Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (7 page)

I nodded, felt the old sting of accusation. “We were in the same grade, but we weren’t really friends. I hardly knew her.” The old lie came easily, despite how many years it had been since I’d had to tell it.

“Yeah,” Jim continued, nodding, “what a mess that was. I remember how quick they were to point the finger at poor Nicky Griswold. But then they arrested one of the guys from up at New Hope, didn’t they? What was his name…I can’t think of it now. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. They had the wrong guy. Never did get the right one. Never did. Well, let’s see, that’ll be three eighty-nine,” Jim said, looking down at the cash register, turning back to business.

I found my mother studying the rack of magazines. She had a copy of
Deer Hunter
in her hands and was staring at the dead doe on the cover. A man in blaze orange was propping the gutted animal up like a tired dance partner about to do the last waltz.

“Come on, Ma. Let’s go home and make pancakes.”

“What’s happened to that girl?” my mother asked, and I realized she must have been listening.

“Nothing,” I lied.
It’s just that we’ve been dropped into my own funny little idea of hell, but hey, what of it? We’ve got strawberry pancakes to make. My favorite. You remember.

My mother dropped the magazine back into the rack upside down and walked up to the group of men talking at the counter.

“What’s happened to that girl?” she demanded.

“Murdered,” the fat one said before Jim could get a chance to stop him.

“Poor thing,” my mother said and all three men nodded.

I took her arm and led her from the store.

I kept thinking about Opal, wondering how much of it she might have seen. I knew all too well how it felt to have your best friend brutally murdered. It was something you never got over.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” she asked as we were going out the door.

“Who?”

“The dead girl. You used to wait for the bus with her. All those mornings. Wasn’t she your friend?”

“No, Ma. Just a girl I knew. And that was a long time ago.”

“Poor thing.”

D
EL AND
I
HAD BEEN ARGUING
for days about whether or not I really lived in a tepee. In the end, I gave in and agreed to take her up the hill so she could see for herself.

“Now you’re not just a hippie but an Indian, is that it?” Del had asked during our argument.

“I’m not an Indian.”

“Your Ma an Indian?”

“Nope.”

“Your daddy?”

“I don’t have a daddy. We live with Mark in the tepee. Mark’s not an Indian, but he has an Indian name. Lazy Elk.”

“That’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard. Hippies don’t make no sense at all.”

It had crossed my mind over the previous weeks that I should invite Del home in some legitimate way—my mom would have been thrilled for me to bring someone home, even creepy, scrawny Del Griswold. My mother often asked how things were going at school, if I was making friends.

“Sure,” I lied. “Lots of friends.”

“What are their names?”

“Well,” I said, chewing my lip for inspiration, “my two best friends are these girls Ellie and Sam.”

“What about that girl down the hill? The little Griswold girl?”

“Oh, we’re not friends.”

“Why not?”

“She’s kinda creepy. The kids all call her the Potato Girl.”

My mother made a
tsk-tsk
sound and shook her head.

“I hope you don’t call her that.”

“No. Never.”

My mother smiled and ruffled my hair. I was her good girl, friends with the popular, bright-faced kids, knowing better than to make fun of outsiders.

Still, I wondered what it might be like to bring Del to New Hope. I tried to imagine her sitting down to communal dinner in the big barn, tried to picture how she might look as Gabriel served her a wooden bowl full of lentil soup. She would make faces, kick me under the table, think she’d gone to sleep then woke up on Mars.

But Del was my secret as much as I was hers and I never did invite her home. Instead, we agreed to view the tepee from a distance, to spy on my own home like a couple of Peeping Toms.

W
E HAD BEEN WALKING
through the woods for ten minutes when we passed the turnoff for the old cabin. I wondered if Nicky was there, smoking and looking at magazines, and I hoped we’d run into him on our way back to the Griswold place.

That’s when Del said, “I know someone who’s got a crush on you.”

I had this eerie feeling she’d read my mind—but maybe she’d just caught me glancing down the tangled trail.

My face flushed.

“Who?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

“Kate and Nicky, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,”
she sang. “He’s got it real bad for you. Ain’t you the lucky one? But before you count your lucky stars, you should know a thing or two about my big brother. See, he’s got his share of secrets. A few of ’em, bad. B-A-D spells bad.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe I’ll tell and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll let you find out on your own. I’m just saying things ain’t always what they seem.” She fiddled with her sheriff ’s badge. She wore a stained pink T-shirt with the same corduroy pants she’d had on for days. Her hair was wet from a shower she’d taken just before I met her. She smelled like moist earth dusted with baby powder.

“Who says I want to know anyway? Who says I’m even interested in your big, ape-y brother?”

“You sure seem interested when you’re with him, Desert Rose. You two are acting like little love birds already. It’s enough to make a person wanna puke.”

