“No, it’s not,” she agreed. She had figured that out too. “We’re a lot alike in some ways. Too scared to take a risk, and then suddenly, you’re in the thick of it, and it’s not so bad.” She smiled at him.
“So one of these days, will you have dinner with me, without Emma, when you feel like you can leave her with Brett—and not in your kitchen, with one eye on Emma? Let’s go have some fun one of these days, and do something silly. Go to a movie, go bowling, go to the beach or go windsurfing, whatever sounds like fun to you. We both have a lot of time to make up for. We’ve both been working too hard for a lot of years.”
“Paige used to say that to me too. I thought she was silly and frivolous, but she was right. I was always the serious one. I don’t want to be that serious anymore. Not all the time at least. Life’s hard enough. It’s good to take a break sometimes.”
“Good. Let’s go be silly together. Although I have to admit, your yacht vacations sound pretty damn cool,” he said with envy, and she laughed.
“There are no yachts in my future, Dr. Turner. A small rowboat maybe, or even a tiny sailboat. But I’m afraid the fancy boat trips are history for me now. Although I’d be happy to introduce you to my ex-boyfriend if you like boats,” she said, and he laughed.
“I’m probably not his type.”
“Neither am I now,” but the prospect of spending time with Bailey was very appealing to her. They had their work in common, and they had both spent a lot of years being responsible and building their medical careers, and they had both been careful to avoid deep emotional relationships, which Whitney thought now had been a mistake. She had finally realized that she needed more than that. Paige and Emma had taught Whitney that, and she was showing it by example to Bailey. Just watching her was teaching him about relationships and life, seeing all she gave to her niece.
“We’ll talk about this after the seminar,” Bailey promised. “And I’m not letting you off the hook for dinner.”
“That’s a deal.” The idea of a real date with him sounded like fun. It had taken months to occur to her but now that it had and he had mentioned it, she liked the idea, and wondered why they hadn’t thought of it sooner.
* * *
—
Her presentation to the brain injury seminar was a knockout, even better than Bailey had hoped when he’d invited her to do it. She started by showing a film clip of Emma on her TV program seven months before. She chose an astoundingly sensitive scene where her performance reduced nearly everyone in the room to tears. And then she described the accident, the results, and Emma as she was now. She talked about all the things she could do again, the things that still eluded her now, even things as simple as reading a first-grade book, compared to the scripts she used to learn and never miss a line. She talked about the doctors’ hopes for her, and the statistical likelihood of her recovery. Everything she described illustrated the complicated and conflicting symptoms of brain injury, and the range of how severe and how minor some of the cases were. Whitney said that in many ways, Emma had been lucky, and she was functioning surprisingly well given the trauma she had sustained. But she described her memory as something akin to Swiss cheese now, some of it was solid, and the rest was full of holes no one could explain. Whitney described the violence and the aggression that were typical with frontal lobe injuries, and the minor injuries she had sustained while caring for her, from a child who would never have laid a hand on her, or anyone else, before. Then she posed a long list of questions that neither psychiatry nor neurology had easy answers to, and questioned which side of the illness should be treated first and by whom. Her conclusion at the end of it was that they needed better interdisciplinary cooperation, better research, and better protocols to treat brain injury patients, which addressed the full spectrum of symptoms, not just some, or the physical issues. They had to deal with the psychological and emotional ones too. They were all part of the picture.
At the end, she expressed what their hopes were for Emma, and what encouraging signs there had been so far. She pointed out that the medical field was making some real progress in the area of traumatic brain injury, but there was room for more. And then she thanked them and stepped down, and the entire room got to their feet to give her a standing ovation, and there were tears in Bailey’s eyes when he hugged her. Even Amy Clarke looked deeply moved, and she was usually less emotional than Bailey. Her eyes were damp when she hugged Whitney.
“You were fantastic. I knew you would be,” Bailey whispered when he took the podium over again to thank her for her presentation, and then they broke for lunch. And she joined him and Amy and four other neurologists who praised her again for what she’d said.
“We’re trying to get her to give up psychiatry and come and work with us on brain injury cases,” Amy said, and everyone agreed on what rewarding work it would be. Whitney said she was thinking about it, but she liked the work she did too, and was considering finding a way to do both, which was an intriguing idea, and would add variety to her practice.
