Your best bet would be to make component-a completely responsible for toggling the modal. So instead you should pass the toggleModal action to the model-element:
{{modal-element closeAction=(action 'toggleModal')}}
Now model-element only needs to trigger the given action:
actions: {
onCloseButtonClicked() {
if (this.get('closeAction')) {
this.get('closeAction')();
}
}
}