It was true that I thought about Nicky a lot, felt a strange, live-wire sort of excitement when I was near him. But the idea that this was visible to Del embarrassed me.

“Is Desert Rose really the color you painted your room?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

“Nah. Daddy said I can’t.” She paused for a beat, looked at the ground, frowned like she’d just remembered something. Then she was back. “I’ve got the paint sample from Thurston’s Hardware, though! I’ll show it to you sometime. It’s real pretty. I named you after a real pretty color.”

“I’d like to see your room sometime.” I had tried often to imagine what it might look like. If she really did have all the wonderful things she bragged about—the four-poster bed, a collection of more than one hundred plastic horses, the tails from those baby pigs in a canning jar full of rubbing alcohol.

“Can’t. Daddy says we can’t have friends over. Stevie and Joe can have their girlfriends sometimes, that’s okay with Daddy, but they’re almost grown up anyway. Daddy says family should be enough.”

As strange as things were at my house—if you could call a circle of canvas draped over poles a house—things seemed stranger still at Del’s. I lived in a world of almost no rules—Gabriel believed kids would do a good job raising themselves if they weren’t confined by adults and their hang-ups. Del, I knew, got slapped around when she didn’t clean her plate at dinner.

As we walked, I told Del about my life at the top of the hill—camping out in the tepee, eating dinner in the big barn with the other New Hope members. I told her how Lazy Elk would turn on the little battery-operated radio in the tepee at night and pull my mother up to dance. Sometimes they’d get me to join them, too, all of us doing these crazy moves—pretending to be robots, snakes, birds. We’d swoop circles around the tepee, cawing like a family of ravens.

Lazy Elk was trying hard to be a dad, but I couldn’t take him seriously. He told me stories every night about Trickster Coyote and began calling me Katydid. Sometimes I helped him make his jewelry, piecing together necklaces from twigs, stones, and bits of glass and wire. I’d go with him on collecting missions where we’d come back with our pockets full of pretty stones, pop tops from beer cans, and old shotgun shells.

“Stuuupid!” exclaimed Del when I told her this. “Who the hell wants to wear jewelry made from junk?”

I told her about the feather in his hat. How he called it a talisman.

“And I thought my daddy was crazy,” she said.

“He isn’t my daddy. He’s just Mark. He’s okay. Just kinda goofy.”

The truth was, Lazy Elk was the closest thing to a father I’d ever had. I never knew my own dad, and none of my mother’s other boyfriends had stuck around very long. All my life, I’d secretly hoped for someone to come along and fill that daddy void, and if that someone happened to wear a floppy hat, make jewelry out of junk, and dance like a bird, so be it.

“What is it he calls himself? Droopy Moose?”

I started to laugh. “Lazy Elk,” I said. “Come on now, we have to be quiet, we’re getting close.”

I could see the top of the tepee through the trees up ahead where the path ended and smell the smoke from the outdoor mud oven beside the big barn. I heard voices and struggled to make out who they belonged to as Del and I crept closer.

I knew the other residents of New Hope pretty well by that time and liked them all despite their various oddities. Gabriel was a smart man with a lot of patience. He was the one to go to for help with complicated homework or any sort of moral dilemma. His wife, Mimi, was a good ten years younger than he but her love for him was clear. It seemed to border on worship. He was her life and whatever visions he had for New Hope became hers by default.

Bryan and Lizzy were the only others who’d been there since the beginning. They were in their forties and made pottery, which they sold at craft fairs. They lived in a little shack next to the goat barn. The goats had been Lizzy’s idea. She thought New Hope could make some money selling their milk, making cheese, maybe even goat’s milk soap. Then, after the goats arrived, she discovered their milk dries up unless they keep getting pregnant—and the offspring are somehow disposed of. That seemed cruel to Lizzy, so the goats served little purpose except for the excitement they caused each time they found their way through the fence and into the garden or through some open doorway. Once, they’d eaten a hole through our tepee’s canvas.

Shawn and Doe were a young couple who lived in a log hogan behind the greenhouse. Shawn was the resident mechanic and tinkerer. He kept the cars and tractor running. If something was broken, he was the guy who could fix it. Doe spent most of her time with Raven, a fussy baby who didn’t like to be ignored.

Zack had been a freshman at Dartmouth when he read an article Gabriel had written for a socialist newspaper on the nature of community. Zack had hitchhiked to meet Gabriel and spend a weekend at New Hope—and just never left. When he wasn’t reading battered paperback copies of
Siddhartha
and
The Communist Manifesto
, he was playing Bob Dylan songs on his beat-up six string. Zack was enamored of Gabriel and would spend hours in quiet but animated discussions with him about what a truly democratic society would look like.

