Silent Night

by Danielle Steel

  As soon as Emma appeared to be comfortable with Brett, Whitney decided to confront the task of emptying Paige’s house. She took three days off from work to go through everything Paige had left behind. She wasn’t a tidy housekeeper, and there were closets full of old albums, clippings about their mother, fan mail to Emma from the show, and letters from old friends, including several from Emma’s biological father, which Whitney thought she might want one day. She boxed up all the papers and sent them to a storage unit she had had since her father’s death. It was filled with boxes of her mother’s contracts, and those of some of his other famous clients. She sent Paige’s papers to the same place.

  She packed up Paige’s clothes to send to a resale store, including some of their mother’s old furs, which were very glamorous and nothing Whitney would ever use. Paige had saved them to wear to award ceremonies she attended, and she intended to wear one of their mother’s old white mink coats if Emma was ever nominated for an Emmy, or even an Oscar one day. Paige was sentimental about that kind of thing, and Whitney was always more discreet and simply dressed. She didn’t have the grandiose pretensions of her younger sister, or the taste for reincarnating Old Hollywood. Paige wanted everyone to know she was Liz Winston’s daughter. Whitney usually tried to hide it, and avoided bringing attention to herself.

  She had a local auction house come out and look at Paige’s furniture, none of which was of any value. She donated all the kitchen equipment, the pots and pans she didn’t need herself. Whitney didn’t like her sister’s taste in art, so she gave that to the auction house too, and she gave away Emma’s baby toys and equipment, like a broken high chair and the stroller Emma hadn’t used in years.

  By the end of three days, the house had been stripped, and she had signed a listing agreement with a realtor. Paige had left no will, but Whitney was going to put the proceeds from the house and anything else in Emma’s trust account, along with the salary she had made, and the recent payment from the producers and the network when they’d bought her out of her contract for the show. Emma would have a very respectable amount in her account when she was old enough to have access to it, and hopefully the amount would have grown from the investments in her portfolio by then. The only things that Whitney kept of her sister’s were a sapphire bracelet and ring that had been their mother’s. She was going to give them to Emma one day.

  As she looked around the house once it was empty, Whitney felt a wave of sadness wash over her. It was all such a waste. If Paige had paid attention and driven more carefully with her seatbelt on, and Emma’s in the backseat, none of this would have been necessary. She would have been alive to continue driving Emma’s career, whatever Whitney thought of it, and Emma wouldn’t have a brain injury that might hamper her forever and destroy the future Paige had wanted so badly for her. It made Whitney angry all over again as she drove away.

  An industrial cleaning service was coming the next day, and then a stager to put in generic rented furniture to make the house sell better than it would have with Paige’s slightly battered mismatched pieces. Whitney had agreed on a price with the realtor. It was a cute house, with two bedrooms and a sunny kitchen that needed new appliances, but was otherwise okay. Paige had bought it when their father died, two years before she had Emma, who had lived there all nine years of her life. Whitney wondered if Emma would miss it, if she remembered it one day. But she didn’t want to wait to sell it. It made no sense to keep it for Emma to use later. She was better off having the money invested. Paige hadn’t been in love with the house either. It was just convenient, on a street at the edge of Beverly Hills, and had been a good buy at the time, since it was part of an old lady’s estate, whose children didn’t want it either. Paige had always talked about fixing it up, but she never did. She didn’t really care, and decorating wasn’t her thing.

  When she got home, Whitney found Brett and Emma doing an art project on Whitney’s smoked glass dining room table. Emma was drawing tall trees with birds and butterflies in them, and children playing underneath. She seemed to be enjoying herself. Brett was very creative with her, and she was letting Emma use her iPad. Emma handled it hesitantly at first, and then seemed to be remembering how to use it, as Brett pointed to it and reminded her each step of the way. It gave Whitney an idea as she watched them, and she spoke to Brett as she put away the art supplies that she had brought with her.

  “Why can’t we teach her sign language, since she can’t hear or speak? She could communicate with us that way.” Emma was still having trouble reading, and remembering how to do it. It seemed to take a great deal of concentration and sometimes she just looked baffled, put the iPad down, and walked away. Brett had used applications on the iPad for young children that were all pictures instead of text, including some fashion options that Emma had caught on to quickly. Both Whitney and Brett kept trying to find ways to reach out to Emma.

  “Sign language might be a little too stimulating for her brain at first, but we can try it,” Brett said thoughtfully. “It would be fantastic if we could find a way for her to communicate with us.”

  “There’s a school for the deaf. I’ll call them,” Whitney said and then went to take a bath, after clearing Paige’s house all day. She was still angry at her sister for being negligent with her daughter’s safety. It was so typical of Paige to do something stupid, and this time it had cost her her life and her daughter’s future, which made it the ultimate stupidity, and no one could undo it. At least not so far.

  She felt better when she put on clean jeans and a T-shirt, and had dinner with Emma and Brett a little while later. She’d worked hard clearing Paige’s house, and it gave her a sense of closure. It reminded her that she still had to bury her ashes at her parents’ grave site at the cemetery. She hadn’t felt up to dealing with it yet, but she was planning to. Brett went to her room after she put Emma to bed, and Whitney went to bed herself with a book about children and traumatic brain injuries that Bailey had given her. The house was quiet and peaceful, and Whitney was surprised when Bailey called her. She told him she was reading the book and they agreed that it was excellent.

