Forget You Know Me

by Jessica Strawser

  “Chicago is better with you in it,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” she said ruefully. “Chicago is trying to kill me.” She’d meant it as a sort of joke, but to her surprise, she burst into tears. Max startled, shaking his head vehemently. “Don’t shake your head,” she sobbed. “It’s true. It’s a miracle we’re having this conversation. I should be dead!”

  The outburst felt strangely good—the truest thing she’d said since she’d called Max trembling from the sidewalk the afternoon before. She pushed back her chair and dropped her face into her hands. He leaned down, touched his forehead to hers, and rested his hands gently on her knees.

  “I’m sorry!” she cried, her voice muffled by her palms.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about.” The toaster popped, but neither of them moved. They sat that way for a minute or two, until her heaves slowed to sniffles. Finally, he tapped the bottom of her chin with a fingertip, willing her to raise her red eyes to his. She was surprised to find them equally watery.

  “Do you think I haven’t thought about it?” he said. He handed her a napkin from the pile in the center of the table, and she pressed the rough square to her cheeks. “You got unbelievably lucky, Liza. What a weird-ass way to survive, but thank God. I’d unequivocally say that you’re supposed to be alive. I don’t want to hear any more of this I should be dead talk. This isn’t—what was that kind of campy movie, with a bunch of sequels?”

  She gave a little laugh. “Final Destination.”

  “Right. Chicago isn’t going to hunt you down until it gets you. Those corner-cutting contractors, though, will have hell to pay. We’ll find out this was human error, not destiny.”

  Did it matter? The terrible outcome was the same. And the ways that it could come about suddenly seemed endless.

  “It’s just—you can walk out of this apartment, turn left, and be fine. Turn right and be leveled by a bus. How screwed up is that? How is anyone supposed to know which way to go?”

  He blinked. “I guess we’re not supposed to know. We’re just supposed to live our lives.”

  He made it sound so simple. Someone less prone to her special kind of almost anxiety would have found it comforting.

  She took a shaky breath, managing a sad smile. “I know you’re right. And I know this isn’t what you want to hear … but I don’t see a point in rebuilding a life that wasn’t making me all that happy in the first place.”

  He looked stung, and she rushed ahead. “It’s nothing to do with you, Max. Being friends with you is the best thing I have going here. It might even be the only thing that’s been keeping me here. The job was supposed to be this big step up, but I’m a smaller fish in a bigger lake. My coworkers are … we can’t seem to find much else in common. I’ve been trying to ground myself in this town, and I just—didn’t. I think I did it wrong, moving to the city.” She tried a little laugh. “I should have found a spot outside of downtown, where I could actually afford to hang out and make friends. It’s no wonder I’ve wasted the last couple years on a string of bad dates—they picked up the tab!”

  “Come on. Some of them weren’t that bad. I wouldn’t say you’ve wasted the last couple years.” She hadn’t meant the words as harsh, but she understood their effect was worsened by the fact that he hadn’t been expecting them. A stab of guilt hit her—for never letting on how she’d been feeling, for being her blunt, don’t-hold-back self about everything but this, for trying too long and too hard to fake her way through until things got easier. But she’d known, on some level, that Max being Max, he’d only get caught up trying to fix the unfixable.

  Hell, maybe he’d have succeeded, if she’d let him. But it was too late now.

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I just never felt like I belonged, outside of tagging along with you. If I was waiting for a sign that it was okay to go home, this is it.”

  “Shouldn’t you at least give two weeks’ notice?”

  She raised an eyebrow. He was reaching and knew it. Her boss had made it clear he found her the most capable of his whole management team, but that didn’t change the fact that—as both the only woman and the only transplant from a less expensive market—she was paid the least. His repeated denials of her requests for a raise had rubbed away any sense of duty she might have felt otherwise.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Max persisted. “You’re—” He looked away, then back at her, clear eyed. “I guess you’re my best friend.”

