Read A Week at the Lake for Free Online Page A

handles. She wasted a couple of seconds wishing that hospitals had bellhops and luggage carts as they strode through the lobby.
    â€œShould we call your father?” Mackenzie asked as they waited impatiently for the elevator.
    â€œNo.” Zoe shook her head. “I hardly see him. And I don’t think Emma . . . I don’t think my mother would want him making decisions for her.” Tears slid down her cheeks though Serena could see the girl trying to hold them back. They stepped onto the elevator, hauling their luggage in behind them.
    â€œWell, we’re here.” Mackenzie had not let go of Zoe. She caught Serena’s eye. Serena nodded her agreement. “We’ll stay and make sure your mom is taken care of.”
    Serena had no idea if anyone would or could listen to them. Back when Emma had named them Zoe’s fairy godmothers, she and Mackenzie had signed a stack of paperwork and agreed to be there should Zoe ever need them. But she had no idea where things stood in light of Emma’s grandmother’s death eight years ago, or Emma’s virtual radio silence for the last five.
    â€œJust take us to Emma.”
    â€œBut I think only family is allowed.”
    â€œThen we’ll be her step-sisters for the time being,” Serenasaid. They might have lost five years, but that didn’t mean they would leave Emma alone and unable to speak for herself.
    Serena and Mackenzie piled their luggage in a corner of the family waiting room located just outside the entrance to the neurocritical ICU. Serena was practically vibrating with anxiety and could feel Mackenzie doing the same. But as they contemplated each other over Zoe’s head, a nod from Mackenzie reassured her. Both of them had to do their best to present a calm, united, and hopefully comforting front for Zoe.
    â€œWill you take us in to see her?” Serena felt an urgent pull to get in as quickly as possible and an equally desperate fear of what they would find when they got there.
    Zoe nodded carefully. She hadn’t shrugged off Mackenzie’s arm around her shoulders and didn’t look like she was about to anytime soon. Together they entered the ICU. No one stopped them as they left Zoe in the hall and slipped into the small glass-fronted room.
    Serena had known it was serious. She knew they were entering a neurocritical ICU. Still she was unprepared for the sight of the woman she’d once considered her best friend.
    Emma looked small in the hospital bed, dwarfed by the mass of machines and monitors she was attached to. They whooshed and beeped at regular intervals, their display panels glowing as numbers and graphs appeared and disappeared, the information no doubt feeding into the computers arranged on the other side of the plate glass windows that lined the hall.
    Emma’s head was swathed in bandages. Her eyes were closed. Mackenzie saw no sign of movement behind the lids nor any sign of awareness. Her chest moved up and down with mechanical precision, no doubt due to the clear plastic tube taped inside her mouth. A heavily bandaged leg was propped on a pillow.
    â€œEm?” Mackenzie stepped closer to the bed, no longer able to hold back the tears she’d been so careful not to shed in front of Zoe. “It’s us, Em. Mackenzie and Serena.” They held theircollective breath while they waited for anything that could be considered a response. But there was no indication that Emma could hear her. No sign that Emma was even there, inside the battered and bruised face, that horribly still body.
    â€œZoe’s so beautiful, Em. You must be so proud of her.” Her thoughts drifted back sixteen years ago to when she and Emma had been pregnant. They’d found out within weeks of each other and both of them had married during their first trimesters. But Emma had delivered a healthy baby girl while Mackenzie . . . She reached for the corner of the sheet and tucked it