Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (3 page)

“Del?”

“Hang on, I’ll light a match.” I felt her brush by me, heard her feel around along the shelves, shake a box of matches, open it, and strike one. The small room glowed orange. Del pulled an old jelly jar with a candle in it from off a shelf and lit it. She blew out the match, then held the stubby candle in the jar up to my face like she was studying me, unsure of who I might turn out to be.

“Okay, if I show you my secret, you gotta promise not to tell. You gotta swear.” Her pale eyes seemed to look right through my own eyes, reaching all the way to the back of my skull.

“Okay.”

“Swear on your life?”

“Yes,” I muttered. She pulled the candle back from my face and set it on a shelf next to a row of dust-covered canned tomatoes.

“Cross your heart and hope to die?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said.

“I’ve got a tattoo,” she told me. Then she started to unbutton her dirty yellow shirt, which was embroidered with colorful little lassos, hats, and horses.

I wanted to tell her to stop, to say that I believed and didn’t need to see, but it was too late. The shirt was off. To my relief, she wore a soiled white cotton undershirt with a tiny pink-petaled flower stitched at the center of the neckline. But then she peeled this off quickly, without hesitation, and I looked down, embarrassed, thinking that maybe the stories I had heard were true—and yet there I was, in the cellar with the Potato Girl. What was I thinking? If this ever came out at school…I shuddered. I struggled to think of an excuse to make a quick escape. The dirt smell intensified.

“Well, are you gonna look or what?” she asked.

I slowly shifted my gaze from the packed earth floor to Del’s naked torso.

Del was a skinny kid—I could practically count her ribs. She looked like a person who’d had all the color washed out of her—even her nipples seemed pale. And there, over her bony cage of ribs, just where I believed her heart might be, was the letter
M
. I moved closer for a better look, trying to make myself forget that this was some strange girl’s skin I was studying—not just skin, but the place that would one day be a breast. I could already see the beginnings of them, slight swellings that looked out of place on her skinny frame. But what my eyes were drawn to was not Del’s developing breasts, and how different they were from my own flat chest, but the tattoo.

It was a cursive capital
M
, delicate and swirling. It had been etched into her skin in black ink, and done recently enough to still be red and puffy. It looked slightly infected and terribly painful. I backed away.

The only tattoo I had ever seen in my life had been a faded anchor on the forearm of one of my mother’s boyfriends who’d been in the navy. There was him, and there was Popeye, but cartoons hardly counted, and meant nothing in the situation I now found myself in.

I tried to look unimpressed. But a tattoo? On a fifth grader? Del was more alien to me than ever.

“What’s the
M
for?” I asked.

“Can’t tell you that.” She smiled at the power of her secret.

“Who gave it to you?”

“Someone special.”

“Didn’t it hurt?”

“Not really.”

“It looks like it hurts now.”

“It’s a good kind of hurt.”

I didn’t ask what a bad kind of hurt might be. I didn’t get a chance to ask any more about it before the wooden door swung open and the root cellar filled with light. I looked up and saw the silhouette of a lanky boy standing at the top of the steps.

“Del, what the hell you doin’? And who’s this with you? Christ, you two making out down here or somethin’?” His voice was scratchy, as if he had a sore throat and it hurt to talk too loud.

Del turned away quickly and threw on her undershirt.

“Scram, Nicky!” Del shouted with her back to him, and I realized I was looking up at the crow killer. I squinted against the light behind him to make out his features. I could see raggedy pale blond hair and strangely long arms that seemed to hang awkwardly. Orangutan arms. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that this boy was as tan as Del was pale. A dark-skinned ape boy in torn jeans and a white T-shirt, heavy work boots on his huge feet.

“Yeah, I’ll scram all right,” said his raspy voice. “I’ll scram right back into the house and tell Daddy what I just saw.”

“You shit!” Del spat up at him.

“Who’s your friend?” he asked with a sly, thin smile.

“None of your beeswax,” Del answered.

The boy laughed, white teeth flashing against the background of his bronze face, then backed away from the door.

“Man oh man, I’d hate to be in your shoes. Daddy’s gonna give you one hell of a licking.” And then he took off toward the house, leaving the root cellar door open.

“You better go,” Del ordered. “But come back tomorrow. Meet me in the field after school. By the crow. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

She raced up the steps out of the root cellar, then stopped at the top and called back down to me, “See you later, alligator!” before chasing her brother back toward the house.

