Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

S OMETIMES 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 that 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.