Chapter 20 What Really Happened
Hank
Rachel called on the first Saturday in April, at seven o’clock in the morning.
“She told me,” she said.
I was already awake. I’d been awake since five, which had become a habit. I sat up in bed and pressed the phone against my ear.
“Told you what?”
“Everything.” Rachel’s voice was thick. She sounded like she’d been crying for a long time, or like she hadn’t slept at all.
“I went over last night. I told her about the footage. I told her I knew she’d never been in the lobby, because she’d told me so herself in the ER.
I told her I couldn’t keep pretending I didn’t know.
And she...” Rachel stopped. “Hank, I think she needs to say it to you herself. I think she needs to. And I think you need to hear it from her.”
“Is she willing?”
“She’s terrified. But yes.”
I drove to Cherry Creek North an hour later.
It was a clear, cold April morning, the kind Denver gets between spring snows, with the mountains standing out white along the whole western edge of the sky.
I kept catching myself rehearsing what I’d say when I walked into that kitchen, the questions I’d ask and the order I’d ask them in, and every time I caught it, I stopped.
Rachel hadn’t asked me to come and run the conversation.
She’d asked me to come and hear it. On Speer Boulevard, stopped at a red light behind a bus, I turned the radio off, put both hands on the wheel, and decided that whatever Priscilla told me, I was going to let her finish before I said a word.
The townhouse looked the same as it had in November. Rachel answered the door again. Her eyes were swollen, and she hugged me, briefly and hard, which she had never done before in twenty years.
“She’s in the kitchen,” she said. “I’m going to stay. If that’s okay with you.”
“I’d like you to.”
Priscilla was sitting at her kitchen table, in the kitchen I’d recommended the contractor for, with both hands wrapped around a mug of tea she wasn’t drinking.
Her boot was gone. She was wearing an old sweatshirt from Colorado State and no makeup, and she looked older than I’d ever seen her.
When I walked in, she didn’t stand. She didn’t reach for me.
She looked at me once, and then she looked down at the table.
I sat across from her. Rachel leaned against the counter by the sink.
For a long time, nobody said anything.
“I was on the terrace,” Priscilla said finally.
Her voice was flat. “After you went back inside. I was upset. You’d been checking your watch the whole time I was talking to you, and I knew you wanted to go upstairs to Lesley, and it made me feel...
” She stopped. “It doesn’t matter how it made me feel.
I stayed out there. I was still out there when the alarm went off. ”
“Okay.”
“I came in through the terrace doors. The corridor was already full of smoke. I couldn’t see.
I tried to go toward the ballroom, and I tripped over something, and my ankle just went.
I fell and hit my head on the edge of a table.
” She touched the faint scar above her eyebrow.
“I couldn’t get up. I tried. I kept trying to crawl, and I couldn’t figure out which way to go, and the smoke kept getting lower. ”
Her hands were shaking around the mug.
“And then your phone rang,” she said.
I didn’t move.
“In the jacket. In the inside pocket. It kept buzzing against me. I took it out because I thought...” She laughed, a horrible, cracked sound. “I thought maybe it was you. I don’t know why. I thought maybe you were calling to find me. But it wasn’t. The screen said Lesley.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“It rang twice,” Priscilla said. “I didn’t answer it. Then a text came in, and I could see it on the lock screen. It said the main stairs were full of smoke. It said she was on three east. It said, Where are you?”
I closed my eyes.
Delivered. Not read. The preview on a lock screen doesn’t mark a message as read. Lesley had watched her screen in that hallway, waiting for the word to change, and it never had. Because the person who’d seen it hadn’t been me.
“I put the phone back in the pocket,” Priscilla said.
Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper.
“And about a minute later, you came through the smoke. You were running. You were heading for the east wing. I knew where you were going. I knew exactly where you were going, because I’d just read it on your phone. ”
“Priss,” Rachel said softly from the counter.
“Let me finish.” Priscilla’s eyes were streaming now, but her voice didn’t waver.
“I knew if I told you she was still up there, you’d go.
You’d go up those stairs and you’d leave me there on the floor, and I’d be alone in the smoke, and I couldn’t...
” She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
“I couldn’t be alone again. In the dark, trapped, waiting.
I was eighteen again, Hank. I was in that car.
I could smell the gasoline. Kelsey wasn’t breathing, and nobody was coming, and then you came, and you pulled me out.
You always pulled me out. And I thought, if he goes up those stairs, nobody’s going to come this time. ”
“So you told me she was already out.”
“I told you she was already out.” She looked at me directly for the first time.
“I told myself the firefighters would get her. I told myself she was smart, she was capable, she’d find a way down.
Lesley always finds a way. That’s what everyone says about her.
I told myself all of that in about two seconds, and then I said it.
And you believed me. You asked me if I was sure, and I looked you right in the eye and said yes. ”
I couldn’t speak.
“When we got outside and you started asking where she was, I knew I had to say something. So I said I thought it was her. I said I saw red hair. I made it sound like a mistake.” She wiped her face with both hands.
“And then I kept making it sound like a mistake. For five months. To you, to my mother, to everybody. And I got better at it every time.”
“And the lobby,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, very far away. “Watching the firefighters on the stairs, then turning back toward the terrace. You told me all of that at your house.”
