The Prophecy

The prophecy began with a single photograph crammed amongst dozens in a shoebox, their corners bent and frayed. At the time, it seemed like a random choice for my little hand to grasp just that one, the photo of the plane. Later, I would know it was not.

I was 8 years old and my mother’s companion for her favorite hobby: thrifting. Long before it was trendy, my mother loved to climb into our 1970 Pontiac Lemans, jetting off to neighboring towns in search of “treasures”. Yard sales, estate sales, and her favorite—thrift stores—were on the agenda each Saturday morning while my father toiled away at his retail job. As an only child, I was coerced to join her, always with the promise of a small treat. An ice cream cone from McDonalds was usually not worth the boredom, but I idolized my mother, a mix of glamour and salt-of-the-earth, so I tried not to complain.

On this day, it was unbearably hot, and Mike’s Secondhand Shop was stuffy and musty. My mother, sensing my waning patience in the slump of my steps and Oscar-worthy sighs, pointed me towards a table in the back. Stuffed haphazardly in numerous boxes was everything from costume jewelry to ceramic animals to lace gloves. Pick something for yourself, she told me.

The box of old photos is what drew my attention, and I leafed languidly through the collection of browning images, all of which seemed to come from the same place. A farm, a family of four—two older boys, a dad, and a very pregnant mom, as if most of the film had been shot in one summer. There were a few horses, a few landscapes, and a few group shots. But it was the photo of the plane that caught my attention. There was no logic behind this. I wasn’t particularly into planes or anything like that. It just looked…neat.

I showed it to my mother, but she was giddy over her find of some antique or another, and she barely glanced at it. Why don’t you pick out a few more, she suggested, distracted. We could make a collage. I went back and grabbed a handful. The family in front of a maple tree, the mother’s hands splayed on her basketball belly, was on top.

The blonde man at the checkout (Mike, he introduced himself as) glanced at the pictures and smiled kindly at me, but it was my mother he could not stop staring at. This was common—she was a striking woman. And as usual, she didn’t even notice the way the man looked at her, as if he longed to know her. I took them home and promptly forgot about them, save for the plane photo.

Something about that gleaming silver machine felt important to me. I tucked it into my nightstand drawer, and every now and then I’d reach in and feel my fingers slide across the smooth matte of the photo.

And when I was 9, my mother, who was quirky and stubborn but also: kind, and someone I wished to grow up to be like, died in a plane crash. Encouragement from my dad to visit her best friend, who’d moved to California, ended in a plane that barely got off the runway before a freak mechanical malfunction sent it hurtling back down, killing every person on board. Including my mother.

I never made a connection between the photo and my mother’s untimely death…how could I? I was only 9, tragically half-orphaned with a father who loved me dearly, but had no idea how to connect. And I had no idea what to do with all my grief and the emotions that felt so massive I could not even name them. Between my dad’s workaholism and my belief that I would never love anyone as much as my mother, it was easy for me to slip into the typical latchkey kid persona of my decade. Years passed. I wrapped up my trauma like most in the 80’s and 90’s did, locking it away and convincing myself I was fine. FINE. I grew up, went to college, met a boy. My father and I drifted apart, save for holiday meals and birthday cards and occasional phone calls. The day at the thrift store settled into an unreachable place in my memory, only retrieved when, after marrying the boy, my father sent a few boxes of my childhood things to me. There it was, nestled between Barbies and middle-school yearbooks—the plane.

I was 28 at this point, my mother so long gone that weeks could go by without her crossing my mind. She was a smudged memory, something intangible. A concentrated effort would bring forth her distinct scent—jasmine—and the melodic rise of her laughter. I would feel a jolt of shock when calculating how old she would be now. In my mind, she was forever thirty, her head thrown back in laughter at something my dad said over the dinner table.

The photo of the plane, though. Suddenly, it was as if I were transported back to that day. I remembered the store, Mike’s Secondhand Shop, and the mildewed scent and the dusty beams of light from the rectangle windows. I could see what she was wearing—blue jeans and a tight yellow t-shirt with a bank logo stretched across the front, her hair an afterthought under a navy handkerchief. I recalled, perhaps for the first time ever, that I’d had a chocolate ice cream cone from a roadside stand on the way home.

I decided I wanted to see if Mike’s was still in existence. It was, but only open on Sundays. While I waited for the week to pass, I became consumed with a burning need to ask my father questions about my mother. For nearly two decades we’d only spoken of her passing as a factual occurrence, a benchmark for time. My direct questions seemed to fluster my father, especially the ones about her family.

