Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (4 page)

“Inside. She must be inside. Under the closet. Inside the bed. Magpie! Here, Miss Magpie! Breakfast!” My mother turned and walked inside, calling to the cat. Raven nodded at me, and we followed my mother into the cabin.

I had seen my mother’s tiny house for the first time during my last brief visit two years before. She was just adding the finishing touches, the trim and moldings, after building the whole thing herself. There had been a few more residents at New Hope then, and they helped raise the framed walls and roof. Opal and some friends dug the pit for the outhouse. But other than that, it was my mother’s project. The four-room cabin was built by her own seventy-year-old hands almost entirely from donated and salvaged materials. It seemed to me then, as she took me on my first tour of the place, to be more a work of art than a home. She proudly showed me the built-in shelves, the flooring from an old silo that Raven had helped her nail down, the flat slabs of granite rescued from the reject pile behind a polishing shed in Barre that now served as her kitchen countertops.

My mother, after years of living in the tepee and then in the loft of the big community barn, had made a home that was truly hers. It was to be her house to grow old in, tucked about three hundred feet behind the big barn, bordered on the back side by the sloping woods that led back down the hill, away from New Hope, right into the farmland once owned by the Griswolds.

L
OOKING BACK
on my last visit to New Hope, I found there were signs of my mother’s sickness even then. There had been little clues all along, but nothing that set off any alarms, rang any bells that would toll loud and clear with the weight of the words
dementia, Alzheimer’s.
She had seemed a bit more absentminded, more scattered. She repeated herself, forgot things I’d told her. She seemed preoccupied, a little on edge. I figured the strain of building the house was taking its toll. She was a seventy-year-old woman, after all.

During that visit two years ago, I learned that she’d wrecked her car and had decided not to get another one. When I asked what had happened, she said she was out for a drive and fell asleep behind the wheel. The car went off the road and into a drainage ditch. Luckily, she escaped with only minor bruising. It happened near Lancaster, New Hampshire.

“But what were you doing in Lancaster in the middle of the night?” I had asked. And she shrugged off the question. Later, Raven told me she’d been getting lost from time to time, finding herself farther and farther from home. Usually, she’d run out of gas and call Gabriel or Raven to come rescue her. She kept the New Hope numbers pinned to the Pontiac’s visor. My mother had known those numbers by heart for years. Her needing to pin them to her visor should have set off alarms, but it didn’t. Her body was strong and healthy enough to build a house. But her mind was going, and she must have felt it slipping away, memory by memory, beginning, perhaps, with something as simple as those phone numbers.

As I followed Raven through the front door into the living room, I saw that the inside of the house looked the way I remembered: the same overstuffed plum-colored couch, wooden rocking chair, and braided rug. To the left of the door was a bench to sit on while taking your shoes off and there was a row of coat pegs along the wall. Hung on it were a yellow rain slicker, a down parka, and a blaze-orange vest for walking in the woods during hunting season. No doubt about it—I was back in Vermont.

Walking forward and turning left into the kitchen, I saw the white enamel wood-burning cookstove and the round wooden table that had been with my mother since the tepee days. The door to my mother’s bedroom at the far end of the house was closed. Beside it, the door to her painting studio was ajar, and I caught a glimpse of the colorful canvases and the cot and dresser pushed against the far wall. The house smelled of wood smoke, oil paints, and the lavender lotion my mother used. Familiar smells that I couldn’t help but find comfort in.

What was different about the house were the notes tacked up everywhere—signs on white paper written in bright markers. On the inside of the front door: K
ATE, YOUR DAUGHTER, WILL BE HERE THIS AFTERNOON
. And below it, someone had taped up a snapshot of me taken during my last visit. In the picture, I’m staring straight ahead, eyes heavy and sullen—a regular
Wanted: Dead or Alive
mugshot. I could picture the description now:
crime of abandonment, reward offered.

