Promise Not to Tell: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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