Sentinel Green Interlude: Mina

Interlude: Mina

There was something wrong, but underneath that, there was something wrong.

The top layer of “wrong” was obvious. Ash hadn’t come home Sunday night. Victor had been steaming as early as Sunday morning, annoyed that Ash wasn’t picking up her phone, answering texts or dropping them a line to check in, but Mina hadn’t been worried. In fact, she’d enjoyed a few indulgent, private eye rolls at her husband’s silent fuming, and only sent off two messages to Ash herself: morning, and just so you know victor’s trying to reach you. She’d left it at that, confident the other woman was fine and Victor was overreacting, and hadn’t given it another thought until ten that night.

The tower of outgoing messages grew after that.

Morning                        10:11am
just so you know victor’s trying to reach you        3:14pm
you coming home soon?                9:42pm
hey we’re trying to call you                10:05pm
is everything okay?                    10:16pm
victor’s getting worried                    10:33pm

Mina looked at that last message now. She’d thought nothing of it at the time, but now it felt weak, somehow. She hadn’t said we’re getting worried, because at the time she hadn’t been worried, not truly. Not yet. It wasn’t in her nature to freak out over someone slipping off the grid for a bit.

By the time the sun set on Monday, that had changed.

So the top layer of wrong was beyond clear. Ash was gone. It pained Mina to realize that she’d failed to add Irina, Ash’s mother, as a contact to her new phone, but there hadn’t been any need before. Ash was by far the chattiest of their trio, almost always the first to send a morning greeting or a random text about some goofy video or errant thought. Mina had had to message her mother on Facebook and get her number there.

When she found out Ash had left Irina’s condo on Saturday night it started to get real. She’d been stubbornly clinging to the theory that Ash had obliterated her phone, something she was unfortunately known for, and had decided to go straight to work from her mom’s place on Monday morning. Once that idea was dashed Mina was adrift, mind gray and fuzzy and perfectly blank on what to do next. Victor had taken over from there.

The police had probed for the exact time Ash had last been seen, trying to determine if it had been less than 24 hours ago. Once three separate people vouched it had been nearly 48, and Ash was confirmed as a no-show at work, they’d gotten involved. Victor had a list of things to do and actions to take, and Mina gratefully followed his lead. He could be overbearing and reactionary, but he was decisive, and she needed that right now.

Because there was a layer underneath that first flavor of wrong, and that bothered her more than she cared to admit.

They’d been questioned, of course. Mina’s grandmother was almost too much to handle, barely able to hear the officer who was mainly focused on interviewing Mina and Victor, beside herself with horrible ideas of bloody car wrecks once she realized what was going on. Mina tried to tune her out, as well as her yapping dog, and had initially attributed her immense distraction to all the chaos. But when they took their questions to a quieter room and it didn’t help at all, a creeping sense of confusion rooted inside her.

Saturday night. It wasn’t a blur, necessarily, but it wasn’t clear, either. She’d been watching Aliens in the room. She’d turned in around midnight. Somewhere between those two points one of the cats had knocked over a houseplant. But it was so hard to remember anything else.

Victor was much the same, but didn’t seem bugged by this fuzziness. He attributed his own lack of specific memories to the headache he’d had earlier in the night. Mina had no such excuse, but was assured she’d probably just dozed while watching the movie and lost track of time that way.

Yet there was a knot of anxiety and despair associated with Saturday night. Was it because she knew, retroactively, that that was the night Ash had truly gone missing? Was she imagining car wrecks like her grandmother, or abductions, like Victor was? It wasn’t conscious, if she was actively fretting. Her own mind was an alien landscape to her for the first time in her life.

Though she didn’t care for the social media site, Mina pulled her battered Macbook Air toward her and navigated to Facebook. The page was slow to load, and when it did her eyes glazed over like they always did when confronted with this much meaningless garbage. Rows and rows of faces stacked on the right that she barely ever spoke to, but were now available to chat, a slew of old apps she had long forgotten piled up on the right. “News” in her “feed” that amounted to nothing more than randomly selected nonsense Facebook thought she wanted to see first. She skimmed the first several stories: a homeless man had been stabbed downtown, the hunt was still on for a diver reported missing on the north shore, and a wild dog or something was preying on animals and leaving torn-up carcasses worrisomely close to the highway. Mina paused at that story, frowning. Ash wouldn’t have been attacked by a dog—there wouldn’t be any reason for her to get out of her car on the ride home. She disregarded it and kept scrolling.

And, for once, Facebook was right. Mina lurched closer to the screen; a thrill of fear stole her breath.

Sandra Wakefield
April 20, 3:41 pm

Does anyone know where my husband is!?

View more comments

Mina jammed the text.

Tasha Akimoto Wait what??
Like - Reply - April 20 at 3:45pm
    -> Sandra Wakefield He never came home Saturday night.
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 3:51pm
    -> Tasha Akimoto Oh shit!
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 3:52pm

Marcus Quimby Did he maybe crash at someone’s place?
Like - Reply - April 20 at 3:58pm
    -> Sandra Wakefield If he did, he’s not picking up his phone.
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 4:14pm
    -> Marcus Quimby I’ll keep an eye out.
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 4:18pm
    -> Sandra Wakefield Thank you.
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 4:21pm

Malia Santos so to avoid asking dumb questions i’m just gonna ask for the whole story first
Like - Reply - April 20 at 5:26pm
-> Sandra Wakefield He’s been missing since Saturday night. I got a bunch of weird texts from him (or maybe not him?) Sunday morning, but I haven’t seen him. Phone wasn’t getting picked up, it’s going straight to voicemail now. His parents don’t know. I’m freaking out here.
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 5:42pm
    -> Tasha Akimoto crap, that was gonna be my next question
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 5:49pm
    -> Tasha Akimoto if his parents knew
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 5:49pm
    -> Malia Santos it’s been long enough, are the police involved?
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 5:51pm

Eye R. Baboon holy shit i’m sorry i don’t know where he is either
Like - Reply - April 20 at 6:02pm
-> Eye R. Baboon wait is he maybe with his parents?
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 6:04pm
-> Malia Santos no he’s not, she said so above in a reply
        Like - Reply - April 20 at 6:07pm

Mina stared at the nested comments and replies, her brain turning to gray static. She was halfway through a reply of her own when she stopped. After a second of foreign, wordless half-thoughts clogging her mind, she reread it.

sandra, ash is missing too. we haven’t seen her since saturday night either. she was at her moms and i guess never made it back here. you dont think something bad happened to both

She was deeply aware of her own breathing in a way she’d rarely ever felt before. Real, knot-in-the-gut anxiety was a stranger to her, and the way she could feel her heart beating hard all the way up to her collarbone was distracting. She highlighted all the text she’d just written and clicked “delete.”

Then she pulled her phone across the table to her, swiped to unlock the screen, and called Sandra instead.