There were several signs in red marker taped to the stove: STOP! DO NOT LIGHT! There were signs on all the cupboards saying what was in each one:
DISHES
,
GLASSES, CEREAL
. The phone on the wall had a list of names and numbers next to it. There was also a sign saying, D
O
NOT
DIAL
911
UNLESS IT IS AN
EMERGENCY! (I learned later from Raven that my mother had been calling 911 several times a day, asking whose house she was in, wanting to know if there was more yogurt anywhere.)

Magpie had been just a kitten when I last visited, a gift from Raven and Opal. Now she came trotting out of my mother’s studio and wound herself around my mother’s legs, doing little figure eights, loop de loops, a sleek little black-and-white thing. My mother picked up the cat, cooed at her and carried her over to the Servel gas fridge.

“What’s for lunch?”

“You had your lunch, Jean,” Raven told her.

“What’d I have?”

“Grilled cheese.”

“What’s for supper?”

“You just had supper. Gabriel brought you stew.”

“I’m hungry,” my mother said, her voice whiny as a child’s. She unceremoniously dumped Magpie back onto the pine floor. “What’s for lunch?”

Raven ignored her. She opened the StarKist and plopped it into Magpie’s bowl on the kitchen counter. The cat danced around her feet now, saying “Murl?” again and again in a plaintive voice. My mother leaned in quickly and stuck her face into the cat’s bowl. She gulped at the tuna, getting a good bite before Raven yanked it away.

“I’ll fix you a sandwich, Jean. Now go sit down.” There was an edge to Raven’s voice I hadn’t expected—a touch of hostility. She gripped the edge of the counter and blew out a long breath.

My mother turned toward me. “They’re starving me,” she said. I just stared. Flakes of tuna were stuck to her face.

“I know you,” she said, smiling.

My stomach ached. I fought back the urge to run from the cabin, legs pinwheeling like a cartoon character’s, jump in the rental car, and hop the next plane back to Seattle. I hadn’t been close to my mother in years, but I knew her to be a bright, resourceful, dignified woman. This person who had replaced her was a complete stranger. My mother, it seemed, had vanished completely without my even noticing she was taking her leave. Ah, I realized, she’d pulled the same trick on me that I’d pulled on her. Touché.

L
ATER
, after making my mother a sandwich, Raven and I put her to bed, then settled down on the living room couch. I longed for a stiff drink but knew there was nothing in the house. My mother had always frowned on alcohol—
“Katydid, I will never understand why on earth you would want to dull your senses, the wits God gave you, with that stuff.”

Raven pulled a pack of matches from her pocketbook and lit the oil lamps in the living room. Just as it had been in the tepee, light came from candles and oil lamps, heat from the woodstove, and whatever water she needed was hauled from the well by the big barn in gallon jugs and buckets. When she needed to bathe, there was a tub in the big barn, too. It was a self-reliant lifestyle chosen by my mother when she
had
been self-reliant. It was a life I remembered all too well even after all those years. And I was sure it was the reason for my love of gadgets—my house in Seattle was full of them: blender, food processor, microwave, coffee grinder, espresso machine, electric can opener, Crock-Pot, electric toothbrush, and bright halogen track lighting angled carefully so that every corner blazed.

Raven dug around in the leather shoulder bag again like a magician searching for her next trick and handed me a large metal ring of keys. She showed me how they kept my mother in her bedroom at night with a brass padlock.

“Jesus,” I said, “What is she, one of America’s Most Wanted?”

Raven said if we didn’t do this, my confused mother would wander and get lost. Nighttime was worse. My mother was more clear during the day. Raven promised I’d see a change in the morning.

Another key went to the lockbox on top of the fridge that contained the array of medications that Dr. Crawford had prescribed over the past several months: lorazepam, haloperidol, Ambien, and a tube of burn ointment. Raven explained that they didn’t like to use the pills, they just seemed to dope her up. I tried not to roll my eyes—what did she think the drugs were for? Inner peace? She said that before now, they medicated her only during really bad spells, but since the fire they’d had to increase the dosages. Most days, they had managed to get by giving her only the tinctures Gabriel made. There was a memory tincture with ginkgo that she got in tea twice a day. And at night, a sleeping tonic with valerian root. My mouth went bitter at the thought of it and I made a silent promise not to subject my mother to such botanical torture.

