Don't Scream

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Spotting her sorority sisters approaching the table with the hostess, Tildy lowers her wineglass. Maybe she should have invited them to the party, she thinks—but only for a split second.

  No, she shouldn’t have. They’re not a part of her life now. They wouldn’t fit in.

  Brynn, she hasn’t seen in years. Tildy notes, reluctantly, that her former sorority sister hasn’t lost her fresh-faced, wholesome prettiness, nor her willowy figure.

  But the cut of her dark blazer is all wrong, and she’s wearing it over a pair of Gap khakis, with flat brown loafers of all things.

  Tildy herself is appropriately dressed in Ralph Lauren Black Label, perfect for a Saturday luncheon in the country. Fresh from the salon, her hair is newly cut in sophisticated layers that fall to her shoulders.

  Brynn’s is still long, pulled back in a simple ponytail, and she’s got on precious little makeup.

  With some eyeliner, a flattering haircut, and stylish clothes, Tildy thinks, she’d be a knockout.

  As it is, she just looks so…small-town New England. Like someone’s wife, someone’s mom. All of which, Tildy reminds herself, she is.

  But she doesn’t have to look the part, for God’s sake.

  Jealous, are you? an annoying little voice pipes up.

  Certainly not. Not of Brynn’s looks, anyway.

  And not of anything else. Not anymore.

  Ah, there’s Fiona. She hasn’t changed much since she was in Boston in June, when Tildy introduced her to her old boarding-school friend James Bingham over an elegant seafood dinner at Aura.

  Her well-cut trim charcoal designer suit is a little businesslike for Tildy’s taste. Still, it’s expensive, fashionable, and becoming, and her legs look fabulous in the above-the-knee pencil-slim skirt and tall-heeled pumps. Her jewelry is gold and tastefully expensive.

  Her painstaking assessment sliding north, Tildy notes that Fee’s hair is twisted from its sleek right part into its usual smooth auburn chignon, her porcelain skin is flawless as ever, and her green eyes are expertly highlighted with a smoky shadow.

  She looks good, she thinks grudgingly. But not better than I do.

  Standing, Tildy takes turns air-kissing both their cheeks and notices that Brynn’s eyes are suspiciously bright.

  “You’re not going to cry, for God’s sake, are you?” she asks lightly as they pull out chairs.

  Rather, she intends it to come out lightly, a quip among old friends.

  Instead, she sounds bitchy, even to her own ears.

  “I’m trying not to.” Brynn studies her cloth napkin as she spreads it in her lap. “I’m just a little emotional about…everything.”

  “You always were,” Fiona comments with a hint of affection, and gives her shoulder a pat. But, looking at Tildy across Brynn’s bowed head, she smirks, just a little.

  “And you never were,” Tildy can’t help but comment, as she lifts her glass again in a silent, and not necessarily approving, toast to Fiona.

  “I never was what? Emotional?” Fiona shrugs and picks up the leather-bound wine list. “To my credit, no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t a lot of things Brynn was. Is that Chardonnay you’re drinking?”

  “Pinot Grigio.”

  Fiona flags a passing waiter; not theirs. “I’d like a glass of the Bouchard Père & Fils Puligny-Montrachet. Brynn?”

  She looks up. “Oh…Just an iced tea, please. With lemon.”

  “Oh, come on, Brynn, live a little,” Tildy urges. “At least have a glass of wine with us.”

  Brynn shakes her head. “I’m just getting over strep throat and I’m still on antibiotics. I’ll be the designated driver.”

  “I don’t think so,” Fiona says briskly, and turns to Tildy. “Have you heard from Cassandra?”

  “She left me a message this morning.” And one last night, as well. Tildy screened both calls.

  “What did she say?”

  “Just that she’ll be here. She must have hit traffic. Did you know she’s getting married to some guy in November?”

  “She e-mailed us both when she got engaged,” Brynn says. “I called her to say congratulations and catch up. She told me about her fiancé…She said they met at the hospital where she’s doing her residency. He’s a doctor, right? A podiatrist or something?”

