Don't Scream

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Well then, why don’t you be SpongeBob?”

  “Tyler says that’s boring.”

  “I think SpongeBob is anything but boring.” I also think we need to limit your time with Tyler, Brynn decides as she hands Jeremy the cup.

  “Well, I want to be Gary. You can make me a Gary costume, right, Mommy?”

  She sighs. “Sure, why not?”

  “Good. I’ll go get some tape. You need tape, right?” He pushes back his chair.

  Brynn pushes it back in promptly with a hip check. “Whoa, hang on there, Gar’, we’ve got plenty of time before Halloween. Eat your breakfast.”

  “How many days do I have?”

  “Till Halloween?” She does quick mental math as she sets the sippy cup on Jeremy’s plastic placemat. “About twenty five.” Which means only twenty-three days until her thirtieth birthday. Yikes.

  “Cool beans.”

  Cool beans?

  She suppresses a smile. That’s a new one, and yet another reminder that her firstborn is now living a whole life that doesn’t involve her.

  Lately, Caleb’s vocabulary has been sprinkled with unfamiliar phrases like “crisscross-applesauce,” “Line Leader,” and “morning message.” He takes as much pleasure in his parents’ exaggerated confusion whenever he drops one of those phrases into conversation as he does in patiently defining them.

  “How many days,” he asks now, munching Frosted Flakes, “till we get to go visit Grandpa and Grandma?”

  Now there’s a word she doesn’t like to hear. Grandma. She tries not to cringe when her boys use it, though. Her father insists that they refer to his wife that way, just as the other grandkids—Brynn’s brothers’ children—do.

  For some reason, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone but Brynn.

  Sue shouldn’t get to be Grandma.

  Brynn’s mother should be Grandma…even if she never got to see any of her grandchildren. Angel Grandma in heaven, Brynn calls her with the kids, to differentiate—and she makes sure that she talks to them about her mother a whole lot more than she does about Sue.

  Or about her mother-in-law, for that matter.

  Garth’s mother is a good person—not as warm as Brynn’s family, but she does love the boys. She’s seen them an average of once a year, though…and she’s old. Really old. Snow-white-hair, deep-wrinkles, and-a-walker old.

  “Mommy? How many days till we go?” Caleb prods.

  “To see Grandpa? That’s next weekend.”

  “Grandma, too?”

  “Grandma, too,” she says reluctantly, and tries to smile cheerfully.

  Caleb and Jeremy adore Sue. According to Caleb, she’s “laughy”—meaning, she tells the boys silly jokes that crack them up. She always has a purse full of Hershey’s Kisses and Bazooka Bubblegum. She takes them bowling whenever they visit, and she lets them beat her.

  Mom, on the other hand, never let anyone win a game in her life. Always competitive—not to mention realistic—she thought kids should learn from an early age that loss was a part of life.

  Maybe she was subconsciously trying to prepare her own children to face the world without her someday.

  Or consciously, even. Sue told Brynn right after the funeral—and right before she got her claws into Brynn’s father—that Mom had a feeling, long before her diagnosis, that something was going to happen to her.

  “She had this thing where sometimes, she just knew things,” Sue said. “It was a sixth sense kind of thing. She didn’t like to talk about it, though. Especially not this past year, when she started thinking she might not be around forever.”

  Gazing at her two young sons over the rim of her coffee mug, Brynn can’t imagine ever having to say good-bye to them forever.

  What if…?

  Stop thinking about that right now! she chides herself as a chill creeps over her. You’re not going to kick the bucket anytime soon, so why worry about it?

  Well, maybe that’s what she gets for being married to someone obsessed by death.

  All right, “obsessed” isn’t the right word.

  The sociology of dying just happens to be Garth’s chosen field of study.

  Is it any wonder morbid thoughts sometimes creep into his wife’s consciousness?

  These days, she has no qualms about telling him to change the subject whenever he steers a conversation to a particularly ghoulish topic, particularly when others—particularly their sons—are in earshot.