  “You really do your homework, don’t you?” he said admiringly.

  “I try. I want Emma to have the best chance I can give her for a full recovery.”

  “You’re already doing that,” he said gently. He didn’t know any other parent who had worked harder at it.

  “How did you get into this field?” Whitney asked him. It was nice hearing a friendly adult voice at the end of the day. She missed talking to Chad occasionally but would never have called him. Their last conversation had been final for her.

  He hesitated before he answered, he didn’t usually talk about his personal history, but she was a doctor, they were becoming friends, and he wanted to invite her to the next brain injury conference sponsored by UCLA. “My younger brother, David, nearly drowned in a neighbor’s pool when he was three. He never recovered from it, and he was seriously damaged. My parents never got over it. They each blamed the other for not watching him. I was five years older and I blamed myself. I always promised myself I’d become a doctor one day, and help children like David. My parents got divorced two years later, and he was institutionalized. Neither of them could deal with what had happened. He died at fourteen of pneumonia. His respiratory system had been badly compromised along with his brain. He was a very severe case. Neither of my parents ever remarried or had more kids. His accident ruined their lives, and his. My mother was depressed for the rest of her life, and my father drank himself to death after the divorce. The guilt was too much for them. It’s not a happy story. But I wanted to make a difference after that.

  “I’m not sure I have, though. I met Amy Clarke during my residency, and she had a sister who died pretty much of the same thing. She was in a coma for two years before they took her off life support. We met at a brain injury conference, consulted jointly on a few patients after that
, and decided we liked working together. We combined our practices and it worked out well. Maybe our similar histories gave us a common bond as friends and work partners. There are more stories like this than you think. One careless moment, and lives are changed forever. At least for you, Emma’s situation is clean. There’s nothing you did wrong, or could have done differently, so you don’t need to feel guilty. I know my brother is why I never wanted kids. It was such a heavy responsibility, and such a tragedy for the whole family, I never wanted to risk it. These cases destroy everyone’s life, not just the victim’s. I’d much rather try to save the victims than have a child of my own.” It seemed sad to Whitney.

  “I’ve been pretty angry at my sister,” she admitted, impressed by what Bailey had told her, and deeply touched. “She was always irresponsible when we were kids. She let our dog out of the house once, and he got run over. She got in a couple of car accidents when we were in our teens, and I don’t know what she did this time, but some part of it must have been her fault. If she really was texting as the police think, it was unforgivable.” Whitney sounded harsh as she said it. But she was haunted by what had happened and the price Emma was paying for it. “I just wish I could turn the clock back for Emma, so it comes out differently. She doesn’t deserve to suffer for her mother’s mistake and carelessness.”

  “In Emma’s case, I think she’ll recover. It’ll take time, but when she regains some of her memory, and we get her speaking again, I think her initial IQ will play in her favor. She may not be perfect, but she can be highly functional.” Whitney told him about her idea then to teach Emma sign language so she could communicate with them, despite her lack of language and hearing.

  “It’s worth a try,” he said, impressed by her ingenuity. No one had ever suggested that to him before. But it might work.

  “I’m going to call the school for the deaf tomorrow and see what they think. Maybe they can send someone over to teach her. Brett and I can learn too.” They talked for a while longer and then hung up, and when Whitney turned the light off she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of Paige’s house stripped bare, eventually with strangers in it. It all seemed like such a waste.

  After tossing and turning for an hour, Whitney turned on the light again. She was thinking about Bailey’s little brother and what a waste that had been too, and how it had destroyed his parents’ lives, and impacted him, but inspired him to embark on a medical career. Her mother’s high-powered Hollywood life, and her father running everything and treating her like a beautiful puppet while he pulled the strings, had done that for her. Medicine had seemed an ideal place to hide and look for a more meaningful life.

  She clicked on the TV with the remote, and turned on the movie channels to see what she could find, until she came to an old film of Anne Bancroft’s called The Miracle Worker, where she had played Annie Sullivan, the woman who had taught Helen Keller to communicate. The story had always fascinated her, about a time when no one was trying to save children like Helen Keller, and had locked them away in mental institutions. Whitney became engrossed in the movie, and was mesmerized by it as the story unfolded. Some of Keller’s early behaviors reminded Whitney of the condition Emma was in now, particularly when she attacked Annie Sullivan physically, and Annie Sullivan forced her to learn to sign in the palm of her hand. It was what brought Helen Keller into the world as a sane, rational, functional person. It reinforced Whitney’s idea about teaching Emma sign language. Emma could see, her vision had cleared again after the accident, even if she couldn’t hear or speak now, and Whitney wanted to teach her to read again, since she had apparently forgotten that too ever since her injury.

