“What are you doing for yourself these days, by the way?” Bailey asked her one night and she looked blank.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s my point. You’re with Emma all the time, or at work, or working on your research paper. When was the last time you went out to dinner or saw a movie, or did something you enjoy doing?”
She looked startled at the question. “I don’t know. I haven’t done anything since before the accident, I guess.” She hadn’t even had a manicure since July. “I really don’t have time now that I’ve got Emma to take care of.” It reminded her again of her trips on Chad’s yacht, which were ancient history now. She had no regrets.
“You have you to take care of too. Try not to forget that,” he said gently. His concern for her took Whitney by surprise. They were allies in Emma’s recovery, but she didn’t expect him to think about her, and her need to relax and have entertainment.
“I’ve got too much on my plate right now to think of anything else except Emma, my patients, and your seminar.” She smiled at him. It was the truth.
“When was the last time you had a vacation?” She smiled at that.
“The day of the accident. I was back in twenty-four hours. I used to go away at least once a month with a man I was dating. We used to go to Saint Barts in the winter, and Italy in the summer on his boat. It was a nice, easy, self-indulgent life. That’s why I always said I never wanted kids. But I’ve got Emma now and all of that has changed. No time, no desire, no one to travel with. No more yachts in my life, borrowed or otherwise.” She sounded matter of fact about it, and didn’t miss it.
“What happened to him?” Bailey felt like he knew her well enough now to ask, and he could see that there were no diversions in her life, not that he could detect anyway. She was all about duty and responsibility, her work and her sister’s child. She was the most unselfish person he’d ever met.
“He took a hike, or maybe I sent him on one when I told him I wasn’t going to institutionalize Emma to get her off my hands. He doesn’t do kids. He has four grown ones of his own that he never enjoyed much. He wants a trouble-free, responsibility-free adult relationship with a single woman and no kids. I no longer qualify. So that was that.”
“That’s a little cold, isn’t it?” Bailey said, looking shocked.
“I guess so. I thought so, but he was honest about it. He never pretended to want anything different. And as I pointed out to him, love is messy sometimes. It doesn’t come all wrapped up in a neat little package. You can’t control everything in life. My sister taught me that in spades. I thought she was crazy when she decided to have a baby with a friend and no partner. You couldn’t have paid me to do that. But maybe she was right. I don’t like the way she exploited Emma and became the stage mother of all time, but maybe she gave Emma something wonderful in the process. She helped her develop her talent, and she loved Emma passionately. Maybe that’s what love is about, doing something crazy with all the energy and passion you’ve got. Until the night she screwed it all up and didn’t put her seatbelt on, I don’t think there was any doubt how much she loved her daughter, for better or worse. So I don’t mind at all that I’m not having vacations on yachts right now, or going to the ballet, or to Italy in the summer. My life may be a mess at the moment, I don’t even have time to go to the hairdresser right now, but so what? Emma and I love each other, and she’s better than any fancy vacation or adult relationship I might have had. I’m not hurting, Bailey. I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. Maybe my flaky, slightly crazy sister was right, and I was the one missing the boat in life, until now.” He could see that she meant it, and seemed satisfied with her life. There was no question how much she loved Emma, and was willing to sacrifice for her.
“You don’t sound angry at your sister anymore,” he said with interest.
“I still am sometimes. Every time I see Emma struggle or suffer. She’s the one paying the price for her mother’s mistake, and it makes me mad. But I’m fine. I don’t miss anything I’ve given up. I just wish she’d put their goddamn seatbelts on, but who knows why she didn’t. Careless, tired, busy, distracted. Oddly, I’m not even as angry at my father anymore either. I never wanted to marry because I hated the way he ran my mother’s life and controlled everything. It looked like a nightmare to me, and I never wanted some guy doing the same thing to me, telling me what to do. I always thought that was why my mother died so young. But now I wonder if she was happy and she enjoyed it. She had a fabulous career, thanks to him, and maybe having a ball till she got sick at fifty-two was enough for her. We all have to decide how we want to lead our lives and what love means to us. Love always looked too difficult to me, like you had to pay too high a price for it. Right now, love means a nine-year-old child to me, even if she’s got a brain injury and may never recover fully from it. We’ll manage somehow, and if it’s messy and I don’t have time to get my hair done, that’s okay. I think Emma’s worth it.”
“It’s funny, I always felt the same way. My parents’ lives were so destroyed when my little brother almost drowned that I never wanted kids of my own after that, as I told you on the phone that night. It looked too painful to me, and it was for them. I wanted to help other children like him, but I never wanted to take a risk with a child of my own, or get married. But watching you with Emma, I realize that the only way to live is with your whole heart, despite the dangers and the risks. I admire you for taking it on, and doing everything you can for her. Suddenly having kids and taking a chance on love doesn’t look so scary. It’s a lot scarier being forty-two years old and never having had the guts to take a chance on love. Just working isn’t enough.” He said it as though it were a recent revelation for him.
