Where'd You Go, Bernadette

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19

Fax from Soo-Lin

Audrey,

WARNING: Aliens took over my brain yesterday! It’s been such a long time since I’ve been pregnant that I completely forgot how hormones can make you do crazy things, like run to Argentinean Internet cafés in the middle of the night and write wild, embarrassing emails to friends back home.

Now that I’ve got my brain back, I will attempt a more levelheaded update of the Bernadette saga. But I must warn you, if the events described in my last (incoherent) email seemed action-packed, they’re nothing compared to what transpired over the past forty-eight hours.

After arriving in the middle of the night, Elgie and I awoke in the dreary, wet, little town of Ushuaia. It was summer, but it was not like any summer I’d ever seen. The fog was thick and constant, and the air damper than even the rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula. We had time to kill before Bernadette’s boat arrived, so we asked the gentleman at the front desk if there were any sights to see. He said their most famous tourist attraction was a prison. Yes, a prison is their idea of fun. It was decommissioned a while back and is now an art gallery. Thanks, but no thanks. Elgie and I walked straight to the dock to meet Bernadette’s boat.

Along the way, I did see some Icelandic poppies, lupine, and foxgloves, which reminded me of home. I took pictures and will send them to you if you’d like.

The dock stank of fish and was packed with the most unattractive fishing boats and vulgar dockworkers. In Seattle, we park our cruise ships far from the fishing vessels. Not in Argentina!

Elgie and I waited in the “immigration office,” four flimsy walls with a framed photograph of Michael Jackson and an X-ray machine that wasn’t even plugged in. There were three boxy, ancient-looking pay phones. Lots of international sailors waited in line to call home. It was like the Tower of Babel at that place.

To give you a sense of where Elgie was emotionally during the weeks leading up to this, he vacillated between believing Bernadette would come traipsing through the door and worrying that something terrible had happened. As soon as he learned Bernadette had skedaddled to Antarctica, leaving them all worried sick, well, he was furious. I can tell you, I found it a little strange.

“You don’t get mad at someone for getting cancer,” I said. “She’s clearly sick.”

“This isn’t cancer,” he said. “She’s selfish and weak. Instead of facing reality, she escapes. She escaped from Los Angeles. She escaped into her Airstream. She escaped from any personal responsibility. What did she do when confronted with this fact? She literally escaped. And now I’m fucking blind.”

Audrey, he isn’t blind. My father was blind, so I don’t have patience for exaggeration. Elgie just has to wear tape over his left eyeglass lens until his cornea heals, which will be soon.

The H&H Allegra finally sailed into port. She’s smaller than any cruise vessel I’ve seen in Seattle, but a real gem, with fresh paint. The dockhands rolled up a set of stairs and the passengers started filing out and going through immigration. Elgie sent word that we were there to see Bernadette Fox. Passengers and more passengers streamed by, but no Bernadette.

Poor Elgie, he was like a dog whimpering by the door for his master to get home. “There she is…,” he’d say. Then “No, that’s not her. Oh, there she is!” Then all sad, “No, that’s not her.” The passengers slowed to a trickle, and still we waited.

After a long worrisome gap of no passengers at all, the ship’s captain and a few officers walked toward us in a tight pack, talking severely among themselves.

“She didn’t,” Elgie muttered.

“What?” I said.

“You’re fucking kidding me!” he said.

“What?” I said, as the captain and his gang entered the immigration hut.

“Mr. Branch,” the captain said in a thick German accent. “There seems to be a problem. We can’t find your wife.”

I’m not kidding, Audrey. Bernadette did it again! Somewhere along the way, she disappeared from the ship.

The captain was really shaken up, you could tell. He’d reported it to the president of the cruise line and promised a thorough investigation. Then it got truly surreal. As we stood there, absorbing this huge bomb that had just been dropped, the captain graciously excused himself. “The next group of passengers is due to arrive,” he said. “We must prepare the ship.”

The purser, a German woman with bleached-blond hair cut very short, handed us Bernadette’s passport with a sheepish smile, as if to say, I know it isn’t much, but it’s all we have.

“Wait a second—” Elgie cried. “Whose responsibility is this? Who’s in charge?”

The answer, it turns out, is nobody. When Bernadette boarded the ship, she left Argentina (it was stamped right there on her passport), so this wasn’t Argentina’s problem. But because Antarctica isn’t a country, and has no ruling government, Bernadette didn’t officially enter anyplace when she left Argentina.

“Can I search the boat?” Elgie pleaded. “Or her room?” But some Argentinean official insisted we couldn’t board because we didn’t have the proper paperwork. The captain then trudged back along the rain-swept dock, leaving us standing there, agape.

