A Week at the Lake

by Wendy Wax

  “What is it about, then? This conversation, I mean.” Serena’s voice had risen. “Because at the moment it’s not feeling about Emma at all.”

  Mackenzie had no answer. Or excuse. Except that her nerves were stretched so tight she could practically feel them quivering. Still, she hadn’t meant to lash out like that. Serena’s attraction to other women’s husbands wasn’t something new. And while she’d never particularly approved of it, she’d never taken it quite so personally before. “Sorry. I seem to be overreacting about a lot of things,” Mackenzie said. “Your personal life, fairy tale or otherwise, really isn’t my business.” Besides, it wasn’t like adultery was contagious or anything. She had no reason to doubt Adam’s fidelity, not even with this protracted separation or how hard he’d suddenly become to reach.

  She was lost in thought, reassuring herself that Adam’s excitement over what was happening for him in California was no reflection on her or the state of their relationship, when the first monitor alarm went off. Her eyes swung to Emma as the door burst open and white-coated people rushed into the room.

  Emma:

  I hear angry voices. A bell. I’m hot. Covered in coals. The darkness begins to blur around the edges with white. The sounds fade away.

  Suddenly I’m standing in the closet of my Malibu beach house. Staring stupidly at the motorized racks of clothing and the shelves of designer “fuck me” heels that are lit and showcased more lavishly than the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

  My closet is the Taj Mahal of storage, a decadently unnecessary example of conspicuous consumption. Yet there is not one item in this two-thousand-square-foot testament to vanity that is designed for a pregnant woman.

  I stand in the epicenter of this ridiculous closet crying great big tears of panic and self-pity. I’m in the middle of shooting a movie that does not require the extra padding I’m now carrying. My makeup person has taken to tutting over the breakouts on my face and has raised more than one overplucked eyebrow at the chubbiness of my cheeks, which have never been as chiseled as the rest of my family’s and now look like a squirrel unwilling to let go of a cache of acorns.

  Even I don’t understand how this has happened. I’ve been in a dry spell to end all dry spells, a sexual desert without a sign of an oasis, even if People magazine remains convinced I’m having an affair with my costar. Which would be funny if it weren’t so improbable. Calvin Hardgrove is perhaps the gayest leading man since Rock Hudson. Or my father.

  I drop onto the settee and don’t even care when my tears start to soak the turquoise silk upholstery. If my name were Mary I’d be tempted to claim immaculate conception. I’ve had sex exactly once in the last six months. And that was an accident, the result of one too many shots of tequila, that I’ve tried like hell to erase from my memory for all kinds of reasons.

  By the time I realized I was pregnant, I was too far along to terminate, not that I think I could have. Now I’m too far along to hide my pregnancy. I come from a long line of inept mothers in both sides of my DNA. Even Gran, who saved me completely and whom I love more than anyone, admits she didn’t do such a great job with her only child. I know she loves me, but I also think she sees me as her chance to make amends. Maybe I can learn from my grandmother’s mistakes and get it right the first time.

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror and can barely believe the tear-streaked, red-faced, puffy woman staring back is me. I’ve always been too short, too round, too far from pretty, but now I’m downright ugly. And not just on the outside.

  I had sex with someone I had no right to. And now I’m having a baby that shouldn’t belong to me. I am lower than pond scum.

  I sit and cry for so long I feel dizzy. My sobs echo in the cavernous closet reminding me just how alone I am. I can’t call the people I most want to talk to. There are secrets and then there are secrets. There are worse things than being pregnant and alone.

  Her temperature’s spiking. I’ve got 102. Increase the Tylenol. Bring the cooling blanket.”

  Serena, Mackenzie, and Zoe watched helplessly as the medical people crowded around Emma.

  “We’ve got to bring it down. I want a blood culture stat.” The doctors came and went. Hematologists. Pulmonologists. Infectious disease specialists.

  “She’s septic. Let’s start the broad spectrum antibiotic while we wait for the lab results.”

