Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (9 page)

“What was she like?” Opal asked.

“She was strong-willed. Tough. Not afraid of much.”

“Was she mean?”

“I guess she could be. But mostly people were mean to her.”

“Why?”

“Because she was different, I guess. Don’t you have some kid in your grade everyone picks on?”

“Sure, Johnny Lopez. He’s got a lazy eye and wears pajama tops as shirts.”

“Well, Del was our Johnny Lopez.”

Raven appeared in the doorway, frowning a little to show she’d been there long enough to hear our topic of conversation. “I thought I heard you two in here. Any sign of Magpie?”

“No,” I told her. “I cut myself looking for her in the old greenhouse. Opal’s giving me a little first aid.”

Opal helped me put some Band-Aids over the cut.

“Hey, you’re better than me at this, and I do it for a living,” I told her. “Any chance you’ll give up on this stuntwoman thing and go into medicine?”

She laughed. “No way!”

“It’s less painful to set bones than break them,” I said.

“I’d rather break every bone in my body than be bored out of my mind putting
Band-Aids
on people all day!” Opal said.

“I think your mother’s ready to go home,” Raven said and I took the hint, collected my mother, and gently led her back to her house, promising the cat would turn up. Cats went on adventures of their own all the time, I told her. They just pack up their little hobo bundles and set off to see the world and catch more exotic mice. It’s their nature, I explained. Along the way, my mother moved from grief to suspicion to rage.

“You got rid of the cat!” she sobbed.

“I did not get rid of Magpie, Ma. She took off on her own. I’m sure she’s fine. She’ll come home when she’s ready.”

“Why did you get rid of the cat? First you get rid of the cat, then you want to get rid of me. I’m not going to a home.” Her body shook as she cried, her wrinkled face slick with tears and mucus.

There, she’d said it. She didn’t want to go. I’d brought up the idea of a nursing home with her the night before and she’d played catatonic, not seeming to absorb a word I’d said. Now here she was with her delayed response. Things were going to get mighty complicated if we were going to have conversations in twenty-four-hour cycles.

I moved to place a hand on her back and she pulled away as if I’d burned her. As if I were the one who could shoot fire from my fingertips.

“I didn’t get rid of the cat, Ma. I promise. She probably ran off when the police were here. She got spooked, that’s all. She’ll be back.”

“Why were the police here?”

“To ask us if we heard anything strange that first night I was back.”

“What would we have heard?”

“Nothing. We didn’t hear anything.”

And you didn’t go out into the woods that night. I didn’t find you sitting at the kitchen table with a knife the next morning.

“Why were they asking?”

“Because a girl got hurt in the woods.”

“I know. She’s dead. The poor Griswolds. You rode the bus with her.”

“Yeah Ma, I rode the bus with her.”

“But she wasn’t your friend.”

“No, she wasn’t my friend.”

“Where’s my kitten? Magpie! Oh, Magpie!”

T
HE TRUTH WAS
, the police had been by more than once and with each visit, their questioning took on a more accusatory tone. They’d come the day after the murder to question my mother and I, then Opal, Raven, and Gabriel. They returned the next day to talk to me alone, to ask me, all these years later, about my connection to Del.

“Jesus,” I said. “That was more than thirty years ago. Don’t you guys have enough to do with this new murder? That’s ancient history.”

The detectives were stone-faced.

“Were you and Delores Griswold friendly, Miss Cypher?” one asked.

“I barely knew her,” I told them. “She was a kid I rode the bus with. I think I tried to play with her a few times, but she was too…odd.”

“Odd in what way, Ms. Cypher?” asked one of the detectives.

“She lied,” I told him. “She was a compulsive liar.”

Ah, irony.

W
HEN
I
WAS IN NURSING SCHOOL
, I worked nights as an aide at a state psychiatric hospital outside Olympia, Washington. My husband, Jamie, was finishing up his residency. We had agreed that once he finished school, I would go back full-time. I had originally planned to become a doctor, a pediatrician maybe, but a nursing degree would take less time, would put us less in the hole financially. And one doctor in the family was enough, and cardiologists did make more than pediatricians, after all…. That’s what we decided.

