Previous: Part 1: The Beginning of a New Adventure
Next: Part 3: The Shattered Mirror
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The next morning I dusted off my razor and trimmed down my beard to make myself more presentable. Good parents will love their child regardless of how they look, but it’s always nice not to have them worry about you. I took a bus out to their little suburban home on the east end of the city. It’s not where I grew up, but my parents had a way of making any place feel like home.
It was a small bungalow, one that looks like it could be a converted trailer from the road. Instead of a lawn, my father had put together a wildlife garden of sorts, but had to tone it down because the neighbours thought wild plants left to live was unkempt.
A stone path led from the driveway up to the front door, a nice little addition my father did after getting rid of the standard looking concrete slabs that were all the rage in the 90’s or something along those lines. On the side of the house, not far from the side door was the garbage containers along with their compost bin that fed most of their plants in the backyard. My parents seemed so normal to me growing up, but it was only once I hit school did I realize how radical they were. Since I was young, they were open about the fact that I was adopted, that they weren’t my biological parents, but that never seemed to matter to me. Beyond that, for a while they were the only people who thought having vegetable gardens shouldn’t be illegal, and until other people thought the same, had to fight just to keep their single tomato plant in the backyard of my childhood home.
All these things flew through my mind as I walked up to their front door, mostly unannounced. It’s just that for so much of my life I didn’t care who my biological family was. Now suddenly, I was coming to them to try and figure it out, all because I saw someone at a café that I thought could have been another version of myself. I was chasing after imaginary geese ,but it was a welcome distraction from the cycle of self-hatred that I had fallen into. For once, my whole life didn’t seem to revolve around Solenne and the pain associated. There was a mystery to be had, and an investigation only I could undertake. There was more to life.
My dad answered the door with his burly hairy arms, thick red mustache, and dirt on his knees. “Well, look who it is!” he exclaimed happily before patting me on the shoulder and welcoming me in. “Well don’t just stand there. Come on in, son!”
My mom came around the corner with her round black reading glasses on. She had a round face with shoulder-length brown hair that somehow hadn't turned grey yet. “It’s so nice to see you!” she cried out as she wrapped her arms around me in a tight embrace. “What brings you to us today?”
“Can’t I just visit you whenever?” I questioned jokingly. She side-eyed me and let out a playful sigh.
“Sometimes I regret letting you pick up on sarcasm. You’ve been a little smart-ass since.”
“A loving little smart-ass, at least,” I added as I took off my shoes and followed the two of them into the adjacent living room. “So why are you covered in dirt, Dad? Doing work out back?”
He glanced down at himself and seemed to have a moment of concern. “I didn’t realize I had so much of it on myself,” he admitted. “I had been working on the crawlspace, and happened to come out to grab a snack when you knocked.”
My mom plopped down on the couch. My father sat down next to her and I took the armchair that they kept because it was my favorite seat. My dad had even embroidered my name into the back, though it was usually covered by a blanket thrown across the top.
“So to what do we owe this visit?” My mom asked again, knowing better than to take my sarcasm as an answer.
“I was actually wondering a bit about my biological family,” I confessed to them with an odd amount of guilt and shame in me. I had spent so long not thinking about it that now that I was asking about it, it felt wrong. Like I was betraying my parents or something.
“I told you he’d ask eventually,” Dad said as if he just won a bet.
“I hate it when you’re right,” Mom muttered in response, poking him in the ribs before returning her attention to me. “What do you want to know?”
“Did I have a sister?” I asked, but I could tell by their immediate reaction that the answer was no.
“Goodness no, otherwise we’d have two children. Why? What gave you that idea?” My mom questioned in turn.
“I saw this girl at the café, and she had eyes exactly like mine. Hair kind of like mine too. Mahli suggested she might be a lost sibling or something.”
“Well, to be honest, we don’t know a lot about your biological family,” my dad informed me. “All we were told was that your mother had passed away in childbirth and that your father couldn’t bear to keep you after the event.”