  Their voices remained calm and professional but there was no mistaking their urgency. Emma had moved from “lightening up” to frighteningly feverish so quickly it was hard to absorb. It didn’t take a medical degree to see how rapidly she was deteriorating.

  “But how could this happen?” Eve had arrived as they were ushered out of Emma’s room.

  “Dr. Brennan says that the spots where tubes and lines perforate the skin are always vulnerable to infection,” Mackenzie repeated what they’d been told. “They’re trying to identify the source and strain of the infection now.”

  “Good God.” Eve’s whisper reflected the fear they all felt.

  Unable to speak, barely able to breathe, the four of them stood outside the room, watching through the glass as the medical team worked to control the infection now threatening Emma’s life.

  I burn then shiver. Fire. Then ice. My body’s temperature gauge is broken.

  I don’t know what’s happening but whatever it is, it’s different. The darkness is gone and I can see as well as hear. In fact, I’m floating above my body like you see in movies and hear about in near-death experiences. I look around for the tunnel of white light.

  Gran?

  I’m here.

  Panic wells inside me. I haven’t taken care of things. Haven’t explained. Haven’t apologized. I watch the medical staff move around my body. Touching. Adjusting. Assessing.

  Mackenzie and Serena are pressed against the glass. The first friends I ever had. The only ones who loved me for me. I was wrong to do what I did. But I was also wrong to push them away.

  Am I dead?

  No. Gran’s voice is adamant, but worried.

  Zoe’s beautiful face is white with fear. Her eyes glitter with tears. Her teeth clench her lips. I feel how hard she’s trying not to cry.

  Eve’s standing next to her watching me closely. Her face registers sorrow, pain, regret. But I’m not buying it. I didn’t interest her when I was alive. Why would she be interested in me now that I’m dying? She can’t have Zoe, Gran. Not now. Not ever.

  No one can have your daughter if you stay.

  Zoe’s tears stab at me. I feel their pinpricks.

  Stay? As if I have a choice. Come or go. Leave or stay.

  You can choose.

  “We’re losing her. Get me . . .”

  I can’t listen to the people working so feverishly on my body. I can’t bear to look at Zoe. I don’t want to hear Gran’s voice anymore. I don’t have the strength for any of this.

  You can and you do. Gran’s voice resounds in my head. You must. You have a life waiting for you.

  A life? If I had the strength, I would laugh. My life doesn’t feel like anything worth fighting for. The weariness seeps into me; whatever is tethering me to my body stretches tighter. If it breaks will I float away?

  Your life doesn’t belong only to you. Your daughter needs you.

  I watch Zoe’s tears slide down her cheeks. See Eve’s arm slip around her shoulders. My daughter doesn’t shrug it off.

  Now, darling. Gran’s voice is gentle but insistent. If you’re going to stay you must make it happen now.

  But I don’t know how. Fresh panic assails me as the darkness once again descends.

  The last voice I hear is my grandmother’s. Yes, darling. Yes you do.

  Fourteen

  In her dream Emma had apparently turned into a fish, because she was underwater and somehow breathing. She swam easily through the lake’s cool depths,
skimming over sandy bottoms, and slipping through its undulating plant life. When she tired of this, she began to make her way toward the crystal clear surface that sparkled with diamonds of what her small fish brain recognized as sunlight. Somehow she also knew that when she broke the surface, she’d be in the rock-edged cove near the cottage boathouse. But when she came up and opened her eyes, which were no longer walleyed but centered in her non-fish face, Zoe, Mackenzie, and Serena were peering down at her as if she were not a person or even a fish, but some fascinating specimen pinned down beneath a microscope.

  “What?” Her vision was slightly blurred and her throat hurt when she tried to speak, her voice coming out in an almost unrecognizable croak. “Why . . .” She swallowed painfully and tried to focus. “Why are you looking at me like that?” No longer weightless, her body ached. Her eyelids seemed to weigh a couple of tons each. Her head pounded painfully.

