Forget You Know Me

by Jessica Strawser

  But the Toby issue had waited this long. Daniel could stall for another day.

  Molly could not wait. Not as of this morning.

  Not as of a week ago, in fact, when kindhearted, earnest Grant had said to him—so sweetly and unthinkingly and confident he would agree—“Girls aren’t strong.” Then: “I can just tell, from watching Mom.”

  Daniel had cringed, but he might have chalked up his son’s words to the realm of things kids with no filter say if not for the broken look on Molly’s face, her sobs that night when she thought he was asleep, her defensive posture the day after that, and the next. Because he’d known: He bore responsibility for this. He had influenced his son to see Molly as less than. Because he’d treated her that way himself.

  And though things between them were a bit chicken-or-the-egg, he had to admit: He couldn’t recall her ever behaving as incapable until he’d started doubting her capabilities.

  Now their children were doing it, too.

  This wasn’t like the nagging shame he’d been feeling at the office. Not a persistent background alert that had finally drawn his attention, but a blaring, horrifying wake-up call from the one source he’d hoped would be untouched by his shortcomings. How had he not seen it before?

  Suddenly he’d desperately needed her to know that he was sorry, that things would be different now. But he didn’t know how. And now this. She hadn’t even told him about an intruder in their house. This was worse than her not thinking he’d be there for her: This was her not wanting him to be. Not needing him at all. Not holding out her hand for him to take.

  He had two choices: confront Molly about what had happened last night, her awkward silence this morning, and the unmentionables in between, or wait and see if she took the lead. The latter seemed less promising with each hour that ticked by without her lighting up his phone with a text, a call, anything at all. Not so much as a notification that she’d added milk to their grocery list app.

  He shut down his computer, switched off the lights, and, not bothering with the pretense of gathering up work to take home, hustled out without a glance at Jules. It would take nerve for anyone to stop him. He never left early. And he hadn’t been expected today anyway.

  Feeling like a cheat of a cliché, he walked two short blocks to the florist, where he passed over the roses and lilies and stood contemplating a bouquet of yellow tulips. “Those traditionally symbolized ‘hopeless love,’” the clerk called out from behind the register.

  She was young and wide eyed, and said it like it was a good thing.

  Still, it was too spot on not to buy them.

  Back on the sidewalk, he surveyed the storefronts, wanting some other gift, something more original. But he hadn’t the faintest idea of what his wife might really like just now, aside from the many mysterious balms she’d taken to for her litany of pseudo-identifiable ailments. Nothing about a new essential oil diffuser seemed thoughtful or romantic, even if it did cost more than seemed passable.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about that word. Hopeless.

  He walked back to the office parking lot, which was still full, and headed for home, uncertain what he’d do when he got there but no longer able to bear being anywhere else.

  * * *

  Molly was wearing his shirt. His old favorite. Her old favorite. One neither of them had touched in years.

  She was lying on her back on the living room floor, perfectly still on her acupuncture mat, knees bent toward the ceiling. Once, just the sight of her lying down had stirred something within him—an impulse to join her. These days, her body radiated tension—he wasn’t sure if it was true discomfort or just a constant, tentative fear of it, but she seemed to have gotten used to it and adjusted accordingly.

  He never would.

  Worst was the feeling that he must have contributed to how out of sorts she’d become in her own skin. He couldn’t fathom how she’d ever have ended up here had he not failed her. Her growing disappointment in him was easy to recall, but its exact origin was not, and he wanted to go back, to find the precise moment where the discord had begun and do the opposite thing.

  When was the last time he’d seen her reach for anything of his, much less put it on? This particular shirt had meant something to them both, once.

  Did it still?

  As he shut the door to the garage behind him, she opened one eye to confirm it was him—not the jumpy response one might expect from someone who’d escaped an intruder the night before—and closed it again, showing no reaction to the tulips he was holding. He stopped where he stood, waiting to see if she’d look again, feeling ridiculous. Though he’d always thought of their living room as homey rather than dull, the yellow blooms looked unconscionably bright here, too much like forced cheer—the contrast exposing them all as the frauds they were. The wall-mounted flat-screen was muted on one of those afternoon talk shows that try way too hard, and he wondered at the mindless comfort of turning on something that you were neither watching nor listening to.

  Why bother?

  “Home early,” he announced, stating the obvious, and this time when her eyes blinked open they formed narrow slits.

  “Please keep your voice down. Nori’s napping, for once in her life.”

  Poor kid. He guessed she hadn’t slept well last night. But then again, if the chaos had woken her, wouldn’t she or Grant have mentioned it to him this morning? Was everyone counting him out now?

  “You’re wearing my shirt,” he said instead, more quietly. She looked down at herself with surprise, embarrassment flashing on her face, and he still wasn’t able to discern the shirt’s significance or lack thereof, only that perhaps she hadn’t planned for him to see her in it, either way. He waved the flowers with a rueful smile, laid them on the coffee table, and crossed to turn off the TV. She rolled gingerly off the mat and hugged her knees to her chest, looking from the tulips to Daniel with an expectation that didn’t quite mask her dread. He would pretend not to notice the puffiness now evident behind her long lashes, the tell that she’d been crying.