“Maybe she’s a cousin or something on that side!” My mom suggested with a hopeful tone. “Here, I’ll give you the documents from the adoption agency so you can have all the information we do about your biological family.”
She got up and walked out of the room, leaving me alone with my dad. After a moment of silence, he cleared his voice and asked, “so how have you been? Work good?”
“Good enough, nothing really worth mentioning,” I half-answered. Once adulthood had settled in, I found myself with so little to say. I got into a routine and months passed without much change besides the seasons. I no longer had projects to work on, or new classes and topics to think about. It was the same tasks day by day. There wasn’t necessarily anything bad about it, but it felt alien to me. Alien and wrong.
“How about you?” I returned.
“We’ve been good. Looking forward to spring. We’re expecting a couple of lilies to pop up this year, bloom and all. Excited for that,” he told me. There was legitimate excitement in his voice, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was trying to fill the silence. Luckily for him, it wasn’t long until Mom came down the hallway with a folder in hand.
“Found it!” she called out to us. She plopped it down on my lap before taking her seat next to my dad.
“Found it? Did you lose it?” I questioned playfully as my eyes desperately searched the surface of the folder for answers, too unsure to open it just yet.
“Are you going to look at it?” she inquired after a couple moments of me just staring at it.
“It’s a little surreal, that’s all,” I confessed, “to have the papers that made you my parents sitting on my lap…” I took a deep breath and opened up the folder.
The papers were clearly old but well-kept. Most of them were legal stuff that I didn’t bother reading through, assuming it had something to do with their legal responsibilities as guardians and so on. Finally, I found a sheet that described my condition when being adopted.
“Born at 6 pounds at 4:23 am on April 1st, 1993, as Arthur Holtz, with father Richard Holtz and mother Holly Holtz,” the detailed sheet described. “Mother died during childbirth at home, grief-stricken father unable to care for child given the conditions.”
I searched through the sheets for a number to contact my biological father with, but none was to be found. All I had to find him with was his name, which didn’t seem promising. After a few moments of shuffling through the papers, I decided to head home to try and get more answers. I kissed and hugged my parents goodbye, and thought about all the possible ways that stranger could be connected to me. Maybe there was a second baby that they didn’t know about. Maybe she’s my cousin. Or maybe my imagination created the likeness between us.
On the bus home, I updated Mahli with my progress, adding, “it’s weird to see my name as Arthur Holtz and not Arthur Compton.”
“We associate so much meaning to the sounds we call ourselves,” he answered in his usual poetic way of texting, “but knowing of another name does not change who you are.” I could tell he was writing a poem about identity at the time.
“You’ll have a book of poetry ready to go by the time this is done,” I joked.
“I don’t know about that. How long do you intend on pursuing this?”
I knew the question wasn’t meant to be terribly serious, but it struck me. It was a moment of clarity, a moment where I found myself looking in the mirror and asking how long I’m going to be chasing a distraction just to get away from it all. It was a question I didn’t have an answer for, and one I didn’t want to answer.
“We’ll see how far it goes,” I replied instead. “Maybe this will be a dead end and I’ll find out it was probably just a coincidence.”
“Or maybe you’ll expose some government plot that your bio-father was trying to cover up by separating you from him, or protect you from,” he suggested.
“Are you going to start writing novels now?” I joked.
“No, thanks, novelists are the type to talk a lot about nothing at all.”
As I got home and turned on my computer for full-blown research mode, I couldn’t help but to think of his suggestion that my bio-father had separated us for some higher reason. At the end of the day, I was abandoned by him. The idea that it was to prevent some evil plot really made it seem better, even though I had no doubts that I had the best parents I could have had. It was exciting, had more meaning than the explanation the agency provided.
