Chapter 3 I Believe You
Lesley
He came in a little after one in the morning.
By then they’d moved me from the emergency bay to a room on the second floor with a window that looked out on the parking lot and a sliver of dark mountain.
The oxygen mask had been swapped for a cannula that hissed softly in my nose.
Amy had gone to find coffee and a phone charger she could lend me, and the nurse had dimmed the lights, and I was lying on my side with one hand on my stomach, listening to the fetal monitor they’d agreed to leave on because I’d asked.
A nurse named Joyce had come in around midnight to check my oxygen and adjust the belt of the monitor across my stomach.
She’d been working the emergency department for twenty-two years, she told me, and she’d never seen a night like this one.
Forty-one patients from the resort. Smoke inhalation, cuts from broken glass, two broken ankles, a man who’d had a heart attack on the lawn and was now upstairs in the cardiac unit, alive.
She tucked the blanket around my feet while she talked, efficiently, the way my grandmother used to.
“You’re the one who called it in from the balcony,” she said. “The ladder crew was talking about you downstairs.”
“I didn’t do anything special.”
Joyce gave me a long look over the top of her glasses.
“Honey, I’ve been doing this a long time.
People who don’t do anything special don’t end up on a ladder with four other people they got out.
” She checked the monitor one last time and dimmed the lights on her way out.
“Get some sleep. That baby’s heartbeat is the best thing I’ve heard all night. ”
After she left, I lay there listening to it. I found I didn’t want the room to be silent. As long as I could hear that fast, steady sound, I could keep the other sounds away: the alarm, the recorded voice, the glass breaking somewhere below the grand staircase.
The door opened, and Hank stood in it.
He looked terrible. There was soot in the creases of his neck and across one cheek, and his white dress shirt had gone gray.
His suit jacket hung open. His hair, which he kept short enough that it never looked messy, stood up on one side as though he’d been dragging his hands through it for an hour.
His eyes found mine and then dropped to my stomach and then came back up, and the expression on his face was one I had never seen on him before in seven years.
He was terrified.
“Les,” he said.
“Hi.”
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the chair beside the bed, as though he didn’t trust himself to sit all the way back. He reached for my hand. I let him take it. His fingers were ice cold and shaking.
“Is the baby...” His voice gave out.
“The baby’s fine,” I said. “Heart rate one sixty-two. They’re keeping me overnight to monitor my carbon monoxide levels and repeat some tests, but the doctor said everything looks good so far.”
He bent forward until his forehead rested on the back of my hand.
His shoulders shook. My husband, who hadn’t cried at his grandfather’s funeral, who had stood in front of three hundred people five hours earlier and made a toast without notes, wept into my hand in a hospital bed in Aspen, and for a long moment I let him.
I watched the top of his head and felt the old instinct rise in me to comfort him, to stroke his hair and tell him it was okay.
I didn’t. It wasn’t okay yet, and I was too tired to pretend.
When he finally lifted his head, his eyes were red. “I’m so sorry. God, Lesley. I’m so sorry.”
“I need to ask you some things,” I said. “And I need you to tell me the truth, even if it’s bad.”
“Anything.”
“Where were you at ten o’clock?”
He didn’t look away. I’ll give him that. “I was still downstairs. The man from the Denver fund wanted to talk about Montana, and Neil thought we were close to a deal. I told myself it would take ten more minutes.”
“And after that?”
“Priscilla caught me by the elevators. She needed to talk about the foundation dinner. We went out on the terrace.” He hesitated. “She was cold, so I gave her my jacket. I stayed out there until about ten twenty. Then Neil pulled me back in for one more conversation.”
“Where was your phone?”
The muscle in his jaw moved. “In my jacket.”
“On Priscilla.”
“Yes.”
I looked at the ceiling for a moment. I had known, somewhere under everything, that there would be an answer like this.
There always was. It was never a big, ugly betrayal with Hank.
It was a series of small, reasonable decisions, each of which made sense by itself, that added up to him not being where he said he would be.
“I called you twice,” I said. “I texted you from the hallway. The main stairs were full of smoke.”
“I know. I saw them in the truck on the way here.” He swallowed. “I didn’t have my phone, Les. I swear to God I didn’t know.”
“Okay. So tell me about the fire.”
He told me. He told me about the alarm, about trying the grand staircase and being driven back, about cutting through the terrace corridor toward the east wing service stairs. He said he’d been coming for me. He said it quietly, without drama, and I noticed he didn’t make it sound heroic.
Then he told me about finding Priscilla on the floor with her ankle twisted and blood on her face, and what she said.
“She told me you were already out,” he said. “She said she’d seen the firefighters bring you down the main stairs. She said you were outside.”
“And you believed her.”
“She was sure. I asked her if she was sure, and she said yes.” He rubbed his face with both hands.
“She couldn’t walk. I thought you were safe on the lawn.
I picked her up and carried her out, and the whole way across the drive I was looking for you in the crowd.