“I made that part up in November. The night before you came over. I lay awake and worked out a story that made sense.” She was crying openly now, her shoulders shaking.
“I’m so sorry. Hank, I’m so sorry. I’ve been so sorry every single day.
I kept thinking about her in that hallway.
Pregnant. Calling you. And I had your phone in my hand. ”
“Did you ever think about telling me?” I asked. “Any of it. Any time in five months.”
“Every day.” She didn’t look up. “Every single day. And every day I told myself tomorrow. And then it had been so long that telling you would have meant admitting I’d kept lying all that time, too.
” She pressed her hands against her eyes.
“It got harder the longer I waited. That’s the only answer I have. ”
I stood up. I didn’t know I was going to until I was on my feet. I walked to the window over the sink and stood beside Rachel, looking out at the small, tidy courtyard behind the townhouse, the bare branches of a crabapple tree, the patio furniture still under its winter covers.
I thought about Lesley on the balcony, waving a bathrobe until her arms shook. I thought about Evelyn Price on the gurney, telling me my wife hadn’t waited for anybody. I thought about the paramedic’s notes that Dr. Kessler had read aloud in November. Reporting party called 911 with exact location.
She’d saved herself and four other people. And the woman sitting at this table had known she was up there, and had chosen to let her stay.
The rage came up in me so fast and so hot that for a moment I couldn’t see.
I’d never felt anything like it. Not at a contractor, not at a bank, not at anyone.
I gripped the edge of the counter with both hands and waited for it to pass, because I knew that if I turned around while it was in me, I would say something I could never take back.
Rachel put her hand on my arm and didn’t say anything.
It passed, eventually. It didn’t disappear. It sank down somewhere and stayed, heavy and cold. When I turned around, Priscilla was sitting exactly where I’d left her, with her face in her hands.
“I’m going to tell Lesley,” I said. “All of it. Today, if she’ll see me.”
Priscilla nodded without lifting her head.
“And this is the last time you and I are going to speak,” I said.
“I’m resigning from the foundation board.
Cheryl will handle the paperwork. I won’t come to your birthday, or your mother’s Christmas party, or anything else.
If you need help, you call Rachel, or your therapist, or anyone else in the world.
You don’t call me. Not in a year. Not in ten years. Not ever.”
She made a sound that was barely a sob.
“I pulled you out of that car when you were eighteen,” I said.
“And I’ve felt responsible for you ever since.
I let it matter more than it should have.
More than my own wife. I’m done. Whatever you owe anyone for what you did, you don’t owe it to me.
You owe it to Lesley. And if she ever wants to hear from you, which I doubt, that’s her decision to make. Not mine.”
“Hank.” Priscilla lifted her head. Her face was wrecked. “I know what I did. I know it’s unforgivable. But I need you to know I’m not... I never wanted her to die. I swear to you. I just couldn’t be alone.”
I looked at her for a long time.
“I believe you,” I said. “I don’t think you wanted her to die. I think you wanted to be rescued more than you cared what it cost anyone else. And for twenty years, I let you believe that was what I was for.”
I walked out of the kitchen. Rachel followed me to the front door.
“I’m sorry,” she said on the steps. “I’m so sorry, Hank.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You did the right thing. It cost you something to do it.”
“She’s my sister,” Rachel said, and her voice broke. “I’ll get her help. Real help. She’s going to need it.”
“I know. I’m glad she has you.”
She hesitated on the top step with her arms wrapped around herself. “Are you going to tell Lesley?”
“Today. If she’ll see me.”
“Will you tell her something from me?” Rachel looked out at the street. “Tell her I’m sorry it took me so long. I heard it in that emergency room in November, and I told myself it was the painkillers, because I didn’t want it to be true. She should have known months ago.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
I got into my car. I didn’t start it. I sat in the cold with my hands on the steering wheel and stared at the dashboard, and I let myself feel all of it.
The rage, which was still there. The horror.
The image of Priscilla on the floor of that corridor, holding my phone in her hand, reading my wife’s name on the screen while Lesley stood in a smoke-filled hallway three floors above her, waiting for the word Read.
For about a minute, there was something else too. Something that felt, shamefully, almost like relief. It whispered that now there was a villain. That now there was someone to point at. That the woman who’d kept me from reaching my wife that night was Priscilla, not me.
I held that thought and looked at it, the way I’d been learning to do all winter.
Then I set it down.
Priscilla had lied to me once, in a burning building, with devastating consequences. She’d be carrying that for the rest of her life, and she should.
But Priscilla hadn’t been in the room when I told Lesley I’d be upstairs at ten and then stayed downstairs anyway.
She hadn’t been the one who missed Lesley’s promotion dinner, or told Cheryl to move the Tuesday nights, or skipped the pottery class and the counseling sessions.
Nor had she been the one who looked at his watch at ten twenty, felt a small, manageable guilt, and decided his wife could wait until morning.
That had all been me. Every bit of it.
Priscilla had kept me from Lesley for three minutes. I’d kept myself from her for seven years.
I picked up my phone and texted her.
Priscilla told me the truth this morning. It’s worse than I thought. I’d like to tell you in person, whenever you’re ready. Today if you want. Or not at all, if you’d rather not know.
Her reply took four minutes.
Come now.