Patti Callahan Henry - Friend Request: The True Story that Inspired the Novel And Then I Found You

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In the middle of an ordinary day, the extraordinary happened, and my family will never be the same.

On That DayApril 20th, 2010I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, with my husband, our daughter, and our two sons. My sister, Barbi, lived an hour away in North Georgia, with her husband and her two sons. At that time, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the town where Barbi and I grew up, lived a girl we didnt know. Catherine Janelle Barbee was twenty years old when she sat down at the computer on that April morning and sent two Facebook friend requestsone to me, Patti Callahan Henry, and one to my sister, Barbi Callahan Burris.

Then she waited.

I have rituals; most writers do. Id sent my kids off to school and settled into my office to write. To tell a story. My office held a jumble of objects, large and small, all designed to foster my creative habits: photos of my kids displayed in colorful wooden frames; name tags Id collected from book conferences and speaking engagements; leaves, twigs, acorns, shells, and starfish gathered aimlessly during walks. Candles, too, of course. Some burnt to the bottom and some newly lit. And the books, everywhere booksstacked on my desk, piled on the floor, and in the extra chair that now no one could sit in. These were the touchstones that I needed to ground myself after disappearing into words and story.

On that April morning, I did the things I do every ordinary morning: poured a cup of coffee, lit a candle, wrote a few pages in my journal, read the Poem of the Day in The Writers Almanac , checked my Facebook, and scanned my e-mail. After that clearing of my deskand my headI opened my novel-in-progress and tried to find my way into the story. But that morning, before I could disappear into that place where I tell the truth and make things up at the same time, my eyes caught an e-mail from my sister, Barbi. Odd. There was no content in the body of the e-mail, just a question in the subject line. Who is Catherine Janelle Barbee?

It was 9:30 A.M .

I have no idea, I typed.

She is your friend on Facebook and asked to be mine, Barbi quickly shot back.

She friended me this morning, I wrote. And usually when I dont know someone, I assume it is book related. I went to her page and shes from Philadelphia and shes harmless.

Subject over, I thought.

Time for fiction .

I love to write and I also find ways to avoid it. This is an affliction I dont understand, but one I believe is fairly universal among writers. If someone demanded I quit writing I would fight to the death to prove that stories are essential to humanity, not just to me. And yet, I also find all kinds of excuses to put off the workcleaning out the closet, folding laundry, browsing Facebook, and the kind of research that takes me from one end of the Internet to the other when Im only looking for a single fact. But I didnt have anything to research that morning and I wasnt avoiding the work at all. I glanced again at Barbis e-mail.

Janelle the name was an echo of the past, of good-byes and heartache and blind faith.

Twenty years before, Barbi had given birth to a baby girl. She placed this beautiful child for adoption with a chosen, but anonymous family. It was a closed adoption where the child could, at twenty-one, return to find the birth parents, but the birth parents could not (legally) find her, ever. And that was the hardest partthe ever. The birth mother, Barbi, could never look for her birth child. She could never find the exquisite daughter she thought of every day. The baby she loved dearly. The one she had named Janelle.

Living with uncertainty and the unknown is part of our messy, human lives. Uncertainty is the distraction that pulls us from our chosen paths and causes us to wander . Unknowing is the darkness we all avoid. How do we live with these twins of fear? How do we get the ground under our feet when we feel like were in a free fall? My sister had found her way with faith, and I believed her strength indomitable. Through the years, I thought about Janelle, and I wondered where she was and how she was living. Did she love the color pink as my own daughter did? Was she a gymnast as my sister had been? Did she have our Irish temperament and laughter? Was her hair blond and straight like my sisters or curly like my own? I wondered about her parents, and if she had siblings. I wondered if she was happy.

I tried not to think too much about Janelle as there was nothing I could do to find a single answer to the questions that our family all longed to know. And all this time, I understood that my pain in this unknowing could not possibly compare to Barbis.

Half avoiding my tangled novel in progress, and half curious about who had the middle name, Janelle , I returned to Facebook to look up my new friend , Catherine.

I write novels where synchronicities are catalysts to action, where the mystery of chance makes magic. If I dont know where a story is going or how it will unfold, if I am lost in the muddy middle, I have come to understand that the story isnt finished. If the structure is unraveling, more needs to be revealed: hidden scenes; motivations I dont understand, characters I havent met, or secrets that havent been told.

I claim to believe that life is a story, yet I also know that our lives are a narrative without visible structure. When the synchronicity happens and the mystery unfolds in real life, I am skeptical. Which in many ways means that I trust a story more than I do an unfolding life. I read Catherines full name again: Catherine Janelle Barbee. How could this girl, whose middle name was Janelle, have the last name Barbee? A cosmic hint at best. A cruel joke at worst. It was too, too much.

This is the thing when we are mired in the middle of our liveswe can miss the mystery and beauty of our own story.

Almost.

I clicked on Catherines photo and found a profile of a young girl kissing a bulldog. I tried to imagine the dog moving away so I could see her eyes, her face and smile, but she was hidden from me. Preoccupied, as I usually am, the unconscious part of me knew that something more was at work here. I get that feeling at timesthat something is working through me and I have nothing to do with it all. Ill read a sentence I wrote and wont remember writing it. And that was the bee-buzz in the gut feeling that daysomeone prodded me forward even as my thoughts and mind were somewhere else altogether. Then I saw one photoI still know the photoCatherine staring at the camera with a wide smile. My body knew before my mind understood. This happensour bodies tell us a truth, and we can ignore it and turn the static up or we can get quiet and listen. This time, I listened.