Content Warning: child sexual abuse, incest
“I don’t remember.”
Her voice is tinged with frustration, the furrows on her brow grow deeper and her quivering hand reaches to her temple, as though to smooth them away. I sit on the carpeted floor in front of her, unmoved. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard these words. Long before her diagnosis—years even before any symptoms of Parkinson’s, those words wore ruts in my mind. I hear them in her voice, and in my father’s. Before his death, he too, had said them often.
I don’t remember—the empty refrigerator, the beatings, the cartoon drawings of white-bearded, grandfatherly men fucking small-breasted teenage girls, the child-rearing anecdotes that recommended fellatio and manual stimulation as effective techniques for putting a toddler down to nap.
My mother sits perched on the beige leather, her pale feet—thin like mine—rest on the edge of the couch, her knees pressed into her chest. She is delicate and bird-like. Not at all like the woman of my girlhood who showed me perfect cartwheels and taught me to somersault. Her thin lips move slowly, her voice is soft and low. When she speaks, it comes out like a whisper. Not loud and strident like the mother who shouted when I played with boys—who lectured that I needed to stay inside, out of sight of the neighbors’ suspicious looks and curious questions.
At night, when that sonorous voice read me stories, her wide blue eyes glimmered with the same anticipation that I felt for the hero’s journey. Now those eyes are creased and deep set, listless, except when she smiles, then they shine beautifully, like in the old days. Her hands—once so strong that I jumped with fear when she raised one—are too weak to work the knife. I cut even the tenderest meat. Chewing itself challenges her now. At dinner, I make rambling, one-sided conversation while she eats, ignoring my plate so she won’t see me finish and think to give up.
I can’t let it go. Not this time, not again. “You don’t remember how much time I spent in the shed? That you’d only let me outside if I played in there? Or you don’t remember dad going out there—that he only started his ‘projects’ after I made it my playhouse?”
“I remember the shed,” she clears her throat as she talks, matter-of-fact, “but I don’t remember that. I don’t remember that I said you had to play in there.”
“Do you remember I was twelve? That you said that I would like being there, and at first I did like it—I was dying to be out of the house.”
“I don’t remember you playing there, I don’t remember…” Her voice fades, sifting through aqueous memories.
More than what she remembers, I want to know what she thought. If she thought at any time that the isolation might be bad for a growing girl, if she thought it was odd when my father wanted to bathe with me and sleep with me—after I had started to look like a woman but while they still treated me like a little girl.
I break her reverie, “Did you know he used to climb into my bed? That he used to touch me and try to fuck me?”
“I didn’t know.” She opens her mouth, then closes it again. She sighs but her face is placid, unsurprised.
“Do you think that was okay?” I force down the frenzy I hear in my voice. I adjust to my patient, fact-finding tone. “Do you think that incest is okay?”
Her eyes, wide again like the old days, stand still, suspended in space and time but I don’t know what they mean. “No, of course not,” she says, at last. She blinks and that look, of fear or recognition, vanishes from her eyes and they are vacant again. “Of course, I don’t believe that incest is okay.”
Her answer changes nothing. Not the showers or the stories or the times I traipsed shamefully from the shed to the porch, bare feet against the wet evening dew, the wind wisping through my thin nightgown to touch my bare body underneath. Not the therapy nor that I am always too angry, or never angry enough. She’s never said those words before, but I can’t tell by her voice or the look in her eyes if she means them or if they’re just something she’s learned is the right thing to say.
Her answer tells me nothing. It doesn’t tell me what she thought those years ago, or what she knew or didn’t know. It doesn’t tell me what she would have done if she had known. Nor whether she would remember what I told her now, if she could remember, for one whole day or two. But though they tell me nothing, and change nothing, those words in her voice, of course I don’t believe that incest is okay, release some innate relief in me, and I want to hug her.
Instead, I sit a moment longer, then climb from my spot on the floor in front of her. “It’s been a while since you’ve eaten. Can I make you a snack?”
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Kristi Ferguson (she/her) is a researcher and writer. Originally from Brazil, she currently lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband. Kristi’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in (mac)ro(mic), The Daily Drunk, Litro Magazine, Fabula Argentea, and elsewhere.