  “No. Please. Don’t close your eyes!” Zoe’s panicked voice halted her eyelids’ descent, but it took some serious effort to open them back up. She stared up into her daughter’s face, which was stretched into a mask of panic that matched her voice. Her hair stood on end. Dark circles rimmed her eyes. Her cheeks were streaked with mascara and the residue of tears. “Why do you”—she swallowed again, forced the words out—“look like that?”

  She shifted her focus to include Serena and Mackenzie. “You all look like,”—swallow—“like shit.”

  The three of them grinned. As if she’d complimented them. “I must have said that wrong.”

  They laughed. Serena and Mackenzie high-fived. Emma studied their faces and what she could see of the room, looking for some clue to where they were and why she was the only one lying down. “We need to check out immediately.” She swallowed again. What the hell had happened to her throat? “This hotel looks worse than you do.”

  She was funnier than she’d thought and way funnier than she felt, because they laughed again.

  “We’re just so relieved,” Mackenzie said, holding a glass of water to her lips.

  “Thank God you’re back,” Serena added.

  Zoe just nodded and swiped at her tears.

  “Back?” She wanted to reach out to Zoe but her limbs weighed a hundred times as much as her eyelids, which still wanted to close. There were tubes running out of her. Machines all around her. “Where did I go? Why”—she swallowed again—“am I attached to this stuff?”

  “We were kind of hoping you could tell us that,” Mackenzie said.

  Although she knew who she was and who they were and they were clearly in a hospital, she had no idea how she’d gotten there.

  “You’ve been in a coma since the accident twelve days ago.”

  “Accident?” She tried to remember, tried to concentrate on something besides their faces and voices, but there was nothing there. No memories to reel in. “I was in . . . accident?”

  Zoe nodded solemnly. Fresh tears ran down her cheeks.

  “You don’t remember?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No.” The croak was one of fear. How could she not know this? How could she possibly have lost twelve days and have no memory of it at all?

  “What’s the last thing you do remember?” Serena asked.

  She tried to think, to focus. But her thoughts moved as slowly as molasses and were just as murky. Fish dreams from the bottom of Lake George. Gran. The judge’s study. Her closet. Eve. “Were Eve and Rex here?”

  Serena nodded. “The whole Michaels clan showed up. But Eve has been here almost every day.”

  This made no sense. But neither did anything else.

  She tried to stay tuned-in as they talked. Wanted to understand what had happened. But her eyes were so heavy. Her body so tired. The words blurred to a background hum. Her eyelids began to close.

  “Mom?”

  She was surprised to hear Zoe, who’d referred to her by her first name since the age of ten, call her Mom. But she liked it. “Hmmmm?” Emma managed, trying to hold off the threads of sleep that pulled at her.

  “You’re only allowed to go to sleep if you promise to wake up again.”

  Emma’s eyelids were too heavy to open, but she had no intention of going anywhere. “Promise,” she murmured, already half asleep. A moment later she was swimming again. Her fish lips turned up in a smile.

  The next time Emma opened her eyes, two doctors were leaning over her. One of them was tall and slim with an attractive blend of Caucasian and Asian features, the other white haired and blue eyed with a military bearing. She didn’t think she’d ever seen either of them before, but their voices were instantly familiar.

  “Ms. Michaels,” the younger, taller one said. “I’m Dr. Brennan. Head of Neurocritical Intensive Care here at Mount Sinai. We’re very glad to have you back.” His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled.

  “And I’m Dr. Markham, your neurosurgeon,” the other doctor said crisply. His blue eyes were sharp, his attention laser focused as if he were trying to see inside her head.

  “Dr. Markham has been in charge,” Brennan said. “He removed the blood clot that threatened earlier on and supervised the team fighting your recent infection.”

