My son’s high school called me about his transcript. He graduated in 2006, so I assumed it was some routine records issue that had finally surfaced. The registrar said someone had requested a copy, and their policy required them to notify the parent still listed on the file. The request came from a college he never applied to, and it was the fourth request. The first three had gone out in 2009, 2014, and 2019, and nobody had ever called me about them.
I asked her to read me the name on the request form. She hesitated and said she probably shouldn’t, but then she read it anyway. It was my son’s full name, exactly as it appeared on his diploma, followed by a middle name he had never used. I told her he didn’t have a middle name, and she went silent for several seconds. Then she asked me whether my son had ever told me about a second birth certificate. I said no, because as far as I knew, there had only ever been one.
She pulled up the original student record and told me something that made me sit down. His admission paperwork had been submitted with a photocopy of a birth certificate that listed a different place of birth. The date was correct, the parents were correct, but the hospital was in another state. I asked who had submitted that document, and she said the signature looked like mine. I knew immediately that it wasn’t my signature, because I had never seen the form before. Then she told me the most recent request had included a note asking the school to confirm whether I was still alive.
I drove straight home and started going through the documents I had kept from my son’s childhood. At the bottom of an old filing box, I found a sealed envelope from the hospital where he was born. I had never opened it because I thought it contained nothing more than billing records. Inside was a copy of a form I’d never seen before, dated two days after his birth. It had my name on it, but underneath my name was another signature, one that looked almost identical to mine. On the last page was a handwritten note that said, “If they request his records again, don’t send anything until you know which son they’re asking for.”:::
