Chapter 2 Where Is My Wife?
Hank
I set Priscilla down on the back of the ambulance, the paramedics took her from me, and the first thing I did with my empty arms was turn around and look for red hair.
The front lawn of The Summit had become something I didn’t recognize.
Three hundred people in tuxedos and gowns stood in the snow under the floodlights, some wrapped in foil blankets, some in coats the staff had pulled from the coat check, most of them holding up phones to film my resort burning.
Fire engines idled along the drive with their lights washing everything red and white.
Hoses snaked across the flagstones. Somewhere behind me, a woman was sobbing in long, broken gasps.
I scanned the crowd for Lesley’s hair. In a crowd, it was always the first thing I found. At parties, at airports, across the lobby of every hotel I’d ever built, I’d look up and catch that flash of copper and know exactly where my wife was.
I didn’t see it.
Tom Whitaker, my general manager, was standing near the valet stand with a tablet in one hand and a radio in the other, his tie gone and his face gray with ash. He’d run The Summit for six years. He was the best GM I had.
“Tom.” I grabbed his shoulder harder than I meant to. “Where’s Lesley?”
He looked at me, then at the tablet. “I don’t have her, Hank.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have her?”
“We’ve got two assembly points, front lawn and the tennis courts. Staff are checking guests against the registry.” He scrolled with his thumb, fast. “She’s not checked in at either one.”
“She’s out,” I said. “Priscilla saw her. The firefighters brought her down the main stairs.”
Tom’s face did something careful. “I’ve been standing at the front doors since the alarm went off. I didn’t see anyone bring Lesley out.”
“Then she came out the back.”
“Maybe.” He was already lifting the radio. “Tennis courts, this is Whitaker. Do you have Lesley Cavanagh? Red hair, green dress, thirty-five.”
The radio hissed. A voice came back, thin with static. Negative. No Lesley Cavanagh here.
The ground tilted under my feet.
I turned and went back to the ambulance. Priscilla sat on the gurney with an oxygen mask over her face and my suit jacket still around her shoulders. A paramedic was taping gauze to the cut above her eyebrow. Her left ankle was propped on a folded blanket, already swelling.
“Priscilla.” I leaned into the doorway. “Where did you see Lesley?”
She pulled the mask down. Her eyes were red and streaming. “What?”
“You said the firefighters brought her down. Where? Which stairs? How long ago?”
“The main stairs,” she said. “Before I fell. I saw a firefighter with a woman, and she had red hair, Hank. I thought...” She broke off and coughed, a deep, wet sound. “I thought it was her.”
“You thought.”
“It was so smoky. I saw red hair. I was sure.” She reached for my hand. “Hank, I’m so scared. Please stay with me.”
I didn’t take her hand. I didn’t answer her. I was already running.
The main doors of the lodge were thirty yards away.
Black smoke poured out of them and rolled up the stone facade, and the heat reached me before I’d covered half the distance, a dry, pressing wall of it against my face.
I’d built this place. I knew every hallway, every stairwell, every service corridor.
I knew the fastest route from the lobby to the third floor of the east wing better than anyone alive, and I was going to take it.
Two firefighters stepped into my path. I tried to go around them, and one of them caught me across the chest with his arm and drove me backward.
“Sir! Sir, you cannot go in there.”
“My wife is inside.” I shoved against his arm and got nowhere. He outweighed me by thirty pounds, most of it gear. “She’s on the third floor. She’s pregnant. Let me go.”
“Sir, we have crews inside. You go in there, we lose you and whoever has to come in after you. Where is she? Give me a location.”
“East wing, third floor. The corner suite. Please.” My voice cracked on the word. I hadn’t said please like that since I was a kid.
He keyed his radio and repeated what I’d said. Another firefighter, older, with a white helmet, came up beside him and took me by the arm. His grip was calm and absolutely immovable.
“Stand here with me,” he said. “Right here. We’re going to find her.”
I stood there because I didn’t have a choice. I watched the smoke pour out of my building and tried to understand how the woman I’d believed was safe on the lawn could still be inside it.
