The Double Bind (9 page)

C
HAPTER
S
IX

I
N THOSE FIRST DAYS
after Katherine had given Laurel the photos she had found, the young social worker was fixated most on the one of the girl on the bike. She caught herself staring at the jersey, the hair, the trees behind her for long moments until—almost suddenly—she would be nauseous. She would, as she hadn’t in years, see again in her mind the faces of the two men precisely as she recalled them from those long summer days in the courthouse in Burlington. One time she had to put the photo down and duck her head between her legs. She almost blacked out.

Certainly, she was intrigued as well by the odd coincidence that this mysterious Bobbie Crocker had owned pictures of the country club of her youth. She wondered what it meant that he might have grown up in her corner of Long Island—swum, perhaps, as a boy in the very same cove as her—and then, years later, been on the dirt road with her on the Sunday she nearly was killed. That he had photographed her hours (perhaps minutes) before the attack. But that would presume she really was the girl on the bike. And that the picture had been taken that nightmarish Sunday—versus either of the two Sundays that had preceded it. And Laurel just couldn’t be sure. On some level, she didn’t want to be sure, because that would put Crocker in a closer proximity to the crime than she wanted to contemplate.

It was easier to focus instead on the tragedy of a man of such obvious artistic talent and accomplishment winding up homeless. Still, she tried not to obsess even on this thread too much. Other than skimming a few heavy tomes on old rock and roll and photography in the middle part of the twentieth century, she didn’t do much in the way of investigating his identity—especially when she didn’t come across Bobbie’s name in any of the photo credits in the books. Still, at his funeral she had made a lunch date for the following week with Serena, and the next day she left a voice mail with Bobbie’s social worker, Emily Young, asking to see her when she returned from vacation. Emily had cleaned out Bobbie’s apartment at the Hotel New England with Katherine, and then left immediately for a lengthy Caribbean cruise. It was why she hadn’t been present at the man’s burial at the fort in Winooski.

And so for two more days that week she did her job, and she went out again with David, and she swam each day in the morning. She actually went bowling with Talia and a guy her roommate was considering dating, and then, when they returned home, surfed the Web with her friend so they could both learn more about paintball.

She brought the box of photographs back to her apartment, but—with the exception of that image of the girl on the bike—she did nothing more serious with it than flip through the pictures abstractedly while doing other things: brushing her teeth. Chatting on the telephone. Watching the news. She did not begin to carefully archive the photos to see what was there or take the negatives up to the university darkroom to start printing them. There would be time for that later. And then, on Friday, she went home for a break. Neither Katherine nor Talia had to ask why. They knew. The anniversary of the attack was approaching, and Laurel made it a rule never to be in Vermont on that day. Her plan was to return to Vermont the following Tuesday, after the anniversary, and then resume work on Wednesday at BEDS.

After breakfast, she threw some clothes and cosmetics into her knapsack, checked the stove one last time, and prepared to start south in her tired but functional Honda. She wasn’t sure whether she would try to see Pamela Buchanan Marshfield while she was home, but just in case she got the telephone numbers for both the Daytons and Mrs. Winston off the Internet and made sure that she had Bobbie Crocker’s snapshots in a safe envelope in her bag.

I
T HAD BEEN ALMOST
too easy for her to find Pamela Marshfield. Laurel hadn’t even had to bring the woman up: Rebecca Winston did that for her.

She was holding the phone against her ear in her childhood kitchen and watching the fog outside the window slowly engulf first the pines at the edge of the lawn—an edge not on Long Island Sound, but separated from the shore by a mere spit of preserved state forest—and then the wooden swing set and attached playhouse that had sat in the backyard like a great, hulking massif almost her entire life. She saw a blue jay land on the peaked roof of the playhouse and survey the grass. It was nearing lunchtime on Saturday, and she had only just woken up. She’d slept for close to twelve hours.

Rebecca Winston had already described for the social worker the leaf-peeping bus tour she had taken five years ago through the torturous roads that crept up and over the Green Mountains. It sounded nauseating, but Laurel didn’t tell her that. Then Rebecca had volunteered her fear that all too soon she would be unable to live alone in her house, and the conversation had turned naturally, seamlessly, to Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s daughter.

