Silent Night

by Danielle Steel

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  Whitney had lunch with him two days later when he came to L.A. They met at La Scala, which she had always loved. She enjoyed the Old Hollywood feeling it had, and she was happy to see him. He held her in his arms for a minute as he smiled down at her, and then they sat down, and he took her hand in his own.

  “I’ve missed you, Whitney. Italy wasn’t the same without you, and I was beginning to feel like I’d never see you again. Why don’t you come up to San Francisco next weekend? We can go to the Napa Valley or Tahoe. It would do you good.” He was startled by how pale she was, how thin and tired she looked. She’d had a rough time for the last month, worse than he had realized, or understood.

  “I’d love to but I can’t,” Whitney said quietly, and he looked puzzled.

  “Why not? They’ve got great doctors at Cedars, and she’s getting everything she needs from the ICU nurses, I’m sure. You don’t have to be there with her every minute. What you’re doing has been an impressive gesture of respect for your sister, but you’ve got to know where to draw the line.”

  “And where is that?” Whitney asked, watching his eyes. They were cold and calculating, and always had been, she realized now. He felt sorry for her, and Emma, but he wanted time with her now. He thought he had been patient for long enough.

  “Bottom line, she’s not your kid. She’s someone else’s.”

  “And if that someone else is gone now? Then what?”

  “You write a check to a good rehab hospital every month,” he said with a hard look in his eyes. He was a great businessman, but not a warm father. “You don’t take care of her yourself. That’s above and beyond the call.” He was definite about it.

  “And if I do take care of her myself, then what?” She met his eyes squarely and he didn’t answer for a minute.

  “You’ll miss out on having a life. You don’t have to do that. You don’t owe that to your sister or her child. You’ve never wanted kids of your own. Why get tangled up in this mess now? You had a great life before this happened, just the way you wanted it. Why give all that up now?” He didn’t understand the choice she was making, or the fact that she felt she had no choice.

  “I don’t think I have an option, Chad. Sometimes things happen that you never expected, and all you can do is step up to the plate.” It was what she was doing and wanted to do for Emma, and Paige.

  “Or write a check to ease your conscience if you need to do that. She’ll be well taken care of, and I assume your sister had decent insurance, and probably some money put aside.”

  “That’s not the point. This isn’t about money.” It was all about love for Whitney.

  “You always told me you had no maternal instincts. I love that about you, Whit. It keeps everything so simple. I’d hate to see you complicate things with us now.”

  “My sister did that for me when she failed to put on her seatbelt, whatever the reason, and didn’t notice the truck coming toward them from the left. And now here we are.” Her eyes were bottomless pools of sadness. She had never looked more beautiful and didn’t know it.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he reminded her, “and to be honest, it can’t be like this for me, Whitney. I can’t wait around to see you while you play Florence Nightingale to your brain injured niece. I need more of you than that. My kids are grown, you don’t have any, we’re both adults with no encumbrances. It’s not going to work with us if you take this on.” He was being honest with her, and not making any bones about it.

  “Is that what you came to L.A. to tell me?” She looked sad as she said it, but she wasn’t really surprised. After five years, she knew who he was, and he had told her right from the beginning that he didn’t date women with children. Now she had crossed that line, and with a brain injured child on top of it. But fate had dealt her this hand, and she was going to play it, not run away and abandon Emma to strangers.

  “I guess it is,” he said simply in answer to her question. “I wanted you to know where I stand on this. I’m not good at waiting in the wings. I need you to be available when I have time. It’s worked pretty well for us so far, but it won’t if you take on this incredible burden and play Mother Teresa to a severely injured niece. You could have come back to the boat,” he said reproachfully. “You didn’t have to be here with her the whole time.”

  “Actually, I did,” Whitney said quietly. “She was in a coma for the first two weeks I was back.”

  “Then you could have come after she woke up. Don’t blow what we have, Whit. It works great for both of us,” he reminded her.

  “It did, as long as everything was fine. Now I’m dealing with a tough situation, and I’m not going to run out on her so I can take a trip with you once a month. I have a responsibility now, Chad, and I’m not going to walk away from it. And I get your drift. If I take care of my niece, you’re out of the picture from here on. Do I read you correctly?” Her voice was cold as she asked him, and he nodded. She was disappointed more than angry. He was less of a human being than she’d hoped.

  “I think you do,” Chad said as he gazed at her regretfully. “I can’t take this on, Whitney, and I don’t want to. I can’t be there for you if you want to be the stand-in parent for a nine-year-old, brain injured kid. You need a different kind of guy, if that’s what you want to do. We’re lovers, Whit, that’s all we ever wanted to be. I’m not married to you. You can’t expect me to share this with you, when I don’t think you should be doing it yourself. You’re a shrink, for God’s sake. You have a terrific career. We both do. You don’t need to take this agony on. Get out of it now before it’s too late and you get even more deeply involved.”

