The Double Bind

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

DAVID’S THROAT went a little dry when he read the note Laurel had left for him at the newspaper’s front desk.

My sister called: Our mother went to the hospital last night. She had an appendectomy, but they’re doing more tests to see if something else might be wrong. My aunt is with her now, but I can tell she’s a little worried, and so I’ve gone to Long Island for a couple of days to check in. I’ll call tonight.

Please tell Marissa I’m sorry I won’t be taking her headshot this afternoon. But she’s a beautiful girl with a voice like a lark, and it doesn’t take a talent like mine (sound of throat clearing) to make her look great. She’s the best.

I’ll call when I can.

L.

He held it in his hand and studied the handwriting. She’d written with a blue felt-tip pen in her small, nearly calligraphically beautiful script. He appreciated that she was anxious about her mother, but he wondered if she wasn’t overreacting. If there wasn’t something else going on here. After all, she had left this note for him downstairs. Hadn’t even asked the receptionist if he was upstairs in his office.

He knew that he should have called her on Sunday. At her home. On her cell. Katherine had told him enough at the movies on Saturday night that a more attentive person-a more involved person-would have been sufficiently alarmed to do something.

But he hadn’t, and so he phoned her now. As he expected, he missed her at BEDS, and so he left a message on her voice mail. He left a second one on the answering machine that she and Talia shared at home. And then he left a third on her cell. Finally, he replaced his phone in its cradle and sat on the edge of his desk, considering what he should do. If, in fact, he should do anything.

He knew Marissa was going to be disappointed. And she was going to be alarmed. Sure, she had spent twenty minutes that morning going through the clothes she had at his apartment because of that afternoon’s much-anticipated photo shoot. But after their conversation Saturday night, the real issue in her mind was going to be Laurel ’s well-being.

And then there was Cindy. He had planned on spending the morning interviewing hospital executives about the skyrocketing costs of their building project, but he’d had to cancel when she had fallen off the swing set at the school playground and taken sizable chunks of skin off her calf and both elbows. Seven stitches in the leg and butterfly bandages on her arms. She had been made nearly hysterical by all the blood. He had met his daughter and a teacher’s aid at the emergency room (at, ironically, the very same hospital where he was supposed to be researching an editorial). Then he had brought Cindy back to his apartment, calmed her, and convinced his sister to race up from Middlebury to watch her so he could return to work.

But missed headshots and stitches might turn out to be nothing compared to the big problem: Laurel. And he really wasn’t sure what he should do about her. He knew he was a careful, cerebral man. It was a strength of his-and, on occasion, a weakness.

He understood that conceivably he could do nothing. After all, Laurel was a grown-up. She had gone home to care for her mother. Besides, it was an appendectomy-not open-heart surgery. And she wasn’t going to be there alone: She had her sister, Carol, and her aunt in the area. She didn’t need him, too. Moreover, he had always made a point of not babysitting her-of not, in fact, babysitting any woman. Not girlfriends, not wife. He hadn’t the time to babysit Laurel anyway, even if he were the babysitting type. He had a time-consuming job and two little girls, and the last thing he wanted to do was encourage a high-maintenance relationship with-and this was a term he realized he had used Saturday night while talking to Katherine-a fragile young woman.

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.

“Who were you calling?” he asked.

“ Laurel ’s home on Long Island. I got her mom’s machine.”

“You thought Laurel might already be there?”

“No. I thought she might be lying about her mother. I almost expected her mom to pick up.”

“But she didn’t.”

“That’s right.”

“So she might really be in the hospital.”

“Maybe,” Talia said, and then she beelined for Laurel ’s bedroom. He followed her.

“What are you looking for?” he asked. “Anything specific?”

“Not really.”

He wanted to do something, but he felt it would be a violation to open Laurel ’s drawers. And so he was standing uselessly in the doorway with his hands on his hips when she waved her index finger in the air and opened Laurel ’s closet. She rolled onto the floor a piece of black American Tourister luggage, the biggest size an airline might allow in the overhead bin. “This is interesting: She didn’t take her suitcase. She doesn’t expect to be gone very long.”

Then she opened the bottom drawer of the dresser in the bedroom and started pulling aside Laurel ’s sweaters. She held up her roommate’s checkbook and flipped to the last page of the register. “She didn’t take this, either,” she said.

“Then do we know for certain she’s really left?” he asked.

“No,” she said slowly, seeming to consider this possibility. “Maybe we don’t.” Then they stood there, more like helpless children than young adults, completely unsure what they should or could do next.

KATHERINE MAGUIRE’S meeting with the BEDS development committee had been long and hard and had left her on the verge of despair. The number of people-men and women and families-approaching the shelter was climbing, just as the federal government had slashed programs so severely that they were going to lose $145,000 in the coming year. They were likely to lose as well at least 740 housing subsidies, the result of the government evisceration of the HUD program that provided them. And the cost of oil in the coming winter was expected to skyrocket.

She sat back in her chair after hanging up the phone with the shelter’s city attorney and decided that she probably wouldn’t like this woman from Long Island if they ever met face-to-face. Pamela Buchanan Marshfield certainly wasn’t a guardian angel, descending upon the shelter when it was most in need. She was only making this offer now because her attempts to bully the group had failed. But the timing? Remarkable. It was as if she had known. Katherine had returned from the development committee meeting wondering how they could possibly raise enough money in the short term from the private sector to replace what they were losing in government support. And then, out of the blue, there came this offer from her lawyer.

The BEDS attorney, Chris Fricke, had assured Katherine that the municipality would sell the Crocker collection to the shelter for a dollar, which would then allow them to give it to the Long Island woman. After, of course, she had made her donation. One hundred thousand dollars.

Katherine understood that initially Laurel would be furious. The young social worker would feel personally betrayed, and she would insist that the organization was doing exactly the opposite of what one of their clients would have wanted. But Katherine thought that eventually she would come around. After all, half the time Bobbie himself hadn’t known what he wanted. And she had to believe that Bobbie would have been happy to see BEDS making so much money off his work. He would have been thrilled!

Moreover, it was certainly in Laurel ’s best interest to get her away from those photographs. Even if this wealthy dowager hadn’t offered to make this contribution to the shelter, Katherine was planning to insist that Laurel turn over the materials and give up on the project. She’d done enough. She’d done more than enough. It was time to let it go.

Of course, Katherine wasn’t sure how to tell her this. Or how even to get the photos back. It was while she had been on the phone with Chris Fricke, simultaneously going through the papers that had appeared on her desk like mushrooms in a wet summer, that she had found the note Laurel had left: Apparently, her young caseworker had gone home to care for her mother.

At least that was what she had written.

PATIENT 29873

Clearly sees far more in the photos than is there. The snapshots, too. Tomorrow I need to examine the collection-all the images-and explore this avenue further.

Patient still writing six and seven hours a day in those notebooks.

From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,

attending psychiatrist,

Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont