Helen took Sophie to a specialist. The specialist told Helen the silence was a trauma response. The child had experienced a separation from her primary attachment figures, her parents and her twin, and the separation had produced a withdrawal that manifested as the refusal to use the voice that had previously connected her to the people who were no longer there.
Sophie’s voice was the connection. Removing the connection removed the voice.
Carol told me she wanted to bring Sophie home immediately. David was still recovering. The income was still reduced. The house was still too small and the budget was still too tight and the particular, cruel arithmetic that had produced the decision in the first place had not changed just because the decision’s consequences were now visible.
She told me she and David drove to Michigan four times in the next year. Each visit, Sophie was silent. Each visit, Carol held her daughter and whispered to her and tried to produce the sound of the connection the separation had severed. Each visit, Sophie looked at her mother with the eyes Nate and I now saw on our daughter and did not speak.