“For now, we’ll stick with the heavy med regime Dr. Crawford prescribed. I’d rather see her doped up than hurt again,” Raven said and I nodded in agreement, making a mental note that we needed a consult with a gerontologist as soon as possible. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the town doctor, but my mother was on some heavy-duty medication, and I questioned how well it was being monitored.

There was a key to a padlocked kitchen drawer that contained knives, scissors, a nail file, nail clippers, and matches.

“Never, ever, ever give her matches,” Raven instructed, as if the bandages on my mother’s hands weren’t enough warning.

“Right,” I said, picturing again my rabid, foaming mother shooting fire from her fingertips. I shook the nightmarish image from my head.

Raven went on to explain the routine: getting my mother up, cleaned, and dressed; emptying her chamber pot; changing the bandages; serving her breakfast; going for a walk; making her lunch; having her take a nap; and making sure she gets each of her pills. I must have looked a little overwhelmed.

“I know it’s a lot. And I know it must be a bad shock for you to see her like this. But I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here. How glad Gabriel is, too. We just couldn’t do it anymore. Not like this. Not with winter coming now. She can’t be alone. Not here.” She looked around the cabin, gesturing helplessly at the woodstove, the oil lamps hung from the ceiling, well out of reach. “See what you think once you’ve been here a few days. God, I’m so glad you came.” Then she hugged me—this woman whom I felt I barely knew, who had been only in second grade when I left home for good—put her arms around me and held tight. I was her life raft. I was the one who was going to come in and make everything okay, even if meant packing my mother off to a nursing home. I let all my breath out as she squeezed.
Great,
I thought,
a life raft without air.

The first thing I did when Raven left was undo the padlock on my mother’s door. I was not going to be her jailer—at least not yet. I jingled the large ring of keys, feeling like a deputy in an old Western:
You’re free to roam the open range, partner. Just get out of town before sunset.

I peeked in and saw that my mother was sound asleep on her brass bed. The wind-up clock ticked loudly on the nightstand beside her. Its hands glowed. Only eight o’clock. It was just five back in Seattle. Jamie would be getting home from work soon. Tina or Ann or whoever his latest was might be there now, in his place waiting, dinner in the oven, white wine chilling. I wondered how he kept track of his girl of the month, sometimes girl of the week. He must have to mark his calendar, keep notes. With bitter amusement, I remembered his index card habit. He kept stacks of them in the office, the glove compartment of the car, next to the bed. He had them stuffed in the pockets of shirts and jackets and was always writing little notes to himself on them. Notes that he would promptly shove in some other pocket or between the pages of a magazine, his reminder to pick up stamps or check out a book he’d heard about on the radio, lost forever. Perhaps he now used the cards to keep a girl file:
Sasha—redhead w/ appendectomy scar. Likes martinis, dislikes dogs.
I chuckled to myself as I imagined the card one day tumbling from the pocket of his blazer when some other girl dropped off the dry cleaning.

I carried the lamp into the room that had been my mother’s painting studio, where there was a cot set up in the corner, piled high with blankets, wheeling my black suitcase, Magpie at my heels. The cat watched with her head cocked as I unpacked socks, underwear, and T-shirts and put them in the battered wooden dresser, no doubt a remnant from a long-gone New Hope resident. I came across my Swiss Army knife in my toiletry bag, among the tea tree oil shampoo and avocado body scrub—I had stuck it in there at the last minute when I realized I wouldn’t be allowed to carry it on the plane. About the only things I ever used it for were opening wine and slicing cheese at impromptu picnics, but I am a woman who likes to be prepared. I considered locking it up in the sharps drawer in the kitchen, but finally tossed it into my purse.

Suddenly, I was exhausted. Not by the unpacking but by the whole afternoon. By being home. More than anything else, it was the guilt I felt seeing how much my mother had changed, slowly slipped away, while I held on to my careful little life back in Seattle—my life of electric appliances and halogen spotlights—oblivious, thinking she couldn’t be that bad, thinking the phone calls from Raven were exaggerated.