Turning Point(36)
“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.