Forget You Know Me

by Jessica Strawser

  The fact that he knew her name, for instance.

  “Yes?”

  “I think we might have met once. Through a mutual friend. At a TM intro session?”

  TM. Shorthand for Transcendental Meditation. There was exactly one person Molly remembered from that session, and he was no friend of hers—or of anyone in her position. If only she hadn’t discovered that too late.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t recall.” Nori had stopped fussing—she’d push her limits with wild abandon when it was just the two of them but had an intrinsic wariness of witnesses to her antics—and was sniffing loudly, staring slack jawed at the man. Molly opened the car door to the backseat and gestured for her daughter to climb in. Mercifully, Nori obeyed.

  “Fancy running into you,” he said easily. “I thought I’d missed out when they said your shift had ended, but I can see why you’d stay late. It’s a very therapeutic place, isn’t it?”

  She leaned down to strap Nori into her harness, blocking her from view as much as she could while absorbing the dread that hit her with his words. Of course they knew she worked here. She’d filled out her place of employment on one form after the next.

  “Not a bad deal for the membership fee, either,” he continued. “If you can spare it.”

  She pushed the remote start button on her keychain and checked that the air-conditioning was on before shutting the door, turning to face him. Please. Let the car muffle this conversation enough that Nori can’t make sense of it.

  “I’m afraid we’re running late,” she said as politely as she could. It was time to pick up Grant.

  “Then I’ll get to the point,” he said. “Our mutual friend is well versed, as you know, in helping with challenges like yours. It’s so sad when patients’ families do not understand their need to seek treatment outside traditional channels, and he prides himself on being discreet. I think you’ll agree he’s held up that end of the bargain quite well.”

  She couldn’t contest this, chilling though it was, and she found herself nodding.

  “Always happy to meet a satisfied customer.” A smile stretched across his mouth but did not reach his eyes. “At a certain point, however, you understand that discretion isn’t free. And neither are loans. Payments need to be made.”

  If only Rick hadn’t left.

  “We tried to make this clear before—perhaps you didn’t get the message?”

  She drew a shaky breath, but the exhale wasn’t enough to release her terror as his words sank in. Suddenly she very much wanted the masked intruder to have been Rick, at any cost to her marriage, their friendship, her reputation—at least with that, she knew what she was dealing with. But surely that wasn’t what this man was referring to? They had left an awful lot of messages.

  “I’m sure you won’t need another of these reminder visits, yes?” He tipped his hat. “Wouldn’t want to have to involve anyone you’d rather leave out of things. It’s lucky when we happen to spot someone out and about, but we do make house calls, too.” With that, he headed off toward the butterfly garden, the walking stick punching the gravel with every other step.

  She scrambled into the driver’s seat and backed out without bothering to watch him go, lest he decide to add to his parting words.

  Less than an hour ago, she’d boasted that this was the one place she never felt afraid.

  As usual, she’d jinxed everything.

  16

  Liza had never felt so out of place, or so grateful to be out of place, as she did waiting for Steph in the waiting room of the hospital’s Perinatal Center. While the brochure on the table said the unit handled “routine” care for “normal” pregnancies, everyone here seemed to be fighting some invisible foe on behalf of the life growing inside of them. You could tell from the set jaws and bitten lips, from the tearstained faces and determined stares, from the loved ones who’d come along—protective husbands and anxious grandparents-to-be—and the way they moved from the door to the check-in counter to their seats to the clipboard-bearing nurse clasping each other’s hands, a white-knuckled tethering to the empty promise that everything is going to be okay. It was an assurance, if you thought about it, that no one had the power to make and yet everyone had the gall to. False comfort may have seemed kind to those offering it, but from where Liza was sitting, it seemed equally possible that it was cruel. Delaying the facing of facts.

