by Laura Smith
“Yes!” I put my hands on my head. This was the biggest break yet, the only real break in what had felt at times like an impossible search. Finding the manifest revealed to me what I had always suspected and wanted to believe: she was out there. She had lived past December 7, 1939. She had run away. She had crossed the continent, gotten on a boat, and left. It was all so clear now. She had seized control of her life rather than letting other people determine it for her. She had triumphed. I had triumphed. I rapidly took screenshots of the manifest, irrationally concerned that the proof would somehow disappear. I saved the manifest on my computer and e-mailed it to myself.
“What are you going to do now?” P.J. asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess try to trace her steps after Hawaii?” I doubted she had stayed in Honolulu and suspected she had used it as a port of embarkation to other places, which was what she had done the last time she was there. It occurred to me to start looking right then, maybe stay up late into the night now that I had another clue. Maybe I would need to travel to Hawaii. That sounded nice. I took some notes. I could feel how frazzled I was. “I’m going to go to kickboxing to calm down a little. Meet me after and let’s go to dinner. We’ll go out.” I was in a celebratory mood.
I jogged to my kickboxing class, which was a few neighborhoods away. I didn’t mind the putrid smell as I ran over the oil-streaked Gowanus Canal because I was so amped up. I wasn’t concerned about the dark, didn’t bother switching to the other side of the road as I normally did when I passed the creepy abandoned parking lot. I was flying and felt invincible. Outside the kickboxing gym, I texted Michael. I e-mailed my grad school professor and my editor. Of course she had gone to sea, I thought again and went into the gym.
Class was especially packed that night with sweaty women punching bags. I rolled my bag out to the middle of the floor and punched and kicked with more vigor than usual. I was midpunch when a thought occurred to me. Why had the manifest listed Barbara as twenty-five? In March, Barbara would have been twenty-six, unless the ship had sailed in the first four days of the month—her birthday was March 4. Not a big deal, I told myself. I would check the manifest when I got home. It could just be a mistake, a miscalculation on the part of the record keeper even if it was in the later part of the month. I kept punching. Then my stomach dropped. The manifest was stamped 1939. March 1939. A full nine months before Barbara had vanished. At that point, she would still have been living with her husband, oblivious to the affair and the threat of divorce. March 1940 would have been the right timing, not 1939.
How could I have made such a stupid mistake? I kicked the bag hard. I had been preoccupied since getting back from Canada, and sleep deprivation was making me frenzied and careless. I walked out of the gym into the cold, fall darkness utterly deflated. How had another Barbara Rogers traveled the same route Barbara had traveled before, just a year off? It seemed a cruel coincidence, a shadow Barbara taunting me. She was Eepersip darting through the forest; just when I thought I had gotten a hand on her wrist, she had wriggled from my grasp. I reminded myself that in a world of billions of people doing billions of things, cruel coincidences abound.
I texted Michael. I e-mailed my professor and my editor. “Never mind,” I wrote. I walked to the bar to meet P.J., told him about my mistake, and quickly ordered a beer, slumping in my seat. I ordered the least healthy thing on the menu. Health suddenly seemed pointless. P.J. and I had planned to walk the two miles home after the meal, but as we stood outside in the dark, it began to rain lightly and I suggested we take a cab. We never took cabs. But I couldn’t muster up the energy to wait on the subway platform. I just wanted to curl up in bed, possibly forever.
In the taxi, I watched the rain-blurred storefronts go by. I had felt so close to finding her, and now she seemed impossibly beyond my grasp. I had believed that it was just a matter of looking, of trying hard enough. But suddenly, finding a single person among the billions of people who have lived and are living on this planet seemed absurd. Perhaps it was naive to believe that people leave marks on the world, that we are not churned back into the earth like dead leaves in a compost pile. I had heard once that in a hundred million years, all buildings will be gone. Paper will exist, but the ink will vanish, so everything will be blank. Eternal blankness—forever. Why resist if that is our fate? I didn’t even know my own great-grandparents’ names. They had lived entire complex lives, had careers, had created homes and raised children. They had wanted things. Their children had known about them, their grandchildren less so but still some, and I knew nothing. As of 1990 between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand people were missing in the United States. I recalled the Brookline police logbook. Even that had a lot of missing people in it—a husband who didn’t come home for dinner, then turned up later at the local pub, the twenty-two-year-old girl who slit her wrists and then walked out of her house.
