Home > Silent Night(5)

Silent Night(5)
Author: Danielle Steel

“I’ve missed you,” he said, beaming.

“I’ve missed you too,” she said, with her arms around his waist. It felt so good to be there. In a way, being with him always felt like home, and at the same time whenever she saw him it always felt exciting and new. They saw each other infrequently enough to keep their relationship interesting.

“How was the flight?” he asked her casually.

“Long, but worth every minute of it,” she said as they sat on a banquette, and a stewardess handed her a cup of coffee.

The boat was a hundred and eighty feet long, fifty-five meters, with a crew of fifteen. They had been waiting for her to arrive to set sail and were already casting off lines.

“We’ll leave in a few minutes,” Chad told her. It was a beautiful late July morning, the castle loomed over them, and the marina was full of yachts as large as Chad’s and even larger, some of them quite well known. It was easy to get spoiled while sharing time with him. Her luggage had already disappeared to his cabin where a stewardess would unpack for her, and there was a pink marble bathroom and dressing room for her use next to his accommodations. She had given the crew her purse to take with her bags. There was nothing she needed now, it was the middle of the night in California, and she was in no rush to charge and turn on her cellphone. She was on vacation, and part of the beauty of being on the boat with him was that she could leave all her duties and obligations behind. She had none from late July to late August. Her time off had already begun.

They pulled out of the port, motoring slowly, and twenty minutes later the chef produced a sumptuous breakfast for them at the dining table on deck. As soon as they cleared the boats coming into port to dock, they turned the engines on full, picked up speed, and headed to the open sea where Chad preferred to cruise for the trip to Italy. They expected to anchor in Portofino in the late afternoon and go ashore for dinner at a small restaurant they knew and liked there.

They lay on deck chairs and chatted easily in the sea breeze, as Whitney dozed in the sun, and went down to Chad’s cabin before lunch to change. Then they had a sumptuous meal on deck. It was a fairy-tale life being with him, and they held hands as they lay in deck chairs side by side after lunch and slept until they reached Portofino.

* * *

As Chad and Whitney watched the crew set anchor and tie up to a rock just outside the port of Portofino, Emma had been in a coma at Cedars-Sinai for thirty-six hours, since the accident. Her condition was still listed as critical. It was morning in L.A., and the police had obtained Whitney’s name and cellphone number from Paige’s DMV records in the computer system. She was listed as next of kin in an emergency. The police had been calling Whitney’s phone for the past twelve hours but had been unable to reach her, and the producers of The Clan had been able to keep the story out of the news, since no family member had been contacted yet. For now, no one on the set needed to know the truth. Eventually, the writers would have to write her accident into the scripts, but that was weeks away, or after the hiatus. The producers had told the cast that she had mono, which would buy them some time, and everyone was sorry to hear it.

Whitney had gotten her cellphone out of her purse before she and Chad boarded the tender to go into the little port town and walk around for a while. She’d asked a stewardess to charge her phone and left it with her.

They wandered in and out of the little shops and stopped for a glass of wine at a restaurant with a terrace overlooking the port, enjoying each other. Their time together was always relaxing and uncomplicated. They were both people who appreciated life without drama, and they treasured their downtime together. It was the nature of their relationship, stress-free adult time.

They went back to the boat after an hour, and the stewardess returned Whitney’s cellphone. She noticed that she had a slew of messages, which was unusual while she was on vacation. She glanced at them and saw that none of the numbers were familiar, and Paige hadn’t called her. She was sure she was busy with Emma, with their long list of daily appointments and lessons that extended from morning to night year round. Whitney wondered if the calls were from patients, if they’d had trouble reaching her replacement, and decided to check before she went to Chad’s cabin to dress for dinner on shore that night. Chad handed her a glass of champagne as she sat down to listen to her messages, and then he went downstairs to shower and change. Neither of them liked being interrupted by work unnecessarily when they were on vacation. Chad had strict rules about it at his office, and so did she.

“I won’t be long,” Whitney promised as she took a sip of the champagne and set it down on a table next to her, as he left her and she waited for the first message to play. She was surprised to hear that it was from a lieutenant of the LAPD. She couldn’t imagine why he was calling her. She had three more from him and began to wonder if it was about one of her patients. Whitney dreaded hearing that one of them had been injured or worse, committed suicide. That hadn’t happened in years. She pressed the number to return the call and asked for him by name when she reached the Los Angeles Police Department. The lieutenant came on the line quickly.

