the Double Bind (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Sometimes Talia wondered if she really knew all that had occurred that Sunday night up in Underhill. Sometimes she wondered if anyone did.

  Quickly, she caught herself. This was paintball. A game. And, the truth was, Laurel didn't get out a whole lot. She saw David a couple of nights a week, swam with her boss, but otherwise spent most of her time with the homeless who just wanted in from the cold. Talia was practically her only serious friend. Which, of course, led to another inscrutable element in Laurel's personal history: Why had her roommate allowed her to remain a part of her life when she had consciously exiled herself from the rest of the herd? Laurel had been a part of one once. They both had been in one, traveling through school in a pack: a group of young women who dressed alike and talked alike and through sheer force of numbers could help each other endure even the most awkward or intimidating social situations. But Laurel had banished herself from the rest of her coterie ever since that nightmare at the start of her sophomore year of college.

  "Remind me," Vanessa was asking Talia now, her voice an up-and-down wave of adolescent uninterest and boredom that brought the youth minister back into the conversation. "Just why are we doing this paintball thing?"

  She leaned in toward the younger girl, her elbows on the knees of her second-skin jeans, and smiled as broadly as she could. "Because--and you will have to trust me on this one," she answered, "it will be absolutely, positively massive amounts of fun. Okay?"

  She thought to herself that she would have to tell Laurel this, too--and to say it in precisely this fashion--when she saw her next.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SOMETIMES LAUREL and her boss swam side by side and sometimes they were separated by any number of lanes. It depended upon how crowded the water was when they arrived at the pool. The two of them didn't race. They didn't speak. They were, in fact, largely oblivious to each other as they counted their laps. Once Laurel asked Katherine what she thought about as she swam, and her boss remarked that she didn't think much at all: She said that she tended to zone out, and when she considered any idea it was usually of the most prosaic nature. How quickly little cuts seemed to heal in the midst of all that chlorine. Whether her bathing cap was pinching her earlobe. Why she still hadn't mastered an underwater kick turn, despite her social worker's patient tutelage.

  Laurel didn't craft particularly great thoughts, either--she didn't ponder black holes, she didn't contemplate Wordsworth--but often she solved small problems in her life or found solutions to the dilemmas that confronted her homeless clients. How to get someone back on Temporary Assistance. Whether a woman with a baby might be eligible for a supplemental food program. Who had recently passed successfully through BEDS and might be willing to take on a roommate. On occasion, she might think about her boyfriend, and wonder whether this might actually be one with whom someday she might live.

  She had returned to Vermont on Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning she was back in the pool, a lane away from the woman she viewed as both a mentor and a boss. That morning, she found herself replaying her conversation with Pamela Marshfield in her head, just as she had for hours the day before in the car. Despite the woman's denials--despite the doubts of her mother and her aunt--she was now more confident than ever that Bobbie Crocker was Pamela's younger brother. She had no plans to fly to a cemetery in Chicago to see a tombstone or mausoleum wall with the name Robert Buchanan carved into the marble or granite--at least not yet--but that was only because she wasn't sure what this would prove to her. She tried not to think conspiratorially, but she had spent enough time with paranoid schizophrenics that clearly she was capable of imagining the worst, too. After all, even paranoids had enemies. Moreover, she kept coming back to a likelihood that would cause her to fume in the water: The Buchanans--Daisy and Tom and their daughter Pamela--had deserted a family member who needed them. A brother. A son. Like so many of the homeless she saw, Bobbie had been hung out to dry by the very people who were supposed to be there for him no matter what. And, unlike so many of those families, this clan had the resources to have provided for Bobbie when he was in need, instead of viewing him as a madman of the attic to be hidden away or discarded.

  Consequently, almost angrily, Laurel began to build a plan in her mind. She already had a lunch scheduled with Serena Sargent for Friday, but there were other people with whom she could meet as well, including some of the tenants at the Hotel New England. She would begin with the three men who had come to the funeral. And she needed to do more with the photos that Bobbie had left behind than merely glance through them while spooning the last of a cup of yogurt into her mouth or watching the news. She should produce an inventory of the images that were already printed, and try to annotate them: Who was in them, where and when they were taken. She should start to make contact sheets from the strips of negatives he had left behind and examine what was there. She should see if there were any more connections to a house in East Egg, or any other markers on the sad picaresque that had brought him from an estate on Long Island Sound to a hotel for the homeless in Burlington and, at least briefly, to the dirt road on which she nearly was murdered.

  Moreover, somewhere in his file at BEDS was his VA number--his identification as a veteran--and a Social Security number. Those digits alone might open all sorts of possibilities. She wasn't supposed to abuse her access in this manner, but Crocker was dead, and at the moment he didn't seem to have left anyone behind who might care.