  “I think so.” Tildy idly inspects her manicure.

  “She said you met him when they came to Boston for a Red Sox game this summer. What’s he like?”

  Tildy wonders if Brynn really cares, or is just trying to keep the conversation afloat until Cassie arrives and they can get down to business.

  Fiona is busy pulling her Blackberry from her pocket and flipping it open under the table, checking for e-mail.

  “Alex? He’s nice enough,” Tildy says briefly. She can think of nothing to add other than, “Good-looking, too.”

  “Oh, it’s Alex?” Brynn asks. “I thought it was Alec.”

  Hmm. Maybe it is. Tildy makes a mental note to pay more attention next time Cassie mentions him.

  Fiona tucks her phone back into her pocket and casts a glance over each shoulder before asking Tildy in a low voice, “So, what did you think when you got that birthday card in the mail?”

  “To be honest? I thought one of you had a sick sense of humor.”

  “It wasn’t us,” Brynn tells her definitively. “And Cassie swears it wasn’t her. So unless it was you—”

  “It wasn’t me. Please!” Tildy rolls her eyes.

  “Well, then, who the heck do you think it could have been?”

  Hmm, Brynn seems to have a bit more spunk than she ever did back in college, Tildy notes with some satisfaction. Good for her.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she replies evenly, and fights the urge to pick up her wineglass again. She doesn’t want them to think she’s drinking to calm herself.

  And anyway, she’d better keep her wits about her, or this could go very badly.

  Fifteen minutes after watching Brynn and Fiona climb out of the BMW and walk into the restaurant, Cassie is still sitting in her Toyota parked at the far end of the parking lot.

  She’s got to go in.

  Either that, or just drive away.

  But she can’t just sit here indefinitely, mulling things over.

  I shouldn’t have come at all.

  Really, there’s so much she could be—should be—doing instead, with every free moment she’s not working at the hospital. She has to finalize the reception menu. Meet again with the seamstress who’s doing the final alterations on her wedding gown. Give Alec’s sister the final guest list for next month’s shower, which she was supposed to have completed weeks ago.

  “Go ahead and invite anyone you want,” Tammy urged her. “Neighbors, distant relatives, old college pals…I’m serious, I’ve got plenty of room.”

  Cassie suspects that her future sister-in-law is as eager to be graciously accommodating as she is to show off her newly built 7,000-square-foot brick Colonial facing the Long Island Sound.

  “Someday, we’ll have a spread like this, baby,” Alec said when they walked through it for the first time last month. “You and me and our five beautiful kids. They can each have their own room.”

  “Five kids?” Cassie laughed nervously.

  “You’re right, let’s go for six. I don’t like odd numbers. And we’ll put up a big stable for Marshmallow, and you can ride him whenever you want, every day if you want.”

  “Ride him where?”

  “On our beautiful property. We’ll have a few acres, lots of trees, a water view, white picket fence, the whole nine yards.”

  White picket might as well be barbed wire, she found herself thinking illogically, as her fiancé pulled her in for a kiss.

  She tried to relax and let him kiss her, but she couldn’t.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  He gave her a long look and was about to question her further when his sister stuck her head in and
told them dinner was ready.

  How much longer can I go on pretending everything is fine? Cassie asks herself now, resting her head against the steering wheel.

  She had enough to worry about before this whole Rachel thing reared its ugly head the other day. Between her medical residency and her wedding plans, she’s barely had time to digest what that birthday card might signify.

  All she knows is that her life is finally thrashing out of control like a wild stallion.

  And she has two choices.

  She can either tightly take hold of the reins while there’s still time…

  Or she can close her eyes, allow fate to toss her wherever it may, and pray for a safe landing.

  There she goes at last, heading tentatively up the wide brick steps and disappearing into Glenview Springhouse.

  For God’s sake, it took Cassandra Ashford long enough to get out of the damned car.

