by Tara Marta

Vivica spent her Saturdays scouring antique shops. A different one every weekend. It didn’t matter if they were two minutes away or two hours. She loved everything about them, even the dank, musty smell that assaulted her nostrils and took up residence in her clothing.

“Nothing but junk,” her boyfriend Rick once said. She knew enough not to ask him to join her during her favorite weekend outing. It was her time to be alone and take a walk in someone else’s past.

On this day, Vivica found a new shop in a town thirty minutes away. She pulled her blue SUV into the parking lot. She could almost hear the vintage treasures calling out to her. Home décor, music boxes, cathedral radios, delicate figurines, records, and art. “This stuff isn’t junk,” she thought to herself. “It’s history.”

She combed the shelves full of trinkets and gawdy costume jewelry, giggling at a statue of two pigs cuddled together with the words “Makin Bacon” sprawled across their stomachs.

“See anything you like?” the owner asked.

Vivica smiled. “Lots of things. It’s hard to choose.”

The woman pointed at a door off to the side. “If you’re looking for baby dolls, they’re in the nursery.”

“The nursery?” Vivica let out a hearty laugh until she realized the lady was serious. Dolls never interested her, not even as a child, and certainly not ones that were kept in their own private nursery. She opted to look upstairs instead.

Every item in the shop had a story to tell. But nothing spoke volumes like a photograph. A stack of photo albums on a table caught Vivica’s eye. She reached for the one on top, swiftly flipping through its pages. Then she picked up the next and the next, until she realized that the albums all belonged to the same person.

She went back to the first album. The beginning pages were of a Baptism. A skinny, chicken of a baby in a white dress, wrapped in a blanket, being held by some man and woman. Probably the godparents. The next picture was of another man and woman with their hands over the baby while a priest made the sign of the cross. “Must be the parents?” Vivica thought.

She noticed a rocking chair in the corner of the shop. Without hesitation she grabbed the photo albums and sat in the chair as if she were at home in her living room. The story tucked between the pages of each album needed to be told, even if Vivica would never truly know the exact circumstances.

So many photographs depicting different scenes in some stranger’s life. Who was this mysterious person? And how did her private journey end up in an antique shop?

Terri Ann reached for the milkshake on the end table. It was lukewarm and half melted. A perfect consistency for a woman with cancer. Solid food had become an enemy. Earlier, she tried to fill her stomach with protein but vomited it right back up.

“I hate you!” she screamed at the cancer that ravaged her petite frame.

Curse words were used to emphasize her anger. She thought it might alleviate some of the pain if she acted tough. The cancer didn’t care. Terri Ann doubled over until tears plunged from her eyes.  

She rested her right cheek against the cold hardwood floor. Her body slowly began to loosen out of its fetal position. “It’s come to this,” she thought. In the not-so-distant past, she had witnessed her mother lying on the floor to ease her own cancer. She never thought she’d be in the same situation.  

Duncan, her small Terrier, sauntered out of his bed and over to where Terri Ann lay. Dogs can sense when their owner is suffering. When Terri Ann let out a painful groan, the loyal pup lifted his furry face and licked the top of her forehead.

An hour later, the pain had subsided enough to allow Terri Ann to straighten up. She grabbed the side of her bedpost and pulled herself into a standing position.

“We’re not letting it win today, right Duncan?” The dog agreed with a quick wag of his tail.

The cancer had recently spread. Terri Ann was handed a death sentence─six months to a year. Her initial reaction was denial. The doctor had to be wrong. She was too young to die. But then, so was her mother during Terri Ann’s childhood. Her father, too, had lost his life to a cruel disease much too young.  

It wasn’t fair, this game called life.

“It’s all a roll of the dice,” her uncle once said. He was a gambler who loved the ponies and playing the lotto, although he warned his niece myriad times that the chances of winning were slim. “You have more of a chance of getting cancer than hitting a number.” He was right.

As an only child with her parents both gone, no husband or kids, she was on her own. Having extended family meant nothing since they never got along with her. It was something Terri Ann could never quite figure out. She had always been someone who marched to the beat of her own drummer. Her family could never relate to her old-fashioned values.

Terri Ann believed that family did not necessarily consist of blood. “We are all connected in this universe,” she was fond of saying. She made friends wherever she went with people she met at libraries or in the grocery store. Terri Ann knew how to strike up a conversation with like-minded individuals who shared her values.

She had never regretted being unmarried. Remorse only came when she realized she had no one to leave her belongings to when she passed from this world into the next.

The furniture did not matter. It was stuff she bought. What concerned Terri Ann was the past. What would become of her personal memories? There were boxes of Christmas decorations that had belonged to her parents. Ceramic trees and plastic ornaments. A Santa mailbox and snow globes that no longer produced swirling snow.

