Forget You Know Me

by Jessica Strawser

  “I appreciate the thought,” she said. And in some off-center way, she did. “But it’s okay. That’s not something I’ve been secretly longing for. If I had been, I would have asked.” Of course she wouldn’t have asked. But the first part was true.

  “This is different from anything you’ve done,” he said. “It’s a healing retreat, a weekend away. And it’s not just about physical treatments, though they have those. It’s about having time to get lost in the mountains, to unplug for a while. They have spiritual guides, to help you—center, I think they call it. And they also have these people—not therapists, exactly, but coaches, sort of. You can tell them about everything that’s happened, and everything you’ve tried, and get their feedback. What do you think?”

  She opened the brochure and let her eyes touch the photographs inside, one by one. Rocky creeks and fire circles and morning tai chi and intimate conversations in valley-view tearooms. What she thought was that this must be enormously expensive and that she wished he had offered it two years ago, or even one—back when she’d looked with longing at such offerings, unable to fathom how she could manage to get away, let alone justify her desire to. What she thought was that financially speaking she could not let herself consider this possibility, even if she wanted to. What she thought was that she couldn’t resist digging just a little bit more.

  “This is something you’d actually want to do?” she asked. She laid the brochure back in the space between them and met his eyes. “I don’t think it does anyone any good to go to these things and then act like they’re bunk.”

  “I’d want to do it if you wanted to do it,” he said, and she could see that he meant it. Or at least he thought he did. “I’d be willing to try. And if you’re worried about me judging the retreat, judging you, don’t. I know I’ve been guilty of it before, but you have my word that I’d look for the good in it. That I’d try to learn something.”

  She squinted at him. “This is where the wife character says, ‘Who are you and what have you done with my husband?’”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  They fell into silence, both of them staring at the brochure. The hope on his face was almost too much to bear. She’d cycled through her whole supply, and it was tempting to dip into his, to hold herself over until she could replenish her reserves. If only it were that simple.

  “Do you know,” she said, “what they would tell me if I went? Those coaches, those guides?”

  “No,” he said, “but I’d be interested to find out. Only if you wanted to share those parts with me, of course.”

  “I can share it with you now. They’d tell me I’ve been doing it wrong.”

  “Doing what wrong?”

  “All of it.”

  He searched the air for a response. “I guess they’d teach you how to do it right, then.”

  “I’m not talking about techniques. I’m talking about my whole approach. These treatments, they’re supposed to become a part of your lifestyle. Every practitioner warns you that you need to implement them consistently before you’ll see benefits. But do I listen? No. I flit from one to the next in something like a panic, worried that what I’m trying isn’t working fast enough, convincing myself that it won’t fix me, that it’s the wrong solution, setting my sights too soon on the next thing that will. Everything I’ve tried that hasn’t worked? It isn’t that this stuff doesn’t work. It works for plenty of people. It’s that I’ve been doing it wrong.”

  He blinked at her. “Why?” he asked finally.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I know I’m going about it wrong, yet I can’t seem to stop.”

  “Well, this could be the perfect chance to start fresh.”

  He sounded so sure, and it was so ironic, coming from him, and she was filled with a rush of the rage she’d been holding back. “You know what?” she said, her spine stiffening, her stomach roiling. “I do know why I’ve been doing it wrong. It started with you. You’d ask how it was going after two classes and I’d tell the truth and it’d be written all over your face, what a waste of time this was, what a waste of money. You were impatient with it, and that made me impatient with it. I had to find something that would prove to you, and to myself, that I could do it. What I should have done was just stop. I was too vulnerable to be put in a place to have to defend something that I had no idea would be effective. But I didn’t stop. Instead, I just stopped telling you about it. I just stopped telling the truth. But I could hear your voice anyway.”

  The muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched. “I’ve been making a real effort, since the night we had that scare.…” His voice was so level it seemed designed to make her sound irrational by comparison. “But you keep bringing up everything I did wrong before. Doesn’t it count that I’m trying to do better now?”

  “We can’t just go on as if the past few years never happened!” she exploded. “A part of me wants to, but we can’t! You eroded the empathy from our marriage.” He drew back, wounded, but she didn’t feel sorry for saying it. In some ways it was the truest confession she could make, regardless of everything she still had yet to tell.

  These past years, he had looked at her and seen a woman in pain. A woman who couldn’t get by without certain kinds of help on certain kinds of days. A drain on their family’s energy, a drag on their productivity, a leap that fell short, over and over. And she had been those things. She’d seen them, too, hated them, too. But it wasn’t all she’d seen. She still knew who else she was. She was a mother who loved her children with an intensity that kept her alive. She was a warm smile at the visitor center. She was a woman who liked to walk alone in the woods, who was grateful for the hidden beauty she found there, who was proud that no hindrance had kept her from seeing it. She was a helper, a listener, to others in her therapeutic classes, to middle-of-the-night regulars on message boards, to the widower who lived behind them.

  She was a whole person. She was not only a sufferer. But even now, when he was priding himself on looking at the pain in a more understanding way, he wasn’t seeing the rest. He seemed to believe she had been replaced by all the negatives rather than complicated by them.

