Winners

by Danielle Steel

  “Something wrong?” She could hear instantly the somber tone of his voice when he said her name.

  “Yeah, very much so,” he said, as tears filled his eyes and he cleared his throat. He didn’t want to get emotional with her, he just wanted to let her know, but it was comforting to hear her on the phone. They knew each other well after all. “Lily had an accident in Squaw.” He told her what had happened then, and Penny was horrified. He didn’t tell her the doctor had said she would never walk again—the rest was bad enough, and he didn’t believe it yet.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Do you want me to fly out? I was leaving tomorrow anyway. The opening went really well,” although it seemed irrelevant to both of them now, in the face of what he had said. She had been planning to stop in New York to see a client there on the way back, and another in Chicago, but said she was more than willing to come to California and drive to Lake Tahoe to be with him instead. He was touched by the offer, but it didn’t feel right to him. He wanted to focus on Lily and no one else. “Will she walk again?” Penny went right to the obvious question, and Bill sounded hard when he answered.

  “Of course she will.” He had no intention of sharing Jessie’s prognosis with her. He thought it was wrong anyway. And he didn’t want Penny thinking of Lily that way—it would make it all too real. “I’ve got Angie looking up a list of neurosurgeons to consult. We want the best care we can get. This is a backwater town, although the surgeon is supposedly pretty good, she’s Harvard trained, but not as sophisticated as doctors in big cities. I want to take Lily for some other consultations when we leave here.” Penny could sense that there was something he wasn’t telling her. Bill had put on his toughest voice, and she wondered if they had given him bad news. If it was about Lily, he wouldn’t take it easily.

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Penny said quietly, and didn’t press him further about it. “She’s lucky to be alive. Is there anything I can do?” she asked, sounding wistful for a minute. She would have liked to be there for him in a crisis like this. She liked Lily, and Bill, but she was also aware that he never let her into the inner sanctum of his life, and he was even less likely to now when Lily needed him so much. There hadn’t been much room for her before, and there would be even less now. It was just the way he was. Lily was the center of his universe, and Penny was just a place he visited from time to time.

  Marriage or even living with a man had never been her goal. And too much time with anyone, or intimacy, made her uncomfortable as well. Her career was easier to manage than a man who might take over her life and try to control her. Like Bill, she had fought hard to improve her life and establish her business. Her own security and independence were more important to her than close personal bonds. But when she heard the sadness in his voice, she was sorry he wouldn’t let her be there for him. Still, she wasn’t surprised. That wasn’t the kind of relationship they’d shared, which was strictly meant for good times, and nothing else.

  “I’ll let you know if there’s anything,” he said kindly. “For now, she just has to get strong and heal. She came through the surgery very well, but it was only yesterday. I’ll call you when I can,” he promised, but she doubted that he would. She could hear it in his voice. She was on the outside now, and always had been, except for the occasional nights they spent together when Lily was out, or on trips. Bill Thomas had very successfully compartmentalized his life and guarded his heart from anyone but his daughter.

  “I’ll talk to you soon. Give Lily my love,” she said as they hung up. She sent her love to Lily, but had never offered it to him, nor did he want it for himself. They had no commitment to each other, and had preferred it that way. And for an odd moment after they ended the call, Penny had the feeling that he had just said goodbye to her and their relationship. She wasn’t sure, but she could sense that he wanted no distractions now from his helping Lily to recover. And Bill had the same feeling as he sat looking out the window in Squaw Valley, at the chairlift that had broken two days before and changed their lives. The entire area had been cordoned off, and a large part of the mountain was closed and would stay that way for some time until they solved the mystery of what had happened and why.

