In the Image of Grace

by Charlotte Ann Schlobohm

  “She might have been,” I surmised. “There’s more to the story.”

  “I think I heard enough for now,” he said. He walked into the dining room and took something off the table. It was a silver picture frame and he came over and handed it to me. “This is from when we were younger.”

  I looked at the picture and it was our mother and her brother standing in front of a Christmas tree wearing red flannel pajamas. She looked like she was about eight years old and I could have sworn it was a picture of me or my sisters.

  I looked up. “Can you tell us about her?”

  John looked over at me. “How did you girls find me? Why now?”

  “Well, we called every Fernando that we could find in the phone book and online and we eventually found you,” I said looking back down at the picture.

  “Why now?” He asked.

  “Until now, we didn’t have the resources to find any answers, but now we do.”

  He accepted my vague answer.

  “If we’re really clones,” I said. “Then you’d technically be our brother too.”

  He turned towards us and crossed his arms. “I can’t deal with this. I’m sorry girls.”

  “Your parents are technically our parents,” I informed him.

  “Girls, my wife and daughter will be home soon.”

  “Do you have a piece of paper and a pen perhaps?” I asked.

  He went in the dining room where there was a china cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and took out some stick it paper and a pen. He came over and handed them to me. On the paper I wrote down The Clonation Foundation and the Xtials. I handed it to him. “You might want to look these up. There will be a press release soon about us.” I stood up and signaled my sisters to do the same.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have answers to what happened to Grace.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I affirmed. “Would it be possible if we contact your parents?”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” John said scratching his ear.

  “Don’t you think they would want to know about us?”

  He sighed and wrote something on the stick it notes. “Wait a day or two to contact them. I want to inform them to everything before you talk to them.” He handed me the paper. It had the names Helen and Robert Fernando on it, along with a phone number and an address for Indiana.

  “Thank you,” I said holding up the little note. We said goodbye and my sisters and I were on our way back to the bus stop.

  …………………………………………………………..

  The three of us stood at the bus stop. It started to drizzle out. Cars passed and made a whishing sound in the wet street. “Was that successful at all?” I asked because I still wasn’t sure how I felt about how everything turned out.

  “She has family and we know where they are and if we talk to her parents’ maybe they would know a little more about what happened,” Isabelle suggested reassuring me.

  “She didn’t even want us,” Clarissa pouted. “She didn’t want to make a clone.”

  “She never knew anything about us,” Isabelle said in a voice riddled with gloom.

  “I wonder if at first she thought it was a good idea and then backed out?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t what our father did to her be considered rape?” Isabelle asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “We have to get a hold of her parents before any of this clone business hits the news.”

  We knew we couldn’t call from the house phone because our father would check the phone records, so on the way home we stopped off at a drug store and I bought one of those pre-paid phones.

  ……………………………………………….

  The three of us got back home still unsure how we were getting back in the house. We helped each other scale the wrought iron fence that went around the property and we stood in the front yard looking for a way to get up. We decided to go look in the garage. The side door was open. We were quite surprised because we actually found quite a long ladder inside. We dragged the ladder to the front and leaned it against the house, all the while making a loud clattering noise. I climbed up first while holding a laundry basket. I thought I was going to fall for a second there, but I was able to regain my balance and kept climbing. I got to the top and slid the basket onto the roof. I climbed onto the roof on my and knees over to the window. I opened the window and chucked the basket inside. I then climbed back down because we had a lot of stuff to carry back up with us. Isabelle and Clarissa climbed up. I followed with the last basket with a garbage bag of stuffed animals and assorted fluff on top. I held onto the ladder with one hand and held the basket under my arm with the other. We all got safely to the top and threw the stuff into the room.

  “We can’t leave that ladder out there,” Clarissa said stating the obvious.

  We had Clarissa climb inside the house and Isabelle and I pulled up the ladder guiding it through the window. Our only problem was where to hide a large ladder in our room.

  We decided to hope for the best and left the ladder in Elizabeth’s room. On her door we taped up a sign that said, “Please do not enter. We shall be respectful of the dead.” We were hoping that our sign would ward off our father and even Ms. Dunderfeltz because it seemed that she had a little bit of a big mouth. She most definitely would have said something if she found a ladder in Elizabeth’s room.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next day we called our mother’s parents and they hung up on us. We tried again later in the day and they hung up again. We wanted to go see them, but we had no definite way to get to Indiana. We also decided that we needed to pay Mr. Carl another visit. We figured maybe we’d get something more out of him now that we knew some of his secrets. I went to my room and called Jeremy and told him all our woes. He told me that he actually had his mom’s car for the day and he’d be over in about a half hour.

  …………………………………………………..

  The four of us were in Jeremy’s mother hatchback. Jeremy drove, I was in front and Clarissa and Isabelle were in back. Jeremy said he’d take us to see Mr. Carl first and then to Indiana. We escaped the same way we did the other day, but at least that day we had a ladder. We left the ladder on the side of the house. We were starting to really not care if we got busted. We weren’t just going to sit around the house. We wanted answers.