Then Tom told me you weren’t checked in anywhere, and I went back to Priscilla, and she said she thought it was you.
She’d seen red hair.” He laughed once, a terrible, broken sound.
“I ran for the doors. Two firefighters stopped me. I was standing there with a fire chief holding my arm when the ladder crew called in that they had a pregnant woman on a balcony in the east wing.”
I watched him while he talked. I know my husband’s face.
Hank is a skilled negotiator and a terrible liar, which people who’ve sat across a table from him never believe until they’ve been married to him.
When he lies, even about something small, like whether he remembered to call his mother back, he gets very still and very reasonable and his voice slows down.
None of that was happening. His voice kept cracking.
He kept losing the thread and finding it again.
“Did you look up?” I asked. “When you carried her out. Did you look up at the east wing?”
He closed his eyes. “No.”
“I was standing at the window in the service stairwell,” I said. “I watched you walk across the drive. I thought, maybe he’ll look up.”
“I didn’t know you were there.”
“I know.”
He opened his eyes.
“I believe you,” I said. “I believe she told you I was out. I believe you’d have come for me if you’d known I was still inside.”
The relief that crossed his face was so total that it was almost painful to look at. His whole body loosened. He squeezed my hand in both of his and bowed his head over it again, and I heard him let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. Les, I thought... when Amy told me you’d seen me, I thought you’d believe I just left you there.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Okay.” He nodded several times, fast. “Okay. We’ll figure out what happened with Priscilla. I’ll talk to her. I’ll find out why she said it. And we’ll get you home, and I’ll clear my schedule, and...”
“Hank.”
He stopped.
“That doesn’t fix us,” I said.
He looked at me with genuine incomprehension. It would have been easier if he’d looked guilty. I could have worked with guilt. Instead he looked the way he might have looked if I’d told him the sky was green.
“I don’t understand,” he said slowly. “You just said you believe me.”
“I do believe you. About the fire.”
“Then what...”
“You were supposed to be upstairs at ten,” I said.
“The fire didn’t start until almost eleven.
You weren’t upstairs because of an investor, and then because of Priscilla, and then because of the investor again.
If the building had never caught fire, you’d have come to bed around midnight, and I’d have been asleep, and in the morning you’d have been so sorry.
You’d have brought me breakfast. And I’d have forgiven you, because I always do. ”
“That’s not fair. Nobody could have known.”
“I’m not talking about the fire.” I kept my voice level. It took effort. “I’m talking about ten o’clock. I told you exactly what I needed. I told you what time. I told you what would happen if you weren’t there. And you promised, and then you decided I could wait.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
“You said it yourself,” I said. “You told yourself it would take ten more minutes. You told yourself I’d understand.”
“Les, I’ve been working on this deal for six months...”
“I know. There’s always something.” I pulled my hand gently out of his and rested it back on my stomach. “I’m very tired, Hank. I’ve breathed a lot of smoke and I’ve been scared out of my mind and I want to sleep. I don’t want to do this tonight.”
“Okay.” He sat back, looking stunned. “Okay. We don’t have to talk about any of this now. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here.”
“I’d rather you weren’t.”
He flinched.
“Amy’s staying with me,” I said. “You can wait in the family lounge if you want. Or go to the hotel in town where your parents are. But I want to sleep, and I can’t sleep with you sitting there watching me.”
For a moment I thought he might argue. His jaw set in the way that meant he was about to explain why his plan was better than mine. Then something shifted, and he stood up.
“I’ll be in the lounge,” he said. “If you need anything. Anything at all.”
“Okay.”
He went to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame. “Priscilla’s here too,” he said without turning. “Down the hall. They think her ankle’s broken. I thought you should hear it from me.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
He left.
I lay in the dim room and listened to the cannula hiss and the monitor count out our baby’s heartbeat.
Amy came back a few minutes later with two cups of decaf tea and a phone charger.
She looked at my face and set the tea down on the tray table without saying anything, and pulled the chair closer to the bed, the one Hank had been sitting in.
“I passed him in the hall,” she said eventually. “He looked like somebody had hit him with a truck.”
“I told him it doesn’t fix us.”
Amy wrapped both hands around her tea. She didn’t ask what I meant. That was one of the things I loved about Amy. She’d been married to Neil for fifteen years, and she’d sat through enough company dinners beside me to understand exactly what I meant.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Do you know what you want?”
I thought about it. The honest answer surprised me with how clear it was. “I know what I don’t want,” I said. “I don’t want to go home and wait for the next time. I don’t want to spend another seven years being reasonable.”
Amy nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“You’re not going to tell me I’m overreacting? That I nearly died and I’m in shock and I shouldn’t make any decisions?”
“You nearly died, and you’re probably in shock,” Amy said. “And you should make whatever decisions you want. I’m not going to tell you what to do, Les. I’m just going to sit here.” She reached over and took my hand. “For as long as you want me to.”
She turned on some old sitcom with the volume low, and she held my hand until I fell asleep.
I dreamed about the window in the stairwell. In the dream Hank looked up.