Don't Scream

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  They all laughed…at first.

  But their amusement faded as the four of them passed around the bottle of champagne while Rachel guzzled the contents of the mason jar, clearly hell-bent on getting trashed.

  There was no joy in it; it was clear to them even then that this was no celebration.

  Something was troubling their friend.

  Brynn even pulled her aside and asked her, at one point, what was wrong.

  “If I could tell you, I would, Brynnie. But I can’t.”

  And sweet, pretty Rachel Lorent carried her secret to her death that night…or so they all believed.

  Cassie’s cell phone rings a few minutes after she turns it on, just as she slips behind the wheel of her car in the hospital parking lot.

  It’s probably Alec. She left him a message earlier saying that he shouldn’t come over tonight; that she feels as though she’s coming down with something.

  He’ll probably insist on coming anyway, with chicken soup or ginger ale or flowers. That’s the kind of guy he is.

  A great guy.

  And I don’t deserve him, Cassie tells herself, not for the first time.

  Why is she consumed by a familiar urge to drive straight to the barn, climb on her horse, and gallop off as fast as she dares…?

  Where? Where would you go?

  Anyplace other than here, in my life.

  Because it doesn’t feel like my life.

  She reluctantly presses the SEND button on her ringing phone.

  “Cassie?”

  It’s a female voice. Unfamiliar…

  But only in that first instant.

  “Hello? Are you there?” the caller asks, and Cassie realizes, with a quickening pulse, just who it is.

  “Brynn?”

  “Oh, you are there. I heard a click a second ago and I thought you’d hung up.”

  “No, I’m here.”

  “Can you talk? I mean…you know…Is anyone around?”

  At her furtive words and hushed tone, Cassie understands why she must be calling.

  “Yes,” she says reluctantly. “I can talk.”

  “Did you get one, too?”

  Cassie’s heart erupts in a wild pounding.

  “Yes,” she says simply.

  So it wasn’t just me.

  “So did Fiona.”

  Then what about Tildy?

  Maybe I have a voice mail from her, Cassie thinks—though there wasn’t one the last time she checked, on her lunch break.

  “Listen, we’re meeting at one tomorrow afternoon, near Springfield, to talk about it. Can you be there?”

  “Who’s meeting?”

  “Me, Fee, Tildy…and you.”

  “You talked to Tildy?”

  “Fiona did. She tracked her down at work.”

  “So she got one, too? Tildy?”

  And why didn’t she call me back last night?

  “All four of us did. Can you be there tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? No, I can’t—”

  “You’re working?”

  At her hesitation, Brynn says firmly, “Cassie, you have to come.”

  “But—”

  “You have to.”

  Brynn is right.

  Cassie dutifully writes down the directions to the meeting place.

  “You haven’t told anyone about…” Brynn hesitates.

  “Come on, do you really have to ask that? We took an oath, remember?”

  “I remember. But that was ten years ago.”

  “An oath is an oath, Brynn.”

  There’s a pause.

  “I know. I’ll see you tomorrow at one.”

  Tomorrow.

  At one.

  That’s going to take some juggling to arrange, but it has to be done.

  There’s no way I’m going to miss this.

  Four so-called sisters, together again at last.

  The precious bond of trust, stretched thin across the span of years, is on the verge of snapping.

  They’re wondering, now, who among them might have violated the sacred vow.

  They’re wondering whether carefully sealed closet doors are about to be thrown open, brittle, decade-old bones tumbling out.

  Ah, ladies…if you only knew.

  One moment, Rachel was there, clutching the almost-empty mason jar.

  The next, she was precariously close to the brink of

  The Prom, laughing hysterically about something.

  Or maybe she was crying.

  It was hard to tell; she was incoherent.

  All four of them warned her to get away from the edge.

  And all four watched as she lost her footing and fell.

  Unlike the champagne cork, she didn’t sail out over the edge of the cliff. No, she rolled off, grasping helplessly, her terrified screams punctuated by a horrible thrashing descent, curtailed abruptly with a sickening thud far below.