It came back to me in pieces, standing there with his hand on my arm.
The bar at nine thirty. Lesley’s hand on my sleeve, her face pale and tired, telling me if I wasn’t upstairs by ten she was going to sleep.
Me promising. Me meaning it. Then the man from the Denver fund had wanted to talk about the Montana property, and Neil had given me a look that said this was the conversation we’d been chasing for six months, and I’d thought, ten minutes. Lesley will understand.
Then Priscilla, catching me on my way to the elevators at five past ten, needing two seconds about the foundation dinner.
She’d pulled me out onto the terrace because it was quieter.
She’d been shivering in that silver dress, so I’d taken off my jacket and put it around her shoulders without a second thought, the way I’d done a hundred times over twenty years.
When she started to hand it back a few minutes later, I told her to keep it for now and I’d grab it before we left.
Her two seconds had turned into fifteen minutes about seating charts and a donor who’d been slighted, and her voice had gone thin in the way it did when she was about to fall apart, and I’d stayed.
I remembered looking at my watch at ten twenty and thinking, She’ll be asleep by now. I’ll make it up to her. Breakfast in bed. The long way down the mountain on Sunday. She’ll understand.
Then Neil had waved me back inside for one last handshake with the Denver fund, and I’d gone.
I’d still been in the ballroom when the alarm went off at ten fifty-two.
I’d tried the grand staircase first, and the smoke had driven me back.
I’d cut through the terrace corridor toward the east wing service stairs, the ones that came out at the loading dock, the ones that would take me straight to our floor.
That was where I’d found Priscilla, on the floor of the terrace corridor with blood running down her face and her ankle twisted under her. She’d grabbed my arm with both hands.
Lesley’s out. I saw them take her down the main stairs. The firefighters have her. She’s outside, Hank. Please don’t leave me here. I can’t walk.
I’d asked her if she was sure.
She’d said yes.
I had turned around. I had been on my way to my wife, and I had turned around, picked Priscilla up, and carried her out the front doors into the clean air, and the whole way across the drive I’d been scanning the lawn for Lesley and feeling nothing worse than impatience that I couldn’t spot her yet.
The radio on the chief’s shoulder crackled.
Ladder Two to command. We’ve got occupants on a third-floor balcony, north side, east wing. Five total. One elderly female with mobility issues, one pregnant female. Reporting party called it in herself. We’re bringing them down now.
The chief looked at me. “That your wife?”
“North corner of the east wing,” I said. “That’s our suite.”
“Then she’s coming down a ladder right now. Go.”
I ran.
I went around the end of the lodge through the side parking lot, slipping on packed snow and catching myself on the hood of somebody’s Range Rover.
My lungs burned. My dress shoes were useless.
I came around the corner of the east wing in time to see the ladder truck with its arm fully extended to the third floor, a platform descending, a cluster of paramedics around a second ambulance.
The ambulance doors were closing.
“Wait!” I shouted it across the lot. “Wait!”
The ambulance pulled out with its lights on and turned toward the highway. I stood in the middle of the lot with my chest heaving and watched it go.
A paramedic looked up from a gurney beside the ladder truck. “You family?”
“Lesley Cavanagh. Pregnant. Red hair. Was that her?”
“That was her. They’re taking her to Aspen Valley. Smoke exposure, but she was talking and alert.”
“The baby...”
“They’ll check at the hospital, sir. That’s where she needs to be.”
On the gurney beside him lay a small, silver-haired woman in a beaded jacket with an oxygen mask over her face. She reached up and pulled the mask aside, ignoring the paramedic’s protest.
“Are you her husband?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“She’s the one who got us out,” she said.
Her voice was hoarse but perfectly clear.
“I was on the floor in the hallway. People kept stepping over me. She stopped. She took us into her room and blocked the door and called for help and told them exactly where we were. She waved a bathrobe off that balcony until her arms were shaking.” The woman looked at me for a long moment.
“She didn’t wait for anybody. I thought you should know. ”
I couldn’t answer her. I nodded, and the paramedic put her mask back on, and I stood there in the flashing lights with nothing in my hands.
