The Quiet Girl

by S. F. Kosa

  “I can’t help it. I’m so messed up.”

  “How did you get messed up?” Their eyes met. Very softly, Lori asked, “Who hurt you?”

  Maggie touched her hair, her fingertips skimming over a crusted scab that sent shocks of pain along her scalp. “Besides me, you mean?”

  “I see that more as a scream for help—and my question stands.”

  Maggie glanced at the chessboard and pressed her face to the pillow. “My dad used to love to play chess. He was a pretty good player. We used to play after dinner each night. I was in the chess club. I was playing with the middle schoolers when I was still in elementary school.”

  “Did your parents take pride in that?”

  “I guess so. After my dad died, my mom made sure I kept playing.” Maggie ran her fingers along the velvety couch fabric. “She got the middle school chess club coordinator to give me lessons.”

  “Did you want to keep playing?”

  “She said my dad would want me to. That I could honor him by doing it.” Maggie stared at a catch in the fabric, one thread pulled loose from the rest. She wished she had those scissors again.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t think it matters anymore, whether I wanted to keep playing or not.”

  “Why do your preferences not matter?”

  Maggie sighed in exasperation. “This isn’t working,” she snapped.

  “How can we make it work better?”

  She shoved herself up to sitting. “Aren’t you the doctor? Aren’t you supposed to know that?” She was being rude. Her fingers curled over couch cushions, ready for blowback.

  But Lori simply smiled. “I am the doctor. But you’re the expert, Maggie. You’re the only one who can tell me what feels good and bad.”

  Maggie jolted to her feet, laughing. “I have no fucking idea,” she shouted.

  “I believe you,” Lori said. “Sometimes, things get really mixed up, and it’s not easy to tell them apart. Good and bad. Love and abuse. I think that’s what’s happened to you.”

  “That I got mixed up? No shit, lady.”

  “Maggie, please stay,” Lori said as Maggie turned for the door. “You can sit, you can stand, you can lie on the floor, hop on one foot, stand on your head, but please stay.”

  “You can’t help me. Nobody can.”

  “False,” Lori said firmly. “I can help you. But only if you give me permission.”

  Maggie began to pace, her body unable to contain the rage crackling along her limbs. “I’ve let people do all sorts of things to me, Lori,” she snapped. “You’d just be one of many.”

  “Who else is on that list, Maggie?”

  Maggie shook her head, clutched at it, rubbed until there was blood. When she looked up, Lori was standing there with a first-aid kit in hand. “For now, we’ll deal with it this way,” she said to Maggie. “Have a seat.”

  Maggie sat like her legs had been cut out from under her. Her eyes burned as Lori dabbed her wounds with antiseptic and pressed bandages to her shorn hair. Shame and fury bred and bloomed, filling her lungs and making it hard to breathe. Finally, when Lori stood behind her, when her hands lifted their weight from her skull, Maggie said, “He wanted to play. He wanted to teach me how to do things properly. He always said that. Every time.”

  “The chess tutor?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “But you’re not talking about chess.”

  “It was, at first. I mean, it was and it wasn’t. I know that now.”

  “It’s called grooming.”

  Maggie flinched. “I was so stupid. I liked him.”

  “How long did it go on?”

  Spit filled her mouth. She shook her head.

  “Okay. But it didn’t stop with chess lessons. He took it further. Crossed a line. Inched across it, I’m guessing.”

  “He told me I was special,” she muttered.

  “Did you tell anyone? Your mother?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Lori,” Maggie said, “she had already decided to marry him.”

  “Maggie…” Lori moved to her chair again and sat down. “You’ve been talking about your stepfather.”

  “I actually thought he’d leave me alone after they got married. And he did, for a while.”

  “You were nine? Ten?”

  “I believed he had stopped forever. I even forgot about it for a long time.” Maggie shrugged. “I was in middle school when he started up again.” Ninth step, fourth step, right outside the door. Creak, creak, creak, a slice of light from the hall, a shadow blocking it out, signaling there was no escape. “He’d come into my room. He told my mom it was nightmares. He was a light sleeper. She wasn’t.”

  “Oh, Maggie.” Lori’s voice was so sad.

  Maggie couldn’t bear to look at her. She was afraid that if she saw the pity, she’d run. Or attack. “When I was in eighth grade, she did wake up. She caught us.”

  “‘Caught…us’?”

  “She walked in. She saw us.”

  “Can you tell me what she saw?”

  The whine sounded like it came from someone else, somewhere else. Ventriloquist’s dummy. Maggie covered her face with her hands.

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to. I know it’s painful. You’re being so brave, Maggie.”

  “What do you think she saw?” Maggie snapped, dropping her hands. “Just guess.”

  “A grown man abusing an innocent girl.”

  Maggie laughed, sharp as those scissors. “Oh no, that’s not what she saw. No, Ivy Wallace-Gainer saw her whore daughter seducing her innocent husband. She saw the man she loved led into temptation by a tool of the devil. She saw a lot, but not a grown man abusing an innocent girl.”

  Lori had been listening, her whole body taut with attention, but the more Maggie spoke, the more Lori’s face changed, transforming from queasiness to a rigid clench.