A
S THE TREES THINNED OUT
to scrubby pine saplings and the ground leveled off, I recognized the voices of Doe and Mimi coming from the clearing. Del and I hid behind a huge boulder beside the entrance to the path. The tepee was just to our left, so close we could smell the damp canvas. To our right was the big barn. Between the two structures was the dome-shaped mud oven where we baked all our bread. Beyond the smoking, clay-covered mound, we could make out one end of the vegetable garden and the stuffed scarecrow my mother and I had made.

Doe and Mimi were standing at the long wooden table in front of the oven, kneading bread dough with their backs to us. Both women had long hair down past their shoulder blades—Doe’s was black and curly, Mimi’s was chestnut brown and straight. Raven was snoozing on a blanket in the shade under the work table.

“Told you I lived in a tepee,” I whispered. Del only nodded in response, her eyes wide, taking everything in. We strained to hear Doe and Mimi.

“I’m just saying it isn’t right the way he treats you,” said Mimi. “Refusing to even acknowledge the baby is his. I mean, who does he think he’s kidding?”

Weird. Were they talking about Shawn? He doted on Raven—and Doe, for that matter.

“He knows,” Doe said back. “Of course he knows. I think the problem is that he doesn’t want other people to know and that’s cool with me. I mean, Raven’s mine. She’s still gonna be mine whoever I say the father is.” She crouched down and stroked the baby’s forehead.

“Well, I think it’s disrespectful,” Mimi continued. “It’s like he’s lying, that’s all. Lying to everyone here—to her most of all. I think it’s lousy. I think he can be so goddamn lousy. Gabriel thinks so, too.”

“Is it really Gabriel’s place to pass judgment? I mean, let he who is without sin cast the first stone and all that.” Doe stood up from Raven and grabbed a tray of bread, which she carried over to the oven and pushed in using the large wooden paddle that hung beside the oven door. She stretched, reaching her arms up to the sky and leaning left, then right. Then she turned around to face Mimi, and Del and me, too.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Doe said. “I didn’t mean to insult Gabriel. That was kind of low. He’s not the one I’m angry with.”

“So you admit you’re angry with him?” Mimi asked.

“No. Not really. Sometimes it’s just hard. To keep a secret like that.”

“So don’t keep it. Tell. I think you should tell everyone the truth.”

“Let’s go,” I whispered to Del, but she didn’t respond. Curious as I was, I didn’t want to hear any more. New Hope wasn’t the kind of place where people kept secrets and I found a certain easy comfort in that. Everyone shared everything during the circle meetings—all the women even shared when they had their periods (although they referred to it as their “moon time”).

I got up from my crouched position slowly and gently tugged at Del’s arm. She stayed put.

“Look at her titties,” Del hissed. “They hang down to her belly! Don’t hippies know about bras?”

“I’m going with or without you. I don’t want to get caught,” I whispered, feeling strangely like a trespasser outside my own home. Del just stared at Doe and Mimi as if they were some kind of exotic circus animals—peacocks or dancing bears. I turned and started to make my way back down the path, careful not to make too much noise stepping on sticks and dry leaves. I picked my feet up high and watched where I stepped.

In a minute, I heard footsteps behind me, as Del galloped up and grabbed my shoulders.

“Boo,” she whispered. “You’re walkin’ like you got a load in your pants.”

We both started to laugh and took off running so we wouldn’t be heard. When we were sure we were out of earshot, Del began asking all about New Hope. She wanted to know everything all at once.

“So whose baby did that girl have? Ain’t they married? Do hippies even get married? And who is this Gabriel guy? And who is it that’s supposed to be so lousy?”

“Doe, that’s the girl with the baby…”

“Doe like a deer? Like a goddamn she-deer?” Del asked.

“I think it’s short for Dorothy or Doreen or something,” I explained. “Anyway, she’s with this guy Shawn, but I don’t think they’re married, and he’s not lousy at all. He can fix pretty much anything and he’s real good with the baby.”

“He’s the daddy?”

“I guess so.” The truth was, I wasn’t so sure anymore. But I made up my mind to try to forget everything I’d heard, to not let it weigh on me. There were not supposed to be any secrets at New Hope. I was the only one with a double life, the friendship no one knew about.

“Whaddaya mean, you guess so? Goddamn, hippies are worse than people say. You got a girl named after a she-deer who maybe is and maybe isn’t married to the guy who maybe is and maybe isn’t her baby’s father, and a guy named after a droopy moose who makes jewelry out of sticks and stones. My best friend’s living in a goddamned for-real Indian tepee, and people are baking bread inside a mound of dirt. What the hell, Kate? What the hell kinda place is that?” Del’s eyes were wide with wonder and I felt truly elated. I saw for the first time that I was interesting to her—that it wasn’t just the other way around. And she’d called me her best friend. After only a few weeks of really knowing each other, I had become best friends with the Potato Girl.