  “And I guess you’re mine.” If there was ever any doubt, the competition had dwindled after the trip to Molly’s. She nudged his knees with her own. “It’s not that far to visit. I’ll only be staying with my brother until I can find a job and apartment—he’ll want me out before the baby arrives. And he has enough room that even his guests can have guests. Compared to anything here, it’s ridiculously big.”

  Luke hadn’t hesitated when she’d called him yesterday, for which she was grateful. She didn’t want to put in two weeks at work and make insincere platitudes about wishing things had turned out different. Didn’t want to bide her time here on the futon, waiting for calls from insurance agents and whoever else would be involved with sweeping up the ash of this mess. She just wanted to go. Staying with Luke and Steph wouldn’t be like going back to her parents’ house—it wouldn’t feel like a step back, only a break, an intermission to splash some water on her face and regroup. And now that she had an external reason to go, she wouldn’t have to worry that it would look like city life had chewed her up and spit her out.

  It would look only like what it was: like the world had tried to swallow her whole.

  And she had survived.

  So far.

  10

  In spite of the fact that Molly hadn’t managed sleep again last night, it was nice to be busy—mindlessly, outwardly, dutifully busy. The displays along the front section of the visitor center had been moved to repair the flood damage, and the director decided to have the work crew add a membership desk while they were at it. Molly loved that just days later this rustic building she’d come to love wasn’t just good as new but better—that you could almost be glad of the temporary damage, thanks to the permanent improvement. As they partially reopened to allow access to the naturalist stations and restrooms, pardon our dust, Molly’s normal sections of the Nature Shop and birdwatching outposts remained closed, and so the shuffling and reorganizing fell to her while the others made themselves available to the morning crowd.

  If only people were as easily put back together, relationships as easily remodeled.

  She’d never stop appreciating that this was what passed for a crazy day at the office now. In her earliest years of parenthood, she’d been as frantic as working moms came, caught up immediately and swiftly in the Monday-through-Friday hamster wheel. Her friends at the office assured her that these mornings of crying in the daycare parking lot would pass, that one day she’d give up on spending her lunch breaks back at the infant room, nursing her son, and rejoin their group outings to Thai bistros and Indian buffets. But once he was weaned, she took to working through that hour in hopes of leaving on time, which for her division was early. Then Nori came along, and it wasn’t so much that Molly couldn’t stand to leave the kids—truthfully, some days she handed them over gladly. It was that she couldn’t stand the pace of it all, the run-run-run, the what did I forget?, the Mommy will be back, the just a minute, the constant feeling of being two steps behind everyone else even though she seemed to be trying ten times harder, forcing herself through the motions even while enduring the pain, which she hadn’t yet thought of as chronic, but which seemed to have a new source every day. She and Daniel couldn’t afford for her not to work, but she thought she might get away with something less breakneck, a reduced salary if it came with reduced stress. The mere prospect of seeking it out, though—updating her résumé, finding a suit to fit her post-baby body, sneaking off to interviews—was enough to overwhelm her.

  Then one day, she’d called in sic
k, thrown on the most casual clothes that could pass as professional, dropped the kids off as per usual, and come here. These days, she wouldn’t beat herself up over taking a day for a little self-care, but in that overextended phase she’d felt so guilty about not devoting every “free” minute to her babies that she hadn’t even been able to enjoy the stolen morning, in spite of the fact that she hadn’t been able to resist stealing it.

  As she’d sipped her lukewarm coffee right here in the visitor center, staring lethargically into the cold stone fireplace, something had happened. Something that wasn’t about her, not at first. She became aware of the conversations floating in and out of the lodge. The bright-eyed school groups with their cries of “Whoa!” and “Cool!” The patient chuckle of the naturalist. The local artists restocking their wares on consignment, remarking kindly on one another’s pottery and jewelry and prints. The retirees analyzing their new plantings for the herb wall. This wasn’t just a nonprofit; there was a community here, a place for good, a feeling of connection, and to Molly the pull was like a rescuer’s rope lowered to a ledge where she’d been stranded so long she’d lost all sense of time. By the time she’d headed home, at last refreshed from exploring the trails, she’d already spoken with a hiring manager and had regained enough strength to withstand Daniel’s grumbling about the waste of taking a job that didn’t even require her college degree. He’d just gotten a promotion, after all. She wasn’t putting a strain on anything.