  “Blood clot?” Her throat was still sore, her voice rusty. “Infection?” The hits just kept on coming. She was stunned that so much could have happened to her without her knowledge. Next thing they’d tell her she’d been speaking in some long-dead language she’d never heard of, or exhibiting some other talent she shouldn’t possess. “But I don’t remember how I got here. I don’t know what . . .” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t even know what she didn’t know. And wasn’t sure she wanted to. Having such a huge hole in her memory made her feel dizzy and nauseated with anxiety.

  “We know it’s disconcerting to discover things you have no memory of,” Dr. Markham said. “But it’s quite common in your situation. The vast majority of coma patients who regain consciousness have large gaps that typically begin slightly before the traumatic brain injury occurred.”

  Her brain had been traumatically injured. “Why am I so tired if I’ve just been lying here?” she asked, unable to ask what she really wanted to know.

  “You came in here pretty beat up,” Dr. Brennan said. “Your brain and your body suffered severe trauma. Then the fever and infection took even more out of you. You’ve been through a lot even if you weren’t consciously aware of it.”

  “And my brain? Is it . . . is it all right?”

  Dr. Markham considered her carefully. “Things are looking very positive. But you’re going to need plenty of time and rest to heal properly. And you’re probably going to need . . .”

  She sensed they weren’t finished speaking, but her eyes were once again heavy. Before they’d finished talking, she’d fallen asleep. Once again her dreams were of the lake. Only this time she was on top of it, not underneath it.

  When she awoke again, she was in a small but well-appointed private room and most of the tubes and machines had been removed. Rex and Eve sat nearby.

  “Hello, kitten,” Rex said quietly. His smile was lopsided. It was the “I know I’ve let you down but you know I love you” smile that used to melt her heart.

  Eve said nothing, but studied her intently. Emma recognized that look, too, and wasn’t at all sure she had the strength to counter whatever was coming when Eve rose and moved closer to the bed. “I, we, would like to help during the rehab phase. I wanted to take you to California, but it seems you’re not yet cleared to fly and of course you’ll need follow-up.”

  Emma’s body tensed even as she blinked sleepily. Eve didn’t wait for Emma to respond. “I’ve found the perfect place here in Manhattan. There’s a long waiting list but I’ve managed to convince them to make room for you.” She smiled triumphantly. “In fact, Zoe can stay with us and be close enough to visit you regularly.”

  No! The word resounded in Em
ma’s head, but she must not have spoken it aloud because Eve continued. “I think it will work marvelously. We’ll have an opportunity to spend time with Zoe and we can make sure you get the best possible treatment.” She sounded so pleased, so certain. “It looks as if you’ll be allowed to leave the hospital before week’s end.”

  “Why?” It was all she could manage. It was the one thing she wanted to know.

  “Why, what, darling?” Eve asked smoothly. “What more compelling reason could there be for mending our fences than almost losing you this way?” She stepped closer. “We’re all adults now and should be able to let go of old hurts and . . . misunderstandings.” Her tone had turned reasonable, almost matter-of-fact, which meant Emma needed to pay close attention to what came next. “Besides, what sort of person would I be if I didn’t look after my own flesh and blood who came this close”—she held up two fingers with barely an inch between them—“to dying?” She looked to Rex for support, but her father looked slightly embarrassed. “You’re in no condition to take care of yourself, let alone your daughter.”

  Emma studied her mother’s face as she digested this. Appearances had always been more important than reality to Eve. And a far greater motivator.

  There was a soft knock on the open door and Serena entered, greeting Eve and Rex as she crossed toward the bed. Her stilted tone told Emma that she’d heard at least part of Eve’s plan.

  “Hi, Em.” Serena took her hand and looked Emma in the eye. “You okay?”

  Emma nodded, pathetically glad that Serena was here and that she didn’t let go of her hand.

  “I was just telling Emma that we’ve secured a bed for her at Edgemere, which is a five-star facility,” Eve said as if it were a fait accompli. “And that Zoe can stay with us.”

  There was a weighty silence as Serena plumbed Emma’s eyes for a reaction. The hand that held hers tightened slightly. “Is that what you want, Em?”