The Double Bind

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Well, since you ask, Mom thinks Laurel is way too young for you.” His ex-wife, an attorney, was in court that morning.

  “Why is your mother even worrying about the age of the women I’m seeing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Wrong question. Forgive me. Does it bother you that your mother is, suddenly, unnecessarily interested in Laurel’s age?”

  “Oh, it’s not sudden.” She dropped the magazine back into the rack beside the couch and yawned, then stretched. She leaned her head against the side of his arm.

  “Thank you for letting me know,” he said simply.

  “No problem.”

  “So…does it bother you?”

  “Laurel’s age? Nope.”

  “Does it bother Cindy?”

  “She is, like, totally unaware of age. For all she knows, Laurel is Mom’s age.”

  “I think you can give your sister more credit than that.”

  “Not much.”

  “For a kid with a sore toe, you are impressively sassy this morning,” he said.

  “Hey, it was pretty gross last night.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So?”

  He pulled his arm free and wrapped it around her in a hug. “So, nothing. I’m glad we’re taking care of this.”

  After a long moment in which neither of them said anything, she asked, “You seeing Laurel this weekend?”

  “I am.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Saturday, too? Or Sunday?”

  He thought carefully about her inquiry. Was she asking because she wanted to see Laurel, or because she was worried that his girlfriend was going to impinge upon their time as a family? She and her sister had both been more clingy ever since their mother had announced she was going to marry Eric Tourneau, another lawyer in her firm, in November. Marissa probably didn’t view Laurel as an impediment to her parents ever reconciling—a reconciliation that was wholly inconceivable even before his ex-wife and Eric had fallen in love, but an idea that he understood a child might cling to tenaciously nevertheless—but perhaps she felt Laurel was stealing away her father’s attention.

  “I’m going to be with you and your sister this weekend,” he said, hoping he sounded casual. He had the girls, as usual, from the moment he picked them up on Saturday until they left for school on Tuesday morning. He hadn’t planned on Laurel and his daughters spending any time together in the next couple of days: He was having dinner with Laurel that evening precisely because he wanted to be able to focus entirely on his girls over the weekend. He had carefully compartmentalized his life, and an advantage, he had discovered, to dating a woman as young as Laurel was that she made no demands that he contemplate marriage. She felt no pressure yet to have children because she still had lots of time. Whenever he dated women even close to his age, he felt on the first date that he was being scrutinized as a marriage prospect; if he passed—which invariably he would because he was breathing and employed—by the second or the third the subject of children would arise. And the reality was that he had no intention of becoming a father again. It was not that he didn’t love children; rather, it was that he was devoted to his two girls and would never do anything to make them feel replaced or replaceable. His own father had a daughter and a son from his second marriage when David was still shuttling between his parents’ homes as a child, and he always felt like a second-class citizen after they arrived.

  Was this fair to Laurel? Probably not. In this regard—and, yes, in other ways, too—he knew that he was not an especially suitable companion for her. For many women. What he viewed as a mere compartmentalization, other people had told him was coldness. He was emotionally indifferent, one girlfriend advised him when they were breaking up. Given Laurel’s own wounds, this may have been a particularly damning flaw. But he was confident that she didn’t see it this way. He thought that precisely because of her own need to cocoon, she saw his distance as an indication that he was an apt partner. And, of course, his age helped. He knew she desired only older men, and he understood why.

  Did he feel badly about the way he remained so detached? Yes, on occasion. But not badly enough that he had any intention of changing.

  As early as that morning in the pediatrician’s office, however, he had begun to question Laurel’s interest in Bobbie Crocker. And so when Marissa brought her up, it crossed his mind that it might actually be good for his girlfriend to be spending a little more time with his kids. Anything to focus her interest away from that old photographer who had died.

  “Why are you wondering about Laurel?” he asked Marissa.

  “I need a headshot.”

  “Excuse me?” He honestly wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly.

  “You know, a picture that makes me look really professional. I’m going to audition for The Miracle Worker, and I’m going to be up against like fifty other girls for Helen Keller. It will be a real cattle call, so I figure I need all the help I can get.”

  “And you want Laurel to take your picture?”

  “I could pay her my allowance for the next couple of months.”

  “Oh, good Lord, I doubt she’d accept money.”

  “Do you think she’d mind? I don’t. I know it’s a huge favor and all…”

  He exhaled, relieved that the whole reason she was bringing up his girlfriend was because she wanted a headshot. “I wouldn’t call it a huge favor,” he said.

  “Well. It would still be a favor. Especially if I didn’t pay her. And Laurel has already done tons for me.”

  “Tons?”

  “She knows every cool clothing store in town, and she must have taken me to them all. You saw the skirts and scarves she got me when we were together.”

  “I remember.”

  “I think that’s what got Mom really jazzed up. The idea that your college-aged girlfriend—”

  “Laurel finished college four years ago. Your mother knows that. She has a master’s in social work. Your mother knows that, too.”

  Marissa thought about this briefly. Then: “I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Laurel sometimes seems a little, I don’t know, faraway.”