  Lily developed a fever that night, which wasn’t unusual after surgery, and Ben called Jessie to report it to her. They had just come back from the funeral parlor, where the entire medical community of Squaw Valley, and several others, had come to pay their respects to Tim. Parents of their children’s friends were there, men who had played tennis and softball with Tim when he had time. There were people Jessie didn’t even know he knew, and others who only knew her. She was shocked by how many showed up, and she felt drained when she got home and Ben called. And her children looked miserable too. The casket with their father in it had been there, but at Jessie’s request, it was closed. It would have been too much to see Tim lying there. She was sure that she would have lost control and become hysterical if it were open, and she didn’t want her children having the memory of him that way. What Jimmy had seen that night after the collision was bad enough, and he was still talking about the blood coming from his father’s ear, which Jessie knew was from the head injury that he had sustained and that had killed him.

  “I’ll come in,” Jessie said with a sigh when Ben called her about Lily’s fever. It was fairly high, and something to watch, but not unusual in the circumstances, but Jessie wanted to see her anyway to be sure. She was responsible and diligent even now, no matter how hard for her.

  “You don’t have to,” Ben reassured her. “I’ll stick around for a while.” His girlfriend Kazuko had come to the funeral parlor, and Ben was going to be one of the pallbearers the next day. Kazuko was a nurse he had met at UCSF, and they had lived together for years. She had come to Squaw Valley from San Francisco with him, and the living arrangement they had seemed to work. He was two years younger than Jessie, and at forty-one, he still didn’t feel ready to get married. Jessie and Kazuko had talked about it several times, and Kazuko had given up hope that he ever would. She was forty-six years old, totally devoted to him and didn’t seem to care if they got married now. She said she felt too old to have kids, and had given up the opportunity, to be with him. She worked at the hospital in radiology, had dozens of hobbies, and spoke fluent Japanese, although she’d been born in the States. She and Ben had gone to Japan several times, and he had learned Japanese too. They were avid skiers, which was what had brought them there in the first place, and Ben loved their life in Squaw Valley. Ben had grown up in L.A. and said he never missed it. Mountain life suited him far more than it did Jessie, who still missed city life occasionally, and the cultural life it offered, after her years in Boston and Palo Alto, near San Francisco, and growing up in New York before that, but she had come to Lake Tahoe for Tim and never looked back.

  When Jessie got to the hospital to check on Lily, she was sleeping, and Bill was roaming the halls, worried. Jessie examined her and was satisfied that it was a minor but ordinary complication of the surgery, and she and Ben agreed, but she felt better for having seen her.

  “How are your kids doing?” Bill asked her before she left. He had been surprised that she’d come in, but Lily was a major case, and although she trusted Ben implicitly, she wouldn’t have been comfortable if she hadn’t seen her herself. She didn’t say it to Bill, but he understood and was impressed. If the news she had given him weren’t so bad, he might have liked her better than he did. As it was, he resented what she’d said about Lily never walking again.

  “My kids are okay, I guess,” Jessie answered his question. “As okay as they can be right now. It doesn’t seem real to any of us yet,” and as she said it, she realized that that was how he felt about Lily’s accident. It took time to absorb the reality of change into one’s life, especially changes as major as the ones that had just happened to all of them.

  “Thank you for coming in.” He knew the funeral was the next day, and her showing up at the hospital to check Lily’s fever was a si
gn of her meticulous diligence.

  She reassured him again about Lily, and then left, and went home. The children were painfully quiet, and the house was eerily silent since the accident. It was hard to imagine laughter there again. The older children were distraught. Jimmy was already sound asleep in his mother’s bed, and Adam was playing video games on the TV, with a glazed look. They all felt as though they were underwater, moving in slow motion.

  Tim’s mother was alive in Chicago, but had dementia, and wouldn’t understand what was going on, so she didn’t come. Jessie had lost her parents years before, fairly young, so the children had no grandparents to share their grief with them. All they had now was their mother.

  The funeral the next day was even worse. It had a horrifying unreality to it, as the priest talked about Tim and the choir sang “Ave Maria,” while Jessie and her children cried. Almost every medical practitioner, nurse, and technician in Squaw was there. Jessie recognized hundreds of faces but wouldn’t remember any of them later. The pallbearers were all fellow anesthesiologists he worked with, and Ben, and Chris had asked to be one of them too. It nearly ripped out Jessie’s heart as she watched him and realized for the first time, as her son helped carry his father’s casket, that he was now a man. He had just turned eighteen. And this was the most awful rite of passage of all.