  Fiona lives still in the house she and Pat bought during their marriage: a vintage 1920s Tudor tucked into a quiet, winding side street in Cedar Crest.

  “Don’t you want to sell it and start fresh in a place where there are no memories?” Brynn asked, after the divorce.

  “Trust me, there are no real memories here.”

  No meaningful ones, anyway—good, bad, or even trivial, day-to-day stuff. As far as she’s concerned, everything about her marriage was behind her the moment they signed the separation papers. The house itself was always just a roof over their heads and a façade behind which they could carry on the charade of marriage and family life.

  The mountain cabin is even less meaningful. They bought it just a few months before the split—Fiona more as an investment, and Pat because he wanted to actually use the place. As far as she knows, he rarely goes up there—and she never does. They keep the key under the doormat, and Fiona has more than once urged Brynn and Garth to use it as an escape. Mostly because she doesn’t want Pat to think he has sole dibs.

  “Leave the kids and take a second honeymoon,” she tells the Saddlers every so often. God knows they could stand a break.

  But they keep protesting that they don’t have anyplace where they can leave their kids, and Fiona isn’t about to offer to watch them for a weekend.

  “Why don’t you ever go up, Fee?” Brynn wanted to know once.

  “Because I like my creature comforts. I’m not the rough-it type.”

  Brynn laughed. “No, you’re definitely not.”

  Now, as Fiona stands in the master bedroom taking off the suit she wore to the office, she admires the Waverly floral wallpaper, coordinating draperies and area rug; the white iron bed she bought at an estate sale in Lenox, along with an antique dressing table, bureau, and wardrobe.

  The first thing she did after Pat left was strip off all the old striped wallpaper, rip up the carpeting, and get rid of the bedroom suite they had bought with their wedding money.

  She gave that to Sharon, who was thrilled with all those polished cherry Ethan Allen pieces.

  Of course, they didn’t fit in the small rectangular bedroom of her ranch house, so she put the armoire in the living room to hold her television and all those Hummel figurines she collected, and used one of the nightstands as an end table. Fiona privately thought it looked out of place beneath a stack of paperback romance novels and a ten-dollar Wal-Mart lamp, positioned beside the sagging orange and brown plaid couch.

  When Sharon moved in with her daughter last month, she offered the furniture back to Fiona, who told her to go ahead and sell it at her tag sale. In the end, Sharon reported, it was hauled away by a young family in a battered pickup truck, who had paid for it mainly in ones and fives.

  Fiona found some satisfaction in knowing that those people, who could never afford new furniture, were enjoying her luxurious bedroom suite.

  She found much more satisfaction in mentioning that to Patrick and watching him turn purple with fury.

  “There was nothing in the divorce agreement that specified what I had to do with th
e furniture I got in the settlement,” she pointed out. “If you thought there should have been, you should have spoken up to your attorney. Oh, wait, I forgot…Legal issues aren’t exactly your strong suit.”

  That, of course, alluded to the fact that he flunked out of law school not long after they were married. She had no idea he was even struggling, though she should probably have guessed.

  When he came home and told her, she walked right out the door, with no intention of ever going back.

  Fate intervened by way of a positive pregnancy test.

  Oh, well. At least she wasn’t stuck with Patrick Hagan forever.

  She divorced him the moment her business was comfortably established, and immediately reclaimed her maiden name.

  It isn’t that she’s particularly eager to be associated with her estranged parents in any way, but it was better than keeping Hagan. Besides, she likes the alliteration. Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations…It really flows quite nicely.

  Things have a way of falling into place.

  These days, Pat takes Ashley to dinner at least once a week and she spends every other weekend with him, from after school on Friday afternoons until eleven on Sunday mornings. Fiona insisted he have her back that early so that she can take Ashley to noon mass with her. Pat was raised Catholic, too, but he hasn’t gone to church in years.

