Chapter 12 Strong Doesn’t Mean Unbreakable
Lesley
The fire alarm at my office went off at two fifteen on a Wednesday afternoon, the week before Christmas, because an intern named Brody had put a bag of popcorn in the break room microwave for eight minutes instead of two.
I was at my desk reviewing a set of mechanical drawings. The alarm began to shriek, and the strobe lights on the ceiling started flashing white, and for a second I wasn’t in the office at all.
I was in the hallway at The Summit, with the haze pressing down from the ceiling and the recorded voice telling me calmly to proceed to the nearest exit.
I could taste smoke. My chest locked. My hands, which had been holding a pen, were suddenly flat on the desk, the way Evelyn Price’s had been flat on the carpet by the ice machine.
“Lesley?” Somebody was standing beside my desk. It was Priya, one of our junior architects, a young woman with a nose ring and a habit of bringing me ginger tea. “Hey. It’s just the microwave. Brody burned popcorn again. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said. My voice came out perfectly normal, which surprised me. “I’m fine. Let’s go outside.”
I stood up. I picked up my coat. I walked calmly down the stairs with everyone else and stood on the sidewalk on Wynkoop Street in the cold for eleven minutes while the fire department came and went and Brody apologized to everyone individually.
People were laughing. Someone made a joke about Brody’s culinary career. I laughed too.
When we were allowed back in, I went to the single-stall bathroom on the third floor, locked the door, sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, and shook for twenty minutes.
I didn’t cry. I just shook, hard, from somewhere deep in my body that I didn’t seem to have any control over.
My heart pounded. My hands wouldn’t stay still.
I pressed them against my stomach and felt the baby shift, a small, fluttering movement I’d only started noticing the week before, and I said out loud, very quietly, “We’re okay. We’re okay. We’re okay.”
Then I washed my face, went back to my desk, and finished reviewing the mechanical drawings.
Priya was waiting at my desk when I got back, holding a mug of ginger tea with both hands. She didn’t ask anything. She set it down beside my keyboard and stood there, looking at me with open worry.
“I had a reaction to the alarm,” I said. It seemed simpler to say it than to let her wonder. “Because of the fire. I’m okay now. I’d rather it didn’t become a thing around the office.”
“It won’t,” Priya said immediately. “I won’t say anything.” Then, after a second, “Do you want me to ask facilities to test the alarms before hours from now on? So there aren’t surprises?”
I hadn’t thought of that. “Yes,” I said. “That would actually help. Thank you.”
She nodded and went back to her desk. I drank the tea and finished the drawings, and at four o’clock I walked into Gail’s office and told her, briefly, what had happened, because I’d rather she hear it from me than from the office.
Gail listened, asked if I wanted the afternoon off, accepted my no, and sent an email to facilities before I’d left her doorway.
That night, I called Dr. Kessler’s after-hours line and asked, very calmly, whether she could recommend someone who worked with trauma.
Courtney Reyes had an office above a bakery in Highland, which meant her waiting room always smelled like cinnamon and brown butter.
She was thirty-one, with sleek black hair in a low ponytail and a direct, unhurried way of talking that reminded me of Dr. Anand.
On her bookshelf, between clinical texts on post-traumatic stress, there was a small ceramic owl and a photograph of her with a very large dog.
“Tell me about the popcorn,” she said at our first session, after we’d gotten through the paperwork.
I told her. Then she asked about the fire, and I told her about that too. The dress, the alarm, the stairwell window, the balcony and the bathrobe and the ladder. She listened without interrupting, and when I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“What you’re describing after the office alarm is a very normal trauma response,” she said.
“Your nervous system learned something that night. It learned that an alarm means you could die. It doesn’t care that it was popcorn.
We can work with that. There are good approaches, and they work well in pregnancy. ”
“Okay,” I said. “Good.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve told me the whole story of the fire, and you’ve told it very clearly, and you haven’t once said you were scared. You said you made a plan. You said you called 911. You said you helped Evelyn. You said you waved the robe. But you didn’t say you were scared.”
“I was terrified.”
“I believe you,” she said. “I’m curious why you left it out.”
I thought about it. The honest answer came to me slowly. “I think I’m used to being the one who handles things.”
“Who told you that you were the one who handles things?”
I almost laughed. “Everyone.”
“Tell me who.”
So I did. I made a list, out loud, sitting on her soft gray sofa with the smell of cinnamon coming up through the floor.
My mother, in Santa Fe, who had raised me by herself after my father left when I was nine, and who used to tell her friends that Lesley was her little grown-up.
My teachers, who put me in charge of group projects because I’d make sure everyone did their part.
My boss, Gail, who told me in every performance review that I was the calmest person in the firm under pressure.
Heather, who called me the smartest person she knew.
Nancy Cavanagh, who told people I was so independent, I didn’t need Hank hovering.
Hank, who’d told Dr. Morrow that I was the strongest person he knew, so he figured I could handle it.
When I got to that one, my voice caught. Courtney waited.
“Strong,” she said. “Independent. Calm. Sensible. Capable. Understanding. Those are all compliments. How do they feel when you hear them?”
“Good,” I said automatically. Then I stopped. “They used to feel good.”
“And now?”
I looked at the ceramic owl for a long time.
“Every time somebody’s called me strong,” I said slowly, “it’s been right before they gave me less.
My mom said I was her little grown-up, and then she’d go out and leave me to put myself to bed.
Gail tells me I’m calm under pressure and then gives me the projects nobody else can manage.
