by Laura Smith
She wouldn’t have necessarily gone to him for romance when she left in 1939—it had been four years since their last exchange the year after her marriage—but perhaps it would have been comforting to stop by and see him, to be in the presence of someone who professed his devotion and thought of her “as life and adventure itself.”
“Happiness, contentment, security, bah, give me freedom,” Anderson had written. He was a good person to know if you were trying to get out of town. He knew sailors and routes all over the world and would be eager to help. He offered the possibility of a plot twist in her life that was more to her liking. She wasn’t a discarded wife: she was an adventurer. What if she had turned personal loss into an opportunity? I decided that when I got back to New York, I would look for Anderson.
—
A few days into our trip, P.J. and I went to a campground thirty minutes from Jasper. We were tired of eating out of cans, and the thought of a proper shower was too enticing to resist. Our new campsite was surrounded by evergreens in a wide valley. We could hear the Snaring River rushing gently while we fell asleep. At night, by the light of our headlamps, we talked for hours. We went to a bakery in the morning and drank hot coffee. In the bakery parking lot we bought weed from some sixty-year-old hippies who were worried that we were the police. “We’re not the police. Are you the police?” we asked, knowing full well that they were not.
That afternoon, we went on a long trail run to Jacques Lake, occasionally calling out or clapping as we ran along the overgrown trail to avoid startling the bears, because a ranger had told us that was how people get eaten. We arrived at the lake and found a moose and its baby grazing along the edge. We ate peanut butter straight from the jar as we watched the moose. I had become a relationship barometer, constantly evaluating the state of our marriage. I decided things were so-so, but trending in the right direction. Occasionally we talked about whether our arrangement would continue. We agreed that it was hard to conceive of being with other people right then. We were both so raw. But we didn’t want to decide the issue firmly. Imagining the future was impossible when just navigating the moment felt overwhelming. There was only now, and in many ways this was a relief.
The next morning, I opened the flaps of our tent to find P.J. sitting by our campfire scribbling in his journal. When I asked him what he was doing he said he was calculating the number of days we had both spent with other people and trying to determine if he cared that there was a disparity in our experiences. He seemed sheepish, but I was furious. I felt I had been given permission to act without guilt, only to be punished later. We’d had fun the past few days, trail running and enjoying the mosquito-free campsite. I couldn’t bear the thought of backtracking. All the talking, all the problem solving had sapped me of energy. I looked around at the campsite and decided that I needed to be alone. I had been tied to P.J.’s side for days and I missed my freedom, the carefree way that a person on her own can get up and go whenever she decides she needs to.
“We need a few hours apart,” I said. I told him I would take the car into town for coffee and a run. I wanted to be the one to go away, to be on the move. P.J. looked a little worried and sad, but he agreed. If I left, there would be clarity, I thought. And maybe I would miss him.
A long, straight road leads out of the Snaring River Campground, up a wide-open plane of prairie grass and rocky, dry earth. The morning light cast shadows on Pyramid Mountain and the air was sharp and clear. I rolled down the windows, feeling relieved to be alone. I went to a little coffee shop in town. Families on vacation passed by in groups, and I sat quietly at the sidewalk café, feeling unencumbered for the first time in weeks.
When I finished my coffee, I jogged on the Pyramid Bench Trail that runs behind town. I felt lighter and thought of P.J. He always worried when I ran on trails by myself. I was ready to go back, to assure him that I hadn’t been killed.
When I found him back at the campsite, I felt a surge of affection. We hugged, apologizing for the morning, and made plans to eat pizza in town that night. Something that had been blocked between us had come loose and we talked easily and eagerly now. We smoked the weed we had bought from the old hippies and went to dinner. He gripped my arms and told me I looked beautiful.
“We made such a mess,” I said to him and he agreed. We shook our heads, smiling. “There were times when I didn’t know who I was, when I felt like I didn’t have anything to hang on to,” he said.
Michael had called our marital arrangement an “experiment in chaos,” and he was right. The pain was not just an unfortunate side effect, but part of the goal. Sometimes pain is preferable to blankness. There is something electric and clarifying about hurting, something intoxicating about experiencing everything on the spectrum from agony to exaltation.
In his memoir on addiction, David Carr wrote, “When there is no edge, we make our own.” He made his edge with cocaine. By his own admission, he was making trouble where there didn’t have to be any, and so was I. But I also saw destruction’s revolutionary potential. From the mess you make of your life, you could build something new and it might be better—you might be better.
A particularly shrewd friend asked me once if I envied Barbara. Of course the answer on some level was yes. To seize your life and abruptly change course—to disappear—that seemed like real power. The saddest way to leave is to fade, to stay too long at a party when the hosts are yawning and want you to leave. There was something alluring to me about premature departures, about people wanting and missing you, or not really ever having you.
But Barbara’s spectacular exit hadn’t saved her from fading. Her disappearance hadn’t inspired a mad search. So much of The House Without Windows had been about the chase, but when Barbara disappeared in real life, the chase was strangely halfhearted and lacking in urgency. There were no dogs sniffing in the woods, no headlines in broadsheets. Her employers presumably hired a new secretary. The clothes that hung in her closet were perhaps loaded into boxes and given away—or were they thrown away? Her husband eventually divorced her in absentia and remarried. Part of the appeal of vanishing is the expectation that you will be longed for. But you can’t predict or control how people will react. Maybe they won’t miss you.
