragged and worried. As was expected, they felt worse the next morning. Four more children had died during the night, and one teacher. One hundred sixty-eight. It was now officially the worst incident of its kind that France had lived through, with the heaviest losses.

  Valérie was at the meeting, but said she couldn’t stay long. She had too many counseling sessions to organize, and programs and counselors to coordinate. She had met with Solange that morning at seven o’clock, who said she never wanted to go to school and face her peers again. But Valérie and her grandmother had convinced her to try it in a few days and see how she felt. There was much healing that had to happen, on all fronts, and Valérie was working hard to orchestrate it.

  The entire team talked for hours about what had been handled perfectly, and what fell short. They each had valuable feedback for Marie-Laure, for another incident in the future. Had there been several gunmen, it would have been worse.

  Afterward, they visited the hospitals where the victims had been taken. Some of the damage they had sustained was horrifying. And the team suspected that several would lose limbs, after the explosive damage of the shooter’s ammunition. At Necker, Tom had a happy surprise. They inquired about the little girl, but it took them time to match her case up to his description and find her. They asked what color her hair was, but he wasn’t sure because she had been covered with blood. Her parents were standing next to her bed when Tom walked in. They talked for a few minutes in his awful French, and they addressed their gratitude to him in halting English. No one could easily absorb what had happened, and yet they all had to find a way to live with it.

  Tom was relieved when he’d seen the little girl he’d saved. She was heavily sedated and had had surgery the day before, but he could see that she was doing well and it was likely she would survive.

  Tom met up with Valérie again at the end of the day, and they had a glass of wine at a bistro near her apartment on the rue du Bac. She looked tired, and their guard was down. The events of the day before had brought all of them closer to each other. Their merits and talents as physicians had shown, and Valérie had seen over the walls he surrounded himself with. They were walls of lighthearted fun and laughter but solid nonetheless, and she liked what she saw. He was a serious, good-hearted person, and she understood now what his colleagues in Oakland saw in him and why he was so respected.

  “So what makes you do this kind of work?” she asked him directly, as they relaxed for a few minutes. She was going back that night to another school where counseling had been set up for the survivors.

  “Moments like yesterday,” he said quietly. “Being able to make a difference in a matter of seconds before it’s too late.” She suspected more than that, but he didn’t volunteer it. They all had a personal stake in it, whether they admitted it or not. “What about you?”

  “We lived in Lebanon for two years when I was growing up, during the war there. I lost some friends I was close to. And I thought maybe I could change something in the world. I wanted to be an obstetrician when I started medical school, but I got hooked on psychiatry. The human heart and mind intrigued me more than delivering babies. I think I made the right choice for me,” she said peacefully and smiled at him. Tom didn’t say anything to her for a minute and then she could see something open up as he looked into her eyes and knew he could trust her with the secrets of his past.

  “I grew up in a rural area of Montana. I was in a car accident with my parents and brother when I was eleven. The paramedics took a long time to come because everything is so spread out there. I stood there with them, and watched them die. I wanted to help them and didn’t know how. Everything and everyone I loved disappeared that night. I knew that if I’d been a doctor, I could have saved them. I knew after it happened that I wanted to be able to save people one day. I went to live with my aunt and uncle in Oklahoma. They weren’t kind, but they took me in. They didn’t have much money. They were simple people, and they used what my parents had left to pay for what I needed. There was enough for medical school when I finished college, so I went.” What he told her explained everything to Valérie and her heart went out to him.

  “Is that why you never married and don’t want kids?”

  “Probably. It’s pretty classic. You can lose everyone you love in a matter of minutes. Destiny can take it all away. I think I decided early on not to take that chance, so I try to keep it light instead. No ties, no losses, no heartbreaks. You can’t lose what you don’t have and tell yourself you don’t want. It seems to work for me.” But beyond the fun and games it was a lonely life, and she could see it in his eyes. “And why don’t you want marriage and kids?” He turned the tables on her and she smiled.

  “My parents had a hateful marriage, it didn’t look like fun to me. I was the weapon they used against each other, the child that neither of them ever wanted or loved. They felt obliged to stay together for me, and hated me for it. I had no desire to do that to a child, or to live a prison sentence like the one they imposed on themselves, for my sake. It seemed much too unpleasant and complicated to me. I’ve lived with two men in my life. The relationships eventually played out, and I never wanted their children. I think some people aren’t cut out to be parents, and I’m one of them. But I turned what I learned in my childhood into something useful for other people, and a wonderful life for me.”

  “It’s amazing how the past always gets us in the end, isn’t it?” Tom said seriously.

  “It doesn’t have to,” she said philosophically. “We’ve both turned ours into something positive. That’s already a lot. You saved a child’s life yesterday by your quick actions, and I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve done it. You’ve more than made up for the parents and brother you couldn’t save. And I help some people with my work. It’s a good way to exorcise the ghosts of our past, don’t you think?” He nodded, thinking about it. She wasn’t a bitter person, and he admired how free she seemed to be.

  They talked about other things then, and she said she had to go back to work. She would be very busy for the next few weeks.

  “Can we have dinner sometime?” he asked her simply and there was none of the Don Juan act that usually served him so well. He was a man who liked a woman, enormously, and felt deep respect for her. And she was drawn to the man she had discovered behind the games.

  “I’d like that,” she said easily. “Things will calm down a little in a few days. And we’ll have time in San Francisco.” He liked that idea. He kissed her on both cheeks when he walked her to the Metro. She smiled and waved at him, and then she disappeared to go back to work.

  * * *

  —

  Their debriefings and analytical meetings continued throughout the week, and they were all feeling pressured by how insistent the press were, seeking interviews with anyone who would talk to them at the various offices that provided emergency services. They wanted to know what they felt went wrong, how the event could have been handled differently, and how did they explain that so many lives had been lost. One journalist in particular was dogged about it, Jacqueline Moutier. She tried to corner Bill when he left the office one night, and he was tired of it. She’d been hounding them all day. And the Americans had only been observers at the scene. All decisions had been made by the French police. But the reporter w
as clearly looking for dirt and officials to demonize.

  She followed Bill to the Metro, and asked him if he felt any one person was to blame, and the question enraged him. Despite the enormous loss of life, everyone had worked so hard to get the best possible result both after the shooting and during the hostage crisis. She pointed out that one family had lost two daughters, and their son was still in critical condition and he might die too. It was one of the many tragedies that had occurred, but it was no one’s fault except the man who had shot them, and it infuriated Bill that she wanted to pin it on someone else and make everyone involved look bad. She personified everything he hated about the press.

  “Why do you want to make it worse than it is?” he said, stopping to answer her with his eyes blazing. “I think it was handled as close to perfectly as possible. I am in awe of how well every aspect of this tragedy was treated.” She was known for making trouble and pointing fingers unfairly to make her articles sensational, no matter who they hurt. He had the utmost contempt for her. She had already said once in the paper she wrote for that the police had been too slow to go in, and if they’d gone in faster, many more lives could have been saved. It wasn’t true. If they had gone in earlier, they would have been ill prepared, and many more lives might have been lost.