“I know there are some very nice retirement communities nearby, but I love my home. Right now I’m looking out at the water—as we speak. It’s lovely. Soothing. Especially with the mist. And I have resources. Obviously. But I couldn’t possibly bring in all the help that someone like Pamela Marshfield can. Did you know she has nurses who live with her? Two!” the woman was saying.

“Where is she living now, Mrs. Winston?” Laurel asked. “Do you know?”

“You must call me Becky.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” she answered. Mrs. Winston was somewhere between three and four times her age.

“Please?”

“I’ll try.”

“Let me hear you say it. Indulge an old woman.”

“Mrs.—”

“Come on!”

“Okay.” She swallowed. “Becky.”

“Was that so bad?”

“No, of course not.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you know where Mrs. Marshfield is living now?”

“Now
her
you’ll have to call Mrs. Marshfield.”

“I understand.”

“She’s living in East Hampton. I hear she has a spectacular place.”

“More spectacular than her old estate—the one next to you?”

“It’s not quite as big. But who needs six or seven thousand square feet when your husband has passed away and you don’t have any children? Still, it’s not petite. And people tell me that the view of the water is absolutely breathtaking. I’ve got this little cove filled with boats and houses. I used to watch you kids take out your Sunbirds from the club. Capsize your kayaks. Pamela, on the other hand, has a long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean and her own private beach. Someone told me when it’s warm they carry her onto the chaise on the terrace, and she watches the waves.”

“She’s that infirm?”

“No, she’s that wealthy.”

“Would she mind if I called her?”

“She’d probably prefer you wrote. She’s of that generation that still writes letters. And she is a particularly eccentric letter writer. She’s known in some circles for long, formal letters that are chock-full of opinions and stories. We corresponded for a while after she moved.”

“Do you still have the letters?”

“Oh, I doubt it. We lost touch a long time ago.”

“I’m only here for a couple of days, so I think I’ll risk the telephone,” Laurel said, and Rebecca gave her Pamela Marshfield’s telephone number—although, because it was unlisted, Laurel had to promise that she would share it with no one. And then, as soon as they had hung up, she dialed the Marshfield estate in East Hampton.

L
AUREL NEVER UNDERSTOOD
precisely what Tom Buchanan saw in Myrtle Wilson, the woman with whom Tom had that ridiculous affair in 1922, and who Daisy would accidentally run over while driving her own lover’s car. Tom Buchanan might not have been very nice—he might, in fact, have been an abusive bully who once broke Myrtle’s nose—but he was handsome and he was rich. Laurel knew the house. She knew where he had kept his polo ponies. But Myrtle Wilson? She had never met anyone who actually knew her. But clearly the woman was neither particularly bright nor especially kind: She was a dowdy screecher with a tendency to put on airs. She wasn’t even all that attractive. Obviously, she didn’t deserve to die the way that she did. No one did: Laurel, too, had nearly been killed by a car—run over while clipped to her bike. Like Myrtle, she had been left for dead as the vehicle sped away. But Laurel still didn’t view Myrtle as a kindred spirit. She just didn’t see why a man like Tom might be attracted to a woman like her. She always presumed that his next lover was a more predictable trophy catch.

Laurel found herself thinking about Tom and Daisy most of the next afternoon, Sunday, since on Monday morning she was going to meet their one daughter. A woman, either a nurse or a personal assistant of some sort, took her call on Saturday, put her on hold, and passed along her message to Mrs. Marshfield. Laurel actually apologized for phoning instead of writing. But she explained who she was and told the woman that she had some snapshots of the old Buchanan estate and what she believed was Mrs. Marshfield when she’d been a little girl. Laurel added that she wanted very much to bring them by and introduce herself. She made no mention of the boy in one of the photos or Bobbie Crocker. After a moment of silence, the woman returned and said that Mrs. Marshfield would be delighted to see her on Monday at eleven.