  In contrast, it takes no time at all to furtively dart from the silver BMW to the red Ferrari to the blue Toyota and slip a white envelope beneath the driver’s side windshield wiper on each.

  There you go, ladies. A nice little surprise for all of you…

  Especially Matilda.

  She’ll look at it with confusion, and certainly with disdain, and, perhaps, ultimately, with dread.

  That’s the point.

  At the very least, she and the others will come to realize that they aren’t alone here at this secluded inn in the woods.

  That, in fact, after this they can never really be sure they’re alone anywhere.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Daddy!”

  About to settle into his desk chair at the computer, Garth bolts back to the living room at the blood-curdling shriek.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” He skids to a stop in the doorway. Both the boys are sitting calmly on their little wooden stools pulled up to the cluttered coffee table, where he left them just a moment ago.

  “There’s crust on his bread!” Caleb explains, one eye trained on the television, where SpongeBob Squarepants is doing a little dance.

  Oops. Brynn did say he was supposed to cut off the crust.

  “Crust!” Jeremy bellows like someone in the throes of physical torture. “Yucky!”

  “Cut that out, Jeremy. Crust is good for you.”

  “No crust!”

  “Okay, okay, stop shouting.” Garth reaches past a tall stack of magazines and a taller one of unpaid bills to retrieve the paper plate containing the peanut butter sandwich he just made.

  “There’s crust on mine, too, Daddy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll cut it off.” Picking up Caleb’s sandwich as well, he retreats back to the kitchen, where this morning’s cereal boxes still litter the white countertop, along with plentiful toast crumbs.

  He promised Brynn he’d clean up everything and load the dishwasher with the cereal bowls, milk-soggy and still in the sink.

  “Just go get ready for your lunch,” he urged her, as she surveyed the messy kitchen.

  She protested, but only for a moment. When she emerged from the bedroom a half hour later, she looked like her old self again—in khakis and a nice blazer rather than the T-shirts and raggy-hemmed faded jeans she favored most days.

  Her old self, as in the person she used to be, before the boys came along.

  She smiled when he complimented her. Then he caught her looking at the mess he hadn’t yet touched.

  “Don’t worry, I’m on it,” he promised. “You just go have fun.”

  “I will. But…” She shook her head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That superglue didn’t hold. The towel bar just dropped off the bathroom wall again. Can you fix it?”

  He sighed. “Yeah, I’ll fix it.”

  “Soon? Because I don’t want one of the boys to get hurt.”

  How, exactly, she thought one of the boys could get hurt by a missing towel bar was, and still is, beyond him.

  Yet Garth knows better than to argue with illogical maternal logic. He never wins.

  “You go have fun with the girls, and forget about everything here. I’ll hold down the fort.”

  “I hate to leave.”

  “It’s only for a few hours, and you never go anywhere. Enjoy it.”

  “I am kind of looking forward to a change of scenery,” she admitted. “In fact, I was thinking maybe one weekend in October, we could take a ride to the Cape to see my father.”

  “I don’t know…It’s such a long drive for just two days, between Friday-night traffic and Sunday-night traffic.”

  “We could go on Columbus Day weekend.”

  “Isn’t that when I’m in Arizona?”

  “Oh, right. I forgot.”

  “Why don’t you go anyway,” he suggested, “with the boys?”

  He expected her to accuse him of not wanting to see her family, as she has before. But, surprisingly, all she said was, “Maybe I will.”

  Good. She should. Her father and stepmother will want to see her and the boys…And Garth is well aware that they’d just as soon do it without him around.

  There’s never been much love lost between him and his father-in-law. Joe Costello is an old-fashioned, blue-collar guy who wasn’t thrilled when his only daughter shacked up with her professor the summer after graduation. That she went on to marry him and settle down on the opposite end of the state didn’t help matters as much as one might expect.

  Joe and his wife are civil enough these days, but Garth is never entirely comfortable in their presence—nor are they in his.