Nothing compared to the photo albums Terri Ann kept in a plastic storage container. Her entire life had been captured and stored. Not just her life, but the lives of her parents. She remembered the day when her grandmother gave her photos of her mother as a baby. “These are precious memories,” said Grandma. “Hang on to them.” There were even rare pictures of her great-grandmother as a child, handed down from one generation to the next.

Terri Ann began boxing up the albums, but not before sifting through them one final time. There was no memory of her days as a baby. Things came into focus for her fourth birthday party. She remembered the pink bike with the flowered banana seat. The Little Orphan Annie dress she wore to first grade. Holy Communion. Confirmation. The trips to Hershey Park. There was a picture of her mother right before she got sick. Terri Ann looked intently at the snapshot, recognizing that her mother’s emaciated face mirrored her own.    

“Material things should not matter,” her priest told her when she spoke to him on the phone.

“I don’t care about the other stuff, Father. It’s the pictures. There’s always been someone to hand them down to. Because of me, they’ll be lost forever. It will be like we never existed.”

Did a priest even have photographs? If he did, there was no sentimental value attached. He tried to comfort Terri Ann by reminding her that what really mattered was that she would be reunited with her mother and father. “There are no pictures in heaven,” he stated.

If his statement was meant to put Terri Ann at ease, it had missed its mark. She thanked him for the call, hung up and returned to her past.   

“I’m sorry, Mom and Dad,” she sighed, remembering the delight she and her parents had experienced each time they opened the albums to review their lives. A profound emptiness loomed over her. “Our memories will be scattered in the wind once I depart from here.” Whatever agony cancer had caused her stomach could not compete with the grief that cemented her heart.

Terri Ann would embark on a new journey, one where images could not be captured on paper. She would leave behind her own private time capsule of family history. Each photograph was a shared experience between her loved ones; moments in time preserved by the click of a button.

She took a deep breath and cast a warm gaze at her mother and father. “See you soon,” she whispered. Then she neatly stacked the albums back in the container.

On her way to bed, Terri Ann grabbed Duncan and cuddled him in her arms. “At least you’ll be taken care of,” she said. “Mrs. Harrington will love you as I have.” He wiggled his tail and burrowed his nose under the blankets. 

But what would become of her precious photographs?

Vivica had finished looking through the last of the albums when the owner of the shop came up behind her. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve leafed through those a few times.”

“Do you know anything about the woman they belonged to?” Vivica asked.

“Not a thing. Sorry. One of the neighbors brought them in after the woman died.”

Vivica’s heart descended. “How incredibly sad.” No one that knew Terri Ann had wanted to keep the albums. It was hard to fathom someone’s existence being reduced to an antique shop. “How much do you want for these?” she asked the owner.

“Good question. I didn’t anticipate anyone buying all of them. I’ll tell you what. You can have the whole stack for $40 bucks.”

“Sold!” Vivica paid cash and carefully loaded the photo albums into her car. As she drove home, she thought about Terri Ann, whose name she had learned from the backs of the pictures. She knew all their names thanks to the annotations.

“You bought a stranger’s photos?” Rick said in astonishment. “What are you going to do with someone else’s pictures? I mean, you don’t know these people, Viv.”

Vivica slouched down and removed one of the albums from the box. “Some things I can piece together by looking at the photos. She was an only child. Never married. I know that her parents died because there’s snapshots of their graves.”

“I wonder what happened to the woman. Terri Ann, is it?” Rick asked.

Another photo appeared. It was of Terri Ann, surrounded by nurses at the hospital. A small birthday cake lay on the tray in front of her.

“Rick, look! It’s Terri Ann.”

“Whoa! She lost a lot of weight.”

Terri Ann’s skin was bright yellow. She wore a knit cap on her head to hide the hair loss. Her arms resembled toothpicks. Though she tried to smile, the pain etched in her face was palpable.

“She had cancer,” Vivica remarked. This much she knew because she had an aunt who looked the exact same way when she died of cancer. “I think I’m going to cry.”

“Stop! You don’t even know her.” Rick could be cold at times. A trait that irritated Vivica.

“I feel like I do know her. She was a human being, and she seemed so lonely in this picture. No one at her side except doctors and nurses.”

Vivica couldn’t relate to every part of Terri Ann’s life. She had brothers and sisters. Too many she thought whenever they got on her nerves. Her parents were alive and well. She attended large family gatherings on holidays and special occasions. She wanted to get married and have a big family.  

Still, there was something about Terri Ann that seized Vivica’s attention. Maybe it was the happiness in her childhood. The smiles on the faces of her parents. Or perhaps it was the desolate look in her eyes before she died.

When Terri Ann drew her last breath, she had no way of knowing that her life story would end up on a shelf in an antique shop. Nor could she have imagined that a total stranger would come along and recuse her memories.

Terri Ann and her parents had found a new home, and their lives would pass before the eyes of many in the years to come.