You know they weren’t close, he said. Heck, I don’t know where her brothers ended up. I’m sure her parents are dead. The story, as I knew it in tiny threads, was that my grandparents had not approved of my father, going as far as to give my mother an ultimatum—it was either them, or my father. She chose my father and never looked back. That was what she herself said, with her characteristic stubborn pride. It didn’t make sense then or now. Even my father still seemed clueless when I directly asked him why they didn’t like him.

Beats me, he muttered.

After seven days that felt as if I’d some opened some portal in my mind to set free every question I’d ever had about my mother, I was on my way to Mike’s. The boy, whose name was Jason and was now my husband, cheerfully took the wheel to escort me back in time, and that's exactly what the drive felt like. With the windows down, letting in the fragrant spring air, and with my eyes closed I could almost feel the leather of the Pontiac seats, could imagine my body was still 8, lithe and knobby-kneed. Could sense my mother next to me.

Maybe we’ll find something cool for the house, Jason said, breaking the spell. We had just bought our first home and were effectively cash poor. I smiled at him.

Maybe, I said.

We arrived and upon walking inside, I was a bit disappointed. It looked nothing like it had before. It was now filled with a lot of new-but-made-to-look-old merchandise. There were a few pieces of expensive, Amish-made furniture and shelves lining the walls of collectible toys and memorabilia. Gone was the musty smell and the dim light. Standing behind a newly built counter, an elderly man was grinning in greeting.

Looking for anything special? He smiled wider, staring at me the same way he'd stared at my mother--it was the same man from all those years ago, Mike. The only difference was his hair—instead of blonde, it was now snow white and he was sporting a Sam Elliot mustache.

I explained I had been here with my mother as a child. I told him she was an avid “thrifter” before it was cool, and he admitted that he had gone more mainstream with his sales. Times were tough, he said with a shrug, and then pointed to the back corner.

There’s that table back there, he said. More like the old days.

The table could have been the exact same one with the exact same items as twenty years ago. I eagerly pawed through the box of photographs, wondering if it was indeed the same one, but these photographs were different. They were mostly non-descript—gardens and boring landscapes. While Jason checked out the collectible shelves, I found my hand pulling one tattered, bent picture from the back of the box.

It was of a little girl. She appeared to have fake bandages wrapped around her head and a plastic stethoscope gripped in her hand. Her toothy grin gave it away, that it was just a game of doctor. It could have been any kid—but the resemblance to me was uncanny. I knew, of course, that it was not me, but it was like looking at a ghost, a twin from the past.

How much? I asked Mike, pulling out my change purse, waving the old photo at him. He shook his head, grinning.

Naw, nothing, he said. Take the whole box if you want. But I didn’t want the whole box. I didn’t even know why I was here. What had felt adventurous and nostalgic now just felt…weird. I slid a few dollars to Mike anyhow and dragged Jason out. Like the plane picture, I put this one in my nightstand drawer and promptly forgot about it. Jason and I were busy…decorating the new house, working, trying to start a family. A year came and went after my short-lived obsession with my mother’s memory.

And then, the ball dropped, and everything fell apart. It began as headaches. Blurry vision that seemed to get worse each week. Fatigue so great that I thought perhaps I was pregnant. A depression that seemed to snowball when I found out, repeatedly, that I was not pregnant. It was a drawn-out discovery process—but the result was this: I had a malignant tumor growing in my brain. Surgery followed by radiation and chemo would be my only hope. Survival came with a great chance of recurrence. Treatment would kill any dreams of having a baby without intervention.

It was a lot.

In the days after my surgery, when I was floating in the thin spaces between conscious moments, I thought of my mother and felt her cool hands on mine. When I was finally able to sit up a little, finally able to say yes, I can still see, kind of, I began to go through the personal items Jason had brought in for me. He had put them in a little plastic container, along with the contents of my nightstand drawer. Lip balm, hand cream, a small book of poems that I read often…and tucked inside of it, the photo of the little girl playing doctor.

I stared at it, unable to pinpoint the feeling rising in me. I knew that little girl wasn’t me. I knew this, but at the same time she could have been my mirror image at that age. I fumbled with my slow-to-respond hands, opening my phone and turned the camera to attempt a selfie.

I was pretty gruesome. Most notable was the white bandages wrapped around my head, tufts of yellow hair sticking out. I forced myself to smile, and then, with great effort, looked between the photo and my image on the phone. The little girl with the bandages. Me with the bandages.