  “You’re sure you’re okay with this?” I asked Jeremy repeatedly.

  “Yes,” he answered each time smiling at me with his tooth catching his lip.

  We were on our way to see Mr. Carl first. We were going to visit him at his home. I found it quite amazing all the information you could find online.

  “So you’re in a band?” Clarissa asked as we entered onto the expressway.

  “Yeah,” Jeremy replied while concentrating on merging.

  “What kind of music do you play?”

  “I like to call it post pop punk.”

  “Okay,” Clarissa said having the slightest idea what post pop punk was.

  “I didn’t come up with that. I stole it from this one band’s website. I thought it suited our music, even though our music might be post, post pop punk.”

  “Cool,” Clarissa chirped.

  We headed to the south side. It was Sunday afternoon and traffic wasn’t all that bad. Before we knew it we were pulling up in front of Mr. Carl’s building. Jeremy parallel parked the car across the street and we all got out. The neighborhood was nice. It was a mix of brick apartment buildings and houses. Mr. Carl lived on the second floor of a two flat. We rang his buzzer and waited for him to answer.

  “Yes,” we heard.

  I did a little cheer in my head when I heard his voice because I was afraid he wasn’t going to be home. “Hello Mr. Carl,” I said to his voice coming out of the little speaker below his buzzer.

  He immediately recognized my voice. “What are you girls doing here?”

  “We just came for a visit,” I answered.


  “I’m busy.”

  “We know what you’ve been keeping from us Mr. Carl and you know that we know.”

  There was silence. Then the door buzzed. I pushed it open. We walked up the narrow stairwell to the second floor. It smelled like incense. The door at the top of the stairs flew open and there stood Mr. Carl in jeans and a tee-shirt. A look I had never seen on him. It was strange seeing him dressed casually.

  “You girls and guy can only stay for a couple minutes. What is it that you want?”

  “We want answers Mr. Carl. Why have been lying to us?” I demanded.

  “What do you girls know?” Mr. Carl asked standing in his small entrance hallway.

  “Oh, we know more than you think. We know all about the Clonation Foundation and the Xtials and Grace and all this cloning garbage. We know you were the one who posted the pamphlet,” I said.

  “Did you go to the gathering then?” He asked crossing his arms over his body.

  “Yes, why didn’t you just come out and tell us the first time we visited you?” I asked taking a step into his personal space.

  “I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure what the repercussions would be.”

  “What happened to our mother?”

  “I honestly don’t know. All your father told me was that we didn’t have to worry about her anymore.”

  “That sounds pretty sinister. We met her brother. We know what our father did to her,” I avowed looking into his eyes, which looked down with my news.

  “It was for the better good,” Mr. Carl said uncrossing his arms and crossing them again getting in a defensive stance.

  “How in the hell could it have been for the greater good? Was getting rid of her for the greater good also? What did he do to her?” I was starting to get peeved at him, even more so than I was before.

  “Girls I don’t have answers.”

  “You’re a bastard,” I seethed.

  “Girls I care deeply for you. That’s why I was the one who tutored you all those years. You needed somebody there to watch over you. You girls belong to all of us.”

  “We belong to nobody.” I could feel my face turning red. “So it’s true then. We’re seriously clones.”

  Mr. Carl nodded his head. Jeremy placed his hand on my back. Clarissa and Isabelle seemed to have been in a state of shock. Both their mouths were just partially open.

  “Jesus Christ,” I screamed. I covered my face with my hands and tried to calm down. My heart was about to leap out of my chest. “So what’s with this cult stuff?”

  “It’s not a cult,” Mr. Carl said very calmly. “It is a religious sect and people really do believe in it, in the image of Grace.”

  “You’re Nazi’s, trying to create a perfect human race,” I sputtered out.

  “That’s enough young lady,” Mr. Carl chided pointing a boney finger at me. “We are trying to create healthy disease free human beings. It’s survival of the fittest. What we could do with this science is amazing.”

  “You’re crazy and your Clonation Foundation is crazy and all those cult people are crazy.”

  “We’re not crazy; those people that belong to The Children of Grace are our main investors in The Clonation Foundation.”

  “You and my father are con artists. Why don’t you just do you’re little experiments at the university?”

  “While cloning is technically not illegal, the government will not fund it and the university receives government funding.”

  “So therefore you had to create some crazy scam to get money and didn’t you ever think of the end result for us and not just the science? Did you think you were going to manufacture four perfect little girls and the fact that we’re freaks will have no impact on us?”

  “Girls, you’re not freaks. You’re scientific break throughs. You’ll be in history books forever.”

  I could not believe him. “We don’t want to be in history books. We just want to be normal teenagers.”

  “You girls are going to have to accept the fact that you’re not.You girls are the image of perfection.”

  “Bullshit,” I yelled. “And what about Elizabeth? There was a flaw in the design there!”

  “Girls, girls, I’m sure soon enough your father will tell you everything. He’s planning a press conference in a few days. I’m sure by then he will give you all the details.”

  “I don’t think so, he’s evil. He’s kept us locked up our whole lives. I don’t think he’s going to bother to sit down to have a little chat with us.”