A year after Barbara disappeared, Wilson wrote, “This is someone of striking presence, of glowing beauty, impossible not to notice in a room, a street, a subway, a crowd; a person twenty-five years old, born into an excellent family, five years married into another, and surcharged with distinction, with talents, as no one using half an eye could help perceiving in her carriage, the free swing of her stride, the quiet inner power she radiates unaware; an important being, one in ten million, and—don’t you see?—my daughter!”
I had presumed, like Wilson, that our physical hold on the world was stronger, that we couldn’t slip so easily into the unseen masses, especially if you were someone like Barbara, so brilliant, so lively, and for a brief flicker of time, so noticed. But those things didn’t seem to matter. No one was exceptional; nothing lasted.
TWENTY
I woke up the next morning feeling galvanized rather than discouraged. Almost finding Barbara had given me a taste of what it would feel like to really find her. I had told myself that the mysterious ending was more elegant. Like Eepersip, Barbara was the ephemeral wood nymph. I had believed that the mundane facts would dilute the fantasy. Finding out that she had lived most of her life in a quiet neighborhood in Colorado and raised three sons would have been disappointing. Even if she had done something more unconventional, becoming one of the few female ship captains, it still wouldn’t live up to my expectations. The idea that she could be anywhere, could have done anything, was seductive. Her many possible lives tantalized more than any one life ever could. But sitting on my bed, taking screenshots of the ship manifest, I had been given a touch of what it would feel like to know.
—
I began going through the grave index, an online database where you can search graves by name and state. At Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in San Mateo, California, I found a Barbara Follett who was buried in 1992. She had the same birthday as Barbara, March 4, but a different year. This Barbara, Barbara Lee Follett, was three years older than my Barbara, and she constantly popped up in my searches, making my heart skip a beat.
I spent most of my time searching through travel records. I recalled that once Anderson had asked Barbara if she was writing under the pseudonym Barbara Hardy. He had recently seen an article for a seasickness cure by a Barbara Hardy and wondered if it was hers. Yes, I could see Barbara Follett becoming Barbara Hardy. It sounded like the kind of name she might pick. I searched it. A twenty-five-year-old Barbara Hardie had traveled to Hawaii in 1939. My heart jumped. But my previous experience had made me steelier, more clinical. I opened the manifest. It was for June 1939—before Barbara disappeared.
In 1947, eight years after Barbara vanished, a Barbara Rogers took a Pan Am flight from Bermuda to New York. Had she gone to Bermuda only to return later? This Barbara Rogers was traveling with someone: Edward Rogers. The name struck me. A strange coincidence. I scrolled over to the next column that listed the ages. They didn’t match.
A Katherine Newhall who was Barbara’s age traveled from San Francisco to Honolulu in 1943. Her profession: librarian. Barb
ara had used K in a pseudonym before. I added her information to the file. A Barbara Newell hiked across the U.S. border into Canada in 1954. I saved her information too. But later I was able to rule them both out.
When I found a Barbara Rogers traveling from Havana, Cuba, to Miami in 1940, it gave me pause. I opened the manifest and read and stopped suddenly when I noticed another name: Elwood E. Anderson. He was thirty-four years old, roughly the age Anderson should have been at that time. I scrolled down to Barbara’s age. Twenty-three. Not the right age. I was about to click out of the document when I noticed a small mark next to the “23.” It was a very faint 6, as if the typewriter key had landed on the paper but without quite enough ink. A ghost 6. Had the person recording her age meant to write “26”? That would have been the right age. I downloaded and saved the manifest, so I could look into it further.
