“Can I interest you in some boat time in Italy? That might be a lot more fun for you than Lake Tahoe. You missed the whole trip last year.”
“Yes, I did. And I guess I’ll be missing it again this year,” she said, sounding unaffected by it.
“You don’t have to, Whitney. I’d love to have you, if you want to come. We can hang around the South of France, stay at the Hotel du Cap for a few days, and motor down to Italy.”
“It sounds great, but I don’t think so, Chad. I haven’t heard from you in eight months, and I don’t work that way. Just hop on a boat with a guy who doesn’t call me, cruise around, and then say so long for another year. Funnily enough, that doesn’t work for me anymore, the way it used to. It turns out that I like the idea of having someone around for the messy parts too.”
“I get your point, Whit. I discovered that myself this year too. I think I was probably a little harsh about your niece. I just couldn’t see you taking on a brain damaged kid at this point in your life. That’s the last thing you need. But if she’s getting better then I’m happy for you. I just thought it might be nice if we spent some time on the boat, for old times’ sake. We’ve always had such a good time together.”
“Yes, we did. I’ve had some great times with you on your boat, Chad, and in other places. I’m grateful to you for that. But I’m not big on the ‘for old times’ sake’ school of romance. My life is more real than that. Or I want it to be. I’d rather be in Tahoe with my brain injured niece than floating around the Mediterranean on a fancy yacht with a guy who can’t be bothered to be there for me when things get rough. I just can’t do that, Chad. I hope you have a great time. I’m sure you’ll find someone only too happy to be there with you. You’ve got a gorgeous boat, and you’re fun to be with. There will be plenty of takers who’ll jump at the chance. My life is very different now.”
“Don’t be that way, Whitney.” He sounded annoyed by what she’d said, and shocked. She’d never acted this way before. She was always independent, but he could hear that he’d hurt her with his earlier decision and regretted it now. “I just couldn’t see myself hanging around while you dealt with a brain injured kid who’s not even your child. I couldn’t see the point.”
“I got the message loud and clear. She’s my niece, and I’m all she’s got. That’s good enough for me. That is the point. Have a great trip. And thanks for thinking of me. Good luck with your daughter-in-law and daughter in rehab and your ex-wife. That’s the kind of messy stuff I meant. It catches up with you sometimes. Take care, Chad,” she said, and he sounded shocked when she hung up. He was a selfish guy, and always had been. He wanted to be around for the good times and nothing else, and keep just enough distance not to get too involved, which had suited her too. But it no longer did. Suddenly he realized that he’d made a mistake and been cruel in September. And she clearly had no interest in giving him another chance. He wondered if there was someone else. But he realized now he’d probably never see her again. She knew him too well and wanted more than he had to give. He didn’t want a serious relationship with anyone.
Whitney felt lighthearted when she hung up. All Chad wanted was a traveling companion. The last nine months had been the hardest in her life, but she and Emma had come through it, and they would make it the rest of the way, without Chad’s help, or his boat, or a trip to Italy. She didn’t know what would happen with Bailey, maybe nothing ever would. But she’d rather be alone with Emma than sell her soul for a three-week vacation on a yacht with a guy who didn’t really care about her, and wouldn’t be there for her when she needed him.
She felt like she could conquer the world after Chad’s call. She’d been afraid to love anyone before, and have kids of her own. Now she had Emma and wasn’t afraid anymore. Whatever happened, she knew she could handle it. Anything was possible, with Bailey, with Emma, or on her own, but not with Chad. She didn’t need another glamorous boat trip. All she needed was a real human being with a kind heart. The rest she could deal with herself. Chad had never been that man, and wouldn’t be now. And she was fine.