  Discounted enrollment at the on-site preschool helped sell Daniel on the idea, as did her willingness to drop the pretense of expecting him to share in a certain segment of the family duties: the kids’ activity calendars, shopping, cooking, laundry. They argued less as a result, though they communicated less, too.

  Reducing her routine to thirty hours a week also left more time to focus on trying to heal, and to botch those efforts spectacularly. But that wasn’t the nature center’s fault.

  Most days here weren’t like this one. Ordinarily she’d have bemoaned the physicality of this work—she’d have to ice her knees tonight to control the inflammation, and to adhere one of those annoyingly sticky heating strips to her back just to remain upright until the kids’ bedtime. But today she welcomed the labor, even the pain. It was better than being trapped inside her head, which remained filled with the shocked hurt on Liza’s face at her front door, the confusion emanating from Rick at his, the sudden hopelessness exhaled in every breath of her husband, right down to the flowers.

  For a moment, he’d looked at her the way he used to. Like he loved her. Like he finally, finally saw their situation for what it was—and maybe even wanted to fix it. Like if they failed, his heart might be just as broken as hers.

  She’d been waiting for that look. Years. Just about given up. But now that she’d seen it, she didn’t know what to do with it. The resentment she’d been collecting wanted to stiffen, to declare any overture from Daniel too little too late. The hope she’d rediscovered wanted to jump at the chance, at the expense of all else. And her ever-present guilt laughed cruelly at the irony—that he’d picked a fine time to about-face his betrayals, just as one of her own was about to do them in.

  She was taking her time with the little table of log-shaped blocks, grimy from so many fingers and dusty from yesterday’s construction. Wiping the pieces clean one at a time, she arranged them in neat little piles on the area painted to look like a forest floor, then erected a small cabin to demonstrate the possibilities. She’d just dropped a chimney onto the sloped roof when she heard her name, the last word of a question, and Brian, her favorite naturalist, responding with a friendly greeting. “Go on back—just watch your step.”

  Rick was climbing over the rope, unsmiling.

  No. He’d texted her twice last night, wanting to clear the air from her morning visit, still claiming he had no idea what had upset her. She hadn’t responded then and sure as hell didn’t want to now, here. Rick was a familiar fixture to her coworkers, who found their daughters’ sweet hand-in-hand hikes adorable. Here as in the neighborhood, the slightest bit of awkwardness could ruin things. Things she quite liked.

  “Sorry to come here,” he said quietly, “but we need to talk.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at Brian, hoping he might shake his head or call out a reminder of how much work there was to be done, but he’d never admonished her before and was unlikely to start now. There was never much hurry here, with so much of their staff made up of volunteers no one wanted to chase off. He wasn’t looking anyway. He had the lid off the milk snake’s aquarium and was peering in, murmuring something soothing, the cleaning supplies spread on the counter behind him.

  She met her neighbor’s eyes, afraid to speak, afraid that anything worth saying was something she didn’t want Brian to overhear. Her expression, she hoped, said it for her. Really? Now? You think this is appropriate?

  It can’t wait, he mouthed, and his return look wasn’t the kind one she was used to or the confused one from yesterday. It was angry.

  She led him through the adjoining library, free today of the usual smattering of members with packed lunches or knitting projects or laptops, and opened the door to the balcony, big enough only for a small bench and the woodpile to feed the fireplace inside. The latter made the ledge a haven for spiders and so she was wary of the spot, though it afforded a pretty view of a busy row of bird feeders and the marshy edge of the lake beyond. She gestured to the bench, but neither of them made a move to sit.

