Backup Parents
| 24 min read
His mother said "Rise and shine, mister man" on a Tuesday and again on Wednesday, same inflection, same two knocks on his door frame. Eli kept his face in the pillow until she left and then reached for the composition notebook under his mattress. He wrote Tuesday phrase repeated Wednesday beneath yesterday's entry, which read Monday phrase repeated Tuesday. He had eleven days' worth now.
Downstairs she had made scrambled eggs with the rubbery tops and the wet middles, same as every morning. His father sat at the table reading the sports section of a newspaper they didn't subscribe to. Eli had looked for the subscription once, checked the mailbox every day for a week, but the paper appeared on the kitchen table at 7:14 each morning already folded to the box scores. His father turned the pages at regular intervals whether or not he'd finished reading. Eli had timed it: forty-five seconds per page, regardless of content. Ads got forty-five seconds. The obituaries got forty-five seconds.
"Big day today," his father said without looking up.
It was always a big day. Eli had stopped asking what made it big.
"You want juice?" his mother asked.
"Sure."
She poured exactly to the seam where the glass shifted from smooth to textured. He'd marked the seam with a dot of red nail polish two weeks ago, testing whether she poured to a visual cue. The juice hit the dot every time.
"I was thinking," she said, leaning against the counter, "we should do something fun this weekend. Maybe the zoo."
She had suggested the zoo on nine of the last eleven mornings. Eli ate his eggs. They tasted like warm nothing.
He had promised himself he wouldn't test them at breakfast anymore, because breakfast made him nauseous now, watching them perform their lines. He would wait until after school when the patterns were harder to catalog and his own paranoia felt less justified. But his mother mentioned the zoo and his hand moved under the table, pulling out the note he'd prepared.
"I'm going to put my plate in the sink," he said, and he did, and while his back was to them he opened the cabinet above the sink where his mother kept the coffee filters and slid the folded square of paper between the third and fourth filter from the top. She used one filter per morning. Tomorrow morning she would find the note while Eli was still upstairs.
The note said: You told me we'd go to the zoo. You've said it nine times.
He closed the cabinet and walked to school.
The school was three blocks away, a brown brick building with a flagpole that flew the American flag and a second flag for the state that had a rip along the bottom edge nobody repaired. Eli walked past the crossing guard, Mrs. Loomis, who said "Morning, sunshine" to every kid and adjusted her vest between each greeting, a small tug on the left side, always the left side.
He watched her do it four times in a row and wondered if she was like his parents or just a person with a habit. He couldn't tell anymore. That was one of the problems.
His friend Marco met him by the double doors. Marco smelled like the cinnamon oatmeal his grandmother made, and he was already talking about a video game Eli didn't own.
"You look weird," Marco said.
"I didn't sleep."
"You never sleep." Marco held the door open with his foot. "My abuela says people who don't sleep are either in love or in trouble."
"What if it's neither?"
"Then you're boring and tired."
Eli almost told Marco everything. He had come close twice before, once at lunch and once walking home, but both times the words arranged themselves in his head and sounded like the plot of a movie Marco would dismiss. My parents are robots or my parents are stuck in a loop or my parents aren't real. None of those were exactly right. His parents seemed real. They had warm hands and coffee breath and his mother had a small scar on her thumb from cutting a bagel wrong. They occupied space correctly. They cast shadows. They left crumbs.
But they said the same things.
And when he told them something important, told them about the science fair or about how Marcus Webber had shoved him into the water fountain, they responded appropriately, concerned in the right places, proud in the right places, and then the next morning they had no memory of the conversation.
He had tested this fourteen times.
After school he came home and checked the coffee filters.
The note was gone.
He opened every cabinet in the kitchen, checked the recycling bin, the trash under the sink, even the junk drawer where his father kept twist-ties and expired coupons. The note was nowhere. His mother arrived home from wherever she went during the day (he'd tried following her twice but she drove and he was twelve) and set her purse on the hook by the door. Same hook, same angle, purse swinging once before settling.
"How was school?" she asked.
"Fine. Did you find something today? In the kitchen?"
She tilted her head. The gesture looked correct. "Find something?"
"Like a piece of paper. In the cabinet."
"I don't think so, sweetie." She opened the refrigerator. "You want a snack? We have those granola bars you like."