“We’ve been trying to reach you,” he said when Whitney gave her name and sounded puzzled to be hearing from him.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been traveling. I’m calling from Italy. What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” She had on her official doctor’s voice and waited for him to explain.

“I’m sorry to call you about this. We’ve gone to your home several times trying to locate you. There was an accident two days ago, involving your sister, Paige Watts, and her daughter, Emma.” Whitney froze as he said it. She hadn’t expected this, and now she wanted to know the rest of it quickly.

“What happened? Are they all right?” she asked, sounding hoarse. Suddenly she was shaking.

The lieutenant hesitated for a fraction of an instant. “No, I’m sorry,” he said for the second time. “Your sister was ejected through the windshield of the car she was driving and was killed on impact when an out of control truck hit her car. It was probably too late to avoid it when she saw it.”

“Oh my God.” Whitney was deathly pale. Other than Emma, Paige was her only living relative. They had had their differences, but they loved each other, and now she was dead, at thirty-seven. “Where is she?”

“She’s at the police morgue, where she’s been while we were unable to get in touch with you.”

“And my niece?” Whitney could hardly breathe now. What if Emma was dead too?

“She was unconscious at the scene. Neither of them were wearing seatbelts. The car came to a halt on impact with other vehicles, and your niece fell out of the car. She’s been in a coma since the accident, with a head injury, at Cedars-Sinai. She’s in critical condition, but she’s alive.” Whitney was trembling violently by then, thinking of Emma in a coma and Paige dead. “I can tell you who to speak to there,” the police lieutenant said helpfully as Whitney grabbed a pen and pad and wrote down the names he gave her, of the pediatric neurologists in charge of her case at Cedars. “I told them to expect to hear from you as soon as we contacted you. Is there anyone you want to send over to be with her?”

“There’s no one except me,” Whitney said weakly. “The only relatives she has are her mother and me. She has no father.” And now she had no mother either. Only Whitney.

“We spoke to the producer of the TV show she’s on, to try and find out which relatives to locate. They’ve been very cooperative about not talking to the press until you were notified. You might want to speak to them.” Whitney nodded, her mind racing about what to do next. She had to get back to Los Angeles immediately. She couldn’t leave Emma alone in a hospital in a coma. And what if she died before Whitney could get there? She couldn’t bear thinking about it, and Whitney was trying not to think of her sister dead in a morgue for the past two days while she was flying to France and getting on a boat to Italy. That was why she had never reached them. From the time of the accident the lieutenant had mentioned, Whitney could easily calculate that Paige had been dead before she’d left L.A.

She thanked the lieutenant and hung up and immediately called the doctors he’d mentioned at Cedars-Sinai. She was able to reach the second one within a few minutes, identified herself, and told him she was a physician. “How is she?” she inquired about Emma.

“There’s been no change since she came in,” he said simply. “There’s frontal lobe damage with considerable swelling. We’ve avoided doing surgery until now. I’m still hoping the swelling will come down on its own. She’s had several brain scans, a CT scan, and an MRI. We don’t see damage or lesions, other than the swelling, but the fact is that she’s in a coma, with no sign of her regaining consciousness since she’s been here. She’s had considerable trauma to her head, and she’s young. There’s no way to know yet what kind of damage that’s going to leave her with, if any. There could be severe consequences or fully restored brain function after the trauma heals. As long as she’s still comatose, there’s no way to know how the trauma has affected her brain. We’ve intubated her and sedated her, but where it goes from here, we just don’t know yet.” Whitney felt sick as she listened. What had Paige been thinking? If they were on the freeway, why weren’t they both wearing seatbelts? The image of her sister shooting through the windshield like a human torpedo was horrifying.

“There are no big decisions to be made right now,” the doctor said quietly, “although there could be later. She has brain activity. How impacted she is, though, we just don’t know, and we won’t until she wakes up. If she does,” he emphasized. “We need to see how the next few days go. Will you be coming in to see her?” the doctor asked.

“Of course. I’m in Italy,” she told him again. “I have to get back to L.A. now as quickly as I can.” She gave him her cellphone number and asked him to put it in Emma’s chart as the family member to contact about any changes. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get back,” she said and hung up. After that, she called the producers of The Clan and explained the situation to them in greater detail than they’d heard from the police. She was grateful they’d been able to keep it out of the press. Whitney didn’t want a feeding frenzy at the hospital, or anyone taking pictures of Emma, intubated in a coma. That would be awful.

   
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