Chapter 1 She Gets Herself Out
Lesley
The third-floor corridor was worse than when I’d left it.
In the few minutes I’d spent in the stairwell, the haze near the ceiling had thickened into a dark, rolling layer that hung lower than the tops of the doorframes.
The sconces had dimmed to smudges of yellow.
The alarm hadn’t stopped, and the recorded voice kept calmly instructing us to proceed to the nearest exit, which might have been funny if my lungs hadn’t been burning.
The man in the dress shirt came through the stairwell door behind me, coughing hard, and two more guests stumbled out after him.
One was a heavyset man in a tuxedo. The other was a woman I recognized from the hospital foundation board.
The barefoot couple was gone. I hoped they’d found a way down, and I let myself hope it for exactly one second before I put the thought away.
“Are there other stairs?” the woman asked. Her mascara had run in two dark tracks down her cheeks. “Is there another way out?”
There wasn’t. I knew the east wing well enough by then. The grand staircase, the service stairs, and the elevators we’d been told not to use. That was all of it.
I breathed through the wet towel and made myself think the way I would if this were somebody else’s emergency, a problem at work, a budget with numbers that didn’t add up.
Smoke rose and spread. Both stairwells had turned into chimneys.
The corner suites on this floor had balconies, though, and the balconies faced outside, where the fire trucks were.
“We’re going into a room,” I said. “One with a balcony. We close the door, block the smoke, call 911, and tell them exactly where we are.”
The man in the tuxedo shook his head. “We should keep trying to get down. We can’t just sit here and wait for somebody.”
“We won’t be sitting and waiting,” I said. “We’ll be making sure they know where to find us. The stairs are full of smoke from the second floor down. You saw it. If you want to try again, I can’t stop you, but I’m pregnant and I’m not going back in there.”
I hadn’t planned to say it. It came out flat and certain, and it changed something in all three of them.
The woman from the foundation board put her hand on my back.
The man in the dress shirt nodded. The man in the tuxedo glanced at the stairwell door, then back at me, and finally gave one short, unhappy nod.
“Which room?” the man in the dress shirt asked.
I held up the key card I’d grabbed without knowing why. “Mine. It’s the corner.”
We were halfway down the hall when I nearly tripped over someone.
She was sitting on the carpet with her back against the wall beside the ice machine, a small woman in her seventies with short silver hair and a beaded evening jacket.
One of her shoes had come off. Her hands were pressed flat against the floor on either side of her, and she was breathing in short, frightened gasps.
I crouched beside her. “Hi. I’m Lesley. Are you hurt?”
“My hip,” she said. “I had it replaced in the spring. I fell when the lights went funny, and I can’t get up by myself. Everyone kept running past.” She said it without self-pity, almost apologetically, and my throat tightened for reasons that had nothing to do with the smoke.
“What’s your name?”
“Evelyn. Evelyn Price.”
“Okay, Evelyn. We’re going to get you up and take you somewhere safer.” I looked over my shoulder. “Can you help me with her?”
The man in the dress shirt came back without a word.
His name, I learned later, was Martin Sokol, and he’d flown in from Chicago that morning for a conference and wandered into the gala because the bar poured better whiskey.
Together we got Evelyn onto her feet, her arms over our shoulders, and half carried her the last thirty feet to my door.
The lock flashed green on the first try. I have never been so grateful for a working key card.
Inside, the air was almost clear. Smoke had started to creep in around the edges of the door but hadn’t filled the room yet.
I settled Evelyn on the sofa and went straight to the bathroom, yanked every towel off the racks, and threw them into the tub.
I turned the cold water on full and asked the woman from the foundation board, whose name was Denise, to soak them and pass them to me.
Then I jammed them along the bottom of the door and pushed them hard into the gap with my foot.
“Balcony,” I said. “Somebody open the balcony door.”
The man in the tuxedo slid it open, and cold night air poured in, sharp and clean and so beautiful I nearly cried.
Below us, the side parking lot was full of flashing lights.
I could hear engines and shouting and the deep rumble of a generator.