  “Got some interesting calls at the office today,” he lied, sinking onto the couch a safe distance from her. No one had called him, actually. He’d left neighborhood friendships mostly to Molly, not for lack of interest, but for lack of … well, initiative. But he knew that a cop camped outside the house overnight wouldn’t go unnoticed, so it seemed plausible. He cocked his head at her in a way he hoped conveyed more compassion than sarcasm. “Care to fill me in?”

  She averted her eyes, pressing her fingers onto the acupuncture mat’s bed of needlelike tips. No way that didn’t hurt.

  “Maybe you can explain why you haven’t mentioned it yet, while you’re at it,” he added. He couldn’t resist.

  When she looked up this time, guilt pooled in her eyes. “I wanted to call you right away, but I figured you’d just worry,” she began. She opened her mouth again, but nothing came out. On the mat’s needles, the skin around her nail beds whitened from the pressure. Jesus, this was painful to watch. Had she taken him for such a fool that she’d not foreseen this conversation, in some shape? Did she not see that he was trying to do this as kindly as possible?

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning,” he suggested. He sounded calm, reasonable. Not bad, considering.

  She obliged, with the barest of facts: Liza on the webcam. Nori calling. What Liza claimed to have seen. The knock at the door, the flashing lights. The police coming up empty. “I should have called as soon as they left, I know.” She was talking faster now, picking up steam. “But Daniel, we were fine, and I was exhausted. By the time the cops left, it was late, and I knew we’d be safe—there was still an officer outside. Nori was half-awake when they came upstairs, searching the house, and I had to convince her it was all a dream to get her back down.” The muscles in his neck eased up, just a little. So Grant and Nori had been left out of it after all. “I guess it worked, because she hasn’t said a word about it since, but—”

  �
�But neither have you.”

  She shook her head. “You caught me off guard this morning. If I’d known you were coming home early—or even that that was an option—I’d have given you a heads-up. But I didn’t want to tell you in front of the kids, and then it just … I don’t know. I was waiting for the right moment and it slipped away.” Conspicuously absent was any mention of Liza showing up on their doorstep.

  “It slipped away from you to tell me there was an intruder in our house when you were here alone with the kids?” He was losing his cool, but only a saint could withstand this. He wanted to throw something, tip over a chair.

  She frowned, and in her eyes the pools of remorse congealed into something colder, harder. Determination, maybe, or denial. “I’m not even sure there was. There was no sign of it, aside from whatever Liza thinks she saw. The cops looked everywhere. No forced entry, nothing. Though I can’t even say whether the back doors were locked.”

  “You’re not calling Liza a liar? Why would she make something like that up?”

  “She wouldn’t. I don’t know, it could have been a camera glitch or something?”

  He blinked. “Did the cops think that’s possible?”

  “They didn’t seem to know, but they also didn’t seem overly concerned. They asked if I could think of a reason we’d be targeted—”

  “What did you tell them?”

  She glared at him. “I told them of course not. That’s ridiculous. We live modestly on a salary and a half, and we’re nice people.”

  Her voice warbled on the word ridiculous.

  Then again, his probably would have, too.

  “Most likely, it was some random intruder,” she went on, more steadily. “He got spooked and won’t be back. Cop said the worse the heroin epidemic gets, the more break-ins they see. So I don’t think—”

  “Fine,” he said. “Say it doesn’t matter what happened—though I’m not sure I agree with that. It still matters that you didn’t tell me!”

  “We never talk to each other about anything real anymore,” she snapped. “Why talk about this?”

  He drew back as if she’d struck him. She was supposed to be answering his knock at the barrier between them, inviting him in to make this right. Yet minutes in, her tolerance for him had already waned, and here she was, lashing out instead.

  Why, though, was he surprised? He couldn’t even ask her how she was feeling anymore without her shooting back some sort of roundabout statement that amounted to a skeptical Do you really want to know? or a frustrated What difference does it make? Usually he’d walk away from her—something between shrugging it off and storming off—but he had to stop doing that. He had to start staying. Even if it was uncomfortable, or frustrating. Perhaps especially then.

  “Jesus, Molly,” he said. “Have we really grown that far apart? Because that’s all the way apart.”

  There was hurt in the words, emotion he would have usually worked to hide, but honesty suddenly seemed in short supply between them, and he doubled down on it. She looked taken aback, and for a terrible moment they simply stared at each other.

  When she answered, her voice was barely more than a whisper. “I hope not.”

  “Well,” he said, straightening his shoulders. “So do I. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and liquid emotion spilled onto her cheeks. Finally. A sign of life. He lowered himself onto the floor next to her.

  “You must have been scared,” he said quietly. “Thank God for Liza.” He watched her closely, but there was no change in her expression. Best to leave that one alone. For now. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. And I’m glad you won’t be alone again tonight.” She wiped at her face with her sleeve and smiled weakly. He slid the bouquet closer on the coffee table, pulled a tulip out of the bunch, and handed it to her. She hesitated, then took it, burying her nose in the bloom.

