Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

He wondered if this was precisely why he hadn’t called her on Sunday. Because it would mean getting in deep, and he was not merely cerebral and careful: He was aloof and detached, and since the divorce he had wanted nothing that resembled commitment.

And going to join Laurel at her mother’s bedside certainly suggested a serious commitment. It might unleash a more profound obligation than he was willing to make to any woman right now. It might mean marriage and it might mean more children, and more children remained absolutely out of the question. Not with Cindy six and Marissa eleven. He wouldn’t do that to them. It was bad enough that their parents’ marriage had fallen apart and now they needed extra TLC because their mother was getting remarried.

On the other hand, Laurel ’s very fragility suggested that he needed to jump in. He knew Laurel ’s history as well as anyone; he had a responsibility. Consequently, he reached once more for the phone and rang the Baptist church, where he was connected quickly to the youth pastor.

“Let me guess, you want to know what’s going on with Laurel, right?” Talia asked almost as soon as he said hello.

“I do. I want to know how ill her mom really is. I can’t tell from the note.”

He heard her make a clicking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Finally: “Her mother’s ill?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“She left a note for me here at the newspaper,” he said, and then he read it to her.

“The timing isn’t real good,” Talia said. “I think her mom was supposed to go to Italy this month.”

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“I wonder if there’s a note for me at the apartment,” she murmured, her voice a mixture of hurt and concern. “I honestly didn’t think Laurel was capable of going anywhere these days except that smelly darkroom or her office at BEDS.”

“You really had no idea she was leaving? She didn’t call you, either?”

“Nope. But-without wanting to put too fine a point on this-she hardly talks to me these days.”

“She didn’t tell me you’d fought. May I ask what it was about?”

“We didn’t fight. Not exactly. We had a few words on Saturday afternoon, but by then she was already avoiding me. At least that’s what it seemed like. She was supposed to play paintball with my youth group, you know. But she didn’t make it.”

“Huh…”

“She went home to Long Island around the anniversary, and when she came back she was like a ghost. She’d sneak into the apartment late at night to change her underwear, but that was about it. Otherwise, she was never home. She was practically living at the darkroom. I left her notes and stuff, but I might as well have been writing in invisible ink.”

He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. He felt a headache coming on and reached into his desk drawer for his thousand-count bottle of ibuprofen. He was reminded once more that he was closer to Laurel ’s mother’s age than he was to Laurel ’s, and the reality made him a little disgusted with himself. “I can’t believe she’s mad at you,” he muttered, and then swallowed two of the pills without water.

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, something’s going on, and if she’s gone home I think we should be worried.”

“I am.”

“Are you going to follow her?”

“I just left a message on her cell. I thought I’d wait to hear back from her before I did anything.”

“Think I should follow her?”

“Maybe. But let’s sit tight for the moment.”

“That’s it?” asked Talia.

“Is there something else you would recommend?”

“I’m worried!”

He paused. Then: “Do you realize, Talia, how many years I have on Laurel?”

“Is your point you’re a middle-aged letch? If so, please get over it. Laurel needs you.”

“She needs more than me,” he said, not exactly raising his voice, but speaking with a serious snap in his tone. “That’s the problem. Why do we only see each other a couple of times a week? Because my children are my priority at the moment, and I won’t give her more time than that. I was telling my daughter the other night what happened to Laurel -”

“Are you serious? She’s a child!”

“I gave her just the barest bones. But even that, just verbalizing a small portion, made me realize that I represent the two things Laurel needs least in her life.”

“And those are?”

“Yet another middle-aged man. And a person who won’t commit himself to her completely. To really be there for her.”

She was silent, and he sensed a storm surge of anger welling inside her. He braced himself. Instead, however, she said simply, “Call me, please, when you know what you’re doing.” Clearly, she was sandbagging her fury.

“I will,” he said. He almost wished she had vented at him. He felt he deserved a good dressing-down.

After hanging up, he contemplated her observation that Laurel had grown obsessed with the photographs after she had returned from Long Island, and he wondered if something had happened there she hadn’t told him about. Or, perhaps, whether this all had something to do with Underhill; in the end, he guessed, everything did. He decided he should call Katherine: see what else might have been in those photographs, and whether Laurel had said anything more to her.

This wasn’t doing much. But it was doing something.

SAY WHAT YOU will about nurture and upbringing and really bad parenting, Whit Nelson believed, a good many of the human shells who filled Laurel Estabrook’s caseload were going to wind up at BEDS no matter what because of hardwiring and chemicals. And he didn’t mean substance abuse, though there was an obvious connection between substance abuse and mental illness. They fed on one another. He meant brain chemicals. Obviously, not all of the homeless were victims of nature. There were the veterans, for instance, and most of them had been fine until they had seen things or done things-or been ordered to do things-that had sent them over the edge. And there were the people whose parents’ addictions-alcohol, cocaine, gambling, sex-had left them scarred, too.

But for most of the mentally ill at the shelter? Whit had concluded that their fate was as inevitable as someone’s with cerebral palsy. Their future was already buried molecular deep in the furrows inside their heads the moment they were born. Their demons already were present. Their fears or their paranoia or their reckless hunger for chemical amelioration. Their inability to work. The world needed places like BEDS and people like Laurel, it needed them desperately. But so much of what they did was palliative and quixotic.

Which, he guessed, helped to explain his attraction to Laurel.

That, of course, and her vulnerability. Her history. She was a victim, too.

TALIA WENT HOME that Monday morning immediately after hanging up with David, wanting to see what sort of note Laurel might have left for her. She told Whit, a little breathless from her near-jog up the hill, what David had told her when they ran into each other on the stairway.

“You finished organizing,” he said when she unlocked her front door. The clothes were gone from the living room, the books were piled neatly on the shelves, and the magazines had been slipped vertically into a brass rack beside the couch.

“Yeah, my drawers are a thing of beauty,” she said.

They found the note right away on the coffee table. It was brief and distant and vague-and a little defensive. Laurel had offered Talia no more information than she had given David. Immediately after reading it, without telling Whit who she was calling, Talia picked up her phone and dialed. He waited and watched, and saw her shake her head when she got an answering machine. Then she hung up.