The main lodge rose to our left, and from this angle I could see smoke pouring off its roof in a black column that blotted out the stars.
I dialed 911 with fingers that didn’t feel like mine.
“911, what is the address of your emergency?”
“I’m at The Summit Resort, the fire,” I said.
“My name is Lesley Cavanagh. I’m on the third floor of the east wing, in the corner suite on the north end.
Room 312. There are five of us. One is in her seventies and can’t walk well.
I’m twelve weeks pregnant. Both stairwells are full of smoke, so we’ve shut ourselves in a room and we’re going out on the balcony. ”
The dispatcher repeated it back to me, and I corrected her once. East wing, not west. North corner, not south. She told me she was relaying it to the crews on scene right now, asked me to stay on the line, and told me to signal from the balcony so they could spot us.
I grabbed the white bathrobe I’d dropped earlier, went out onto the balcony, and waved it over the railing in big, slow arcs. My arms shook. I kept waving.
“They see you,” the dispatcher said after a minute. “Stay where you are. A ladder is coming to you.”
I have no idea how long it took. Two minutes, maybe five.
The smoke seeping under the door grew thicker despite the towels, and Martin wedged a chair beneath the handle as though that would help.
Denise sat beside Evelyn and held her hand.
The man in the tuxedo, who never did tell me his name, stood at the edge of the balcony and cursed quietly and continuously at the sky.
I kept the phone at my ear and my other hand over my stomach, as though my palm could shield the baby from the air.
The ladder rose out of the flashing lights, the platform at the top swaying slightly as it came level with the railing. Two firefighters in full gear rode it up. One of them, a broad-shouldered woman whose helmet read RUIZ, leaned toward us.
“Who’s first?”
“Her.” I pointed at Evelyn. “She had a hip replacement this spring. She can’t climb.”
Ruiz nodded. The two firefighters lifted Evelyn over the railing onto the platform with a gentleness I wouldn’t have expected from people dressed like that. The platform descended. It came back for Denise and the man in the tuxedo, and then it came back for Martin and me.
Martin tried to insist I go ahead of him.
I let him help me over the railing, because it was faster than arguing and my legs had turned unreliable.
I set my phone on the balcony table to free both hands and never thought about it again.
When I stepped onto the platform, Ruiz took one look at me and put a gloved hand on my shoulder.
“You the one who’s pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“You the one who called it in?”
“Yes.”
“Good job,” she said, and the platform dropped away from the balcony, and I watched the corner suite where I had been waiting for my husband disappear into the smoke.
On the ground, everything happened fast. A paramedic fitted an oxygen mask over my face before my feet had steadied.
Someone wrapped a foil blanket around my shoulders.
I kept telling people I was pregnant, twelve weeks, and every time I said it their faces changed and they moved a little faster.
I heard someone say smoke inhalation, someone else say carbon monoxide, and a third voice say we need to transport her now.
Before they loaded me into the ambulance, I saw Evelyn on a gurney a few yards away, a paramedic bending over her with a penlight.
I pulled the oxygen mask down and called out that she’d had a hip replacement in the spring and had fallen in the hallway, and that someone needed to check it before they moved her.
The paramedic looked up, startled, and then nodded and made a note.
Evelyn lifted one hand off the blanket in a small wave.
Martin Sokol appeared at my elbow, his dress shirt streaked gray, a foil blanket around his shoulders like a cape.
“You’re a hell of a person to be stuck in a fire with,” he said hoarsely.
Denise hugged me from the other side, careful of the mask, and whispered something I couldn’t hear over the engines.
Then the paramedic touched my arm and said it was time, and I let myself be helped up the steps into the back of the ambulance.
In the ambulance, the paramedic, a young man with a tired face and very kind eyes, clipped something onto my finger and asked my name, the date, and who the president was. I answered all three correctly and then asked him if the baby was okay.
“We’re going to find out,” he said. “Hospital’s twenty minutes. Keep breathing that oxygen for me.”
I breathed.
The ride down the valley was a blur of red light through the rear windows and the paramedic’s calm voice asking me how I was doing every few minutes.
