I learned you shouldn’t lick toilets and to sing gospel—I would’ve had to think about where I was and where I wasn’t. I was somewhere between alone and afraid. I wasn’t learning my Espanish. When it was dark, I’d pretend to dream, but I spent most nights wide awake, imagining a plane with Frances in it flying over the roof. Straining my ears, listening for the once-frightening roar to turn into my mother’s voice, like thunder before the possibility of lightning. After hours of waiting, I’d finally go to sleep, knowing she wasn’t in the sky.

The five days I spent without a mother were and will always be the worst of my life. Frances was my dirt, and when she left, she took my feet with her. A six-year-old girl without gravity. Weightless but not flying, because that would have been a relief. Instead, I was in a constant state of losing—spending one minute remembering the plump of the small bump on both her pinkies where her sixth finger used to be, and the next minute trying to picture the curl of the three hairs near her chin. There were moments when I could call up her face on speed dial and others when I couldn’t remember the number to save my life. I needed saving.

Repression was my refuge. There are few things I can remember from that week. Whose clothes did I wear? Where did I sleep? What did I eat? How did I cope? Why didn’t I jump out a window? No one spoke of Frances to me, except once. According to Humongobutt, a glass of water cost like $5 in Spain, and apparently that was a lot and therefore more than my mother could afford. She said this by way of explaining my presence in her home. My grandmother, according to this woman I’d never met before, was saving me. A messiah, not a mobster. Also, according to this woman, because Frances had failed to calculate the exorbitant cost of drinking into our Spanish plans, she was therefore unfit not only as a mother but as a human being. Your mother didn’t know what she was getting you all into. Plus, you know, she had just left me here all alone in an unfamiliar America like Fievel. I was better off now, supposedly. Nobody said she’d be back.

After spending about a week with Humongo and LaNieceMichelle, a familiar face finally showed up. Without explanation—a recurring motif—my auntie Barbara came and took me away on a boat.

She was the youngest of my mother’s four sisters, and I was in awe of her. She knew everything. She smelled like clean, shopped at Robinsons-May, and had a high-class voice that made me feel special. But when she came to spring me from Humongo’s, I knew I hadn’t been rescued yet. She took me to the mall, for McDonald’s, and then to Catalina Island for a day at the beach with a bunch of skinny kids I’d never met. I ran, I jumped, I ate sand, I threw sand; I was a child finally. In the fleeting moments not crowded with activity, I felt guilty for all the fun being had sans Frances—but I needed this. Maybe this was my new life, I thought. Maybe from now on, I would be bounced from unknown to unfamiliar and then back to alone. Maybe I should just adjust.

After one day of feeling normal and loved, Auntie dropped me back off at Mrs. H’s without explanation, and I went back to being a motherless child. Later she’d say that I seemed happy, well-adjusted. Her job, I think, was to make sure they—my grandmommy, Humongobutt, the Boogie Man—hadn’t severely damaged me in some irreparable fashion. To see how I was, then report back to whoever masterminded this whole thing. These women were protecting me from something horrible, something they couldn’t name, something Frances must not have known existed. Snapping my childhood in two was simply par for the course.

I figured it was really Frances they wanted tamed. I was just an irksome but unavoidable byproduct. No more panty-free days at school, no more moving on impulse, no more lesbians, no more living. That was the first time I cried, when Auntie left me on that fat woman’s doorstep with a shopping bag full of new stuff and emptied-out insides. Even LaNieceMichelle couldn’t shut me up. I remember well what it’s like to be a child crying. The slobber, the spit, the throat-scratching stuttering and uncontrollable