My sister suggested an escape room for what was ailing me, which was a strange fix — trapping yourself behind a locked door feels more like a metaphor for depression than a cure for it. Then again, I was in strange circumstances. It was January 2020, and I had realized that I needed a divorce the way Hemingway figured out he was broke: gradually, then suddenly. I was 27 weeks pregnant at the time, which meant the demise of my marriage perfectly coincided with the start of my third trimester — just as I’d always dreamed as a little girl. I was finding it impossible to put on pants in the morning. Mostly this was because they didn’t fit, but less literally, it was because I was instantly, cripplingly heartbroken.
Here’s the thing about going through a breakup pregnant: There’s not really a buffet of options for self-soothing. The well-trod Rx of drinking and going home with strangers was off the table for obvious reasons. All I had were useless Enya-coded salves: Reiki healing, sound baths, screaming near or at large bodies of water. (Can you tell I live in Los Angeles?)
A week into my new existence as a Jerry Springer cautionary tale, my younger sister, Alissa, came to visit. My parents had already dragged me to dinners and matinee movies. Alissa, however, is a wonderful nerd, an astrophysicist who likes video games and Dungeons & Dragons. She wanted to do an escape room — one of those self-described “immersive experiences,” which is apparently a way of saying, “We’re going to lock you in a themed room for 60 minutes to solve a series of escalating four-dimensional riddles.” I had always thought of escape rooms as exclusively designed for corporate bonding, the modern, no-touching-required version of an ad sales team doing trust falls. But apparently anyone can pay about 50 bucks to defeat the evil wizard Haladrax before his next dark scheme unfolds. For our morning, my sister had picked out a Mount Olympus-themed room. I don’t know how she persuaded me; maybe the naked sculptures of Zeus? Third trimester is when the horny hormones kick in.
It was unclear who wanted to escape more: us or the “escape master,” a teenage boy with ’90s facial hair charged with explaining the rules of the game to two women — one massively pregnant and in tears — at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning. The task? Stop the war between the Titans and the Gods and save Olympus. The room looked like a high-school production of “Antigone,” but when the timer on the wall clicked on and started counting down from 60 minutes, something miraculous happened: I stopped thinking about my life, and started thinking about how Alissa and I were supposed to make a model hot-air balloon in front of us rise up to the next section of the mountain.
There were times, though, when reality crept in. While my unpregnant sister lifted a floor tile that led into a crawl space — “the Minotaur’s cave” — and spelunked down into it, I had to wait idly, and my mind wandered to my daily mantra of agitations. How do I have a baby alone? Will I ever love again? But a few days later, Alissa got me out of my apartment again, this time to a room set on a creaky ship inside a creakier construction warehouse in Tarzana, and I felt relief the entire time. Handed an assignment and a deadline, the Type A schoolgirl inside me kicked into gear. It also helped that the room banned phones. But most important, during a time when I could barely clean a dish or think a day ahead into the future without melting into a panicky slush, figuring out a four-digit padlock based on sea-shanty syllables was something I could accomplish. And accomplishment feels good.
My sister flew back to Atlanta, but I kept escaping. After I hit all five rooms in my neighborhood, I started venturing farther out. Usually I took the first time slot of the day — 10:30 a.m. — and usually I did them by myself. In the month leading up to the birth of my daughter, I rewrote history and saved a bunch of passengers on the Titanic, discovered the underwater city of Atlantis, returned to Earth after a failed lunar mission and very much freaked out the actor in the “Zombie on a Chain” room, who broke character to say he was afraid he was going to send me into labor.
Each time, I emerged refreshed after a much-needed break from dwelling on my circumstances, and maybe even a little more confident in myself. I could do hard things. Sure, the hard things at hand were, say, “arrange ancient spell books in the right order to open a secret door,” but they allowed me to achieve something even harder: feeling like a capable person, even for a moment, which is an important feeling when you’re about to have a new human come barreling out of you. I got to escape my unbearable circumstances for an hour, but with each room, I also started to glimpse a future version of myself in a reality different than my own — one that might actually be OK.
The last room I solved before my daughter arrived was called “Lab Rat.” I had to solve a series of “experiments” designed by a superintelligent doctor. (Twist! The rats were the scientists and the humans were the test subjects.) I made it out with six minutes to spare. I would have found other places to escape, but the world suddenly shut down because of the coronavirus, and we were all confined to our homes. Two weeks later, I went to the hospital and gave birth — which, if you think about it, was my daughter’s first escape room. (Escape womb?) Maybe it runs in the family.
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