The Page Was Blank

Three days before Christmas, Marian was dead tired as she climbed the steps to her small efficiency apartment.  Life in the bowels of the big library downtown, returning great tomes of wisdom, and occasionally something interesting to their proper resting places on the long shelves was boring, boring, boring, and tiring, tiring, tiring.  Her spirits perked up a bit when she saw the package tipped up against her door.  She looked around at other doors.  Nope, no one else had a package outside, not unless they had already been taken inside.  Curious, she opened the card that was attached to the top of the package. The page was blank.  What the heck?   What? Who?

She unlocked her door, opened it far enough to drop her coat and purse on the chair just inside, and reached back for the package.  It had fallen over when she opened the door, and now she hoped there wasn’t anything breakable inside.  She lifted it gingerly—not too heavy—smaller than a breadbox, as they used to say on that old radio show they listened to when she lived at home—and not rattling around inside.

She carried it to the small hallway table she used as a dining table on the few occasions when she had guest for dinner, and set it down carefully.  Now she took a more careful look at the package.  Plain brown wrapping paper.  Heavy mailing tape sealing the edges.  The small envelope that held the blank card taped to the paper.  No obvious clues.  It didn’t come through the mail or by FedEx or UPS.  A private delivery company?  One of those bicycle delivery guys?  Maybe it wasn’t even for her.  Maybe someone left it at her door by mistake.  Probably a corporate Christmas present—one of those ubiquitous fruit cakes—for one of the other tenants.  But it would have to be a very large cake to fill up that box, or else it was packed in tons of Styrofoam peanuts.  

Well, this is silly, Marian thought.  Just open the thing and see what’s inside.  So, carefully, in case she had to re-wrap it when it became obvious that the package was intended for someone else, she used the kitchen scissors to cut through the tape at one end of the package and gingerly unfolded the brown wrapping paper.  No clues there.  Just the side of a plain cardboard box.  She cut through the tape on the other end of the package and unfolded the wrapping paper.  Another side of a plain cardboard box.  It looked like she was going to have to unwrap the whole darn thing.  So she slid the scissors through the tape on the top of the box and pulled the paper back.  Another blank.  The flaps of the box were securely taped, but there was no writing, no logo, no printing, no pictures, no company name, nothing.  She picked the box up from the wrapping paper and turned it over.  Son of a gun.  Where does someone get a completely blank box?  She hefted the box a bit with her arms.  Heavier than a typical fruitcake.  Lighter than an iron skillet.  

 She guessed there was no choice now—she’d come this far—she was going to have to open the box to decide whether it was really meant for her or not. Who would be sending her something.  It must be a Christmas present.  Who’d be bringing a present to her apartment and leaving it outside?  Not her parents who lived across the state.  Not her sister who was still in college and should be on her way home to their parents’ house, not coming into the city.  She didn’t have a current boyfriend and the last one left in a huff.  He wouldn’t likely be buying her a present, unless it was something mean.  Surely not.  He wasn’t THAT bad.  She had already exchanged gifts with her gang of girlfriends who met up every two weeks for drinks and gossip.  And the policy at the office was no gifts.  Well, who, then?

 Even though she was getting more and more sure that the package wasn’t meant for her, now her curiosity was heightened, and she was going to have to open the cardboard box.  She delicately dragged the point of the scissors through the tape that held the box flaps together and pulled the flaps back to open the box.

A photo album, it looked like.  A large new photo album with the words “This is Your Life” printed across the front in curliques and squiggles.  Whose life, she wondered.  And turned the cover over to expose the first photos.  Old polaroid shots of a baby.  A cute baby.  A girl, based on the outfits.  And on the next page, a whole series of photos of what must have been a first Christmas for the baby.  Shots of the baby patting the bows on a package, sitting in a big box, hiding under torn Christmas paper.  

And on the next page, more shots of the baby, a toddler now, holding the hand of what must be her mother, a slim woman, girlish, with a pony tail and sneakers.  And here, the child on a merry-go-round, being held on a carasel painted pony by a young man in jeans and a crew neck sweater.  The father?

The next page showed pictures of the child sleeping in a crib, covered with a little quilt, probably made by a grandmother.  I had one just like that, Marian thought.  Just like that one, one that MY grandmother made for me.  In fact, it looks JUST LIKE mine.

Marian raced into her bedroom and frantically took down the box of memorabilia she’d been carting around since she left home for good.  Inside, on top, was the quilt her grandmother had made for her and which she had slept with until she went to elementary school.  She took it back to the living room and compared it to the picture.  It was eery.  So similar.  No, not similar.  Identical.  

 Her vision clouded over and her head began to pound.  She sat down in the chair by the door, on top of her coat and purse.  This was too strange. There were more pages in the album, but she was afraid to look.