One afternoon in the library, I used Stanford’s copyright renewal database to look up The House Without Windows. A renewal record came up for the novel. I clicked on it. It had been renewed on December 10, 1954, almost fifteen years to the day after Barbara vanished. I scrolled down. “Renewing entity: Mrs. Nickerson Rogers (Barbara Newhall Follett).” I jumped out of my seat, my heart pounding, feeling like I had seen a ghost.
I took screenshots of the renewal notice. I imagined a middle-aged Barbara on a chaise longue on a beach, lackadaisically filling out a renewal form that she would later drop in the mail from whatever exotic location she was in. She had cut all ties with her former life, but she harbored a protective fondness for that first book, the one she wrote when she still lived with her father, when she was making up her own language and dreaming of the wild life.
I contacted the publisher but couldn’t get through to anyone on the phone, so I sent an e-mail and heard nothing. I contacted my publisher and asked about their copyright renewal policy, assuming that publishing houses used the same standards. I was told that renewals were handled by the publisher, not by the author, but were done in the author’s name. It was unlikely that Barbara had had anything to do with it.
The next day, I had a phone call with Paul Collins, the journalist and literary investigator at Portland State University who had written the magazine piece in which I first learned about Barbara. I was eager to talk to him because, though his article mentioned Barbara’s disappearance, it didn’t make reference to a search for her. I wanted to know if he had tried to find her.
He was friendly and generous on the phone, touched that something he had written had resulted in such large interest. He had not looked for her, he said. I quickly mentioned the copyright renewal notice and he said he had come across the same thing and had been similarly stunned. But he agreed with my publisher. At the time of his research, he had requested the copyright renewal paperwork from the Library of Congress and had come to the conclusion that Knopf had probably done it in her name. He e-mailed me the file. It was a simple typewritten form listing unremarkable details about the book. The address given was Knopf’s. There was no signature.
Looking for Barbara reminded me of a ghost story a friend had once told me. Her grandfather had died and one day not long after, her grandmother was walking through the house when she heard the sharp crack of her husband’s cough in the hall nearby. She froze. How could this be? It had so plainly, so unmistakably been the cough she had heard for so many years. I considered it a grief-stricken hallucination driven by the expectation of hearing her husband cough again. The mishearing of a branch scratching against a window was the mind’s refusal to understand that what is gone is gone. The more I looked, the more I saw these almost-Barbaras, these mirages everywhere.
—
One day, I was flipping through the end of Lost Island again and it struck me differently:
Sometime, not too far off, she would stage another rebellion. It would not be the same kind of rebellion, though. One could never repeat the real adventures. That was why so many people were unhappy, she reflected. They tried to go back and repeat all the things that had made them happy before. They tried to retrace the trail and visit again the places where they had known their highest ecstasies; whereas, if only they had the courage to push on, forward, over deserts and swamps and glaciers, they would sometime make new discoveries as bright as the others, or even brighter, perhaps. . . .
If we assume that Barbara continued to subscribe to that philosophy, I had been looking in all the wrong places. The fact that she had been to Honolulu before didn’t matter. She wouldn’t retrace her steps. She would break out into an entirely new adventure—an entirely new life. The whole world was an option.
TWENTY-ONE
Fall marked the beginning of my shadow life. Something small but elemental had changed in the texture of my marriage. Like a pattern in a knit rug in which the needle had slipped, a seemingly minor error had sent the whole design askew. Indefinitely pausing the marital experiment loosened something in my fantasy life, allowing me to imagine in richer detail what my life with Michael would have been like. I was protected by the conviction that I had made my decision, I had picked P.J., so a little fantasizing seemed harmless. One evening I was setting the table—P.J. and I had just run around the corner to grab Indian takeout, and then we were going to watch a movie—and as I set a plate down, I realized I was happy. And then a memory of Michael occurred to me.
