Forget You Know Me

by Jessica Strawser

“Since I can’t claim none…” He smiled. “That I chose a career where it’s impractical to have a dog. I’d love something big and goofy, a retriever or a husky.”

  He seemed the perfect human counterpart to just such a dog, relaxed and happy. So this was what it felt like, to be out with a man again. Not one who’d been chosen through an app but by way of that old-fashioned sequence of chance meeting, chemistry, and the testing of waters. The wine was mellow, easy drinking, better than she would have chosen for herself, and she felt warmed by the buzz that was traveling straight through her empty stomach to her brain.

  When they were finally seated in a sleek booth at the window, the dining room’s ambience was a grateful sigh. It was so much nicer here, in a quiet, dim corner away from the hyped chatter of the barflies. She and Henry exchanged a look that was both expectant and a little shy—now the real date could begin.

  “So,” he said, once fresh flights were arranged in front of them and they’d ordered a flatbread to share. “Have they followed you here?”

  “Who?”

  “Your spies.” He leaned over the table conspiratorially. “Don’t fire them, but I’m afraid they weren’t terribly subtle about watching out the window when I picked you up.”

  She was glad of the dim lighting; maybe he wouldn’t make out the color flooding her cheeks. “Oh, them. They have a lot of nerve, don’t they? Monitoring comings and goings from their house as if it’s any of their business.”

  “So it wasn’t your house, then.” He looked relieved, and she frowned. Had he thought her too independent?

  “I’m staying with my brother and his wife. Temporarily.”

  “Excellent.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “It is?”

  “Well, I’m as progressive as the next guy, but I was sort of hoping all those maternity circulars on the porch didn’t belong to you.”

  She burst out laughing. “Yes, soon they’ll want their guest room back. But I haven’t been there long. The day I met you was actually my first full day back in town.”

  “Lucky me.” He smiled. “Of all the crazy airfields in this mixed-up world, you decided to lunch at mine.”

  She laughed. “Okay, let’s hear it. Tell me your craziest airfield story.”

  “Take your pick. We’ve had streakers jump the fence and head down the runway—you have the best view of that from the cockpit, by the way.” His eyes crinkled with mischief. But it was occurring to her that not everything encompassed by crazy was quite so frivolous, and her smile faltered.

  “Nothing bad, though?”

  “I wouldn’t call that guy’s form good.…”

  She rolled her eyes, trying to stay with him on the lighter side of the moment, and he grinned. “You know what I mean.” She persisted. “All those small planes and helicopters taking off and landing … Anyone ever miss the runway? Clip the building?” She supposed she should be glad the possibility hadn’t occurred to her before. She might not have pursued the job if it had. Might not have seen Henry again. Still …

  “I’ve heard of close calls in bad weather, but the guys in the tower are pretty ace. The worst emergency I ever saw was a runner who had a heart attack on the trail. Never did hear how that turned out.”

  Liza grimaced, knowing its far points were over a mile from the access roads.

  His face turned thoughtful. “There were a couple of bad accidents with cars leaving the parking lot in front of the terminal—people drive way too fast on Wilmer. But they finally added the traffic light to avoid that.” She liked the way he answered the question so thoroughly, in spite of the fact that he probably thought the question itself was overblown. He flashed her a smile. “That’s statistically accurate, by the way.”

  “I know, air travel is safer than car travel. I tell myself that every time I’m in the air.”

  He leaned closer. “If you’re asking because you’re worried about me, I’ll take that as a sign that you like me.” She laughed, and he drew back with suspicion. “Wait. You’re worried about yourself, aren’t you? You think something’s going to fall out of the sky and land on you during your shift.”

  She splayed a hand across her heart. “Who, me?”

  “You were probably in more danger in Chicago. Of that, or something else wild. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings…”

  She must have cringed, because he stopped short. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make light of it.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re right … I was in more danger in Chicago.” She took a swig of her wine—an uncomfortably large swig—and began to cough.

  He was looking at her with concern. She should have known better than to let the conversation go here, yet she could hardly blame him that it had. She’d started it, after all.

  “What was it,” he asked carefully, “that made you come back?”

  She’d found a place to go, whenever she had to discuss the fire with her claims rep or during her mother’s check-in calls—to a perch in the corner of her mind where she could watch the conversation as if she weren’t the one participating in it. She went there now.

  “There was a fire,” she began. “It gutted my building, everything in it. Everyone in it, above a certain floor.” Her voice sounded flat, not especially lucky. Even though it was.

  By the time she’d finished telling him the rest, he seemed to be taking stock of her anew, though not unkindly. “That’s why you’re so fixated. On the odds of things going wrong.”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m fixated,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. Never mind that hours ago she’d found it prohibitively risky to decide on something as mundane as a bag of lettuce. At least he seemed content to skip to the now of things rather than harping on details. Like where she’d been that night, if not at home.

  “Well, it’s understandable you’d be freaked out,” he said.

  “Temporarily,” she said, for the second time. “At least, I hope so.”

  “Cut yourself a break. You’ve made pretty impressive headway in a short time. Not only did you get the first job you applied for, but you met me.”

