Silent Night

by Danielle Steel

  She wondered if she and Chad would ever see each other again, and he wondered the same thing as he hung up after their call. She had become exactly what they both knew he couldn’t handle and didn’t want, a woman with deep family attachments and obligations. She spent all her time at the hospital, in the private room they had moved Emma to from the ICU. It felt like a prison cell. Whitney felt like she was trapped on a desert island, and it looked like she and Emma were going to be there forever. It was too soon for her to go home, and she wasn’t ready for rehab.

  It was terrifying, as they sat in Emma’s room, staring at each other in silence, tears rolling down their cheeks, as nurses came and went to check on her. Whitney went to Emma and put her arms around her, trying to comfort her, and Emma slapped Whitney across the face as hard as she could with a look of fury in her eyes. It was the only thing she knew to do. The Emma Whitney knew was gone now, and the one that was left was trapped in lonely isolation in a silent world. Whitney’s cheek was still stinging as she left the room to go for a walk and get some air, while a nurse stayed with Emma. When she came back, they’d try again until some form of communication finally got through. It was all Whitney could do, as tears of frustration rolled down her cheeks again. The future was looking very bleak.

  Emma turned her face to the wall and cried with a look of rage on her face. The nurses warned Whitney that Emma could become dangerous as a result of the brain injury. That was typical from frontal lobe damage too. They said that psychotic behaviors were normal, as a result of losing her inhibitions from the injury. No part of the original Emma remained from before the accident. A stranger had taken her place. Whitney had to make the best of it, no matter how hard, upsetting, and frightening it was. There was no way she could explain it to Chad. She knew he wouldn’t want to hear it. She had never felt so alone in her life.

  Chapter 4

  Four weeks after the accident, on the date Whitney had been planning to return anyway, it was a relief when she went back to her practice. The big difference was that she only went back part-time. She resumed seeing her most seriously ill patients and her long-term ones, but she had to ask the psychiatrist who had taken over her practice in August to continue seeing the others. She didn’t want to leave Emma for too many hours, and tried to be back at the hospital by two P.M. every day. She was also acutely aware that they couldn’t leave Emma in a hospital forever once her body recovered, which it hadn’t fully yet.

  Whitney had to refuse to take any new patients for the time being. She was trying to reduce her time in the office by half and spend the rest of it with Emma. She spent hours with her every day and was still sleeping with her at night, or lying awake and worrying about her. Whitney hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in just over a month, since the accident.

  Emma’s private room was still adjacent to the ICU, but the hospital neurologist in charge of her case reminded Whitney that they would have to make other arrangements for her eventually. The physical damage from the accident was severe, but none of it was life threatening now except for the occasional deregulation of her heart, which was also less acute. What they were left with was the evidence of the brain injury, which hadn’t abated yet, the lack of speech, the obvious memory lapses which were still huge, her inability to hear or communicate. Her arm was healing, the bruises on her face were gone, but her brain was continuing to refuse to function normally. Her reactions were still those of a three-year-old, and not a warm cuddly one. Emma was angry, aggressive, and acting out most of the time. She had rages and tantrums, tried to hurt people, and had knocked several of the nurses down. In her madness, she was strong, unusually so for her size, and it sometimes took two adults to control her.

  “Do you think it’s frustration from not being able to speak that leads to her outbursts?” Whitney asked Bailey Turner when he dropped by. He was her chief interpreter of what they were seeing, most of which was a mystery to Whitney. He spent hours explaining it all to her, with endless patience. He said most of Emma’s violent reactions were a result of the frontal lobe damage she had sustained, and typical of her injury too. It made caring for Emma that much more difficult, and she had injured Whitney several times. Whitney had bruises on her face and cuts and scratches on her hands and arms from the many times Emma had hit her with her fists or assaulted her with an object near at hand. She hit Whitney whenever she could, and sometimes drew blood. Whitney was patient with her but it was upsetting and disheartening. She lashed out at the nurses too and was a handful to manage. It made the prospect of taking her home frightening. Whitney wasn’t sure how she would manage and was in no rush to try. She was afraid to be alone with her. The ICU nurses were there to help her, but once home alone with her, Whitney knew that Emma could injure her aunt, or herself. Whitney was no match for the tiny elfin child when she was acting out and at her worst.

  “You can’t do it alone,” Bailey Turner said quietly. He was the constant deliverer of bad news with as much grace and compassion as he could muster. His work partner, Amy Clarke, tended to be harsher and more blunt, although Whitney liked her too. Amy never sugarcoated anything, and often told Whitney the harsh truth, more so than Bailey, who had a softer heart and liked Whitney.

  They were using three different kinds of sedation to calm Emma in the hospital, but they didn’t want to turn her into a zombie either, at home or in the ICU, and the right dosage was still in question. “You can’t keep her in the hospital forever either. This isn’t a holding tank for brain injured kids. You could put her in a rehab for a while,” Bailey said, watching the despair in Whitney’s eyes. She wanted to be there for Emma, but there was also only so much she could do, and some days, despite her own experience as a physician, Whitney was overwhelmed. Putting her in a rehab facility felt like a defeat to Whitney and there was always the risk of exposure to the press.

