Silent Night

by Danielle Steel

  For the past five years, she’d been dating someone she considered the perfect man for her. Chad Phillips was a brilliantly successful high-tech venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He was twenty years older than she, had four grown children she had met but spent no time with, and he didn’t expect her to. And he had no interest in remarrying or having more children. He had a yacht that he kept in the Mediterranean in summer and the Caribbean in winter. They loved taking trips together, and managed to meet once a month for a quiet weekend, or a fun adventure somewhere, which was all either of them wanted. They cared about each other, but Whitney had strong boundaries, and she never let men get too close to her. She didn’t need or want a man running her life, and Chad didn’t want to have a woman dependent on him again. His ex-wife was still bitter about their divorce fifteen years later, and Whitney wanted no part of jealous stepchildren or angry ex-wives. She and Chad thoroughly enjoyed each other and their adult relationship, and he was fascinated by her work, her beauty, and her history. Whitney was a striking-looking woman, tall like her father, graceful and slim with an exquisite face, porcelain white skin, and long dark hair. The only trait she shared with her sister was their mother’s huge blue eyes.

  Whitney’s relationship with Chad suited them both perfectly, and he was always slightly intrigued by who her parents had been, and how removed Whitney kept herself from the whole Hollywood scene. He thought it was admirable of her. She never traded on it. In fact she never mentioned it, and he had only discovered it a year after they’d started dating, when he read an article about her. Whitney hadn’t said a word about it to him before.

  He had never met Whitney’s sister, whom Whitney described as a flake for most of her life, and the consummate stage mother living vicariously through her child, which sounded unhealthy to him. He loved how balanced and sane Whitney was, despite what must have been an unusual upbringing. Enough so to make her gun-shy about marriage and children of her own, which worked for him. Women had been trying to lure and ensnare him into marriage for all the years he’d been divorced, and it was a breath of fresh air that Whitney never did.

  Chad was fifty-nine years old, vital, active, healthy, brilliantly successful, and he and Whitney got along perfectly. They were about to leave on their annual summer trip together, on his boat in Italy. They hadn’t seen each other in a month, since a lovely Fourth of July weekend in Lake Tahoe. They shared the fun in their lives, not the headaches. He was already on his boat in Monte Carlo, waiting for her, and she was flying over to meet him in a few days. They spent three weeks on his boat every summer, and she spent another week at home afterward, getting organized to go back to work. There was purpose and planning to everything Whitney did. Spontaneity was not her style. To her, spontaneity always felt like chaos.

  * * *

  —

  Paige’s love life had been even more checkered than her sister’s while she floundered through the early years of her unsuccessful acting career. She’d had a series of notoriously badly behaved Hollywood boyfriends, the usual bad boys to her lost ingénue. She’d had public breakups, embarrassing cheaters, actors who wanted to get to her father by sleeping with her, hoping Bill Watts would take them on as clients and further their careers, since he was still working in his eighties. Paige had been a mess in the early days, and Whitney considered her embarrassing and irresponsible. Paige was almost as beautiful as their legendary mother, but she had never had her act together where men were concerned.

  Their mother’s death had rocked Paige’s world. She was twenty-four when it happened. And losing her mother had led to a year or two of drugs, and a celebrity rehab, while Whitney was doing her residency.

  The worst blow had come when their father died two years after their mother. He was ninety-one years old by then. He had gone downhill rapidly after Liz died. He retired very shortly after her death, and his health began to deteriorate. Whitney felt that losing her had disheartened him so severely, he didn’t want to survive. They had had a totally codependent relationship. Paige was twenty-six when their father died, and Whitney twenty-eight. It had been a crushing loss for both of them, but Whitney had weathered it as she did all things, with resilience, strength, and quiet fortitude. Paige had been a lost soul for almost two years, squandering her share of the inheritance, in a free fall of confusion and despair without her parents, and had finally stopped it by deciding that what she needed to ground her and give stability and purpose to her life was a baby. With no meaningful man of the hour to accomplish that with, she’d used an old friend from high school as a sperm donor. He was gay and had been touched by the request. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want an active role in the child’s life, which appealed to Paige. She embraced the idea of being a single mother, and he did it as a favor for an old friend. Paige was already pregnant when she informed Whitney of what she’d done. Whitney was horrified, and shortly after Emma was born, the baby’s biological father got sick and died of AIDS, and Whitney attended her niece’s birth with a feeling of overwhelming dismay and sorrow for the child, with a mother who would be incapable of caring for her responsibly, and no father at all. Whitney was glad her parents weren’t there to see it, but things had turned out better than she’d feared. Much to Whitney’s surprise, Paige was fiercely devoted to the baby, and made her the center of her universe. Whitney didn’t agree with her theories about child rearing, but at least Paige was no longer on drugs or endangering Emma in any overt way, even if she was obsessed with making her a star one day. But it could have been a lot worse. Paige cleaned up her act and settled down to mother the baby, and Whitney was pleasantly surprised.

