"The Double Bind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bohjalian Christopher A.)

CHAPTER TWO

KATHERINE MAGUIRE had luminescent green eyes, and unlike her chlorine-saturated hair they hadn’t faded the slightest bit with age. People actually found them a little unsettling. Laurel certainly did. She guessed that Katherine was fifty, not quite twice her age, but she was toned and trim and passed for a woman considerably younger. The two of them had swum together at the UVM pool for six years, ever since Laurel had returned to the water after the attack, meeting at the changing room weekday mornings at 5:45. Two decades ago, when Katherine was only a few years older than Laurel was now, Katherine had founded the homeless shelter-and she had created the institution virtually on her own. Laurel had always viewed this as a daunting accomplishment. She wasn’t quite sure she could start a lemonade stand on the sidewalk outside her apartment house on her own. Along with her twin boys in high school, Katherine considered the shelter her life’s work.

Katherine strode with her usual confidence into Laurel ’s office a little before lunch on a Monday in September, cradling in her arms a beaten-up cardboard banker’s box. She dropped it with a small thud on Laurel ’s floor, and then sank into the folding chair opposite her social worker’s industrial-strength metal castoff of a desk-a desk identical to the one Katherine used in her own, only slightly larger office.

“There was an envelope, too,” Katherine said, “but I forgot it on my side table. And you can’t believe the piles of newspapers and junk mail he managed to amass in a single year. The guy was an unbelievable pack rat.”

Katherine had a habit that some people (especially men) found annoying, but usually it didn’t bother Laurel: She would begin every conversation as if it had been going on for some time.

“Who?”

“Bobbie Crocker. You know he died yesterday, right? At the Hotel New England?”

“No, I didn’t know,” Laurel said, lowering her voice. When one of their clients died, they all grew a little somber. Sometimes it didn’t even matter how well they had known the person: It was the idea that they were the only ones who stood witness to that life at the end. They all keenly felt how small and spare and diminished that individual’s existence had become. “Tell me what happened?”

“You hadn’t heard?”

“I’ve been with clients or in meetings all day.”

“Oh, Laurel, I’m so sorry. God, I didn’t mean to break it to you this way,” she said. This might have been true, but Laurel knew it was also possible that this was precisely the way Katherine had meant to share this news with her. Because of her history, people either treated Laurel with excessive delicacy when something tragic or sad had happened, or they steamrolled clumsily ahead. Her sister, Carol, was the one who informed her that their father had died, and they must have been on the phone a solid minute before she realized that Carol was telling her in the most convoluted manner possible what had occurred. Her big sister was so evasive at first that for easily thirty seconds Laurel thought she was phoning with the essentially inconsequential information that their father was on a business trip overseas somewhere and they might not hear from him for a while. She honestly couldn’t understand why her sister was bothering to call at all. In the case of Bobbie Crocker’s death, Laurel suspected that Katherine may have chosen the opposite tactic, the inadvertent bludgeon, in which her strategy was to act as if Laurel already knew that one of their clients had passed away.

“Go on, talk. Tell me,” Laurel insisted, and Katherine did, beginning with the way another tenant had found Bobbie on his way to church, and ending with how easily-how tragically easy-it had been for Emily Young, his caseworker, and her to clean out his apartment on Sunday afternoon.

“Took about two hours,” Katherine said. “Can you imagine? Lord, when my parents die it will take about two years to go through all the stuff they’ve amassed in their lives. But a guy like Bobbie? The clothes went into a couple of plastic bags: the plastic bags for the Dumpster and the ones for the Salvation Army. And trust me: The ones for the Dumpster were a lot heavier. Mostly it was just newspapers and magazines.”

“Any letters at all? Any sign of family.”

“Nothing really. I mean, there were some snapshots in that envelope, but I only looked at them for a second. I don’t think they really had anything to do with Bobbie. You knew he was a veteran, right? World War Two. So he gets a little burial plot up at the cemetery by the fort in Winooski. There’s going to be a small ceremony tomorrow. Can you make it?”