“The other passengers,” Elgie said, running to the street. But the last bus had already departed. Elgie then made a mad dash toward the ship. He didn’t get far because he ran into a pole, which knocked him to the ground. (His depth perception is hinky because of the one dark lens.) By that time, the Argentinean customs agent was standing over Elgie with a gun. My screaming had caused enough of a ruckus for the captain to at least turn around. The sight of Elgie flat on the slimy dock, groaning, “My wife, my wife,” with a gun pointed at him, and me jumping up and down, was enough for even a German to take pity. He came back and told us he’d have the ship searched and to wait.

As far as I was concerned, if Bernadette was across the ocean in Antarctica, Antarctica could keep her. Yes, you heard me. If I didn’t like that woman before, I really didn’t like her now that I was pregnant with her husband’s baby! The reason I can admit to such craven selfishness is because here’s how much I love Elgie: if he wanted to find his wife, then I wanted to find his wife. I swung into full admin mode.

I got in line behind the dozen crew members wanting to call home during their quick turnaround. When it was my turn, I miraculously got through to Agent Strang at the FBI. Elgie and I shared the earpiece as Agent Strang connected us to a friend of his, a retired maritime lawyer. We explained our dilemma, and he searched the Internet from his end.

Our silence made the waiting sailors more irate by the minute. Finally, the lawyer got back on and explained that the H&H Allegra was registered under a “flag of convenience” in Liberia. (I’ll save you a trip to the atlas: Liberia is an impoverished, war-torn country in West Africa.) So that was of no comfort or help. The lawyer told us to expect zero cooperation from Harmsen & Heath. In the past, this gentleman had represented families of persons who’d gone missing from cruise ships (who knew that’s an industry unto itself?), and it took him years and government subpoenas to obtain so much as a passenger list. The lawyer then explained that if a crime occurred in international waters, the government of the victim has jurisdiction. However, Antarctica is the one place on the planet that isn’t considered international waters, because it’s governed by something called the Antarctic Treaty. He said it looked like we had fallen down a legal rabbit hole. He suggested we try to get the Liberian government to help, or the U.S. government, but we’d have to first convince a judge that the “long-arm statute” applies. He didn’t explain what that was because he was late for squash.

Agent Strang was still on the phone, and he said something about us being “shit out of luck.” I think he had grown disgusted with Elgie and especially Bernadette, for the trouble they had caused. For some reason he was no fan of mine, either.

Time was ticking. Our only connection to Bernadette was the ship itself, which was leaving in an hour. The fleet of buses returned, this time with a new group of passengers who dismounted and started to wander around snapping pictures.

Thank God the captain kept his word and returned. The ship had been searched top to bottom with a carbon-detecting ray gun that checks for stowaways. But nobody who was not a crew member was on board. Elgie asked the captain if he knew of another ship that could take us (us!) to the places Bernadette visited, so we could search for her ourselves. But every ship with ice-breaking capabilities was booked years in advance. Adding to the sheer impossibility of heading out to find her, the Antarctic summer was ending, and the ice was closing up. So even the H&H Allegra, on this next trip, wouldn’t be going as deep into Antarctica as it had on the previous one.

Trust me when I say nothing could be done.

“Stop! Warten sie!” It was the purser, running toward us in her short skirt and ankle-high cowboy boots, waving a notepad. “This was found on the desk.” But there was no writing on it. “The pen is pressed down.”

Elgie took off his glasses and examined the paper. “It’s indented—” he said. “We can send it to a forensic specialist. Thank you! Thank you!” The pad of paper is now in the hands of a lab in Delaware that tests for such things, at huge expense, I might add.

They say hope for the best. But how can you, when the best is that Bernadette was left behind on an iceberg in Antarctica? It’s one thing to disappear from Seattle. It’s quite another to disappear in a land with no shelter and the coldest temperatures on the planet.

We returned to Seattle this morning in a state of shock. Elgie checked his voicemail and had a bunch of calls from the headmaster at Choate. It seems like something is now up with Bee. Elgie wouldn’t tell me what. He’s on a plane back east to see her, which seems a little sudden.

As for me, I’m trying to focus on the here and now: my pregnancy and furniture for the new house. So many bedrooms, and a full bath for each! We’re waiting until I’m safely in my second trimester to tell Alexandra and Lincoln about the new baby. Bee knows nothing of the pregnancy or our trip to Ushuaia. Elgie wants to wait for the captain’s report before he sits her down. Bee is scientifically minded, so he thinks it would help to have some facts in front of her.

Anyway, I told you this one would be a doozy. Oh, I miss you, Audrey. Come home soon!

Soo-Lin