  “I already am, Chad,” Whitney said as she stood up and looked at him. They’d had some good times together in the past five years, but in the end, that wasn’t enough. After five years, she needed more, especially now. And he didn’t want to be more. “Life is messy sometimes. Love is messy. People get hurt, they die, they leave a trail of problems behind them. And I’m not going to walk away from the mess my sister left because it’s inconvenient for you.” She patted his shoulder then, as he looked at her coldly, and made no move to touch her hand. He was colder than she’d ever realized. “Take care of yourself,” was all she said to him, and walked away from the table as he signaled the waiter for the check. He had done what he’d come to do. He’d wanted to give her fair warning that unless she stepped away from Emma now, there was no room in his life for her. She had heard him loud and clear and instead of making her feel closer to him, he had severed the slim tie they had. Whitney walked out into the late afternoon sunshine and felt as though she could hear a door closing behind her. It was the door to her old life and the fun she’d had with him. She had a new life now. She had Emma to take care of, and whether Chad understood it or not, suddenly Whitney did. She loved Emma with all her heart, and somehow, whatever it took, and no matter how hard it was, they were going to get through this. A new era in her life had begun. She owed it to her little sister, and to Emma, and she wasn’t going to let either of them down.

  Chad had written her out of the show now too. It hurt, but they didn’t love each other. It had been easy and convenient for both of them for a long time. Nothing about her life was either one now. But she realized that she didn’t love Chad any more than he loved her. She loved Emma, and that was enough. And as it turned out, she was a mother of sorts after all. It was a major realization, and she smiled as she drove away from lunch. Her life would be less glamorous without him and the trappings of his life, but it would be infinitely more real, and that was what she wanted now. He had wanted Whitney to make a choice between him and Emma and she had. It was Emma, hands down. She had no regrets and knew she’d never look back. Her life was about her and Emma now. Chad was history.

  Chapter 5

  The announcement that Emma would no longer be part of the series T
he Clan was handled with all the discretion and poignancy that Melvin had promised. And it was met with all the grief and heartbreak of Emma’s millions of fans. It was explained that Emma needed all her time and energy for her recovery now, from the accident that had nearly killed her and claimed the life of her mother. All the major fan magazines ran tribute articles about it, with photographs from her two years on the show. The writers of The Clan killed Emma’s character in a riding accident, which happened off camera, and had all their viewers sobbing and in mourning the night it was shown. Whitney debated about letting Emma see the magazines, but then decided it was too soon to do so. But eventually, she wanted to try and jog her memory by showing her DVDs of the show. She had to try to remember someday, just not yet.

  There was a flood of articles online and in the press about her, talking about her accident in real life and how much she would be missed. The paperwork had come from the producers of the show by then along with the huge severance settlement that Whitney put into a trust account for her and invested with a major brokerage firm. It would give her a real nest egg one day, which might be useful if she could never work again, even as an adult, which was possible. There was no way to know how far her recovery would go.

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  By mid-September, Emma had been in the hospital for about six weeks. Her improvements had been minimal so far, and her progress was slow. She was steady on her legs, and her motor skills had improved. But her speech and hearing had gone nowhere. Her frustration over her inability to communicate seemed to be getting worse, and led to more violence against Whitney and the nurses. She began to have night terrors, which led her to scream for hours in the middle of the night, and all Whitney could do to calm her was hold her tightly in her arms and wait until they passed. It was impossible to soothe or reason with her when she had them. Whitney wondered if Emma was reliving the accident, or pining for her mother, and Emma had no way to ask questions about Paige in a language all her own. Whitney still hadn’t told her that Paige was dead. It seemed too cruel to do so when she couldn’t talk about it, or express anything she felt. Emma was trapped in a silent tomb of her own.

  Whitney hadn’t heard from Chad again after their lunch at La Scala. She had no regrets about the choice she’d made and had lost all respect and affection for him, which made losing him easier, even after five years. He didn’t seem to be missing her either. The only support she was getting was from the two neurologists, Bailey Turner and Amy Clarke, who were guiding her through the difficult process of helping Emma through her recovery from the accident. She still showed marked effects from her frontal lobe injury, all of which affected her ability to communicate. And with impaired vision, she seemed unable to read and focus on the books they showed her, even those for a much younger child. There were so many things she could no longer do that used to be second nature to her. The contrast between then and now was shocking and very sad.

  And at the end of September, the neurologist who had taken care of her at Cedars since the accident was suggesting to Whitney that it was time to put Emma in a rehab facility or take her home. The rest of the progress she still had to make would take months or even years, and she couldn’t stay in the hospital for the remainder of her recovery. Whitney discussed it with Bailey when he came to check on Emma one afternoon. He stopped by almost daily, and it was comforting when he appeared. Even Emma seemed to brighten a little when she saw him.

  “How am I going to manage her at home?” Whitney asked him in the hallway when they stepped out of the room. She was feeling breathless at the prospect. Sometimes waves of panic washed over her at what she would be facing on her own.