“Of course,” Laurel said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“He was such a likable guy.”

“He was.”

“Though also a bit of a lunatic.”

“But a sweet one.”

“Indeed,” Katherine agreed.

“And for an old man, he sure had a lot of spunk,” Laurel said, conjuring a picture in her mind of Bobbie Crocker and recalling some of their last conversations. They were, invariably, as interesting as they were demented. They were not unlike the sort of banter she shared with many of the people who passed through the shelter, in that she could safely presume easily half of what he was telling her was a complete fabrication or delusion. The difference-and in Laurel ’s mind it was a substantial one-was that victimization was rarely a part of Bobbie’s anecdotes. This was atypical for a schizophrenic, but she understood it was also likely that she only saw him at his best: By the time she met him, he was once again being properly medicated. Still, he seldom complained to Laurel or lashed out, and only infrequently did he suggest that he was owed anything by the world. Certainly, Bobbie believed there were conspiracies out there: Usually, they had something to do with his father. But as a rule he was confident he had dodged them. “The last time I saw him was two weeks ago at the walkathon,” she added.

“Remember what you talked about?”

“I do. He told me he’d been at a civil rights freedom march in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1963 or 1964. We were all about to begin-well, not Bobbie-and he was hovering at the starting line, savoring the crowds and the sunshine and the breeze off the lake. When I asked him to tell me more, he changed the subject. Told me instead how he started every Tuesday and Thursday with a bowl of bran flakes floating in exactly one-half cup of orange juice instead of milk, because he worried about his cholesterol. He said he cut the sweetness of the juice with a sprinkle of soy sauce. It sounded pretty repulsive.”

“You ever hear him bellow hello?”

“Absolutely.” It was common knowledge at the shelter that Bobbie’s voice, relentlessly booming even though he was now over eighty, was inappropriate anywhere but a ball game or a bar.

“Honey, I’m home…less!” Katherine roared suddenly, parroting Bobbie’s common cry-a sitcom dad amped on methamphetamines-when he would arrive at the shelter to see if any of the staff he knew were on duty that day. Apparently, he had used that line even when he really was homeless, when he first appeared at the shelter more tired and hungry than he’d ever been in his life. Even then he was no skittish stray cat.

Slightly paranoid and subject to occasional hallucinations? Yes. Skittish? No.

“He used to give me so much grief-”

“Good-natured, I hope,” Katherine said.

“Usually. Whenever he was hanging around the shelter and I was here he would tease me for being so green. I remember when we met he thought I was still in college. Couldn’t believe I’d been out for a couple of years.”

“He share with you any patented Bobbie Crocker wisdom?”

“Let’s see. He said I was too young to know the first thing about life on the streets. He told me the only truly safe drinking water left in Vermont was forty miles away in some spring that fed the Catamount River. He told me that Lyndon Baines Johnson-yes, the president-was still alive, and he knew where. He claimed he’d once partied for a weekend with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. And he said he grew up in a house that looked out across a cove at a castle.”

“I loved that man’s fantasies. So many of the people we meet think they’re Rambo or the pope. Or they have millions of dollars hidden in Swiss bank accounts. Or the CIA-or Rambo, the pope, and the CIA-are after them. Not Bobbie. He dreamed of castles. Gotta love it.”

“Well, he did see the devil,” Laurel said.

“Excuse me?”

“He only mentioned it to me once. But he told Emily, too. One time he saw the devil.”

“Did he say what the devil looked like?”

“He looked like a person, I think.”

“Anyone in particular?” asked Katherine.

“Someone he knew, I’m sure. But that would be a question for Emily.”

“How serious were the drugs he was taking when he saw him?”

“Maybe the devil was a woman.”

“Or her?” Katherine said, correcting herself.

“I’d say very serious. You don’t see the devil on Thunderbird.”

