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

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