Evan and I had gone out on a boat to go diving during our getaway at Sapphire Bay, I recalled. Evan hadn’t seemed nervous being out on the guide’s boat. In fact, he’d seemed extremely at ease and entirely in his own element out on the water.
Thankfully, my brief mention of diving changed the direction of Valeria’s and my conversation. We decided we’d try a dive tomorrow. Valeria said her brother Manny could take us out on one of the boats while we dived.
“One of the sharpest drop-offs on the lake happens right here near Les Jumeaux. I’ve dived it before, but not near your house,” Valeria explained. “Just fifty feet or so from the shoreline, the water depth goes from thirty feet to over a thousand. From that overlook where you paint, you could throw a rock, and it’d sink eleven hundred feet to get to the bottom. They call it the Great Wall. There are boulders the size of houses, and some pretty big underwater caves. Maybe we should do that dive tomorrow, since it’s so close?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Once we reached the house, Valeria went to the kitchen to start meal preparations. I went upstairs to double-check that everything was prepared in her guest room. Afterward, I decided to do a workout in the exercise room, and then sauna.
I heard the muted sounds of hammering in the distance later as I stripped out of my sweaty workout clothes and wrapped a towel around me. It was good to know that the construction crew was keeping it honest, and weren’t cutting out early on a Friday, just because their supervisor wasn’t on site.
The workout facility at the North Twin contained both a wet and dry sauna. Evan preferred the wet one exclusively, while I loved the dry heat, especially from this particular sauna. It got satisfyingly hot, and always melted every trace of tension out of my muscles.
Once inside, I turned up heat to the highest level and stretched out on the cedar planks on the top bench.
Fifteen minutes later I was slick with sweat. I’d forgotten to bring a bottle of water in with me, and now I was feeling dehydrated from the combination of being in the hot sun out on the lake this afternoon, my workout, plus the intense sauna heat.
My legs felt a little rubbery as I stood and descended down the benches. Spots scattered at the periphery of my vision. Fantasizing about drinking quarts of ice water and then taking a cool shower, I reached to push open the door.
It didn’t budge.
I pushed harder, but the door was fixed in place. I stared blankly at the solid cedar door. An adrenaline rush cascaded through my whole body. There was no lock on the door. I knew that for a fact.
I pushed again, then threw my hip against the door once, and then twice in mounting frustration and fear. The impacts caused the black spots at the sides of my vision to scatter toward the center.
“Hey!” I yelled, pounding on the door with my opened hand. “Let me out of here.”
What the hell was going on? Was Valeria out there, playing a practical joke on me?
Even as I thought it, I knew the idea was ridiculous. I realized I didn’t know Valeria well, but she absolutely did not seem like the type to do something as crazy as to hold the door of the sauna shut on her new employer on her second day of work.
Besides, Valeria was even smaller than I was. Even if she had thrown her entire weight to block me inside, I would have felt a give in the door when I pushed. But that absolutely wasn’t the case. It was as if the door had become frozen, an utterly unmovable stone slab. Even if there had been a lock on it, I would have felt more give in the door than I did presently as I pushed, pounded, and shouted.
Recognizing the pressure in my chest as the prelude to panic, I forced myself to pause and try to slow my breathing. It was hard, with what felt like a wall of fear pressing in on me from every direction. It was hot. So hot. I couldn’t breathe the heavy air. Just the distant echo of the word suffocation in my head made it feel like my heart had been pinned outside of my chest, exposed, vulnerable, and convulsing grotesquely.
Think, Anna.
No one is holding the door shut. It just got stuck somehow. You need to stay calm. What should you do until you can get Valeria’s attention?
Clutching the towel around my breasts, I went over to the temperature control and slid the dial all the way to the lowest setting. I couldn’t shut the sauna off entirely, though. The power button was just outside the door. Unfortunately, I’d turned up the temperature up so high upon first entering that it would take quite a while to cool down.
Don’t think about that.
I just needed to make enough noise that Valeria would hear me from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I was feeling so weak-kneed from the intense heat, I hardly felt up to making the necessary ruckus.
Cursing myself for not bringing in a bottle of water, a thought struck me. I dipped my hand in the wooden pail with the dipper we used to throw water on the heating element to create steam. There were several inches of water in it, even if it was probably old and dirty. I lifted the dipper and drank several mouthfuls of water. It was almost too hot to swallow, but I hoped it’d give me the energy I needed.
Then I went over to the door and hammered with my fists and screamed my head off. I called Valeria’s name. I begged. I cursed. When my hands and forearms grew sore from pounding, I got the wooden ladle out of the pail and banged on the door with that.
Every minute or so, I’d try to open the door again, each time wondering if I’d been temporarily insane by imagining it was locked tight.
At one point in this waking nightmare, I climbed the sauna benches and banged on the ceiling with the ladle and shouted, thinking sound might carry through the house to Valeria in the kitchen better that way.
It was much hotter toward the ceiling, though. So I staggered back down the benches, my legs nearly folding under me when I leapt to the floor.
I’d been leaving the last of the water in the pail for an emergency, but it seemed like the crisis was upon me. The water wouldn’t do me any good if I passed out.
How long had I been in here? I wondered after I drank the remaining mouthful of water. It felt like an eternity, but was probably closer to an hour. I usually could only tolerate fifteen or twenty minutes or so in a dry sauna. I pounded on the door again, but my banging sounded weaker. My throat felt cracked and sore. I couldn’t shout anymore.