Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

“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, abruptly, she flinched and closed her eyes because, clearly, she had just landed exactly the wrong way on her toe.

L AUREL 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.