Chapter 3

"So what you're saying is that this baby's handprints match mine and that makes him, me, right?" He's surprised how much anger he discovers in his voice. He thought, or more so dreaded, that when the pretty brown skinned social worker led him into the conference room to 'talk', he feared that the evidence would be so overwhelming, so devastating that it would not only bring himself to tears but also his life to shambles.

But fingerprints? If this was the only true evidence they had to link him to this other person, then they could shove it.

He grips the armrest of his wheelchair tightly for support and sends a glare to the adults in the room. Dylan's sitting in an overly large conference room surrounded by his head surgeon, a detective and a social worker. The room looks like it was specifically built for being told life shattering news like the kind he's receiving now. Nicely decorated furniture, a smooth long wood table with plush chairs and glass windows that you can stare out and contemplate throwing yourself out of one of them.

The adults nod back at him stiffly, waiting for him to come to the obvious conclusion that they're right, but Dylan isn't nearly convinced of what they're trying to sell him, that his mother is his kidnapper. It's going to take a lot more than a thin sheet of paper with baby prints to convince him.

"But that's bullshit," he tells them. He sees the doctor bristle back from his language and the detective frowns disapprovingly but Dylan doesn't give a shit right now about what they fucking think. They're accusing his mother of a crime that two lesbians happened to make up because they're starving for a son. "Its baby prints. Couldn't it just be a mistake and we just happen to have the same prints?

"Gus, hand and-"

"Dylan! My name is Dylan." He corrects the doctor with a snarl.

"Dylan," he amends, "I'm sorry, Dylan, but fingerprints are unique. Each one is completely different than the next and belongs to only one person. No two people can have the exact same prints. Not even identical twins," Dr. Reynolds explains.

Dylan shakes his head, still not convinced. He isn't an expert on fingerprints nor is he a doctor or a detective but he remembers reading something in a book or watching on the news about how unreliable fingerprints can be. Yeah sure, the doctor could be right but it can also be said that a person can never reproduce the exact same prints the next time even if they wait just 10 seconds later, they wouldn't be alike in every detail. There are tons of cases where innocent people have been wrongly accused of crimes or singled out because of fingerprints. There isn't enough evidence out there that demonstrates that fingerprints are reliable enough to prove anything. Now they're trying to tell him that these prints from a baby from God knows how many years ago, are the same as his. He doesn't fucking buy any of it.

"But isn't it true Detective that if you take a person's prints and then take a second copy. The first and second copy won't be exactly the same either? Me and this other guy could just have really similar prints, but that doesn't make me this Gus guy." Dylan fires back, turning to Detective Bailey sitting to the left of him. She's been tight lipped and distant for the last 20 minutes, letting the doctor and the social worker dominate the conversation. Dylan is determined to draw her out if that means he gets to win this argument, if he gets to keep his life. "If baby fingerprints are the only evidence you have to link me to this other person then I can't believe anything that's coming out of your fucking mouths because it's not enough to prove anything," he informs them.

Dylan takes their silence as a win. He thinks he might have convinced them or at least made them doubt themselves, but when he glances up at their faces he doesn't see contemplation or confusion but instead pity. Pity raining down on him from strangers and it makes him cringe.

"Dylan, you're completely right," the detective says. Her voice too sickly sweet and too calm. He knows that what she's about to say is going be a game changer, a reactor, an explosion to his already dismantled life. "Fingerprint samples aren't enough to prove anything, which is why I had one of the nurse's take samples of your blood after your fingerprints can up as a match for Gus Peterson-Marcus." She slides the blue folder across the table to him. "In this folder you will find that you are indeed Gus Peterson-Marcus."

He could argue until he turned blue in the face about fingerprints and convicted innocent people but in the face of DNA and blood, that was an argument he was not prepared to have. Dylan sat there in his wheelchair for a couple of seconds staring down at the blue folder that read on the side, in black letters 'PETERSON-MARCUS, GUS'. He couldn't summon the strength to open it and that made him feel weak and ashamed. So it lay there untouched. He considered his next move or next response to this surprise element to his crumbling life – or should he say 'crumbling lie of a life', but he had no clue what to do next.

When he looks up from the blue folder he finds Ms. Montgomery, the social worker, smiling down at him sadly. One of her bony warm brown hands wrap around his and squeezes. It's almost comforting.

"This must be so difficult for you to even wrap your mind around the possibility of you not being who you've always been. I-" she breaks off with a sigh. Dylan realizes he can't look at her pretty heart shaped face without feeling his cheeks burn and his eyes sting. So he looks at her collar instead, pleading in his mind for her to just stop talking. He can't deal with her soft voice or her warm hands right now.