  His eyes held hers until she couldn’t help but smile—even as a part of her held back. Was it impressive headway to be jumping on the first things she came across? She liked Henry, more by the minute. And the job was a practical fit for now, more so than one that would overwhelm her while she was still regaining her land legs. But was anyone really so fortunate to come across actual good options without even trying? “Two birds with one stone,” she said drolly.

  Their server brought the flatbread and a pair of small plates and was gone again.

  “Did you know Tom Petty’s house burned down?” Henry asked. “Arson. He was inside, his family, too. He wrote ‘I Won’t Back Down’ after that.”

  “Seriously?” She loved that song—had even considered it something of an anthem at one point, though at the time she’d had little more than typical teenage squabbles to back down from. That was during the phase when Molly had gone around spouting lines from that Eleanor Roosevelt book. Liza had admired that spirit, but for her real empowerment came with the windows down and the radio up. Well, I know what’s right / I got just one life.…

  Somewhere along the line, she’d lost sight of what had felt right. She wouldn’t again.

  “I can’t imagine what that would feel like,” he said, more serious now. “To lose everything you own. I’m really sorry.”

  She drained the dregs of her Cabernet and moved on to the Shiraz. Should she tell him? How ashamed she felt that she was still struggling with it at all? How she still had awful visions of her neighbors who hadn’t made it? The emotion crept up her throat, reminding her why she’d swallowed it in the first place. So she latched on to his words instead and sang them back at him. “You don’t know how it feels.…”

  He laughed. “See? There’s a Tom Petty song for everything.”

  Their eyes locked again, and though his were smiling, they also seemed to be waiting. For he
r to go on and tell him. She cleared her throat.

  “It feels … I feel grateful, of course. But a little precarious, too.” She steeled herself with another sip while she contemplated the highest degree of honesty that wouldn’t scare him off. “I’ve always felt in charge of my life, even when it wasn’t going well. Now, though, I can’t shake this sense that none of us are really in control of anything, or ever have been.” She smiled at him. “I realize that you and your ‘seven things’ theory disagree.”

  “I might not have gone on about that the way I did had I known why you were asking.”

  She shrugged. “I’m glad you did. It’s—a different way of looking at things. Even if I’m not sure I buy into it.”

  “I take it you’re not big on fate. Or God having a plan,” he said. He wasn’t laughing at her. Nor was he brushing this off as some kind of fleeting survivor’s guilt or overreaction, the way she knew always-positive Luke would. He was considering it.

  “I don’t know. Which I guess means I’m not.”

  She’d talked openly enough with Max and with her family … but somehow it was Henry who made her feel less alone. Maybe it was because he wasn’t trying to put Liza back in some safer box. He’d never had her in one in the first place.

  “Well, I think it’s natural to be spooked. But that doesn’t mean you have to give in to the idea of having no control.” He slid a piece of the flatbread onto his plate. The drizzled pesto gleamed. “This might sound nuts, but there’s this thing we did, in pilot’s training. The military does it, too. It’s called pre-mortem thinking.”

  “As in the opposite of post-mortem thinking?”

  “Yep. So, instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then assessing the cause so that it doesn’t happen again, you prepare yourself for various not-good scenarios. You have a plan, train your brain, because in a panicked situation you might not be thinking clearly. When you’ve thought ahead, though, when you’ve practiced, instinct takes over.”

  “You know, this is going to sound more nuts, but I have found myself sort of collecting disaster scenarios. I see these bizarre news stories, and I…” She had to stop. She really was going to sound crazy. She’d been amassing a sort of list, of all the ways something can take a horrible turn. She’d linger over the articles, and sometimes she found herself imagining the real stories behind them, just as her own had been so far outside of anything that was printed about the fire. She’d even rewritten a few based on nothing beyond her own concocted backstories.

  Like the one about the man whose car had gone into the river and who’d led such a lonely life it took days for him to be reported missing.

  An incident occurred on the Brent Spence Bridge when Jim Duff was essentially doing the same thing he did every evening, which amounted to trying not to question his life choices.…

  Or about the fatal incident involving a customer who’d taken her new designer puppy shopping for pet supplies from a high-end discount warehouse.

  With the culpable forklift obscured by the ceiling-high shelving, the puppy’s instincts were superior to his owner’s. Thus, he lived to be adopted by an elderly couple who had no concept of his breed, or how much she’d paid for him, and who did not obsess over what kind of food might keep his coat shiny.…

  It was her way of trying to give the victims some life beyond cold black and white type. She wasn’t sure it qualified as healing, the way every imagined story chipped away a bit at her own. But it was something. A heightened vigilance, an empathy. Something that perhaps she’d been lacking before. Why else would she feel compelled to do it?

  She straightened, tried to smile. “So I should practice—what? How I’d dodge falling pianos?”

  “Not exactly.” To her relief, he looked more interested than alarmed. “But it might make you feel better about things if you think through some scenarios. For instance, your bedroom at your brother’s house. Is it on the second floor?” She nodded. “Okay, so give some thought to, if there was a fire, how would you get out?”

  Liza bit the inside of her cheek. “I’ve thought about it plenty. Usually when I should be sleeping.”

