Paige had rented a house in Malibu for the last two weeks of August so Emma could play on the beach. She wanted to stay close to home so Emma didn’t miss any of her lessons during their brief hiatus. They would be off for August too, and Whitney would be back from Europe halfway through their time in Malibu. She was planning to spend three weeks with Chad and a week on her own to get organized before she went back to work, as she always did. Whitney had promised to spend some time with Paige and Emma in Malibu then. Emma would still be having lessons. She never really got time off. Emma knew better than anyone that the road to stardom was hard work.
* * *
—
Traffic on the freeway started to speed up as they got closer to home. Emma had finished the Slurpee by then and was still playing on her iPad in the backseat when Paige looked at her watch and realized they were going to be late for Marty. And if he was in a bad mood, as he often was at the end of the day, she knew he wouldn’t wait. He always said that he hated people wasting his time.
Paige grabbed her cellphone from the seat next to her, to send him a text, as Emma glanced up in the back with disapproval.
“Don’t text and drive, Mommy!” she said sternly.
“I just want to tell Marty that we’re running a few minutes late, but we’re almost home. Otherwise, he’ll leave before we get there.” Paige started texting quickly, holding the steering wheel firm with one arm.
“You’re not wearing your seatbelt!” Emma complained as Paige glanced at her and noticed that Emma still wasn’t either. She’d heard the buzzer but forgotten again, worried about Marty leaving, and that he would charge them for the session.
“Neither are you,” Paige said, distracted by the text she was writing. She’d been rushed and stressed all day.
“I forgot,” Emma said and started to put it on, but it was caught in the door and she couldn’t. She struggled to free it but it was stuck, and she told her mother.
“We’ll be home in a minute,” Paige said, and Emma’s eyes grew wide as she saw a truck careening toward them from the left, which Paige didn’t notice as she wrote the text. The truck hit them with immense force as Emma screamed. There was the sound of crushing metal as Paige’s cellphone flew from her hand. Emma watched in horror as her mother’s whole body shot through the windshield like a torpedo, careened through the air, and disappeared under the cars in front of them. Their car struck another, stopped abruptly, and Emma hit her head hard on the TV screen on the back of the front passenger seat. They were crushed in a tangle of other cars. The truck had forced them three lanes over. The driver lay inert with his head on the steering wheel as people rushed from their cars toward him, and several others ran toward Paige’s car.
The door on Emma’s side had flown open, and Emma lay unconscious on the freeway, her head, face, and arms covered with blood. People were calling 911, and a group of them were staring at Paige under the SUV where she had landed, covered with blood and broken glass from her exit through the windshield. Traffic was backed up as far as you could see behind them, and within minutes people could hear sirens in the distance as they surveyed the scene in shock. The driver of the truck was dead, and there was no sign of life under the car where Paige lay. No one dared touch Emma for fear of damaging her further, and they weren’t sure if she was breathing. It didn’t look like it, but there was so much blood everywhere, no one could see clearly.
Only one ambulance left the scene quickly with Emma. After that, it took time to move the truck, Paige’s car, and the other disabled vehicles to the side of the road and to remove Paige’s body and the truck driver’s from the scene, and it was hours before traffic began moving again. In all, four people had been injured but none severely, except Emma. The paramedics had inserted a breathing tube as they left the scene with sirens shrieking and lights flashing and assessed her in critical condition. The police and paramedics had said Paige was dead on impact, when she hit the pavement.
The police found a pink backpack in the backseat of the car, with an ID badge from the studio with Emma’s name on it, and Paige’s purse with her driver’s license was on the floor of the front passenger seat, alongside her cellphone with a shattered screen. She and Emma both carried a card that stated that their hospital of choice in an emergency was Cedars-Sinai.
Paige and the truck driver were taken to the morgue by the police, and there was nothing in Paige’s purse listing next of kin or who to notify in an accident. They would have to get the information from the DMV, if it was listed. All they knew for now were their names.
The paramedics had assessed that Emma had a serious head injury, a broken arm, and probably internal injuries. The police had made due note that she hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt. Neither of them would have fallen out of the car if they had been, or flown out, in Paige’s case. All the police could deduce was that Paige hadn’t seen the oncoming truck, and possibly had been on her cellphone or texting. Both were common causes of accidents and fatalities. Beyond that, they knew nothing, not even whether Emma would survive the accident. It had looked unlikely when they’d left the scene and headed at full speed to Cedars-Sinai.