Or rather that’s what he decided, and I was so gaga in love that I went along, telling myself it was for the best.

Am I bitter about giving up on my career? Only when I think about it too hard. Regret is overrated.

I met Jamie my first year in med school. He was in his last year. He was a blond from Long Beach in faded jeans and bright, gaudy Hawaiian shirts. What I was drawn to was the dichotomy: here was this gorgeous guy with the crazy shirts and surfer philosophy—laid back, waiting for the next wave—who just happened to be at the top of his class, the most dedicated student many of the instructors had ever seen. I fell head over heels the first time he looked me in the eye and drawled, “Whatever.” I dropped out of school and we were married at city hall on Christmas Eve. We moved into a shabby little studio apartment and I enrolled part-time in a nursing program and took a job working the graveyard shift at the state hospital to pay the bills.

This is how I met a giant of a woman named Patsy Marinelli. The other women on the floor called her Tiny. Tiny was six foot three and weighed well over three hundred pounds. Tiny had shot first her husband, and then herself, in the head. He died instantly, but she survived, remarkably intact aside from some ugly scars and the total loss of her short-term memory. Everything that had happened right up to the moment she pulled the trigger was clear to her—childhood vacations with her big Italian family, crushes on movie stars, summer camp, high school graduation, first love, first drink, first betrayal. But no new memories could be made. Even though I saw her every night for two years, she would introduce herself repeatedly—sometimes several times a night. And nine times out of ten, after the introductions, she would ask me the same question.

“Tell me, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

During the first year I worked there, I did not answer her. I shrugged my shoulders, made a joke maybe, then turned the question back around to her, as I had learned to do with the very depressed, delusional, and psychotic. Inevitably, Tiny Marinelli would tell me about shooting her husband. She would cry and sob, all three hundred pounds shaking—not quivering like jelly, but erupting with the force of a volcano.

During my second year at the hospital, Jamie admitted to having an affair with another resident—the first in what would be a long series of infidelities. He claimed my emotional distance had driven him to it. We had been fighting constantly over money, household chores that weren’t getting done, and whose job it was to pick up milk at the store. I felt stretched to the limit. The classes I was taking were more difficult, money was tighter than ever, work more stressful, and all I wanted to do was sleep, which Jamie took personally when I rebuffed his infrequent attempts to make love.

I didn’t turn him down every time—obviously, because I got pregnant shortly after learning about the affair (which he promised was over—done—
finis
—and besides, it was purely physical). I was on the pill, but in my exhausted state, I must have skipped a morning or two. I was afraid to tell Jamie, sure he would blame me, accuse me of manipulating him, which maybe I was on some subconscious level. Jamie didn’t believe in accidents. The truth was, neither did I. I also didn’t believe that our shaky marriage could survive news of a pregnancy. And we had decided ( yes,
we
this time) that we were going to try to make things work. I still loved him—loud shirts, roaming eye, and all. I’m kind of a sucker that way—once I love someone, I can’t seem to turn it off.

I was the one who had made the mistake, so it only seemed right that I should be the one to fix it—on my own.

I had the abortion on a Friday afternoon and spent the weekend in bed, cramped up, swallowing Motrin. I told Jamie I had the flu.

That Monday night when I dragged myself into the hospital, Tiny introduced herself to me and asked me the question. We were alone in her room during bed check.

“Tell me, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

All I could think about was the abortion; I ached to tell someone, to share the burden. Whatever I confessed to Tiny would be forgotten in five minutes.

But, of course, that was not the worst thing I had ever done.

“I betrayed my best friend and then she died.” I found myself saying the words without thinking them through. I just blurted it out.

“Did you kill her?” Tiny wanted to know.

“I wasn’t the one who strangled her, no, but I’m partially to blame. If that day had gone differently, then, I don’t know, maybe…”

“Do you think she blames you?”

“No.” I shook my head, remembered who I was talking to. “She’s dead, Patsy.”