Katherine smiled ruefully, tilting her head back toward the screen in the one tiny window in Laurel ’s office, hoping to catch a wisp of the wind. She was, it seemed to Laurel, summoning a memory of the man herself. Bobbie-and he was always Bobbie to the social workers and the residents of the Hotel New England-was a human skeleton when he arrived at the shelter, but he recovered quickly: One of the side effects of his antipsychotic was weight gain. He never became truly rotund, but within three or four months he had regained the paunch of the poor who live on fast food and the carb-laden breads and pastas that were heaped onto plates at the emergency day station and the Salvation Army. Food heavy enough to help the hungry feel full and keep warm. Lots of peanut butter. He’d shrunk with old age, but he still had presence and bulk. His face was hidden up to his eyes with a white beaver beard that retained a few small patches of black, but those eyes were what everyone noticed because they were deep and dark and smiling, and his eyelashes were almost girlishly long.

“He was quite a character,” Katherine purred after a moment. “Did you know he was a photographer?”

“I know he said he was,” Laurel answered, “but I don’t think there was much to it. I assume it was a hobby or something. Maybe a part-time job he had before his mind went completely. Shooting class pictures at elementary schools. Or babies at Sears.”

“There might be more to it than that. Bobbie didn’t have any cameras or photo stuff in his room, but he had these. Look in the box,” Katherine said, waving languidly down at the carton at her feet.

“These being…?”

“Pictures. Photos. Negatives. There’s a ton in there. All very retro.”

Laurel peered around the side of the desk. Katherine pushed the box toward her with her foot, so she could reach it and pull apart the top flaps. The first image Laurel spied was an eleven-by-fourteen black and white of easily two hundred teenage girls in identical white button-down shirts and black skirts on a football field playing with Hula-Hoops. It looked like it was some sort of halftime extravaganza: Synchronized Hula-Hooping, maybe. The next one, based on the modest two-piece bathing suit the subject was wearing, was from that same era: A surfer girl was posing atop her surfboard on the beach, pretending to ride an actual wave. Laurel picked it up and saw scrawled legibly on the back in pencil, “Real Gidget, not Sandra Dee. Malibu.” She thumbed through a few more, all black and white, all from the late 1950s or early 1960s, until she came upon one she thought might have been a very young Paul Newman. She held it up for her boss and raised her eyebrows.

“Yup,” Katherine said, “I think it’s him, too. Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the back. No annotation or clue.”

She put Paul Newman back in the box and pawed briefly through the prints. Toward the bottom, she discovered long strips of negatives, none of which had been placed in sleeves. Like the photos, they had been dumped unceremoniously into the carton.

“And you think Bobbie Crocker took these?” she asked Katherine, sitting back in her chair.

“I do.”

“Why?”

“They were in his apartment,” Katherine said. “And when he was brought in off the street last year, he had this old canvas duffel with photos in it that he insisted were his. I assume most of these were in it. He wouldn’t take a bed until he was sure that the lockers were safe-that his locker would be safe. He was literally going to sleep with them, but there were only top bunks left in the shelter, so he couldn’t.”

The homeless often brought an object or two into the shelter of totemic (and, to them, titanic) importance-that single item that either reminded them of who they were or what their life had been like before it began to unravel. A certificate from a spelling bee they’d won as a child. An engagement ring they’d been unwilling to pawn. A teddy bear-and even the veterans from the Vietnam and Gulf wars sometimes had a stuffed animal with them. Laurel had seen plenty of family snapshots in the mix that was checked into the lockers, too. But she’d never before seen anything that resembled either serious art or professional accomplishment. And she had taken enough photography courses and snapped enough pictures herself to know with confidence that these photographs were interesting from both a journalistic and an artistic perspective. She thought it was even possible that somewhere she had seen the image of the teen girls with their Hula-Hoops-if not this exact photograph, then perhaps one from the same shoot.

