The Double Bind (29 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE

A
FTER
S
HEM HAD LEFT,
Laurel went through the photos one last time in the diner, trying to piece them together in a linear fashion. Not chronologically. She’d already done that. This time she was seeing if she could, as Shem had suggested, form a treasure map. She winnowed out the celebrities—pushing aside the likes of Chuck Berry and Robert Frost and Julie Andrews—and then she made two piles, one of places and one of things, and she wrote down on a yellow legal pad what was in each.

Places

The Brooklyn Bridge

Plaza Hotel

Washington Square

Train station, West Egg

Manhattan cityscapes

Chrysler building

New York Philharmonic

Greenwich Village

Street football underneath Hebrew National billboard

World’s Fair (including the Unisphere)

Brownstones (in Brooklyn?)

Mustang in front of Marshfield estate Midwestern arts-and-crafts house (Wright?) Unknown jazz club (a series)

Central Park

World Trade Towers

Wall Street

Main Street, West Egg

Valley of Ashes office park (not real name) East Egg train platform

East Egg shoreline

West Egg shoreline

My old swim club (Gatsby’s old house) Underhill dirt road scenes (two with a girl on a bike) Stowe church

Waterfall

Mount Mansfield ski trails (in summer)

Things

Hair dryers

Autos (many)

Cigarettes (in ashtrays, on tables, close-ups in people’s mouths)

More autos (a half dozen)

IBM typewriter (three)

Mustang in front of Marshfield estate Fifth Avenue bus

Lava lamps

Love beads and peace medallions Art deco jewelry box

Crab apple tree (a few prints, one with a little pyramid of apples beside it)

Dog by bakery

There were certain images that Laurel assumed were valueless in this quest: the cigarettes, the lava lamps, the cars. The hair dryers. Likewise, she knew that other photographs had been commissioned assignments, such as the Unisphere. The ones that were most puzzling to her were actually the pictures of Vermont and the pictures of her that were taken just before her life would be altered forever: photographs Bobbie had snapped on that very Sunday in Underhill, perhaps, or on one of the Sundays that had preceded that awful day. Were those images relevant to her search? Was she actually a clue herself in Bobbie’s treasure map? Or was it just an odd coincidence that her path and Bobbie’s had crossed years before they would formally meet, and that they would cross in that particular month—perhaps on that very Sunday afternoon? Were the photographs of a bicyclist on a dirt road or of a church up in Stowe a part of the pictorial labyrinth he was constructing, or were they irrelevant? After all, there were no indications that either Gatsby or the Buchanans had ever set foot in Vermont.

And what of that house Laurel had presumed was somewhere in the Midwest? Was it in Chicago, where she knew Tom Buchanan’s family was from? Or was it in Saint Paul, where Howard Mason had said that Bobbie might have tracked down a grandfather? For all Laurel knew, the house with its gently pitched roofs and wide boxlike floors—a second floor that jutted out like a jaw above the first—might very well exist in East or West Egg, Long Island. Or it might have belonged to one of those Louisville cousins.

The prints that Laurel thought had the greatest potential were the ones that most obviously hinted at a part of Bobbie’s life. Carefully, she drew a line through the images that she was confident were not clues to his parentage, and decided that what remained was manageable. Doable. She could see the elements of a map, just as Shem had suggested. She would simply tell Katherine that she needed some time off from work—a week, maybe two. Tonight she would make prints from the last of the negatives, and perhaps as soon as tomorrow or Tuesday she would start to use up her vacation days and go…

Well, she might have to begin with a prison in northern Vermont. And, if that inmate wasn’t Bobbie’s son, then one in Montana. Because although the project might be doable, it wasn’t going to be easy. There were the trace elements of a map, perhaps, but which were the clues and which were merely the aimless photos (or, perhaps, even the red herrings) taken by a schizophrenic who drank too much she couldn’t decide. She had landmarks in East and West Egg: the houses and train platforms and the manicured lengths of beach. Her country club—Gatsby’s estate. She had an office park that had risen from the Valley of Ashes. She had the Plaza, the hotel where Bobbie’s own mother had been asked to choose between her husband and her lover, and been unable. She had an art deco jewelry box with scalloped mirrors along the lid. Surely there was a chance that the box held Jay’s wartime portrait—and perhaps something more. A letter. A locket. A ring with an engraving. But how did one begin to find a box in any of these structures? Suppose she found the arts-and-crafts house? What then? Ask the owner if she could dig up the basement? Ransack the floorboards in the attic? Likewise, what could she do at her old country club? Ask to rummage around the library—the one that had once dazzled guests simply because it happened to have books that were real?

Nevertheless, she felt confident now that no one could possibly question what she knew was true: not David, not Katherine, not Talia. No one ever again would question her sanity.

W
HEN
S
ERENA REJOINED
her in the booth, Laurel pushed the portfolio case toward her, reminding her to tell no one she had it. As soon as Laurel had finished speaking, however, she could see by the look on Serena’s face that she had been wrong, completely wrong, a moment earlier: People were still going to doubt her. It was clear what the woman was thinking, and Laurel knew more or less what her friend was going to say before Serena had even opened her mouth.

“Laurel, you know there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you…and I will hang on to these for you. I will. It’s fine. But honestly, girl, do you really believe for a second that someone is going to try to steal these pictures from you?”

“Yes. And I don’t believe it. I know it.”

“But—”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“No, of course I don’t. But I do think you may be, I don’t know, overreacting.”

