The Quiet Girl

by S. F. Kosa

  “Is everything going okay?” she asks. “I thought the next step was getting venture capital money.”

  “It is. Drew just wants to make absolutely sure we’re able to fund the trial that’s set for spring. He doesn’t want a delay.”

  “None of us want that. If my damn cancer comes back, CaX429 may be my only chance.”

  “Don’t say that, Mom. You have lots of options.”

  She laughs. “And if Biostar goes down the tubes, I won’t be able to pay for them!”

  I grimace. I’m the one who convinced her to invest. Drew sold me on the idea. God, he’s a great salesman. Immunotherapies for solid tumors are the holy grail right now, and he’d partnered with a guy who’d identified a certain ion channel as an ideal target, one that could be boosted to supercharge the cells that might attack the cancer. It just so happened to be promising as a treatment for the same type of cancer my mom had been fighting for the past year and a half—she was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma in her salivary glands right before my dad died abruptly from a goddamn aneurysm, a double gut punch that had left me reeling.

  I’m no scientist, but CaX429 sounded like some kind of miracle, and there was my best friend, pushing me to be his financial guy in the company he’d founded to bring it to market. I left the accounting firm where I’d worked for ten years to help him make it happen. I convinced a lot of people I knew to invest in our company so that we could run a pilot—Drew and I grew up in Weston, which is thick with people who have more money than they know what to do with.

  Our angel investors are still waiting for their returns. Our pilot data were really promising—enough so that we thought every VC in Boston would jump on us in a hot minute. Hasn’t turned out that way, but I’m not giving up yet. “Don’t jump straight to the doomsday scenario, Mom. Biotech is expensive, and Drew is trying to cover all the bases. He’s being cautious.”

  Impulsive and reckless is what he’s being, but it’ll hurt the company if I ever say that aloud.

  “I didn’t realize money was such a problem. Can’t Caroline give Biostar some positive publicity or something? I keep hearing about these viral online things where people raise boatloads of cash. You only need the right push.”

  Caroline, Drew’s wife, is an on-air reporter for the Boston NBC station. “That’s kind of a conflict of interest for her, Mom. And startups don’t really raise money that way, not the ones that need millions of dollars, anyway. Look, we’re on top of this, I promise. I’m sorry if his email worried you.”

  “I want to hear news like this from my son,” Mom says.

  “You do understand that I’m the CFO, and that means a lot of this is on me? I’ve been kinda busy.”

  “Poor Mina,” she says. “I hope she’s not feeling neglected.”

  “Did you call just to make me feel shitty?”

  As soon as the words are out, I regret them, especially when my mom says, very quietly, “I didn’t mean to make things worse. The pressure must be crushing.”

  She’s trying to make me feel better, but somehow, it’s only making my heart beat faster. “I’m handling it okay,” I tell her, softening my tone. “Sorry for snarling at you.”

  “The last thing you need is to feel guilty. You go ahead and snarl if you need to.”

  How is this only making me feel guiltier? “I’ll call next week to explain the investment stuff to you, okay? I’m still working on the numbers and negotiating with potential VC partners, and I want to make sure I give all our investors, and especially you, the right information. Make sense?”

  “I’m lucky to have a son like you,” she says, sounding wistful.

  “And I’m lucky to have you for a mom.” I actually mean that. She’s a pain in the ass, my mom, but she’d lie down in traffic for me without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Oh! Oh. Is Mina there?”

  “What?”

  “Is your wife with you, silly? I read her newest, and I wanted to talk to her about it. I tried calling her a few days ago, but she hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”

  I sit up in my chair. “When did you call her, exactly?”

  “Hmm? Oh, Tuesday morning, I think? Yes. It was before my hair appointment. Went straight to voicemail. She didn’t mention that I called?”

  I close my eyes. “Like I said, I’ve been busy. So has she.”

  “My book club is next week, and my girls and I are discussing Bound for Life. I promised them I’d have insights from the author!”