  “The police were at my house this morning,” he said. She froze, her eyes on his, betraying her. “Wanted to know if I had any security cameras on my property that might have caught an intruder coming or going from yours.”

  He cocked his head expectantly, and she looked away, her mind racing. Shit. But why? They’d come; they’d seen; they’d left. Hadn’t they? She’d thought that part, at least, was done.

  “Do you?” she said finally.

  “Do I? Molly, you had an intruder? While Daniel was away? And that’s what you were referring to yesterday, when I couldn’t make sense of it?” She didn’t look up. “I’ve been trying to put two and two together ever since they left, and the best I can come up with is that you think it was me.” Her anger came rushing back then, that surge that had carried her through the woods yesterday and pounded on his door. When she lifted her head, her eyes were blazing. “Please tell me I’m wrong,” he snapped.

  “You have a lot of nerve,” she replied, defiant.

  He buried his hands in his hair and pulled, fists clenched, like a frustrated child.

  “Because of that joke you made? One shared, awkward laugh? You thought I’d actually act on that?” He dropped onto the bench, clasped his hands, looked up at her. “You honestly thought if I was going to—” He fumbled for the right words, and she realized that of all the less-than-perfect ways she’d seen him in these months since they’d grown close—sad, impatient, annoyed—she’d never seen him like this. Flustered. That was her role, perpetually. She honestly hadn’t thought he was capable of it, a fact she’d both admired and found a little maddening. “If I wanted to try to change things between us,” he said finally, “you think that’s how I’d go about it? That’s what you think of me?”

  “What did you tell them?” she asked, her voice shaky. A disturbance erupted at the bird feeders—flapping wings, a few warning squawks. Squirrels, probably. No matter how many barriers stood in their way—how out of reach the seeds, how smooth and high the poles—they couldn’t help going after things that didn’t belong to them.

  He blinked at her. “Nothing,” he said sharply. “There isn’t anything to tell.”

  Her breaths were coming shallow, quick. Easy, she commanded herself. Her one-word mantra, repeated dozens of times on any given day, hundreds on a bad one. Easy now. Take it easy. It did little to stop everything from feeling so damn hard.

  “Molly, listen to me. It’s hard to know where to begin with this talk we clearly need to have. But let�
��s set that aside for a very important minute to establish that the person who entered your house was not me. Whatever you convinced yourself it was—a sick joke, some twisted come-on, a reenactment of the thing we saw—it wasn’t. I promise you. Okay?”

  Even cloaked in anger, he was impossibly sincere. There wasn’t a soul alive who wouldn’t believe him. She wanted to cry. She wanted to run, crawl under something, plug her ears. A searing acid rose into the back of her throat. If not Rick, then who? “My God, Molly, someone broke into your house and then took off, got away! The whole neighborhood should be on edge right now, and you haven’t even said a word about it!”

  “I assumed…” She took a step back, and the slabs of the wooden wall grazed her spine.

  “Yeah, I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one.”

  “What exactly did the police say?” she managed. “Are they—making rounds? I thought they’d sort of … dropped it.”

  “He just said he was following up. That they figured the intruder had been sufficiently spooked, but thought it was worth a try to see if anyone saw anything.” He shook his head, incredulous. “You have a friend who caught him on your webcam?”

  Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.

  “Would the provider have a record of the video?”

  “The police seemed pretty certain there’s no video record unless you make one. Privacy laws. Like with a phone call. They can access who you called and how long you talked, but not what was said.”

  “Okay … but a burglar just happened to hit your house on a night Daniel was out of town? Did you tell anyone he was leaving? Anyone at all? A repair guy, a cashier?”

  Molly shook her head. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bothered with friendly chitchat in the checkout line or scheduled a service call. It was all she could do to muster the energy to be pleasant with her children, her coworkers. Her husband.