Silent Night

by Danielle Steel

  On Christmas Eve, she and Emma had dinner together, and Emma wore her new red dress. Whitney gave her a pretty gold bracelet, and high-top pink Converse that Emma put on immediately with her velvet dress. Then Whitney tucked her into bed in her pajamas so she could fill the stockings, and pile up the gifts from Santa that she’d been hiding downstairs. Emma had believed in Santa Claus the previous year, and presumably still did. Whitney scurried around the house after taking off her dress and putting on a pink cashmere dressing gown.

  She could hardly wait for Emma to open her gifts from Santa in the morning. When everything was set up in the living room, Whitney sat down on the couch and enjoyed the sight of all of it. Emma was already sound asleep, and in a moment of nostalgia, Whitney got up and wound her sister’s favorite music box, and it began playing “Silent Night,” just as Whitney remembered. She sat listening to it with tears in her eyes in the darkened house, and suddenly she heard a scream and a dark flash shot past her, shrieking, and Emma began attacking the Christmas tree, using all her strength to try and knock it down, while shouting “No!” as loud as she could.

  Whitney couldn’t understand what was happening. She rushed forward to stop Emma before she knocked over the ten-foot tree and injured herself. The tree was teetering precariously, as Emma screamed and flailed wildly as she hit Whitney, with the music box playing in the background. Emma stood there distraught, dwarfed by the tree with her hands over her ears, as Whitney finally dragged her away, breathless, as she forced her to sit on the couch before she did any more damage. Then Emma rushed to the mantel, grabbed the music box, and threw it to the ground, where it broke in a million pieces at her feet and the familiar Christmas carol finally stopped. It looked like a bomb had hit the room. Some of the gifts were crushed where Emma had trampled them, and the enormous tree stood at an angle in the stand, as Whitney tried to understand what had happened and what had set her off.

  “No!” Emma was still shouting again and again, and as she did, Whitney had a sudden realization. Emma had come from upstairs, and she had heard the sound of the music box. She was shaking as she looked at Whitney.

  “No song! No song!” she screamed at her as Whitney realized what had happened. Emma’s hearing had returned. She had heard the music box playing “Silent Night,” and it brought back too many memories and too much pain. The cloud had lifted over her hearing. She could hear Whitney now, which was a huge leap forward, the biggest one of all so far.

  “You heard the music box?” Whitney asked her intently, and Emma nodded and spoke more softly this time.

  “No song…No Mom…”

  “It was your mom’s favorite song, wasn’t it?” Whitney asked sadly, and Emma nodded. “No song…No Mommy.”

  “Emma, you can hear me, can’t you?” Emma nodded again. Whitney suddenly wondered if Emma had been hearing for a while, or if this was new. Five months after the accident, her hearing had returned. It was huge.

  Whitney led her gently upstairs back to bed and tucked her in, and then went downstairs to clean up the debris. The music box was smashed beyond repair. Whitney put what was left of it in the trash, wrestled with the tree to straighten it, and put the room back in order. And if Emma inquired why the gifts were there that night, she was going to say that Santa had already come by when Emma was asleep. But she had been so upset about the music box playing “Silent Night” that she hadn’t even noticed them.

  Whitney also realized that things would be different now if Emma could hear. She would be able to communicate with her without signing. Whitney stopped to gaze at Emma sleeping when she got back upstairs. She looked peaceful and there was no night terror that night. Whitney lay in bed awake for a long time, wondering what would happen next, if Emma would be able to talk now that she could hear. But in the morning when Emma woke up, she didn’t speak. She signed to Whitney as though nothing had changed. Whitney didn’t sign to her, she spoke to her.

  They opened their gifts. Emma was subdued and went back upstairs immediately, carrying as many of her presents as she could. Whitney called Bailey on his cellphone when Emma went to her room. He had gone skiing with friends over Christmas and she wanted to share the news with him.

  “She can hear,” she said, sounding stunned. She described what happened the night before. “I don’t know if it just started last night when she heard the music box or if she’s been hearing for a while. She acts like she can’t hear me today, but I think she can.” Now that her hearing had returned, Whitney assumed that it would stay, and Bailey thought so too.

  “It probably frightened her if it happened all at once. Did the song have any particular meaning for her?” He was excited by everything Whitney had to say.

  “It was Paige’s favorite, ‘Silent Night,’ and she loved the music box. Maybe Emma was angry that Paige wasn’t there for Christmas. She seems very withdrawn today.”

  “She needs time to adjust, and she obviously remembered the music box, so her memory is coming back, along with her hearing. I think speech will be next. Just let her do what she wants today. I want her hearing tested after the holiday. This is a big step, Whitney.” She knew it too, and it gave her hope for further recovery in the future. Hopefully soon.

  “I know,” she said, still sounding shaken by the events of the night before. “I know it sounds crazy, but this is the first big sign of improvement we’ve had.”

  “It is,” he agreed. “She may regress for a while after this. These gains are frightening for her. It’s like being carried along by a river. She has no control over the memories that come back to her. She needs to move at her own pace. How is Christmas otherwise?” he asked and Whitney sighed.

