Danielle Steel: Irresistible Forces

The nurse brought it quickly, and the child's mother couldn't drink. She made terrible, airless, strangled sounds as she tried to absorb what he had told her, and Steve Whitman felt as though he had been the killer, instead of the man with the gun. He would have liked to be the savior, and sometimes he was. There were wives and mothers and husbands who threw themselves around his neck with gratitude and relief, but not this time. He hated the losses so much. And too often, the deck was stacked against him.

He stayed with Henrietta Washington for as long as he could, and then left her to the nurses. He'd been paged again, for a fourteen-year-old who had fallen out of a second-story window. He was in surgery for four hours with her, and at ten thirty he walked out of the operating room, hoping he had saved her, and finally made it to his office for the first time in hours. It was the quiet part of the night for him, usually the really bad cases didn't start to come in till after midnight. He grabbed a cup of cold coffee off his desk, and two stale Oreo cookies. He hadn't had time to eat since breakfast. He'd been on duty officially for forty-eight hours, and had done another forty-eight as a favor to one of his colleagues whose wife was in labor. He was long overdue to go home, but hadn't been able to break away until then. He had a stack of papers on his desk to sign, and he knew that as soon as he did, he could go home. There was already another doctor on duty to take his place. And as he heaved a long sigh, he reached for the phone. He knew Meredith would still be up, or maybe even still at the office. He knew how busy she'd been for the past few weeks, and he wasn't sure if she'd still be in meetings, or if she'd finally gone home.

The phone rang once, and she answered. Her voice was as calm and cool as Meredith herself. They were a good balance for each other. She had always matched Steve's volcanic intensity with her own special brand of silky smoothness. No matter how crazy things got, Meredith always seemed to stay calm in the heat of crisis. She was quiet and elegant and cool. Her entire being was a contrast to her husband.

“Hello?” She had suspected it would be Steve, but she was in the midst of a huge deal, and it could have been someone in her office calling her at that hour. She had in fact gone home. Meredith Smith Whitman was a partner in one of Wall Street's most respected investment banking firms, and highly respected in her field. She lived and breathed and ate the world of high finance, just as Steve was totally engulfed by his work in trauma. And they each loved what they did. For each of them, it was an all-consuming passion.

“Hi, it's me.” He sounded tired and sad, but relieved that she had answered.

“You sound beat,” she said, sympathetic and concerned.

“I am.” But he smiled as he heard her. “Just another day at the office. Or three of them actually.”

It was Friday night, and he hadn't seen her since Tuesday morning. They had lived that way for years. They were used to it, and had long since learned how to work and live around it. She was all too familiar with his crazy two- and three-day shifts, the emergencies that dragged him back to work only hours after he finally got home. But they each had a healthy respect for the other's work. They had met and married when he was a resident and she was in grad school. It had been fourteen years, and sometimes, to Steve at least, it seemed more like weeks. He was still as crazy in love with her as he had been in the beginning, and theirs was a marriage that worked well for both of them, for a variety of reasons. They certainly didn't have time to get bored with each other, in fact they hardly had any time at all. And with their two all-consuming careers, they had never had the time or the inclination to have children, although they talked about it from time to time. It was an option neither of them had entirely ruled out yet.

“How's your big deal going?” he asked her. For the past two months she had been working on the prospectus for the initial public offering of a high-tech venture in Silicon Valley. They were going to take the company public and sell stock to people buying shares in the company. It was a hot deal for Meredith's firm, and fascinated her, although it wasn't as prestigious as some of the bond offerings they did. But Meredith was much more interested in the firms in Silicon Valley, and the opportunities they presented than their more traditional deals in Boston and New York.

“We're getting there,” she said, sounding a little tired. She'd been at the office until midnight the night before. It was easy for her to do that when Steve was working. He knew she was going to lead the road show for the IPO, to tell potential investors about the company and encourage them to invest, in the next month, and she'd be gone for a couple of weeks. He was hoping they'd be able to spend some time together before that, and he was going to take time off to be with her on the Labor Day weekend. “I've almost finished the red herring.” He knew the jargon, it was a term they all used for the prospectus, and it was called that because of the red caution-warnings required by the SEC along the outer edge of the prospectus. “When are you coming home, sweetheart?” she asked, stifling a yawn. She had just gotten home from the office, and it was nearly ten thirty.

“As soon as I sign some stuff they left for me. Have you eaten yet?” He was more interested in her than the forms he had to sign, as he sat sprawled in his office, staring at the papers on his desk.

“More or less. They threw me a sandwich a few hours ago, at the office.”

“I'll make an omelette when I get home, or do you want me to pick something up?” Despite their heavy work schedules, Steve was usually the one who did the cooking, and he liked to brag that he cooked better than she did. And he obviously enjoyed it more. Meredith had never claimed to be particularly domestic. She'd rather eat a sandwich or a salad at her desk, than come home and whip up a four-course dinner. And he liked cooking a lot more than she ever had.

“An omelette would be great,” she smiled, listening to him. Their time apart always made her miss him, even when she was busy. Theirs was an easy, comfortable relationship, and an attraction that had never dimmed, even in the fourteen years they'd been married. They were still passionately devoted to each other, despite their demanding careers and hectic lives.

“So what happened today?” She could always hear in his voice when things hadn't gone well. They knew each other better than most people did, and cared a lot about each other's victories and defeats.

“I lost two kids,” he said, sounding depressed again. He couldn't help thinking of the young black woman who had lost her daughter five hours before, and how much he would have liked things to come out differently for her. But he was a doctor, not a magician. “A fifteen-year-old kid who got in a shoot-out against a rival gang. He managed to hit three of them before he went down, but they killed him. And a little girl a few hours ago. She was an innocent bystander in a shootout between three kids and the cops in Harlem. They shot her in the chest. We operated, but she didn't make it. I had to tell her mother, the poor woman was devastated. And after that, I operated on a fourteen-year-old who fell out a second-story window. She's in lousy shape, but I'm pretty sure she's going to make it.” Meredith would have hated doing what Steve did, the constant agony of the patients he saw, the despair, the losses, the heartbreak. She knew all too well what it did to him, and she could hear the toll it had taken.

“Sounds like a miserable day, sweetheart … I'm sorry. Why don't you come home and relax? You need it.” He hadn't been home in three days, and he sounded exhausted and disheartened.