I blew out the candle and crept up the wooden steps slowly, peering right, then left when I got to the door. I saw no one coming, so I bolted straight ahead, not daring to turn and look back toward the house, toward Del and Nicky. I ran past the pigs with their razor teeth; past the horse pasture with its limping pony; through the spinach, carrots, and beets; and back to the field of baby peas where the dead crow hung still on its wire like some broken marionette.

At the edge of the back field, the woods began and I found the path that would lead me all the way to the top of Bullrush Hill, all the way back to New Hope. It was only a fifteen-minute walk home, but after being with Del, it felt light years away. In just an hour, Del had shown me a whole distant universe with its own set of dangers and rules. I couldn’t wait to return.

I
KNOW WHO YOU ARE
.”

They were the first words my mother spoke to me when I came home, her hello, as I hugged her on her doorstep. Her body was limp, unresponsive. Her arms dangled loosely at her sides, both hands wrapped in thick white bandages. Mummy hands. I had come three thousand miles to see her and she wasn’t even going to hug me back. I pulled away from her with awkward, mechanical movements. The Mummy meets Robot Girl. Now all we needed was Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi and we’d have ourselves a movie.

“It’s good to see you, Ma.” I forced a smile.

She repeated the words. “I know who you are.”

She stood before me, disheveled in a worn flannel nightgown. Her hair—long, straight, and white as paper birch—was tangled and greasy. She wore running shoes on her feet, the laces hanging loose, untied. She had what looked like dried egg yolk on her chin. I resisted the urge to say,
Yeah, you may know me, but just who the hell are you?

I had just spent an hour in a somber meeting with Raven and Gabriel—two of the only three remaining members of New Hope, not counting my mother. The third was Raven’s twelve-year-old daughter, Opal, who popped in halfway through our meeting holding a bicycle chain.

“Have you guys seen that big crescent wrench?” she asked as she hurried into the room, knocking over an empty chair, the grease-covered chain swinging from her filthy hand. She had a baseball cap on backwards and a blue and white varsity jacket with some other girl’s name on it.

Opal had changed just enough in the two years since I’d seen her to give me pause. She was taller and thinner, and in spite of the bull-in-a-china-shop way she’d barged into the room, she seemed more graceful than the little girl I remembered so well.

She turned, her eyes fell on me, and her face cracked into a huge smile. She dropped the chain and gave me a big, greasy-pawed hug. “I thought you were getting in tonight,” she said. “God, I have like a million and one things to do right now—I’ve gotta get my bike back on the road and then go meet some friends—but I’ll come find you later. Tomorrow! Okay? Tomorrow. I’ve got so many new tricks to show you. I’ve totally mastered the jump from the barn. I can even do a somersault on the way down! And I just got this cool book on barnstormers with great pictures. You’ve gotta see it!”

Opal was a skinny, freckled girl who had been saying, since she was seven, that she wanted to be a stuntwoman when she grew up. She had broken her arm quite badly during my last visit, throwing herself from the old hay loft in the big barn.

Raven was running an errand down in Rutland and I had been the one to take Opal to the emergency room and sit with her. She seemed severely shaken, not just by the fall, but by whatever had happened in the barn just before the jump. She claimed someone had been up in the loft with her, but when Gabriel went up to check, all he found were a couple of rusted pitchforks leaning against the wall and a few clumps of long-rotted hay.

“Who did you see up there?” I had asked, but she’d never answered.

To distract her during the endless waiting between examinations, X-rays, and getting a cast, I asked her to tell me about her favorite stunts. She told me she’d been reading about the days of barnstorming and the wing walkers.

“Charles Lindbergh got his start that way,” she said. Then she went on to tell me about the women, her voice bubbling with admiration and excitement.

“This one lady, Gladys Ingle her name was, practiced archery on the top wing of her Curtiss Jenny.”

“Her who?” I asked.

“Curtiss Jenny. It’s a biplane. I’ve got a model of one in the tepee. Anyway, Gladys Ingle was also famous for jumping from one plane to another, midair. How cool is that?”

“Pretty cool,” I agreed.

“Then there’s Bessie Coleman. I did a report on her for school. She was the first African American woman pilot. She was a wing walker, too. Oh, and Lillian Boyer—‘Empress of the Air’—she quit her job as a waitress to learn to wing walk.”