He did not like those granola bars. He had told her this on at least six separate occasions and she had agreed each time and bought them again the following week.
He took one and went upstairs.
In his room he sat on the bed and opened the composition notebook. Under the entry for today's date he wrote: Note removed. No evidence of reading. Mom has no memory. Test inconclusive.
Then he crossed out inconclusive and wrote successful. She had said the zoo nine times and now, if the pattern held, she would say it again tomorrow. If the note had disrupted anything, tomorrow would show it.
He planned a second note. This one he would leave in his father's newspaper, between the sports section and the classifieds, where his father's forty-five-second page-turn rhythm would carry him at approximately 7:22 a.m.
The second note said: You read this paper every morning. You don't subscribe to it. Where does it come from?
He folded it into a rectangle small enough to fit between the pages without bulging.
Setting it up required waking before 7:14, which meant waking before his parents were downstairs. He set his alarm for 6:45 and put his phone under his pillow so the vibration wouldn't carry.
At 6:50 the next morning the kitchen was dark and the newspaper was already on the table, folded to the box scores.
Eli stood in the doorway and looked at it. The table was otherwise bare: no plates, no coffee, no evidence that either parent had come down. The overhead light was off. The window above the sink showed a yard just starting to separate from the dark, the fence posts visible before the grass.
He crossed to the table and picked up the paper. It was dry, slightly warm, and the ink didn't smudge when he rubbed his thumb across a headline. He turned to the page between sports and classifieds and slid his note in. Then he squared the paper on the table, lining it up with the position he'd photographed on his phone two days ago: rotated twelve degrees clockwise from the table's edge, top-left corner five inches from his father's placemat.
He went back upstairs. Twelve minutes later his mother knocked.
"Rise and shine, mister man."
He waited for her to leave and came downstairs. His father sat reading. His mother made eggs. The juice would hit the red dot.
"Big day today," his father said.
Eli ate. He watched his father turn pages. Sports coverage, more sports, a car dealership ad, a column about local zoning, and then the fold where the note waited. His father turned the page at the forty-five-second mark and the note slid out and landed next to his coffee cup.
His father looked down at it.
He picked it up and unfolded it and read it. The reading took about three seconds, which seemed right for two sentences.
Then he refolded it, placed it under his coffee cup, and turned to the next page.
"Good eggs," he said to Eli's mother.
"I was thinking," she said, "we should do something fun this weekend. Maybe the zoo."
Ten.
Eli finished breakfast and went to school. When he came home the note was gone again. The newspaper was gone too, which was typical; it vanished every day sometime between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. and reappeared the following morning.
The next test was bigger. He left a note on the bathroom mirror, taped at face height, where his mother would see it when she went to brush her teeth. He wrote it in red marker on white cardstock. It said: Mom, it's Thursday. You will suggest the zoo this morning. You suggested it yesterday. And the day before. Please read this note out loud.
He set his alarm for 6:30 and crouched in the hallway outside the bathroom with his phone recording audio.
At 6:58 the bathroom light clicked on. He heard the tap run. Toothbrush sounds. The tap off. A pause that lasted longer than it should have, maybe eight seconds, and then the papery sound of the card being peeled off the mirror.
No reading aloud.
The bathroom light clicked off. His mother's footsteps went downstairs.
When Eli checked the bathroom, the card was gone. The tape was gone. No adhesive residue on the glass, though he'd used the kind that always left residue, the cheap clear stuff from the junk drawer.
He had breakfast. She suggested the zoo. Eleven.
After school he called Marco and asked a question that had been growing in him for days.
"Do your parents ever say the same thing every morning?"
Marco laughed. "My mom says 'Apúrate' like sixty times before I even get to the bathroom."
"But does she say the exact same sentence? Word for word?"
"Probably. That's just how moms talk, man."
"Does she ever forget stuff you told her?"
"All the time. I told her about the field trip permission slip like four times. My dad too. Why?"
Eli picked at a thread on his bedspread. Marco's answer was reasonable. Parents repeated themselves. Parents forgot things. Maybe Eli was counting something that didn't bear counting, turning ordinary absentmindedness into evidence.
But Marco's mother didn't pour juice to the same millimeter. Marco's father didn't read a newspaper that appeared from nowhere.
