Replacements

The last time our kids were with their real parents was at the mall.

I can remember it, hazily, in the same way I remember everything else before then- our daughter had bought a new toy, and our son had spent the whole trip looking for change on the floor, and picking it up whenever their parents weren’t looking.

They were so happy back then, back when they had their parents.

I wish we had never replaced them.

I remember it quite clearly; one moment, they were being driven home from the mall, and the next, I had replaced their father.

You don’t believe it, don’t you? Yes, I look exactly the same, have all his memories, have all his behaviors.

No.

I’m his replacement. I don’t know how I know this– I mean, I certainly wasn’t involved, I have no clue why it happened. I don’t think I even existed before it–the replacement– the whatever-it-was happened. I’m as much of a victim as the father was.

It’s strange. I love my kids just as much as I would love my own– have loved them since forever– loved them as soon as I saw them, my behaviors somehow implanted in me kicking in and diffusing love through me. After confusion, the momentary startle of becoming, of becoming someone who already was, I felt love for them, that paternal feeling. That was my first real emotion. Yeah, that’s right, I was born and then felt proud of being somebody’s dad.

But I think you need to know that, need to know it to put everything else in context.

We decided not to tell the kids, my wife and I. We had both been replaced, or were both replacements, or however you would describe it. It’s funny, filling into someone so easily, so quickly becoming someone who was never you.

I got along well with her. We hated each other, of course– hated each other, and ourselves, for what we were. We hated ourselves for stealing our children’s parents (again, not our fault, but it still bit deeply into our replica hearts), and hated each other for replacing our spouses, or our memories of them. We had been implanted with the same feelings that the people we replaced had, but we knew, could never forget, that we had replaced the ones we loved. Whenever I looked at her, I saw the memories of the wife that I never had, but I knew that something was wrong; not on the outside, but what I knew was on the inside. When she looked at me, she saw a similar replacement, and was filled with a similar seething rage, a kind of hypocritical horror.

But we got along well, or at least tried to, pretended that we weren’t strangers to each other, for the kids, and for ourselves, too. We were our only confidants, barely partners, but partners nonetheless, partners in a crime we hadn’t committed.

When we got home from the mall, or rather the kids got home (since we had never been to the house before, no matter how intimately familiar it felt), our dogs could tell that something was wrong immediately.

I leaned down to pet them, and they snarled.

I backed away in panic. I had expected them to not notice that something was wrong, to be just as blissfully oblivious as our kids.

My daughter was similarly afraid.

“What’s wrong, dad?”, she said, concerned and spooked by the pet’s reaction.

I tried to smile, tried my hardest to not scare her, though I was sure she would see that something was terribly wrong, see just how terrified I was.

“I must smell different after the trip to the mall, sweetie. Just give them a while.”

And so it went, a fragile familiar dance, trying to hide my secret, trying to hide that I was a fake, always stepping away and hiding my face and then stepping back to show them that everything was alright. I should have tried harder, should have tried something different, should have figured out a better way to do it, but I never did. Goodness knows I tried. Goodness only knows how much my avoidance must have hurt them, left them unsure, left them worried. I didn’t see anything, though I watched like a hawk or a mother hen. Nothing, nothing that I could tell. Nothing bad from the constant tiptoe of lies, this imitation of their father deceiving them.

After my terrible excuse, she nodded, seemingly believing me, and started unwrapping the new toy that we– no, her real parents– had bought her. She seemed to love it.

I was able to hold onto that, able to use that to keep myself sane that first day. That day was the hardest. We didn’t have the experience we have now, didn’t have so much control over ourselves. We felt guiltier, too; guilty about being an unwitting replacement, guilty about lying to our kids. Now I’m used to it; I still feel guilty, of course, but I became able to keep it down, keep it from ruining our kids' lives.

And I held onto a love that wasn’t truly my own. I knew it wasn’t real, I guess, wasn’t of myself, at least at first. It was as fake as I was, but it still helped me, helped me hold on, a fake feeling in a fake heart helping a fake person make it in the real world. I lived for my kids.

I don’t know how my wife– if it’s right to call her that– dealt with it, dealt with being fake. I guess I should have helped her.

I should have spent more time with her. I still hate her, even now, but it’s not without some loss, some remembrance of cultivated affection, as weak and ragged as a heat-baked sapling, that I think about her. And maybe if I had talked with her more, well, maybe she’d still be around.

The kids would have liked that.

