Read Promise Not to Tell: A Novel for Free Online

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