  But back when they were first married and she was still a little in awe of him, she feigned fascination whenever he went off on a tangent about Iroquois burial customs or ritual suicide. She dutifully read nonfiction books he recommended, with titles like Violent Death and Point of No Return. And she regularly wore the first piece of jewelry he ever bought for her—even after she discovered what it really was.

  He did tell her, when he presented her with the unusual garnet-encrusted gold brooch, that it was “Victorian hair jewelry.”

  She thought he meant that it was antique, and that women used to wear it in their hair.

  It never occurred to her that the woven brown patch encased beneath an oval of glass was actually made of hair. Human hair. As her husband explained, it was a nineteenth-century custom to memorialize the dead by making their hair into jewelry.

  “Doesn’t it give you chills, realizing that it was once on the head of someone who’s been dead for over a century?” Garth asked with a delicious shiver.

  It gave Brynn chills, all right.

  But she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so she went on wearing it. For awhile, anyway.

  She stopped after Caleb was born. Then she tucked it away in her jewelry box, alongside her similarly abandoned sorority bracelet of intertwined silver rosebuds with her old initials—B.C.—dangling in two small silver letter charms.

  Garth never asked why she wasn’t wearing the brooch. By that time, she had stopped wearing any jewelry other than her wedding ring, along with makeup, and stockings, and heels…

  I’ve really turned into a housewife drudge, she tells herself as she stands at the sink in droopy, ancient flannel pajamas, pouring soggy cereal into the garbage disposal.

  On the heels of that thought, for some reason, she thinks of Tildy.

  Well, actually, she’s been thinking of her quite often in the month since they last saw each other.

  When she first walked up to the table that day at the inn, she didn’t miss Tildy looking her over from head to toe.

  An hour earlier, Brynn had been so happy to get out of the house looking human for a change. But under her old friend’s scrutiny, she might as well have been wearing her dingy white T-shirt with the orange SpaghettiOs stain over the right breast.

  That day, Brynn was painfully aware that she alone, of the four of them, lacked the right clothes, a manicure, a real hairstyle—a life.

  Then she came home to slobbery kisses from little boys, and a husband who told her she looked beautiful, and a message from Maggie, a fellow stay-at-home mom who understands what Fee and the others don’t.

  And Brynn managed to convince herself that she alone, of her four sorority sisters, has a life. The whole package: a stable marriage, healthy children, a real home.

  Which she wouldn’t trade for anything.

  But sometimes, it just might be nice to feel a little less…domestic, she can’t help but think wistfully as she leaves the boys eating cereal and dashes off to splash hot water on her face and throw on her clothes.

  Less domestic, more…attractive.

  Like Tildy. And Fiona. And Cassie.

  Oh, well. She has a feeling it’s going to be a long, long time before she’s faced with their triple threat again—if ever.

  Of the trio, she’s spoken only to Fiona since that day—and even more sporadically than usual, as Fee has been wrapped up with some important new client. She still hasn’t even bothered to return Brynn’s phone call from last week when she left a message to see if Fee wanted to meet for coffee someda
y.

  Well, at least the unnerving incident that sparked the sorority reunion has all but faded away. Nobody has surfaced with accusations or blackmail.

  Brynn has come to realize that she’ll probably never know who sent that card.

  Yet she can’t entirely shake the suspicion that Rachel is alive. That she got up that night and walked away from everything. From her life.

  And she just wanted us to know that she’s out there somewhere.

  Either that, or somebody was watching.

  Somebody who wants us to know we weren’t alone out there that night.

  But is that all they want?

  The possibilities give her chills.

  Thank God nothing out of the ordinary has turned up in the Saddlers’ mailbox since September 7.

  Nothing more to do with Rachel…

  Not, for that matter, even a wedding invitation from Cassie.

  “Do you think we’ll be invited?” Brynn asked Fiona as they drove home along the Mass Pike after lunch that day.