  She visited them from time to time, since they both lived in L.A., and Emma was undeniably cute and bright and adorable. She provided a “child fix” for Whitney when she thought she needed one, which was rare. But Emma was her niece, and despite her cynicism on the subject, Whitney had to concede that Paige took motherhood seriously, and her daughter’s modeling and acting career even more so. Paige groomed Emma for stardom and often made a fool of herself on TV and movie sets. And admittedly, she had created a successful career for Emma, which Paige thought was desirable and Whitney thought was a grievous mistake.

  Whitney still considered Paige a flake about a number of things, but not about Emma’s career. Paige was totally focused on it, to the exclusion of all else. She still had the occasional affair with some second-rate actor or other, whom she usually met on the set of the show Emma was on, but her romances never lasted long. She was so intense and obsessed with Emma’s career that she drove most healthy, normal men away. For Emma’s sake, Whitney tried not to be overly critical of Paige. She loved being with her niece, when they all had time, which wasn’t often. Whitney was busy with her patients and her work, and Paige was always chauffeuring Emma from one lesson to the next. “I’m going to be a big star one day, you know, Aunt Whit,” Emma loved to tease when she was with her aunt and her mother wasn’t around. She would do a little pirouette then and laugh.

  “You already are a star,” Whitney reminded her. “You’re on a TV show. What more do you want?”

  “I’d like to be on a girls’ soccer team, if you really want to know,” Emma would say dreamily. That sounded fantastic to her.

  “I don’t think your mom will let you do that,” her aunt said.

  “I know, she says I’d get hurt, or knock out a tooth or something. But it sounds like fun to me.”

  “You can decide all that for yourself when you’re older,” Whitney reminded her. “You can pick any career you want one day.”

  “Not likely,” Emma said wistfully, “as long as Mom breathes air. She’d kill me if I give up acting, after everything she’s done for me.” Paige knew how to run her daughter’s life with just the right amount of pressure and guilt. “She says she gave up her own acting career to make me a star like my grandmother. Mom thinks I’ll win an Oscar someday.”

 
“Maybe you will,” Whitney said, “if that’s what you want to do.” For now, Paige wasn’t giving her a choice, and Whitney felt sorry for her. Emma was a slave to her mother’s ambitions, but Whitney didn’t dare say too much to her niece about it. Maybe one day when she was older, she would. At nine, it was too soon.

  “Mom says you’re a shrink because you think everyone in Hollywood is crazy,” Emma said whimsically, and her aunt laughed.

  “I never thought of it that way, but maybe she’s right. There are certainly plenty of crazy people in the business,” and in some ways, she thought her sister was one of them, at Emma’s expense. The life of a child star was not easy or fun. Whitney had several patients who had been actors when they were young, and had paid a high price for it. She didn’t want that happening to Emma, but she knew it already was, and there was nothing she could do about it. She just tried to spend a little relaxed time with Emma whenever she could, they had a good time together, when Paige let that happen. Fun wasn’t on Emma’s schedule, or playtime or other kids.

  Whitney hadn’t seen Paige or Emma for the past few weeks. She’d been busy and so had they, and she wanted to touch base with them before she left at the end of the week to meet Chad in Europe on his boat. She was looking forward to it. They were planning to sail to Portofino as soon as she arrived. It was one of their favorite spots, a romantic little port town on their way to Corsica and Sardinia and other idyllic locations. Whitney could hardly wait, and had been packing for several days. She knew she wouldn’t have time to see Paige and Emma now, but she wanted to call them before she left, to say goodbye.

  * * *

  —

  Paige stopped and picked up dinner on the way home from Emma’s ballet lesson. They only had half an hour before her voice coach arrived. She’d bought two big salads, and set them out on the kitchen table while Emma complained.

  “I’m tired of salad. Why can’t we have pizza?”

  “Because you’re the star of a TV show, remember?”

  “So I can never eat pizza?”

  “Of course you can, we had pizza two days ago, you just can’t have it every night.”

  “Why? Because you’re afraid I’ll get fat?” There was an evil glint in Emma’s eye, and Paige did not look amused. What if Emma suddenly started overeating as a way of expressing some kind of rebellion in a few years? It was a horrifying thought.

  “You’ll never be fat, it’s not in our DNA.” Both she and Whitney had always been slim, as had their mother, but Emma liked torturing her sometimes, and knew how to do it. Paige was dreading her teenage years. “Besides, if we take the Broadway musical, you don’t want to put on weight before we do.”

  “I don’t care,” Emma said with a shrug. She dug into her salad with no interest and stopped eating when the voice coach came. She stayed for two hours and after that, Paige watched Emma take her bath, and then they spent another forty-five minutes going over her lines for the next day. She knew them flawlessly, although she was tired by then, and started to miss a few. She was drifting off to sleep as Paige stood looking at her for a moment and smiled as Emma’s eyes fluttered closed. She was already sound asleep.

  “Good night, my beautiful little star,” she whispered and then closed the door softly behind her. Building an important career for her was a demanding, full-time job, but Paige never regretted it for a minute. Emma had made her dreams come true, and now she was going to do the same for her. She was going to give Emma dreams that she never even knew she had.

