Our Triplets Were Raised Identically—Then One Started Sharing Unexplainable Memories
We kept the drawings in a folder, tucked into the kitchen drawer where we used to keep preschool crafts and finger paintings. But this felt different—less like art, more like memory rendered in crayon.
One night, I heard soft footsteps and found Eli sitting at the dining table, sketching under the glow of a small lamp. He didn’t look up when I approached.
“The tulips are purple,” he murmured. “They turn red when it rains.”
I sat beside him.
“Eli,” I said gently, “how do you know that?”
He finally looked at me, and for a split second, I didn’t see my son. I saw someone older behind those eyes. Sadder.
“I planted them with Mom,” he said.
A chill ran down my spine.
“Do you mean me?”
He hesitated, then shook his head.
“No. The other one. She hummed when she gardened. Always the same song.”
I swallowed. “Can you hum it?”
He did.
It was off-key but familiar. Too familiar. My own mother used to hum it when I was a kid, folding laundry on the couch. I hadn’t heard it in years.
That night, after the kids were asleep, Marcie and I sat in bed staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t know what to think,” I whispered.
“Maybe it is just imagination,” she said. “But… how does he know that song?”
Neither of us had an answer.
The next morning, things escalated.
Eli didn’t come down for breakfast.
We found him in the closet, curled up in a pile of blankets. His eyes were red from crying.
“I want to go home,” he said.
“But you are home,” I said.
“No,” he sobbed. “Not this one. The real one.”
His brothers hovered in the doorway, worried but quiet.
Marcie took the boys to school. I stayed back and flipped through Eli’s drawings again.
On the last page was something new: a face in the upstairs window. A woman. Smiling.
Below it, in crooked letters, he had written:
“Mom says it’s almost time to come back.”
I stared at the page for a long time, the edges trembling in my fingers.
That night, I dreamed of a house with a red door.
And a green Buick in the driveway.