Don't Scream. Wendy Corsi Staub
the years have flown by, and here I am.
Here we are.
Living happily ever after…
Until now.
No, don’t start thinking that way, she warns herself, watching Garth stir Splenda into his coffee, and Caleb munching his pancakes, and Jeremy licking maple syrup from his fingers. Everything is going to be fine.
Which is precisely the same thing she assured herself fifteen years ago, when a routine X-ray showed a suspicious shadow on her mother’s lung.
Mom didn’t even smoke and Dad gave it up years ago, so it couldn’t be cancer…
But it was cancer.
Well, Brynn wasn’t going to let it rob her of her mother…
But it did, in the space of a few months.
It robbed her as well of the jovial, loving family man who loved chocolate with nuts, the Red Sox, doo-wop music, and his wife and children. Not in that order.
Her father’s heart and soul died with her mother, leaving in his outer shell a brooding, often-angry stranger. The house was silent and dusty, the fridge filled with expired condiments, no dairy or fresh vegetables.
That stage lasted only a few months, and was replaced with one that was, in Brynn’s opinion, far more disturbing.
At first, though, she was grateful whenever Sue Learner, her mother’s longtime friend from her women’s bowling league, came around with the proverbial casseroles and condolences. Sue was a former nurse practitioner; she had a nurturing, maternal air that Brynn welcomed. She poured out her grief to Sue, along with a flood of adolescent angst.
She finally figured out that Sue was hanging around the house not to comfort her late friend’s motherless children, but to seduce their widowed father.
Mom could never convince Daddy to go bowling, but somehow, Sue did. One of Brynn’s friends spotted them together late one night at Lucky Lanes. Brynn didn’t believe it, but she questioned her father—and he confessed.
That bombshell struck Brynn about twenty-four hours before he threw a far more explosive one: he was getting remarried. To Sue.
“It’s what your mother would want,” he said—so often that Brynn wondered if he was trying to convince himself.
Personally, she doubted her mother had drawn her last breath fervently hoping that her good friend would move into her house, and her bed, before the granite slab was even laid over her grave.
Brynn, who, until that tumultuous loss, had wondered how she would ever go away to college without becoming terribly homesick, lived for the day when she could leave.
Once she did, she rarely looked back.
“Are you okay, Brynn?” Garth asks, and she looks up to see him watching her over the rim of his coffee cup.
“Fine. Just tired.” For emphasis, she tacks on a yawn that starts out forced, but winds up the real thing.
“You didn’t sleep well?”
She shakes her head at the understatement. But then, Garth wouldn’t know she tossed and turned all night behind their closed master bedroom door.
A lifelong insomniac, he rarely joins her in bed before dawn. Some nights—like last night—he stays on campus working on his book until the wee hours. Others, he doesn’t reach the bedroom at all, presumably sitting up in the den either writing or watching television, occasionally snoozing in his easy chair there when she emerges in the morning.
Early in their marriage, Brynn got up often to check on Garth or coax him to bed. Whenever he obliged, she felt like she was trying to sleep alongside a restless animal desperate to escape its cage. She gave up, years ago, the notion of climbing into bed beside her husband every night.
“I guess it’s not surprising that you couldn’t get much sleep last night. After all, yesterday was a major milestone.” Garth tilts his head toward Caleb.
“Definitely a milestone,” she agrees. And not just in the way you think.
Last night, she should have climbed into bed warmed by the afterglow of her son’s big, successful day.
Instead, she was tormented by visions that jabbed like icy fingers into her consciousness, keeping sleep at bay, forcing her to relive in horrifying detail the unthinkable events that unfolded exactly a decade before…
It was Brynn who unwittingly set things in motion.
“Did you notice how bummed Rachel was at dinner tonight?” she asked Fee as they left the library at dusk after a scant ninety minutes of studying.
“Not really,” Fiona returned predictably, her thoughts most likely on her boyfriend—or herself. “Why?”
“She just seemed down, even when Puffy brought out the cake and we were all singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her.”
Puffy Trovato was the sorority housemother, a warm, maternal woman whose nickname came from her round physique. Nobody knew her real name, and she didn’t seem to mind.
Her specialty was triple-layer Devil’s Food Cake topped with whipped-cream frosting and a spray of fresh red roses—the sorority flower. She made it for every one of the sisters’ birthdays, serving it up with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and a maternal bear hug.
Then everyone would serenade the guest of honor, first with the birthday song, then with the official sorority song.
Tonight, watching Rachel pick at her cake before pushing the plate away and leaving the table, Brynn wanted to ask if everything was okay. Petite Rachel, with her free-spirited gypsy style and easy smile, was usually the most upbeat, laid-back sister in the house. Last year on her birthday, she stood on her chair and laughingly conducted the Happy Birthday chorus, then followed that up with a hammy, operatic solo of her own.
Rachel, pursuing a bachelor of fine arts degree, had been taking voice lessons since childhood. She had a vague ambition to one day have a career on a concert stage; she just hadn’t decided whether it should be at the Met, backed by a full orchestra, or at the Garden, backed by electric guitars.
“Maybe Rach is just feeling old, leaving her teens behind,” Brynn decided, and Fiona rolled her eyes.
“Oh, as if. Who wants to be stuck in their teens? I can’t wait to turn legal so I can officially hang out at the Rat with Pat.”
The Rat, of course, was short for The Rathskeller, the off-campus pub where Fiona’s older boyfriend tended bar. Her fake ID was useless here in town, where the locals had known her since she was born.
“I hate to break it to you, but legal’s going to take awhile,” Brynn informed her friend. “You’ve got to turn twenty before you can turn twenty-one, remember?”
“When I do, though, I’m throwing myself one hell of a birthday party at the Rat. And I know just who I’m inviting, too.”
“Already?”
“Yup, because by that time, graduation will be right around the corner and I’m going to be networking every chance I get.”
Accustomed to retrieving conversations that had been commandeered and steered off course by the self-centered Fiona, Brynn prodded, “In the meantime, what are we going to do about Rachel? Her birthday is today, and so far it seems to suck.”
“Well…I’ve got a bottle of decent champagne Pat gave me last weekend to celebrate the new semester.”
“You didn’t drink it with him?”
“Nah, he only drinks beer and bourbon. Come on, let’s go find Tildy and Cassie and surprise Rach with a little party.”
“At the sorority house?”
“Uh-uh, then we’d have to invite everyone else.” Fiona was currently