Silent Night

by Danielle Steel

  “I was born to be a spinster,” she said to Belinda with a sigh one day, after worrying about it and mentioning it to her, and she laughed at what Whitney said.

  “I’m not sure they call it that anymore. That has a pretty negative connotation. Being single isn’t a sign of failure these days, it’s a choice. I’m having the same issues with Sam at the moment.” They’d been dating for six months, since they’d met during Emma’s sign language lessons, and Belinda admitted that they were crazy about each other, and were spending a lot of time together. “He wants us to move in together, and I think it’s too soon. I don’t want to even think about it for a year. I still want to travel, and I want a career in show business, not just to be a teacher. He wants to settle down and have kids. I’m not ready for that by a long shot. But I don’t want to lose him either. I’m thirty-four, which seems so young to me, but I guess if I want babies, I should start thinking about it. But I don’t want kids yet. He does. He’s only a year older than I am, but all his brothers and sisters are married and have children. Everyone in my family is divorced. That’s not exactly an incentive.”

  “Yeah, I know. My sister and I never got married either, and when she wanted to have a baby, she did it as a single mom and used her best friend as a sperm donor. I’ve never wanted kids, or marriage. My work has always been a substitute for that, and I’ve always gone out with men who weren’t looking for marriage either. I’ve always been very honest about it with the men I dated. Bailey and I are a lot alike, he’s never been married either. But I think he’s a lot less scared than I am. I think he’s fantastic but I think this is a serious problem for women of our generation. A lot of us don’t want to get married, or give up our freedom. That never looked appealing to me. My mother was an old-fashioned woman. She thought the man should decide everything, and the woman should just follow along blindly, which is what she did. That scares me to death,” Whitney freely admitted. “I could never do that and don’t want to. Not even for a great guy like Bailey. Marriage scares me to death.”

  “Maybe you can just figure out some way to live side by side as equals, and find common ground with mutual respect,” Belinda said hopefully. It was what she wanted too.

  “What novels have you been reading?” Whitney asked her. “That sounds like a perfect world. I don’t know a single guy who would agree to that. They’re biologically built to call the shots. I hear it in my office every day, from both sides. Guys who want to control, and women who don’t want to be controlled. It’s the battle of the ages, and sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Everything goes along great until you fall in love and move in together, or get married, and the next thing you know it’s a tug of war day and night, over everything from money to kids. It’s a nightmare. Bailey is one of the nicest men I’ve ever met, but we haven’t even slept together yet. And if we ever move in with each other, then what? Who would have the power then? It’s pathological with them, they can’t help it. They all want to be the boss.” Whitney looked worried as she said it.

  “You’re scaring me. It sounds like me and Sam. I’ve even thought of breaking up with him over his wanting to live together, but I don’t want to give him up. I just got a new apartment, and I love it. It’s not big enough for the two of us, and I hate his apartment, and where he lives. I’d have to commute an hour to work.”

  “What about getting a new place for the two of you?” Whitney suggested, and Belinda looked depressed about it.

  “It’s all about sacrifice, isn’t it? And I’m not good at that. I had too much of that when I was a kid. Now I’ve got things the way I want them, and along comes the best guy I ever met, and I’m a goner. It sucks.” Whitney hadn’t figured out how to solve the problem either, so for the moment, she was making no moves at all. She and Bailey were making out like teenagers, but Whitney was too afraid to make any serious moves or commitment, and taking care of Emma was a convenient place to hide. Turning forty had shaken her too. By now she felt like she should know all the relationship answers, especially as a shrink, and she didn’t. Lately she’d been telling herself that she was too old to make changes. But sooner or later, she knew Bailey would do what Sam was doing to Belinda, and lay it on the line, and they’d have a showdown over it, about whether to move forward or not.

  Amy had asked her about it too. She was puzzled by their relationship. She knew that Bailey was spending a lot of time with them, at night and on the weekends, more than was warranted by Emma being his patient, but she didn’t get the feeling that they were fully involved, and she was right. Whitney was too scared, and Bailey didn’t want to push her and risk scaring her off. For the moment, the problem seemed insoluble, and they were circling the issues without having the courage to face them. Amy had tried to encourage them both, but Bailey insisted to her it was still too soon, and he didn’t want to push Whitney. She had too much on her plate, and he knew she was scared. But one day, as Whitney admitted to both Amy and Belinda, it would have to be faced. Just not yet. And hopefully not for a while, until she could figure out what she wanted. She knew she wanted Bailey and had never met a man she liked as much, and her breath caught every time he walked into a room with his long legs, warm eyes, and broad shoulders. But she wanted to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted Bailey and her freedom. When she figured that out, she’d be willing to make a move.