“The dead can blame.”

I stared at this enormous woman. Her eyes, nose, and mouth were too small for her moon face.

“The dead can blame,” she repeated.

I
BEGAN LEAVING AN OPEN CAN
of tuna and a saucer of milk on the front porch to lure Magpie back. Each morning, the tuna and milk were gone, but there was no sign of Magpie. Little sneak. She was playing us for all we were worth.

“Why’d you get rid of the cat?” my mother continued to ask.

Because she kept asking the same questions over and over.

“First the cat, then me. I’m
not
going to a home!” Then she would begin to cry the cat’s name in sick desperation.

I upped the dosage of her medication. Sometimes it seemed to work; sometimes it seemed to have no effect on her at all.

O
NE EVENING
, three days after she’d disappeared, I was putting Magpie’s treats out by the front door when a banged-up blue Chevy pickup arrived. Out stepped a man I recognized immediately, in spite of his ragged appearance.

Out of old habit, I felt that electric tingle, only this time it seemed a little more dangerous, like touching a downed power line to see if it was live.

“It’s true then,” he said, grinning as he hopped down from the cab of the truck. “Kate came home.”

“How’re you doing, Nicky?”

He took a few steps forward and I could see how he was doing. He looked a little drunk. He’d put on some weight and was in bad need of a shave and a haircut. Twenty-some years older than he was when I last saw him, but he still had the same gravelly voice and loping walk. His hair was pale and his skin dark. He wore a grease-stained John Deere baseball cap, clean T-shirt, red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, and jeans. He smiled his sly fox smile and my chest warmed. Like I already said, once I love someone, it’s for life. In spite of everything. Crazy, I know.

I hadn’t been in a serious relationship since Jamie finally left me five years ago for a young surgeon. She was pregnant, he explained, and he wanted a family. Sick with the irony of the situation, I broke down and told him about the abortion.

“You could have had a family,” I spat. “You could have an eleven-year-old child right now. There’s your fucking family!”

I knew, once I said it, once I saw his face, that the fate of our marriage was sealed. He would never forgive me. I was the one who ruined things—me, the emotionally distant, secret-keeping, child-murdering monster.

She had the baby—a boy named Benjamin—but it was over between Jamie and the surgeon inside of a year. When I heard this bit of news, I expected to feel vindicated, but didn’t. Although Jamie and I did not keep in touch, over the years, the news of his string of conquests filtered back to me. My ex-husband, the successful cardiologist, broke nearly as many hearts as he fixed.

Right after the divorce, I went out a few times, a series of one-night stands, fuck-and-run sort of dates, but they left me empty and disappointed and I eventually opted for the role of spinster, rebuffing the advances of even the most promising men. My coworkers at the elementary school all presume I’m a lesbian and I’ve said nothing to correct them.

Standing on the porch before my first crush, or the man my first crush had become, I couldn’t help but do a bit of quick arithmetic in my head—a little over three years. Yep, three years since I’d slept with anyone. I knew it was crazy to be attracted to Nicky Griswold, but there it was.

“Nicky.” I wanted to hug him, but resisted. I sat down on the steps and patted the spot next to me.

“Desert Rose,” he said as he folded his long body down next to me. “Want a smoke?” He pulled out a pack of Camels and I took one, although I hadn’t smoked in years. “How ’bout a drink?” He pulled a bottle of Wild Turkey from his jacket pocket and took a swallow.

“Gobble, gobble!” He offered me the bottle.

“I could sure use some of that.” I took the bottle and took a long sip, letting the bourbon warm me through and through. Manhattans were my drink of choice, but I was willing to forgo the vermouth and cherry.

“It’s good to see you, Nicky.” I meant what I said. After being with my mother for nearly a week, I was desperate for a friendly, familiar face. Someone other than Raven and Gabriel, who always ended their visits by asking what I’d done about finding a place for my mother. The fact was, I’d done nothing at all. I told them I was still assessing the situation, but they easily saw through to the truth: I was stalling and we all knew it. My mother’s pleading was getting to me.