  He knew his older child was perceptive and empathetic, and so he wasn’t surprised that she had sensed that something was slightly wrong with Laurel. A little off. In his opinion, Laurel was always going to be a beautiful but wounded little bird. Nevertheless, he wasn’t about to discuss what had happened in Underhill. Not that moment, anyway. Someday, maybe. Marissa needed to know that the world was a dangerous place. Even Vermont. But he wasn’t about to go into any details. “Oh, I guess like the rest of us she can be sad sometimes,” he answered simply, hoping he didn’t sound evasive.

  “Not sad. It’s different than sad.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s that she’s…wispy.”

  “Wispy?”

  “Like the curtains in Mom’s dining room? The ones you can sort of see through?”

  “I know the ones.”

  “But I really do like her. You know that, right?”

  “I do.”

  A woman with a clipboard—a nurse Laurel’s age—gently called, “Marissa?” and scanned the small crowd for a reaction.

  “That would be us,” he said, raising an arm, and then—because it struck him as funny—his daughter’s.

  Marissa giggled at the idea she was a puppet, but turned to him as she rose to her feet. “So, Laurel can take my headshot?”

  “We’ll ask her,” he said, but he guessed she would. And he was glad. Suddenly, he was intrigued by the idea of Marissa sharing her interest in drama with Laurel. And he liked the notion of Laurel doing something—anything—in her free time that did not involve the work of a schizophrenic photographer.

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  She jumped up and down two or three times in quick succession and pantomimed a short staccato clap with her hands. Then, abr
uptly, she flinched and closed her eyes because, clearly, she had just landed exactly the wrong way on her toe.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LAUREL HADN’T FOCUSED on Serena at Bobbie’s funeral the week before, and they’d chatted only long enough to reconnect and set up a date for lunch.

  When Laurel saw her on Friday, Serena looked older than she would have expected, but the once homeless teenager looked healthier, too. Serena was already at the restaurant when Laurel arrived, a bistro on the waterfront not far from the diner where she worked. She was seated at a table that faced the ferry dock, and one of the large boats had just drifted into the slip from the New York side of the lake. The passengers—mostly tourists—were streaming into the midday autumn sun. The boat was big, but there were so many people disembarking that it nevertheless reminded Laurel of the clown cars at the circus.

  Serena’s eyes were the vibrant blue that Laurel recalled, but her cheekbones had disappeared into a face that had softened and grown round. Her hair still cascaded over her shoulders, but at some point Serena had made it a shade or two blonder than Laurel remembered. When Serena saw her, she raised her eyebrows in recognition, stood halfway up, and gave her a small salute from her chair. The young woman’s pink T-shirt fell to the base of her ribs, and she had a glistening stud in her naval that emerged from a small rope of flesh like a rivet on jeans. She was wearing a pair of thin silver hoops in her ears, each of which was the size of a bracelet.

  “We go years without seeing each other, and now twice in two weeks,” Serena said.

  Laurel had brought along the eight-by-ten photographs of Serena she’d taken years earlier, and she pulled them from her bag soon after they’d taken their seats. “I have a surprise for you,” she said, and she watched Serena’s eyes grow wide as she began to study the images.

  “I was this close to the edge. Man, heroin chic was never a good look on me,” Serena murmured, shaking her head in slight disbelief. Then—afraid that she had hurt Laurel’s feelings—she added quickly, “I mean, they’re great photos. I just look kind of scary. You know?”

  “I do know. Heroin chic isn’t a good look on anybody,” Laurel answered.

  “Can I keep these?”

  “That’s why I brought them.”

  “Thank you. Someday I’ll show these to my kids to scare them straight. Then again, I might not. Who wants to see their mother looking like this?”

  “You were in a bad place and it wasn’t your fault. You landed on your feet.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I got lucky. My aunt moved back and took me in. Now I have to find a place of my own. It’s time.”

  It dawned on Laurel that she didn’t know if this aunt with whom Serena was living was her mother’s or her father’s sister, but since her mother had disappeared when Serena was so young Laurel had a feeling the woman had to be related to her dad. And so she asked Serena if she ever saw her father or spoke to him.

  “No, he keeps his distance. And my aunt keeps us apart. She knows her brother’s a creep. One time he sent me a check. I wasn’t going to cash it, but my aunt said I should. And so I tried. It bounced. Another time he showed up uninvited—and drunk—at Easter, but there was a big group of us at my aunt’s, and even wasted he could see he wasn’t wanted. So he split. But he knows where I work and where I live. He’ll appear again.”

  Serena watched the two waitresses chatting at the bar while they waited and smiled. “Man, if I gave service like this, I’d be fired.”

  Eventually, one of waitresses greeted them, and Laurel ordered a garden salad and a diet soda. She was still feeling the weight of the massive breakfast she’d eaten.

  “How fresh is your curried egg salad?” asked Serena.

  “Very,” smiled the waitress, a rail of a girl who seemed too young to work there, and Serena agreed to give it a try.

