In 1973, when Mr. Barlow resigned from Phillips Exeter Academy and moved to New York City, he was forty-four. I was thirty-one, a published novelist—I was writing my second novel—but with Elliot Barlow’s resignation from the academy, it was high time for me to get out of town. The snowshoer said I’d prolonged my adolescence by sharing the faculty apartment in Amen Hall with him into my thirties. It’s unclear what I would have been prolonging if I’d moved in with Nana and Dottie. Those two old ladies would have welcomed me, and what a wonderful workplace for a writer it would have been—all those unused rooms I could have written in. But the prospect of my sleeping, full-time, in the attic bedroom of the Front Street house was forbidding. No one should sleep with ghosts every night, not even writers.

Yet my most convincing reason for leaving the town of Exeter was an actual (not a ghostly) encounter. One late night, I drove out to Roland’s to pick up a pizza for me and Mr. Barlow—thus sparing the snowshoer the possible temptation of going to Roland’s as a woman. It was late at night, even by Roland’s standards, but I’d called ahead and ordered the pizza. It was a quiet night; there were no drunken thugs lurking in the darkened parking lot, waiting to accost me as I carried the pizza to my car. There was only the woman with the baby carriage. The woman was walking toward me, out of the darkness—as if she and her baby were picking up a late-night pizza, too. I refused to be intimidated by her brazenness as a ghost. I should have known this woman wasn’t a ghost.

“So now you’re going public—you’ve got balls, I’ll give you that,” I said to her, but she wasn’t the woman from The Wrong Car—she was the wrong woman, an actual woman with an actual baby. Scant light from Roland’s reached the parking lot, but the woman I’d frightened pushed the baby carriage into what weak light there was. Her moonfaced baby was wide awake and staring up at me, with the noirish indifference some babies have, but the woman was clearly afraid. “Oh, I’m so sorry—I mistook you for someone else,” I said to her.