  She hadn’t held Steph’s hand. Steph’s family was in New York, where she was from, and Luke had a meeting he couldn’t get out of today, so—when her condition had not resolved on its own after a week of careful observation and diligent at-home positioning and her doctor had referred her here—Liza had offered to come along for support. Steph accepted at Luke’s urging more than of her own accord, and Liza worried that her presence wasn’t really welcome, was making things less comfortable instead of the other way around. They’d sat quietly until Steph’s name was called. That was nearly an hour ago, and plenty of other patients had come and gone. Only one of them had left smiling.

  Liza had brought along busywork, insurance claim forms and the new-hire paperwork she was to bring to her first day at Sky Galley tomorrow. She’d been hired with little fanfare on either side of the table, aside from a mutual eagerness for her to start as soon as possible, and it was nice to feel she’d accomplished something that counted as getting back on her feet. If pressed to admit it, she was also looking forward to the possibility of running into the red-haired pilot again. She kept catching herself thinking over his theory, preparing more counterarguments she had no way to give. The business of proving to herself that disaster was in fact random kept her oddly but mercifully focused on stating the case rather than imagining the implications.

  The worst of her imagination was harder to ignore here, where fear was taking up its fair share of the waiting room. She wasn’t making much progress on the forms, either. How could anyone concentrate in the midst of so much tension? She didn’t like it here, breathing in the uncertainty, heartbreak, and loss hovering just a breath away. At least Steph wasn’t supposed to be getting any news today, just more monitoring, with the expertise of someone who’d encountered this rare complication more often. But if that was really the case, then what was taking so long?

  The door banged open and Steph appeared in the frame, looking no more happy than anyone else had, plus something else. Embarrassed? “Let’s go,” she mumbled, breezing past Liza and through the door to the corridor, and Liza rushed to gather her papers and chase after her, catching up only at the elevator. As they stepped inside, she realized Steph was crying.

  “What’s happened? Did they—”

  “Not here!” Steph hissed, sniffing hard, though they were the only two in the space, which smelled of stale coffee and antiseptic. “In the car.”

  The walk through the vast lobby was excruciating. Slow.

  “I’m sorry,” Liza blurted out as the revolving door deposited them on the pavement. The car wasn’t far, but she couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “I feel bad you’re stuck with me here. I know what it’s like when the person you really want can’t be along.”

  “Do you?” Steph snapped, then caught herself at the stricken look on Liza’s face. “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I don’t want Luke here anyway. Thank God he wasn’t, actually.” She shuddered, her tears still flowing, and Liza didn’t risk another word until they were shut inside her little car—she’d driven, just in case of … something—with the engine running, the vents revving to clear the stuffy air.

  “I thought I’d come to terms with setting aside my dignity for anything related to feminine care,” Steph said, wiping at her eyes with a tissue, drawing a shaky breath. “But that? That was humiliating.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They tried to move things in the right direction, literally. They reached up there … they had me on my hands and knees.…” She shook her head, and Liza tried to mask her horror, to maintain a happens to the best of us front. “Hurt like
a motherfucker!” Steph yelled suddenly, pounding the dashboard, and started to cry again.

  Liza placed a tentative hand on her shaking shoulder. “I’m so sorry.…”

  “The worst part is that it didn’t work.” She looked miserably at Liza. “If I can’t resolve this on my own in the next week, they want to really get in there and fix it. I’d have to get an epidural. And … there are risks. I could miscarry.”

  Liza recoiled, in spite of herself. “Wait. They want to do this so that you don’t miscarry, but in the process, you could miscarry?”

  Steph nodded, cupping a hand over her mouth to muffle another sob, and Liza leaned back into the headrest and stared straight out the windshield, as if that might afford her sister-in-law some privacy. But the next thing she knew, salty emotion was streaming down her own cheeks, unstoppable. How could Steph bear it, holding out while she and the baby were both at risk, not knowing whether it was even okay to be happy? How could Luke? How did anyone?

  They passed a few minutes like that in what might have been solidarity, but when Liza finally swiped her cardigan sleeve across her cheeks and glanced over at her sister-in-law, Steph was taking her in with a mixture of concern and pity. Just as they were not close enough to hold hands in the waiting room, it was hardly proportionate for Liza to wail along with her afterward.

