by Laura Smith
—
How does one simultaneously kill oneself and dispose of one’s body? Water was one solution. I began investigating each of the bridges. The Mystic River Bridge is a cantilever truss bridge that extends for two miles. At its highest point, it stands 115 feet above the water. But construction didn’t begin until nearly ten years after Barbara disappeared. The Harvard Bridge, constructed in 1887, seemed too low to the water to be fatal, though I found a case of a woman killing herself there in 2011. The Bunker Hill Bridge had been built in 2003. The Boston University Bridge also seemed too close to the water for a suicide, but I found articles about bodies being found near there and people attempting suicide from the bridge, so I couldn’t rule it out. The Longfellow Bridge had been constructed at the turn of the twentieth century and people had committed suicide from it. The John W. Weeks Bridge was constructed in 1927, but it was also too low.
This left the Longfellow Bridge, the Boston University Bridge, and the Harvard Bridge. I started with local newspaper searches, with the name of the bridge and anything about bodies of women around the time of Barbara’s disappearance. No news items turned up.
I decided to go through local papers more generally, using keywords like “drowned,” “unidentified woman,” “Jane Doe,” “Charles River, woman,” “missing woman,” “body found,” and “woman harbor victim” for the year after Barbara’s disappearance. It wouldn’t have had to have been a bridge. It could have been a boat. Or something else I wasn’t considering. I was looking for bodies now. And searching newspapers allowed me to explore the possibilities of both suicide and foul play.
—
There were so many false leads, so many women who could have been Barbara but were, on closer examination, clearly not. Three weeks after Barbara vanished, a murdered woman’s body was found drowned in Boston Harbor. But she was identified by her brother. A couple of weeks after Barbara disappeared, another woman appeared at Back Bay station and asked police to help her figure out who she was. But the amnesia victim was later identified as a Mrs. Hazel Gray of Bulrush Farm. A month after Barbara disappeared, the Coast Guard received a distress call. A ship was sinking off the coast of Nantucket with 146 people on board. A half dozen ships searched the icy waters for hours but found nothing. In the newspapers, they called the ship “the ghost ship.” It turned out to be a hoax. The hoax’s perpetrator, Byron C. Brown, was unrepentant, telling the authorities he would do it again if he had the chance.
A few weeks after Barbara disappeared, a woman suffering from frostbite and exhaustion had appeared at a residence in Hampton, New Hampshire, late at night. Barbara had been born in New Hampshire and had loved going to Lake Sunapee. This could be her, I thought. The woman refused to explain to police why she had been out in the cold and wouldn’t give her name or address. They observed that she was well dressed and articulate, clearly educated. Later, at the hospital, nurses overheard her say things that led them to believe she was from Boston.
But upon further reading, I discovered that the woman was middle aged, weighed 160 pounds, and had false teeth. Later I found an article that stated simply that the woman had been identified and returned to Boston, never revealing her name.
There was one case that gave me pause. On December 23, about two weeks after Barbara disappeared, a woman’s body was found in a Boston hotel room. The coroner determined that she was in her late twenties and 125 pounds—Barbara’s weight. She had been beaten to death with the sharp end of her own high-heel shoe. On the dead woman’s left thigh was a large, brilliantly colored butterfly tattoo, and so the woman became known as the Butterfly Girl. At first I dismissed the possibility of Barbara having a tattoo because I had heard no mention of her having one, and I had never really considered her the tattoo type. But then I recalled the passage from The Voyage of the Norman D., when Barbara’s only regret from the voyage was not getting a tattoo. She had also made a compendium of ornate drawings and descriptions of imaginary butterflies. And there was, of course, the end of The House Without Windows, when butterflies land on Eepersip’s wrists and she vanishes forever. The butterflies set Eepersip free.