“Couldn’t someone else have taken the photos and given them to him?” Laurel asked. “A brother or sister, maybe? A friend? Maybe somebody died and left them to him.”

“Go talk to Sam,” Katherine said, referring to the manager who had been on duty the night Bobbie Crocker had arrived. “He knows more about Bobbie than I do. And talk to Emily. I’m pretty sure he’d told them both he was a photographer. Of course, he wouldn’t show them the pictures. Not ever. Apparently, no one could see them-or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Oh, who knows? Welcome to Bobbie’s World. Emily managed to sneak a peek at the pictures pretty soon after he first arrived, just to make sure that he wasn’t some horrid child pornographer. But you know how busy Emily is. The woman’s life is chaos. Once she saw they were innocent, she didn’t think about them again until she was going through his room with me yesterday.”

Laurel considered this for a moment and then glimpsed another photograph. A pair of young men playing chess in Manhattan ’s Washington Square, surrounded by a half-dozen onlookers all watching the match intently. She guessed this one couldn’t have been later than the early 1960s. Something about it definitely felt pre-Johnson to her. Pre-Lee Harvey Oswald.

Beneath it was an image with a completely different sensibility: a dirt road she recognized in Vermont. A girl in the distance on a mountain bike. Black Lycra shorts. A wildly colorful jersey with an image on the front she couldn’t quite make out, but that might very well have been a bottle. It was perhaps a half mile from where she had been attacked, and instantly she was back on that road with the two violent men with their masks and their tattoos and their plans to rape her, and her heart was starting to palpitate. She must have stared for a long moment, because Katherine-her voice sounding as if she were speaking underwater-was asking her if she was all right.

“Yes, uh-huh,” Laurel heard herself murmuring. “I’m fine. Can I hang on to these?” she asked. She knew she was sweating, but she didn’t want to draw attention to it by wiping her brow.

“Do you want some water?”

“No. Really, I’m okay. Honest. I’m just…it’s just hot out.” She smiled for her boss’s benefit.

“Well, when you want to go through them-and there’s no rush, Laurel -I’d love to know what you think.”

“I can tell you what I think right now: They’re good. He-or whoever took them-had legitimate talent.”

Katherine dipped her chin just the tiniest bit and grinned in a manner Laurel knew well: coquettish and ingratiating at once. Katherine had built the shelter and kept it afloat these many years through a combination of inexorable drive and the ability to charm the world with her smile. Laurel knew she was about to be asked to tackle a project.

“You still have your privileges at the UVM darkroom, right?”

“Well, I pay for them-the way we do to use the UVM pool. But as an alum, it’s a pretty nominal fee.”

“Okay, then. Would you be willing to-and I’m not sure if I have the right word here-curate a show?”

“Of these pictures?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes. I think I would.” She knew she had said yes in part because of that image of the lean, spare girl up in Underhill. She had to know what else existed in those images. But she also understood that she was acquiescing out of guilt: She hadn’t taken Bobbie seriously when he had brought up his photography. If these pictures were his, then she had missed an opportunity to validate his accomplishments at the end of his life, as well as the chance, perhaps, to learn something as an apprentice photographer herself. Nevertheless, she did have reservations, and she shared them with Katherine. “Of course, we don’t know for sure if Bobbie took these,” she added.

“We’ll confirm that. Or you will. And I’m going to talk to our lawyers and our board of directors about spending a little money to make absolutely sure that Bobbie doesn’t have some family out there who might want them. Maybe we’ll place a small ad in a photo magazine. Or whatever magazine estate lawyers read. Or maybe even the New York Times. You’ll see a lot of these seem to have been taken in New York. And maybe we’ll put what we found on the Web. There are heir search firms with Web sites.”

“You know, these are in pretty horrid condition. We can’t have a show with them like this. And do you have any idea how much effort it would take to restore them? I don’t even know if the negatives are salvageable.”