  Chapter 2

  Emma had a long shooting schedule the next day and was in every scene on the call list, but she knew all her lines. She met with Belinda, the teacher, during lunch to turn in her homework, and Belinda gave her a break and didn’t assign her homework for that night, because she knew Emma would be tired at the end of the day. They had a flexible study schedule that accommodated her obligations on the set.

  They finished shooting at four in the afternoon, after starting at seven A.M. Emma had been in hair and makeup at six-thirty, and had to learn a new, very emotional scene that the writers had added the night before. Paige had helped her learn her lines, as she always did. As soon as Emma came off the set, Paige drove her to Santa Monica for her hip-hop lesson. She would have canceled it, but she knew it was Emma’s favorite activity. The traffic was terrible getting there, and the lesson ended at seven, which gave them just under an hour to pick up something for dinner and be back at their house in Beverly Hills at eight o’clock to meet with Emma’s drama coach, Marty Smith. He was an excellent drama coach for children, and he’d been working with Emma since she started on the show. She had learned a lot from him, he was a hard taskmaster, but known for his great results. He also didn’t tolerate anyone being late, and Paige knew that if they didn’t get there on time he was capable of leaving to make the point. She was trying to speed through heavy traffic, while Emma played on her iPad. Paige stopped at a 7-Eleven and picked up half a roast chicken for dinner when they got home, and she got Emma a blue Slurpee slush drink because she begged for it, and Paige didn’t want to argue with her. They were both hungry and it was late, and they got back onto the freeway, and Paige groaned when she saw the traffic slow down up ahead. There was an accident, and she knew Marty would have a fit and might even leave if they were late. Emma’s lips were blue from the dye in the drink by then, and Paige laughed when she saw her in the rearview mirror, and noticed then that Emma hadn’t put her seatbelt back on yet after their stop at the 7-Eleven. She was going to remind her, but they were stopped in traffic. Emma was usually good about that, and always reminded her mother and told her not to text, which she sometimes did if they were very late. Paige always had her sit in the backseat, to be safe, and she was diligent about seatbelts, most of the time. But once in a while if she was too busy or rushed she forgot, even after the buzzer sounded three times before it stopped.

  * * *

  —

  Whitney had had a long day too. It was her last day in the office before leaving on her trip. She was handing off all her regular patients to a psychiatrist who had covered for her before for the month of August. He taught at the medical school at UCLA, and her patients liked him. She’d seen her last patient that afternoon, and was going to finish packing that night. She had a stack of new bikinis and wraps for the trip, and a ticket for the flight to Paris at eight the next morning. She was flying straight to Charles de Gaulle airport, and had a two-hour layover until the flight to Nice at six A.M. local time. Three of the crew members from Chad’s boat were meeting her, as they always did, and by eight A.M. local time, she’d be on his yacht. They planned to leave the dock immediately and head for Portofino, which was about a seven-hour trip by sea. By late afternoon, they would be in Portofino in time for dinner, and their vacation would have begun.

  Chad liked to travel as far offshore as possible, and Whitney knew her cellphone wouldn’t work then, so she wanted to call Paige and Emma that night, before she started traveling the next morning. Paige had all the Satcom numbers on the boat from previous trips, but Whitney had emailed them to her again. She wouldn’t need to call, but it was good to have them, just in case. Whitney usually texted her a few times from the trip, but her vacations with Chad were the only time when she disconnected from all her responsibilities, and she could hardly wait. He was planning to have guests on board for a day or two in Sardinia, but for most of the three weeks, they would be alone. She loved her time with him, and being able to relax and forget life in L.A. completely.

  Paige had rented a house in Malibu for the last two weeks of August so Emma could play on the beach. She wanted to stay close to home so Emma didn’t miss any of her lessons during their brief hiatus. They would be off for August too, and Whitney would be back from Europe halfway through their time in Malibu. She was planning to spend three weeks with Chad and a week on her own to get organized before she went back to work, as she alway
s did. Whitney had promised to spend some time with Paige and Emma in Malibu then. Emma would still be having lessons. She never really got time off. Emma knew better than anyone that the road to stardom was hard work.

  * * *

  —

  Traffic on the freeway started to speed up as they got closer to home. Emma had finished the Slurpee by then and was still playing on her iPad in the backseat when Paige looked at her watch and realized they were going to be late for Marty. And if he was in a bad mood, as he often was at the end of the day, she knew he wouldn’t wait. He always said that he hated people wasting his time.

  Paige grabbed her cellphone from the seat next to her, to send him a text, as Emma glanced up in the back with disapproval.

  “Don’t text and drive, Mommy!” she said sternly.

  “I just want to tell Marty that we’re running a few minutes late, but we’re almost home. Otherwise, he’ll leave before we get there.” Paige started texting quickly, holding the steering wheel firm with one arm.

  “You’re not wearing your seatbelt!” Emma complained as Paige glanced at her and noticed that Emma still wasn’t either. She’d heard the buzzer but forgotten again, worried about Marty leaving, and that he would charge them for the session.