Snapshots from a Parallel Life

The album was wedged between a fondue set and a stack of National Geographics from the ’80s. Brown leather cover, no label, the spine cracked from use. Jenna picked it up because it was two dollars and she collected old photographs the way other people collected stamps.

The first photo stopped her breathing.

It was her. Not someone who looked like her. Her. Same nose, same scar above the left eyebrow from the bicycle accident at age nine, same slight asymmetry to the mouth that she’d spent her teenage years hating. The woman in the photo was standing on a beach she didn’t recognize, holding a surfboard, tanned and laughing.

Jenna had never surfed. Jenna burned in fifteen minutes and spent her vacations in cities with museums and coffee shops and reliable Wi-Fi.

She turned the page.

Her again. Older this time, maybe mid-thirties, standing in front of a small house with blue shutters and a garden full of sunflowers. A man stood beside her, arm around her waist. She didn’t know him. He’d kind eyes and paint on his hands.

Jenna was thirty-four. She lived in an apartment in Portland. She’d been single for two years. She didn’t garden.

Page three. Her, in a hospital bed, holding a newborn. The expression on her face was something Jenna had never seen in her own mirror. Complete. That was the word. The woman in the photo looked complete.

Jenna didn’t have children. Hadn’t decided whether she wanted them. The question sat in her chest like a stone she kept stepping around.

She flipped faster. A birthday party. Forty candles on a cake and the man with paint on his hands lighting them while two kids, a boy and a girl, bounced in their chairs. A Christmas morning, wrapping paper everywhere, a dog she’d never owned sleeping under a tree she’d never decorated. A kitchen with morning light and a coffee cup that said “World’s Okay-est Mom.”

Her face. Her scar. Her crooked mouth. A life she’d never lived.

“Find something good?” The shop owner was behind the counter, reading a paperback.

“Where did this come from?”

“Estate sale. Couldn’t tell you whose. We get boxes, sort what sells, bin the rest. That’s been sitting there for months.”

Jenna looked at the last page. The woman, older now, gray streaking the same hair Jenna saw in her bathroom mirror every morning. She was sitting in the blue-shuttered house, alone, reading a book by a window. The man with the kind eyes was absent. The children were grown and gone. The dog’s bed was empty by the fireplace.

But the woman was smiling. Not broadly. Just the settled, quiet smile of someone looking back at a life and finding it was enough.

Jenna closed the album. She stood in the thrift store for a long time, holding a two-dollar photo album full of a life she hadn’t chosen, wondering whether she’d made the right calls or just different ones.

She bought it. Took it home. Set it on the shelf beside her own photo albums, the ones full of cities and museums and solo trips and dinner parties with friends and mornings in coffee shops with a book and no one else’s schedule to consider.

She didn’t open it again. But she kept it. Some questions are better as questions.