  They were surrounded by businessmen and women whose offices looked out on the lake, and tourists who were visiting Burlington. The two of them talked about their jobs, and Serena told Laurel about her boyfriend. She was dating a guy who worked the night shift at the ice cream factory in Waterbury, but had just applied for a position in the marketing department. Serena thought he had a shot because he was sharp and the company was more interested in good ideas than whether someone had a college degree—and, apparently, he had a lot of experience with ice cream. Laurel described her relationship with David, and wasn’t completely surprised when Serena remarked, “It’s kind of casual, huh?” Laurel thought she sounded disappointed for her.

  “Yes,” she said simply. “It’s kind of casual.”

  Finally, Laurel brought up Bobbie Crocker, and told Serena how he had died with snapshots of the country club where she had spent a large part of her youth in his possession, and how she believed he had grown up a child of plenty in a mansion just across the cove. Laurel asked her to recount the story of how she had found him.

  “It was real clear he didn’t have a place to go,” Serena said. “I mean, he was supposed to be somewhere. The hospital doesn’t just open the door and say, ‘Fly, little bird, fly.’ I’ve lived in Waterbury long enough to know there’s always a plan for the patients. He was supposed to go someplace. He was supposed to be with someone. But he couldn’t tell me where or with who. Or he wouldn’t. Who knows? He couldn’t even tell me how he’d gotten to Burlington. A bus? Hitchhiked? Beats me. The thing is, with a lot of these people it only takes the slightest wobble and they fall off the horse. They stop taking their meds. But I liked him a lot, and I thought with a little help he could probably get along on his own. I didn’t guess he needed the hospital anymore. Not really. He wasn’t a danger to anyone. That’s why I brought him to BEDS. I talk to enough troopers and sheriffs at the diner to know that’s all they would have done.” She leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.

  “What did you like about him?” Laurel asked.

  “Oh, he was very kind. I mean, he kept wanting to help me. It was, of course, a little insane.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he offered to make phone calls to the presidents of record labels. I told him I didn’t sing, but that didn’t matter. He went on and on about all the record-label presidents he knew who owed him favors, and how he could get me a recording contract with a single phone call. Why was he doing this? Well, because I gave him extra coleslaw. And then seconds for free. That’s it. I mean, this old man comes in and he has barely enough money for a grilled cheese! And, you know, he was very funny—despite the fact he had to have been starving. He strolls in that night telling me knock-knock jokes about homeless people, and how many homeless it takes to screw in a lightbulb. And because he had, like, no money, he kept giving me advice as a tip. ‘Here’s a tip,’ he would say. ‘One good turn gets most of the blanket.’ It was corny, but sweet. Unfortunately, he just wouldn’t tell me where he was supposed to be. That’s the thing. I have no idea where he’d been sleeping before he wound up on the street.”

  “You’re right,” Laurel said. “There had to be someplace between the hospital and BEDS. Obviously, they released him to someone besides us.”

  Serena shrugged. “I kept asking him where he lived. And he finally rubbed his eyes really hard—like a little kid, you know, using his fists—and said he was pretty sure he was going to sleep that night where he’d slept the night before.”

  “And that was?”

  “The boiler room of that hotel just up the hill. That’s a ridiculous place for someone to end up. I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but I didn’t want him to spend another night in that room.”

  The waitress returned with their drinks and momentarily they both grew quiet. Laurel watched Serena wrestle her straw free of its paper.

  “So, you brought him to us,” she said.

  “Yup. And he didn’t mind at all. You hear all about homeless people being real resistant to coming in off the street—hey, look at what I was like—but he was happy as a clam.”

  �
�Did he understand where you were taking him?”

  “He did. He just wanted a little assurance that no one would take his bag from him. I asked him what was in it that was so important, and he said his pictures.”

  “When did you see him next?”

  “Oh, I didn’t see him a whole lot before he died. Once his caseworker—a woman named Emily, you probably know her—brought him by the diner so he could thank me. She’s very nice. And another time I saw him at that candle vigil you do on Church Street just before Christmas. You know, the march where you say the names of the homeless?”

  Laurel smiled. “You were there? I’m sorry I didn’t see you.”

  “Yeah, I was in the crowd. I was too shy to say a name in the church, but I had my candle and I marched. Hell, look what you did for me.”

  “As I recall, you spent about a week and a half at the shelter. We really didn’t do all that much.”

  “But it was a week and a half when I really needed a place,” Serena said adamantly, meeting Laurel’s eyes with an intensity that surprised her.

  “Did Bobbie ever tell you anything about his sister?”

  “His sister? I didn’t even know he had a sister.”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t see her at the funeral. Is she alive?”

  “She is.”

  “You know her?”

  “A bit. I met her last week.”

  “Is she a little wacky, too?”

  Laurel thought about this briefly before responding. “No, she’s not. At least not like Bobbie. She’s actually pretty nasty.”

  “I guess she and Bobbie weren’t real close.”

  “No, they weren’t. He ever mention any family at all?”

  “Not a word,” Serena said, and her voice grew solemn, as if she were trying to conjure in her mind a family for Bobbie Crocker. “Not a single word.”

  “What about that first night he came into the diner? Think back. When you were asking him if he had a place to go, what else did he say?”

  Their food arrived, and Laurel could see that Serena was contemplating that August night when Bobbie had appeared at the counter with his duffel and a pocketful of change.