Nancy says I’m independent when she’s about to ask Hank to leave me somewhere so he can help her. And Hank...”
I stopped.
“Hank,” Courtney said gently.
“Hank thought I was strong,” I said. “So every time he had to choose, he chose the other person. Because I’d be fine.
Because I could handle it.” I pressed my fingers against my eyes.
“And I could. That’s the thing. I always could.
I handled all of it. I handled it so well that everybody decided I didn’t need anything. ”
“You sound angry.”
“I am angry.” I dropped my hands. “I’m not angry that I’m strong. I like being strong. I got five people off a burning floor because I’m strong. I’d do it again. I’m angry that everybody treated it like a reason to give me less. Like I got punished for being capable.”
Courtney nodded slowly. “That’s an important distinction.”
“I don’t want to stop being strong,” I said. “I just want to stop paying for it.”
“Then that’s something we can work on,” she said.
Near the end of the hour, I told her something I hadn’t planned to say.
“When the alarm went off at work,” I said, “the first thing I saw wasn’t the smoke. It was the window in the stairwell. Hank walking across the drive.” I looked at my hands. “I can’t seem to pull them apart. The fire and him. Every time I think about one, I end up in the other.”
Courtney nodded. “What do you make of that?”
I thought about it. “I think they’re two different things that happened in the same five minutes,” I said slowly. “The fire is what happened to my body. Hank is what happened to my marriage, and that didn’t start in the stairwell. It just happened to be where I was standing when I finally saw it.”
“The first one I can help with directly,” Courtney said. “The alarm, the smoke, the hallway. There are specific treatments for that, and they work well, and we can start next week. What you decide about your marriage isn’t something that treatment will answer for you. That part’s yours.”
“I know,” I said, and found that I did.
She gave me one small tool to take home: when the panic started, name five things I could see, four I could hear, three I could touch.
It sounded almost insultingly simple. At three o’clock that morning, the bedroom radiator clanked the way the tenant’s note had warned me it would, a sudden metallic bang in the dark, and I sat bolt upright with my heart slamming.
I made myself look around. The window. The streetlight.
The quilt. The pothos on the sill. My own feet, tucked under the blankets.
The radiator hissed. A car passed. The baby shifted.
My heart slowed. I lay back down. It was, I had to admit, not insultingly simple at all.
The following Monday, Gail called me into her office and asked me to lead the Union Station hotel expansion.
It was the biggest project the firm had landed in three years.
A two-hundred-room addition to a landmark building, with historic preservation reviews, a notoriously difficult developer, and a design timeline that would stretch past my due date in May.
Gail sat behind her desk in her red reading glasses and told me she couldn’t think of anyone else who could keep it on track.
“You can handle anything,” she said. “I’ve never seen you rattled.”
Two months earlier, I’d have said yes before she finished the sentence. I’d have figured out the details afterward, the way I always did. I’d have worked until nine every night and never said a word about it, because saying something would have made me feel like I was complaining.
“I’d love to lead it,” I said. “I have some conditions.”
Gail’s eyebrows went up over the red frames.
“I want a dedicated project coordinator, full time, starting in January,” I said.
“Not shared with the Larimer Street team. I want Priya as my second, because she’s ready and she’s better than anyone gives her credit for, and I want her ready to take over the day-to-day when I go on maternity leave.
I want the leave plan written into the project schedule now, not figured out in April.
And I want it understood that I’m not working weekends on this.
If the timeline requires weekends, the timeline needs to change. ”
Gail looked at me for a long moment. Then she took off her glasses and laughed.
“Well,” she said. “That’s new.”
“Is it a problem?”
“No,” she said. “It’s the first time in eight years you’ve asked me for anything. I’ll have the coordinator position posted by Friday.”
She posted it on Thursday. I interviewed four candidates between Christmas and New Year’s, in a conference room with a whiteboard and a plate of Priya’s leftover holiday cookies.
Three of them had architecture degrees and told me about their design philosophy.
The fourth, Marcus Bell, was twenty-nine and had spent six years as a scheduler for a general contractor, and when I asked him how he’d handle a developer who kept adding features, he said, “I’d put a cost and a date next to every one of them and send it to him in writing the same day.
” I hired him on the spot. He started on the eleventh of January.
Before he arrived, Priya and I built the maternity-leave plan into the project schedule, line by line, in a spreadsheet with a column for every task I owned and a name next to each one showing who would carry it while I was gone.
It took us two full afternoons. When we were done, Priya sat back and looked at it.
“This is the most organized thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Most people just go on leave and leave a sticky note.”
“Most people get called at home the whole time they’re gone,” I said. “I’m not going to be one of them.”
I walked back to my desk feeling strangely light. Priya caught my eye across the room and raised her mug of ginger tea at me questioningly. I gave her a thumbs up.
That night, lying in bed, I felt the baby move again, stronger this time, a distinct little tap just below my navel. I put my hand over it and lay there in the dark and thought about what I’d said out loud in Courtney’s office.
For seven years I’d been proud of how little I needed. I’d thought it made me a good wife. I’d thought it made me easy to love.
It had made me easy to leave for later.
I didn’t regret who I was. I’d needed every bit of that strength to get out of that building.
But I was done letting other people use it as an excuse.
I could be the woman who handled a fire and the woman who asked for a project coordinator.
I could shake in a bathroom stall and still be the calmest person in the firm. None of that was a contradiction.
The baby tapped again. I laughed out loud in the dark.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. Me too.”