  “So what’s the plan? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “If I can make it one door down to the bathroom, that window opens onto the roof of the porch. I can climb out there, then hang and drop down.”

  He took a bite of the flatbread, nodding slowly, and she slid a piece onto her own plate. “Or,” he said, “you could buy some of those fire safety ladders. The little kits that attach to windowsills? Then you don’t even have to worry about making it one door down.” He shrugged. “You might rest easier, is all. Pre-mortem thinking.”

  “How does this play into your seven things theory?”

  “It helps eliminate human error.” She thought immediately of Steph, twisted into her upside-down poses. Hope yoga, they’d started calling it. Liza hoped that whoever would be doing Steph’s procedure next week—if it came to that—had been doing a lot of pre-mortem. It was only fair for the person on the other end to shoulder as much of the worry.

  “Has it ever happened for you?” she asked. “Instinct taking over?”

  “All the time. Usually I don’t realize it until later, though. When your thinking is cloudy, sometimes you don’t realize it because, well, your thinking is cloudy.”

  Liza laughed. “Why was your thinking cloudy?”

  “Stress and lack of sleep,” he said without hesitation. “Biggest enemies of pilots and drivers of all kinds. Of anyone trying to concentrate, really.”

  It was a level of analysis she’d been lacking. She’d been doing pre-mortem thinking, all right, but the wrong kind—focused more on problems than solutions. As a result, she had stress and lack of sleep in droves.

  “But you can’t prep for everything,” she challenged. “It wasn’t preparation that got me out of the fire—it was dumb luck. And a little rope ladder wouldn’t have helped me on the fourth floor.”

  “Not everything,” he agreed. “But some things. It might help you get some of that sense of control back, that’s all.”

  This was not a thing she was supposed to like—this masculine urge to fix things. Don’t bother to complain to them about your day if you don’t want them to try to fix it, her mother always said. That boys-will-be-boys attitude infuriated Liza, who thought it perfectly reasonable to expect a boyfriend to listen and sympathize if she wanted to commiserate about her day.

  But letting Henry be Henry didn’t seem so bad. Max would roll his eyes at this analogy, cracking puns about preparing for takeoff or reaching their cruising altitude. But Liza was tired of making jokes out of everything. And there was something about this man, some undercurrent that drew her to him.

  “It would be easier for me to stick with my approach if you’d make less sense,” she said.

  “And it would be easier for me to stick with mine if I wasn’t distracted by thinking a little too much about Sky Galley,” he said, grinning. “If you’re coming around to my way of thinking, I should fess up that I might be coming around to yours. I actually got nervous in turbulence the other day.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t seem like a positive effect for me to be having.”

  “It’s been a while since I had anyone in particular I cared about getting home to see,” he said. “And I’d call that positive. So maybe we should meet in the middle, theory-wise.”

  Liza relaxed into the booth, a slow smile spreading at last across her face as she took a bite of the flatbread. The crust was flakey, the pesto salty, the cheese creamy. “Did you prepare for this? For what you’d say tonight?” she teased.

  He watched her for a moment before he answered. “I’m fairly certain I was wholly unprepared for you,” he said, catching her off guard. “Yet somehow, I’m okay with that. Even if it is contradictory to my training.”

  She took another bite, as if this moment were on par with all her dinner conversations and not potentially marking the start
of something, a silent agreement to forge ahead, together. “Is that a good thing?”

  He smiled. “I look forward to finding out.”

  19

  Daniel knew the superstition, that bad things arrive in threes. He could remember his mother waiting for weeks, after attending two funerals inside a month, certain that a third person would pass. But Daniel’s run of bad luck required no patience to count it up neatly.

  As if he’d needed an additional sign that things were beyond bad.

  It started Sunday—on the letdown end of a weekend that had held so much promise. He and Molly had finally lightened up a little the night before, after the kids were in bed—smoked some of that weed he could scarcely believe she had, put a dent in a good bottle of vodka, made love like teenagers while a rented movie watched itself on the big-screen. On paper, it was the most fun they’d had together in years, though the reality of it was something else. They were both so hyperaware of how long it had been, of how this was no longer second nature. Of how so-called fun had come to require effort, intent. It felt like—like being watched by a skeptical third party in a private moment.

  And indeed, come morning, little seemed to have changed. In fact, the dutiful woman serving French toast to his children seemed so incongruous with the unfastened one of the night before that he worried she’d simply been going through the motions for his sake. He didn’t want that. He wanted nothing from Molly that wasn’t genuine. Couldn’t she see that?

  Small steps, the book had said. Mindful ones. He could accept responsibility for his part in all this. But it still stung to see her thought process scrawled across her face: Gosh, he’s being sweet.… But he was such a hopeless asshole before.

  Like he didn’t know.

  He was out back later on, taking out his frustrations on the grimy grate of the grill that had lain dormant all winter, when Molly came out the back door, a curious look on her face.

  “You mentioned Mr. Human Resources the other day,” she said. “Does he live around here?”

  Daniel kept his eyes on the metal brush in his hand, working it with renewed gusto. “Why do you ask?”