Turning Point(64)

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll try,” she responded, feeling pressured by her responsibilities at home, Andy looming like a jailer, and the man who wanted to make love to her every minute of the day. She went to bed early that night, and Andy stayed downstairs to watch TV. He was keeping away from her, and she was grateful not to have to talk to him. She didn’t know what to say. It was harder participating in the emergency services program here at home than it had been in Paris, where she had no responsibilities, and no husband and children to go home to at night. The juggling act she had to do in San Francisco was much more difficult, and the lies she had to tell made her feel guilty all the time.



* * *



—

    The whole group met outside UCSF’s new Mission Bay facility the next morning. It was state of the art in every aspect, and everyone who worked there was proud of it, and so was Stephanie. The new facility was a masterpiece of sorts. It had taken 1.52 billion dollars to build, ten years of construction, and another ten years of planning before that. It opened on schedule. A hospital administrator had joined them to complement what Stephanie had to say. The administrator filled in numbers and statistics, and Stephanie showed the team where she worked every day. She explained that they had started at the old facility on Parnassus, above the Haight, which was why she and Andy had bought their house there. In recent years, the hospital had moved several of their departments south and east, to Mission Bay, near the baseball stadium. The buildings were vast and robots traveled the halls delivering meals and equipment.

It had been an adjustment for the staff at first, because it was so much bigger, but Stephanie said she loved working there now, and didn’t mind the drive down from her house. The working conditions were excellent. There were research facilities, a cancer hospital, a women’s specialty hospital, and a 183-bed children’s hospital. Every inch of the hospital was the most up-to-date possible, including a 207,000-square-foot outpatient building and a helipad. In Paris there was no hospital to compare to it, nor any that cost anything comparable to build. Stephanie said she felt lucky to work there. She was obviously proud as she showed them around, and Valérie watched her face carefully. She glowed when she talked about her work, and everyone in trauma and the ER knew her. It didn’t go unnoticed, and Valérie and Marie-Laure exchanged a look. She would be giving up a lot for Gabriel, her whole familiar world and status, as well as her marriage.

    They had lunch at a bar and restaurant South of Market with a pool table, and when the men went to shoot pool while they waited for lunch, Valérie again thanked Stephanie for the tour and then gazed at her thoughtfully.

“Do you really think you can give all that up, a job you love that much, and be happy practicing in France? You need to think about that carefully,” Valérie said, concerned about her.

“What choice do I have?” Stephanie said. “If I want a life with Gabriel, I have to give this up.” Wendy was listening to the conversation and was worried about her too. She knew she couldn’t have given up her job for a man, and didn’t want to.

“It’s an enormous sacrifice,” Valérie reminded her, “and you’d better be very sure he’s going to leave his wife. You don’t want to give all this up and then find yourself sitting in an apartment while he spends Christmas with his wife and children, and tells you he can’t leave them yet. I know several women that has happened to. Right now he’s madly in love with you, and I’m not saying he isn’t going to get divorced, but when his wife asks him for half his savings, his pension, their summer house, and everything he has, it may be a different story. Living with her may not seem so bad. That’s what French men do. Americans get divorced. Sometimes French guys don’t, or damn few do.”

    “And not all Americans do either. Jeff used every excuse in the book. It was always a year or two or three away. I didn’t have to give up anything to be with him, except my friends and my time. If I’d had to give up my job at Stanford, I’d have bailed a lot faster than I did. That would have been too much for me.”

“He says he’s going to take care of everything when he goes back, and call a lawyer.”

“Maybe you should wait and see if he does, before you make a move. And I don’t just mean your marriage. You trained for thirteen years for this job. You’d better be sure before you give it up.” Stephanie felt sick as she listened, and nodded. She knew her father would have said the same thing about her job at UCSF. But she didn’t want to lose Gabriel either. She felt torn. She was quiet when the men came back from playing pool and dug into the sandwiches they’d ordered. They were still talking about the medical facility they’d seen that morning.

“My poor hospital is going to look like nothing after that,” Tom said sadly. “But we do a good job anyway.” They had an excellent reputation and he liked working there. And they had built new additions too, just not on as grand a scale as UCSF, which was mammoth, or the new facility at SF General, which had government funds to use, and an enormous private donor.

    They were scheduled to visit Alta Bates on Thursday, and Stanford on Friday, and then they were going to focus on emergency services operations thereafter, and drills similar to the one they’d participated in in Paris.