  “Some comfort you are,” Steph teased finally, awkwardly.

  “I apologize. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” She thought of her brother, who would not be touched at this show of emotion. She was his stand-in, and if he were here instead, he certainly wouldn’t be carrying on as if the outcome was too terrible to imagine.

  “Just—tell me something good,” Steph said. “Something to get my mind off all this.”

  Liza blinked at her, considering. When in doubt, might as well reach for the kind of retelling she was known for. Never mind that it was also what she’d been purposely avoiding for months. “Well. I think I flirted with a pilot at lunch the other day.…”

  Steph took a deep, steadying breath and nodded. That’ll do. “You think he was a pilot, or you think you were flirting?”

  “He was in uniform, and he was at Sky Galley, so I’m positive about the pilot part. Also, he ate one of my French fries. Which seemed natural in context but, looking back … maybe flirty?”

  “Too bad you’re going to be a manager. I’m guessing they frown upon feeding customers off your own plate,” Steph teased. She reached into her purse for a compact and flipped open the mirror. “Wait.” She turned back to Liza, her mascara-smeared eyes wide. “Don’t tell me that’s why you applied! Is he that good-looking?”

  “I applied because I’m guessing you guys don’t want me living with you indefinitely,” Liza said, shooting her a look. “But … he was interesting. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a conversation like the one we had.” She shook her head. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter, because I’m on hiatus from dating. And this hardly seems like a good time to go back into production.”

  “Why not? I mean, I understand why you wouldn’t go looking, but if you happen to meet someone…”

  The same had occurred to Liza, but she’d dismissed it as old habit. “I can’t shake this new sense that life’s too short,” Liza said, and she could see from the look on Steph’s face that it was the exact wrong thing to say. She scrambled forward. “I only mean—I don’t want to waste time just … mucking around.”

  Steph got to work on her makeup as Liza put the car in reverse and eased out of the space. “Really great things begin by mucking around,” she countered. “It’s not like the second I met Luke I knew we were going to be serious. I mean, you’ve met Luke, right?”

  Liza laughed. Somehow, right up until this crisis, she’d still hardly thought of Luke and Steph as serious. She’d seen it in her brother’s eyes, though, how it would wreck him just as deeply as it would wreck his wife if anything happened to their baby.

  “You’re right that life is too short,” Steph said, clearing her throat to still the quiver in her voice. “So why put limits on it? Take it from someone with an incarcerated organ: You are free. For now. You’ll have plenty of other opportunities to be confined by rules.”

  That was true enough. So why didn’t she feel free? Just as she was now cursing herself for not having better records of all the things she’d acquired before the fire—it seemed an impossible task to calculate the value of possessions after they’d been lost—maybe she should have paid more attention to the social and emotional load she’d accumulated along the way. Keeping a closer tally of the deposits and withdrawals might have made more sense than getting overwhelmed and closing the male relationship account entirely. She didn’t know if it was the pilot himself or his oddball theory that was causing him to linger in her mind, but maybe it wouldn’t be such a terrible transgression to let herself find out.

  “I think I’m supposed to be giving you pep talks instead of the other way around,” Liza said, easing into traffic. “But that wasn’t a bad one, thanks.”

  “Do you think you’ll run into him again? I mean, without going out of your way?”

  “He seemed like a regular. I think it’s a decent bet.”

  Steph smiled. “Luke is a regular everywhere he goes. I used to think it was boring, that he always went to the same places, but now I like it. When you go out with him it’s like he’s in his own version of The Truman Show—the idyllic part before it got creepy. He turns these regular little moments of ordering food or whatever into real connections.”

  Liza bit back a sarcastic comment about how he’d been striving to star in “The Luke Show” since he was born. The admiration in her sister-in-law’s voice was clear.

  “Well, this guy didn’t exactly remind me of Luke,” she said. “My brother is the master of small talk, without question. But this was kind of … the opposite of small talk.” She took her eyes off the road long enough to see Steph’s satisfied grin.