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. She had figured that out too. “We’re a lot alike in some ways. Too scared to take a risk, and then suddenly, you’re in the thick of it, and it’s not so bad.” She smiled at him.
“So one of these days, will you have dinner with me, without Emma, when you feel like you can leave her with Brett—and not in your kitchen, with one eye on Emma? Let’s go have some fun one of these days, and do something silly. Go to a movie, go bowling, go to the beach or go windsurfing, whatever sounds like fun to you. We both have a lot of time to make up for. We’ve both been working too hard for a lot of years.”
“Paige used to say that to me too. I thought she was silly and frivolous, but she was right. I was always the serious one. I don’t want to be that serious anymore. Not all the time at least. Life’s hard enough. It’s good to take a break sometimes.”
“Good. Let’s go be silly together. Although I have to admit, your yacht vacations sound pretty damn cool,” he said with envy, and she laughed.
“There are no yachts in my future, Dr. Turner. A small rowboat maybe, or even a tiny sailboat. But I’m afraid the fancy boat trips are history for me now. Although I’d be happy to introduce you to my ex-boyfriend if you like boats,” she said, and he laughed.
“I’m probably not his type.”
“Neither am I now,” but the prospect of spending time with Bailey was very appealing to her. They had their work in common, and they had both spent a lot of years being responsible and building their medical careers, and they had both been careful to avoid deep emotional relationships, which Whitney thought now had been a mistake. She had finally realized that she needed more than that. Paige and Emma had taught Whitney that, and she was showing it by example to Bailey. Just watching her was teaching him about relationships and life, seeing all she gave to her niece.
“We’ll talk about this after the seminar,” Bailey promised. “And I’m not letting you off the hook for dinner.”
“That’s a deal.” The idea of a real date with him sounded like fun. It had taken months to occur to her but now that it had and he had mentioned it, she liked the idea, and wondered why they hadn’t thought of it sooner.
* * *
—
Her presentation to the brain injury seminar was a knockout, even better than Bailey had hoped when he’d invited her to do it. She started by showing a film clip of Emma on her TV program seven months before. She chose an astoundingly sensitive scene where her performance reduced nearly everyone in the room to tears. And then she described the accident, the results, and Emma as she was now. She talked about all the things she could do again, the things that still eluded her now, even things as simple as reading a first-grade book, compared to the scripts she used to learn and never miss a line. She talked about the doctors’ hopes for her, and the statistical likelihood of her recovery. Everything she described illustrated the complicated and conflicting symptoms of brain injury, and the range of how severe and how minor some of the cases were. Whitney said that in many ways, Emma had been lucky, and she was functioning surprisingly well given the trauma she had sustained. But she described her memory as something akin to Swiss cheese now, some of it was solid, and the rest was full of holes no one could explain. Whitney described the violence and the aggression that were typical with frontal lobe injuries, and the minor injuries she had sustained while caring for her, from a child who would never have laid a hand on her, or anyone else, before. Then she posed a long list of questions that neither psychiatry nor neurology had easy answers to, and questioned which side of the illness should be treated first and by whom. Her conclusion at the end of it was that they needed better interdisciplinary cooperation, better research, and better protocols to treat brain injury patients, which addressed the full spectrum of symptoms, not just some, or the physical issues. They had to deal with the psychological and emotional ones too. They were all part of the picture.
At the end, she expressed what their hopes were for Emma, and what encouraging signs there had been so far. She pointed out that the medical field was making some real progress in the area of traumatic brain injury, but there was room for more. And then she thanked them and stepped down, and the entire room got to their feet to give her a standing ovation, and there were tears in Bailey’s eyes when he hugged her. Even Amy Clarke looked deeply moved, and she was usually less emotional than Bailey. Her eyes were damp when she hugged Whitney.
“You were fantastic. I knew you would be,” Bailey whispered when he took the podium over again to thank her for her presentation, and then they broke for lunch. And she joined him and Amy and four other neurologists who praised her again for what she’d said.
“We’re trying to get her to give up psychiatry and come and work with us on brain injury cases,” Amy said, and everyone agreed on what rewarding work it would be. Whitney said she was thinking about it, but she liked the work she did too, and was considering finding a way to do both, which was an intriguing idea, and would add variety to her practice.
She had a wonderful day at the seminar with Bailey, and was happy to see Emma when she got home. She was reading aloud from the iPad with Belinda. It was a simple book for a five- or six-year-old, and way below her previous level of reading ability, but she was speaking clearly, and bigger chunks of language had returned. As Whitney had said in her speech, Emma had come a long way, and had a long way to go, and how far she would get down the path to full recovery remained to be seen. Others had done it before her, and some hadn’t gotten as far. It was a step-by-step process. Along with the first-grade reader, she was learning to play chess again. It was a checkerboard pattern of recovery for the brain.