"We're not here to confuse you or to make your life any harder than it has been or as it has been these last couple of days. Everyone in this room is here for you and is here to help you. So Dylan, what can we do for you?"

He doesn't even have to consider the question. "I want to see my mom."

The meeting with Doctor Reynolds, Detective Bailey and Ms. Montgomery seems to fly by pretty fast after the life detonator that was dropped into his lap. His doctor updates him on his condition. Apparently he cracked his head on something ridiculously hard during the explosion that took 2 different complex brain surgeries to bring him back to full health and a sprained arm. Dylan's first surgery was back in West Virginia, immediately after the explosion and the second surgery in Pittsburgh at the current hospital.

At this news, Dylan quietly seethes in his seat in annoyance that no one thought it would be a good idea to at least inform him that he was no longer residing in his home state. He wonders aloud to the adults in the room if his mother and siblings are still in West Virginia or if they travelled with him to Pennsylvania. The response, of course, is the same one he received after demanding to see his mother: "We'll have to speak with your parents first before we can release any information." So he sits back in his wheelchair in silence and lets the adults continue to drone on about him.

After a good 15 to 20 minutes, Doctor Reynolds finally finishes his very long and overly drawn out story of Dylan's medical surgery. Instead of the story making him feel warm and fuzzy feelings towards the Doctor for saving his life, Dylan finds himself wishing that he would have died on the table rather than endure another second of his minute by minute account. He's a bit frustrated and pissed off because there's a lack of relevant information floating around in the room. Who gives two shits about the perfect steps and techniques the Doctor made while fixing him? The only thing that truly matters is if his family survived. Dylan's having a difficult time trying to steer his mind away from over the thought of how bad his sisters, brothers, and mom's condition must be that the detective, doctor and social worker have to get permission from his "parents" in order to tell him anything about them.

The detective takes over the meeting after the doctor finishes prattling on. Dylan had hoped that the detective would let something slip about his family but she doesn't give up any information. She instead questions him for 15 minutes straight over what his mom does for a living, if she ever abused him or made him do things that he didn't want to do or not liked. Dylan's pretty sure that Bailey was doing a lot more than just DNA samples on him while he was unconscious because after 10 minutes into the questioning, she begins to ask him about the little candies he gave away at school. Dylan, as loyal as ever, even with all the evidence stacked against his mother, denies all accusations against her. The detective crosses her arms in menacing manner and stills her blue eyes at him sternly. She knows he's lying.

Yeah, it was true that his mom had him and his sibling sell drugs but that didn't make her a bad mother. Dylan wanted to explain to Detective Bailey that his mother did what she had to do because she loved them and wanted to take care of them. There's so many mothers in the world who drop out of their kids' lives or dump their kids on other people doorsteps when things start to get tough, but not his mother. His mom was made out of sterner stuff, she knew which hard choices to take and which ones would get you killed. She shouldn't have to suffer because she was trying to provide for her children when everyone else had turned their backs on them.

As Dylan's eyes land on the blue folder, sitting directly in front of him, he begins to wonder why? If she wasn't really his mother then why would she go through the struggle of taking care of him? Let's assume that evidence in the blue folder was genuine, if he was kidnapped, what did that make his siblings? Were they his mother's or someone else's? What person would voluntarily take care of 5 children, when your only source of income was your full-time job at Walmart? None of this made sense. It seemed like the more information he received, the more the questions grew. One thing he knows for sure, is things will never go back to normal.

Presently, Dylan's stuck in a hard place of wanting to believe his mother is the saint of all mother's while questioning her true motives. He stopped answering questions. It was obvious by the direction of the questioning and the heavy frown on Bailey's face that she wouldn't understand anything that he was going through. She didn't even look like she wanted to be bothered with him, like working with Dylan was beneath her.

A loud beep emitted from the room. It was the Doctor's pager going off.

"Oh, that's me!" The doctor said with a start. "I can't stick around much longer, I'm being called away for a consult." Studying the message on his pager. Dylan rolled his eyes. He didn't care if the doctor left or stayed. He wasn't all that important to him. He served his purpose and now he could leave. The man whirls out of the room, promising Dylan that he would meet up with him later. Dylan once again rolls his eyes and turns back to the detective.

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline when he sees the slight frown she's wearing. Her thin chapped lips curl up in distaste as if she smelled something funky or witnessed something truly disgusting. Dylan first thought is that she's having a similar reaction as he is to the doctor, but her eyes tell as a different story. They seem to linger a little too long on Dylan's, and he'll swear up and down that he picked up on the ever so slight shake of her head at him, in disappointment, most likely.