The police were able to rustle up a couple of people who had seen the woman around the hotel. They reported that the Butterfly Girl called herself June Blaine, but that this was not her real name. One of the men reported that she had been a talented musician—a detail that stuck out to me considering that Barbara was an excellent violinist. The story of the Butterfly Girl was reported widely. When the police went through her hotel room, they found a picture of her and circulated it in the papers, hoping that this, along with the butterfly tattoo detail, would help them identify her. But no one came forward. Eventually, they were able to find the murderer. At the same court where two years later Nick would file for divorce, Anthony Konetsky was sentenced to a mere six to ten years in jail. June Blaine’s true identity was never discovered. She remained at the mortuary for a month and then was interred, according to one newspaper, in a “pauper’s grave—alone and unmourned.”*
I looked at the picture. The woman’s face was almost entirely in shadow and the inky newspaper print wasn’t helping. She seemed pretty, but her features were hard to make out—her mouth was obscured. It could be Barbara, I thought. This wasn’t how I had pictured Barbara’s end, though. The details—drinking and being bludgeoned with a shoe—were sordid. I scanned for more articles about the Butterfly Girl until I came across a line that I had somehow missed before. The man who had originally identified the Butterfly Girl as June Blaine said he had known her for two years and had seen her at the hotel often and that he had felt sorry for her because she had been a heavy drinker during that time. This didn’t fit with Barbara’s story. There was evidence of her drinking whiskey when her marriage was falling apart but no mention of heavy drinking prior to that. I closed the files.
In the weeks after Barbara disappeared, women were murdered, found beaten, died in house fires and car accidents, and drowned in the Boston area. But in one way or another, I was able to rule them out as not Barbara. When I expanded my search to include the rest of the country, targeting places Barbara had been—Seattle, California, New Hampshire, and Vermont—the list of possible Barbaras became impossibly long. The sheer number of women who drowned off the coast of California, caught in a riptide, or killed in a boating accident, was staggering. There were so many women. Women in distress. Unclaimed women. Lost women. Unnamed women. Women in hiding. Deliberately hurt or killed—all by now forgotten.
TWENTY-FIVE
Around Christmas, P.J. and I decided to move to Mexico City. P.J. was still writing research reports for an education nonprofit, and most of this work could be done remotely. A girl we knew there had an airy apartment that we could rent for cheap. We could both do more writing if we were released from the financial grip of New York. P.J. was eager to spend time in Latin America and perfect his Spanish. I had spent almost no time in the region and wanted to see it. But I also wanted to make a gesture to P.J. that said: Where you go, I go.
But we were leaving great friends. We had created a tribe in New York, perhaps more so than any place we had ever lived. These were the people who had seen me through a painful period in my marriage. But more simply, I had fun with them. A few nights before we planned to leave, my grad school professor threw a beautiful farewell dinner with a few grad school friends and another mentor. She cooked shrimp, we drank wine, and she toasted us, saying that we were like family—a comment that moved me because I felt that she meant it. As I looked around the table, I realized we were leaving New York before the party was over. The house was still filled with people. There was chatter in every room. Something dazzling could still happen, and I might miss it. I was leaving while I was still loved. If I stayed another year, would they grow sick of me? I felt a small ripping sensation, like a fruit torn too early from a tree. But I still believe it is better to go early than to see the party disband with nothing but dirty
plates left behind.
—
The scene at the airport was different from the one three years earlier, when we had left for Southeast Asia. We had our backpacks, but also a suitcase each. All the rest of our belongings were sold or placed on our stoop and somehow reabsorbed by Brooklyn. There was no large good-bye party at the airport. Just my parents drove us. We had said good-bye to P.J.’s family the night before. My parents parked at the departure gate curb, got out of the car, and hugged us. “A picture,” my mom said. “Let me take a picture.” I think she wanted our leaving to be remarkable, but we all knew it wasn’t anymore. Inside the airport, we faced the agent.
“Your return tickets?” she said.
“We don’t have them,” P.J. said.
“Then you can’t get on the plane.”
