The Question by June Trop

June Trop

June Trop has studied storytelling her entire professional life. As a professor of teacher education, she focused her research on the practical knowledge teachers construct and communicate through storytelling. Now associate professor emerita, she writes the Miriam bat Isaac Mystery Series set in Roman Alexandria along with some contemporary short stories.

The Question

My hand trembled as I unlocked the car and started the engine.

My mother had just phoned me, her voice like a feeble echo that seemed to have come from faraway.

“I don’t feel so well, Katie.”

“I’ll be right there.”

A pick was hammering in my chest as I climbed out of bed, but not from her call. I’d been taking care of her for years. But this call seemed different. Maybe because it was so late.

#

Twenty minutes later, I was perched alongside her as she lay on her couch in a faint circle of yellow lamplight. The end tables held jars of her unguents and bottles of her lozenges, tablets, and granules. A wraith of the mother I once knew, her hair clung to her forehead like silvery lace, and her jellied eyes, deep in their mauve sockets, seemed to have moved closer together.

“Can I get you something, Ma?”

Looking at me with a haunted gaze, she shook her head, but I brought her another blanket anyway.

Then she asked me a question that took me back thirty years, to when I was nine years old and she’d summoned me from upstairs.

#

“Katherine Marie Garvey, come down here this instant.” Her staccato tone cut through me like a blade.

As I stood before her, the air still trembling from her command, she looked bigger than ever as she took control from her wing-back chair, her thick legs flung apart. She held onto me with her eyes.

“Is it true what your sister says about Daddy?”

I turned to look at my sister, but I didn’t have to ask what she’d said. Our father had been molesting us for years, and she’d vowed to make him stop.

But how can I tattle on my father? So gentle and loving to me, his favorite. And besides, where would that leave our family, already on the edge of chaos?

“No, Ma, it’s not true,” I told the carpet.

Little did I realize that henceforth my sister would be the Cinderella stepchild.

#

I looked at this once formidable woman now on her couch laboring to breathe as her life ebbed away.

“Was it true what your sister said about Daddy?”

“What did you say, Ma?” But of course, I knew. Shock flashed through me and punched the breath out of me.

What could have prompted her to resurrect this question? And don’t I owe it to my sister at last to clear her name? But what’s to be gained by burdening this old woman with the truth now—and branding myself as the liar?

I drew in a deep, slow breath. “No, Ma, it wasn’t true.”

#

I called my sister the next morning.

“Can you ever forgive me? I lied again! I was with Mother last night, and out of the blue, she asked if what you said about Daddy was true.” 

“Of course, I forgive you, Katie. If she really wanted to know, she’d have asked me.”