  There were tears running down Whitney’s cheeks when the movie ended, and she slept peacefully that night. There was a glint in Whitney’s eyes when she met Emma at the breakfast table the next day, while Brett put a bowl of cereal in front of Emma. As soon as they had finished eating, she hurried off to call the school for the deaf. They agreed to send one of their teachers out to meet Whitney and Emma the next day. They said they had never taught sign language to anyone with a brain injury, but they thought it was an intriguing idea, although they wanted to meet Emma first to see how cooperative she would be, and how capable she was of learning the basics. One of their teachers would come to the house to do an assessment.

  Whitney was waiting for Samuel Bond when he drove up to the house the next day. He was an attractive, pleasant African American man somewhere in his mid-thirties, and he looked very serious as Whitney led him into the house, walked him into the living room, and invited him to sit down. As soon as he started speaking with a slight impediment, she realized that he had a hearing problem. She noticed that he was wearing hearing aids, and he explained that he had been deaf most of his life as a result of chicken pox when he was a child. He had been teaching at the school for the deaf for many years, and he thought teaching Emma would be an interesting challenge. He seemed warm and kind, and Whitney liked him and hoped Emma would too.

  Whitney went upstairs to find Emma then, and beckoned her to come downstairs, which she did with considerable suspicion, and she looked shy and uncomfortable as soon as she saw Sam. He signed hello to her, and Emma looked from him to Whitney, as though baffled by what he was doing. Whitney explained to him that she and Emma’s nurse wanted to learn to sign too, since their whole goal was to communicate with Emma in case she never regained the ability to speak, or at least in the meantime. They agreed to a series of a dozen lessons, and he promised to return the next day with the books they needed to learn the symbols. He was enthusiastic about the project, and Emma didn’t know what they’d agreed to, but she looked angry when she went back to her room. She was having a bad day, which still happened frequently, and she didn’t like new people around.

  Some days she was just bored and out of sorts, and frustrated. She’d been trying to talk to Brett in her own language, and Brett hadn’t understood a word she’d said. And she still acted out occasionally. She did that night when Whitney set a dinner down in front of her that she didn’t like. Before Whitney could protect herself, Emma took a swing at her, and cuffed her on the ear, which set off a ringing in Whitney’s head. Whitney grabbed Emma’s wrist firmly, as Annie Sullivan might have done, looked Emma in the eye, and shook her head.

  “No, don’t do that. It hurts,” she said, rubbing her ear, and Emma ran out of the kitchen and upstairs to her room. Whitney left her alone for a while, put Emma’s dinner aside, went upstairs to check on her when she’d finished, and sat down on Emma’s bed. Emma wouldn’t look at her, and Whitney was reminded of Helen Keller all over again. She leaned over and kissed Emma, who stroked Whitney’s ear apologetically, and said something garbled in her gibberish. Whitney could tell she was sorry that she’d hit her. It went with the territory, but it was unpleasant anyway. And then Whitney went downstairs with her and sat with Emma while she ate dinner after Whitney reheated it. Emma was docile this time, and kissed Whitney on the ear to make it better.

  Emma looked angry again when Sam Bond showed up for their group lesson the next day. He set up his charts in the kitchen, they sat down at the kitchen table, and two minutes later, Emma ran away.

  “Why don’t we start without her,” Whitney suggested. “Brett and I can learn it first.” She knew there was no point forcing the issue when Emma was frustrated and in a bad mood. Sam agreed to start without her, but he said that she would have to participate in the class eventually, and Whitney promised that she would.

  She and Brett were diligent students, although they each made several mistakes. He laughed at them more than once, and translated what they had actually said. It was easy to make mistakes at first, but he was an intelligent, patient man, who admired what Whitney was trying to do, and hoped it would work as a means of communication with Whitney’s niece.

  The next time he came, Brett got Emma to join them. She made a few halfhearted signs, and Sam nodded hi
s approval at her, and then she disappeared again. She wasn’t a willing student, and watching him gave Whitney an idea. She called Belinda Marshall that night, the teacher on the set of The Clan. She asked how Emma was doing, and Whitney said she was making progress, but she still had a long way to go.

  “Everyone misses her on the show,” Belinda said sadly. They hadn’t replaced her when they wrote her out. Fans were still mourning her, and begging the producers to bring her back, which they couldn’t now. It wasn’t possible in the plot of the show, nor in the condition Emma was still in. And they had paid handsomely to release her.

  “Belinda, I’ve had an idea and I need your help,” Whitney said and Belinda was intrigued. She explained to her about wanting to teach Emma sign language so she could communicate with them.

  “She can’t speak at all?” Belinda was shocked. She hadn’t heard that before, but it explained why Emma had to leave the show. The producers had been very closemouthed about it, according to the confidentiality agreement they’d signed, to avoid gossip about Emma in the press.

  “She’s forgotten all language. She speaks in some kind of talk that makes sense to her and no one else. Sign language might bridge that gap. We have a teacher, but I don’t think Emma likes him. She loves you, and if she remembers you, she might be willing to work with you. Her reading skills are sketchy now too, but I was wondering if you could try to get her to use an iPad? She has an app with pictures, but for now she’s trapped in a silent world until she learns to speak again, and that could take a long time. They don’t want us pushing speech therapy on her too soon. So what do you think?” Belinda was stunned by the offer, but also very touched.