"No reason," Eli said. "See you tomorrow."
He escalated. Over the next week he left seven notes in seven locations: the glovebox of his mother's car, inside the medicine cabinet behind the ibuprofen, between the couch cushions where his father sat every evening, in the pocket of his father's work jacket, under the placemat, inside the sugar canister, and on the shelf in the garage where his father kept a toolkit he never opened.
Every note said something different.
You said "big day" fourteen mornings in a row.
The newspaper appears at 7:14. Nobody delivers it. I've watched.
I told you Marcus Webber pushed me. You were upset. The next day you didn't remember.
You promised the zoo. You keep promising. We never go.
My birthday is April 12th. You celebrated it on March 7th this year and neither of you noticed the date was wrong.
There are no photos of me before age seven in this house.
Where do you go during the day?
Every note vanished. He never found one in the trash, never found one crumpled or torn. They didn't accumulate. They were removed thoroughly and without comment.
His parents' behavior did not change.
"Rise and shine, mister man."
"Big day today."
"Maybe the zoo."
At night, after Eli went to his room, they watched television. He could hear the murmur through the floor, a program that sounded like a talk show, though when he'd crept downstairs once and peered around the corner the television was showing a test pattern, the old kind with the color bars and the tone, and his parents sat on the couch staring at it with their hands in their laps. When he'd said "Mom?" she had turned and smiled and said "Can't sleep, sweetie? You want some warm milk?" and the television behind her was suddenly showing a home renovation program, a woman explaining how to tile a backsplash. He had looked at the screen and at his mother and gone back upstairs.
He did not write this in the notebook. He drew a small picture instead, a rectangle with vertical colored bars, and closed the book.
On a Saturday he rode his bike to the public library and used one of the computers to search for his parents' names. Richard and Sandra Marsh. He found a Richard Marsh who sold insurance in Cedar Falls and a Sandra Marsh who had run a half-marathon in Tulsa in 2019. Neither was his parent. He searched for their address and found the house listing from when they'd bought it, allegedly, eight years ago. The real estate listing showed photographs of empty rooms. No mention of previous owners. He searched for his own name and found nothing.
He searched for "parents reset every day" and got results about parenting blogs and factory-resetting tablets. He searched "same routine every morning stuck loop" and got results about OCD. He searched "parents have no memory" and got results about Alzheimer's. None of it matched.
He biked home in the late afternoon, the shadows of mailboxes stretching across the sidewalk. When he came through the door his mother was in the kitchen peeling carrots. She peeled carrots every Saturday. She made the same stew. She would ask him if he wanted rolls with it and regardless of his answer she would not make rolls because there were never rolls in the house and she would seem briefly confused by this and then set the table for three.
"Where were you, hon?" she asked.
"Library."
"Oh, that's nice. Your father's in the garage."
Eli went to the garage. His father was standing in front of the toolkit on the shelf, the one he never opened, and when Eli walked in he turned around with a smoothness that looked practiced, like a store mannequin on a rotating platform.
"Hey, buddy. Big day, huh?"
"What are you doing?"
"Just checking on something. You need something?"
"No."
His father walked past him and went inside. Eli looked at the toolkit. It was a red metal box with a latch, the kind sold at hardware stores for $29.99. He opened it. Inside were tools: a hammer, two screwdrivers, pliers, a tape measure, an adjustable wrench. They were clean. They had never been used. There were no scratches on the hammer's head, no worn patches on the screwdriver handles.
He closed the box. Then he opened it again and took out the tape measure and put it in his pocket. He wanted to see if it would reappear.
The next morning it was back in the box.
On the nineteenth day he left a note that was different from the others. He left it on his own desk, in plain sight, where his mother would see it when she came in to tell him to rise and shine. It said:
I know you're not my real parents. I don't know what you are. I'm not scared. I just want to talk about it.
He lay in bed with the note three feet away on his desk and waited. At 7:02 his mother knocked twice and opened the door.
"Rise and shine, mister man."
She walked in. She would have passed the desk. The note was on the desk's near edge, white paper, black ink, impossible to miss from the doorway.
"Rise and shine," she said again, which she had never done before, the repetition itself a break in the pattern, and then she left.
Eli got up and looked at the desk.
