“I am his family, Vanessa,” I said.
“You’re a guest,” Vanessa snapped. “We have the paperwork to prove who is actually in charge of his care.”
“What paperwork?” I asked.
She did not answer.
She turned her head toward Robert, her eyes flashing with a silent instruction that he completely ignored by looking down at his shoes.
I looked up at the front window of the brick house.
The white lace curtain twitched slightly, and for a brief second, I saw the pale outline of my father’s face looking down down at us before the fabric fell back into place.
“He’s terrified of you,” Vanessa said, turning her attention back to me. “He’s not safe with you hovering over him like this.”
“Let’s talk about safety,” I said, stepping down from the porch onto the grass so I was level with them. “Let’s talk about the bruises on his arm.”
Robert flinched, his boots shuffling in the dry grass.
“What bruises?” Vanessa asked, her voice suddenly smooth, without a trace of the high-pitched panic from a moment before.
“The deep finger marks on his forearm,” I said. “The ones that match the shape of a hand gripping him.”
Vanessa shook her head, a small, patronizing smile appearing on her lips.
“Clara, this is exactly why you shouldn’t be handling this,” she said. “You don’t understand his physical limitations.”
“I understand physical force,” I said.
“He wanders,” Vanessa said, her voice dripping with artificial sympathy as she looked toward the street.
“Last Thursday, he tried to walk right out into the middle of the bypass,” she said. “Robert had to grab him by the arm to pull him back before a truck hit him.”
She paused, waiting for Robert to back her up.
“Yeah,” Robert mumbled, still refusing to meet my eyes. “He didn’t know where he was. I had to hold onto him.”
The explanation was clean, rehearsed, and perfectly timed.
