PART 3: Sunrise Visitors
I closed the folder and stood up. Tyler was taller than me, and he took his time looking at me, the folder, and my mother sleeping on the mattress.
"Give it here," he said.
"No."
"Dad will be real unhappy."
"I’m sure he will."
For a long moment neither of us moved. Then my mother stirred and murmured my name, and Tyler’s eyes flicked toward her. Something in his face shifted. It was not guilt. It was calculation.
"Fine," he said. "Keep it. It’s a copy anyway."
He left. I did not believe him, but I also did not trust myself to chase him. I locked the laundry room door from the inside with a chair under the handle and sat with my back against it until the sky turned gray.
I called my old supervisor, Ms. Arellano, at eight in the morning.
"Daniel," she said after I told her everything. "Do not confront them. I am sending a caseworker and calling the sheriff. Stay with your mother."
"They know I’m here."
"Then stay where they can’t isolate you. I mean it."
I sent her the photographs. She replied in under a minute: Stay put. Forty minutes.
Those were the longest forty minutes of my life. Raymond knocked once and asked if I wanted breakfast. I said no. He chuckled and walked away. Tyler never appeared.
At nine thirty, the knock came. The caseworker and two deputies stood on the porch.
Raymond answered in his bathrobe. He tried to smile.
"There’s been a misunderstanding. The kid’s upset. College kids, you know."
The caseworker walked past him straight to the laundry room. She saw the air mattress, the folded wheelchair, my mother’s swollen ankles. Then she picked up the prescription bottles and counted what was left.
Nothing.
"Where are the rest of her pills?" she asked.
"She takes them as needed," Raymond said.
"These were filled nine days ago."
His smile faltered. One deputy asked politely to look around the house. Raymond began to say he needed a warrant.
That was when we heard a crash from upstairs.
A window slid open. Through the hallway I saw Tyler’s legs disappear over the sill. One deputy ran for the back door. The other stayed with Raymond.
My mother gripped my hand.
"Daniel," she said. "The jacket. He keeps it with him. Everything is in the jacket."
Out in the yard, I heard a deputy shout. A moment later, a car engine roared to life.