  “You told me you wouldn’t judge,” Maggie said. “But I can see it. You can’t help yourself, can you?”

  “If you think for one moment that I’m judging you, I’m going to have to examine your reality testing.” Lori shook her head. “The one person you should have been able to count on completely failed.”

  “Did she? She wanted me to be a good young lady. She wanted me to be quiet, to be polite, to be proper and obedient and attentive to everyone else’s fucking feelings. She wanted me to be pretty and to get good grades and to have perfect manners and to make people around me feel good, all the time. And I did, right?” A sob pushed its way out of her, another far away, foreign sound. “I was really good at it. Still am when I want to be.”

  “You’re a survivor is what you are.”

  “That’s bullshit. I don’t need that.”

  “You’re here. You’re still standing after everything. But it’s taken a toll.”

  “She sent me away to boarding school,” said Maggie. “She said she hoped they would succeed where she had failed.”

  “It might have been the best thing she could do for you—getting you away from that situation.”

  “Should I have written a thank-you note? How rude of me.”

  “I wasn’t saying you owed her a single damn thing,” said Lori. “She failed you, Maggie.”

  “I guess she’d probably agree with you at this point. You can’t look at me and claim any kind of success.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, because here you are.” Lori held up her hands. “All I’m saying is that you could have done a lot of things last night, Maggie. The damage could have been to more than your hair. But instead, you chose the absolute healthiest thing—you came looking for help.”

  “She wants to get back together with him. I thought they were going to get divorced. He moved out after everything.”r />
  “When was that?”

  “After I left for school.”

  “Have you had any contact with him?”

  Maggie grimaced. “I guess she doesn’t believe in divorce. And apparently neither does he. He paid for my education. He says he’ll always be my dad. He says he’ll always take care of me.”

  Lori watched her for what felt like a long time. “He didn’t stop,” she murmured. “The distance didn’t protect you.”

  Maggie slowly sank to the floor. Her knees hit the soft rug, then her elbows, then her forehead. “He wanted me to show my gratitude,” she mumbled.

  “Maggie,” Lori said, “when was the last time he visited you at school?”

  “April,” she whispered, rocking forward and back, forward and back.

  “Of this year?”

  “He came and took me out to the nicest restaurant in Amherst. He met my boyfriend.” She shuddered. “He didn’t like him. He said I wasn’t focusing on my studies. He said he didn’t want to pay for my education if I was going to waste my time.”

  “He wanted to keep you to himself.” Lori sounded sick.

  But Maggie had gone numb. Her whole body tingled with a heavy kind of nothing. “I guess he made his first mistake then, didn’t he?”

  “I’m not sure I follow. It sounds to me like he hasn’t done anything right. Not one thing.”

  “But this…” Maggie began to laugh again, her fingers clawing at the rug, leaving little divots.

  “This is what triggered your fugue,” Lori said slowly.

  “It wasn’t the first time,” Maggie said, curling into a ball, vaguely aware of how pathetic she was but unable to care. “He’d done it before.”

  “I know, Maggie. But this time, you got pregnant.”

  It was like a dam breaking. Maggie’s body convulsed, and she began to sob.

  Everything that came after was a blur. Lori said some words. Maggie heard “safety.” She heard “hospital.”

  She heard herself say “Yes. Please.”

  She didn’t fight when the ambulance came. She let Lori hold her hand. She nodded when Lori told her she was brave, when she said it was the beginning of her journey out of the darkness.

  Maggie wasn’t fooled, though. She was too tired to argue or fight or to say a single word, but she knew the truth. She knew where the darkness lay.

  And no amount of talking could light that space.

  Saturday, August 8

  I finish reading Mina’s book in a breathless rush on Friday night, and on Saturday morning, I have to read it again to make sure what I remember isn’t the product of a drunken fever dream. But it’s still there, all laid out, Mina’s story of her past.

  What. The. Fuck?

  There’s no way that actually happened in real life, in her life.

  No. I’ve read the editor’s comments, too, or lack thereof. There aren’t many in the final chapters. If he believed that was all the truth, he would have said something, wouldn’t he?

  Maybe he didn’t want to put any of his thoughts in writing. Or maybe there are some questions best left unasked and some answers left unknown, too dark and horrific to be seen in the light.

  The only thing I really do know is that between the details, the heartbreaking, gut-wrenching threads she wove together, there is a reality I have to understand if I ever want to find her. I’ve been telling myself that it couldn’t be Mina, that Maggie is a foreign creature from her imagination. But in Maggie, I see the shadow of my wife. I hear the echo of her voice. I understand that she was raised to please others, and even when she escaped her parents, that training was there, along with that skill. She knew how to make other people feel good. She made me feel good. And I hope to God it was because she actually wanted to. I wonder how she could have held all this inside her. The violation, the pain, the confusion, the rage. I wonder how any one soul could bear it.

  I don’t see how the manuscript can tell me where she went and what she’s done unless I understand her actual past a hell of a lot better than I do now.

  After yesterday, I know that her parents aren’t going to help me. And Stefan is off-limits, given Correia’s warning and the active case against him. Mina’s therapist might know, but she’s not going to tell me a damn thing.