  Bailey Turner was trying to help Whitney devise a living plan that would work for her, in their circumstances. She needed to be able to keep Emma safe if she was going to bring her home, and the violence she was demonstrating was making the future even more complicated. “We can continue to sedate her to a moderate degree when she goes home, but you don’t want her sleeping all the time either. Let’s try to stabilize her further before we talk about her going home,” Bailey suggested and Whitney nodded, slightly relieved at the reprieve, and wondering when that would be. So far, there was no immediate plan for her to leave the hospital, and she still had many obstacles to overcome before she did, things like hearing and speech. But what if all her faculties never returned? Emma was nine years old now and a lot smaller than Whitney, but what would happen at twelve and fourteen and eighteen, when her violent outbursts, if she was still having them, would pose a real threat?

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bailey would say simply when Whitney brought up the distant future. “We’re not there yet. Right now she’s a nine-year-old kid who was in a car accident four weeks ago. A lot can change in the next few months, or even weeks.” His partner, Amy Clarke, agreed with him, although she was less optimistic than Bailey. She wanted Whitney to be prepared for the possibility that Emma might not improve at all, and might never regain her full faculties or memory. But both specialists thought it was unlikely that she would stay as severe as she was now. “You’re seeing the worst of it. And the restoration of language will help a lot.” For now, whenever Whitney or the nurses didn’t understand Emma’s garbled speech, she eventually got frustrated and tried to hit someone, usually her aunt. Whitney had bruises everywhere to show for it and had been bitten several times. Bailey was very kind and patient with Emma about it, and Whitney assumed he must have children of his own. She asked him about it once, and he said he had figured out years before that his feeling for children was clinical not personal. He had never wanted kids, but he loved his work.

  Emma hadn’t asked for her mother yet, or if she had, they hadn’t understood it, and all her anger see
med to focus on her aunt, as though it was Whitney’s fault that Emma’s private language was impossible to decipher.

  She was having a particularly bad day, and had bitten one of the nurses, when Melvin Levy called Whitney on her cellphone and she left the room to talk to him. The show was about to start filming again after their summer hiatus, and he needed to know where things stood, so they could adjust the scripts accordingly and figure out when she could start filming again. He expected them to know by now. They hadn’t spoken in two weeks, and if anything, as she got stronger, Emma seemed to be worse. She was regressing in age and her brain was still severely impaired. Whitney tried to find the right words to tell him, without being too explicit.

  “How is she now?” he asked with a tone of deep concern. They were all worried about her, and heartbroken over what had happened, but he had a hit show to keep on the air, ratings to worry about, and sponsors and a network to satisfy. “We can shoot around her for a while longer,” he explained to Whitney, “but we can’t do it forever. It all depends on how long she’ll be out. We can keep the fans happy with some interviews and write her absence into the show. But we can’t make it work for a whole season.” Emma was in the first few episodes of the new season, but after that they would be stuck, particularly if she was still a long way from being able to come back. “Can we shoot some videos of her now and get them on social media, to keep everyone happy?” he asked hopefully as Whitney tried to decide how much to tell him. She didn’t want Emma labeled as brain damaged forever, particularly if she recovered eventually. This wasn’t about her career, it was about her life.

  “I’m sorry, Melvin, you can’t video her, or photograph her.” Emma didn’t even look the same, her expressions had changed, and she either seemed angry or blank, which altered the look of her features. “There’s no way that she could handle it. She’s still too injured from the accident. She’s got a long way to go.”

  “I was afraid of that,” he said sadly. “I was hoping she had youth on her side.”

  “She does, but she has a brain injury and has suffered trauma to some very important functions. At best, she won’t be able to work for months,” if she ever can again, or should, she didn’t add. Even if Emma recovered, Whitney couldn’t see the wisdom of letting her overtax herself. And for now it was out of the question. She couldn’t even speak intelligibly, let alone act on a show or do an interview. She was going to have to learn to speak all over again, which could take months or even years. And for now, she was no longer mentally nine years old, let alone the whiz kid she’d been before.

  “We’re going to have a meeting about it tomorrow,” Melvin told her in a subdued voice. “I’ll get back to you with what the network decides. We’d like to come and visit her. The whole cast feels terrible about what happened.”

  “I appreciate it,” Whitney said sadly. “It’s not possible to visit her yet.” Whitney didn’t want them seeing her in the condition she was in, deaf, unable to speak, violent with frustration much of the time. It wasn’t fair to Emma to let them come, and she wouldn’t recognize them.

  “I understand,” he said, but he didn’t. How could he? How could anyone imagine the difference between what she had been barely more than a month before and what she was now? It was shocking. “You don’t think you’re being overprotective, do you?” he asked, clutching at a last ray of hope, and Whitney’s voice was raw with emotion when she answered.

  “No, I’m not. I wish I were.”

  “We could shoot her on a reduced schedule until she recovers fully,” he offered.

  “She still has a long way to go,” Whitney said softly, and he hesitated for a moment.

  “Tell me honestly, just between us and not officially, is she going to be okay? In the long run, I mean.” Whitney wasn’t sure what to answer, the truth was too terrifying.