  Fiona stopped going, too, for awhile, after they got married. She stayed away from the church until—

  She stops the jarring wisp of thought before it can balloon into a full-fledged recollection.

  No, she doesn’t like to think about that.

  The sins of the past belong in the past. You can’t change them.

  All you can do is go to mass every Sunday, and pray for forgiveness.

  She still attends Saint Vincent’s Church, the parish where she and Deirdre made their First Communions. But she diligently avoids the ten o’clock mass her parents have attended for thirty-some years. She doesn’t like to see them unless absolutely necessary; nor does she want Ashley to spend time with them, knowing they’re apt to fill her ears with self-righteous garbage—most likely about the sins of her mother and aunt.

  Back in her college days, Fee all but wrote off her parents when they disowned her twin sister.

  She softened a bit after Ashley was born, though—in part because she was desperately lonely, but mostly because she needed someone to watch Ashley so she could begin working as a freelance PR consultant for a small local agency. She and Pat couldn’t afford childcare and her mother was willing to acquiesce, free of charge.

  That worked out for awhile. Then Fiona got divorced—in her parents’ eyes, a crime as serious as Deirdre’s homosexuality—and it was all over. Just as well. She certainly doesn’t need anyone looking over her shoulder these days.

  Hearing a car’s tires crunching on the gravel driveway below her bedroom window, Fiona quickly pulls on a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt from the hook behind the closet door. She hurries down the stairs just as Ashley, giggling about something her father is saying, is opening the door.

  With her dark hair and eyes, porcelain skin, and lanky figure, Fiona’s daughter looks so much like her father. Acts like him, too, with her increasingly lackadaisical attitude. Sometimes, Fiona just can’t relate to her daughter—and sometimes, she secretly, ashamedly, even resents her.

  “Hi, Mom! Guess what? We went to Applebee’s! I love Applebee’s! So does Dad!”

  Fiona hates Applebee’s.

  “That’s great, Ash.” She musters a thin smile for her daughter, conscious of Pat looming on the other side of the threshold. He hasn’t been invited to cross it since the divorce.

  Fiona flicks a lighter over a cigarette—both because she wants one and because Pat is a militant antismoker. She turns her head to blow a stream of smoke well away from her daughter’s face and asks, “Listen, did you feed your goldfish this morning?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Again?” Fiona’s jaw tightens. She’s so much like her father. “You really need to learn how to be more responsible. Can you please go down and feed it?”

  “Right this second?”

  “Right this second.”

  “Okay.”

  Ashley won the goldfish at a carnival Pat took her to last spring. She brought it home, sickly looking, in a plastic sandwich baggy, and informed Fiona that she had already named it Bubbles La Rue.

  She then begged to keep it here, rather than at Pat’s place, saying her father might forget to feed it. Fiona agreed, on the condition that she keep the bowl in the basement playroom, and secretly assuming the fish would last all of a day or two. A week at most.

  Somehow, like a philodendron that mysteriously thrives without regular watering, the stubborn creature has hung in there ever since, despite Ashley’s sporadic care.

  “See you tomorrow morning, Daddy.” Ashley stretches on her tiptoes to kiss her father.

  “See you tomorrow morning, Princess.”

  Only when Ashley is skipping away does Fiona look at Pat. He’s already turned on his heel, about to leave.

  “Wait a second.” She doesn’t say his name. She hasn’t, in conversation, since their marriage ended. There’s something too intimate, too cordial, about addressing someone by name.

  He turns back. “Yeah?” He casts a disdainful look at the lit cigarette in her hand.

  “Cynthia Reynolds called right after I got home about fifteen minutes ago.”

  Pat waits silently for her to go on, standing on the brick doorstep, his black eyes expressionless and fixed on hers. Clearly, he knows who Cynthia Reynolds is.

  Fiona didn’t, when she called. Not right away. It took her a moment to realize that she’s the mother of one of Ashley’s friends.