  “He set you up for a recurring role!” she said. “Might as well stick around for the next scene.”

  * * *

  Liza didn’t realize how much she was missing Max until he flashed on her cell phone screen, the incoming call set to a snap of him decked out at a Cubs game, ball cap, foam finger, and all. Sitting next to him along the third-base line the night his turn at his corporate seats rolled around, she hadn’t been able to decide if he looked like an embarrassingly unabashed tourist or an over-the-top local. But that was vintage Max. When he called, she was sprawled on the couch half-watching a reality show she couldn’t believe was still on the air—Luke and Steph nowhere to be seen—and she carried the phone out to the front porch swing so she could sit with him somewhere more authentic. Somewhere good.

  “Hey, Cincinnati.” This was her new nickname, apparently. If he was trying to make her dislike the association, she had to admit it was working.

  “Hey yourself, Cubs fan.”

  “If you’re rubbing in the Reds’ victory from last night, that’s just mean.”

  Even when Liza was at a game, she had trouble paying attention to the score—a fact Max knew all too well. “Well, if I’d known about it, I’d have rubbed it in harder.”

  “You’re kind of a disappointment to both franchises,” he joked.

  “Yeah, well, they can join the club.”

  She filled him in on Steph’s awkward doctor’s visit and the bang-up job she’d done of standing in for Luke, and he said the right things, how he was sure Steph appreciated that she was there at all—until Liza mentioned that once she started work, she might not be more available than Luke anyway.

  “You got a job?” His disappointment was clear even as he politely asked for the details. She gave him the short version, weird as it sounded to describe the little old airport with the restaurant inside.

  “It’s kind of a cult classic,” she told him. She knew of nothing like it in Chicago, or anywhere else she’d been. It was just—one of Cincinnati’s cooler quirks.


  “I guess this is real, then,” he said finally, his tone more concessionary than sad, as if they’d reached the end of a running joke. “That you’re not coming back.”

  “Guess so. For now, at least.” She didn’t know why she tacked on that last part. The job was just for now, but the move was not.

  “Have you seen Molly yet?”

  Liza allowed herself a breath to wish it weren’t such a loaded question. That of course she’d seen her, and why wouldn’t she? Even though, all things considered, she was hoping to avoid her at all costs. “As a matter of fact, I ran into her husband at my job interview.”

  “At the tiny airport? We are talking about a midsized city, right? Are you sure you haven’t accidentally moved to some smaller town? Shmincinnati? Vincimmati?”

  She laughed. “It wasn’t the happiest coincidence. And get this: He invited me to dinner. To thank me. For being so helpful in notifying the authorities.”

  Max snorted. “Did he offer you gas money, too? Because they owe you some.”

  “I’m not sure he knows about her slamming the door in my face.”

  “But he was home—we saw his car. You heard him in the kitchen, talking to the kids.”

  “Yeah, well. Assuming he rushed back because of what happened—in spite of her acting so weird about it—he was probably pretty preoccupied at that point. And Molly has never hesitated to censor stories to paint herself in a better light.” Liza had once admired Molly’s affinity for selective omission. It came in handy when they were teenagers on the brink of getting caught doing something they weren’t supposed to be. “Besides, Daniel and I get along pretty well. If he’d known I was there, he’d have come out to see me.”

  She didn’t mention that he’d seemed a bit off at the airport—forcing the issue of the invitation even as she’d been trying to make a good first impression on the hiring manager. Then again, overcompensation had occasionally been Daniel’s MO. Early in his relationship with Molly, he’d seemed almost too willing to include Liza, as if he was indebted to her for graciously lending out her friend for him to date. And when he and Molly did argue, he’d repent with what Molly referred to as a “grand gesture,” some over-the-top romantic night out. Molly had gushed over those prearranged overtures, but Liza couldn’t help suspecting they were shortcuts, faster and easier than doing the real work of making up.