  Predictably, “God, I hope not—I’ve got enough on my calendar as it is,” was Fiona’s response.

  Unpredictably, Garth said almost the same thing when she posed the question to him back at home.

  “Why do you hope not? I think it would be fun to go to a wedding for a change,” Brynn told him. “Considering that all we get invited to these days are kids’ birthday parties. I swear, if I have to tote one more screaming, sticky, sugar-wired kid out of Chuck E. Cheese…”

  “I’d rather do that than drive for hours to a wedding where we won’t know anyone.”

  “Manhattan isn’t hours away, and we’ll know plenty of people.”

  “The bride.”

  “And Fee and Tildy.”

  “That’s three people. You can see Fee any time you want, Brynn. And Tildy…Well, do you really want to see her? You just told me that she gave you dirty looks at lunch.”

  “Not dirty looks. Just…she looked me over. You know, my clothes, my hair…I’m insecure whenever people do that. But I still love Tildy anyway and of course I want to see her. She’s my sorority sister,” Brynn tacked on automatically.

  Now, however, she realizes it’s just as well that she probably isn’t going to be invited to the wedding and won’t be seeing Tildy again anytime soon.

  Some people change for the better over the years, and some for the worse.

  But some never change at all.

  Tildy hasn’t.

  I have, Brynn thinks as she stares into the mirror above the bathroom sink. What do I possibly have in common with Matilda Harrington these days?

  “More than you think,” Tildy says with a sigh.

  “Oh, come on…how much?” Carrot-headed Katie Donovan, one of her coworkers, protests. She’s still clinging to Tildy’s wrist, examining the new silver-and-Swarovski crystal beaded bracelet that caught her eye just now as Tildy handed her a memo.

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t know…a hundred?”

  Tildy shakes her head.

  “You mean it was more than a hundred? Forget it.” Katie drops her wrist glumly. “I’m broke this week and I can’t charge another thing on my Neiman Marcus card. Too bad, because that would have looked great with the black cocktail dress I’m wearing to your party tomorrow night.”

  Tildy opts not to tell her that the bracelet cost four hundred. On sale.

  She does opt, generously and on a whim, to unfasten the silver toggle and hand it over to Katie. “Here.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Take it.”

  “You’re letting me borrow it?”

  “You can have it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s yours.”

  Katie squeals and throws her freckled arms around Tildy’s neck. “Are you serious?”

  “Totally. Take it.”

  “But…It’s so expensive. I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can. I don’t really like it that much anyway.”

  Katie’s sparkly green eyes dim at that, but only slightly.

  She fastens the bracelet around her wrist and admires it. “Well, thank you, Tildy. This is so sweet of you.”

  “No problem. See you tomorrow night.”

  Tildy stops in the break room for a coffee refill and heads back to her desk, pleased to have done a good deed for the day. She really didn’t like the bracelet much—it was an impulse buy, made when she was browsing the jewelry counter at Neiman Marcus the other day. She figured she’d wear it once and toss it into her jewelry box with her old rosebud sorority bracelet.

  But this is much better. Katie loves it. Tildy feels good about that…

  And maybe a little better about herself.

  Too bad you don’t accumulate points for good deeds that you can trade in to appease the bad that you’ve done.

  Stop thinking about that.

  But she can’t.

  Tildy went all these years, ten years, a whole decade, without so much as a twinge from her conscience.

  Why did it have to surface now?

  Why, indeed.

  The birthday card.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO ME.

  XOXOXOXO, R

  And seeing them all again last month, Fiona, Brynn, and—

  “So I hear tomorrow is a special day for you.”

  Tildy gasps at the sudden voice behind her, nearly spilling the hot coffee that sits precariously close to the edge of her desk.

  “Oh, sorry…Did I scare you?” Ray Wilmington looms above her, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt with a tie—one of her ultimate pet peeves—and an apologetic expression.