  NO ONE AT BEDS thought anything of Laurel rummaging through the client files. Tom Buley, a caseworker who'd been working at BEDS probably since she had been in elementary school, was thumbing through the drawers when she wandered casually into the cramped, windowless utility room in which the social workers stored the paperwork on the homeless who arrived at their door. Tom made a catty remark about the group's ancient metal filing cabinets: They belonged in B movies about atomic bombs from the 1950s, he murmured, and must already have been very old when they were donated to BEDS. She smiled, discovered Bobbie's thin folder quickly, and spent a long moment with his intake form.

  She saw he had told Emily Young that he had completed eleventh grade, no more, and that he was a military veteran. And he was single: Not only was the box for single checked, but scribbled beside the married box--in what Laurel had to presume was Bobbie's own hand--were the words "Maybe someday!" There was no emergency contact. No sign of employment. For the question "When did you last work?" Bobbie had written in, "When people still listened to disco." He said he had no current health problems except being "too damn old," and no dental problems "cause I got no teeth." She wasn't sure what to make of the fact that Emily had allowed him to write so many comments on the form himself, or that he had ended some of his answers with exclamation points.

  Bobbie had acknowledged that he had a documented mental illness, and Emily had written on the line beside it, "Possibly bipolar, possibly paranoid, likely schizophrenic." She had checked off the boxes that said he had received mental-health counseling and mental-health case management, and that he had been treated in a psychiatric hospital. The dates were listed simply as "recent." He admitted (boasted, actually) that he had once had a serious problem with alcohol, but he had "licked it!" years earlier. He had no address and said he was chronically homeless. There was a Medicaid number, a Veterans Affairs number, and a Social Security number--all added by Emily, it appeared, at later dates.

  On a yellow Post-it note Laurel scribbled the key numbers and slid the folder back into the drawer.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT, even before they had gone to dinner, she and David went to the editor's apartment on the lake and fell into his bed with its spectacular views of the Adirondacks. Once he tried gently to climb on top of her, but as always she resisted--pinning him flat against the mattress with her hands on his chest, pushing off him for purchase as she slid up and down on his penis--and he relented. She had not had a man atop her since the summer between her first and second years in college; despite her therapist's observation t
hat this was a phobic--albeit natural--reaction to the attack, she didn't believe she ever would again.

  Then, afterward, she told David the details of her visit with Pamela Buchanan Marshfield.

  "Want a tip the next time you're interviewing someone?" he asked. She was content in a postcoital stupor. They both were. She was curled with her head in the small valley between his shoulder and his collarbone, gazing abstractedly at the way the gray hair was starting to encroach seriously on the black on his sternum. David, of course, never saw her chest because she wouldn't allow it; even when they made love she would wear a top from her extensive wardrobe of slips and chemises and elegant little tees. That night it was a silk camisole the catalog had said was the color of sunlight. She had the sense that David might be feeling slightly guilty for testing once more her receptivity to making love with him on top, and she considered reassuring him that he had done nothing unreasonable--she felt he was laudably patient with both her secret and her visible scars. But she didn't want to risk ruining the moment.

  "Absolutely," she answered simply.

  "When the person you're interviewing has finished responding to your question--said all he or she wants to say--you say, 'Uh-huh.' And then go silent. Wait them out. Don't worry, you won't have to wait very long. Nine out of ten times they'll feel compelled to add something. And, invariably, it's a real golden nugget."

  "Really?"

  "Works almost every time--even with seasoned subjects. The most important things they tell you will be after the 'uh-huh.'"

  "I'll keep that in mind."

  "Have you Googled Bobbie Crocker?"

  "I have. Buchanan, too. And I found nothing. And that was after trying every combination I could think of for Crocker and Bobbie and Buchanan and Robert. I also went to his intake form and got things like his Social Security and VA numbers."

  "As a journalist, I'm proud of you. As an ethicist, I'm not so sure."

  "Do you think it was wrong of me to get those numbers?"

  "A little dubious, maybe. But I think it's fine. Really. It's not like you're going to steal his identity," he said lightly. "Are you?"

  "I don't know, Bobbie's a pretty androgynous name..."

  "True. Especially in parts of the South."

  Instead of deodorant, David wore powder under his arms that smelled like verbena. She never noticed it except when they were in bed, but she loved the aroma.

  "I should also see if there's anything about a car accident in Grand Forks," she said.

  "You should, but it was so long ago that it's highly unlikely there is...unless..."

  He yawned, and so she poked him good-naturedly to continue.

  "Unless the kid who died with Buchanan--"

  "Assuming Buchanan really died," she interrupted.

  "Yes, assuming. But you might be able to figure that out from the Social Security number. In any case, my sense is there won't be much about a car accident unless the other kid was the son of an important family in Grand Forks, and a newspaper did a retrospective on the clan in the last decade. If you'd like, I could do a LexisNexis search at my office."

  "You wouldn't mind?"

  "No, of course not. I must confess, I don't expect we'll find anything. But it can't hurt to check."

