The aide told me my brother had been visiting after all, just not when I was there. She had started noticing him on the security camera near the elevator, always on Sunday mornings, always staying less than ten minutes. I asked why he had told me he hadn’t been there in four years, and she said she didn’t know. Then she told me something stranger: he never went into my mother’s room.
Instead, he would sit in the hallway with a folder on his lap and wait for someone to come out. The aide said she had once asked him why he didn’t visit his mother, and he told her, “I’m not here for her.” I couldn’t understand what that meant until she showed me the visitor log. His name appeared beside the same room number over and over, but the notes next to his visits had nothing to do with my mother. They mentioned paperwork, signatures, and one name I hadn’t heard in years.
I asked the aide what she’d seen him doing with the folder, and she said he’d been carrying copies of my mother’s old financial records. Then she told me he’d asked her a question about whether my mother still recognized me. “He wanted to know if she’d be able to contradict him,” she said. I stood there realizing that my brother hadn’t stopped visiting because my mother no longer knew we were there. He had stopped visiting her because he was waiting for the day she couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done.