  “Mina’s not here right now,” I say, feeling hollow. Part of me wants to tell my mom what’s happening, but the rest of me knows that won’t help at all. “I’ll have her call you.”

  “Before Tuesday would be great. This is one of the perks of having a famous author for a daughter-in-law!”

  “Sure thing. Love you.” We hang up, and I lean back in Mina’s chair. Mina’s always seemed super eager to please my mom, so I’m surprised she hasn’t called or texted her back. She actually worries what Mom thinks of her, no matter how many times I’ve assured her that my mom loves her. I think it’s because Mina hardly ever speaks to her own parents, and the first and only time I met them was at the wedding. They seemed perfectly normal and pleasant to me, and they live right nearby—in Truro, only a couple of miles down the road from Provincetown. But whenever I’ve suggested inviting them over or visiting them, she changes the subject.

  Same strategy she’s used when I ask about starting a family, too, until I forced the issue on Sunday.

  It feels like the walls are closing in on me. Launching myself out of the chair, I shove my feet into my shoes and head out the door. I end up at this beer garden on Commercial Street that Mina loves. Not just for the drinks—they’ve got great burgers and several vegetarian options, which is great because Mina absolutely despises all forms of seafood, an unfortunate characteristic for a native New Englander. We’ve been there at least four times this summer, and the last time, the grizzled Italian guy who owns the place even came out to tell her he’d made sure to stock this one brown ale from Jester just for her.

  The serious-faced blond hostess tells me there’s a spot at the bar, and I squeeze myself between two couples to peruse what’s on tap. I watch one of the bartenders, his black hair slicked away from his tanned face, as he shakes a cocktail into a glass. I’m almost sure he’s been behind the bar when Mina and I have eaten here before. When he notices me, I order a Night Shift IPA. As he hands me my drink, I say, “My wife and I come in here all the time. She’s a big fan of this place. Mina Richards?”

  “Lots of people come in here, man. It’s Provincetown in the summer.”

  “The owner here stocked a beer she really likes. The Feste.”

  “I know who you’re talking about now! The writer, right? She orders Feste every time.” He chuckles. “About the only one who does.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I blurt out.

  The relaxed smile disappears, and his gaze slides to the other bartender, a black woman with a tangle of ringlets pulled into a loose bun, who has her back to him as she banters with customers. “Um,” he says. “I’m not sure. Like I said, it’s pretty busy.” He focuses on rearranging little jars of cocktail condiments lined up along the edge of the bar.

  “I was supposed to meet her here for lunch, but I missed her,” I improvise. “I just thought—”

  “Haven’t seen her today,” he says, keeping his eyes on the jars, probably thinking I’m some jealous abuser he needs to save her from. “She always seems to have her phone with her, though, so…”

  “Text her. Yeah. I will. Thanks.”

  I down my beer in about three minutes flat, pay in cash, and slink out of there before he has a chance to slide the bills off the bar.

  I wake up alone. I know it before I open my eyes. My fist clenches over the sheets. My thoughts are a scrum of worry
and anger.

  Why is she doing this to me? Punishing me for wanting to have a kid, for fuck’s sake? It’s not like I demanded that we try to get pregnant immediately. I just asked a question. And now my wife has fucking ghosted me.

  Fuck this. I won’t let her blow up more of my life than she already has; I have a company to save. I was up working on my financial model until two, in part because I had a hell of a time getting to sleep—I was too busy listening for her car pulling into the drive, her key turning in the lock. In that grinding, oppressive silence, I pulled the model apart and put it back together a thousand times. On Monday, when I go to meet with the Pinewell guys and show them the details, it’s going to turn things around. Our first meeting with them was generalities, just the beating heart, but I’ve got the bones. And the brain.

