The Double Bind (17 page)

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

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.

“I was this close to the edge. Man, heroin chic was never a good look on me,” Serena murmured, shaking her head in slight disbelief. Then—afraid that she had hurt Laurel’s feelings—she added quickly, “I mean, they’re great photos. I just look kind of scary. You know?”

“I do know. Heroin chic isn’t a good look on anybody,” Laurel answered.

“Can I keep these?”

“That’s why I brought them.”

“Thank you. Someday I’ll show these to my kids to scare them straight. Then again, I might not. Who wants to see their mother looking like this?”

“You were in a bad place and it wasn’t your fault. You landed on your feet.”

She rolled her eyes. “I got lucky. My aunt moved back and took me in. Now I have to find a place of my own. It’s time.”

It dawned on Laurel that she didn’t know if this aunt with whom Serena was living was her mother’s or her father’s sister, but since her mother had disappeared when Serena was so young Laurel had a feeling the woman had to be related to her dad. And so she asked Serena if she ever saw her father or spoke to him.

“No, he keeps his distance. And my aunt keeps us apart. She knows her brother’s a creep. One time he sent me a check. I wasn’t going to cash it, but my aunt said I should. And so I tried. It bounced. Another time he showed up uninvited—and drunk—at Easter, but there was a big group of us at my aunt’s, and even wasted he could see he wasn’t wanted. So he split. But he knows where I work and where I live. He’ll appear again.”

Serena watched the two waitresses chatting at the bar while they waited and smiled. “Man, if I gave service like this, I’d be fired.”

Eventually, one of waitresses greeted them, and Laurel ordered a garden salad and a diet soda. She was still feeling the weight of the massive breakfast she’d eaten.

“How fresh is your curried egg salad?” asked Serena.

“Very,” smiled the waitress, a rail of a girl who seemed too young to work there, and Serena agreed to give it a try.

They were surrounded by businessmen and women whose offices looked out on the lake, and tourists who were visiting Burlington. The two of them talked about their jobs, and Serena told Laurel about her boyfriend. She was dating a guy who worked the night shift at the ice cream factory in Waterbury, but had just applied for a position in the marketing department. Serena thought he had a shot because he was sharp and the company was more interested in good ideas than whether someone had a college degree—and, apparently, he had a lot of experience with ice cream. Laurel described her relationship with David, and wasn’t completely surprised when Serena remarked, “It’s kind of casual, huh?” Laurel thought she sounded disappointed for her.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It’s kind of casual.”

Finally, Laurel brought up Bobbie Crocker, and told Serena how he had died with snapshots of the country club where she had spent a large part of her youth in his possession, and how she believed he had grown up a child of plenty in a mansion just across the cove. Laurel asked her to recount the story of how she had found him.

“It was real clear he didn’t have a place to go,” Serena said. “I mean, he was supposed to be
somewhere.
The hospital doesn’t just open the door and say, ‘Fly, little bird, fly.’ I’ve lived in Waterbury long enough to know there’s always a plan for the patients. He was supposed to go someplace. He was supposed to be with someone. But he couldn’t tell me where or with who. Or he wouldn’t. Who knows? He couldn’t even tell me how he’d gotten to Burlington. A bus? Hitchhiked? Beats me. The thing is, with a lot of these people it only takes the slightest wobble and they fall off the horse. They stop taking their meds. But I liked him a lot, and I thought with a little help he could probably get along on his own. I didn’t guess he needed the hospital anymore. Not really. He wasn’t a danger to anyone. That’s why I brought him to BEDS. I talk to enough troopers and sheriffs at the diner to know that’s all they would have done.” She leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.

“What did you like about him?” Laurel asked.

“Oh, he was very kind. I mean, he kept wanting to help me. It was, of course, a little insane.”

“How so?”

“Well, he offered to make phone calls to the presidents of record labels. I told him I didn’t sing, but that didn’t matter. He went on and on about all the record-label presidents he knew who owed him favors, and how he could get me a recording contract with a single phone call. Why was he doing this? Well, because I gave him extra coleslaw. And then seconds for free. That’s it. I mean, this old man comes in and he has barely enough money for a grilled cheese! And, you know, he was very funny—despite the fact he had to have been starving. He strolls in that night telling me knock-knock jokes about homeless people, and how many homeless it takes to screw in a lightbulb. And because he had, like, no money, he kept giving me advice as a tip. ‘Here’s a tip,’ he would say. ‘One good turn gets most of the blanket.’ It was corny, but sweet. Unfortunately, he just wouldn’t tell me where he was supposed to be. That’s the thing. I have no idea where he’d been sleeping before he wound up on the street.”

“You’re right,” Laurel said. “There had to be someplace between the hospital and BEDS. Obviously, they released him to someone besides us.”

Serena shrugged. “I kept asking him where he lived. And he finally rubbed his eyes really hard—like a little kid, you know, using his fists—and said he was pretty sure he was going to sleep that night where he’d slept the night before.”

“And that was?”

“The boiler room of that hotel just up the hill. That’s a ridiculous place for someone to end up. I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but I didn’t want him to spend another night in that room.”

The waitress returned with their drinks and momentarily they both grew quiet. Laurel watched Serena wrestle her straw free of its paper.

“So, you brought him to us,” she said.

“Yup. And he didn’t mind at all. You hear all about homeless people being real resistant to coming in off the street—hey, look at what I was like—but he was happy as a clam.”

