Without a Word by Carol Lea Benjamin Page A

lanes. I slipped into an empty lane and began to swim, all the thoughts that had been plaguing me gone for the moment. I swam hard, wanting to keep my mind empty, just to feel my body working as I moved through the water, leaving room for nothing but what I was doing at the moment. I concentrated on my breathing, stretching my arms as far out in front of me as I could, trying to kick away my anger. There was something calming about the blue world under the water, something that allowed me to push away all the chatter that had been going on inside my head.
    But once I was out of the water, all the calm disappeared. Now there was a wall of noise from the kids, only a dozen or so of them but each one shouting as loud as possible. And as I walked toward the showers, all my own noise came back. Standing in the hot shower, I finally knew why I’d been so angry at Madison’s house. It wasn’t a coincidencethat I’d been thinking about my sister lately. Because what had happened to me had happened to her as well.
    I was only five at the time. Lillian was fourteen. My mother sat us down in the kitchen and told us that she was going away. We were bad, she said, and that was why she was leaving. I remember how cold the air seemed, how hard the wooden chair I sat on felt. Lillian asked when she’d be back. My mother, who had been sitting with us, got up and walked over to the sink. With her hands on the edge of the sink, her back to us, she said she didn’t know. Without turning around to face us again, she left the room.
    It was my fault. I knew it. Lillian was always so good. I was the one my mother got mad at time after time. I was the one she said would aggravate her to death. I was frozen with fear and guilt. Lillian ran after her. “If you don’t love us anymore, then fuck you,” she shouted. I didn’t hear my mother’s answer, if there’d been one, and even though I waited for Lillian to come back and tell me what to do to keep my mother from going 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. Shenever 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