  I call Hannah. It goes straight to voicemail. Either her phone is off or she’s blocked my number. I ask her to call me back, but I won’t be holding my breath. So I search for Kyle, the editor who Hannah mentioned. Kyle Wu has been a senior editor at Pleiades Books for the last six years. I look up his number, but it’s Saturday, so no one answers. Even if I reach him, I’m not sure he’ll tell me anything. I leave a brief message asking for a call back and decide I need to stick closer to home to get the answers I need.

  I look up Sharon Rawlings. She and Phillip have lived next door to the Richardses for years. If anyone knows them, it’s her. She answers immediately and agrees to meet me for lunch at Montano’s. When I arrive, her brown Mercedes is already in the gravel lot, and she’s waiting at a table inside with an empty cocktail in front of her. She greets me with a hug. “I wondered if I might get a call from you, actually.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I saw the look on your face yesterday as Rose and Scott did their dance.”

  The waitress comes over and clears the empty glass. I order a beer, and so does Sharon, but only after asking after the young woman’s parents, who are apparently friends of hers and Phillip’s.

  “I don’t usually partake this early in the day,” she says with a glint in her eye. “But I had the feeling this conversation would call for a drink.”

  “I’m getting the sense there’s a lot that Scott and Rose don’t want to tell me.”

  She chuckles. “They do give that impression, don’t they?”

  “I’m just trying to understand what happened to Mina.”

  Her face goes serious. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Almost hoping you’d reach out.”

  I watch her for a moment. “You’ve been hinting.” There’s been a weird intensity to all her pleasant, oh-so-complimentary comments about Rose.

  A shrug as our drinks arrive. She takes a long sip of hers. “I don’t like to overstep. I mean, sometimes I do, right? Sometimes I’m hopeless.” She shakes her head. “Shotgun wedding.”

  “It’s fine. But…did you ask me about that because of Mina’s past?”

  She sits back. Takes another drink. “I guess you know more than I thought.”

  “What I want to know is the truth.” Because I know what I read, and it’s disturbing as hell.

  “How much truth?” she asks before taking another gulp of her beer. Her cheeks are getting pink. “Dig deep enough in the past and you might hit an artery.”

  I’m rapidly losing my appetite, but I order a sandwich. Sharon orders crab cakes. I make a bad joke about food poisoning, and she gives me a questioning look and then waves it away. “Different restaurant, thank God,” she replies. And after another draft—emptying her glass—she looks me in the eye. “I never thought I’d talk about any of this. I’ve spent so many years pretending it never happened.”

  “You were more involved than you let on.”

  “Not by choice.” She flags the waitress and orders another beer. “I love my husband,” she says as the waitress walks away. She leans forward and speaks quietly. “But he’s not perfect.”

  “No one is.” I have no idea where she’s headed with this, but my heart is beating too fast.

  “I just want you to understand where I’m coming from.”

  “Okay…”

  She hangs her head back. “I’m sorry, Alex. I wanted to make this easier, and I’m doing the opposite.”

  We sit in silence for a moment. I drink my beer and look around. The place is packed with families, and I’m guessing almost all of them
are tourists, wearing their sunburns like uniforms.

  Finally, Sharon says, “When Scott and Rose and Mina moved in next door, I was so happy. She was such a cute little girl. Phillip and I…” She presses her lips together. “We had a son. Robbie.”

  “Had…”

  “Leukemia. He was four.” Her face crumples. “He would have been Mina’s age.”

  “I’m so sorry, Sharon.”

  She sniffles and looks toward the window as the waitress returns with her second beer. I thank the woman in order to give Sharon a second to pull herself back together, thinking the whole time about how it would feel to lose Devon that way. My chest is aching as Sharon looks back at me.

  “I loved Mina from the start,” she says in a husky voice. “From the very start.”

  “Did you have a sense of what she was going through?” Because I’m afraid I do. “Like, why they sent her off to boarding school? I talked to Amy Poole, and she said Mina was pretty withdrawn before she left.”

  “Oh, I can’t blame her at all.” She meets my eyes with an apologetic tilt of her head. “Out with it, right? I’m dancing around all this like a dog in need of a fire hydrant.”

  “Take your time.” That’s what I say. I’m no therapist, but I’m a fair negotiator, and I understand the benefit of letting people stew for a bit. It’s why I still haven’t answered Drew’s calls from yesterday.

  “At first, we were great friends,” she says. “I mean, we don’t go to that New Life church. People in Truro aren’t usually that religious. Most of the people you met are their church folks, but only the Pooles live in Truro, too. Right up the road from us. But Rose was always all about the church and the community. Scott…he was always all about Rose.”

  “I don’t know what to make of Scott,” I tell her. And what I’ve read…I don’t know how to translate it. In Mina’s book, the dad is dead, and he’s replaced by this nightmare stepdad who abuses her. Was that Mina’s way of protecting herself from having to write about Scott doing all that to her? Yet another thing too painful to include in the story?

  “He’s a tough nut to crack,” Sharon acknowledges. “Still waters run deep.”

  And are often cold as hell. “You described Rose as an exotic bird.”