Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

“Are you kidding?”

“I’m not. It was awesome. You have no idea what you missed. I may never be able to sit up again. I may stay like this forever. But it was worth every gash and cut and bruise. We started out really badly. Whit came along-”

“Whit?”

“Uh-huh. Thank God. I needed another chaperone, you know-and a captain for a second team. And Whit took it incredibly seriously-more seriously than I did. It is so clearly a guy thing. Women can do it. But it’s not instinctive with us the way it is with guys. He took a team and I took a team. And for the first two hours he just spanked us. I mean spanked us hard. It was pretty harsh, trust me. But then I figured it out. I just, like, totally got it: You actually need to view it like chess at first and plan your moves. And then, all at once, as soon as you’re in position, you stop thinking and you pretend you’re at the wildest party you’ve ever been at in your whole life, you’re on the dance floor, and you are totally out of control. You just give it up completely. And once I understood that? Well, Whit was a dead man for the rest of the day. We were unstoppable, and I didn’t have the kids on my team who live for their PlayStations. I did it with soldiers like Michelle. You know Michelle, right? Shy little Michelle? Well, we took no prisoners. None. Zip, zero, nada.”

“It all sounds sort of violent,” said Laurel.

“Sort of? Hello? I found myself snaking through a quarter mile of mud and pricker bushes on my stomach so I could sneak up behind a half-dozen teenagers I’m supposed to be mentoring in the ways of the Lord. When I rose up to nail them, I heard myself screaming they better drop their rifles or their brains would be roadkill.”

“Did you really say that?”

Talia paused. “Actually, I think I said something much worse. But we won’t go there.”

“And they dropped their rifles?”

“Well, if you want to know the truth, I didn’t really give them the option. I think Matthew tried to get off a round before I gunned him down. But he didn’t have a prayer. None of them did. I torched them all. Next time, you have to join us. You simply must.”

Laurel smiled politely and hoped she looked sincere. But she wasn’t sure that she did. “Okay,” she murmured. “I’ll really try.”

“I’m serious,” Talia said, exhaling loudly, contentedly, despite her aches and pains. “And I know I owe you a lamp. Is there any other wreckage? I dragged Merlin back downstairs before I could really survey the damage.”

“Just the lamp. And you don’t owe me anything. Don’t even think about it.”

Talia pushed her ragged body back up into a sitting position, resting her weight on her elbows. It was apparent to Laurel that this small feat had taken serious effort. “Well, I’ll buy us a new one. And I should clean up this mess myself. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can bend over.”

“You stay here,” Laurel insisted. “I can pick up the pieces. Do you want something to drink?”

“Morphine.”

“Will wine be okay? Or juice?”

“Wine’s fine. But crush an analgesic in it…or morphine.”

“Okay,” she said, hoping they really did have a bottle of wine in the kitchen. She honestly wasn’t sure.

“Tell me something,” Talia said suddenly.

“Sure.”

“Why haven’t I seen you since you got back from your mom’s?”

“Is that true?” she asked, though she knew that it was.

“I can’t believe you’re pissed at me,” Talia continued, “because I am far too adorable for anyone ever to be pissed at me. At least for more than, like, a minute. But someone with a less-healthy ego might wonder what’s going on here. I mean, I haven’t seen you since before you left for Long Island, and then today you left me to the lions.”

Laurel felt an eddy of autumn wind in the room, and so she closed the window and locked it. She thought for a moment before answering, because she was of two minds. On the one hand, she had always taken a small amount of pride, perhaps unjustified, in the reality that she was attentive and responsible in the eyes of her family and friends. She didn’t let people down. On the other hand, she wondered if the reason she forgot about paintball wasn’t that she was so focused on Bobbie Crocker’s work; perhaps it was because a part of her understood that the last thing in the world anyone should expect of her was a desire to run through the woods with a toy gun. Perhaps she forgot because Talia should never have asked her to join the group in the first place.

“I didn’t mean to leave you to the lions. And I’m certainly not mad at you. Why would I be?” she asked. She recognized a small iciness in her voice and did nothing to rein it in.

“So you’ve simply been busy.”

“Yes.”

“With David?”

“No.”

“Not with your dead homeless man, I hope.”

“Why do people refer to him that way? He wasn’t homeless! We found him a home-”

“Hey, Laurel, chill. I didn’t mean-”

“And why must being homeless be anyone’s sole distinguishing feature? I notice you didn’t describe him as a photographer. Or a veteran. Or a comic. He was very funny, you know. Frankly…”

“Frankly what?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s nothing to say. Just…nothing.”

Talia lurched slowly to her feet and narrowed her eyes as if to say, I’ve had enough of this, thank you very much. Laurel hadn’t noticed it before, but the girl had a gibbous-shaped bruise the color of eggplant on the side of her neck. “I think I’m going to go take a hot bath,” Talia said quietly. “I can get my own wine.” Then her roommate limped past her into the kitchen, where Laurel heard her reaching into the cabinet for a glass and into the refrigerator for the wine. Laurel waited, unmoving, until she heard their bathroom door close. Talia did not exactly slam it, but she gave the door a demonstrable thwack.

She had a nagging sense that she didn’t feel quite badly enough that Talia and she had snapped at each other-that she just might have overreacted when her friend had referred to Bobbie Crocker as homeless. But this had been a stressful week, hadn’t it? And it had been a very long day, right? And, besides, what did any of it matter when Crocker’s work-when her work-might be in jeopardy? When there remained negatives left to print? The most important thing to do now, Laurel decided, was to return to the UVM darkroom and find a secure place for Bobbie Crocker’s negatives and photographs. Just because someone hadn’t tried to take them that afternoon didn’t mean someone wouldn’t try to steal them tomorrow.

The rest-Talia and David and Mr. Terrance J. Leckbruge-would just have to wait. The mess on the living room floor would just have to wait. And so she shouted through the bathroom door that she was leaving again, and then she started down the old Victorian’s creaky wooden stairs.

BEFORE PACKING AWAY Crocker’s photos at the UVM darkroom-the finished ones that he had kept with him all those years, as well as the negatives Laurel had printed herself-she ripped a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad and scribbled a time line indicating roughly when they had been taken. Most of the dates were guesswork based on Internet research: The Hula-Hoop had been invented in 1958 and the craze had run its course by the early 1960s. Assuming that the photograph of the two hundred girls with their Hula-Hoops on the football field had been taken at the pinnacle of the toy’s popularity, it had probably been snapped between 1959 and 1961. Laurel ’s aunt Joyce had looked at the liner notes of her cousin Martin’s Camelot CD and given Laurel the rough years when Julie Andrews had played Guinevere. Other dates were even more imprecise: Eartha Kitt was ageless, but Laurel guessed she was about forty in the portrait of her Crocker had taken outside Carnegie Hall-a guess based entirely on Laurel’s sense that Kitt looked about the age she had been when she had played Catwoman on the old Batman TV show, and the performer was thirty-nine that year. Sometimes Laurel gave a picture a date based on nothing more than her profoundly limited knowledge of vintage clothing and cars.