She spent most of Sunday in the playroom in her cousin’s home. Martin was in a
42nd Street
phase, and so they devoted a sizable part of the afternoon to tap dancing. His mother had recently found him a black top hat and cane at a vintage clothing store, and the two of them sang “Young and Healthy” a half-dozen times. Martin was almost a head shorter than Laurel, the difference in their heights attributable both to his Down syndrome and the reality that Laurel was a lanky five-nine. He had deceptively broad shoulders, however, and one of those male frames that seems designed for formal clothes. He looked dashing in blazers, and danced with a charismatic abandon. Laurel had the sense from the embraces Martin received from the young women he knew with developmental disabilities that he had the potential to be a real heartbreaker, but the truth was that those young women—like the young men—hugged absolutely everybody. Whenever she had been a volunteer timekeeper for the Special Olympics, an awful lot of the athletes sacrificed precious seconds so they could wrap their arms around her and tell her how much fun they were having or how much they loved her.

“You dance divine,” said Martin gallantly. Then, perhaps because he had just said something of emotional consequence and was embarrassed, he added quickly, “You’re so silly,” a non sequitur he used to fill any conversational silence that made him uncomfortable. That night the two of them watched
Snow White
for the third time together that Laurel could recall, skipping all the scenes with the witch and the apple and the thunder that Martin found frightening.

Laurel felt it was the perfect way to spend the afternoon and early part of the evening. The year after she had graduated had been a leap year, and so the actual anniversary of the attack would not occur until tomorrow. But the assault had taken place on a Sunday, and so this year she was especially grateful to be away from Vermont. She loved the Green Mountains, but as sunset approached she found herself short-winded and anxious. She was relieved she was six hours to the south—in a world where she could tap-dance with her joyful cousin, while wondering about a series of eighty- and eighty-five-year-old snapshots of a romanticized bootlegger and a mysterious little boy.

P
ATIENT 29873

…speech is rapid and intense, but can be easily interrupted—not at the level of pressured speech. (Note: Patient speaks/socializes very little outside interviews.) Inferred mood is moderately irritable, affect full, thought process coherent.

Thought content: denies ideas of hurting self or others. Still preoccupied with unusual beliefs, not willing to discuss much else. Denies hearing voices—though occasionally observed on ward talking to self (insists just “reviewing” material).

Beliefs still cause functional impairment; little interaction with others, either in hospital or with friends outside, evidently out of concern that discussing beliefs would lead to disagreements and feeling invalidated. Moreover, appears unwilling to focus on practical issues such as future community treatment and discharge planning.

From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,
attending psychiatrist,
Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

A
GIRL, ELEVEN, SQUATTED
on the ground in the apple orchard and held in her hand the McIntosh she had just picked from one of the lowest branches of the tree. Then she took a bite, surprised at both how tart and how juicy it was. She was wearing an elegant jumper the color of jade, with a horseshoe-shaped headband that matched it. Her hair still had the sweet, clean aroma of her strawberry shampoo.

Her sister, six, now tried to roll toward her, but the hill in this part of the orchard really wasn’t very steep. Moreover, the ground was littered with fallen apples. Consequently, the younger girl had to push her way toward her big sister with her elbows and her feet, and she moved more like a box than a wheel on the small incline.

“That’s stealing, Marissa,” she said, rising and motioning toward the slightly gnawed apple in her older sister’s hand. In the sky behind her were undulating waves of white clouds, a series of wings against an otherwise blue sky. It reminded Marissa of the venetian blinds in the windows of the bathroom in her father’s apartment.

“What is?”

“Eating an apple that Daddy didn’t pay for.”

Marissa sighed and took another bite. This time she chewed with a great, exaggerated motion, moving her chin like a mechanical stamp press. She noted that the younger girl’s mouth was covered with caramel from the candy apple she had eaten when they had first arrived at the orchard—one their father
had
paid for—and the front of her white sweatshirt was dotted with spots from the rotting apples in which she had just rolled. She looked like a kid from a TV commercial for a laundry detergent.

“I should tell,” the younger girl added.

“You should do a lot of things,” Marissa said after she had swallowed—again with an obvious dramatic flourish. She had been acting with grown-ups, most bankers and teachers and hairdressers by day, in community theaters for three years now. She hoped that someday she would get to do even more: She fantasized about Broadway. “Maybe you should start by not rolling around on the ground like one of those pathetic messy kids from the preschool,” she continued. “Or maybe you should think about washing your face every couple of months.”