On our laptops at a table near the JetBlue counter, we bought tickets to attend a wedding in California in the summer, just sliding in under Mexico’s six-month tourist visa time limit. We showed the woman the tickets on our phones and she printed our boarding passes.
“Have a nice trip to Mexico,” she said.
On the plane, I became drowsy and woke just before landing. It was night. There were dark mountains below, and it looked like someone had thrown silver and gold jewels that had gathered shimmering all around their bases. This was the city at night, a metropolis, one of the largest in the world—certainly the largest I had ever been to.
In Mexico, P.J. moved me again. I spoke very little Spanish, so his fluency, his ease maneuvering through a city he had never been to, seemed miraculous to me. A few months later I watched him interview a woman whose son had been kidnapped and probably killed by the cartels in Guerrero state. I could catch only bits and phrases of what they were saying, but I admired P.J.’s manner, both professional and compassionate. He sat on the curb in front of a government building where a group of parents had chained themselves to a fence in protest, his legs long and thin like a grasshopper’s as he sat beside the woman, nodding and occasionally asking questions softly. I could tell she was comforted by his presence. I was comforted by his presence.
We loved almost everything about Mexico. The camote salesman who walked around our neighborhood with a little coal oven that whistled. The colorful rows of colonial-era houses with their high ceilings. Parque México was like walking into the American Kennel Club. I saw breeds of dog that I had only ever seen on television: Afghan hounds, hairless Chinese crested dogs, the komondor, which was all hair, its perfectly groomed mane completely covering its eyes and reaching all the way to the floor. We ate huaraches elbow to elbow at the crowded market. We bought Oaxacan cheese from the same friendly, middle-aged woman every week. We began to call her our cheese woman and were baffled when one week she wasn’t there. On the weekends, in the narrow courtyard beside our building, we played soccer with the kids who lived in the apartment below us. We used an old lady’s station wagon as one of the goals. We never held back even though we were twice their size, and still we often lost.
I started kickboxing classes in a small gym above a rowdy bar. No one in the gym spoke English except a couple of the girls in the class. The man who owned the gym was a boy-faced mixed martial arts fighter who would sometimes sleep on the floor during our class. Our instructor would shout things at us in Spanish, and over time I came to understand what he was saying. ¡Más rápido! ¡Rodillas más altas! ¡Más fuerte! Faster! Knees higher! Stronger!
We visited a friend who was studying textile design in a small town outside of Oaxaca City. We saw a wedding replete with a marching band and a parade. People hoisted enormous papier-mâché puppets of the bride and groom in the air. We walked down the narrow winding streets with old brick walls and simple white plaster houses with terra-cotta roofs. I liked the aesthetic of the place: spare with occasional bursts of color. All around us, jacaranda trees were in bloom. We walked through a field, befriending a large, happy dog who eventually abandoned us for more exciting things. As the sun set, we stopped at a little outdoor restaurant that served only mole and overlooked a field where puppies were frolicking. I could imagine staying in Mexico for a long time. I could see an old truck, a ranch-style house, and dogs. I wondered how long this feeling would last.
—
After four months in Mexico, P.J. got a case of what is known as Montezuma’s revenge. He got out of bed only to projectile vomit in the direction of our toilet. I wasn’t worried; Montezuma had already gotten his revenge on me, and I knew it wouldn’t last. I brought Gatorade and plain crackers to his bedside. Occasionally, I poked my head in and watched him while he slept; his face, even in sleep, was worried and worn out.
I felt a fierce protectiveness over him. I saw now that our marriage wasn’t really about vows. I wasn’t there because I had said I would be, but because I wanted to be. And if I had weathered months when I hadn’t really wanted to be there, when I had preferred the comforts of others, I still anticipated wanting to come back to him. Even at our coldest, most unfeeling moments, I continued to admire him—and admiration seemed the lifeblood of our marriage now. It was possible that one day, one or both of us wouldn’t want to stay anymore. It was possible that our store of admiration would become exhausted, the lifeblood of our marriage drained. And if that were the case, one or both of us would leave.
