Chapter 8 Priscilla
Hank
Priscilla’s townhouse in Cherry Creek North was the one I’d helped her find after her divorce, three years earlier.
I’d walked through it with her and the realtor.
I’d told her which of the offers to accept.
I’d recommended the contractor who redid the kitchen.
Standing on her front steps on Wednesday afternoon with my hands in my coat pockets, I couldn’t remember a single one of those decisions that she’d actually needed me to make.
Her sister answered the door.
Rachel Bennett was a year younger than Priscilla and looked like a quieter version of her, same fine bones and dark blond hair, without the brightness that Priscilla wore like perfume.
She taught high school chemistry in Littleton.
I’d met her at maybe a dozen of Priscilla’s birthday dinners over the years and couldn’t remember a conversation with her that had gone beyond the weather.
“Hank,” she said. There was something guarded in her face. “She’s in the living room. She’s been expecting you.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Her ankle’s broken in two places. She has a boot and a scooter and a prescription she’s supposed to take every six hours.” Rachel stepped back to let me in. “Otherwise, you’d have to ask her.”
Priscilla was on the sofa with her booted foot up on a stack of pillows and a blanket over her lap.
The cut above her eyebrow had been stitched and was already fading from red to purple.
She looked small and pale and exhausted, and the instinct rose in me the way it had for twenty years: sit down, ask what she needs, fix it.
I stayed standing.
“Hank.” She smiled at me, and her eyes filled. “Thank God. I’ve been texting you all week. I thought you were angry with me.”
“How’s the ankle?”
“Awful. They’re saying eight weeks in the boot.” She gestured at the armchair across from her. “Sit. Please. Rachel, could you get Hank some coffee?”
“I’m fine,” I said. Rachel had already disappeared into the kitchen. I sat on the edge of the armchair. “I need to talk to you about Saturday.”
Her face crumpled. “I know. I know, and I’m so sorry. I’ve been sick about it. How’s Lesley? How’s the baby?”
“They’re okay.”
“I texted her. She hasn’t answered.” Priscilla pressed a hand to her chest. “I just want her to know how sorry I am about the confusion.”
“I need you to walk me through it,” I said. “From the alarm to when I found you. Everything you remember.”
She told me. The alarm. The panic in the ballroom.
People pushing toward the doors. She’d been separated from the friends she was standing with.
She’d gone out into the lobby and seen the smoke on the grand staircase.
She’d seen firefighters on the stairs, she said, bringing people down, and one of them had his arm around a woman with red hair.
“I just knew it was her,” she said. “The hair, Hank. You know how you can spot her anywhere.”
“Then what?”
“Then I was trying to get out, and it was so smoky, and I went the wrong way. I thought the terrace doors would be faster. And I tripped, and my ankle just went, and I hit my head on something, and then you were there.” She reached across the gap between us and put her hand on my knee. “You were there. Just like always.”
I looked at her hand on my knee. After a moment I stood up and walked to the window, and her hand fell away.
The account was clear. It was sympathetic. It was also bothering me, and it took me a moment to work out why.
The lobby at The Summit opened directly onto the front drive through the main doors.
If Priscilla had been standing in the lobby watching firefighters bring people down the grand staircase, she’d have been thirty feet from the way out.
I knew. I’d put those doors there. Instead she’d turned around and gone back through the ballroom and down the long terrace corridor toward the east wing, which was where I’d found her.
People did strange things in fires. I knew that too. Smoke disoriented you. Panic made you stupid. Tom’s safety consultant had told us once that people often tried to leave a building the same way they came into it. Priscilla had spent half the night on that terrace. It wasn’t impossible.
And yet.
“Hank?” she said. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” I turned back to her. “Tom was at the front doors from the time the alarm went off. He never saw anyone bring Lesley out.”
“Well, I didn’t say they’d gone out the front.
I just saw them on the stairs.” Her voice sharpened slightly, then softened again.
“I was confused, Hank. I was frightened and there was smoke everywhere. I saw a woman with red hair. I thought it was Lesley. I told you what I believed. Are you saying I lied to you?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
I didn’t have an answer. What I had was a feeling, and a feeling wasn’t enough to accuse a friend of twenty years of something unforgivable. So I let it go, for then. I told myself she’d been hurt and terrified and wrong, and that people are wrong in fires all the time.
“I’m saying something else,” I said. “Something I should have said a long time ago.”
She went still.
“I can’t keep being the person you call first,” I said. “For everything. I’ve been that for a long time, and I let it happen, and that’s on me. I’m not blaming you. But it has to stop.”
Her eyes went wide. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’m not going to answer the phone at two in the morning anymore.
It means when something goes wrong, you call Rachel, or your therapist, or your other friends.
I’ll still support the foundation. Cheryl will handle anything that comes through my office.