Chapter 13
In May, the Anderson School contacted Whitney to see how Emma was doing, and asked her to come in and take some placement exams, so they could get an idea of where to place her after her unusual schooling until now, and her absence from school entirely for the past year. Emma was terrified that they wouldn’t accept her, and she froze every time Belinda tried to prepare her. Suddenly her mind would go blank, her hearing would go dim again, her vision would blur, and her speech would slur almost as if she was drunk. Sometimes all she could remember how to do was sign, as Sam had taught her. It was as if her brain couldn’t hold up to pressure, and anxiety would cripple her. Whitney talked to Amy and Bailey about it, and they said it was normal. Recovery from brain injury was an up and down, erratic process, and a bumpy one. Emma couldn’t handle much stress anymore. On a good day, she was connected and made perfect sense. On a bad one, everything she had relearned would evaporate into the mists again, and she’d have to start from scratch. She couldn’t seem to keep a firm grip on her progress, except when it didn’t matter. She had remembered all the tricks of her chess game, and she could beat Belinda at Scrabble, as a spelling exercise, but she lost her ability to speak and her range of vocabulary and couldn’t add two and two when she was scared.
“How am I going to get her into a school if she forgets all language the minute she’s under pressure?” Whitney said, worried about Emma’s future.
“Maybe you don’t for now, and wait another year, or they could give her an oral exam in sign language,” Amy said practically. “Nothing says she has to be back in school in the fall. You have to keep an open mind about it, Whitney. It’s remarkable enough that she learned to speak again, that she regained her hearing, and her vision cleared. You may have to let go of the notion of traditional education for her. In the end, does it really matter? She’s functioning and alive, and she may have gaps in her memory forever, too many to be able to go to school at all.” Amy was much more willing than Whitney was to let Emma’s schooling slide, and be satisfied with the progress she had made, without putting pressure on her. Whitney wanted more for her than that. She wasn’t pushing her into an acting career as her mother had. She didn’t care if Emma never won an Oscar or an Emmy. But Whitney did want her to have the same opportunities other children had, for knowledge and an education, a job one day, and to become a functioning member of society. She had to go to school to achieve that. It was an advantage Whitney wanted to give her, as a gift after her accident. She could tell that, from a medical point of view, Amy thought she’d never get there and didn’t think it was important. Money wasn’t an issue, and Emma could be taken care of forever, if that was all she was capable of. Amy was more inclined to celebrate the small victories and not push toward the big ones. Whitney kept telling Emma that anything was possible, and she believed it.
She went back to the school to talk to them herself, and suggested that someone from the school come to the house to meet Emma first, if they were willing. It was an unusual concept, but when Whitney described the nature of her injury, and the progress she had made so far, in less than a year, they agreed to do it. It was compatible with the philosophy of the school, which was that children with all kinds of brains and limitations had the right to an education. They had a child with cerebral palsy, one with severe epilepsy, and two on chemo among their students, along with several with severe learning disabilities. One of their star students had been admitted as autistic, and there was no sign of it in tenth grade after nine years at Anderson, and she had passed her SATs with flying colors. Whitney wanted Emma to be one of their success stories, and her passion about it and certainty that Emma could do it convinced them. The head of their admissions office agreed to spend a morning with Emma at Whitney’s home, to get a sense of how she functioned on her home turf. After Whitney’s frank description of Emma’s loss
of speech and hearing and her impaired vision after the coma, the director expected to still see traces of severe limitation.
Instead, Emma was having one of her better days. She was serious and quiet when she met the admissions director, and spoke intelligently and with mature insight about what it had been like to be on a hit television show for two years, and the pressure it put on all the actors, both children and adults. She talked about how it felt not to go to a normal school and how it set her apart from other kids, and was lonely at times, but how it had also provided her with an opportunity to interact with adults. And she spoke honestly about her mother’s aspirations for her, and how she had attempted to live up to them with her grandmother as a role model for success.