  “Florist said they stand for ‘hopeless love,’” he told her. She looked up at him, eyes widening, and a beat of silence hung between them. He waited.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m more of a red roses kind of girl,” she said finally.

  Was this criticism? A dig, even now? He decided not to take it as one. Someone had to stop this between them. So instead, he just asked: “What do those stand for?”

  “I don’t know. Plain old ordinary love, maybe?”

  He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her to him. “Plain old ordinary love it is,” he said.

  And for a moment, it almost felt like it.

  9

  The coverage of the fire read stoically, devoid of the life that had existed—and ended—within the charred walls: unknown start; rapid spread; a lawsuit already pending, it turned out, against the contractor who’d converted the warehouse, alleging that safety codes had been skirted in a couple other projects completed for the same developer. Six floors of apartments, dozens of families and couples and singles housed therein, nearly half of them rendered homeless, the rest gone, just gone, a part of the ash. No one on or above the fourth floor, where Liza’s loft had been, had survived. Except Liza.

  Cold as the reporting was, she was glad she could hold it in her hands. It would have seemed even more insubstantial blinking by her on a smartphone screen. And for the Tribune in her grasp she could thank Max, who evidently—just in case she hadn’t found him charmingly reliable enough—still subscribed to the seven-day print edition.

  She’d raised a half hearted but impressed eyebrow when he dropped it in front of her first thing this morning at his glass-topped dinette, where she sat staring numbly at how different his apartment looked in the early hour and trying not to think of how she’d never see the sun light her own little kitchen again. “You read them every morning? They don’t pile up?”

  “Right here before work, with my coffee and avocado toast.”

  “You’re like a character on an eighties TV show.”

  “Not true. I don’t remember seeing a single avocado in the eighties.”

  “Well, they liked the color for cabinets.”

  The banter while he set the coffee to brew had kept her clinging to some semblance of humanity, until he’d gone to shower and she’d been left sitting here, rereading the front-page article that didn’t contain a trace of it. She wanted to crush the paper, to shove it as deep into the trash can as it would go, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from the spaces between the grainy type, where the real story of her own night was an unwritten footnote.

  Liza Green dodged death last night in a strange turn of events that may have amounted to trading her longest friendship for her life.

  Every single person affected could rewrite this story in a different way, and every one of those versions would hold more worth than the one sitting in front of her.

  She’d write them if she could, one for each loss, one for each survivor. It felt inadequate, to be left imagining them through her own limited lens.

  Ms. Green’s neighbors were not so fortunate. Not Judy Joseph, the grandmotherly type who left peanut butter fork cookies in her mailbox at least once a month, because she “seemed a little homesick, dear” (which, of course, she was). Not Sally Tremont, the single mother who we can only hope was with her baby when the smoke and flames overtook them. Not Christopher Sebold or Kurt Brown, whose names no one in the building even knew before this morning’s casualties were released, but whose songwriting most of them quite enjoyed, when it occurred at reasonable hours. Ms. Green wishes she had told them how talented she thought they were, especially the one who rehearsed sad, sweet ballads about his ex-girlfriend when his roommate wasn’t home.

  Max appeared in the doorway, tugging at the open collar of his gray button-down, and Liza felt comparatively childish in the flannel pajamas she’d dug out of her duffel. But they were all she had. “I really don’t feel right about going to work,” he began.

  “Don’t be silly. You already missed because of me yesterday. And I’m just going to shower and go.�
��

  He crossed to the bread box and lifted a loaf of rye into the air, an invitation. She waved it away, and he frowned. Popping two pieces into the toaster, he crossed to sit sideways next to her, grabbing his seat back as if to restrain himself. “I wish you wouldn’t decide this so quickly, Liza. It’s such a shock. You can take a little time—”

  She shook her head. “We talked about this last night.”

  “I’m just not sure you should be making major life decisions hours after a tragedy like this. Stay here. We’ll get you set up temporarily. I’ll help take care of anything you don’t want to deal with.”

  She had to smile, because she knew it was true. He’d been attempting it for years, always willing to step in where a boyfriend or a brother might. More often than not, she shrugged him off. She was perfectly capable of speaking to the car mechanic about her brake pads. Of course she could haul her new bookcases up four floors by herself. And no, she did not need a pity date to her coworker’s wedding—besides, how would she ever meet someone if she looked taken?

  When it mattered, though, Max’s easy loyalty would leave her swimming in gratitude. Even when he was dating someone, he never neglected their friendship. The last time she’d returned from a trip home for Christmas, he’d been waiting at her doorstep with a deep dish and a six-pack, knowing how empty she always found the place in contrast to the chaos of her family, and how much she loathed the task of taking her tree down alone.

  He was so good to her, she sometimes wondered what was in it for him. She’d never fully leaned into their friendship because a part of her, she realized now, had always viewed her time here as status pending—a fact she’d never dared voice.