Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

“We all do it. It’s expected in every department. And trauma and the ER are especially busy on nights like this.” Her father was an obstetrician and her mother had never made a fuss about it. It seemed unfair to her that Andy did. She had understood it growing up. There were things her father inevitably missed when he was working, and no one complained. Why was it different for her?

She walked them to the car and strapped Ryan into his car seat, while Andy put Aden in his booster seat, for the drive to Orinda. Andy looked at her unhappily and didn’t say a word, as she stood in front of the house while he pulled out of the driveway. She waved and then walked back into the house, took off the new black velvet dress and hung it up, put on jeans, a sweater, slipped her feet into clogs, and put on her white coat with her name embroidered on it. She put the nylon rope with her badge on it over her head, grabbed her purse, walked out to her car, and drove to the hospital in Mission Bay downtown. “Merry Christmas,” she said out loud to herself. Her mind was already on her work, there was always something reassuring about it, knowing that this was what she did best. She loved her husband and children, but the hospital was where she belonged and felt most like herself.

—

Thomas Wylie stood with a cluster of women around him at the nurses’ station desk of the emergency room at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland, and a burst of laughter escaped from the women like balloons rising into the air. There were at least six of them standing there as he told one of his stories about when he had trained in Chicago, lived in Ireland for a year, or volunteered in Zimbabwe. He had a million stories to tell. He’d had a colorful life and a varied career, and the stories to go with it, half of which probably weren’t true. But Tom Wylie knew how to make the nurses laugh. The rumor was that he had slept with half the female medical personnel in the hospital, which probably wasn’t true either, but easy to believe. He had movie-star good looks, and at forty-three looked ten years younger than he was. There was a boyish quality about him. He’d gone to Yale as an undergraduate, medical school at the University of Chicago, done his residency at UCLA. He’d done some modeling, in order to meet female models, and had wound up in Oakland randomly, when they needed more doctors for the trauma unit at Alta Bates and he applied and got the job. Alta Bates was the largest private medical center in the East Bay. He worked at the Summit campus in Oakland.

He liked to say that he was a nomad at heart, with no roots anywhere, and never talked about his childhood. He was an artful seducer, and admitted that he’d never had a serious long-term relationship, and didn’t want one. If a woman got too serious about him, he was known to disappear immediately. He had no desire to get married. He was charming, supposedly fabulous in bed, and couldn’t resist wooing almost every female who crossed his path. When the brief affair was over, he usually managed to stay friends with the women he’d slept with. He liked to say that they were his hobby—he collected them.

In spite of themselves, his male colleagues liked him too. He was outrageous and funny, and despite his casual style, he was an excellent doctor, and a good man to have around in a crisis. He took his medical career seriously, but nothing else. When it came to women, he was the class clown and Don Juan. He was a hard man to dislike, although some of the older, more conservative nurses disapproved of him, but most of the time he charmed them too. He was undeniably handsome and a practiced flirt.

Three of the nurses lingered after the others went back to work, and there was a momentary lull in the ER. Tom didn’t mind working on Christmas Day, he usually did. He had nowhere else to spend it, and no family, so he signed up for all the major holidays and freed up the married doctors to stay home with their kids. It had been quiet in the ER for the last two hours.

“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.