She spoke poignantly about what she remembered of the accident, and the shock of losing her mother, and she showed the admissions woman a poem she had written about it. Emma sat down to a game of chess with her and beat her soundly, and then she asked her if she’d like to watch cartoons with her. She alternated between acting her real age, with the depth of someone who had suffered, and like a five-year-old. And she shared that she wanted to be a doctor one day, to help others like her who had had brain injuries, and she talked about how lucky she felt every day, even though she had lost her mother. She could speak again and walk, and take lessons, and many others in her situation couldn’t. Whitney came and went from the room, so that Emma knew she was nearby, and the rest of the time, she sat in the kitchen, nervously drinking coffee with Belinda and Brett, wondering how Emma was doing. But by the time they were playing chess, and Emma was beating the admissions director, Whitney could see that the woman was bowled over by Emma’s abilities, even though Emma admitted to her that some of the time now, she still couldn’t remember her last name and had trouble spelling it when she did. She said that having two Ts in it seemed silly and unnecessary, although it seemed fine to her that there were two Ms in Emma, and she said that math was giving her a lot of trouble with her tutor, but she hadn’t been good at it before the accident either.
“Congratulations, Dr. Watts,” Nora Stratton, the admissions director, said to Whitney after Emma left the room at the end of the lengthy interview, “you’ve done something very remarkable here. You’ve given Emma confidence and faith in herself, despite everything that’s happened, and some lapses of memory that would have destabilized even the most confident adult.”
“I haven’t done anything except be here and love her,” Whitney said humbly. “It’s really all her, and what she has achieved. She’s still making progress, and I’d like her to go as far as she can with it. I think she needs a school setting to do that. She deserves more than we can teach her here at home.”
“Yes, she does. I agree with you. I’ll tell you what, I’ll make a date with you for when she graduates from medical school. I’ve known stories like hers, and there’s no limit to what she can achieve with the right support and accommodations. We had an autistic student several years ago who just passed the California bar and became an attorney. He got a job in the DA’s office, which was his dream. We believe in making dreams come true at Anderson. She can go as far as she wants to.” Whitney had to fight back tears as she listened. She knew they had students without disabilities too, but they weren’t afraid to admit unusual students with special needs, and Emma was going to be one of them now. Whitney was convinced that at the right school, Emma could excel. And if she didn’t and just turned out to be an ordinary student, with mundane aspirations, that was all right too. But she wanted Emma to have the option, not to push her as Paige had done, but to open doors for her, and let Emma choose for herself which ones she wanted to explore and walk through. It didn’t matter if she never became a doctor, or wanted to be a waitress one day, or a salesgirl in a shop. Whitney wanted her to have choices and dreams and options, and how she lived them was up to her.
“I’d like her to fill out a few questionnaires for us, just as guidance about her academic level and general knowledge so we have a better sense of what class to start her in,” Mrs. Stratton explained to Whitney after her time with Emma. “And I think she should visit the school, so she’s not worried about it all summer. But as far as we’re concerned, she’s in,” she said, extending a hand to shake Whitney’s, who was too moved to speak for a minute. One of her patients had told her about the school, because her severely dyslexic nephew had gone there, and Whitney thanked her lucky stars that she had heard about it. It was going to be the perfect place for Emma, and would have been even before the accident. And she had the feeling that even her sister would have approved. She wasn’t going to prevent Emma from going back to acting, if that was what she decided she wanted eventually, but they were going to open all the doors of education to her, and let her get a glimpse of a broader world. Their belief was that no one needed to be limited and that anything was possible, which Whitney believed too.
“I think you should start a chess club at school, Emma,” Nora Stratton said to her before she left. “You won’t have much competition at first, but you can teach some of the other students.”
“I play poker too,” Emma volunteered. “I used to make a lot of money at it on the set, and blackjack.” She looked pleased about it, and the head of admissions laughed.
“We don’t gamble at school, but there’s always Las Vegas when you’re old enough. I used to play poker with my brothers. We’ll have to play sometime. Your aunt is going to bring you over for a visit, so you can get the lay of the land, and see the school. You can bring a swimsuit, we have a nice pool.” Emma looked forlorn as she said it.
“I can’t remember how to swim,” she said sadly.
“You can relearn. Babies learn how to swim, so can you. You’ve relearned much harder things than that.” Emma looked cheered by what she said. The school was heavily endowed by grateful parents, and their facilities were impressive. It was about a twenty-minute drive from Whitney’s house to where the school was in Hancock Park. “See you soon. And thank you for the cookies.” Emma watched her drive away with a serious expression, and then turned to Whitney.