But I’m not going to be your emergency contact anymore, Priss. ”
“You’re punishing me,” she said. Her voice cracked. “For one mistake, in a fire, when I was bleeding on the floor.”
“I’m not punishing you. This isn’t about Saturday.”
“Of course it’s about Saturday.” She was crying now, openly. “Is this Lesley? Did she tell you to do this?”
“No,” I said. “Lesley has never asked me to do this. Not once in seven years.” I heard my own words and felt them settle somewhere heavy. “That’s part of the problem.”
She pressed her hands over her face. I stood there and let her cry, and I didn’t go to her, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Twenty years of habit pulled at me. Twenty years of being the one who made it better.
Rachel came back from the kitchen with a mug of coffee I hadn’t asked for. She looked at her sister and then at me, and her expression was difficult to read.
“I’ll walk you out,” she said.
At the front door, she handed me the coffee anyway, then looked down at it, clearly hearing how strange that was, and took it back. We both almost laughed.
“She told me you gave her your jacket,” Rachel said. “On the terrace. Before.”
“She was cold.”
“She said you told her to keep it for a while.” Rachel was looking at the mug in her hands, not at me. “She was still wearing it when I got to the hospital.”
“I know. My phone was in it.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said slowly. “She mentioned that.”
Something in the way she said it made me wait. But she only opened the door and stepped back.
“Take care of yourself, Hank,” she said. “And your wife.”
I walked to my car and sat in it for a long time without starting the engine. Then I took out my phone and texted Cheryl.
Starting Monday, anything from Priscilla Hart comes to you, not me. Foundation business only. If it’s personal, give her Rachel’s number.
Cheryl’s reply came back almost instantly, which meant she’d been waiting for this text for about fifteen years.
Understood.
At four o’clock, I walked into Dr. Morrow’s office in Cherry Creek for the first time in a year.
It hadn’t changed. The gray couch, the box of tissues nobody touched, the window full of bare trees along the creek.
Dr. Morrow herself hadn’t changed either: small, white-haired, with a voice so quiet I had to lean forward to hear her.
She shook my hand and gestured at the couch, and I sat on the end of it where I’d sat the year before.
Lesley had sat on the other end. The cushion there was smooth.
“It’s good to see you, Hank,” Dr. Morrow said. “What brings you back?”
I’d rehearsed my answer on the drive over, the way I rehearsed everything. I told her about the fire, briefly, and the hospital, and Sunday night and the suitcase. Then I told her what I’d come for.
“I want my wife back,” I said. “I want to know what I need to do. What I need to change, and in what order, and how long it’s going to take. I’m willing to do whatever it is.”
Dr. Morrow looked at me for a long moment and didn’t answer. Then she asked, “What did Lesley say, when she left?”
I told her. The suitcase by the bed. I don’t think you left me in that building, Hank.
I think you’ve been leaving me for years.
I told her about the message I’d deleted at two in the morning because every sentence in them had been asking Lesley for something.
And somewhere in the middle of telling it, I heard what I’d said when I walked in, still sitting there in the room with us.
Steps. An order. A timeline.
“I just asked you for a project plan,” I said slowly. “Didn’t I? Like she’s a building I need to get back on schedule.”
Dr. Morrow didn’t say anything. She waited.
“She told me she’s not asking me for anything anymore,” I said.
“And I walked in here and asked you how to get her back, like it’s a problem with a solution.
Like if I do the steps right, she has to come home at the end.
” I rubbed my face. “It’s her decision. Whether she comes back.
I keep saying I know that, and then I keep acting like it’s mine to fix. ”
The trees outside the window moved in the wind.
“Where would you like to start instead?” Dr. Morrow asked.
“With why she left,” I said. “I think I need to understand that first. Whatever happens after.”
I talked for fifty minutes. At the end, I hadn’t gotten a single step, or an order, or a timeline. I’d gotten a question, which Dr. Morrow asked as I was standing up to leave.
“When you told Priscilla today that you couldn’t be her first call anymore,” she said, “who did you do that for?”
“For Lesley,” I said automatically.
Dr. Morrow waited.
“For me,” I said, after a while. “I think. I don’t know yet.”
“That’s all right. You don’t have to know yet. I’ll see you next Wednesday.”
On the way home I stopped at the King Soopers on Downing Street, because the refrigerator at the house held nothing but condiments and a carton of eggs of uncertain age.
I pushed a cart up and down the aisles without a list, which I’d never done in seven years of marriage because Lesley had always kept the list, and I stood for a long time in front of the crackers without knowing why I’d stopped there.
Then I remembered. Saltines. Ginger ale. Lemons. Hank’s coffee.
I bought the coffee. I didn’t buy the rest. There was nobody at the house to eat saltines, and buying them would have been a kind of pretending I didn’t want to start.
At home, I put the coffee in the cabinet and looked at the list on the refrigerator for a while. Then I left it where it was.