  “There is no ‘otherwise,’ this is all there is in our life now, her progress and her recovery and her setbacks. Her hearing again is so huge. How’s your ski trip?” She was hungry to hear about normal life. Hers hadn’t been normal for five months, and she wondered if it ever would be again.

  “Fantastic, but not as exciting as your news. ‘Silent Night’ must have reminded her of her mother in some unbearably painful way.” Whitney agreed. She wondered if it had brought back some memory of the accident, but she didn’t want to ask her and upset her again. Emma spent most of Christmas Day in her room, playing with her new toys, and seemed very quiet, which in some ways was a relief. Whitney felt drained too after the shock and emotions of the night before. She called Brett in Salt Lake to tell her about Emma’s hearing, and she was thrilled. The noise of children in the background was so loud that she could barely hear Whitney.

  Whitney went to check on Emma again after she and Brett hung up. She was eager to get back to see Emma now that she could hear. Whitney stood watching Emma from the doorway, she was looking at one of the photographs of her mother, and then she glanced at Whitney.

  “She loved you very much, Em,” she said softly.

  “No,” Emma said harshly, her voice too loud in the room. “She went away.” She was speaking again too, Whitney tried not to look startled, and treat it as a normal event.

  “She didn’t want to leave you, Emma. She never would have done that to you. She loved you.”

  “No!” Emma shouted at her again. “She didn’t love me. She went away,” and then she looked at Whitney with despair and pantomimed her mother texting, just as the police had guessed about the accident. Emma kept texting to show Whitney what had happened. Emma was remembering the accident, or what had come right before. She looked broken and angry as she pretended to text again and again. But she was speaking, and she could hear, and her memory was coming back. Whitney’s heart sank as she saw Emma pretend to text with her hands. That was obviously how it had happened. It was clear now. Paige had been texting and driving, and just like Emma, Whitney felt rage at her sister wash over her again like a tsunami. How could she do something so dangerous? It had been so stupid of her, and was such an incredible waste. And now Whit
ney knew for sure because Emma had remembered her mother texting.

  “I told her no,” Emma said as tears rolled down her cheeks. It had taken five months, but now they knew the truth.

  After that, for the rest of the day, Emma didn’t speak again, and pretended not to hear Whitney when she spoke to her. She would only sign, and retreated back into her silent world. Whitney was haunted by what she had said. “She didn’t love me…I told her no.” Emma had taken giant leaps forward, and now several steps back, as she lapsed into silence again….But the words “I told her no” cut through Whitney like a knife.

  Chapter 10

  Bailey took them out to dinner when he got back from his ski trip, but like Whitney, he found Emma shut down. She wouldn’t look at him or talk to him. She answered none of his questions and pretended not to hear anything he said. She had retreated back to a safe place, where the memories couldn’t touch her again. He didn’t force the issue personally, but the next day he sent her for a hearing test. The technicians cajoled her into cooperating with them by playing games with her, and the results came back that her hearing was acute. She could hear everything said to her, whether she acknowledged it or not. And as soon as she got home, she chose not to again. She preferred silence to talking about painful subjects, or questions they might ask about the accident.

  Bailey stayed for dinner after coming to tell Whitney the test results and neither of them was surprised. Emma was showing no signs of her newly recaptured skills, and she pointedly ignored Bailey whenever he spoke to her, so he directed his conversation at Whitney, and took no notice of Emma, on purpose, so she wouldn’t feel threatened or cornered. Now that she could hear, she had nowhere to retreat to get away from them. So they gave her space.

  He brought up the subject of TV shows with Whitney, and ignored Emma while they chatted about it, and suddenly out of the blue, she spoke up with her newfound words, which had waited five months to be released, like pent-up birds.

  “I was on TV,” Emma commented, and Bailey turned to her in surprise.

  “Really? How interesting. Did you like it?” She thought about it for a minute and then nodded cautiously.

  “Sometimes. My mom wanted me to.” He and Whitney exchanged a look.

  “It must have been hard to remember all those lines,” he said in a relaxed tone, and Emma shook her head to indicate it wasn’t.

  “I sing too. My mom wanted me to be in a musical.” It was more information than they’d had for five months, and Whitney hadn’t heard about the Broadway show Emma had auditioned for. Her sister hadn’t had the chance to tell her before the accident.

  “I’d love to hear you sing sometime,” Bailey said casually, and Emma shrugged, and then seemed to withdraw again, and a little while later she went upstairs to her room, having communicated enough for one night. Her words were back, but using them appeared to wear her out. It seemed to be a major effort for her to speak, but at least she was able to now, when she chose.

  “I wish I understood better what happened on Christmas Eve,” Whitney said thoughtfully. “Has she remembered things that have broken through the trauma, so now she can speak again, or is her brain healing physically, which allows her to speak and hear again? I never totally understand what part of this is physical, and what part is psychological,” Whitney said, musing about the changes of the past few days.