“The worst is over, right?” I asked P.J.
“I think so,” he said.
The next day, I got an e-mail from Michael. P.J. and I had plans to go backcountry camping for three days in British Columbia before returning to New York. “Know this,” Michael’s e-mail read, “there’s a man on the other side of the country who loves you.” He said he wanted to visit when we got back.
EIGHTEEN
I wasn’t the only person who considered that Barbara might have contacted Anderson after leaving. Helen had asked Alice if she had heard from him. Alice reported that after Barbara’s disappearance, she had written him a letter, but the letter had been returned to sender.
A few years earlier, I had contacted Barbara’s nephew Stefan—Margaret and Wilson’s grandson. He knew more about Barbara than anyone else I had come across. He had typed up nearly all her letters and had carefully arranged and annotated them in a book he was calling Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters, which he had self-published. We met in Somerville, near Brookline, shortly after I had visited Barbara’s house and the Brookline police station to examine their files on Barbara, which were minimal. Stefan has an intense, serious manner, and his grandfather’s fastidious attention to grammatical precision, occasionally correcting errors in my e-mails. Despite this well-meaning curmudgeonliness, something about him moved me. Maybe it was his total devotion to Barbara’s story, or a sort of wistful restlessness that he gave off. His careful cataloging of the work of the aunt he had never met seemed an attempt to tame something within himself, a quality I related to. In a loud, warehouse-style coffee shop, I asked him what he thought had happened to Barbara. The first thing he said was that maybe she had run off with Ande
rson. This was, of course, the outcome we both wanted to believe. But it was also true that in the tracking down of old friends after Barbara disappeared, Anderson was the only one unaccounted for.
—
P.J. and I returned to New York at the end of August. The place felt at once familiar, but also strange. We had been through a tumultuous, transformational summer—how could everything just be the same as when we had left? Going to the same restaurants, walking down the same streets, picking up our old routines was comforting, but it also highlighted the ways in which we had changed. I had been so sure that the two weeks in the woods would smooth things out between us. But in many ways, being back at home among our friends and belongings left me feeling more confused than ever. Nothing was resolved.
—
There were several factors complicating my search for Anderson. For one thing, I wasn’t entirely sure what his first name was. In letters, he was referred to only as “Anderson.” In Barbara’s mother’s book, he was “the second mate.” Online I found a manifest from the ship where he worked for years, the C.S. Holmes. He was listed as “E. Anderson.” Going through Barbara’s letters, I found one from Gordon Campbell, a fellow shipmate, who had sailed with them. He referred to Anderson as “Ed.” It was still a common name, but it narrowed the field a bit. He could be Edward, Edmund, or Edgar. Or Edwin. According to the manifest, he was American, which helped a little because many of the other Andersons or Andersens I came across were Swedish.
The other available details were paltry. I knew he was tall—six foot two, according to the ship manifest. I knew from letters that he was roughly ten years older than Barbara, which meant he was most likely born between 1903 and 1905. I knew that according to his last letter, he had lived in Seattle for at least five years and that as of 1935 he wasn’t married. But that was it. I didn’t know what state he was from. I didn’t know what he looked like. There was no mention of family or any kind of personal history in his letters. In the archives at Columbia, I came across a picture of him on the deck of a small ship in the Arctic. He was leaning against the mast, his face entirely obscured by shadow. He was a shade, a ghost. It reminded me of Helen’s description of him as barely distinguishable from the ship’s darkness as he sat on deck. The murkiness of the details only made me want to find him more. And finding him would offer a clue about Barbara. At the very least I hoped to rule out the possibility that she had gone to him.
I found a letter from a shipmate of his, who had written to Barbara in 1934 and reported that Anderson had told him that he was going to do two more stints with the C.S. Holmes, then he would build his own boat and settle in Alaska, where he would hunt and fish. I decided to start my search in Alaska and Seattle, his last known address. I added Hawaii because I knew Anderson had sailed there. Alaska and Hawaii were not states at the time, and careful international travel records were kept of crew and passengers. But the name on the C.S. Holmes manifest was the only one I could find that was definitively him. I found hundreds of other Andersons in the online database of ship manifests, but there was always a way to rule them out as not “my” Anderson. They were too short, not born in America, too young, too old, or held positions Anderson likely wouldn’t have held, like cook, since he had previously been a second, then first mate. I saved records of the ones who were close, figuring it was possible that someone made a mistake with the birth date or nationality. When nothing turned up under Ed Anderson, I began searching E. Anderson, then just Anderson. No matches.
I looked up Anderson’s last known address, on Ewing Street in Seattle, and discovered that it currently belonged to Foss Maritime Company, a private shipping company specializing in tugboat cargo. The name sounded familiar. I looked through my notes and discovered an article that mentioned that Foss owned the C.S. Holmes. The company Anderson had worked for was still in operation.