The note was gone.
He had been watching her. She hadn't touched it. She'd been in the room for four seconds, five at most, and her hands had stayed at her sides.
He went downstairs. His father read the paper. His mother made eggs. The juice hit the dot.
"Big day today."
"Maybe the zoo."
He ate his eggs and went to school and sat through math and social studies and a filmstrip about coastal erosion, and when he came home he went directly to his room and opened his composition notebook to write down the morning's data, and there was a note inside the notebook.
It was on a torn piece of lined paper, the kind from his own notebook. The handwriting was his.
Not similar to his. His. The same uneven lowercase e he'd been trying to fix since fourth grade. The same way his y's dropped below the line farther than they should. The same blunt pressure from holding the pen too tight, the same faint smudge on the left margin where a left-handed person would drag their palm through fresh ink.
The note said:
Stop. They don't know yet but they're starting to. The notes make them recalibrate. Every time you test them they get a little better at passing. You're training them. I figured this out the last time and I'm writing this so you'll figure it out faster. There was a version of you before and there will be a version after. Stop testing. Eat the eggs. Say yes to the zoo. Don't look in the toolkit again. Whatever you do, don't let them know you've stopped resetting. Act like you still are. Same as them. Rise and shine.
He read it three times.
He turned it over. The back was blank. He held it up to the window light and saw no watermark, no hidden message, just paper and ink and his own handwriting telling him things he couldn't have written.
He thought about the phrase there was a version of you before. He thought about the missing photographs, nothing before age seven. He thought about the birthday on the wrong date and how neither parent had noticed, or rather, how their version of noticing had been to light candles on a cake on March 7th and sing and give him a book about planets that he already owned, that sat on his shelf, and when he'd pointed to the identical book already there his mother had said "Oh, you must really love space!" and his father had laughed and said "Like father like son," though his father had never once mentioned space or planets or demonstrated any interest in anything beyond the forty-five-second newspaper and the test pattern on the television.
He sat on his bed for a long time.
The afternoon light moved across the floor and onto the far wall, catching the edge of his bookshelf, where two copies of The Planets and Us sat side by side, identical jackets, identical spines. He hadn't removed the duplicate. It felt important to keep it.
He didn't leave any notes the next day. Or the next.
He ate the eggs and said "Sure" to the juice and didn't time the newspaper pages. When his mother suggested the zoo he said "That sounds fun, maybe," and she smiled the way she smiled, which was a real-looking smile with the right muscles and the scar on her thumb visible when she tucked her hair behind her ear.
"Rise and shine, mister man," she said each morning, and he said "I'm up, I'm up," and he went to school and came home and did homework and ate the stew on Saturdays and did not open the toolkit.
But he watched.
Not the way he'd watched before, with the notebook and the timestamps and the red nail polish on the glass. He watched the way you watch a movie you've already seen, where you stop following the plot and start noticing the seams: the cut between the actor's face and the stunt double, the coffee cup that changes position, the extra in the background who walks past the same window twice.
His mother opened the cabinet for a coffee filter and her wrist turned at the exact same angle each morning, the same degree of rotation, the fingers finding the filter edge by the same millimeter of contact. If he hadn't been looking for it he would never have seen it. It was too close to natural movement. The precision was what made it wrong.
His father laughed at something in the newspaper and the laugh lasted the same duration each time. Not the sound, which varied slightly, the way a recording varies when played on different speakers. The duration. Eli counted to himself, one-Mississippi, and the laugh always ended on the second syllable of "two."
He stopped counting. The note had told him to stop testing, and counting was testing, and testing made them better.
He wondered what "better" meant. Better at fooling him? Better at being parents? He couldn't tell if those were different things.
Three weeks later Marco came over to work on a social studies project about ancient Rome. They sat at the kitchen table with Eli's laptop and a bag of chips Marco had brought from his house because Eli's house never had chips, only the granola bars.
"Your mom's nice," Marco said after Eli's mother brought them lemonade and asked Marco about his grandmother's health.
"Yeah."
"She remembers my abuela's hip thing. That's cool."
Eli looked up. His mother had asked Marco about his grandmother's hip surgery. Marco's grandmother had hip surgery in October. Eli's mother had never met Marco's grandmother. Eli had mentioned the surgery once, maybe, in passing, weeks ago.