Laurel repeated the word. It was long. A euphemism for misbehavior. For inappropriate behavior. “Well, then,” she asked. “What would you do? What would you have me do?”

“Come on, Laurel, don’t take that tone with me. I’m just…”

“Just what? Worried?”

“No. Okay, yes. Worried. I’m worried.”

“Then tell me. What would you do?”

“Well, for starters I wouldn’t get so freaked out,” Serena said, but after that opening Laurel really didn’t pay much attention to the rest of her speech. Serena was sweet and she was well intentioned, and Laurel knew now that she couldn’t trust her. Her friend didn’t realize the importance of the images she had with her. As soon as Leckbruge or some minion appeared, Serena would turn them over to him. The whole portfolio case. Of course it would be an act of naïveté on her part, not betrayal. But it would have precisely the same effect. The pictures—and all of her work and Bobbie’s—would be gone.

And so Laurel thanked her for her time and her conversation, and when she left she took the portfolio case with her. She was polite. So polite that Serena walked her to the diner’s front door and assumed, when they parted, that Laurel was going to heed her advice and relax.

S
HE WOULDN’T HAVE
been able to tell what it was from the negative. At least not for sure. It only started to become clear on the contact sheet.

It was when she first printed the photograph Sunday night, yet another resin-coated print, that the image became unmistakable in the orange light of the darkroom. She studied it for a long moment in the chemical bath, not hypnotized, but absorbed. Incapable of looking away.

She thought of something Shem Wolfe had said to her that afternoon about Bobbie, and she felt her face flush:

He had his own devils.

Shem had been referring to Bobbie’s mental illness, but the word
devil
came back to her now—along with the other words that had dogged her for years. Cunt. Twat. Pussy. Gash. Fish cunt. Slut cunt. Dead cunt. She saw in the calm waters of the darkroom tray the tattoo. Here was the picture Bobbie had told Paco Hidalgo he’d taken. What she had presumed all these years had been a mere human skull—albeit one with fangs—she saw now was in actuality a tattoo of the devil: skull-like, yes, but it had ears. And it was breathing. Hence the smoke.

And Bobbie Crocker had known this man and photographed this image: a devil amid stubble, an earlobe hovering above it like a planet. He was either Bobbie’s son, or a friend of Bobbie’s son.

Because, apparently, even rapists had friends. Murderers, too.

This was the devil who had frightened Bobbie Crocker: One of the very men who had tried to rape her. And then driven a van in reverse to try to kill her.

S
HE WAS WEAK
when she finished up in the darkroom, but unless she went downtown into Burlington the only places that were going to be open this late on a Sunday night were the fast-food restaurants and the doughnut shops on the neon-lit strip just east of the campus. It was after eleven.

She hadn’t been home since early that morning. It hadn’t even crossed her mind to stop by her apartment after she had left Serena because she’d wanted to go straight to the darkroom.

Now she drove to the old Victorian and found a parking spot she could have taken right in front of the building, but—almost reflexively—she continued past it. She had noticed there were lights on both in her apartment and in Whit’s, and it was evident that her housemates were awake. This was unfortunate: She didn’t want Talia or Whit to hear her arrive because she didn’t want to have to speak to either of them. And so she parked instead at the far end of the block, near the corner. Her plan was to wait an hour or two, until they had both gone to sleep. Then she would find the keys to the house’s entrance and her own apartment, and have them ready in her fingers well before she reached the front walkway. She would take off her clogs and hold them in her hands, too, so she wouldn’t make any noise as she approached the door or tiptoed up the stairway to Talia’s and her corner of the house.

And, just in case, she told herself that she would undress and climb into bed in the dark. Wouldn’t even turn on the living room light. And did she really need to eat a couple of crackers? Probably not.

None of this meticulous planning would end up mattering, however, because she fell asleep in the front seat of her car. She awoke once, a little before 3 a.m., her back and neck throbbing—was this what some of her clients experienced, she wondered, or did they have the common sense, at least, to crawl into the backseat to doze?—and considered going inside. She had just seen in a dream an Underhill forest alive with flying things: birds and insects and swirling leaves. The birds had the heads of small devils—devil skulls, really, the devil from the tattoo—and she was their prey. She believed that she was trying to walk her bicycle through the tumult, though she didn’t recall if there had been a path on which she might ever have been riding. Eventually, she thought, she had been swamped by the swirling creatures. They had attacked her in all the places where she had been hurt by Bobbie Crocker’s son and his partner seven years earlier, and when she awoke there was an ache—and this, she concluded, was a phantom pain, because why would she experience any discomfort there from a nap in the night in her car?—on the left side of her chest.

Still, she could not bring herself to open the car door and return to her apartment. The dream had frightened her almost to the point of immobility, brought her to the verge of paralysis. And there was so much she wanted to do
—so much she had to do—
that she was too agitated to move. Emily Young was finally back from the Caribbean and she needed to meet with her, and then she needed to visit the prison in Saint Albans. And that would demand complex arrangements with the superintendent at the correctional facility, the inmate’s therapist, and the state’s Department of Crime Victim Services. But at the same time she was tired, more tired than she could ever recall being in her life. Suddenly, much to her own surprise, her eyes were watering. She was crying. She heard small sobs and hiccups and a choking little whistle inside her head that reminded her of the shrill sound the brakes had made on her bike years ago, and she didn’t stop crying until she had fallen back to sleep behind the wheel.