  Brynn’s father frequently likes to point out that he’s just “a regular guy”—as opposed to Garth, who ostensibly is not.

  “I don’t get all that professor talk,” he remarks pointedly whenever Garth uses a word containing more than three syllables. “Can you say that again in plain English?”

  No, Garth isn’t anxious to visit the Cape anytime soon. Let Brynn go with the boys, and explain that he’s off somewhere indulging in “professor talk.”

  “Daddy?”

  Right, the sandwiches.

  “Coming, guys.”

  He opens the silverware drawer and roots around. Butter knife, steak knife, paring knife, meat cleaver…Don’t they have a regular old bread knife?

  “I’m hungry!” Jeremy whines from the next room.

  “You’ll have to be patient,” Garth calls back, and decides his youngest child is spoiled rotten.

  Maybe that’s what happens when you’re the baby of the family. He wouldn’t know. He’s an only child, and his parents were older, and far from doting.

  Brynn dotes.

  Nothing wrong with that; she adores the boys. So does Garth, for that matter.

  But…Motherhood is Brynn’s life. To the extent that she’s actually suggested—more than once—that they have another baby.

  Garth laughed…until he realized she was dead serious.

  Brynn cried when he ruled it out.

  He often relents when she cries, but not about this. Their little house is already overflowing, they can’t afford to move; they can’t afford another child, period. Money is too tight.

  She didn’t see it that way.

  “Daddy!”

  “I’ve got it!” Garth swiftly hacks through eight slabs of Wonder Bread crust with a butter knife, drops it among the dirty dishes in the sink, and returns the sandwiches to the boys.

  Caleb, still glued to the television, doesn’t acknowledge him, just reaches for a sandwich and chews, robotic, fixated on SpongeBob.

  Jeremy, however, breaks into a baby-toothed grin and announces, “No crust! Yay! I love Daddy!”

  Garth’s heart melts. Maybe he’s not spoiled rotten after all.

  But they definitely are not having another child. No way.

  The phone rings before he can return to his work. It’s Maggie, a mom down the street, wanting to set up a playdate with Jeremy and her son, Zack.

  “That’s Brynn’s department,” Garth te
lls her. “I’ll have her get back to you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Out to lunch with some old friends.”

  “Lucky her,” Maggie says. “If you have trouble holding down the fort, feel free to drop the boys here to play with mine.”

  Garth, who resents the implication that he’s incapable of holding down the fort, tells her that won’t be necessary.

  At last he returns to the den, a former sunroom with tall windows on three walls, adjacent to the living room.

  It’s warm in here, the midday sun causing a greenhouse effect through the row of southern-exposure windows. Garth uses the old-fashioned hand cranks to open all of them, as well as the tree-shaded north-facing ones on the opposite wall. Instantly, a cross-breeze wafts into the room.

  There. Much better.

  He settles once again at his large desk, the broad wooden top entirely obscured by research books—though no more “gruesome” ones, in keeping with his promise to Brynn—along with stacks upon stacks of papers and notes, plus his desktop computer components.

  The computer is on its last legs, but of course they can’t afford a new one. It takes a few full minutes for the antiquated system to boot up.

  As he waits, Garth stares at a framed photo of himself with Brynn, snapped just before their wedding. She framed it for him as a gift that first Christmas together, when their newlywed budget was too strained for extravagances.

  Which it has been ever since. Last Christmas they didn’t even exchange gifts with each other, opting instead to ensure that Santa could bring the boys most of what they asked for.

  Garth tilts the frame to reduce the glare of the sun streaming through the windows, gazing at his wife’s image.

  Look at her. She’s so different now.

  It isn’t that she’s aged, exactly. The picture was taken just eight years ago when she was in her early twenties; she still hasn’t chronologically, or physically, left that youthful decade behind.

  But the Brynn in the picture exudes carefree joy, and her attention is focused solely on her husband-to-be. That’s how it always was back then—so different from now.

  When was the last time she looked at him like that? As though she was really noticing him?

  It’s been a long, long time.