A Week at the Lake (3 page)

“Why, I can't imagine what would make you think that,” she drawled, stretching out each syllable, opening up every vowel, as she watched the screen version of herself bat spidery black lashes and pucker bright red lips that were certainly far larger and plumper than her own.

“You know I think the world of you.” The eyelashes batted again. Her cartoon hand landed on her Scarlett O'Hara–sized waist. Georgia had an exaggerated version of Serena's face as well as her dark wavy hair and bright blue eyes.

Following her script and the character on-screen, Serena sighed dramatically then mimed looking up into her character's current husband's eyes. Georgia had been married and divorced more times than Serena could count, while Serena had never actually made it all the way down an aisle. But then Georgia had also been charged with, though not convicted of, second-degree murder and vehicular homicide, come perilously close to death three times, and had amnesia every other year for close to a decade.

As the World Churns
was a well-written, equal-opportunity offender that did not require a laugh track. Big-name stars fought and cajoled to be written into an episode. Even Emma had once played an overperky version of herself.

Now in its eleventh season the series still pulled a hefty twenty share and could conceivably go on forever; a mixed blessing for someone who made a generous living off the role, but who could no longer speak in public without eliciting laughter.

Even without the overdone accent Serena's voice was instantly recognizable. The moment she opened her mouth to speak, others fell open in delighted surprise. Then came the laughter as they peered more closely to confirm that she was, in fact, Georgia Goodbody. Or at least Georgia Goodbody's prototype.

What had seemed like a well-paid lark a decade ago had turned into her seminal role, the part she'd be remembered for. The last part she might ever get. Irony sucked. But at least it paid the bills.

From the recording studio, she took a cab home and raced around her town house straightening and packing. She still lived
in the West Village, where she, Emma, Adam, and Mackenzie had met fresh off the turnip trucks that had deposited each of them in New York City, though her current digs were as far a cry from the crumbling rent-controlled walk-up she'd first lived in as Georgia Goodbody was from her real self.

A little over an hour later she settled into the club chair in her therapist's office and crossed her ankles on the ottoman. “Maybe I shouldn't renew my contract. Maybe I should drop out of sight for a year. Have plastic surgery. Try to raise or drop my real voice a few octaves. I could come back under another name.”

James Grant, MD, PhD looked at her and said nothing.

She tried looking back, but he had way more practice with waiting others out. “What?”

“These are things you should discuss with your agent,” he said. “Or the friends you're going to spend the week with for the first time in five years, but whom I can't help but notice you haven't mentioned once during your last three sessions.”

She sighed Georgia Goodbody's sigh. This was what happened when you paid someone to reach inside you and rearrange your guts. She arched an eyebrow dramatically just as Georgia often did. There was the barest twitch of amusement at the corner of his lips.

“I think it's a good thing it's Georgia and not you who owns the kick-ass lethal fan,” he said genially. His face reflected no agenda, nothing to react to.

She settled back into the chair. “It's been five years since I've spent more than an hour or two with either of them. And a year since Zoe turned up on my doorstep while Emma was out of the country on location. I hardly recognized her—that's how involved a ‘fairy godmother' I've been.”

“Okay. Let's go with that. Why do you think Emma stopped inviting you to the lake house? And why did she invite you now?”

These were very good questions. To which she had no real answers. He watched her with a pleasant but unworried look on his face. As if he thought she could answer them if only she tried.

“I don't know,” she said finally. “I don't remember anything in particular happening; she just stopped inviting us. None of us are the people we were back when we met. Not that we even knew Emma was Emma then.”

“I'm sorry?”

“She introduced herself as Amelia Maclaine and she didn't seem to have any more money than the rest of us. She took classes at NYU like I did and waitressed while she made rounds. Nobody recognized her or had any idea who she was. Not until she started getting parts. I think it was
Starlight Express
or
Into the Woods
when she made it out of the chorus that she got outed. We were all kind of freaked out when that happened—I mean, she'd been a child star, a member of the frickin' Michaels family who divorced her parents and then just dropped out of sight. But she was so ridiculously proud of being hired on her own merit. It was only later that we met the grandmother she'd gone to live with, the legendary Grace Michaels who had the house out on Lake George.” Serena smiled, remembering. “If it had been me I probably would have had
Michaels
tattooed on my forehead or shown up at auditions with a note from my famous mommy and daddy.”

“But you were friends.”

“Oh, yeah. The best.” There was a time she would have sworn to this in a court of law; now not so much. “Emma named us Zoe's fairy godmothers and insisted we all spend a week at the lake house for like ten years running. It was a blast. I never saw myself having children but it felt like Zoe belonged to all of us, you know? And then all of the sudden Emma wasn't really available anymore.” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice. She had once considered Emma and Mackenzie sisters. “She had a big career and a child and
Mackenzie was busy in the hinterlands with Adam, and well, I guess we didn't really have all that much in common anymore.”

“So why now? Why did she invite you? And why did you say yes?”

James Grant should consider a career in journalism if this psychiatry thing didn't work out. “Honestly, I have no idea. But I'm more than a little ticked off that she thinks she can just disappear and reappear whenever she feels like it. I said I'd come, but I still have a good mind to back out.”

The session ended and as she paid at the front desk, Serena told herself she could still cancel, could still change her mind. Shit happened. She could claim an emergency and just send a note with her apologies along with the gift she'd packed for Zoe. Wouldn't that just serve Emma right?