  “I don’t know. I want to think so. I don’t think anyone can tell yet. She could get there eventually, but she may not. The brain is a delicate mechanism, it’s impossible to say how far she can come, if at all.”

  He had tears in his eyes when he nodded. “It’s going to be a tragedy if that little girl doesn’t recover fully. You do everything you can for her,” he said in a gruff voice. “We’re all rooting for her.”

  “So am I,” Whitney promised him, “believe me, so am I.” She had never been a fan of Emma’s career, but she agreed with the producer, if Emma stayed like this, it would be a tragedy, he was right.

  “I’ll call you when I know something,” he promised. “And let me know if there’s anything we can do for her. Anything she wants.”

  A huge bunch of heart-shaped balloons arrived for her that afternoon with a giant card signed by the entire cast and crew, with photographs of them glued to the card. Emma loved the balloons, but she looked blank when Whitney pointed to the names and photographs on the card, as though she hadn’t seen any of them before. Whitney tied the bouquet to the foot of her bed, and Emma lay there, staring at them for hours. Whitney wondered what was going through her head but there was no way to know. There was no clue in her eyes.

  Melvin Levy didn’t call Whitney back for three days. The meetings they’d had, trying to decide what to do about Emma, had been arduous and painful for everyone. Their final decision, with the network’s insistence, was to write her out of the show. They couldn’t wait any longer, and they bitterly regretted the outcome after everything she had gone through. Melvin was in tears over it when he called Whitney back. They were offering her a settlement that would have knocked Paige right out of her chair if she’d been alive to hear it. It would pay for Emma’s college education many times over and provide a comfortable life for her for a long time, while she recovered. They were offering it in gratitude for her outstanding performances on the show, and out of sympathy for all she’d lost.

  “That’s incredibly generous,” Whitney said with tears in her eyes too. “My sister would have been deeply grateful.”

  “I wish she were still alive,” he said sadly. “I wish they’d had their seatbelts on. I don’t know what happened or why they didn’t,” he added, moved to tears again.

  “We’ll never know,” Whitney said quietly. She had her own issues about it and waves of anger at Paige. The thought haunted her constantly, every night. Why were neither of them wearing seatbelts?

  “Emma hasn’t said anything to you about the accident? Does she remember it?” he asked, concerned.

  “She doesn’t speak of it,” Whitney said simply, not willing to tell him that Emma couldn’t speak at all.

  “I’ll send you the paperwork,” he said somberly. “Legal will draw it up in a day or two. I really hate to see them write her off the show. I put up a good argument, but maybe it’s better for her this way, to heal from the accident and start fresh when she’s ready to go back to work, on another show. We’ll miss her. Give her our love,” he said, and Whitney hung up and contemplated the vast amount they were going to pay Emma as compensation for losing her place on The Clan. Paige had managed Emma’s trust account from the show responsibly, and still had some of their parents’ money left, but it was nothing compared to what Emma would have now. She would have real security one day, and Whitney wondered if she would ever be well enough to use it. It made Whitney sad thinking about it, and she was profoundly moved by how generous they had been. Their main sponsor had even added a sizable bonus in gratitude and as a gesture of goodwill. Whitney was still mulling it over when Chad called her later that day to check in. He’d been good about it since he got back, and made an effort to call her. He said he was coming to L.A. for meetings and wanted to have lunch with Whitney.

  “I can’t stay, but I’d love to see you before I fly back to San Francisco.” He sounded serious and sympathetic. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m doing what I have to. I’m still at the hospital with Emma every night.”

  “W
hen do you think she’ll be going home? She must be better by now.”

  Whitney sighed deeply, she didn’t want to lie to him or raise false hopes. “Unfortunately, she’s not. This is a big deal. I don’t know when she’ll get better, or if she will.”

  “I guess you won’t be able to keep her at home then, when she leaves the hospital. There must be rehabs for brain injured kids. She can probably go straight there.” He was speaking purely practically, without considering the emotional issues involved, and the fact that Emma was only nine years old and had lost her mother, had no father, and only her aunt now. “I was hoping we could catch a weekend in New York in a few weeks, since we got shortchanged on the boat this summer. How does that sound?”

  “Wonderful, and like a page in someone else’s life, not mine. I can’t leave her, Chad. She’s still too sick, and she’s my responsibility now. I can’t walk away from that.”

  “Even for a weekend?” He sounded shocked. “She’s not your child, Whitney. No one expects you to give up your life for her.”

  “And if I don’t, who will? I’m all she’s got.” That was her reality now, not weekends in New York.

  “That’s crazy, Whitney. She’s your niece, not your daughter, and even if she were, you can’t be expected to dump your whole life for her. You need to get her into a good rehab as soon as you can. We can talk about New York over lunch.” But she already knew he didn’t understand. He had always admitted to her that he had been an inattentive father in order to pursue his astounding success. There was no way he was going to understand her sense of duty to her niece, especially in these circumstances. He would have understood her starting a new business, but not sacrificing herself for a brain injured child. And he had left out one element completely, the fact that Whitney loved her. That hadn’t occurred to him at all. His suggestions were all about convenience, not love.