  They went to the cemetery afterward and buried Tim in the frozen ground. Someone had told her that the two teenagers who had died in the accident, in the other car, were buried the same day, and those who had died in the chairlift accident would be buried in the coming days. And as everyone went back to Jessie’s house afterward, it began to snow again, big fat flakes of snow that looked like something in a snow globe or on a Christmas card. She stood outside their back door for a minute, to get some air, and to escape all the people who had come to pay their respects, and she looked up at the sky and thought about Tim. It was impossible to believe she would never see him again. She couldn’t imagine a world without him in it, and tears rolled slowly down her cheeks, as they had for days. She shivered in the cold and went back inside, knowing, as she had since it happened, that her life would never be the same.

  Chapter 7

  IT WAS FEBRUARY, and Lily had been at the hospital for over a month, before Jessie felt ready to release her. She had made a good recovery, and responded to the medications and treatments well. They were mostly for bladder and bowel control, and would be important for her in her life as a paraplegic, which was a concept her father still hadn’t accepted. He had been in consultation with neurosurgeons around the world, and had identified four he was planning to take her to, in Zurich, London, New York, and Boston. Jessie was familiar with their names and reputations, and the research they had done or been attached to. The only one of the group she knew personally was the doctor Bill had contacted at Harvard, who was the head of neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Jessie had studied under him in medical school, and had remained in touch with him. She had never consulted with him about a patient until now. All of her cases so far were clear-cut, and although many of her patients came from other places and had been injured while skiing in Squaw Valley, most of them had only wanted referrals to physicians in their hometowns when they went back. None had ever embarked on a pilgrimage like the one Bill was planning, and Jessie had some concerns about Lily traveling so extensively as soon as she was released. But Bill was mindful of that as well. He had chartered a private plane for the journey, and booked suites in the best hotels. He had asked Jessie if she thought a doctor should travel with them, and implied heavily that she should do it, but that would have been impossible for her. She couldn’t leave her children so soon after their father’s death, nor her other patients in Squaw Valley, who needed her as well. Instead, Jessie suggested he take a nurse from the neurosurgery ICU, and she selected one carefully and discussed it with her.

  Jennifer Williams was thrilled to make the trip, and Lily liked her. Jessie assured Bill that she trusted Jennifer implicitly, and he made his plans to leave Squaw on Valentine’s Day. Their departure just happened to fall on that day, due to the schedules of the neurosurgeons they would be seeing, and the availability of the plane. They were planning to fly out of Reno, and would be getting there from Squaw Valley by limousine. Bill’s assistant in Denver had carefully made all the plans and handled all the details. Jessie still felt that the journey would be futile, but she didn’t try to discourage him, and she assured him that she would be available by phone for consultation with any of the doctors. And they had already received from Jessie all of Lily’s records and test results electronically. Given what they showed, Jessie was surprised that they were willing to meet with him, but Bill Thomas was an important man, and he had pulled all the necessary strings to get in to see them. Jessie knew by then just how stubborn he was. They had had several showdowns in the past six weeks, when he continued to assure Lily in no uncertain terms that she would walk again. Jessie felt it was irresponsible of him to do so. Two days before they left, Lily brought it up with her.

  “This is it, isn’t it, Dr. Matthews?” Lily had asked her quietly, while sitting in a wheelchair in her room. She had already begun therapy at Squaw, and Jessie had agreed on a treatment plan with the therapists at Craig Hospital when she got back to Denver. That was crucial for her now, to help her adapt to her new life. Her old life was gone forever, despite what her father said.