* * *
—
Whitney sent some emails when she got home, took a bath, and washed her hair. She’d had a manicure and pedicure at lunchtime between patients. She closed her bags and called Paige. It went straight to voice mail. She tried again before she went to bed, knowing it would be too early to call them the next day before she left. She had to leave her house at five, to check in for her flight at LAX at six A.M., so she sent them a text, sending her love and promising to call or text from the boat. It was the best she could do, and she assumed that Paige was busy, or her cellphone might have run out of juice, which happened a lot when Paige ran around all day and forgot to charge it.
Whitney was in bed by midnight. Paige never called her back. She got up at four, left the house promptly at five in an Uber. Her flight to Paris was on time, and took off on schedule at eight A.M., and she settled back in her seat for breakfast and a movie. She wasn’t worried about trying to reach Paige again. She had said goodbye to them the night before in her text. All she had to do was sit back and enjoy her vacation. Whitney was smiling as they flew over Los Angeles with the sun shining brightly. She was thinking of Chad and meeting him on the boat, and she fully intended to forget L.A., her work, and even her sister and niece for the next three weeks. This was her time, and she needed it badly. She would send Paige another text from Italy when they got there. They never stayed in constant contact anyway, even in L.A. They had their own busy lives in separate worlds. And once on vacation, Whitney didn’t feel obliged to call. They would catch up on news in three weeks when she got back home.
* * *
—
Emma was unconscious when she got to Cedars-Sinai and was taken to the trauma unit, where the neurosurgeon on call examined her. She had a severe head injury from the impact and was in a coma. The debate was whether to operate on her brain or wait to see how severe the swelling was, if she even survived the next few hours. They had no next of kin to call, and the Highway Patrol and paramedics who’d brought her in informed them that the female driving was dead at the scene of the accident. They only had the information on Paige’s driver’s license, and Emma’s name from her badge. They sent a squad car to the address on Paige’s license and found no one home. The police were checking the DMV for next of kin, but had none by morning. They had the name of the TV studio to call, but had to wait until working hours to reach them. For now, Emma was alone in the world, and Whitney was on her way to France.
* * *
—
When Whitney arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport for her layover before the flight to Nice, she didn’t turn her cellphone on, because she wasn’t expecting any calls. It was four A.M. in France and too early to call Chad. It was seven in the evening in L.A. by then, nine hours earlier than Paris. It was almost twenty-four hours since the accident, and Emma’s condition was unchanged. She remained in a coma, intubated, her life hanging by a thread.
The police had called Melvin Levy, the producer of the show, that morning. He was shocked to hear what had happened to Emma and of Paige’s death. They had no light to shed on whom to call to notify relatives. They knew she had a sister, but didn’t know her name or how to reach her. There was no record of a father to contact anywhere in Emma’s files, nor the name of anyone to call in an emergency, other than her mother. The police had asked them to release nothing to the press until the family could be located and notified of the accident and Paige’s death. Respecting the police request, no announcement was made to the cast, other than that Emma was out sick. They were shooting episodes for the fall, after the hiatus, and could shoot around her for several weeks and catch up later. She had just finished the school term with Belinda, so they had no work to do until September. Her absence was not a crisis for them yet, but it would be if she stayed out for too long.
The producer and director conferred quietly about the call from the police, hoping that Emma would survive, and wondering what would happen next. It was shocking to think that a child so young might die, and that her mother already had. Neither of them had any idea who to call. They knew that Paige was a single mother, and they vaguely recalled Paige saying that Emma’s biological father had died around the time she was born. They assumed that some friend or relative would be with her. They called throughout the day for reports on Emma’s condition and were told that no information could be released, but that her status was unchanged.
* * *
—
Whitney caught the first flight to Nice, as she’d planned to, and had been traveling for seventeen hours by then. Chad’s strapping young, immaculately white-uniformed crew members met her at the Nice airport and whisked her and her luggage to their van. They drove her to Monaco, where Chad was waiting for her on deck in white jeans and a sky blue sweater, and a broad smile the moment he saw her. He already had a deep tan. She came up the passerelle, and he put his arms around her and held her as they basked in the warmth of each other’s company for a moment.