“But you’re interested?”

“I am. But make no mistake: It will be a lot of work.”

“Well, I think it would be great publicity for the shelter. It would put a face on the homeless. Show people that these are human beings who did real things with their lives before everything went to hell in a handbasket. And…”

“And?”

“And these photos-this collection-might actually be worth serious money if we were to restore it and keep it together. That’s why I think it’s so important we make certain there isn’t family floating around somewhere who’s entitled to it.”

Laurel carefully reined in the enthusiasm she was starting to feel, because this had the potential to become a task that was daunting. “You said there was an envelope in your office,” she reminded her boss.

“Yeah, but it’s not as interesting as this stuff-at least in terms of an exhibition. It’s a little packet of snapshots.”

“I’d still like to see it.”

“Absolutely,” Katherine said and she rose from her chair. “You know, I am so sorry I didn’t get to know Bobbie better. I knew he was old, but he was so energetic for a guy his age that I figured he was going to be around for a while.”

Then she was gone, on to the next project-and there was always a next project because every year there were more homeless and fewer resources to help them.

Laurel kept trying to return to work herself that afternoon: She had a stack of intake forms to review, and she was in the midst of yet another monumental battle with the VA over benefits for a Gulf War veteran who’d been in the shelter three weeks now and was still waiting for a check, but she really didn’t get much more done. She kept going back to the box with the photographs.

ORIGINALLY, THE SHELTER had been a firehouse-at least the part of the structure that was original. There had been two sizable additions constructed in the last quarter century. The entrance sat largely shielded behind a cluster of statuesque maples on a quiet street four blocks from Lake Champlain in a neighborhood in the city everyone called the Old North End. It was one of the small sections in Burlington that looked tired and felt just a little bit dangerous-though, in truth, there were places all across Vermont that seemed dangerous to Laurel that struck most people as harmless. The houses were all in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, the front porches invariably were collapsing, and almost without exception the eighty- and ninety-year-old structures had been transformed from single-family homes into apartments. But Laurel knew in her heart that it was a safe neighborhood. If it weren’t, she wouldn’t have worked there after her experience in Underhill.

The official name of the organization was the Burlington Emergency Dwelling and Shelter-or BEDS. The acronym was designed for publicity (which the group received in abundance) and fund-raising (which, despite all that publicity, was an ongoing struggle). When Laurel first started volunteering there when she was in college, she liked to read picture books and short novels by Barbara Park and Beverly Cleary to the small children (and, unfortunately, there were always small children) who were living in the special section of the shelter for families. At twenty and twenty-one, she didn’t believe there was much else she could do to help out other than read aloud. Most days, she found three or four mothers and three times that many children residing there. She never once saw a dad. The single adults were in a separate section of the building with a different entrance and massive doors separating the two worlds. There was a large wing for single men and a smaller one for single women. The shelter had twenty-eight beds in fourteen bunks for the men, and twelve beds in six bunks for the women. This wasn’t sexism: There were considerably more homeless single men than there were single women.

The children in the family section where she volunteered always seemed to have runny noses, and so Laurel always seemed to have a runny nose. Her boyfriend her junior year in college, a professor at the medical school twenty-one years her senior, told her there were about 250 different cold germs, and you could only catch each one a single time in your life. If that were true, she responded, then she would never again have another cold as long as she lived. For a time she tried to keep the sniffles at bay with echinacea and antibacterial hand gel, but ethyl alcohol and perfume were no match for the melting glaciers that ran from the noses of suddenly homeless five-year-old girls-especially when those girls were climbing all over her lap and burrowing into her neck and her chest like small, blind kittens in search of a nipple. She knew even then how deeply glamorous she seemed to them: She wasn’t much younger than their mothers, sometimes a mere three or four years. But unlike those other women she was going to college, and she was neither frazzled to the point that she would lash out at them with the back of her hand nor so depressed that she was incapable of rising from one of the shelter’s moldy couches to get them a Kleenex.