  For some reason, it bothers her that Pat knows that detail. Then again, he has plenty of time and attention for Ashley and her friends and their parents. What else does he have to do?

  “She’s taking Meg to the mall tomorrow for lunch at the new Rainforest Cafe,” Fiona tells him in the brisk tone she uses with Emily at work, “then to see some new Disney movie. She invited Ashley to join them.”

  In the next room, an eavesdropping Ashley squeals with joy.

  “Ashley! Go feed your fish,” Fiona commands.

  “But I can go, right?” she calls. “With Meg and her mom?”

  Fiona looks at Pat.

  “Saturdays are my days with her,” he growls in a low voice.

  “You can go with Meg,” Fiona calls back to her daughter. “Go feed your fish.”

  She hears the basement door open, and Ashley’s footsteps skipping down the stairs.

  Fiona looks her glaring ex in the eye and exhales a stream of smoke in his direction. “She really wants to go.”

  Pat curses and waves away the smoke. “Don’t you think it should have been my decision? Especially since she was supposed to be spending the day with me?”

  “You’re the one who always wants her to make lots of friends and be social. You know how much she likes Meg. And anyway, if you don’t want her to go shopping with her friend tomorrow, you can go ahead and be the one to tell her and break her heart, and then call the mom back and break Meg’s heart, too.”

  Pat scowls.

  She can tell there’s a lot he wants to say.

  But he calls, “Good night, Ashley, honey! I’ll pick you up in the morning!” in the sweet Daddy voice he uses with their daughter.

  So different from the deadly cold tone he uses with Fiona.

  He turns and storms away without a good-bye.

  Good riddance to you, too.

  She kicks the door closed with a resounding slam.

  Life would be so much simpler, she thinks as she moves through the living room, smoking, straightening throw pillows that don’t need it, if she and Pat didn’t have a child together.

  Then she could have made a clean break, picked up and moved out of town after the divorce.

  Yes, Fiona Fitzgerald Publi
c Relations would be in the heart of Manhattan if not for the relocation clause in the divorce settlement, which states that neither she nor Pat can move beyond a fifty-mile radius of Cedar Crest without reopening their case.

  She isn’t about to do that, especially now that she’s worked so hard to become a success. Why should Pat reap the benefits in any way?

  So, she’s stuck here for at least another ten years. At least they have only one child, thank goodness. Thanks to me.

  By the time Ashley is in college, she’ll be pushing forty.

  Another milestone.

  But the pivotal one is right around the corner: she’ll turn thirty next month.

  And Rachel…

  Rachel would have turned thirty yesterday.

  Would have?

  Brynn wasn’t so sure those two words were accurate.

  Now Fiona tries the phrase without them—Rachel turned thirty yesterday—and a chill slithers down her spine.

  She watched Rachel Lorent fall to her death ten years ago last night…

  Or did she?

  It was Tildy who immediately made her way down to the spot where Rachel had fallen, clutching a flashlight whose beam bobbed eerily in the night. The rest of them clung to each other above, sobbing helplessly and hopelessly.

  It was Tildy who felt their friend’s—their sister’s—neck for a pulse, and found none.

  And it was Tildy who tearfully left Rachel at the base of the cliff exactly where she had fallen, on a thick bed of pine needles a few feet away from a stone marker at the edge of the hiking trail.

  Back at the top, Tildy was visibly shaken, trembling violently.

  They all were.

  But after they had cried hysterically, and pulled themselves together—the others considerably more quickly than Brynn—Tildy declared that they couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.

  “Are you crazy?” Brynn protested. “We can’t just leave her there. We have to go call the police.”

  “And tell them what?”

  “That it was an accident,” Brynn choked out in her grief, “that Rachel was drunk out of her mind, and we warned her. We tried to stop her.”

  “But we didn’t stop her,” Tildy pointed out. “And now she’s dead. And we’re involved. Look what happened to the Sigs, and nobody even died.”