  “Scare me? No, not at all,” she says sarcastically, scowling as she moves the mug, which is imprinted with the name of a catering company, to a cheap coaster etched with the name of the nonprofit. “I never get scared when somebody creeps up behind me.”

  “I wasn’t exactly creeping.”

  Not only were you creeping, she wants to tell him, but you are a creep.

  She doesn’t say it, though, unnerved by the way his black eyes are fixated so intently on her as he thoughtfully strokes his beard. Whenever he looks at her that way, she feels like he’s trying to see something that isn’t there. Or, perhaps, that he’s seeing something she doesn’t want him to see.

  He perches on the edge of her desk in an unwelcome intimate posture. “I didn’t know your birthday was tomorrow.”

  Oh, yes, you did.

  He knew, because she overheard him talking about it the other day…

  On her way to the break room, she had just seen him stroll in ahead of her, and was thinking twice about continuing on in herself. She wanted to grab her yogurt from the fridge, not find herself cornered by Mr. Cheesy Small Talk.

  About to turn on her heel and head back to her desk until the coast was clear, she heard her name mentioned and stopped short. Ray had apparently come upon Katie discussing the birthday party tomorrow night with another of their coworkers, Allison.

  Eavesdropping just outside the doorway, Tildy could hear Ray grilling them about the party, trying to sound casual, obviously hurt that he wasn’t invited.

  He’s kept some distance from her ever since: a welcome reprieve from his typically undaunted presence in her daily life.

  But he’s continued to watch her from afar, same as always. She often feels his gaze on her even before she looks up to find him gawking. But at least he hasn’t been popping up constantly to flirt awkwardly with her and ask incessant, annoying questions.

  Until now.

  “So, what are you doing to celebrate?” he asks.

  “Nothing much.”

  “Really? But…You should really celebrate. Go all out. I mean, after all, it’s a milestone birthday.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “A little bird told me.”

  A little bird told him? Oh, for God’s sake. Must he always spew antiquated clichés? He’s worse than her Great Aunt Katherine, who, at least, b
eing a relic herself, has an excuse.

  Tildy flashes Ray a tight-lipped nonsmile. “I really should get back to work.”

  She gestures at the pile of paperwork on her desk, which she hasn’t touched in a couple of days. It can wait, but he doesn’t have to know that.

  At this point, she’s using every free moment—at home and at the office—trying to make the final arrangements for tomorrow’s party, which now feels almost anticlimactic in light of next weekend’s trip.

  Tildy still can’t quite grasp the fact that it’s actually going to happen. They’re actually going to go away together for an entire weekend. She’ll be able to wake up in his arms at last, two glorious mornings in a row. Eat with him in a restaurant without worrying that somebody might see them, recognize him, say something to her.

  Yes, it’s really going to happen…unless something goes wrong.

  Why can’t she shake the feeling that something might?

  A nagging trepidation took hold soon after he gave her the green light to make the reservation at the inn, and it’s grown steadily these past few days. It’s as though she’s looking out over a deceivingly calm sea and clear blue sky, armed with a near-certain forecast for an oncoming nor’easter.

  “What are you working on?” Ray peers nosily over her shoulder.

  “You know. The usual.” She shuffles one stack of papers on top of another and then back to the bottom again in a minimal effort to seem busy.

  “I’d love to take you to lunch tomorrow to celebrate your birthday.”

  “Sorry, can’t.”

  “Dinner, then, tomorrow night? I’m free,” he adds, followed by a significant pause.

  She refuses to take the bait, and looks him squarely in the eye as she replies, “I’m not. But thanks anyway.”

  “No problem, Waltzing Matilda.”

  But it is a problem, obviously.

  Ray stares at her for a long moment, as though he wants to say something else.

  Is he going to come right out and ask her about the party? Does he want to know why he’s one of the few people in the office who isn’t invited?

  If he asks, she’ll just tell him the truth in as straightforward a way as she can. So much for the newly anointed Good-Deed-Doer. Sometimes, you have to be brutally blunt with a guy like this.