My brother found me there a few minutes later. Randy had his keys out and his tuxedo jacket off, and he looked at my face and didn’t ask a single question.
“Mom and Dad are on the shuttle to town,” he said. “They’re fine. Where’s Lesley?”
“Aspen Valley. They just took her.”
“My truck’s in the staff lot. Come on.” He held something out to me. “One of the paramedics out front gave me this. Said it was yours.”
It was my suit jacket. Priscilla’s paramedics must have taken it off her to get at her arm.
I put it on because I was freezing and didn’t know it until that moment. My phone was in the inside pocket where it had been all night.
Randy drove. I sat in the passenger seat of his truck with the heater roaring and the phone in my hand, and I looked at the screen.
Two missed calls from Lesley. 10:57 p.m. and 10:58 p.m.
Two texts.
10:25 p.m. Going to sleep. Don’t wake me.
10:59 p.m. Main stairs full of smoke. I’m on 3 east. Where are you?
I read the second message five or six times.
At 10:59, I had been standing in the terrace corridor with Priscilla’s hands wrapped around my arm, asking her if she was sure.
My phone had been on her shoulders. My wife had been calling me from a burning building, and the call had buzzed against another woman’s collarbone.
“Hank?” Randy glanced over at me. “You okay?”
I wasn’t. I kept seeing the ambulance doors closing.
I kept thinking about a smoke-filled hallway and how long a person could breathe in one, and about the baby, who was the size of a lime, according to the app Lesley showed me every Sunday.
I thought about the ten minutes I’d asked for, and the fifteen I’d given Priscilla, and the way I’d looked at my watch at ten twenty and felt nothing but a small, manageable guilt.
If Lesley hadn’t gotten herself into that room and onto that balcony, I would have been standing on the front lawn looking for her hair in a crowd while she and our child died three floors above me.
I had no explanation for that. I didn’t try to find one.
Randy drove the way he always drove, carefully, with both hands on the wheel, down the dark valley toward town. For a long time he didn’t say anything. Then, somewhere past the airport, he said quietly, “She got herself out, Hank. That lady on the gurney said so. She’s okay.”
“She shouldn’t have had to,” I said.
He glanced over at me and didn’t argue.
I looked out the window at the snowbanks sliding past in the headlights and thought about the first ultrasound.
Eight weeks. A small, dim room at Dr. Kessler’s office in Denver, and Lesley on the table with her sweater pulled up, and the flicker on the screen that the technician said was the heartbeat.
I’d been there for that one. I’d held Lesley’s hand so hard she’d told me to ease up, and I’d laughed, and she’d laughed, and the technician had printed three copies of a grainy picture that was mostly static, with one small pale smudge in the middle.
I’d kept one in my wallet ever since. I took it out now, in the dark cab of Randy’s truck, and couldn’t see it, and held it anyway.
I’d been there for that. I’d been there for the good part. I thought about how easy it had always been for me to show up for the good parts.
The hospital was bright and too warm. A nurse at the emergency desk checked a screen and asked me who I was.
When I said I was the husband of the pregnant woman from the fire, she looked up at me for a moment longer than she needed to, and I understood that the ambulance crews had been talking, and that I already had a place in the story of this night that I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t change.
She asked for my ID. She checked it twice.
Then she pointed me down a corridor. Halfway down it, a curtain slid back and Amy Barrett stepped out, still in her gown, her face streaked with soot.
She stopped when she saw me. She looked at me in a way she never had in the six years I’d known her.
“Is she okay?” I asked. “Amy, is she...”
“She’s okay,” Amy said. “The baby’s okay. They heard the heartbeat.”
My knees went. I put a hand on the wall and bent over, and for a few seconds I couldn’t breathe for an entirely different reason. The baby was okay. Lesley was okay. I said thank God out loud, to no one, over and over.
When I straightened, Amy hadn’t moved.
“Hank,” she said quietly. “She saw you.”
“What?”
“There’s a window in the service stairwell. She saw you carry Priscilla out the front doors.” Amy’s voice didn’t rise. “She was still inside when she saw it.”