That was the first day that I realized what was happening. The photograph of the plane…a plane crash that ended my mother. A photograph of a blonde, beaming girl with head bandages and now me, a blonde, fake-beaming woman with head bandages. Something was going on here. Something that I had to figure out and suddenly, as sure as I knew my own name, I knew I had to get back to Mike’s Secondhand Store.

Jason and my father would have none of it. My “rambling” was written off as a residual side-effect, lumped in with my compromised vision and limb weakness due to the tumor. In the haze of morphine and the sheer physical exhaustion of treatment, I dropped it. I didn’t have the energy to ponder what was likely a coincidence, according to Jason. He needed me to focus on healing, on myself, on us. This is what he told me and over the months, that is what I did. Healed my body and our broken hearts over the child we would likely never have.

I couldn’t get the photos out of my head though, and I needed answers. Did the pictures cause the plane crash and my tumor, or were they merely warnings? I believed wholeheartedly that it was something mystical in nature, and Jason, bless his heart, supported this even though I could tell he thought I was nuts. Maybe I was, I thought on the day I stepped into an Uber (I could no longer drive thanks to my eyes) for the hour-long trek to Mike’s.

On the way, it was the same. I cracked the backseat window and was flooded with my mother. She was everywhere: in my mind’s eye, in the air, in the caress of wind on my face. The forlornness inside of me propelled me to dial my father’s number, to leave a voicemail asking him to tell me something about my mother I didn’t know. I knew he’d told me everything, so I ended with maybe I could find her brothers. Maybe they would talk to me. Can you at least get me their names?

I hung up as the Uber stopped and I nearly floated into Mike’s. I could see him watching me from the register, could see that he recognized me even though I was heavier now, with shorter hair and a slower gait. I walked right up to the register and put my hands down, looking him dead in the eye.

Explain the pictures, I said to him, a command, not a question. But he only shook his head.

They’re just pictures, he shrugged. Some are donated, some are from my own family…

I pulled the family photograph out, the one my father had had to look long and hard through every nook and cranny of his house to find. The man, the two older boys, and the very pregnant woman.

Tell me the truth, I demanded. This is you right? I tapped the shorter, towheaded boy.

Mike nodded. That’s me, he admitted.

So what’s the deal? I pick out a plane picture, and my mother dies in a plane crash. I pick out this—I showed him the little girl with the bandages—and I get this. I parted my hair to display my grotesque scar, the slight indentation in my skull that had not yet been cosmetically repaired.

Mike eyed me up and down. He hesitated, as if he were about to spill a great secret, but all he said was this: we’re seers. The men in my family. My father and brother are gone, and as you can see, I’m old too. I’ll be gone soon enough but…there’s another one on the way. Soon.

So you “seers” planted those photos for me to find…why? Do you do that for everyone who comes in here? Mike shook his head vehemently.

Oh no, not everyone. You’re special. Just know that. We thought…well, we thought maybe we could change the course of things. We tried everything to change the trajectory of your mother’s life, to prevent her from being on that plane. And we tried again…if you had gotten your diagnosis sooner…maybe...He looked away from where I still held my hair parted, my scar visible.

I stared at him, still in disbelief. So you just tell me the horrors that are coming and leave it up to me to figure it out?

 No, he said. We realized we couldn’t change things. It was just…well, when you love someone, you want to believe just about anything.

Love someone? What was he talking about? He slid an envelope towards me.

Take it. Prophecy, he added with a twinkle in his eye, is not always bad.

Outside, while I waited for my return Uber, I opened the envelope. Inside was a modern photo, a stock photo from the internet. Of a baby. A perfectly formed, beautiful, blonde baby wrapped in muslin, with an artistic sign behind him that said: It’s A Boy.

Did this mean…did this mean Jason and I’s meager hopes for our frozen embryos might materialize? I looked back at the shop, wanting to go demand more answers from Mike, but he’d already flipped the sign to “Closed”. I was perplexed…it’s not that I didn’t believe him, its just that…why would he care? What was so special about me?

Sighing, I saw that I had a voicemail from my father. Sitting down on the curb and staring at the photo, feeling a flutter of hope, I listened.

Oh, I don’t know about her brothers. It was so weird how they cut her off…like marrying me was going to be the death of her. It made no sense, but I think they really thought she’d leave me and go back to them. Anyhow. I looked them up. David passed away a few years ago. The younger one, he’s about an hour away. Runs a little hobby store, or something like that. His name is Mike.