When I searched his name online though, I found more than I had imagined, though I couldn’t be sure if it really was the right guy or not. There were countless new articles about a scientist named Richard Holtz who had gone missing after the death of his wife and partner, a death that many believed wasn’t an accident after all.
But it was too hard to believe that anything else was true, especially when I clicked on one of the many articles and started reading through it. "Physicists Richard Holtz and Holly Holtz gave birth to a child during an experiment on quantum mechanics, authorities reported. The baby was unharmed, but the mother, Holly, passed away in childbirth. Shortly after giving up the child for adoption, Richard Holtz vanished, leading authorities to believe that there was foul play in the experiment that lead to his wife’s death. While a warrant for his arrest is out, he has yet to be spotted. If you have any information about the whereabouts of this man, please contact the police and provide your information."
I had all the information right there in front of me about my birth. My father was a wanted man for killing his wife, after giving me up he ran off, leaving the last remaining member of his family to fend for themselves. It gave me so many answers about things I didn’t really want to know about. I wanted to know if there was another child, a way to contact him that would give me the answer I was looking for, but instead I got a police report with the assertion that he was a murderer on the run.
All of this information and I hadn’t a single clue as to the identity of the lookalike I spotted in the café. It’d be hard to say that it was anything short of coincidence at this point. I was ready to disregard the whole thing until I scrolled down and saw a picture of my mother at the bottom of the article. Surely enough, I found myself looking into a familiar face, one that I could have sworn I saw in a café only a couple days before.
It seemed impossible that it was her though. She died twenty-five years ago, and even if she didn’t, it’s been twenty-five years. There’s no way she’d look like a twenty-five year old after all this time. She’d be at least fifty, if not sixty, since it’s likely the picture was old at the time.
I sat there at my computer for a long time staring at the old picture of my biological mother. My mind couldn’t wrap around the idea that I had seen her just the day before, that this picture was real, that any of this was real. I thought I was going to find out I had a long lost sister, but instead I found out that the woman I thought I saw could be my biological mother who somehow remained un-aged after all these years. Nothing made sense anymore, so I sent it to Mahli to get his opinion, adding, “that’s the woman I saw at the café.”
His response was what you would expect, “are you sure? It says here she died twenty-five years ago.”
“I’m positive. Don’t you see the resemblance?”
“I do, and it’s uncanny. But…” he didn’t finish that text message, leaving just that little bit to know that he had doubts and worries about the whole thing, doubts and worries that he didn’t feel comfortable putting out in the air.
“I’m going back to the café. Maybe she’ll show up again,” I told him.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Isn’t it kind of like chasing a ghost?”
“Is that any better than sitting around here wasting away pining over Solenne after she was clear she wanted nothing to do with me?”
“You’ve got a point there… When are you planning on going? I’ll meet you there.”
“Tomorrow, same time as yesterday?”
“It’s a date.”
I sent him a joking winking face emoji in response. We stopped talking about it then, changing the subject to other things as we usually do, but my mind was somewhere else. Though I can’t say that it wasn’t in a better place than usual. For the first time in forever, I felt like there was something to my life, something interesting that made it worth living, a mystery that only I could solve.
I got to the café long before Mahli. I didn’t want to miss her and I had trouble sleeping out of excitement so I got there a couple hours in advance. It was business as usual at the café, people coming in and out with coffee, some staying to study, write, draw, or read. Someone I didn’t recognize was working so I didn’t have the chance to see Farah again and ask her if she had seen the woman who looked like me again.
When Mahli arrived a full half-hour before we were supposed to meet, he jumped in shock when he saw me already sitting down. He rushed to the table. “Did I get the times wrong? I’m so sorry about that! I could have sworn we met at 1 the other day.”
“Calm down, it’s okay,” I told him in a reassuring tone. “I came a couple hours early because I woke up early and didn’t know what else to do with myself.”
“Oh thank god. I don’t know if I could endure that kind of mistake.”
