Toronto

FOR YEARS, EVERY TIME I took a flight, I’d route the layover through Toronto, so I could contact Jim Humphries and say I’d be in town. The first time I tried, his wife replied to my email saying that my request was reasonable, but that Jim was going through a rough time. She wasn’t going to pass along the message to Jim, she said, but she asked me to try again later. I never again got a reply to my messages, but the initial response had opened the door just enough for hope. This time I had sent a handwritten letter. As long as she didn’t write back with a definitive no, I told myself, I could show up at his front door. I knew that Jim probably wouldn’t talk about Jane, but I just needed to know that someone had actually asked.

On the day I landed in Toronto, still not having heard from either Jim or his wife, I considered how little I still knew about this man, despite my years of research. All I knew was that after four more seasons at Tepe Yahya, he suddenly withdrew from the Anthropology department. He never completed his PhD. Instead, he took over the family business on the farm he had grown up on, got married, and all but disappeared from the lives of his archaeology cohort.

The next morning, I wrote down Jim’s name, and the phone number of my mother in case I didn’t return home that night, and handed it to the friend of a friend who had agreed to host me for a few nights. He flashed me a look that meant, What have I signed up for?

I put on the most wholesome thing I owned, an ankle-length yellow sundress that made me look like a character in Little House on the Prairie, and took an Uber to Jim’s place, which had been described to me as the last remaining farm in Mississauga. The address I put in turned out to be the side of a two-lane road. Even the driver was concerned: “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” Uh-huh, I said unconvincingly.

I walked down a long driveway surrounded by woods on both sides. It would take me at least five minutes to run back to the main road, I realized. Toronto’s Pearson Airport was less than a mile away, so planes were screaming in the sky. No one would hear me if I yelled.

In the silence between planes, I heard a woman’s voice in the distance. I started toward it and came upon a house. I walked up to the front door and knocked. Nothing. I took pictures and kept moving down the small road, deeper into the woods. I scared a flock of birds into a sudden, flapping movement, and the surprise made me shake. I came upon another house, this one with a tennis court and a giant gate protecting the driveway. It seemed too fancy to match the description I’d heard from Arthur Bankoff, who had kept in touch with Jim over the years.

I continued even farther. I saw a smaller house to the right and a barn off in the distance. It hadn’t occurred to me how hard it would be to show up unannounced at a farm—there were doors everywhere. I approached a greenhouse with broken windows and three canoes out back. I knocked. No one. There were papers pinned up against the windows inside. One sheet was a calendar from 1997.

I continued on, letting my imagination wander. There was rusting farm machinery everywhere: car parts, metal pipes, wooden pallets. So many dark spots where heavy equipment could fall on me, and it would look like an accident.

What if he were watching me from one of the windows? “MR. HUMPHRIES,” I called. I didn’t want to scare him. “MR. HUMPHRIES!” Nothing. I walked past the hay storage barn and the tanks of diesel. It felt like a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek, but I wasn’t sure if anyone else was actually playing. I crossed the high grass field to a brick house crammed with unused furniture. I knocked, reluctantly. Again, no answer.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t leave until I had searched everywhere I could. I had waited too long. I’d come this far.

The path ended by opening into two final fields. Mississauga’s new highway ringed the edges of his farm. Cars glinted in the space between the trees. I was standing in a bubble of the decaying past, surrounded on all sides by the encroaching present.

I turned back up the driveway and passed by the smaller brick house I had walked by earlier. Walking down its tributary driveway, I finally saw the white paper sign taped to the door. On it, handwritten, was the number of the house I had been looking for. It was so straightforward that it made me laugh. I walked until I could see my reflection in the glass pane of the outer door. I reached for my phone to take a picture of the sign, but before I could, I noticed through the door’s mesh screen, silhouetted by the windows at the end of the hallway, a shape in an armchair—head tilted back, glasses on head. I didn’t know if the person was looking at me, but I knew whoever it was was facing me. I put away my phone. The buzzer was an actual bell, and I pulled the string to sound it, trying not to lose my courage with each tug.