  “That was for your own protection and rearing Charlotte.”

  “What, so we don’t mess up our perfect image? So you all can keep your crazy experiment secret?”

  “Girls, I think you should be going now.”

  And with that Mr. Carl ushered us out of his building and gave a little wave. Before we knew it we were back in Jeremy’s mother’s car and on our way to Indiana.

  “Can you believe any of this?” Clarissa shouted. “We’re really supposedly clones, so you are like me,” she said pointing to me. “And you’re like her,” she said pointing from me to Isabelle. “And she’s like me,” she then said pointing from Isabelle to herself. “Are we even real people? How in the hell does that all work?”

  I turned around in my seat and looked at her. She had a frantic look on her face. Her eyes were wide open and she kept darting her head around.

  “Of course we’re real people,” I assured her. “We were just manufactured instead of conceived the traditional way.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better,” she shouted.

  “There’s no need to shout,” I chided.

  “Yes there is. You just said it. We were manufactured. I want to be me not you.”

  “You still are you,” I said trying to calm her down, but she did have a point. We were actually the same person, just born at different times, so we weren’t really unique individuals, were we? It was all so confusing. “Lets’ just focus on what we’re going to do. We should hopefully learn about our mother, or who exactly we were replicated after and maybe her parents would have insight about what happened to her.”

  “I know what happened to her,” Isabelle remarked. “Our supposed father killed her. We just have to find out what he did with her body.”

  “Don’t be so morbid Isabelle,” I said. “We’re not for certain. I’m hoping she’s alive and thriving well somewhere. Maybe she just wanted to get away from all of this madness.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” Clarissa sighed.

  Jeremy didn’t say anything. He just concentrated on driving. We had a good couple hours to go.

  ……………………………………………………

  About halfway there we had to stop at a rest stop. Clarissa really had to go, so we all got out and went in. Isabelle walked across the palatial floor of the rest stop with Clarissa and they both went into the washroom together. Jeremy and I looked around at the food stands that lined the two sides of the stop. We decided to go with the hot dog stand. I told Jeremy I had never had an Austrian beef before and I think he almost tipped over.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never had any of the city’s most wonderful delicacies.”

  “Well, I did have the Italian beef,” I pointed out while we waited behind a large man wearing overalls. The pocket of his overalls covering his large left buttocks cheek was falling off and hung on with about three threads. The color of where the pocket once actually rested was a more brilliant blue than the rest of his dingy overalls.

  We got up to order and Jeremy ordered us all hot dogs, which he insisted that we all had to have, some crinkly fries and some pops. We got it to go so we wouldn’t lose too much time. Clarissa and Isabelle emerged from the bathroom and I went and took my turn to be on the safe side. Jeremy followed suit.

  ………………………………………………..

  Back on the road we all ate our food which made the car smell like a big bucket of grease. I was quite surpr
ised by how tasty my hot dog was. Jeremy said that an Austrian beef was the only way to go when it came to hot dogs. Jeremy ate his hot dog while he drove and occasionally reached over and pulled out some fries from the bag that I held on my lap.

  “Do your guys’ hot dogs taste all right?”Jeremy asked.

  “It was pretty good,” I said looking at Jeremy who stopped eating his.

  “It was quite delicious,” Clarissa chimed in with Isabelle agreeing.

  “I dunno about mine. It kinda has a weird taste,” Jeremy said scrunching up his nose.

  “Like what?” I asked purely curious why his would have tasted any different from ours.

  “It’s kinda metallic tasting.”

  “That can’t be good,” Isabelle surmised from the back seat.

  “Let me see,” I said holding out my hand so I could inspect his hot dog. “Maybe they gave you something else.” Jeremy surrendered his food to me. I took it from him and quickly realized that there definitely was something wrong with his hot dog. “Uh, the outside is kinda a greenish gray color,” I said purely disgusted by the appearance of the hot dog.

  “Uh, nasty,” Jeremy cried. “I really should learn to look at my food before I eat it.”

  I went on. “And the inside is kind of a hot pink color.”

  “Let me see,” Clarissa said with excitement in her voice. For some reason it seemed that she found spoiled food exciting.

  I turned around and showed her.

  “Oh gross,” she shrieked.

  Jeremy made a groaning sound. “God, I ate an old hot dog. If it’s greenish in color it has to be quite old.”

  “Ancient,” Clarissa chirped.

  Jeremy looked over at me and scrunched up his face. I couldn’t help but giggle a little. He reached over and pinched my cheek. I threw his old hot dog in the paper bag our food was in and squished up the bag, putting it on the floor near my feet. I leaned my head on the cool glass of the window and watched northwest Indiana fly by. I dozed off for a while and was awaken when I felt the car slow down. I didn’t realize how long I was asleep for because I opened my eyes and we were turning down a residential street. The street was lined with yellowing trees and ranch houses with large front lawns. Jeremy was driving slow and looking at the addresses. Clarissa and Isabelle also had fallen asleep and were yawing and stretching as they were waking up.