“That’s quite a career change.”

“And you’ve heard of Buffalo Bill? I bet you didn’t know about his niece, Mabel Cody. She was the first woman to transfer from a speeding boat to a plane.”

By the time Opal described how the days of wing walking ended in 1936 when the government outlawed getting out of the cockpit below 1,500 feet, the mysterious visitor in the loft was forgotten. And by the end of our three hours in the emergency room, I was ten-year-old Opal’s new best friend and she was right by my side every remaining minute of that visit, showing me pictures in books of wing walkers and models of early planes she had made. The Curtiss Jenny was hanging on fishing line from a pole high at the top of the tepee. Opal had glued a small plastic woman to the top wing, complete with a tiny bow she’d made from a stick and string and toothpick arrows. There was a bull’s-eye target set up on the other end of the wing.

Opal, at least to my outsider’s eyes, seemed to love life in the tepee, and it was never more apparent than when she showed me her curtained-off bedroom that afternoon and sent that plane flying in circles over our heads with a push from her fingertips. I looked around with a strange sense of déjà vu, and had to remind myself that it was not the original tepee, the one my mother and I had lived in, but the third or fourth incarnation. But now it, too, was going to have to be replaced, and my mother was to blame.

A
FTER
O
PAL LEFT TO REPAIR HER BIKE
, Gabriel, Raven, and I returned to the topic of my mother. We sat at the long wooden table in the big barn that had once served as the community kitchen and gathering place. The barn seemed cavernous and empty, our voices lost in all that space.

New Hope had gradually petered out over the years. Gabriel’s vision of utopia had somehow been lost along the way, falling to ruin along with the buildings and gardens. My childhood home was little more than a ghost town, a ruined shell of what it once had been, and although I was disappointed, I wasn’t all that surprised. Call me a skeptic, but I’ve always thought that it takes more than organic vegetables and talking circles to make an ideal society.

Raven was ten years younger than me and had been the only other child at New Hope when I was there. She was born my third night at New Hope. I slept little that night, listening to her mother’s screams coming from the big barn, which had been turned into a “birthing center,” complete with a sacred ring of candles and a young hippie named Zack alternately playing “Happy Birthday” and
The Lone Ranger
theme song on his guitar. I lay awake wondering what hell my mother had brought me to where babies weren’t even born in hospitals.

When Raven was small, I changed her diapers and, later, taught her to tie her shoes. This was my only legacy to her—accidental pinpricks and a story about making the limp shoestring into a bunny, then sending the bunny through a hole—things I doubted she even remembered.

Raven had grown into a striking woman—nearly six feet tall, with long dark hair and high cheekbones. She worked part-time at the town clerk’s office and was taking night classes toward a degree in psychology. When I went away to college and never came home, Raven quickly became my mother’s surrogate daughter, a fact that tugged at my heart a little, gave me pangs of jealousy and guilt whenever my mother mentioned her name over the years. Raven, not even my mother’s flesh and blood, was the good daughter. The present daughter, who promised never to abandon home and who was able to give my mother the grandchild she never got from me. And me, I was the skinny kid in the photos my mother kept around the tepee—freckles fading in each consecutive picture as if to show that one day my whole self would disappear forever. The invisible woman who called once a week to say how tough college was, then nursing school, married life, one all-consuming job after another—always some excuse for not coming home. But that hardly mattered because Raven was there, standing beside my mother in her neatly tied shoes.

Raven’s own mother, Doe, had died of pancreatic cancer—one of those horror stories where you go into the hospital for stomach pain, and three weeks later, it’s all over. Raven’s father, well, no one really knew whatever became of him. His disappearance, the reasons behind it at least, had been my fault, although I was the only one who knew it. It was yet another in a long list of New Canaan secrets I carried with me throughout my life—heavy and loathsome baggage.

Raven got pregnant with Opal when she was eighteen, just a few months after Doe’s untimely death. I was in Seattle by then, and experienced the whole pregnancy through my weekly phone conversations with my mother—the morning sickness successfully treated with raw almonds and ginger tea; the hour’s drive to special prenatal yoga classes in Burlington; the search for a midwife who would attend the birth in a tepee with no running water. The subject of who Opal’s father might be was never addressed directly, though I always assumed he was just some hippie passing through New Hope. If anybody, including Opal, was the least bit concerned about her being “fatherless,” I never heard about it.

