Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

Nevertheless, she felt confident now that no one could possibly question what she knew was true: not David, not Katherine, not Talia. No one ever again would question her sanity.

WHEN SERENA REJOINED her in the booth, Laurel pushed the portfolio case toward her, reminding her to tell no one she had it. As soon as Laurel had finished speaking, however, she could see by the look on Serena’s face that she had been wrong, completely wrong, a moment earlier: People were still going to doubt her. It was clear what the woman was thinking, and Laurel knew more or less what her friend was going to say before Serena had even opened her mouth.

“ Laurel, you know there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you…and I will hang on to these for you. I will. It’s fine. But honestly, girl, do you really believe for a second that someone is going to try to steal these pictures from you?”

“Yes. And I don’t believe it. I know it.”

“But-”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“No, of course I don’t. But I do think you may be, I don’t know, overreacting.”

Laurel repeated the word. It was long. A euphemism for misbehavior. For inappropriate behavior. “Well, then,” she asked. “What would you do? What would you have me do?”

“Come on, Laurel, don’t take that tone with me. I’m just…”

“Just what? Worried?”

“No. Okay, yes. Worried. I’m worried.”

“Then tell me. What would you do?”

“Well, for starters I wouldn’t get so freaked out,” Serena said, but after that opening Laurel really didn’t pay much attention to the rest of her speech. Serena was sweet and she was well intentioned, and Laurel knew now that she couldn’t trust her. Her friend didn’t realize the importance of the images she had with her. As soon as Leckbruge or some minion appeared, Serena would turn them over to him. The whole portfolio case. Of course it would be an act of naïveté on her part, not betrayal. But it would have precisely the same effect. The pictures-and all of her work and Bobbie’s-would be gone.

And so Laurel thanked her for her time and her conversation, and when she left she took the portfolio case with her. She was polite. So polite that Serena walked her to the diner’s front door and assumed, when they parted, that Laurel was going to heed her advice and relax.

SHE WOULDN’T HAVE been able to tell what it was from the negative. At least not for sure. It only started to become clear on the contact sheet.

It was when she first printed the photograph Sunday night, yet another resin-coated print, that the image became unmistakable in the orange light of the darkroom. She studied it for a long moment in the chemical bath, not hypnotized, but absorbed. Incapable of looking away.

She thought of something Shem Wolfe had said to her that afternoon about Bobbie, and she felt her face flush:

He had his own devils.

Shem had been referring to Bobbie’s mental illness, but the word devil came back to her now-along with the other words that had dogged her for years. Cunt. Twat. Pussy. Gash. Fish cunt. Slut cunt. Dead cunt. She saw in the calm waters of the darkroom tray the tattoo. Here was the picture Bobbie had told Paco Hidalgo he’d taken. What she had presumed all these years had been a mere human skull-albeit one with fangs-she saw now was in actuality a tattoo of the devil: skull-like, yes, but it had ears. And it was breathing. Hence the smoke.

And Bobbie Crocker had known this man and photographed this image: a devil amid stubble, an earlobe hovering above it like a planet. He was either Bobbie’s son, or a friend of Bobbie’s son.

Because, apparently, even rapists had friends. Murderers, too.

This was the devil who had frightened Bobbie Crocker: One of the very men who had tried to rape her. And then driven a van in reverse to try to kill her.

SHE WAS WEAK when she finished up in the darkroom, but unless she went downtown into Burlington the only places that were going to be open this late on a Sunday night were the fast-food restaurants and the doughnut shops on the neon-lit strip just east of the campus. It was after eleven.

She hadn’t been home since early that morning. It hadn’t even crossed her mind to stop by her apartment after she had left Serena because she’d wanted to go straight to the darkroom.

Now she drove to the old Victorian and found a parking spot she could have taken right in front of the building, but-almost reflexively-she continued past it. She had noticed there were lights on both in her apartment and in Whit’s, and it was evident that her housemates were awake. This was unfortunate: She didn’t want Talia or Whit to hear her arrive because she didn’t want to have to speak to either of them. And so she parked instead at the far end of the block, near the corner. Her plan was to wait an hour or two, until they had both gone to sleep. Then she would find the keys to the house’s entrance and her own apartment, and have them ready in her fingers well before she reached the front walkway. She would take off her clogs and hold them in her hands, too, so she wouldn’t make any noise as she approached the door or tiptoed up the stairway to Talia’s and her corner of the house.

And, just in case, she told herself that she would undress and climb into bed in the dark. Wouldn’t even turn on the living room light. And did she really need to eat a couple of crackers? Probably not.

None of this meticulous planning would end up mattering, however, because she fell asleep in the front seat of her car. She awoke once, a little before 3 a.m., her back and neck throbbing-was this what some of her clients experienced, she wondered, or did they have the common sense, at least, to crawl into the backseat to doze?-and considered going inside. She had just seen in a dream an Underhill forest alive with flying things: birds and insects and swirling leaves. The birds had the heads of small devils-devil skulls, really, the devil from the tattoo-and she was their prey. She believed that she was trying to walk her bicycle through the tumult, though she didn’t recall if there had been a path on which she might ever have been riding. Eventually, she thought, she had been swamped by the swirling creatures. They had attacked her in all the places where she had been hurt by Bobbie Crocker’s son and his partner seven years earlier, and when she awoke there was an ache-and this, she concluded, was a phantom pain, because why would she experience any discomfort there from a nap in the night in her car?-on the left side of her chest.

Still, she could not bring herself to open the car door and return to her apartment. The dream had frightened her almost to the point of immobility, brought her to the verge of paralysis. And there was so much she wanted to do -so much she had to do- that she was too agitated to move. Emily Young was finally back from the Caribbean and she needed to meet with her, and then she needed to visit the prison in Saint Albans. And that would demand complex arrangements with the superintendent at the correctional facility, the inmate’s therapist, and the state’s Department of Crime Victim Services. But at the same time she was tired, more tired than she could ever recall being in her life. Suddenly, much to her own surprise, her eyes were watering. She was crying. She heard small sobs and hiccups and a choking little whistle inside her head that reminded her of the shrill sound the brakes had made on her bike years ago, and she didn’t stop crying until she had fallen back to sleep behind the wheel.

When she opened her eyes next, the sun was starting to rise, and she felt a twinge and roll in her stomach. For a moment, she couldn’t recall when she had last eaten. She turned around to make sure the portfolio case was still in the backseat of the car, where she had placed it the night before when she had finished up in the darkroom. It was. On the sidewalk she heard the brooding scuff of heavy work boots. She looked to her left as a man passed within two or three feet of the glass, a great bearded hulk in a parka. It was a heavier jacket than was really necessary this time of the year, unless it was the only jacket you owned. She noticed the man’s pants were tattered at the cuffs and sliced open at the knees. She decided the fellow wasn’t homeless, not yet, but there was something about him-his clothes, his posture, his pace-that made her fear that if he didn’t get help he might be soon.