  “I don’t think you can separate the two, they’re so closely connected,” Bailey responded. “I think they go hand in hand. Brain injuries aren’t just about physical damage, the trauma at the outset is intimately connected to it.” Whitney agreed with him, it was her feeling about it too.

  “What happens to her memory now? Does it come back, or is everything erased by the accident?” Whitney wondered about that.

  “That’s hard to predict. She already remembers some things from right before it happened. How much more comes back in the end remains to be seen. She may always have memory lapses. Or it may all come back. She can only remember what she saw before she became unconscious. And we don’t know what she remembers of her life with her mother. She may have lost memory of some of that too. It may take years for her to retrieve that, and it’ll be painful to remember,” he said quietly as Whitney thought about it. “She lost part of her history. We just don’t know how much of it, or if it’s gone forever.”

  Belinda was impressed by Emma’s progress too when she came to visit her. She was still having trouble reading and said her eyes hurt, and it gave her a headache when she struggled with it for too long, which Bailey didn’t want her to do. They didn’t want to overstimulate her brain, or cause flare-ups and more memory lapses. There had been no incidents of frustration or violence since she had started to speak again. And the gibberish had disappeared. She hadn’t had a night terror since Christmas Eve and seemed much calmer now.

  It brought up the question of school, which Bailey said was still months away. She wasn’t ready for that yet, or to go back to her career, which Whitney was still leery of. The final decision on that would be Emma’s, if she wanted to pursue the acting career her mother had fostered since she was six years old. Whitney realized that it might be important for her. She didn’t want to deprive her of it, or push her into it, as Paige had done. And her skills weren’t solid enough yet for work or school.

  She thought about it that night, alone in her room, and played a DVD of episodes of Emma’s series on her TV. In the months since the accident, Whitney had been so worried about Emma’s survival and the damage to her brain that she had forgotten how challenging some of her performances were. She hadn’t had an easy role on The Clan and Whitney was stunned as she watched, remembering how talented Emma was, how smooth her delivery. It really was in her blood, and Whitney could see now what Paige had seen in her child, and why she had encouraged her with all the lessons and coaches. Emma had a gift, and at the end of the episode she could also see how different Emma still was now, how stilted and halting her speech and what a struggle for her it was at times. She had come a long way in the past five months, but seeing the DVD made it clear how far she still had to go. There were subtle differences in her abilities and her personality. The exuberance she’d had only six months before was gone, the sharpness of her memory to learn extensive lines, the complexity of her ability to play chess against adults. She had come out of the mists, and the coma after the accident, but there were many subtleties of her brain function that Emma hadn’t regained yet, and perhaps never would again. It made Whitney want to help her even more, and suddenly her participation in Bailey’s brain injury conference made sense, and she felt she had something to contribute to it, using Emma as a living example of what a person with a brain injury had to deal with every day and how those who loved them and cared for them could help.

  She called Bailey the next day and told him that she would speak at the conference. He was thrilled, and she had two weeks to prepare. There was so much they all still needed to learn about the brain, particularly after traumatic injury. She worked on her presentation every night after Emma went to bed, and she hoped she could do the subject justice. It was all new to her, except what she had learned through experience with Emma in the past six months, and she had so much more to learn.

  As she started preparing her presentation, she thought of Chad briefly. This was the time of year she’d gone to the Caribbean with him on his boat for the past five years. It had been exciting and fun and luxurious. Now she’d been catapulted into parenthood with a brain injured child, and there were no trips on yachts in her future. She felt like a whole different person, but it did cross her mind once after Christmas.

  She was working on her speech for the conference when Amy Clarke contacted her and asked her to see another patient for her. It was a child with encephalitis, some of whose symptoms resembled Emma’s. The cause of the child’s damaged brain was different, but there were clinical similarities, which Whitney
found fascinating. She consulted with Amy and Bailey after she saw the patient, who was a thirteen-year-old girl. Whitney thoroughly enjoyed working with them, and she found the addition of neurological evaluations to her practice added depth and substance to her work life. She told them how much she enjoyed the cases they referred to her, and they fully agreed with her diagnosis of the patient. She found that she liked working with Amy as much as she appreciated Bailey’s help with Emma. Amy was cooler and more clinical, which Whitney found stimulating, and she thanked both of them for the opportunity to consult on their patients. Their faith in her was flattering, and the cases challenging.

  “Be careful, or we’ll be dragging you into the practice with us,” Bailey warned her, and Whitney laughed at the suggestion, thinking he didn’t mean it. They were already an efficient team.

  “I’d love that,” Whitney commented. “The neurology cases are much more complex than what I see in my practice with straight psychiatry. This adds a whole additional element I find fascinating.”

  “We need your psychiatric expertise at times. You can’t ignore the psych side of brain injury,” Amy persisted. “I’ve been saying that for years, although there is some real resistance to it in neurology circles, particularly around brain injury cases.” It was the essence of what Whitney was planning to present at the seminar Bailey had invited her to, and she felt as though she was heading in an important direction. It had added some real excitement to her work, and she and Bailey talked about it for hours, whenever he dropped by to see Emma, or have dinner with them. And Amy was respectful of Whitney’s perspective too.