The younger child—a plump girl named Cindy—seemed not especially stung by the rebuke. She shrugged. Then she used her sleeve to try to wipe the caramel off her face, but already it had coagulated like blood. It was going to take a lot more than a dry sweatshirt sleeve to clean up that mess.

When their father had suggested they go to the orchard this afternoon, Marissa had expected that his new—newer, anyway—girlfriend would be coming along, too. The one named Laurel who their mother dismissed for being so young. But Marissa liked Laurel, and so she was disappointed when their father had said it was just going to be the three of them and they would not be picking Laurel up at her apartment on the hill by the college. “You still have caramel on your face,” she said after a moment.

Once more Cindy tried wiping it off, this time licking her fingers and rubbing the mess that framed her lips like clown makeup.

“Is it gone?” Cindy asked.

“Much better,” Marissa lied. No point in driving home to her sister the reality that she was a complete slob. Still, Marissa wasn’t sure why she felt so cranky this afternoon. She and her sister and their dad had had a reasonably nice weekend so far. After going to the lawn sale yesterday at one of their mom’s neighbors, they had seen a surprisingly unbabyish movie that they’d all liked a lot and then gone out for pizza for dinner, (a slice of which, predictably, Cindy had managed to spread on the cuffs of her sweater, resulting in the sort of stain that would cause Mom to roll her eyes in frustration and say something snarky about Dad when she noticed it). Their father had made waffles for breakfast this morning. She hadn’t done her homework yet and that was vexing her slightly from the very back of her mind. But she could always dive into her math when they got back to Dad’s, and do her reading in the bath after dinner.

She wondered if her bad attitude at the moment had something to do with Mom’s plan to marry Eric Tourneau in November. She had overheard her parents squabbling about the logistics on the phone this morning, arguing over where she and her sister were supposed to be in the days before and after the ceremony. (Unfortunately, she knew precisely where she was expected to be on the big day itself.)

“Are you gonna eat all that?” asked Cindy.

In the distance, easily seventy-five yards away, their father was standing on his toes as he stretched for a cluster of apples on a particularly spindly tree. When he had dropped another pair in the wicker basket at his feet, he glanced over at them again. Marissa really wasn’t sure how and when she had wandered off here. She knew she had been working on a different tree from her dad and then had passed over a series of ones that didn’t have apples low enough for her to reach. She had no idea how this chasm had appeared between her father and her.

“Okay, you tell me,” she asked Cindy. “Which would be worse? Eating all of this apple, which would be stealing a whole piece of fruit? Or not finishing it, which would be wasting food?”

The little girl thought about this, but only for a second. Then she smiled and did a somersault in the sloppy ground, crushing an apple against her back and leaving a long cider stain along her spine.
This kid,
thought Marissa,
is hopeless. Completely hopeless.
Sometimes, she knew, Mom’s fiancé seemed to think Cindy was cute. But that was probably because Eric didn’t have any kids of his own yet and didn’t know any better. He didn’t know what to expect from a six-year-old. Besides, he really didn’t have a choice: He had to like Cindy because he was marrying Mom.

Marissa had a sinking feeling that he and her mother were someday going to have more children. This, too, made her dislike Eric—and made her angry with her mom. It also caused her to like Laurel even more. Her father had told her that she and Cindy were his priorities, and he had no intention of dating any woman right now who wanted children. This further endeared her to Marissa.

“Think Daddy will buy us another candy apple when we leave?” Cindy asked her the moment she finished her tumble, her eyes wide with pride from her small gymnastic accomplishment.

“I didn’t have a first one.”

“Yeah,” said Cindy. “’Cause you wanted to wait to steal the regular ones from here.”

This was it, the last straw: the final petty, stupid, completely illogic, totally childish remark. It was time to silence her sister—or at least send her packing.

“I did,” said Marissa, aware on some level that she needed to be careful now in her anger not to narrow her eyes. That would ruin the effect. Instead, she looked back and forth slowly, histrionically. She was slightly amazed that the waves of clouds high above them were cooperating on cue and bunching together to block out the sun. The orchard was growing darker before their eyes.

“What?” her sister asked. “What?”

“Shhhhh. Don’t move.”