  “You don’t have to take her home,” he said gently. He was three years older than Whitney, and had gone to the same medical school at UCLA. He respected Whitney’s courage and her sensible decisions. He had sent her a patient for a psychiatric evaluation a few weeks before, and had been impressed by her report. She was managing to do her work effectively despite the strain she was under in her personal life. “You could put Emma in a facility. There’s one I would recommend for a child her age, although I’ll admit it’s not ideal. She might make better progress at home, with individual therapists and personal care, but she’s not your daughter, and from what you’ve said, you’re not set up for kids at your house.”

  “She can’t hear me, she hasn’t regained her language skills yet, she has night terrors, and she gets violent when she can’t communicate. I have no one to take care of her when I go to work. It’s a lot to take on.” Whitney expressed her concerns to him. It had been much easier having her in the ICU at Cedars.

  “I understand.” He smiled at Whitney to reassure her. “No one’s pushing her out the door. The medical staff just think that they’ve done as much as they can for her here, and the rest needs to happen at home if she’s going to make progress, which isn’t a sure thing by any means. For one thing, you’d have to hire experienced nurses to take care of her. Two or three nurses, so they can have time off. I don’t think you should try to take care of her on your own. And besides, you have your practice.” He had been honest with her so far, and she was grateful for it. She liked the way he related to Emma. His associate, Amy, was better with adults, as Whitney had been told from the first. But Whitney liked talking to her more clinically. She liked them both. Bailey was more casual and warmer. “Why don’t you start by interviewing some nurses through an agency, and see what turns up?” It seemed a sensible approach, and she called an agency he recommended the next day.

  They sent six women to Whitney’s office, and she hated them all. Even though all of them had worked in homes with brain injured patients, mostly from strokes, none had experience with pediatric trauma patients, and they seemed dreary and too old. In some ways, dealing with Emma now was like taking care of a toddler, with her limited skills. She was not the easy, sunny child she had been only two months before, able to entertain herself, almost like a small adult. She had the physical independence of a nine-year-old, and the brain of a much younger child since the accident, and she might act like a three-year-old forever, even once she was an adult. Most of the time, trying to figure out how to deal with her, Whitney felt like she was flying blind, straight into a wall.

  The agency sent four more candidates the following week, two of whom seemed like reasonable possibilities when she discussed them with Bailey. One was an older woman who had taken care of a brain injured young woman for seven years until her family finally institutionalized her when she got too aggressive in her late twenties. She sounded enthusiastic about working with Emma. And the other candidate who appealed to Whitney was four years out of nursing school, and had worked with learning-delayed children at a residential facility for two years, and she had an upbeat positive outlook that Whitney liked. She was unfazed by Whitney’s description of Emma’s violent spells when no one could understand the language she was speaking.

  Whitney was still debating about hiring both of them, when she went to the ICU to visit Emma one afternoon and discovered a new nurse on the floor posing for a selfie with her, to show her friends. Her excuse to Whitney when she walked in on her was that she and her mother were fans of the show Emma had been on, and she was taking the photo for her. But taking a selfie with her violated the confidentiality of Emma’s situation as a patient, victimizing her in Whitney’s opinion, or exploiting her helpless situation, and was exactly what Whitney wanted to avoid. She reported the incident to the head of the ICU immediately, and that night Whitney realized that it was time to go home, no matter how much it scared her or how unprepared she was. This was all new territory for her.

  They had been at the hospital for long enough, and it served no therapeutic purpose now to keep her there. Emma needed a home environment. She needed to get out, live a more normal life, and get some air. The next day, Whitney hired both of the nurses she had liked and spent the weekend trying to figure o
ut how to adapt her house for Emma. She decided to turn her guest room into a bedroom for her, and went to Paige’s house to decide what to bring over. There were books she could no longer read and toys and games she couldn’t play with, like Clue and Monopoly, her chess set, and a backgammon game she’d been learning to play and was good at before. She had dozens of dolls lined up on a shelf. There were photographs of her with the cast of the show and her mother, some posters that Whitney had gotten her, of favorite movie stars and from other shows.

  Whitney packed as much of it as she could in boxes and drove it to her house, along with the bedspread from Emma’s bed. She went to IKEA to buy a bookcase and by Sunday night, Emma had a room waiting for her at Whitney’s house. She had briefly considered moving into Paige’s home, for Emma. But she realized that it was Emma’s past and her aunt’s house was her future. So she packed Emma’s favorite possessions and prepared to start a new life with her at her own home. It was where they lived now.

  Whitney realized too that she had a job to do at Paige’s. She needed to get rid of her sister’s furniture and clothes, and put the house on the market. She hadn’t had time to deal with it since July, but she knew that it was time. There was no point keeping the house. Even if Emma recovered, she couldn’t live alone for many, many years. Whitney was giving her a home.