Bailey dropped by to see Whitney later that night, after the seminar ended and he had wrapped it up. He wanted to come by and thank her again. Her presentation had been the highlight of the conference, and humanized some of the issues for them.
“So when are we going bowling?” he whispered as he put his arms around her. They didn’t want to wake Emma, who was asleep upstairs. Brett’s room was at the other end of the house, and she never re-emerged once she went to her room at night.
“How far the mighty have fallen,” she said, laughing, “from yachts to bowling nights. How about a movie instead?”
“Don’t be such a snob, just because your mother was a big movie star,” he teased her, “and your niece was the star of a hit TV show.”
“I’m just a lowly Beverly Hills shrink,” she reminded him, but she was a lot more than that, and so was he, they were both stars in their fields, and there was an undeniable attraction between them that neither could ignore anymore and didn’t want to.
“How about roller-skating at Venice Beach?” It sounded like fun to her. She nodded and he pulled her closer into his arms and kissed her, and then looked down at her with a smile. “I’ve never gone out with the mothers of any of my patients,” he commented with a mild look of concern, but it wasn’t enough to stop him.
“You’re off the hook. I’m just her aunt,” she whispered back, and he kissed her again. The future seemed particularly bright to both of them. Things were looking up. There was fun in their future, and possibly some work together, if they could figure out how to do it. He left a few minutes later, and Whitney smiled thinking of roller-skating at Venice Beach with him. Her life had suddenly gotten very real. Emma was an important part of it, and so was Bailey now. She didn’t feel quite so serious as she thought of his arms around her. Suddenly there was something to look forward to, more than just Emma’s recovery. She felt like a woman again. It was a very nice feeling indeed.
Chapter 11
The long road to recovery continued in the erratic pattern that Amy and Bailey had warned Whitney it would, without rhyme or reason. Emma was speaking again, intelligibly, but sometimes familiar words eluded her. At other times, she had to struggle for every word, or her thoughts came out in a rush. Her memory was still spotty. She remembered some sequences of events perfectly, or parts of the scripts she had learned and diligently worked on. At other times, she couldn’t remember what she’d had for lunch. She could sing all the words to a song, but couldn’t say them. She remembered her singing lessons, but insisted she had never had dance lessons. Although Whitney told her she had taken tap, hip-hop, and ballet, Emma didn’t believe her.
Although she had never mentioned it again, she remembered her mother texting right before the accident, and telling her to stop. But she remembered nothing past that moment, which Whitney said was a blessing. She and Bailey assumed she’d been unconscious after that. She had a thousand memories of her mother, but none of the accident itself, or the first weeks in the hospital.
In March, she started speech therapy, which she found arduous and tiresome. It made her struggle to find words she could no longer remember. And in April, Whitney discussed her acting career with her.
“What do you want to do, Em?” Whitney had been avoiding her agent until they made a decision. Emma had missed the other child actors she worked with. Adam Weiss and Virginia Parker were still on the show. Emma had never watched it after she’d left it. And both of her fellow child actors had wanted to visit her in the hospital, but she was in no condition for visits then, and they had eventually stopped asking. When Emma wrote to them after she was speaking again, they didn’t answer her. It had been nine months since the accident, too long for most people to sustain their interest. Nine months was an eternity to most people. Life moved on. Emma’s feelings were hurt by it, and Whitney tried to explain to her that the actors she knew on the show were busy with their own lives by then. Emma had had no friends except the people she had worked with. She hadn’t been to a normal school in three years, two while she was on the show, and one since the accident.
“Your agent has been calling,” Whitney told her. “He says there’s work out there if you want it. Maybe even on another show,” although Bailey had said it was too soon for Emma to go back to work as an actress. It would be too stressful for her and liable to cause an increase in memory lapses and other symptoms. She still had holes in her memory, and might for several years.
“I want to go to regular school,” Emma said in a small voice, as though she should apologize for it. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful for the work Whitney said she could have. And her mother had thought it was a good career move to be tutored on the set, but she didn’t really have a choice if she wanted a major role on the show. And she didn’t want to betray her mother now. But she missed school and the company of other children. For three years, almost all her friends had been adults.
“Do you want to do any acting when the doctors say you can go back to work?” Whitney needed to know what to tell Robert, Emma’s agent. Emma shook her head and didn’t answer.
“I just want to go to school like a normal kid. Do you think Mommy would be mad at that?” She looked worried.
“No, I don’t think she’d be mad,” Whitney said gently. “I think she’d be proud of you. You have a right to do what you want, Em.”
Emma looked relieved when she said it. “I want to be a doctor like you,” she said shyly.
“You do? Why?” Whitney looked startled. Her going into medicine had been considered an aberration by her parents, and Paige had always said she thought it was weird that Whitney was a shrink. None of them had ever been impressed by her career in medicine. In their family, only show business counted.
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