I kept my hand on my stomach. I thought, for no reason I could explain, about the Sunday in October when Hank and I had driven up to Evergreen to tell his parents.
He’d made me wait in the car while he went in first, because he wanted to see his mother’s face when I walked through the door holding the ultrasound picture.
Nancy had screamed. Clive had put down his coffee and walked out of the kitchen without a word, and Hank had found him ten minutes later in the workshop, crying into a shop rag.
On the drive home, Hank had held my hand on the gearshift the whole way down the canyon and kept saying, over and over, We’re having a baby, Les, as if he needed to hear it out loud to believe it.
I held on to that memory in the ambulance. I didn’t let myself think about anything that had happened after ten o’clock. There would be time for that. Right now there was only the baby, and the road, and the paramedic telling me we were almost there.
At the hospital in Aspen they took me straight back.
There were bright lights and cold hands and a doctor who introduced herself as Dr. Anand and asked me questions in a voice so steady that some small, tight part of me began to loosen.
They drew blood to check my carbon monoxide level.
They kept the oxygen on. Then a nurse wheeled in an ultrasound machine and squeezed cold gel onto my stomach, and Dr. Anand pressed the wand against my skin and moved it slowly, watching the screen.
I watched her face instead. I couldn’t bear to look at the screen.
The room filled with static. Then, underneath it, a sound.
Fast. Steady. Galloping.
“There we go,” Dr. Anand said softly. “That’s a good, strong heartbeat. One sixty-two.”
I put my hand over my mouth. I had been holding myself together for so long, in the corridor and the suite and on the ladder and in the ambulance, and all of it came apart at once.
I cried the kind of crying that doesn’t care who’s watching.
The nurse handed me tissues. Dr. Anand turned the screen toward me, and there it was, the small gray shape I had seen once before at my first appointment, with the flicker of a heart at its center.
“Your levels look reassuring so far,” Dr. Anand said. “We’ll keep you on oxygen for a few more hours and monitor you overnight, and we’ll repeat some tests in the morning. But right now, your baby looks like it’s doing just fine.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
For a few minutes, relief was the only thing inside me. There was no room for anything else.
Then the nurse asked whether there was someone they should call, and the relief receded far enough for everything else to come back.
“My husband,” I said. “Hank Cavanagh. He was at the resort. I left my phone on the balcony.”
The nurse wrote it down. Before she could leave, the curtain slid back and Amy Barrett came in, still in her navy gown, her dark hair falling out of its pins and her face streaked with soot. She crossed the room in three steps and hugged me so hard it hurt.
“Oh my God, Lesley. Oh my God. They said a pregnant woman came down a ladder, and I knew it had to be you.” She pulled back and held my face in both hands. “Are you okay? Is the baby okay?”
“The baby’s okay,” I said, and my voice cracked on the words. “We just heard the heartbeat.”
She burst into tears. Amy always cried more easily than I did. It was one of the things I loved about her.
“Neil drove me down,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her wrist. “They were bringing people from the resort here, and I wanted to find you. I couldn’t get anyone on the phone.”
“Where’s Hank?”
Amy’s expression changed.
It was a small change, and anyone else might have missed it. I’d known her for six years, though, and I saw her hesitate.
“Amy.”
“The last time I saw him,” she said slowly, “he was at the ambulance out front with Priscilla. He carried her out. I think she was hurt.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw him.”
Amy looked at me, confused. “You saw?”
“There’s a window in the service stairwell. I watched him carry her across the drive while I was still inside.”
She didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.
She pulled the plastic chair close to the bed and sat down in her ruined gown and took my hand.
After a minute she texted Neil to tell him where she was, and then she put her phone face down on her knee and left it there.
We sat like that for a long time, not talking, while the monitor counted and the hallway outside filled and emptied with the sounds of other people’s emergencies.
I lay back against the pillow and looked up at the ceiling tiles, at the tiny holes punched in them, and listened to the monitor beside the bed track my baby’s heartbeat, fast and faithful.
Something inside me went very quiet. I could still feel everything, the fear and the relief and the ache in my chest from the smoke, but underneath all of it, a door I had been holding open for years swung softly closed.