  Lily had begun calling and texting her friends at home once she felt better. She had called Jeremy and Veronica, both of whom were horrified by what had happened to her, and she had called some other friends. But suddenly there was a vast chasm between them and Lily, and everything they talked about was something she would no longer be able to engage in, like their Olympic training on the ski team, and all of her friends were on the team. And just as it had been for her, it was their whole life. With her accident, she had become an outsider instantly. Even their recreational pastimes would be difficult or impossible for Lily now, dancing, skating, skiing, sports. And for three or four months after they got home, Lily would be in rehab, and they would have to visit her there. They promised Lily they would, but she already felt left out of their activities when they called her, and without training for the Olympics, there would be a huge hole in her life. Her coach had called to encourage her, after talking to her father, and assured her that she would not be too old to win the gold in five years, if she missed the Olympics the next year. Her father had assured her coach that she would make a full recovery. Bill had told no one that her spinal cord injury was complete or that she was paralyzed from the waist down and would stay that way. Given what her father said, her coach was sure that she would recover, and Lily hadn’t told her friends the full extent of her injuries either. Her father had told her not to. Her eyes looked sad as she put the question to Jessie, who didn’t understand immediately what she meant when she asked her if “this was it.”

  “Here in Squaw? Yes, it is.” Jessie smiled at her after her morning visit. She had grown attached to her, more than she usually did with her patients. Lily was a lovely girl, and the blow of what she was facing would weigh heavily on her for a while, Jessie knew, particularly with her father’s attitude. He still had reality to face and hadn’t yet. Jessie hoped that for Lily’s sake he would soon. It would make it easier for Lily once he did, and they could move forward into the business of leading life in the best possible ways. For now, he was still clinging to the past, and urging Lily to do the same, which wasn’t good for her.

  “You’ll be busy once you get home,” Jessie said to her. “At Craig, with school, with your friends. You’ve got college ahead of you too.” She was trying to get Lily to look forward instead of back.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Lily said sadly, with a look of resignation. “I meant, this is it,” she said again as she pointed to her legs, strapped into the wheelchair so they wouldn’t slip off when the chair moved. She had no control of them whatsoever, as though they belonged to someone e
lse, and she felt nothing below her waist. Jessie paused for a long moment after she asked her the question. Bill had given her strict instructions not to tell Lily she would never walk again, but Jessie was a responsible physician, and she knew what the other doctors were going to tell them, particularly the one in Boston, whom Jessie knew and had called herself. He agreed with her prognosis to the letter and had sensed Bill’s refusal to accept it. Jessie had confirmed that to him. “I’m never going to get out of this chair again, am I?” Lily asked her bluntly. She had suspected it from everything that had been said, but her father kept telling her otherwise, with incredible determination, and he had never lied to her before. It was confusing her now, and Jessie could see it. Lily was more ready to face the truth than her father was.

  “There’s a lot of research in this area,” Jessie said. “Spinal cord injuries are of interest to a lot of people. And stem cell research has given everyone a lot of hope.” Lily’s eyes were boring into hers. She didn’t want to hear about the research, Jessie knew—she wanted to hear the truth from her. Jessie’s voice was serious when she spoke. “For now, yes, this is it. They’re going to teach you a lot of ways to deal with it and improve your skills at Craig.”

  Lily had a powerful lower body from skiing. Now they were going to strengthen her upper body, so she could use her arms in new ways, to guide her wheelchair, or help herself. Her father had ordered her a state-of-the-art feather-light wheelchair for their trip. It was one of the best ones made. And Jennifer would be there to help her.

  “Lily, there’s no reason why you can’t lead an amazing life from now on. Not just a good life, an amazing one. I really mean that, and I believe you will. I’m not telling you it will be easy at first, and it’s a big adjustment, but you can do this. New doors are going to open up to you, which you don’t expect now. You may not be able to win the gold at the Olympics, and in fact you can’t, but you can win the gold in your life, which matters more. You’re a winner, Lily, I know you are. You just have to hang on for the ride now, and see where this takes you.” Lily nodded, with tears in her eyes.