She was okay at first, ticked along as well as I did, maybe even better. We both doted on our kids; it gave us strength. Maybe it took some from them; maybe it was a bad idea, maybe they ended up spoiled, but I don’t think so. Maybe it’s too early to tell.

But we were able to give them love, give them the parents that they didn’t know they had lost. It was all that kept us from going crazy. We nearly forgot that we were replacements from time to time, so I guess that maybe we almost did.

Well, until my wife went wrong, that is.

I would wake up in the middle of the night to find that she was gone. She had walked over to our son’s room, and was standing silently over his bed.

She turned to face me. There was something wrong with her eyes.

For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was, and I don’t think I was able to figure out what it was then, either. Maybe it was just my nerves, or the way they looked in the darkness, with those faint pinpricks of reflected light from the glow-in-the-dark stars that we had so lovingly plastered onto the ceiling.

One night she broke all the mirrors in the house, and I only woke up when I smelled the smoke of her trying to burn a family photo.

In the morning, I told the kids that there had been a small earthquake last night, and that it had caused the mirrors to shatter. I wasn’t able to come up with a better excuse. I had thought about going to the store to buy some replacements, but I didn’t really want to leave her with the kids.

I woke up to her shrieking the next night. She was screaming about how she was a replacement, how she was sorry, how she was a liar. I tried to calm her, tried to cajole her into stopping, tried to threaten her as my fear mounted, but she only screamed louder.

I was afraid.

Maybe it was wrong.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do at the time, and I didn’t think it would turn out that badly.

I locked her up in the garden shed after gagging her.

Horrible I know, but– I mean, did you know my state of mind? My terror? Have you ever been woken up in the middle of the night by somebody screaming your worst secret out for the world to hear?

I thought I’d do something about it in the morning, talk to her some more about it– not like I hadn’t already tried–but when I went to the shed in the morning she was gone.

There was a gaping hole in the back where somebody had broken it.

The splintered wood had fallen on the outside of the shed.

I never saw her again, until they found the body some weeks later.

I called the police, said that she had gone running, said that she had run away. They investigated, of course, interrogated me to no end. I kept having to push down my fear of them discovering that I was a fake; no, there was no way that they could have found out, right? I tried my best to not look guilty.

Those were trying times, stressful for all of us; I remember nights when we all sat on the couch, the kids crying for their mother (who had really disappeared far earlier) and me crying for them, for their sadness.

And I felt terrified. I knew that what had happened to her could happen to me also, and didn’t want to see what it would be like if I wasn’t held in check by someone, wasn’t driven away before I could cause much harm.

I could feel my mask slipping. Not my body; no, my body, if it’s right to call it mine, stayed the same. But my personality was shifting, slipping back into something, though I don’t know what it could have been; there was nothing for it to slip back into. But I was afraid of regressing into something I had never been, of becoming someone who I once yet never was.

I didn’t know what I would be like.

I was afraid.

Mostly I feared for my kids, if it would slowly be revealed to them that their father had been replaced by some dark and slimy intellect, alien in thoughts, a crawling and hostile thing behind my eyes. But I feared it too. I feared dying and becoming something that I may have once been.

I fought it. You wouldn’t, couldn’t understand how hard I fought it. Have you ever had a child? No? Someone to protect?

Now imagine how far you would go, how much you would fight, if you knew that something, some horrible creature, was coming for them.

Now imagine if that creature was yourself.

With those worries in mind, and worrying about what my wife– or whatever she was now, or whatever we were– would do, if she would come back to attack them, I was relieved when I heard that they had found her body. It put my mind at ease– I knew that my kids were safe.

We gave her an unmarked tombstone. I wouldn’t tell the kids why, but I felt I had to. The memory of their real mother– not her twisted replacement– prevented it. It didn’t feel right.

It was just a few months later when I started having my own episodes. I had been watching and monitoring myself carefully, making sure that I didn’t break like she did.

I caught myself visiting their rooms at night on a security camera I had set up.

I left the following night, but not after getting everything in order.

I made sandwiches for their lunch, and put them in the fridge. I stayed up half the night making lasagna for their supper.

I cooked breakfast for them, one last time. Pancakes, soft and fluffy, just the way they liked it.

I cried as I set them out, with instructions on how to use the microwave for the lasagna later on. I woke them up at one in the morning, briefly, and kissed them before letting them settle back into bed.

I called the police to let them know I would be leaving, told them my address, and walked out the door.