Raven's Song

Change

A week later, Tylor was given permission to go back to his house. I went with him, expecting to pull up to the house we went to when I was drugged, but it wasn't. It was slightly less grand. Only slightly. It was still too large of a house for three people, but the thought that a shipping container would still have been too large for a family that crept around each other.

Tylor had given glimpses of his life to me in the days after my mom's interrogation. She'd left that night, telling my dad that there were too many people trying to protect me already in that house. As we watched her pull away, Tylor commented that one positive thing about his mom was that he knew where she was and could visit. I'd looked up to see if he had been trying to make a joke, but his face was as serious as ever. As morbid as it was, he had a point.

Mostly he'd told me stories about his mom. Sometimes his dad was in them but not very often. They always picked out a real Christmas tree. Tylor would cut it down. His mom, Tylor, and his siblings would all decorate and eat cookies one of the chefs had made. His father would always be too busy, even on Christmas morning when they opened presents. His mom would be there, though, with a video camera and soaking it all in. He talked about how she never missed a school event or threw away a school project even if it was shit. She bought him all his art supplies and hired a teacher. He smiled sadly as he said she always thought he would make his money from art. That she was pissed about what his father was doing to him. She was just another pawn for him, though, like his kids, and she couldn't do anything about what was happening.

Now, though, I followed him into the large house. It wasn't a wreck from investigators combing every inch like I had expected. There would have had to of been personal belongings for that to happen. The kitchen was the worst with the cooking utensils and dishes, but everything was just piled on the counter. They'd taken care not to let anything slip out of their hands.

The living room held only a couch and coffee table and end tables and lamps with a flatscreen on the wall and a fireplace. Nothing on the shelves that lined the wall with the TV.

I followed Tylor upstairs. There were old pictures of him and his family that littered the ground with their empty frames. Tylor picked all of them up and handed them to me. Not a single one was taken after his mother had died and only one included his father. A picture from a school event. Probably the one Amber had seen him at.

Tylor's room was on the third floor at the end of the hall. It, like the rest of the house, was sparse. There wasn't a reason for him to have many belongings when he never spent time there.

Sketchbooks and art supplies were scattered on the floor amongst drawings. Tylor and I worked quietly to pick it all up and put it into a suitcase he pulled from the large closet. He cleaned the clothes out of his dresser while I worked on his closet. Clothes and art were the only belongings he had to take. All his electronics and notebooks had been confiscated by the investigators.

"Is there anything else you want?" I asked as Tylor helped me muscle the suitcase shut.

"A few things of my mom's from the safe, but I don't want anything more that will remind me of this place," he said as he slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and took the two suitcases. "Oh, and we need to get the keys for my other car. It's already been combed through, so I'm free to take it."

"Where are the keys?" I asked, following him down the stairs.

"They're on a hook in the garage. We'll grab them on the way out," he said.