She had a wonderful day at the seminar with Bailey, and was happy to see Emma when she got home. She was reading aloud from the iPad with Belinda. It was a simple book for a five- or six-year-old, and way below her previous level of reading ability, but she was speaking clearly, and bigger chunks of language had returned. As Whitney had said in her speech, Emma had come a long way, and had a long way to go, and how far she would get down the path to full recovery remained to be seen. Others had done it before her, and some hadn’t gotten as far. It was a step-by-step process. Along with the first-grade reader, she was learning to play chess again. It was a checkerboard pattern of recovery for the brain.
Bailey dropped by to see Whitney later that night, after the seminar ended and he had wrapped it up. He wanted to come by and thank her again. Her presentation had been the highlight of the conference, and humanized some of the issues for them.
“So when are we going bowling?” he whispered as he put his arms around her. They didn’t want to wake Emma, who was asleep upstairs. Brett’s room was at the other end of the house, and she never re-emerged once she went to her room at night.
“How far the mighty have fallen,” she said, laughing, “from yachts to bowling nights. How about a movie instead?”
“Don’t be such a snob, just because your mother was a big movie star,” he teased her, “and your niece was the star of a hit TV show.”
“I’m just a lowly Beverly Hills shrink,” she reminded him, but she was a lot more than that, and so was he, they were both stars in their fields, and there was an undeniable attraction between them that neither could ignore anymore and didn’t want to.
“How about roller-skating at Venice Beach?” It sounded like fun to her. She nodded and he pulled her closer into his arms and kissed her, and then looked down at her with a smile. “I’ve never gone out with the mothers of any of my patients,” he commented with a mild look of concern, but it wasn’t enough to stop him.
“You’re off the hook. I’m just her aunt,” she whispered back, and he kissed her again. The future seemed particularly bright to both of them. Things were looking up. There was fun in their future, and possibly some work together, if they could figure out how to do it. He left a few minutes later, and Whitney smiled thinking of roller-skating at Venice Beach with him. Her life had suddenly gotten very real. Emma was an important part of it, and so was Bailey now. She didn’t feel quite so serious as she thought of his arms around her. Suddenly there was something to look forward to, more than just Emma’s recovery. She felt like a woman again. It was a very nice feeling indeed.
Chapter 11
The long road to recovery continued in the erratic pattern that Amy and Bailey had warned Whitney it would, without rhyme or reason. Emma was speaking again, intelligibly, but sometimes familiar words eluded her. At other times, she had to struggle for every word, or her thoughts came out in a rush. Her memory was still spotty. She remembered some sequences of events perfectly, or parts of the scripts she had learned and diligently worked on. At other times, she couldn’t remember what she’d had for lunch. She could sing all the words to a song, but couldn’t say them. She remembered her singing lessons, but insisted she had never had dance lessons. Although Whitney told her she had taken tap, hip-hop, and ballet, Emma didn’t believe her.
Although she had never mentioned it again, she remembered her mother texting right before the accident, and telling her to stop. But she remembered nothing past that moment, which Whitney said was a blessing. She and Bailey assumed she’d been unconscious after that. She had a thousand memories of her mother, but none of the accident itself, or the first weeks in the hospital.
In March, she started speech therapy, which she found arduous and tiresome. It made her struggle to find words she could no longer remember. And in April, Whitney discussed her acting career with her.
“What do you want to do, Em?” Whitney had been avoiding her agent until they made a decision. Emma had missed the other child actors she worked with. Adam Weiss and Virginia Parker were still on the show. Emma had never watched it after she’d left it. And both of her fellow child actors had wanted to visit her in the hospital, but she was in no condition for visits then, and they had eventually stopped asking. When Emma wrote to them after she was speaking again, they didn’t answer her. It had been nine months since the accident, too long for most people to sustain their interest. Nine months was an eternity to most people. Life moved on. Emma’s feelings were hurt by it, and Whitney tried to explain to her that the actors she knew on the show were busy with their own lives by then. Emma had had no friends except the people she had worked with. She hadn’t been to a normal school in three years, two while she was on the show, and one since the accident.
“Your agent has been calling,” Whitney told her. “He says there’s work out there if you want it. Maybe even on another show,” although Bailey had said it was too soon for Emma to go back to work as an actress. It would be too stressful for her and liable to cause an increase in memory lapses and other symptoms. She still had holes in her memory, and might for several years.