  "Thank you."

  "And this Long Island woman said her brother was buried in Chicago, right?"

  "Yes. Rosehill. In 1939, I think."

  "Well, there should be a death certificate we can track down that would verify--or, if we can't find one, perhaps dispel--her story. Let me do a little work online. There are research services we subscribe to at the newspaper that are only available to journalists. Let's see what else we can come up with. And if that doesn't work, there's always shoe leather."

  "Shoe leather?" she asked. "Is that another search engine?"

  He laughed and she felt his chest rise. "No. If you're really excited by your new hobby, it's you going to Rosehill and examining the records. It's you going to the county courthouse in your corner of Long Island to see what papers exist. The local library, too. Come to think of it, there may be a newspaper article there if her brother really did die in a car accident."

  On the bureau opposite his bed was a photo of his two daughters at the top of Snake Mountain, a foothill to the south with a flat summit. Their hair was windblown and wild, their round little faces were smudged with grime from their hike, and they looked more than a bit like beautiful, feral children. David had taken the picture that summer, and Laurel imagined him kneeling five or six feet away from them, not even the slightest bit winded. He was trim and athletic and strong: He would live a long time. She guessed that he would outlast her own father by decades, and suddenly she was very glad for those girls. They had a father who was committed to them and who took good care of himself. The man might not be a part of her life in the distant future, she thought, but he would most certainly be a part of his children's.

  IT WAS A LONG SHOT and Laurel expected nothing. HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, prohibited health-care providers from revealing information about their patients to outsiders not connected to the individual's ongoing care. Its purpose was to protect people's privacy and ensure that their medical records were never used against them or became public without their consent.

  Nevertheless, the next day, Thursday, Laurel did call the state hospital in Waterbury to see if anyone there would tell her anything about a patient named Bobbie Crocker. No one could--or, to be precise, no one would. She spoke with a nice young guy she imagined to be about her age who worked in patient care, and then a polite but guarded assistant in the director's office. She explained to them both that she was from BEDS and told them exactly why she was interested in any information they felt they could offer.

  They could offer none.

  Neither was even allowed to acknowledge that an old man named Bobbie Crocker had once been a patient at their hospital.

  LAUREL WAS GOING to the darkroom that evening, but she stopped by her apartment on the way there and discovered a note that Talia had left for her on the coffee table in the living room.

  What's up, stranger? Is it my breath? I should be back around 6 or 6:30. Let's have dinner and catch up. I want to hear all about your trip home.

  xoxoxo, T

  She hadn't seen Talia since before she had left for Long Island. Her roommate had been out with friends on Tuesday night, and she'd spent Wednesday night at David's. They might have had breakfast together on Wednesday morning after Laurel had been to the pool, but because she hadn't been to the office in a couple of days she went straight to the shelter. It was almost unheard of for the two of them to go this long without connecting when they both were in town. She considered changing her plans and not going to the darkroom until after dinner, but she decided in the end that she didn't want to wait that long. Besides, she figured she would see Talia on Friday, if only so she could get the details on their excursion the next day to play paintball. And so she scribbled a short note with her apologies, and then packed up Bobbie Crocker's negatives and prints and even the snapshots. She had decided that she would keep everything together in her cabinet beside the UVM darkroom in the event she wanted to cross-reference a pair of images. Then she padded softly down the steps and back into the brisk autumn air. She'd planned to get something to eat while she was home, but in the end she hadn't wanted to risk it. The longer she was there, the greater the chance that Talia might return--and then it might be hours before she would get to work.

  SHE COULD SEE how badly the negatives were damaged from the contact sheets, but dutifully she continued to clean and print them, hoping in each case for the best. Some of the photographs, until she found someone willing to restore them digitally, would have great scratches and cracks running through the center, or whole sections smeared and blacked out. At one point, a student five or six years younger than Laurel who was working that night in the university's large darkroom as well peered into one of her tray
s. He was a chunky little character in a baggy T-shirt with a line of studs along the cartilage of one of his ears and waves of shaggy hair the color of a rooster's comb. In the red light of the darkroom, he looked almost like he had been pulled from the pages of a comic book.

  "That's Eisenhower," he told her triumphantly, pointing at the image in the tray.

  "I know," she murmured. She recalled the story she'd once heard about Bobbie claiming that this president owed him money.

  "You didn't take those, then. They must be ancient."

  "Not ancient. But old."

  "Very." He gazed for a moment into the chemical bath and then added, "That's the World's Fair. Nineteen sixty-four. Queens. That globe thing is still standing, you know. It's by Shea Stadium."

  "Right." She kept her voice as flat as she could without being obviously rude. She hoped she merely sounded busy. Preoccupied. Focused.

  "Who took them?"

  "Old fellow. Recently passed away."

  "He sure didn't take very good care of his shit."

  "No," agreed Laurel, "he didn't."

  "Too bad," he said. "He was good."