  Chapter 14

  It had taken months, but with a great deal of patience, Whitney had gotten Emma to ride in the car with her, to do errands and go short distances. Emma always remained hypervigilant, as though she expected something bad to happen, and she seemed anxious, but she was slowly becoming more relaxed, and even let Brett drive her too. Emma put her seatbelt on the instant she sat down in the backseat, and watched Brett and Whitney put theirs on too. She didn’t like to have the radio on, and never chatted when they were in the car, but by June, she was able to go wherever they had to. Whitney never touched her cellphone when Emma was in the car with her, even to put it on speakerphone, so as not to upset her. Emma remembered all too clearly her mother texting right before the accident, although she didn’t remember the rest, and Whitney thought she probably hadn’t seen what had happened after that.

  Emma was in particularly good spirits the day they went to visit her new school. She was too shy to speak to any of the students, but she had sat in on a class, walked around the grounds, and put her bathing suit on in the locker room and gotten into the pool and held on to the ladder when the other students were in class. The admissions director had introduced her to several of the teachers, and Emma was telling Whitney all about it before they got in the car to drive home.

  Whitney had suggested they go out to lunch to celebrate, and Emma thought it was a good idea. Their visit was on the last week of school before vacation, and it was a beautiful warm day in June. Emma was very proud that she had been able to fill out the questionnaire to assess her math skills, and they had given her a reading list for the summer. They had decided to start her in the fourth grade in September, which was only a year behind where she would have been before the accident, which seemed fair, and since Emma didn’t know any of the other students, she didn’t care that she’d be a year old for her grade. Whitney had reminded her that there was no shame in being a grade behind, and she would catch up quickly. Belinda was going to do some tutoring with her over the summer, to maintain her progress, and so her memory didn’t lapse again.

  They stopped to do an errand on the way home, and Emma was lost in thought, thinking about the school as they drove along the freeway toward Beverly Hills. Whitney was heading toward the exit to Wilshire Boulevard when a car cut in front of her from the left lane with no warning. She hit the brakes hard and skidded toward the car in front of them. The car that had crossed their path hit another car, and Whitney’s car spun around in a circle and came to a dead stop, and the car behind them rear-ended them. It all happened so fast that Whitney barely had time to
realize what had happened, only to react as cars screeched to a stop all around them. Emma screamed hysterically from the backseat. Whitney had felt a sudden jolt from the car behind them, but she and Emma weren’t injured, just shaken. There was damage to the rear of the car, and several people had gotten out of their cars and were running toward them to make sure they were okay. The minute the car stopped, Whitney turned to make sure Emma was unhurt. Nothing was bleeding, her seatbelt was firmly on, the airbags hadn’t opened, but Emma’s face was sheet white, her eyes were squeezed shut, and she couldn’t stop screaming. Whitney took off her seatbelt immediately and climbed into the backseat to calm Emma down, but nothing stopped her screams as a man poked his head into the car and asked if Emma was hurt.

  “She’s okay,” Whitney said over Emma’s cries of anguish, “she’s just scared.” They could already hear sirens approaching by then, and there were police officers standing next to the car within minutes. Two paramedics came running toward them as Whitney held Emma tightly in her arms. She was flailing as she screamed and fighting to push Whitney away.

  “You’re okay, baby, you’re okay,” Whitney kept repeating.

  “No!” she screamed piteously. “I told her not to! I told her…she was texting…” she said, gulping on sobs, “…and she flew out the window…there…” She pointed to the windshield of Whitney’s car, which wasn’t broken. “She went under the other car in front of us, and then I don’t know what happened.” Emma was hysterical, but she remembered it all now, the moment of impact, her mother flying through the windshield and under the other cars where she died. Emma couldn’t stop screaming, and she fought Whitney like a cat and tried to hit her. Whitney held her tight, and one of the paramedics climbed into the car with them, while two others stood by with a stretcher and a backboard outside the car.

  “Is she hurt?” he asked Whitney, and she shook her head. It was too much to explain to him as she tried to get Emma to calm down. The whole rear end of her car had been crushed, her tires were flat, and they were going to have to be towed, but she couldn’t get Emma out of the car. She reached over and grabbed her cellphone, scrolled to Bailey’s number, and called him. He picked up immediately. All he could hear were Emma’s screams, and he was terrified of what might have happened.

  “We had an accident…we’re okay…I got rear-ended. Can you come and pick us up?” She told him where they were, while still holding on to Emma, and the patrolman tried to calm her down to no avail.

  “Is Emma hurt?” Bailey asked her.

  “No.”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  Whitney sat in the car, holding Emma, with the highway patrolmen standing outside. Whitney understood now what had happened. Emma had been conscious just long enough to see her mother ejected from the car and only lost consciousness after that. It was the key to everything, the trauma and the loss of memory. She had seen Paige fly from the car to her death and after that Emma had been in the coma. And now she remembered what she had seen that night.

