Whose Son Am I?

Spiritual Fiction: He seeks the truth — but it’s far stranger than he ever imagined.

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“Children born of Spirit have one Spiritual Father.”

Lailah Gifty Akita

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“You cheated on Dad!” Brady whispered.

He stood with the old photos hanging from his half-open fingers like autumn leaves ready to fall. Ann could swear she felt a cold wind bristling through the small bedroom.

“You’ve been rummaging through my stuff,” she said tiredly. Brady didn’t take his gaze off the photos, and she realized she had spoken in such a low voice that he probably hadn’t heard her.

Now I’ll know. I’ll know if all the fantasy books I gave him to read and all the legends of mystery I’ve told him have taught him to believe in miracles.

“Brady,” she said louder. The photos dropped from his fingers and fell to the ground, where the brown carpet embraced them like wet, moldy earth. “Brady, listen…”

“What? There’s nothing to talk about! I saw him!”

Ann sighed deeply.

“We did a DNA test. You’re your father’s son. That’s proven.”

“You did a DNA test? When?”

“When you were ten years old. Your father is a very good man, but he’s not blind. He could see that you’re black-haired, curly, broad-shouldered, and big-framed, while we are both blond and skinny. Not to mention your facial features that resemble neither of us.”

“So he suspected it?”

“I guess so. He never told me anything because he loves me too much, but sometimes he’d say that you had probably taken after a grandfather we never knew. It was clear what he was thinking. So, I suggested we do a DNA test, and after some false protests, he agreed. Then it was proven beyond doubt — you are his son.”

Brady opened his mouth. He hesitated, then bent down and grabbed one of the fallen photos. He placed it in front of Ann’s face. A big-framed, dark-haired, curly man was smiling at her in the photo. He was wearing only his tattered jeans, folded up to the knees, and the sea waves were splashing white foam at his bare ankles.

Such zest for life. Such passion in his dark eyes. Such wildness in his features.
A spitting image of Brady.

“This lover of yours looks exactly like me!” Brady whispered. “If Dad’s really my dad, how come I’m a copy of somebody else?”

“This someone else’s name was Alex. He died a few months before I met your father.”

Brady’s mouth opened wider.

Do you believe in miracles, my son?

“He was my first love,” Ann continued slowly, pain piercing through her every word like a needle through the finest silk. “We met as teenagers and spent every free moment together — sharing meals, studying, laughing. We were one soul in two bodies. We planned to get married and have kids, and then, when he turned eighteen, that car ran him over.”

Ann clasped her trembling hands tightly.

“I would have died too if I hadn’t met your father. When Alex went, I went with him. My body stayed alive, but my soul followed him to the place where his soul now is. I was planning a suicide when Jasper… when your father came around. I never told him what I had been through, but he saw I needed help and was there for me. He just hugged me for hours, days, and weeks. He didn’t say a word; he was just present. He was the most patient and selfless person I’ve ever met.”

“But you didn’t love him the way you loved Alex.” Brady slumped on the bed, placing the photo on the blue mattress. In his twenty-two-year-old eyes, Ann suddenly saw the fatigue and cynical wisdom of an eighty-year-old man.

You have to believe me. You have to believe what I’m going to tell you now.

“I love your father,” Ann said, sitting slowly on the other side of the bed. The mattress squealed. “I’ve always loved him. But it’s a quiet, calm love — the mature love of two adults who need a partnership and are ready to work for it. It’s nothing like what I had with Alex. What we had wasn’t something we had to work for. It was simply there. It was given.”

Ann closed her eyes. She waited for Brady to say something, but as he remained silent, she continued,

“So yes, I didn’t love your father the way I loved Alex. I didn’t love him enough to produce life with him.”

Instead of opening his mouth, this time Brady pressed his lips tightly together. He tilted his head, and his eyes — Alex’s dark eyes — stared intensely into his mom’s blue ones.

“In the first years, before I got pregnant,” Ann whispered, “I kept making love to Alex. Every time I was intimate with your father, I didn’t see him, I saw Alex. I didn’t feel him, I felt Alex. I didn’t think it was him, I thought it was Alex. Alex’s soul would invade your father’s body to unite with mine. Again and again and again.”

Brady’s eyes burned into hers. The flames were slowly enveloping her entire brain.

“And when you were born,” Ann whispered into the fire, “I knew I hadn’t been imagining it. I knew it had been real.”

She reached out and caressed the photo on the bed.

“I knew he finished what he had started.”

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