“She’s nice. I think I want to see the school.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” Whitney said and followed her into the house. Emma was exhausted after the long visit, and sat down with her iPad for a little while. It had been a big morning for her. And Belinda and Whitney hugged in victory when Belinda left later that afternoon.
Emma told Bailey about the school when he came to visit them that night after work. He was becoming a more frequent visitor to the house, and Emma considered him a friend. She told him what she knew about the school now, and that she was going to learn how to swim there.
“I wish I’d gone to a school like that,” Bailey commented. “I hated my school growing up. There weren’t any cool schools in the small town where I lived.” It sounded to him as though Whitney had found the perfect school for Emma.
“So how did you get to be a doctor?”
“I went away to a school I liked a lot better. The same school your aunt went to.”
“Why didn’t you meet her there?” Emma looked puzzled, and Bailey smiled.
“Because I studied all the time, and she probably went out with all the hot guys. And I’m three years older, so we must have kind of missed each other.”
“She’s forty now,” Emma informed him. “She just had a birthday. She kept it a secret because that’s old. My mom was thirty-seven.” She could remember their ages, but she still couldn’t remember how to add, which was the nature of her memory now, with holes in some key places and others that didn’t matter.
“Actually, that’s not old,” Bailey corrected her with a glance at Whitney, who groaned and didn’t look happy about it.
“Let’s not tell the whole world how old I am,” Whitney reminded her, and Emma laughed. Emma was turning ten in a few weeks, and Whitney was going to give her a small party at hom
e, with Amy, Bailey, Belinda, Sam, and Brett. “And by the way, I didn’t have a date for four years in medical school, just to set the record straight,” Whitney informed them. “I spent all four years in the library and there was nothing cool about me. Your mom was the cool one. She always had a million dates,” with all the wrong men, but Whitney didn’t add that. Paige had been in her bad-boy phase then, which took her years to grow out of. “She looked like our mother, and she was a lot of fun. I was the dull, shy one.” And sometimes she still felt that way, since all she did was work and take care of Emma now. She and Bailey had only been out to dinner a few times in recent months, since they’d admitted their attraction to each other. There was no time or place to do anything about it, and she didn’t see how there could be. Her days of glamour on Chad’s yacht were over, and she didn’t feel comfortable pursuing a romance with Emma having a front row seat to it. It was something they wanted to figure out, but hadn’t yet, and Whitney wondered if they ever would. Maybe romance was history for her now, at least until Emma was older.
Bailey was good company, a kind, intelligent man, a good doctor, and very good looking with his dark hair and dark eyes, but he was still kind of a romantic fantasy for her. He was handsome and appealing and there was so much she liked about him, but her life was complicated now, with Emma living with her, and her sole responsibility. And she realized at times that she used Emma’s presence as an excuse to avoid getting involved any deeper with Bailey. She wasn’t sure she was ready or if she ever would be. Chad had been easy for her, because he didn’t want to get too close, see too much of her, or make any deep commitments. But Bailey was different, he was a real person, with real needs, and he wanted to see more of her. For now, Emma was the perfect excuse not to. But Whitney knew that one of these days, they’d have to face their feelings, and that still felt dangerous to her. What if they hurt or disappointed each other, or he tried to control her life? She didn’t want any of that to happen, and she didn’t want to lose him either. For now, she was free to do whatever she wanted, and that was important to her. Even more so, with Emma. She wanted to make all the decisions about her, with no interference from anyone else. At the same time, she loved being with Bailey and had come to trust him. She wanted to find a way to be close to him, but not give up any power to him, and she wasn’t sure how one did that, or if it was even possible. He had never made any permanent commitments either at forty-three. She wondered if they were too old to make the adjustment. Relationships always seemed complicated to her, and very high risk. What if he broke her heart, or their relationship became a power struggle? She didn’t want to move into any man’s house, especially now with Emma, and she wasn’t sure she’d want him living with them either.
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