  “You eroded the empathy,” she repeated, lowering her volume to match his. “And no spiritual retreat in the mountains is going to put it back.”

  “That’s not fair.” He geared up, giving in to the fight. “If you’re telling me you stopped telling the truth, then you eroded the trust.”

  “Did I?” Evidently, she’d been braced for this challenge. For once, she knew what to say. “How can you trust somebody with your emotions, with anything, when they don’t feel for you? What is a marriage even supposed to be, if not feeling for somebody?”

  He jumped to his feet. “If you felt like I was ‘eroding’ something essential, why not say something? Even at my soulless office, you don’t get fired out of the blue. They tell you when you aren’t meeting expectations. They give you a chance to improve.”

  “It’s telling, that you’d compare our marriage to a job.”

  “Stop twisting everything. All I’m saying is to give us a chance now. On this retreat.”

  She shook her head, incredulous. It was one thing for him to feel sincere about going with good intentions, but the reality of being there together would be a test of their combined lack of patience and faith. In spite of everything—even if they could afford to go, which they definitely couldn’t—she didn’t want to so obviously fail. Because then what would they do?

  “Look,” he continued. He had that desperate glaze he’d had the day he’d brought her flowers, the day she’d started to believe maybe they could fix this. Had she stopped believing again? “You don’t have to forgive me to go. Maybe it’s good, to have this out in the open instead of tiptoeing around it. They can teach us to fight better, or … whatever they do at these places.”

  There it was. The slightest hint of the verbal eye roll she’d known had to be coming. Her fury grabbed it by the tail and swung. “So y
ou think the way to bring our marriage back together is for you to do something on my behalf that we both know will make you miserable? Dragging people along to things they aren’t into isn’t my idea of a good time.”

  “Since when is compromise bad for a relationship?”

  “Compromise is agreeing on something that would make us both halfway happy. Your idea is that first I make you miserable doing something you don’t want to do and then, what, now you have the Make Molly Miserable card to play whenever you want?”

  He closed his eyes and sighed. Loudly. “Fine. This retreat is now officially the thing that will make me happy. Be miserable about it if you want to. I’ll play my card now.”

  “I don’t get why.” Molly’s frustration thickened her voice into a gurgle of hostility.

  “Because I already paid for it, okay? You’ve been chasing this shit for years; I honestly didn’t think you were going to pick now of all times to decide you’re doing it wrong. What is it you’re really done with, Molly? The treatments, or me?”

  The wall between them was not as sturdy as she’d imagined it to be. Because now it swayed as if caught in a sudden storm, hovered off-balance for a terrible moment, and crushed Molly beneath its weight. Until she couldn’t move. Until she couldn’t breathe.

  26

  A square white box tied with a thick red ribbon sat at the foot of the Sky Galley door when Liza arrived to open the restaurant Thursday morning. She shifted her traveler cup of coffee, her dripping-wet umbrella, and the staff key ring to lift the thin, glossy cardboard between her fingertips and saw her name on the tag—no message, no signature. But the doughy smell of cinnamon reached her even before she untied the bow, and she knew who it was from.

  The perfectly well-meaning man she’d been avoiding since leaving his house late Monday. Or, more specifically, since Luke had rebuked her equally well-meaning gift on Tuesday. Henry had texted her later that night, before bed, asking how things had gone with Steph, and when she sent the shortest possible response—Everything A-OK!—the excitement and relief he shot back made her heart twinge. He’d had no stake in the game other than knowing she did. He’d cared enough to follow up. And he’d checked in several times since, initiating conversations that were easy enough to shut down with a non-conversational response.

  He’d also been out of town for the past couple days, which had given her time to think. About how maybe she was putting too much stock into not just Henry’s theories, but Henry himself. Maybe, with no home address, zero furniture, a meager wardrobe, and a climbing anxiety level, she wasn’t in a position to be putting stock into anything right now. Maybe, given how emotionally attached she was feeling, against both odds and reason, in under a month, she should get out now—simply take the safer route, in a time when danger suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

  Inside her office, she lifted the lid to find a still-warm, generously iced cinnamon roll. It seemed disingenuous to accept the gift when her feelings on its sender had grown murky, but then again, no point letting it go to waste. The first bite was soft and not too sweet, even as she tried not to picture Henry rising from bed to make them, donning his uniform, taking the time to package the pastry, thinking of her.

  A text chimed into her phone, and she knew without looking that it was from Max. He had an uncanny knack for following Henry’s gestures with his own, a fact that had to be purely accidental—least of all because she hadn’t alerted him to Henry’s existence—but that she couldn’t help but think might mean something. She’d been happy enough on her dating hiatus partly because Max was in many ways enough for her. Maybe that wasn’t healthy, but then again, who was qualified to assess that? She knew of women who’d lived their entire adult lives in loves based solely in friendship, a different kind of commitment, and as they aged those couples could seem so affectionate, so fortunate to have found each other—even operating under a certain understanding of what would or would not be happening in the bedroom. Maybe it was silly not to pursue that kind of happiness if you could see it within reach. Maybe the more foolish thing was to drag yourself out on other limbs that, for all you knew, could bend and break under your weight.