  I make myself coffee, rifling through the kitchen for the filters and the beans, which Mina never seems to leave in the same place twice. Then I call in to the board meeting, which goes surprisingly well. Drew is buttoned down. He explains his email to our angel investors, including my mom, as a strategy to entice them to up their ownership in the company because the opportunity is too good to miss. Since half of them sit on our board, they’re intrigued by the chance, but they want to know who else is going to offer up the big funds—the fifty million we want to keep us running and completing studies all the way to FDA approval. It’s not the right moment to hand Drew his ass for going behind my back. It won’t matter too much if Monday goes well, anyway.

  When the phone call ends, I hang up and face the day. It’s late morning and already hot as hell outside. My anger has cooled, though. Mina is a lot of things—she can be flighty sometimes. She’s left the stove on more than once, and she even left one of Devon’s plastic cups sitting on a hot burner one time, not noticing until the smoke alarms began to blare and the condo filled with acrid smoke. She sometimes waits to tell me that she parked my car in the town lot until I’m late for a meeting, and twice we’ve shown up at a restaurant only to discover that she never actually made the reservation. And she can be a little focused on herself, sure. If she’s got a deadline or an appointment with her therapist that day or even just a new idea or a political bug up her ass, then good luck holding her attention for more than thirty seconds straight.

  But she’s not cruel.

  I try calling her. Straight to voicemail. “Mina, call me when you get this. I’m in Provincetown—I came early to surprise you…” I sigh. “Surprise! Anyway, I’m sorry for being a dick on Sunday. Whether you’re still mad or not, give me a call or text to let me know you’re safe, all right?” I’m connected to her by this thin electronic thread, and I don’t want to cut it. “We can work this out,” I finally say. “I know we can.”

  I force myself to end the call, and then I sit there, fighting the urge to hit her number all over again. Where the hell is she? Being away all day is one thing, but overnight? And she left her rings behind. It takes a fierce mental push to shove from my mind images of Mina fucking another man. Or woman. Not that it matters. She wouldn’t do that to me. She couldn’t do that.

  I grab the legal pad she left behind and read the first page—it’s a scene in which two characters are fighting, and the heroine is enraged but still feels inexplicably and irritatingly drawn to the guy she’s arguing with, who I assume is the romantic hero. I turn the page and keep reading. Scrawled in the margin of the second page is a list:

  Eggs

  English muffins

  Bacon

  Cheese

  Seltzer

  Bills

  Cash

  Stef

  Emily

  I know Emily—that’s Mina’s therapist in Boston. But Stef? Is that one of her friends? She doesn’t have many; she’s told me she’s always been an introvert, and she’s not good at staying in touch with people. Her best friend lives in Boston—another writer named Willa Penson, which I think is her real name even though it’s always sounded to me like a pseudonym. I know she has other writer friends, too, mostly on the internet, because they live all over the place, but I think she mostly chats with them online. Perhaps Stef is a friend here in Provincetown, or it could be someone from her publisher.

  For all I know, it could be her dentist.

  I wonder if I should know all these details of my wife’s life. It seems like I should. Especially now. After glancing toward the front door and half expecting her to be standing there, glaring at her obnoxious husband holding her precious legal pad and sitting at her writing desk, I put the pad down and open her laptop.

  It’s a lock screen. I type in my own name as the password. Nope. I try a few other things: our anniversary date, her birthday, my birthday, and the name of a dog she mentioned having when she was a kid. Byron, his name was. No joy.

  I give up and retrieve my own laptop from the bedroom. I’m not a big social media person. Never have been. I don’t understand the pull to share the mundane details of one’s life with a bunch of people on the internet. I have a Facebook account, but I think I’ve posted a grand total of five times. The last time was when Mina and I got married. I changed my status and posted a picture of us together, and I was deluged with several dozen friend requests from people I didn’t know.

  They all turned out to be my new wife’s fans.

  Mina is active on Facebook. She’s got almost five thousand friends, but the vast majority of them are people she’s never met in person and doesn’t know at all. To me, that’s like inviting a bunch of strangers to peer into our bedroom window, but Mina claims it’s not like that because she doesn’t post a lot of personal stuff.