“In our life,” Michael had told me, “you would be sitting at the table writing. You would be fretting about something structural in the draft, and I would reassure you. I would be standing in the kitchen making red sauce for pasta, stirring the onions.” The vividness of the details, how clearly he saw our life together, had touched me. But at the time, I had dismissed it. In his fantasy, I had thought, we are always in his house, doing something domestic. In his fantasy, he was just inserting me into his life. And he was telling me a story whose ending I already knew: a lovely, quiet life, a long marriage, children, houses. That wouldn’t sustain me, I had thought. But now, pulling the Indian food out of the brown bags and setting it on my own table, I saw the scene at Michael’s table clearly and it gripped me. Maybe it was what I wanted. Or maybe it was what I wanted sometimes.
There were two lives now: the one I was living and the one I was not, and they were stitched together awkwardly, helplessly dragging each other around. Something I did in my real life would provoke a fantasy of my unlived life. I would open a can in my kitchen, and suddenly I would imagine opening a can in Michael’s kitchen. P.J. would cough in the other room, and suddenly I would think, what if it were Michael coughing in the other room? If I felt happy, if I felt anything, my shadow life tagged along, forcing me to imagine the correlated moment in the life I was not living.
Previously, if I had regretted anything it was that I got to live only one life. I remember thinking as a kid how sad it was that I couldn’t be a veterinarian, a journalist, and the first woman in the NBA. How disappointing to have to choose. How disappointing that I couldn’t live in the jungle and the mountains and the city. But now that I was living two lives, it wore me out. I saw how a double life, the alluring possibility of the other life, could haunt and poison all my joy.
I tried to will the shadow life away. This is lovely, I would remind myself as P.J. and I walked through the park. I don’t want anything else. It was lovely. But something remained blocked in my interactions with P.J. I had never imagined that two people who talked as much as we did would ever have trouble communicating. But I was beginning to understand that it was not the amount of words but the kinds of words that needed to be said, and we were both groping for them. It felt as though we were standing before an enormous closed door, guessing at the password and being refused entry.
There was something wolflike and wary in our interactions. We never shouted. We were considerate of each other, cooking for each other, doing the little household chores that the other one did not like. P.J. made the bed. I swept. We circled each other, waiting for the other to ma
ke the first move. I wanted him to make some heartfelt declaration that he wanted me. “I love you, you’re my best friend. And no matter what, I’m always going to take care of you,” he said one day as we were talking after dinner and I had gotten upset. Previously, a comment like this would have annoyed me. It implied that I couldn’t take care of myself and besides, it was independence I craved, not coddling. But now, overwhelmed by independence, I found the idea of being taken care of comforting. But what he was describing seemed sad—seemed to imply that he would take care of me, despite some separation between us. I imagined living in separate houses, his coming over to shovel my driveway after a snowstorm or to drop off some groceries. I would be standing in the window, giving him a sad little wave. He would be standing outside, returning my sad little wave. Then he would leave. “It feels like I’ve been stabbed in the gut,” he said at one point. “I think we stabbed each other. I think we stabbed ourselves.”
In comparison, the untrodden life shimmered with possibility. “Don’t forget,” Michael had said. “Either way, you’re giving up a marriage. One just hasn’t happened yet.”
When I planned a trip to see some college friends and P.J. couldn’t come because of work, I had the sense that he was relieved that we would be apart. I compared him to Michael, who seemed to want nothing more than to be around me. Sitting on his couch watching television would have been a momentous event. Dinner would have been a momentous event. He became frantic when I was slow to text back, and when I woke up in the morning I would have texts from the middle of the night telling me that he was sad I wasn’t with him. The comparison was unfair. Of course the man I had been with for years, the man with whom I was struggling to communicate, would be less thrilled to see me. I knew it was unfair, but those kinds of comparisons became irresistible.