Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

Pip was born six months later, and Bill bought a Victorian house in Noe Valley, where they could become a family and begin their life together. Her parents sent over a nanny from London so Athena didn’t have to be tied down, and she went home to England frequently to see her sisters, parents, and friends, and then returned to Bill, their baby, and their San Francisco life, a little less enthusiastically each time. She felt like a fish out of water in sleepy San Francisco.

It had taken Athena all of five minutes to fall in love with Bill the night they met, and about a year to realize what she’d done, and how different they were. He was more of a detour than a destination in her life, and at the end of a year with him, she had begun to have serious doubts about the marriage. She was six months pregnant with Pip by then, and the baby brought them closer for a while. The life they shared was exactly what Bill wanted, a wife he loved and an adorable baby in a cozy little Victorian house in a family neighborhood. Athena was like an exotic bird trapped in a cage in a foreign land. It had taken her less than a year after Pip was born to fall out of love with him completely, and she got pregnant with Alex by accident after they got drunk at a party when Pip was fifteen months old. She spent most of the pregnancy commuting to London to see her old friends, and got increasingly depressed whenever she came back to Bill in San Francisco. His parents had never liked her, and were dismayed by what he’d gotten himself into, but he was still insisting that Athena would settle down and get used to married life. He had a long talk with her father, who suggested that Bill give up his career in medicine, move to England, and join him in the family shipping business if he wanted the marriage to work. Athena was never going to be a “California girl.” The only one who refused to see it was Bill. Three weeks after Alex was born, Athena took the two girls to England and spent the summer in the south of France with her sisters and friends at her parents’ summer home there. At the end of the summer she called to tell Bill she wasn’t coming back and wanted a divorce. He was devastated and tried to talk her out of it, but she was already seeing Rupert by then, and Bill didn’t have a chance. She and Rupert had had a summer fling in the south of France.

She and Rupert had grown up together. He was one of her own, and a British lord like her father. Rupert was as much a libertine and free spirit as she was, and her three years in California were over. She never came back. Bill lived in the house in Noe Valley until the divorce she filed was final, hoping she would change her mind. She didn’t. Eventually he sold the pretty little house and moved to a small apartment on the Embarcadero, with a view of the bay and the Bay Bridge and a second bedroom for his girls when they would come to visit. The apartment was stark and barely furnished, and he was still living there five years later. He had never bothered to decorate it, except for the bare essentials from IKEA, including a pink bedroom set for the girls. The rest of the apartment looked as barren and empty as he felt.

When his daughters visited him now in the summer, they traveled most of the time. He took them to Lake Tahoe, camping in Yosemite, they went on road trips, he took them to Disneyland, and did all the things divorced fathers do, trying desperately to establish a bond with his children in too little time. They were as British as their mother and stepfather, and loved their little half brothers. Bill tried to plant the seed of their going to college in the States one day, which Pip was mildly interested in, but it was still nine years away. In the meantime, he had his month with them in the summer, an occasional weekend when he could fly to London to see them, and Christmas every other year. The rest of the time he had his work. He firmly believed that he didn’t need more than that. There hadn’t been an important woman in his life since Athena, and he was beginning to see now how unsuited they had been for each other. He told himself it no longer mattered, and insisted he wasn’t bitter about the divorce. He hadn’t been in love with her for several years. She had broken his heart when she left with their daughters. The loves of his life now were Pip and Alex. He readily admitted he was a workaholic, and saw no harm in that.

The absence of a wife or girlfriend gave Bill more time to devote to his work, and to his children when he saw them. He didn’t want anyone interfering with his relationship with them, and a new woman might. He saw very little of his brother and parents in New York. They were part of a world he had never liked and had shunned since he’d entered medical school. His brother was an antitrust lawyer with political aspirations, married to an environmental attorney, involved in a multitude of causes. They had a booming social life. His parents were part of the old New York establishment, which had never interested him. He was happy with his much smaller life in San Francisco, spending time between the hospital where he worked and the outdoors. It was a choice he had made when he was young, and it still suited him.

He had hated people knowing who his family was when he was growing up, and he still didn’t like it. His brother thrived on flaunting the family name and connections. They were very different men. Their parents regarded Bill as an outcast and renegade of sorts. His humble life and work mystified them. He could have had an illustrious career in medicine in New York, but he never wanted that. Caring for derelicts and patients with gunshot wounds that he saw almost daily in the trauma unit at SF General was exactly what he wanted to do. His family name meant nothing in the world he worked in, in San Francisco, and that suited him too. He had become something of a loner since the divorce. New nurses and female residents were always startled by how good-looking he was, but he paid no attention to them while on duty or off. He was all about his work and his two daughters. No one knew anything about his personal life, which was just what he wanted.

His romantic life had been sparse and sporadic since the divorce. There was the occasional superficial date, and nothing more. His one regret was that his parents barely knew his daughters. Athena had seen to that, and his parents had made no effort either. Their dislike for their ex-daughter-in-law had carried over to the children. They had tea with the girls in London, when they traveled, if they had time. But more often than not, they found making time to see the children inconvenient, or Athena made it difficult. Planning with her was never easy. She was as vague and unreliable as she had always been, so Pip and Alex had no real attachment to their American grandparents, only to their father, whom they saw too little of but enjoyed when they did. He called them several times a week, and tried to stay abreast of what they were doing. It wasn’t easy maintaining a fully engaged relationship with children six thousand miles away. As girls from good families did in England, Pip would be going to boarding school in two years. She could hardly wait. Time and distance were not on Bill’s side, and he did all he could to compensate for that. Whenever possible with his busy schedule, he flew to London for a long weekend to visit them. Although nowadays they were often occupied with their friends and finding the right time for them was getting harder every year.

—

Things got busier in the ER as the day wore on. Bill sent a heart attack to coronary ICU, an old man from the Tenderloin brought in by paramedics. He sent a homeless recent amputee, a drug addict with a fierce wound infection, to the surgical ward to be evaluated by the attending surgeon, and he moved a child suspected of meningitis to the pediatric ICU for a spinal tap. He called in a neurosurgeon for a woman in a coma from a brain injury she had sustained in a car accident. It was all in a day’s work. He went from one exam room to the next, and stopped to chat with an elderly woman who had fallen down the stairs and was more shaken up than injured. Miraculously, she hadn’t broken a hip, and he was warm and reassuring with her. The hospital had a fantastic elder care unit, the best in the city, and he referred patients there regularly. He had a kind, easy bedside manner that appeared casual to the patients, but wasn’t, as he evaluated them carefully, looking for symptoms of hidden problems in addition to the obvious ones they had. The nurses all admired and respected him. He treated every patient with the utmost care and attention, no matter who they were. Unlike a lot of doctors, he didn’t show off or have a big ego. He was a genuinely nice guy.