Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

away, she never did. I heard the door to my mother’s room close. I heard Lillian’s door slam. I sat in the kitchen for a long time, holding the seat of the chair as tight as I could with both hands.
    When I woke up the next morning, my mother was gone. There was a strange woman in our kitchen. She knew our names and told us to call her Aunt Minnie. She was strangely pale, I remember, not like the dark-haired people in my own family, and she smelled funny, sour, not at all like the sweet way my mother smelled. Even when we were outside, Aunt Minnie’s hands were always warm and moist. I wanted her to touch me and not touch me, all at the same time.
    Unlike Madison, I was a very lucky little girl. My father kept telling us that our mother would come home “in her own good time,” and a week after she had left, she did. She never told us where she had been or why she came back, but years later, when I was an adult, my aunt Ceil did. She said my mother had been thinking of leaving my father, that she’d gone away to think it over. But something in me, something that my mother had broken, remained the way it was. It’s hard, nearly impossible, to alter the truths you learn as a child, even when you find out that what you were told had nothing at all to do with what was so.
    My mother’s mysterious disappearance made my sister, Lillian, want to be the best mother in the world, one, she told me years later, unlike the mother we had. It had the opposite effect on me. If it was possible to give birth to a baby and then one day abandon her, even for a week, I wouldn’t be anyone’s mother. That way I’d be sure I’d never do to a child of mine what my mother had done to me, what Sally had done to her daughter.
    If Madison Spector had nothing to say to anyone, she surely had her reasons. Even without being told so, she would assume that Sally had left her, as indeed she may have. Ms. Peach said that Sally had left shortly after Madison’s diagnosis. What other conclusion could this kid have come to given the timing of her mother’s departure?
    I stopped by Miyagi on the way home and got some sushi to go. I was anxious to get to the computer and find out more about the disorder that might have been part of what made Sally run.
    Chronic motor tic disorder, which Madison might or might not outgrow, was considered to have a genetic cause despite the fact that the gene or genes that caused it had not yet been identified. I wondered if Sally had had a tic disorder as a kid. The more common kind was transitory, lasting only weeks or months. The kind Madison had lasted considerably longer, usually for years and sometimes for a lifetime.
    Or was it Leon who’d had the disorder?
    I stopped reading what little I’d found online when I got to a part that was particularly painful for me. All the symptoms common to the disorder, muscle spasms, tics, grimacing, odd recurrent movements and blinking, exacerbated during times of stress. I had gone to spend time with Madison in the hope that someway, somehow, I could make some connection with her, that she would be able, one way or another, to feed me some information about her missing mother. Instead, I vented my frustration, most of which had nothing to do with her or with this case, ranting at the poor kid while her face twitched, her eyes blinked and both arms began to shake and tremble, reminding me of the autistic kids I used to work with and what happened when you first tried touching them.
    I owed Madison, I thought. But perhaps it wasn’t that simple. Perhaps there was another side to getting her upset. Perhaps that would be the way I would find out what it took to get her to act violent. The question was, how far did I dare go and what would it do to Madison and to me if I pushed her again, if I pushed her even harder than I already had?
    I printed the rest of the pages on chronic motor tic disorder and put them on the side of the desk to finish reading later. Then I wrote some notes and questions on file cards, tacking them up over the desk. It was early evening by the time I called Leon. “I have a few more questions,” I told him.
    “Shoot.”
    “Are there any of your neighbors that Sally was friendly with, another young mother perhaps?”
    “Three-H,” he said. “And four-F. There was another one, but she moved. And Ted. He’s downstairs, the apartment under us.”
    “Names?”
    “Three-H is Nina Reich. Four-F, the Goodmans. They have a girl Madison’s