  The last time she posted was Sunday morning. The day of our fight and the day before she came to Provincetown. It’s a picture from the Caffè Nero in Washington Square, a selfie of Mina at a tiny wooden café table with her coffee and her legal pad. I stare greedily at the image, pulling up the photo and zooming in. She looks tired despite the usual bright smile. Up late writing a new scene. Now, like all passionate affairs, we’ll see if it survives the morning after, she’s written. I squint at the image of the legal pad and then grab the one from her desk and compare the general outline of the prose on the page. I think the picture shows the same pad I’ve got in my hand. I zoom in as close as I can—the list is there in the margins, but the bottom three items are missing. She must have written those—cash, Stef, Emily—later.

  I read the comments beneath. One is from my mother, saying she’d be more than happy to read the scene for Mina and offer feedback, which makes me roll my eyes so hard that I think I strain a muscle. The rest are friendly comments from readers, questions about when her next book will come out and whether it’s a sequel or a stand-alone, stuff like that. Her friend Willa left a heart emoji and a comment about how they should get together this week.

  I instantly click on Willa’s name. Even though I’ve only met her once in person—at the wedding—we’re Facebook friends, too, and her dot is green. Hi, I type, then pause. What the hell am I supposed to say? Embarrassment paralyzes me for a solid minute, but then my worry sets me back in motion. When was the last time you heard from Mina?

  Her response is slow, and it seems like she’s typing a lot, but then it turns out to be only four words: Why do you ask?

  Just wondering, I type.

  …? That’s her response, and I don’t blame her. I consider myself a strategic thinker, but right now, I’m acting as impulsively as Drew. I don’t want to admit that I don’t know where Mina is. We’ve been married for only two months after knowing each other for only half a year, and there’s already trouble in paradise. I’m imagining the I told you so’s coming in fast and furious, and I don’t want to deal with that. This is between Mina and me, and the rest of the world can mind its own damn business.

  Seems like the kind of thing you should ask her, not me, Willa adds, and that clinches it for me.

 
I will, I type and sign out.

  But two hours later, after the silence of the cottage turns oppressive, after reading Mina’s handwritten scene four more times, after Googling “Mina Richards Stef” and finding nothing, after finishing the bottle of red, and after reminding myself that Mina loves me—she wouldn’t let me worry about her for this long—I pick up the phone and call the Provincetown Police Department.

  “Hello,” I say to the woman who answers. “I need to file a missing person report.”

  Chapter Two

  She stared at her knees. Both skinned up, pink and abraded, twin trickles of blood diluted by the steady, warm rain. Drops slid along her nose and cheeks as she rocked slowly, her fingers curled over her shins.

  Her butt hurt. She shifted on the brick steps and winced. Her back hurt, too. Her fingernails were filthy, broken, and crusted with grime. Grit crunched between her teeth.

  She raised her head as a memory came to her: teetering as her bike hit soft, loose sand. Her shoulder and hip hitting the ground. She lifted her left arm and hissed at the deep, dull ache.

  In front of her was a narrow street, water carving its path through the silt at the edge of the asphalt. On either side of her were small cottages. Everything was gray. The buildings. The sky. Even her hands were tinged with it. She peered at them, wondering if she was actually alive or dead and in some weird in-between, a hazy, wet waiting place where she was all alone, the only soul in the world.

  From behind her came a metallic squeak. She whipped around, ending up crouched at the bottom of the brick steps, looking up at a white-haired man wearing a blue robe and pajama pants who was leaning out the front door of his cottage, the stoop of which she’d apparently been sitting on. Number thirty-nine.

  His eyebrows were raised. “Hi there,” he said quietly. “Can I help you?”

  She backed off the porch and stood up. Her tongue writhed inside her mouth like an earthworm in rain-soaked dirt.