“Tell me!”

“I will. But don’t move—just for a second. Okay? I’m listening. This is very important.” She added a tiny, warbling quiver to her voice that she hoped sounded at once pleading and…scared. Really, really scared.

It worked. The kid stood like a statue. Then, almost desperate, her voice little more than a whisper: “What?”

“I heard something. And then…then that apple tree behind you. It just…moved.”

“’Cause of the wind.”

“No. Not because of the wind. It started to reach…and stretch.”

Cindy paused, trying to decide whether her big sister was teasing. “Did not,” she said finally, but she had spoken in a nervous murmur that was only faintly audible. Marissa knew that the child still believed in fairies and trolls and some bizarre prankster dwarf she’d read about in a picture book called a Tomten. It was a wonder the girl didn’t believe the Teletubbies were real—though it was possible she believed in them, too. Best of all, Marissa knew that Cindy was terrified of the angry, talking trees in
The Wizard of Oz—
a dread that absolutely dwarfed her fear of the flying monkeys. They had watched their DVD of the movie just the other day, and the moment the trees had started hurling apples at Dorothy and her pals, Cindy had (once again) burrowed underneath the throw pillows on the couch until it was over.

“It did,” Marissa said softly, ever so softly. “I would not lie to you about something this important.”

“You’re making this up. Trees can’t move.”

“Of course they can. How else could they have filmed that scene in
Oz
? They went to the apple trees and asked them, and the trees said—”

“No. They did not!”

“Laurel has pictures!” Marissa had no idea where this whopper came from, but both sisters knew that Dad’s girlfriend was a photographer and the lie was almost reflexive.

“Of trees talking?”

She nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly. “Of apple trees. And they look…furious.”

Cindy seemed to digest this, and to build in her mind a portrait of furious apple trees that combined what she recalled from the movie (and, in truth, it couldn’t have been much since she had had her head buried for most of the scene) with what she could see in the orchard around her. The talonlike claws made of twigs. The long, grabbing reach of the branches. The angry faces that formed in the bark. When you were six, it didn’t take much imagination to become deathly afraid of an apple tree. Marissa sensed that her sister didn’t completely believe that the tree behind her had moved, but Cindy probably had just enough doubt that it was worth running to Daddy—if only to tell on her big sister and get her in trouble. Abruptly, almost like a time bomb, the little kid exploded. “Dad-dy!” she wailed, her voice a two-syllable ululation of desperation and panic, and then she turned and sprinted toward her father as fast as her pudgy legs would carry her. She looked like a terrified munchkin.

Marissa guessed that her father would say something to her about frightening Cindy, but she didn’t think he would be all that stern. After all, torturing a sibling was practically in a big sister’s job description. She wondered if, by any chance, her dad’s girlfriend really did have any pictures of apple trees. Not likely, but you never knew. She made a mental note to ask Laurel what kinds of things she photographed the next time they were together. Maybe Laurel could even take her picture. A headshot. A really professional headshot. She didn’t have one, and it frustrated her every time she went for an audition. And there were a couple of shows coming up at a theater in Burlington that had parts for a little girl, and so she had to be ready.

Laurel, of course, was a girl with a serious secret. Marissa didn’t know quite what it was, but it wasn’t a happy one. She guessed that someday she’d know, especially if Laurel and her dad continued to date—which she hoped they would. Laurel was more like a big sister who never bossed you around than her dad’s current squeeze. They’d gone shopping for clothes a couple of times, just the two of them, and had a blast. And Laurel had a cousin who was into musical theater, too, and so she actually knew the words to some of the songs from the shows Marissa had been in. But Marissa had also spent just enough time around Laurel to get a glimpse of the darkness behind the curtain.

She took a final bite of her apple and then hurled the core toward one of the posts on a nearby split-rail fence (missing it completely), and started walking up the slope to her father and her sister. She realized she was facing an especially gnarled old apple tree, one with twin knots a foot or two above her that looked more than a bit like eyes that were weeping: The eyebrows were arched, there were tears descending the runnels in the bark. Before she knew it, she was running hard to catch up to Cindy and her dad. She decided when she got to them she would have to tag her sister and act as if this sprint had all been a part of a game.