I called them and a woman answered the phone. I awkwardly explained why I was calling: I was trying to find information about a sailor who had worked for them some eighty-odd years ago because I was looking for his former girlfriend, who had vanished, and I thought maybe she had run off with him. “Oh, that’s interesting!” the woman said. She offered to connect me to a man who had worked at Foss “forever” and was their “unofficial resident historian.” The man picked up. I was disappointed that he didn’t sound decrepitly old, and realized that I had briefly entertained a fantasy that he had been working at Foss for so long that he might have crossed paths with Anderson. I told the man the same story. Had Anderson continued to work for Foss after December 7, 1939? I figured that an abrupt departure around that time would have been suspicious. But really I would have settled for finding out his middle name. Or even just confirmation of his first.
The man told me that Foss had been sold in the 1980s, and when it was sold, they destroyed the records predating the 1950s. He could look for someone by that name after 1950, but not before. I thanked him and hung up, feeling deflated.
I considered the idea that I might find a mention of Anderson in the local newspapers in connection with the C.S. Holmes. Had there been some terrible shipwreck? I used a historical newspaper aggregator to search for his name and any mention of the C.S. Holmes. I found articles about the C.S. Holmes but no mention of Anderson. And no shipwreck.
I moved on to the Social Security Death Index, looking online state by state. The Social Security Administration was founded in 1936, and though Anderson might not have been enrolled right away, eventually he would have been. Then, when he died, his social security number would have been made public, as would his death date and last known address. I looked at the records for every Ed Anderson, E. Anderson, and Anderson, born between 1903 and 1905, who died in Washington State. There were hundreds—but I couldn’t confirm any were him. I combed through the California records with the same criteria, remembering Barbara’s second runaway incident. Then I began looking at the whole West Coast. It was possible he had begun working for a new shipping company and settled there. I also looked at Maine, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Alaska. Then I began the slog of looking through the whole country. There were thousands of E. Andersons. I isolated five men who I thought could be him and contacted a private investigator I knew, Conor McCourt, a former New York Police Department detective, who had offered to run the social security numbers through a system that might be able to give more information. There was an Edward J. Anderson who died in Chelan, Washington, when he was seventy-seven, but the report pulled up no possible relatives, no properties owned, no work history, or any of the other things it had promised. This was true for all the Andersons I had searched. They were a mass of indistinguishable Andersons.
I started to go through census records. The last year of publicly available census records is 1940, and it is the year after Barbara disappeared. I started my search with Seattle and expanded outward, eventually extending it to the entire country. I was able to rule out other Andersons either by their jobs or because they had children who were more than five years old, thinking that Anderson would have most likely mentioned a child in his last letter to Barbara. All Anderson bricklayers, lawyers, mechanics, and accountants were possibly him, but unlikely to be. All naturalized citizens were thrown out. All Andersons with eleven-year-old daughters were thrown out. I spent hours staring at my computer until my contacts dried on my eyes. I would sit down to search in the morning and look up from my screen to discover it was night. After months, I finished going through the census records. I hadn’t found one person who definitively matched his description. I had no trace of him after 1935. I didn’t know where else to look. It seemed that Anderson had disappeared, at least from paper records, around the same time as Barbara did.
—
Kickboxing and searching for Barbara and Anderson became my two most time-consuming endeavors. These pursuits provided a façade of order in an otherwise chaotic period in my life.
P.J. and I talked endlessly about our situ
ation. We talked about our uncertainty: Would we always feel this way? Would we stay together? But leaving felt unimaginable; I did not quite believe myself when I wondered this aloud. What, really, had happened? There was one point of contention that we couldn’t seem to reconcile. There had been a disparity in our experiences. P.J. had spent a lot less time with Kristin than I had with Michael. Before the experiment began, we had discussed the importance of avoiding a tit-for-tat scenario. It would be punitive and petty, we agreed. But something wasn’t sitting right with P.J. He was sheepish about comparing our experiences but couldn’t seem to help himself.
“How is this not tit for tat?” I would ask him.
“I’m not saying that it’s not. But it’s also lots of other things.”
In my mind, he was trying to quantify the unquantifiable. He wanted to determine if he had been taken advantage of or treated unfairly. In an open relationship there are certain societal taboos that the couple must confront, and these are different for men and women. For men, there is the fear of being cuckolded. You let your wife sleep with someone else? What kind of a man does that? For women, it’s that they are reluctant polyamorists who are just trying to please the men they couldn’t satisfy. I dismissed that idea as infantilizing—it depended on an outdated understanding of women’s sexual complexity. But P.J. was having a harder time shaking the notion that his masculinity had been compromised. Had I betrayed him? And if so, how? We had technically agreed to all of it. This kind of betrayal felt unquantifiable. So P.J. turned to the things he could measure—days spent apart, words spoken or not spoken—and tried to tabulate them.
We were at an impasse. It occurred to me that there was a way around the parity question, at least. When we had first returned from Canada, Kristin had been out of town, and P.J. and she had plans to meet for a drink when she got back. I told P.J. that they could do whatever they wanted that night. I was tired of feeling like he was owed something. I was tired of feeling guilty. There was also a vindictiveness to what I was doing: maybe it was time for him to feel a little guilty too.