Christopher Bohjalian: The Double Bind

MARISSA WAS TRYING to do her homework in the bedroom, but Cindy was watching television in the living room with their aunt and her dad’s condo just wasn’t that big. This was the third day their aunt had been with them, and it had grown painfully clear to Marissa that the woman had spent way too much time at rock concerts when she was young, because her hearing seemed worse than their grandfather’s. Almost as if it were a ballet, her sister-still beaten up from her fall off the swing-would climb off the couch to turn the volume down on the movie they were watching, and then their aunt would go and get something from the kitchen and turn it back up so the TV was loud enough to drown out a jet engine.

Moreover, Marissa was still disappointed that Laurel hadn’t taken her photograph on Monday, and worried that something strange was going on between her dad and his girlfriend. She wasn’t sure what, but it was more than just the idea that Dad was troubled by the way Laurel had gone home to Long Island, where she lived. She had the sense there was more to the story than he was letting on, and it all went back to whatever it was that he and that woman named Katherine had been talking about on Saturday night. She thought it was distinctly possible that her dad was about to break up with Laurel. She didn’t think this was fair, but when he had picked her up at school the other day he had seemed more angry than anxious. It was like he didn’t believe Laurel ’s mother really was sick. It was as if he thought she was this crazy girl, and he didn’t want her around his kids anymore.

Well, she could appreciate that if Laurel really were insane. That would make sense. But Laurel wasn’t. She’d just been through a lot. It was too bad no one, not even her dad, seemed to understand.

MARGOT ANN HAD asked Laurel whether she felt up to returning to work after the draining ordeal of the clarification hearing. They were standing in the parking lot outside the correctional facility, the fence with its coils of concertina wire looming high above Margot Ann’s shoulders.

“No,” Laurel had answered. “I think I’m going to go home.”

“Take the rest of the day off-I agree.”

Laurel smiled wanly, hoping to convey emotional fatigue. But the truth was, she wasn’t exhausted. She was confused-but she was also energized. She didn’t like misleading Margot Ann, but she also didn’t believe she had a choice. Her plan was to have Margot Ann drop her off at the parking garage in Burlington where they had met that morning, but she certainly wasn’t about to drive to her apartment in the hill section after that. Home, in this case, meant West Egg. If Bobbie hadn’t given his son the next clue, then she would follow up on a hunch that had been growing stronger ever since she and Shem Wolfe had parted company in Serena’s diner on Sunday: Perhaps she herself was the link to the final evidence. The final proof. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence at all that she had been given responsibility for Bobbie’s images once he had passed away. Hadn’t he photographed her himself that day seven years ago on the dirt road in Underhill? Hadn’t Katherine asked her to research the images he had left behind?

And if she were a critical link for Bobbie Crocker, then it was surely because he had understood that she had spent her summer afternoons as a girl lingering in the shade of the trees behind Jay Gatsby’s house. His father’s house. Swimming not exactly in Gatsby’s pool, but in the one that had been hollowed out in the very ground where Gatsby’s had been.

Perhaps Bobbie had singled her out because he realized that she alone was capable of understanding both his life and his work.

Consequently, she would return once more to his home.

Because if she were Bobbie Crocker and wanted to leave behind the proof of who her father really was, she would place it there. Where Gatsby had lived and, yes, where he had died.

SHE SPENT THE NIGHT in her house in West Egg. She listened to the messages that Talia and Katherine and David had left on her mother’s answering machine. They were checking up on her. Checking up on the notes she had left them.

But she slept little that night, because she had detoured to the country club in West Egg on her way home, arriving just after the dining room had closed for the evening. There she studied the pictures on the walls, including the old black and whites of the small circuses that Gatsby called parties. As the busboys cleared the final tables and the dishwashers in the kitchen inadvertently clanged the heavy pots against the sides of the sinks-as the steam from the hot water slid like mist underneath the swinging doors-she wandered around the dining room and the hallways that linked it with the main entrance and the library. She studied carefully the images of the original swimming pool, trying to envision precisely where Gatsby had been when he had been shot, and where that smaller pool rested in the midst of the Olympic-size one that existed there now. She noticed there were no crab apple trees in the old prints and remembered a story she’d been told as a girl: A mysterious donor had given the club the crab apples. Then the trees had appeared in Bobbie’s photographs-including one picture of a tree with a small mound of crab apples beside it.

That was, she realized with an emotion as close to elation as she was capable of experiencing in her current state, the marker. The symbol. The totem.

By the time she climbed into bed it was midnight and her plans for the next morning were rumbling inside her head like the din inside a theater moments before the curtain is finally raised into the fly space. She had studied the print with the tree and the pyramid of fallen fruit, and knew precisely where her search was going to end.

She awoke well before dawn, went to the garage for the long shovel her father had used around the house and her mother’s small garden trowel, and returned to the country club. She parked in the space nearest the stone Norman tower. For a moment, she sat in her car because she was crying once again, and didn’t know whether it was because she was exhausted beyond words or because no one believed her, or whether she was sobbing for a homeless man who had learned as a boy how callous and cruel grown-ups could be. How capable of delusion. Distortion. Disdain.

She listened to the birdsong and gathered herself. She watched the sky lighten to the east and the textured stones on the structure of the clubhouse grow more distinct. A little before six, she climbed from the Honda and started toward the crab apple trees, leaning the shovel against the one where she planned to dig. All of the trees were dramatically wider and taller now, the branches full and broad. At least one tree had been cut down since Bobbie had photographed them, maybe two. But it wasn’t hard to see where the small pyramid of crab apples had sat, and why Bobbie had built the small mound where he had. This tree was the middle of a small group of three that had been planted near the northern edge of where the original pool had been. This newer pool, easily three times the size of Gatsby’s, had been built where the first one had been constructed, but took up considerably more real estate. Gatsby’s pool had existed roughly where the twelve-foot-deep diving section was now, and this tree was about as close as Bobbie could get to the spot where his father had died.

The sun still wasn’t up when she first thrust the shovel into the ground, but it felt more like day than like dawn, and after sitting for so very long in the car she was relieved to stand up and take the shovel in her hands, place her foot on the rolled shoulder-the wooden handle cold against her fingers and the edge of the blade sharp against the arch of her foot-and press it into the earth. Through the grass and the roots. Into the loamy soil. She pitched the divots into a pile to her right, and then the dirt upon them. Occasionally, she would fall to her knees and root around in the hole with her arms: She wanted to make sure that she wasn’t missing something small but important. A locket, perhaps. A monogrammed wristwatch. But she was confident she was merely being thorough when she did this. Bobbie had given her no reason to believe she was looking for a specific piece of jewelry.