Oddly, this comforted me. If there were vows, they were vows to wait, to make sure that there wasn’t something worthy still there between us to be unearthed. I didn’t want P.J. to stay if he didn’t want to just because he had said he would. I didn’t want to have to stay if I didn’t want to. The comfort was in my own feelings of strength, that I could withstand his departure, that I would have the inner power to know when something was over and to let it be.
But maybe that is just a thought you can have when your relationship feels strong, when you feel strong, and if the moment really presented itself, you might cling to a person who doesn’t want you anymore because you are desperate, because you need someone and will accept any shred of connection, no matter how paltry, because it is preferable to the dull ache of loneliness and abandonment.
I was still young, in that sweet spot where I looked forward to the parts of life that were ahead of me, but felt a little more confident about my place in the world. I knew that old age, middle age, or even just the next day held things I didn’t understand. It occurred to me that P.J. and I were circling around each other, that this was just the first cycle in our marriage. I didn’t really agree with Michael’s analysis that Barbara’s story was about running away and mine was about coming home. Both were about perpetual motion. We move toward one another and we move away. We draw near, we retreat. We start over again. Perhaps the chase has only just begun.
That night P.J. held my hand while he slept. I didn’t mind the clammy feverishness of his palm. I let his hand linger in mine a little longer, until he rolled over, dreaming.
—
I still talked to Michael, but less. The interactions were usually warm and wistful. A few months after I went to Mexico, he met a woman. I could tell it was serious. Their only real problem seemed to be that she was allergic to his cats. Perhaps my leaving was the sign he needed to move on. Perhaps he would have moved on anyway. I thought about Michael in his space capsule, passing by my blue planet. I felt him drifting out of my orbit, heading toward new planets, new lives. My pull had faded for him and I felt pulled by P.J. again. Michael used to joke that when I died, he would weep at my funeral, prompting my relatives to nudge each other and ask, “Who is that old crying guy?” But he smoked, so I figured I would live longer and go to his funeral and alarm his relatives. I told Michael this, and he said that there was nothing more glamorous than having a mystery woman crying at your funeral. Our relationship was unblemished by a life lived together. But I see the value in both: the elegance of the unopened door and the raw beauty of shared experience. Michael and I would be in touch. Or maybe we wouldn’t. Th
ere was no way to know.
One afternoon, P.J. and I walked down a large, tree-lined thoroughfare in Roma Norte. People sat in sidewalk cafés eating lunch, or bought or sold things, or just strolled. At a distance behind us, we heard sirens blaring. Four police cars processed slowly down the street. None of the cars ahead of them moved to get out of their way. People crossed unhurried. I wondered why, if there was an emergency, they were driving so slowly, making no effort to move forward in traffic. It was then that I noticed the small flyers taped to their windows. I had to plug my ears from the sirens to get close enough to see: on the page, there was a photograph of a smiling, pretty young girl, perhaps in her early twenties. She was missing. The girl was wearing a cap and gown. I imagined that her family had deliberately chosen the cap and gown picture because they wanted to evoke the idea that she was a person with hopes, a person who wanted things, a person who had made plans.
Wanting, having plans, believing that you will live and possibly live well suddenly seemed such a vulnerable notion. We are guaranteed none of it. The barrier between fortune and ruin, life and death is unnervingly small. I was chilled by the scene: the piercing sound of the sirens, the police cars’ funereal procession, the hopelessly small poster. It conveyed both a sense of emergency—A girl has disappeared right from our midst! Did you notice?—and the sense that we could do nothing about it. Her story was already over.
It occurred to me, as it often does in moments like those, that perhaps it was time to move on—from Barbara, from the questions that had haunted me about the contradictions of marriage and the story of this one woman’s life. There were other things to be concerned with, other people and things to learn about, other causes to invest myself in. But even as I told myself this, with the police procession still in view, I was struck by another thought. I still just want to know.