  Bailey got there fifteen minutes later, and Whitney was sitting on the side of the road by then, with her arms around Emma. They had gotten her out of the car and she had stopped screaming, she looked glazed and as though she was in shock. Whitney had tried to explain the situation as best she could to the police, and the vehicles that could drive away already had. Whitney’s car was being loaded on a tow truck, traffic was moving slowly, and the driver who had cut her off had been arrested for drunk driving. But no one had been injured. What the accident had done was open Emma’s final door of memory, and she had remembered everything she had seen of the accident that had killed her mother. She wasn’t screaming or speaking by the time Bailey arrived, and she didn’t fight them about getting into his car, after Whitney’s car was towed away. Whitney sat in the backseat of Bailey’s car with her arms around Emma. Bailey glanced at them in the rearview mirror, and said nothing. They were at Whitney’s home within minutes, and she gently led Emma into the house and took her upstairs to lie down. What had just happened was a huge shock for Emma. She had relived the accident that had killed her mother.

  It was half an hour later when Whitney came downstairs, and Brett went upstairs to sit with Emma, so Whitney could tell Bailey what had happened. He looked as pale as she did when she found him in the kitchen, and she sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Jesus, you scared me to death when you called. What happened?”

  “The idiot kid they arrested cut me off. Apparently, he was drunk or on drugs or something. I nearly hit the car in front of me, I hit the brakes hard, we spun around, and the car behind me hit us. It was over in a minute, but Emma remembered everything. The truck, the impact, her mother texting, she described Paige shooting through the windshield and flying under the car in front of them, where she died. I don’t know what this is going to do.” Whitney was worried about it. “I don’t want her to stop speaking again, or regress to where we were last August.” She looked panicked as Bailey handed her a glass of water. Whitney’s hand shook as she took it. The accident had been traumatic for her too.

  “She may regress for a while, but she sustained no injury. This is all about remembered trauma, and releasing the memory she’s been blocking for nearly a year. It’s better that she remembered what she saw. This was bound to come out sooner or later.” They had never been sure until then how much she had seen, but now they knew she had seen her mother fly toward her death. “This is going to be hard for her, and it’s a terrible memory to have, but she can heal from it now. It may close up some of those memory lapses for her,” he said clinically, and then looked more closely at Whitney. “What about you, are you okay?” He turned her face gently toward the light so he could examine her pupils. “Did you hit your head?”

  “No, I’m okay. I have a headache, but I’m fine. She just scared the hell out of me when she started screaming. I’m sorry I called you. I didn’t know what else to do. The poor thing, she had a great morning at her new school, and now she remembers everything she saw of her mother’s death.”

  “It was in there anyway, right below the surface. It’s better to face it, and to deal with it now, than ten years from now, after a decade of headaches and migraines and nightmares and memory lapses. This is the core of the trauma for her. The physical injury is less traumatic than this.” Whitney nodded, and knew it was true. “Do you want me to give her a sedative to calm her down?” Whitney shook her head.

  “She was quiet when I left her a few minutes ago, just shocked and sad. It’s like Paige dying all over again. I just want to be sure she doesn’t stop talking now. She’s come so far in the last eleven months. I don’t want her to lose that.” Whitney looked desperately worried.

  “She won’t. She has you, and she knows she’s safe. She knows nothing bad is going to happen to her now. I think her memory lapses are going to become fewer after this. And the truth is, she may always have some. That’s hard to predict. Or she could go all the way to full recovery. Let’s see how she reacts to this before we panic. Thank God she didn’t get another blow to the head. That would have been really bad.” Whitney nodded and noticed that he said “we,” she wasn’t facing it alone this time. She had Bailey with her, and he cared about Emma too.

  He went upstairs to examine Emma a few minutes later and confirmed that she had sustained no injury. She didn’t have a concussion or even whiplash and hadn’t hit her head, although Whitney had a splitting headache by then from the stress.

  “Why don’t you lie down for a while,” he suggested. “I can stick around for a couple of hours. And I want to see how she’s doing before I leave.” Emma had spoken to him in a normal voice when he went upstairs to see her, and her speech hadn’t altered. She told him what she remembered about her mother flying through the windshield, which was the last time she had seen her alive, seconds bef
ore her death. It was a lot for a nine-year-old child to live through, and remember now. But she was handling it better than he’d expected her to, after the initial shock and her intense fear when the car had cut them off on the freeway. It was an instant déjà vu for her.

  Bailey sat quietly with Whitney after that, and Emma was up and talking normally when he left to go back to his office. He promised to return after work. It made Whitney realize again what a good man he was, and how dedicated to them. He was someone she could count on. It made everything less frightening, and she could tell that Emma felt that way about him too.

  He came back with dinner for them that night, and Emma was subdued and said very little, and hardly ate, but she was speaking clearly, and painfully lucid about what she remembered.

  Whitney was putting her to bed after Bailey left, and she spoke to Emma very gently.

  “Your mom loved you a lot, Emma. She didn’t want any of this to happen to you, or to herself.” Emma’s eyes filled with despair and tears as soon as Whitney said it, and she turned to her with a look of bottomless grief.