S
tanding in the Hall of Fame
. Da-da. Da-da.
And the world's gonna know your
name
. Unbidden, the lyrics from one of her daughter's favorite songs drifted through Emma Michaels's mind. The melody was catchy, the tone triumphant. It wasn't really about baseball as she'd thought the first time she'd heard it, but determination. Dogged persistence. Success. Fame and/or notoriety as the ultimate achievement.

Emma happened to know that having an instantly recognizable name was not all it was cracked up to be. She knew this because her last name was Michaels. As in the large and unwieldy theatrical family, all of whom were descended from actors, and who when left to their own devices found other actors with whom they ultimately created little baby actors. Kind of like a virulent strain of thespian rabbits.

Her particular branch of Michaels had once excelled at playing the perfect family. Put any or all of them on a stage, in front of a movie camera, or even out in public together and they could make you wish your family were even half as close
as theirs. Unfortunately, their day-to-day reality was quite different. Which was only one of the reasons she'd legally detached herself, fled to her grandmother's, and ultimately pretended, at least for a while, not to be a Michaels at all.

Today she was in New York with hours to kill before heading to the lake. At her daughter's request they were having lunch at one of the fancier restaurants on the Upper East Side not far from the Carlyle, where her grandmother's apartment had been and where she and Zoe had taken a hotel room. Emma sincerely hoped this would be the last time she'd be required to dress up to consume food for the next week.

As they entered, there was a muted stutter of surprise followed by a brief pause before conversation resumed. The other diners pretended not to notice them as they were shown to a white-cloth-covered table overlooking a walled garden. But if there was anything Emma knew how to recognize, it was an audience.

“Ms. Michaels.” The maître d' smiled and pulled out her chair.

“Emma.” She smiled back, automatically mirroring his vaguely midwestern accent; she had been born and bred with a finely tuned ear and could do almost any American dialect, with the possible exception of the unnamed one on
Swamp People
, which even the locals required subtitles to understand. “Please. Call me Emma.”

He nodded and smiled again as he pulled out the other chair for Zoe. Her daughter was fifteen and had somehow ended up with far more than her fair share of the Michaels gene pool. Her thick red-gold hair was straight and chopped in angled layers that Emma's curls refused to be ironed, blown, or wrestled into. She was even taller than her grandparents and aunts and uncles, and had the creamy skin, finely chiseled features, and gray-green eyes that attested to their English/Irish heritage. Emma's complexion was only partly creamy and was sprinkled with nutmeg-colored freckles that
not even the best studio makeup people could completely obliterate.

Emma had learned to make the most of what she had. But when you were the runt of the litter and looked more Cockerdoodle than Great Dane, you didn't do Shakespeare. You didn't star with Humphrey Bogart or James Stewart like her grandmother had. Or take direction from Mike Nichols or Stanley Kubrick like her mother. You didn't even play the tragically damaged wife of an unfairly convicted murderer on death row, a part her sister Regan won an Oscar for. You played the girl who couldn't quite get the guy. Or the spunky heroine who picked herself up after her husband left her and somehow finds a modicum of happiness as a greeter at Walmart. Emma had made a great living playing those kinds of parts. At forty-five she didn't get quite as many romantic comedy leads as she used to, though it was possible she'd still be offered the occasional dimple-and-giggle part when she was white haired and stooped from arthritis. Not that her estranged parents and siblings would be any more impressed by her body of work then than they were now.

They looked over their menus, and Emma considered how best to say all the things she wanted to say to Zoe. Conciliatory things that would convince her once and for all that Emma loved her and only wanted what was best for her. Even though despite all efforts to the contrary, she'd somehow turned out to be almost as abysmal a parent as the mother and father she'd so publicly “divorced.” Uncertain, she reached for the bread. If she kept her mouth full she wouldn't be able to say the things she needed to say. But she might not say the wrong thing, either.

In just a few hours the one week she used to look forward to most every year—her lake retreat with the two women she'd known longest and best—would begin. They were the only people on earth who really understood why she'd come to New York all those years ago. They were Zoe's “fairy godmothers.”
The only friends around whom she'd never needed to be “on” and who remembered Zoe as the little girl she'd carted from country to country and movie set to movie set. Her daughter's memory of those happy years seemed to have disappeared along with her chubby cheeks and angelic smile.

If Mackenzie and Serena were here with them at the restaurant, Emma was pretty sure the bread she'd just swallowed wouldn't be turning to lead in her stomach. She was counting on them to help her fix things with Zoe and then somehow, before they all went back to their real lives, Emma would have to find a way to finally share the secret she'd had no right to keep. Then she'd see her attorneys to finish off all the paperwork. Even a benign tumor made a person want to put things right.

They placed their orders. Their retreat, at which calorie counting had always been banned hadn't officially begun so despite all the bread she'd already consumed, Emma ordered rabbit food. Zoe, who got the Michaels metabolism, which appeared to be unfairly tied to height, ordered a burger and fries.

“I spoke with Calvin,” Zoe said after the waiter left. Calvin Hardgrove, movie heartthrob, got top billing as Zoe's father on her birth certificate but made only cameo appearances in Zoe's life. “He said that he'd be away on location all summer but that if I want to stay in his guesthouse while I work on
Teen Scream
I can.”

“No.”

Zoe's lips tightened, but not enough to prevent a response. “Why not?”

Another basket of bread arrived. Emma managed to ignore it.