The detective shuffles the papers around in her hands and arranges them in a clean, orderly pile before picking out the sheet of notes she left off on.

"Well then," she said looking down at the questions, "should we continue?"

He hasn't answered a question in the last 10 minutes after deciding that he would rather not help build a case against his mother, kidnapped or not….

"Actually detective, I think this would be a great place for us to end." The soft voice says from his right side. "Dylan needs his rest and his parents are probably worried sick about him."

The detective shots the social worker with a glare, not as menacing as the one that she gave him, but still pretty lethal. He doesn't know how the soft-spoken social worker managed to hold her ground, several moments later the detective mutters with a tired sigh, "Fine, we'll stop here. I've got all the information I need anyways." She says coarsely and begins gathering up her papers and pens. "If you remember anything, you can reach me from this number." She hands him her card with her name and several numbers printed on it. He wonders briefly who in the world needs so many phones before he finds his hand shook roughly by Bailey and watching her storm out of the room in a hurry.

"Well that meeting went a lot longer than I expected." Ms. Montgomery says into the now silent room. "How about we get you back to your room? Are you hungry or tired?" She lays her hand on his shoulder and squeezes like she did earlier. Dylan knocks her hand off. He doesn't need her comfort.

Ms. Montgomery wheels him down the hallway back to his room even though Dylan insists that he can push himself. Ms. Montgomery isn't having any of it. She told him that any unnecessary strain on his body could led him back to the operation table or permanently gorked. Well, she said it in a more kind and kid friendly way but Dylan got her meaning and stopped all forms of whining. Instead he used his free ride as an opportunity to spy into other people's rooms and look around for signs of his family on the surgical floor.

He mistook a few people for his youngest siblings, Shannon and Mattie. He spotted a young girl with dark brown hair like his own back in room 413 that could've been his sister except their voices were completely different. Dylan couldn't remember a time when his sister had called their mom, "mommy." She was way to cool for that.

There was a boy that walked right by him down the hall that looked just like his brother. Same eyes, face, and stupid kid hair, but when Dylan yelled his name several times, over and over. The social worker had to tell him 3 times to stop yelling before he complies. His mind must have been playing tricks on him because when the kid does turn around, not because it's his name but because of Dylan's yelling. He doesn't anything like his brother. From his hair to his size. He's the total opposite of Mattie. His mind must be playing tricks on him.

They arrive back to his room faster than he expected. He wanted more time to search the floor, he needs more time to search every single room and every single floor. He didn't know when he would get another opportunity to be outside his room again, he needs to know if they are alive. If there was fighting chance that he would be able to talk or see anyone of them.

The social worker begins to reach for the knob and Dylan can see through the glass panels of the yellowish wooden door that both of the crazed lesbo's are in his room. Great! He thinks bitterly, more fighting.

Without even thinking, Dylan kicks his bare legs up onto the door frame, barring him from being wheeled into the room.

"Dylan, please put your feet down." The social worker tells him calmly.

"No! I don't wanna go back to them!"

"Dylan…"

"No, no, no. You can't make me. I don't want to be with them. I want my family."

"Dylan," she starts again. He feels her move from behind his wheelchair. She crouches down to his level and stares at him with a sad look on her face. "Dylan I would never want to make you do something you absolutely don't want to do."

He stays quiet.

"But unfortunately I'm not allowed to take you to your other family yet until I get permission from your mothers." Dylan huffs not at all satisfied. He knows that he's acting like a grade A brat, and if his mother was here, she would beat the crap out of him for giving another adult lip, but he can't help it. He wants his family.

"That's not fair! They're nothing to me, why do they get to decide things like that?"

"Because they have custody and technically you belong to them. I was planning on dropping you off and meeting with your parents to discuss with them the option of letting you see your other family, but if you think they shouldn't even have the right to decide, then I won't."

Dylan pauses. He still agrees that the lesbo's shouldn't have the right to make important decisions like this. They don't even really know him, but if the social worker can convince them to let him see his parents. What would the harm be in that? He could throw his plan to search every floor and every room out of the room. Dylan knows for sure that his doctor and social worker would approve.

"Okay," he says, feeling as though he's giving up something a lot greater than his defiance. He just hopes that none of this will blow up in his face. "You can meet with them."

At the corner of the hospital station a few feet away from it, he sees someone hiding behind one of the pillars with the same dark brown hair and blue eyes as his own. Someone he hasn't thought about all day. He feels his heart drop, his eyes quiver, and his stomach turns, because now he has someone. Someone he hasn't thought about at all but he's so damn happy to see anyway.