“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 before 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.
“If she loved me, she wouldn’t have texted. I told her not to. She didn’t even have her seatbelt on. If she loved me, she wouldn’t have died.” Emma was sobbing piteously as the realities hit her again. She wasn’t angry now, just devastated.
“Sometimes people do stupid things. They think they’ll get away with it, or it’s just for a minute. She wasn’t thinking, but the one thing I do know is how much she loved you. She would never have wanted to leave you. She just didn’t think that something like this could happen. I was mad at her at first, because it was such a stupid thing to do. But it was just stupid, and careless. I’m sure she wasn’t thinking. She was probably in a hurry.” Emma nodded. It was true.
“We were late for my drama coach, and she was afraid he’d leave before we got there. There was a lot of traffic, so she texted him. She was texting so she didn’t see the truck.”
“The police thought it was something like that. But I’m not mad at her anymore, and you shouldn’t be either. The one thing I know for sure is that she loved you every second of her life. She never, ever stopped loving you.”
Emma nodded, looking heartbroken as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I’m glad she left me with you, Aunt Whit. I love living with you. I still miss my mom, but I love you so much,” she said and slipped her arms around her aunt’s neck and held her tight.
“I love you too, Em. We’re lucky we have each other.”
And then Emma pulled away and looked at her intently. “Do you think my mom would be mad that I don’t want to be an actress anymore, and I want to go to school like other kids?”
“I think all she’d want is for you to be happy. It doesn’t matter how you do that, or what you decide to be when you grow up. She’d be happy whatever you do, and so will I.” Emma nodded and looked relieved. Whitney lay down next to her on the bed with an arm around her until Emma fell asleep, and then she tiptoed softly from the room. She thought about Paige herself all that night, and how ambitious she had been about Emma’s career, how proud she had been of her, how much she had wanted her to be like their mother and become a big star one day. She thought of the foolish things they had done together when they were young, how silly Paige had been at times, how daring and how funny, how she flirted shamelessly and how men always fell at her feet. She had been a flake, and a stage mother, a lousy student as a kid when Whitney had written her papers for her, but she had told Emma the truth. Her mother had loved her more than life itself, and had only wanted the best for her. It was a comforting thought as Whitney lay thinking about her sister, missing her, and the memories washed over her again, but more gently now. And the greatest gift of all was that her sister had given her Emma to take care of now, and to love. She was the greatest blessing in Whitney’s life, and what she knew she had to do now was be there for her, love her like her own, and help her grow up and forgive her mother. And as she thought it, Whitney’s own anger at her sister ebbed away, like the tide going out to sea.
Chapter 15
Emma recovered slowly from the minor accident they had had. It had shaken her up badly, and her final memories of her mother flying through the windshield gave her nightmares several times, but she eventually seemed more peaceful, and her tenth birthday a week later cheered her up considerably. Whitney invited Bailey, Amy, Sam, Belinda, and Brett for dinner. They had pizza and an ice cream cake, and Whitney filled the house with pink and purple balloons. They played music and danced after dinner, and Emma looked happier than she had in a long time. The terrible images of her mother had slowly begun to fade. And with ice cream dribbling down her chin, she announced to everyone that her aunt was thirty years older than she was.
“I just did the math!” Emma said proudly. “It’s a subtraction!” Whitney groaned as she said it.
“You couldn’t figure out something else to subtract?” Whitney complained, and everyone laughed as Emma put her arms around Whitney and held her close. She said it was the best birthday she’d ever had, even better than the ones on the set. It was after ten o’clock when everyone went home and Emma slept peacefully that night. She was excited to be ten years old.
Right after her birthday, Emma started on her summer reading list for her new school with Belinda’s help. The reading wasn’t easy for her, but she improved with each book, and she enjoyed what she was reading, Little Women, Charlotte’s Web, and Stuart Little and some other chapter books. They were going to take a stack of them to Lake Tahoe. Belinda and Sam were planning to come up for a weekend. She had finally come to terms with her difficult decision, and told Whitney she and Sam were each going to leave their apartments and rent a place together in September. She was terrified, but she didn’t want to give up and run away from him. It sounded like the right decision to give the relationship a chance, and Whitney had the feeling that it was going to work.
“If it doesn’t, I can always find another apartment,” she said philosophically, “but not necessarily another guy like him.” Whitney was happy for her, and Belinda gave her full credit for introducing them.
“Tell me that if it works,” Whitney said, laughing at her. “If it doesn’t, it was an accident of fate.”
* * *
—
Whitney had called Emma’s agent, Robert Jones, by then and told him that Emma wanted to give up acting for a while and was going to start school in the fall. He was disappointed to hear it, and had liked working with Paige a lot better, whose priority had been Emma’s career on her path to stardom, not sending her to school like an ordinary kid.
“She can always come back to it,” Whitney said quietly.
“That’s not always true. People forget. She was a big talent, and she could be a major star, a legend like her grandmother.”
“That will still be the case in a few years. She needs a chance to recover from her injury and her mother’s death. She has to have time to be just a kid for a while.” Whitney was firm about it, and had Emma’s best interests at heart. She still had memory lapses, although fewer now, and going to school full-time would be a big change for her after having been tutored on the set for so long. Whitney wanted her to make some friends her own age, not just play poker and chess with the actors she worked with. She could make up her mind later about her career. She didn’t need to do it now, at ten.
“I’ll call you if any great opportunities come up,” he said, clinging to the hope that he could talk her aunt into it, although Whitney sounded like a stubborn woman to him. She had her own ideas about what would be best for the child, and they weren’t the same as his and didn’t benefit him.
Whitney had rented a house in Lake Tahoe for them for the month of July, and Emma was excited about it. It would be the first summer she’d had when she didn’t have voice and drama lessons, no dancing classes, and no lines to learn for the fall. Other than her reading for school, she was going to have the summer off. Whitney had gone up to check out the house. It was a large rambling home with lots of bedrooms, and came with a boat and its own dock. She had invited Amy and her fiancé up later in the month. They had just gotten engaged. And Bailey was coming up for the Fourth of July, during their first weekend in the house.
“And what are you going to let Emma do while she’s up there?” Amy questioned her when they saw each other. “Ride a bike? Water ski? Play with other kids?”