“You could turn those feelings into a poem. Boom, it’s a profitable thing to feel bad about being late. Imagine that.”
“You have an odd idea of how profitable poetry is,” he chuckled before putting down his big heavy school bag on the chair and motioning at the counter. “I’m going to get something. Want a refill?”
“Sure, thanks.” I handed him my mug and watched him go.
As he was being served by the new girl, the mysterious woman walked in and got in line behind him. I wanted to jump up and talk to her, but I was overcome by nervousness. As much as I was certain that she and I were somehow connected, that there was no way she bore such a resemblance to both me and my bio-mother by coincidence alone, I couldn’t just thrust that on her so aggressively. Instead, I texted Mahli, “she’s right behind you,” only for his phone to vibrate in his backpack on the chair. I sighed and leaned back in my chair, keeping my eyes locked on her, trying to piece together how this could be real.
“What’s with you?” Mahli asked a couple minutes later as he handed me my mug of black coffee. He looked over his shoulder and then turned back to me. “Is that her?”
I nodded. “Recognize her from the picture?”
He shook his head in disbelief. “It’s uncanny. It’s like it’s a picture of her…” He looked back at me. “Alright, I buy it. This is something else entirely.” He paused, still standing with his hot mug in hand. His hand started shaking a little from holding it up for so long.
“Put your drink down and sit,” I reminded him. He glanced back at me and nodded. He carelessly put down his mug, spilling his latte a little on the table, and nearly sat down on his bag, but it was big enough to fight him off.
Without saying a word, he moved it to the floor, sat down, and turned around to stare more at the mysterious stranger. Her gaze seemed like it was about to come in our direction, so the two of us shifted rapidly so as not to get caught staring at a stranger.
“What are we going to do?” he asked me in a hushed tone, leaning across the table.
“I don’t know,” I answered, shaking my head.
“What if you called her over?” he suggested.
“Why don’t you?” I replied.
“You know I couldn’t if I wanted to,” he reminded me, “but maybe she’ll respond to your bio-mom’s name. If she doesn’t, then you can just say she looked like someone you knew and it’s not weird. Or as weird.”
“You’ve thought about these things a lot, haven’t you?” I questioned as my gaze drifted away from him. She was paying. “Alright, fine. I’ll do it.”
I took a deep breath before getting up and calling out, “oh, Holly? Is that you?”
She turned her head in surprise and our eyes locked. “Do I know you?” she asked, with some fear in her tone.
It was at this moment that I realized we hadn’t spoken about what to do if her name was Holly. Panicked and unprepared, I stumbled over my words as I tried to answer her question. “Umm, yes, I mean, no, but…”
“How did you know my name then?” she questioned, eyebrow raised and suspicion in her tone. I stood there petrified, wishing I hadn’t listened to Mahli.
“Sorry, but is this you?” he squealed as he held up his laptop on the picture from the article.
She glanced down at it and her expression shifted radically. “It sure does look like me, doesn’t it?” she commented in surprise and confusion. “I don’t remember that picture though.”
“It’s an old picture of my mother,” I confessed to her, my panicking mind no longer willing to withhold information, just wanting this situation to end.
“And her name is Holly?” she continued to question.
I nodded. “After I saw you in here the other day, and saw your eyes, I decided to look into my biological family, and this is what I found. I don’t know how you look so much like her, or how you have the same name, but…”
“But it’s too weird to be accidental…” she finished my thought. We all stood there in silence. Well, Mahli was sitting and put his laptop back, but quietly. After thinking for a bit, she said, “okay, I’m here with a friend right now. I’m going to bring my drink over there then tell her what just happened, and then come back so we can talk about this more.”
“Okay, sounds good,” I answered, suddenly filled with gratitude that this horrible exchange went about as well as it could have.
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Part 3: The Shattered Mirror
If need be, I can start posting PDF versions of these sections with normal black text with a white background for readability purposes since they are long. Let me know!
-Zero
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