“Did he understand where you were taking him?”

“He did. He just wanted a little assurance that no one would take his bag from him. I asked him what was in it that was so important, and he said his pictures.”

“When did you see him next?”

“Oh, I didn’t see him a whole lot before he died. Once his caseworker—a woman named Emily, you probably know her—brought him by the diner so he could thank me. She’s very nice. And another time I saw him at that candle vigil you do on Church Street just before Christmas. You know, the march where you say the names of the homeless?”

Laurel smiled. “You were there? I’m sorry I didn’t see you.”

“Yeah, I was in the crowd. I was too shy to say a name in the church, but I had my candle and I marched. Hell, look what you did for me.”

“As I recall, you spent about a week and a half at the shelter. We really didn’t do all that much.”

“But it was a week and a half when I really needed a place,” Serena said adamantly, meeting Laurel’s eyes with an intensity that surprised her.

“Did Bobbie ever tell you anything about his sister?”

“His sister? I didn’t even know he had a sister.”

She nodded.

“I didn’t see her at the funeral. Is she alive?”

“She is.”

“You know her?”

“A bit. I met her last week.”

“Is she a little wacky, too?”

Laurel thought about this briefly before responding. “No, she’s not. At least not like Bobbie. She’s actually pretty nasty.”

“I guess she and Bobbie weren’t real close.”

“No, they weren’t. He ever mention any family at all?”

“Not a word,” Serena said, and her voice grew solemn, as if she were trying to conjure in her mind a family for Bobbie Crocker. “Not a single word.”

“What about that first night he came into the diner? Think back. When you were asking him if he had a place to go, what else did he say?”

Their food arrived, and Laurel could see that Serena was contemplating that August night when Bobbie had appeared at the counter with his duffel and a pocketful of change.

“Let me think,” she murmured. Her egg salad was orange with curry and sat like a globe on a palm-shaped leaf of iceberg lettuce. “You know, he did say one thing that might be important.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He said something about a guy he’d worked with at a magazine somewhere. Name was…Reese.”

“Was that his first name or his last?”

“I don’t know if he told me. But something about it is on the tip of my tongue.”

“Tell me.”

“This was, like, a year ago.”

“I know,” Laurel said, hoping she sounded patient.

“I’m going to say Reese was his first name. And…”

“And?”

“And you know what? He might have been living at Reese’s. After the hospital. That might be it.”

“Why would he have left?”

Serena was chewing the egg salad carefully. “They don’t put celery in it. We do. You have to have celery in your egg salad.”

“I agree,” she said politely. “Why do you think Bobbie moved out?”

“Maybe he was kicked out.”

“Bobbie kicked out? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Oh, not kicked out because he was a bad roomie or whatever. Maybe kicked out because he wasn’t helping with his share of the rent.”

“He would have been eighty years old! How much help could this Reese person have expected—especially if Bobbie came to him straight from the hospital?”

“People are cruel,” Serena said offhandedly. “You know that, Laurel.”

“But Bobbie was…old.”

She leaned forward in her chair, her chin over her plate. Her eyes grew wide and her words were soft but angry: “Old doesn’t matter. My dad shows up at my house when he’s eighty? I got a choice of giving him a room or letting him chill on the street? I can’t see me opening my doors. And I don’t think I’m a bad person. But cruel is as cruel does. Or whatever.”

Laurel thought about this. “I’m sure Bobbie never did anything to hurt Reese—at least not the way your father abused you.”

“I agree. I’m just saying, we don’t know. I think if you want to get the answer for sure, you got to find this Reese person.”

“Bobbie give any hints where he—”

“Or she. I keep saying he, but for all we know Reese could be a she.”

“Or she might live?”

“I’d start in Burlington—or the suburbs. Maybe Bobbie got from Waterbury to Burlington before he was homeless. Maybe he was released into the care of someone who lives around here.”

“That would be an irony.”

“Hey,” Serena said, studying a pair of beautiful young women their age in miniskirts—young public relations executives, Laurel guessed. “Life is all about irony. Irony and luck and…advantages. Why did I get a mom who lit out at first light and a dad who thought my head was a punching bag? Why did those two over there get parents who made sure they did their homework and then sent them to college? I’m not bitter. Really, I’m not. But I also know life isn’t always fair—and I have a feeling, my friend, that you know that just as well as I do.”

L
AUREL LEFT WORK
promptly at five that day, despite the reality that she had gotten so little done. But she wanted to get to the library in Burlington before the reference desk closed at six, because she was keenly interested in making a dent into the microfilms there or the hard copies of the old
Life
magazines.

The library only had bound volumes dating back to 1975, but it had microfilm all the way back to 1936. She was thrilled, and with an eager librarian’s help randomly selected a spool from 1960. Then she sat down at a carrel and began to scroll through images that ranged from a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to Charles de Gaulle boasting of the detonation of his country’s first nuclear bomb. She saw David Ben-Gurion and Nikita Khrushchev and an American U-2 reconnaissance plane. And there was a story about a fellow named Caryl Chessman, a man Laurel had never heard of but whose face gave her the chills because he was going to be executed for kidnapping and sexually assaulting two women a decade earlier. It sounded, based on the article, like he might have been innocent.

She tried to slide past the ads, but they were hypnotic: the mild cigarettes touted by singers and actors, the Air Force bombers used to sell automotive motor oil, the recipes that anchored the ads for canned soups and cake mixes and containers of Borden’s cottage cheese.