“I’m Caleb,” I said as my brows furrowed with suspicion. “Michelle, I don’t understand why I get this strange feeling when I see your face, but maybe you’re right,” I added as I reached for my cup of coffee, only to spill it on my laptop accidentally.
“Damn… not again!” I leaped back.
“Don’t worry, Sir… I’ll clean it up for you,” Michelle dropped the mop and hurried to my table to clean the mess. She rolled up her sleeves and started wiping the laptop with a cloth. That’s when my eyes fell on a peculiar scar on her left arm.
“There you go. Your laptop is clean!” Michelle said as she turned to me.
“This scar… Ho—how did you get it?” I asked.
“Oh, this scar…? Well, you may find it strange. But I don’t remember anything that happened to me over 20 years ago. I have amnesia… I don’t even remember my name. When I saw the name ‘Michelle’ on a billboard, I adopted it as my own… and I have no memory of how I got this scar.”
My heart started to race. “And what about your relatives and friends?” I asked Michelle while simultaneously looking at her left arm bearing the oval-shaped burn mark.
“I don’t have anybody!” Michelle said, disappointed. “Nobody came for me all these years… Not even when I was in the hospital. I lived a gypsy life and finally found a job here in this town.”
A strange sensation crawled up my gut. I knew my mind was dealing with a bizarre theory. But Michelle’s scar and striking resemblance to my dead mother left me reeling. “Michelle, you won’t believe this. But you look a lot like my late mother, who I had only seen in an old photograph,” I revealed.
“What? I resemble your late mother? Oh dear… really?” Michelle stopped in her tracks.
“Yes. You look a lot like my mother. She died 28 years ago, according to my dad,” I replied. “She had the exact same scar like this. I know this is gonna sound crazy. But can we go to the hospital and take a DNA test together? I don’t know why I’m even saying this but something is bothering me. Something doesn’t seem right and I want to find out if there are any odds….”
Michelle pondered for a few seconds. Like me, she was curious to find out if we were related, so she agreed to take the test with me.
As we drove in my car to the City Hospital, nothing but a deadly, grim silence prevailed between us. On the one hand, I was unsettled about getting a positive result. I knew I would have to sort out a lot of things and connect so many dots if Michelle turned out to be my biological mother.
“But what if I’m just assuming things?” I thought. “What if it’s just a coincidence? What if my mother is really dead and Michelle is just her lookalike?”
As I drove across the bustling road and pulled over in the middle of thick traffic, I stared at Michelle in the rearview mirror, and her eyes looked eerily familiar.
Something about those eyes of hers forced me to plunge into my memories. I sat back behind the wheel, recalling the fateful day I made a heartbreaking discovery about my mother while fixing the roof with my dad, William.
12 years ago, when I was 17 years old…
“And… like this! See! You just twist the claw hammer and pull out the rotten plank!” My dad was teaching me how to remove old, rotting wooden planks. That Saturday afternoon, we were doing minor home repairs together.
“That was a good plank and it can be used as firewood!” he said as he gathered all the worn-out planks on the lawn. I was bored of these never-ending fixes my dad taught me every weekend.
“Dad, why can’t we just hire some carpenters?” I smirked. “…and pay them to do all this stuff? It’s so tiring and boring.”
William chuckled as he plucked another plank out. “Champ, if we pay others money for the simple things we can do on our own, then we’ll go to rags like your Uncle Dexter. Moreover, we’ll become very lazy again, like your Uncle Dexter! Now get back to work and start pulling out the planks from the floor in the attic. We must replace them as well.”
“Yeah… whatever!” I squared my shoulders. I climbed up the attic, and just as I removed one of the planks on the floor, I noticed a weathered piece of paper under it.
Curiosity got the better of me as I picked it up. It was an old, crumpled photograph of an unknown woman with a baby cradled in her arms.
“Weird. Who is this woman in this picture? I haven’t seen her before…” I wondered as I flipped the photograph and saw a signature on the back with the words: “Baby Caleb with Mommy. Happy Birthday, Sweetheart :)”
“Caleb with Mommy??” I grew unsettled.
I was stunned by those words. It made no sense why my name was mentioned on the back of a stranger’s picture. First, the woman in the photo did not look like my mother, Olivia. Then, she had a weird oval-shaped scar on her left arm. I had never seen that on my mother Olivia’s arm.
Haunted by the unknown, I took the photo and climbed down the attic, making my way to my dad to find out.
“Dad, what is this? Who is she?” I approached William, who was busy making pencil marks on the new wooden planks.
“What…?” William turned around with a start.
“I found this while removing the plank in the attic… Who is she?”
Anxiety surged into William’s eyes, and his face grew ashen as though he had seen a ghost. “Wh—Where did you get that from?” he asked, uneasiness etched over his face.
“Dad… I asked you what this is. Who is this woman… And what does it mean by ‘Caleb with Mommy’ written on the back of this photo? Is that baby in her arms… me?” I added.
William was beyond shocked as he grabbed the picture from my grip. He stared at it again… and again. Uneasiness cloaked his face, and he knew he could no longer hide the truth from his son.
“Come with me,” he dropped the hammer and marched to the kitchen.
I hastily followed my dad. William grabbed a can of soda from the fridge and sat down at the dining table, anxiously tapping his fingers against the can as he looked up at me.
“Caleb, trust me when I say this,” William chugged a drink and said, his tone heavy with agony. “All my life… I only wished you nothing but good. I… I wanted you to be happy… wanted you to grow up into a successful man… achieve great things. I… and my wife, Olivia, we always wanted the best for you.”
I was desperate to suppress the flood of tears. But my eyes betrayed me. “Your wife, Olivia? That means Olivia is not my mother?” I sadly asked.
William solemnly bowed his head. His silence answered my question. But William was obliged to confess the truth that struck me like a thunderbolt. “Yes, dear… Olivia is not your real mother. Your birth mother died when you were a baby… I… I’m sorry, son. I didn’t mean to—”
I was paralyzed with shock by the revelation, and the truth seemed to have upturned everything I thought I knew about my mother. “How did she die?” I broke William’s silence, desperate to know more about my mother’s fate.
“A car accident…” William replied, his voice choked with grief. “It was nobody’s fault. Fate betrayed us… and your mother was destined to leave us that day. It was an unfortunate, dark day in my life… one that I can never forget. You were just a baby. You needed a mother. I moved on with Olivia, not because I wanted a wife. I wanted to bring you a mother.”
I was shaken. But after hearing my dad out, I took the news like a grown boy.
“Dad… I understand that you wanted the best for me. That you didn’t want me to go through that pain of losing my mother,” I said, placing my hand on William’s shoulder. “But you should’ve told me earlier… And I would’ve understood everything.”
William clutched my hand tightly, unable to hold back his tears.
“It’s okay, Dad. Can you take me to her grave? I would like to go there,” I said.
“Why, of course, boy!” William agreed with a smile. “We will go there tomorrow, alright?”
“Sure!” I said and walked away as William gulped his beer and sat back.
My dad and I arrived at the cemetery the following afternoon. The silence of the graves was haunting as I marched behind him