  She’d felt the creaking already, under her brother’s scrutiny. And if all it had taken was a few pointed questions, maybe she should recognize the signs that the branch wouldn’t hold her—at least not now, when she was carrying so much else on her shoulders. Maybe she should just slowly back off.

  Taking another guilty bite of the roll, she lit the screen of her phone, expecting some sort of morning wisecrack to cheer her, but saw that she’d been wrong. It wasn’t from Max. The little airplane icon she’d assigned to Henry glowed next to the message.

  Pretty good, right?

  She couldn’t argue with that. You shouldn’t have, she sent back, meaning it, even as she uncoiled the outer layer and folded it onto her tongue.

  Laughter came from the doorway, and she jumped. Henry was leaning on the frame, his pilot’s cap tipped down so his grin shone brighter than his eyes. She’d left the door unlocked for the chef and prep crew, but they weren’t due in for half an hour.

  She swallowed the bite too soon and tried to cough into her fist without sputtering as she got to her feet. “I thought you’d be in the air by now?”

  “Rain delay. Seemed like a good excuse to see what you’re up to this weekend.”

  If only he hadn’t caught her so clearly enjoying the breakfast. She didn’t return his smile. “Trying to figure out how to make my brother less pissed at me, maybe. Or apartment hunting? They kind of go hand in hand.”

  “Why is he pissed at you?”

  “Let’s just say he didn’t find pre-mortem thinking to be the best motivation for a baby gift.”

  Henry’s eyebrows shot up. “What was the gift?”

  She sighed. “A top-of-the-line baby monitor. But it had SIDS detection features that he thought were a little over-the-top.”

  He shrugged. “Sounds like a pretty generous gift to me. And not a cheap one, either.”

  “Of course it sounds okay to you. You’re the one who gave me the advice.”

  She expected him to step back, but instead he approached the desk, concern softening his features. “I don’t remember you asking me what you should buy your brother and his wife. In fact, I haven’t heard much from you this week. I thought we had a nice time Monday.…”

  “You know what I mean. Maybe pilot’s training doesn’t translate to life.”

  “You can’t be blaming me because your brother is mad at you?”

  Her eyes dropped to the cinnamon roll, which seemed to have deflated. Sometimes that happened. You took a bite, it seemed good at first, but then the appeal just kind of leaked out. It didn’t have to be anyone’s fault. She knew it was hers as much as his.

  “I’m not blaming anyone,” she said, though her tone did sound sort of accidentally angry. “I just think—I’m not really in a good place right now. So the place that I’m in, I should probably just occupy it by myself for a while. Until I figure out how to get to a better one.”

  He let silence fill the room for what seemed an eternity before he spoke. “I’m always in transit,” he said finally. “It’s not often I meet someone who so instantly makes me want to stay where I am. So it must not be that bad of a place. Not when all I can think about is being there.”

  She knew what he meant—getting him off her mind had been surprisingly difficult from the start, so much so that she might have subconsciously, foolishly taken this job because of him—and yet she didn’t want to. Why couldn’t he just get mad right back, like everybody else? Why did he have to be so—well, so Henry?

  “Please just give me a little space,” she said, her voice barely audible even to her own ears.

  “Liza—”

  “I have to get to work. The kitchen staff will be here soon. I haven’t done a single useful thing since I got here.”

  The last sentence landed with a thud as she turned to open the sa
fe. As if it had been some great inconvenience to pause her morning to accept a gift, to thank the person who gave it to her, to chat with him just long enough to send things between them south. Her bad mood had much more to do with Luke and even Molly than with him, and she regretted her tone immediately.

  But when she turned back, he was gone.

  * * *

  Liza shifted her weight from one foot to the next at the base of the dock, wondering how long this was going to take. And also, what she was really doing here, on the side of a lake, waiting for a silent little girl to speak. Molly had briefed her on Rosie’s situation and on how she and Nori had been helping, but none of it quite explained why she’d brought Liza here rather than to a free introductory meditation class.

  “Nothing after the intro presentation is cheap,” Molly had warned. “I’m not saying it isn’t worth it, but in your situation, with so many other expenses coming? Just come along to this first. Something about it restores my faith in—in faith, I guess. It’ll lend perspective, at the very least.”

  But Liza didn’t lack perspective; her new eyes-wide-open view of the world seemed to be the very source of the problem. And Molly hadn’t told her enough, clearly, about Rick. Now that Liza was here, at the edge of this odd dock that forked in three directions, she especially didn’t want to be. Sharing space with Molly and Rick made her feel as if she was intruding on a private moment. Even though they’d invited her. Even though the children were here, huddled obediently in the center of the dock, contemplating their options with the seriousness of adults.

  “Boat ride,” Molly said for the third time, pointing to the first end of the dock, where a rowboat was tied. “Feed the turtles,” she said again, pointing to the food pellets piled on the middle prong. “Explorer packs.” On the third arm of the dock were backpacks filled with binoculars, magnifying glasses, bug jars, the works. “Which will be our adventure today?”