She'd remembered.
She hadn't remembered Marcus Webber or the field trip or the science fair or the birthday date, but she'd remembered Marco's grandmother's hip.
He thought about this for the rest of the afternoon while Marco talked about aqueducts.
That night after dinner he sat in his room with the composition notebook open to a blank page. He picked up his pen and then set it down. Picked it up again. The note in his own handwriting was tucked into the front cover. He re-read it.
Don't let them know you've stopped resetting. Act like you still are.
What did resetting look like from the outside? He tried to think about what he'd been doing before he started keeping the notebook, before the counting started. He'd been a kid who ate his eggs and went to school and came home and did homework. He'd said "Sure" to the juice and "Sounds fun" to the zoo and hadn't timed the newspaper or marked the glass or checked the toolkit. He'd been, as far as he could remember, happy. Or at least he hadn't been unhappy. He hadn't been paying the kind of attention that makes you unhappy.
Maybe that was what resetting was. Not paying attention.
He closed the notebook and pushed it under the mattress. He turned off his lamp and lay in the dark and listened to the murmur of the television downstairs, the steady tone that might have been a talk show or might have been color bars, and he made himself not think about which one it was.
In the morning she knocked twice.
"Rise and shine, mister man."
He got up.
He went downstairs and sat in his chair and his father was reading the paper and his mother was making eggs and the juice glass was out and the sun came through the kitchen window and lit up the scratched surface of the table, the placemats, the salt shaker with the dented cap that Eli had dropped when he was nine, or had been told he'd dropped when he was nine, and he picked up his fork and ate.
"Big day today," his father said.
"Yeah," Eli said. "Yeah, it is."
His mother leaned against the counter. "I was thinking we should do something fun this weekend."
Here it came.
"Maybe the zoo?"
He looked at her. She was holding her coffee cup in both hands and the scar on her thumb caught the light and her expression was what it always was, pleasant and slightly hopeful, and Eli saw that she was doing her best. Whatever she was, she was doing her best. The repetition wasn't laziness or malfunction. It was the only range she had, the full width of her capability directed at the single task of being his mother every morning, and if the zoo was the best idea she could produce then she would keep producing it until he said yes.
"Okay," he said. "Let's go to the zoo."
She put down her coffee cup. "Really?"
She had never said "really" before. It was not part of the script. The word came out higher than her usual register, almost girlish, and she looked at his father and his father looked up from the newspaper, actually looked up, the page-turning rhythm interrupted for once.
"The zoo," his father said. "That's a great idea."
"Saturday?" his mother asked.
"Saturday."
She turned back to the stove and Eli watched her shoulders, which were doing something he hadn't seen them do before. A small motion, barely there, that might have been a kind of settling, the way a person relaxes when they've been bracing for a long time and can finally stop.
He finished his eggs. They tasted, faintly, like butter.
That night he took out the composition notebook and tore out every page of observations, thirty-one days of timestamps and phrases and red-dot measurements. He stacked the pages and folded them and put them in his backpack. In the morning he threw them away in the trash can outside the school, the big green one by the loading dock where nobody went.
He kept the note, the one in his own handwriting. He didn't know what the next version of himself would need. Maybe nothing. Maybe the note was what made each version of him start testing, a kind of loop inside a loop, a warning that doubled as an instruction manual for the very paranoia it tried to prevent.
He kept it anyway.
He folded it small and put it inside The Planets and Us, the duplicate, the one nobody should have given him because he already had it. Page eighty-four, between Jupiter and Saturn, where the distance between planets was the longest and the book naturally fell open.
On Saturday his mother backed the car out of the driveway. His father sat in the passenger seat. Eli climbed into the back and buckled his seatbelt and they drove west toward the zoo, which was forty minutes away according to the sign at the intersection, and his mother turned on the radio and a song came on that Eli didn't recognize and his mother sang along to parts of it, not all the words, just the chorus, slightly off-key, and his father rolled down his window even though the air conditioning was on and rested his arm on the sill, and Eli watched the houses and the strip malls and the flat brown fields between the developments and did not think about whether they would remember this trip tomorrow.
They would or they wouldn't.
He pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window and watched the mile markers go by, each one a different number, each one farther from home.