Gabriel, at eighty-two years old, was still in excellent shape, both physically and mentally. With his round glasses, white beard, and red suspenders, he looked like a lean, off-season Santa. He had been the patriarch of New Hope, the founding father. His common-law wife, Mimi, had died the year before, leaving him to shuffle around the big barn alone, no doubt recalling more glorious times. Days when there had been many mouths to feed, quiet revolutions to plan.

At New Hope’s beginning, in 1965, there were only four members: Gabriel and Mimi and another couple, Bryan and Lizzy. Over time, the numbers grew. When my mother and I moved to New Hope in the fall of 1970, there were eleven of us living there full time (the largest number there would ever be), not counting the college kids who stayed for the summer, drifters who came and went. There were Gabriel and Mimi, Bryan and Lizzy, Shawn and Doe, baby Raven, Lazy Elk and my mother, me, and nineteen-year-old Zack, the only single adult New Hope resident and unofficial community balladeer. However many people called New Hope home at any given time, it was clear they were all looking to Gabriel to give the place its bearings, to define utopia.

I
LISTENED PATIENTLY
, sipping one of Gabriel’s herbal infusions, which tasted like licorice and mud, while he and Raven filled me in on my mother’s condition as best they could. They warned me that she might not know who I was. She had had a bad week. There was the fire five days before, which was the last straw—the reason they finally called me and said I needed to come back and make some decisions about long-term care. They described how she had fought Gabriel when he was pulling her out, biting his arm viciously enough that he needed stitches. (His wound, I noted, was covered with a neat, sterile bandage, not a compress of rank-smelling weeds as it would’ve been in Mimi’s day.)

Try as I might, I couldn’t reconcile my mild-mannered, peace-loving mother with the maniac they were describing. I tried to picture her foaming at the mouth, shooting fire from her fingertips.

“Since the fire,” Gabriel explained, “she’s been on a downward spiral, lashing out at everyone around her.”

Ho-Ho-Ho.

When they were through describing the latest details of my mother’s steadily declining condition, I told them my plans. I had taken a three-week emergency leave from Lakeview Elementary in Seattle, where I worked as a school nurse. Speaking to them as if addressing the school board, I explained how, in the next weeks, I would, with their assistance, assess my mother’s situation and come up with a plan for long-term care, which meant, more than likely, getting her placed in a nursing home (and possibly fitting her with a muzzle—a suggestion I didn’t mention). I’ll admit that I sounded like a social worker, not like a daughter, but in a way, that’s how I felt. This was my responsibility, and I intended to fulfill it—but I hadn’t really been a daughter since I left home at seventeen.

Gabriel and Raven nodded at me, satisfied with my plan, with my level-headedness. They were pleased, although perhaps slightly puzzled, with how very well I seemed to be taking things. But wasn’t that my job? Wasn’t that what they’d called me in for? To do what they knew needed to be done, but hesitated to do themselves. It would be me who made the final decision to lock up my mother, to take away all her freedoms for what I would tell her was her own good. Neither of them wanted that on their conscience. And who could blame them? They set me up to be the bad guy, the villainous prodigal daughter, and I fell right into it, as if it were a role I was born to play.

I
TOLD YOU
, D
OE
, I don’t want her here.” My mother’s five-foot-two, ninety-pound frame occupied her doorway, rocking back on her heels, then rolling forward to stand on her tiptoes. Back and forth she moved like some hypnotic snake, trying to make herself look bigger. I stepped back, giving my mother some distance, half expecting her to let out a hiss.

Raven sighed, putting a hand to her forehead. “I’m Raven, Jean. Doe’s daughter. And this is your daughter, Kate.”

“I know who she is!” my mother spat, shifting her gaze from Raven to me. “I know who you are!” She was leaning forward when she said it. Spittle sprayed my face. Her hands hung at her sides like oversized white paws, odd and useless. Raven and Gabriel were right. I was in no way prepared for this. There was a fire in my mother’s eyes I’d never seen. I took another step back.

“Well, Kate’s staying. She’s going to stay with you in your house.”

“This is not my house.”

Raven tried another tack.

“Jean, where’s Magpie?” She opened her shoulder bag and retrieved a can of StarKist tuna. The muscles in my mother’s face loosened and she gave a half smile.