Occasionally, she would bring one of her cameras and take their pictures. The children all knew just enough about computers and photography to be disappointed when she wouldn’t arrive with her digital camera, because they presumed when she started snapping away that they would get to see instantly what the pictures would look like. Consequently, sometimes Laurel would bring her digital for no other purpose than to entertain them. They would have casual modeling sessions, and then she would hook the Sony Cyber-shot up to the computer in the shelter manager’s closet of an office and print out the pictures.

The next week the family might be gone, but the images would still be taped to the windows and the walls.

Nevertheless, Laurel always preferred her film cameras, because-unlike most of the aspiring female photographers she had met in high school or in college-she actually enjoyed her work in the darkroom. Printing and toning. Moreover, she preferred black and white because she thought it offered both greater clarity and deeper insight into her subjects. In her opinion, you understood a person better in black and white, whether it was an abruptly homeless little girl in Burlington, Vermont, in the early years of the twenty-first century or a pair of drunken revelers at one of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island parties eighty years earlier.

On a certain level she felt voyeuristic, a bit like Diane Arbus, especially when she would photograph the children with their mothers. The mothers all looked dazed and drugged (which, sometimes, they were) and more than a little sociopathic (which, again, sometimes they were). But Laurel also had a thick notebook filled with nothing but contact sheets of her cousin Martin, who had Down syndrome, and she wondered if she would always feel slightly Arbus-like whenever she took anyone’s picture because so much of her training since junior high school had involved shooting him. Martin was a year older than she was, and he loved musical theater. His mother, Laurel ’s aunt, had sewn enough costumes for him over the years to fill a walk-in closet, and Martin would model these for Laurel for hours. The results were pages and pages of contact sheets of a teenage boy with Down syndrome, imitating in his own way everyone from Yul Brynner in The King and I to Harvey Fierstein in Hairspray. Laurel actually spent much of her recovery after she was attacked with Martin. Her friends from high school were all off at their colleges, and so she was very glad she had her cousin in her life. Her mother still referred to that period as that “awful autumn,” but in Laurel ’s opinion it really hadn’t been all that awful once she had returned to Long Island. She slept. She journaled. She healed. She and Martin must have seen a half-dozen Broadway shows together in those months of darkening days, always a matinee, which meant that when they entered the theater it was daytime and when they emerged it was evening and Times Square was an invigorating, phantasmagoric display of light. Then, the next day, careful not to jostle her slowly mending collarbone, they would reenact again and again their favorite scenes. Laurel was content in her own very specialized cocoon. And once she could use both of her arms again, she took even more pictures of a young man decked out in capes and bowlers and Scarlet Pimpernel wigs.

Every so often when Laurel was still in college, a single woman would wind up at the family shelter who was only a year or two older than she was. These women were at an age in which they were too old for the emergency shelter for teens run by another group in another section of the city, a small world where they might actually have felt the safest, but they were still too young to be comfortable in the wing of the shelter cordoned off for adults. Consequently, if there was room and they were clean-free of drugs, though not necessarily of grime and lice-they would be allowed to stay in the section for families.

Laurel would photograph them, too, even though more times than not they would try to sexualize the experience. Sex was their only currency and they used it determinedly if inappropriately. They would begin to peel off their tops, unsnap and unzip their jeans, or touch themselves and pout at the lens as if they were modeling for an adult magazine. They would, as the song said, try to show her their tattoos. It was almost a reflex for them because instinctively they ached even for Laurel ’s approval, and they knew cold and hunger intimately.

Only when she had been at the shelter close to a year and grown more comfortable with the world of the homeless did she begin to photograph the men, too. Initially, she had avoided that wing because of her experience in Underhill. And, of course, she had seen homeless men on the streets of New York when she’d been a little girl: bedraggled and grimy, malodorous, insane. Screaming or muttering obscenities either at strangers or-and this could be even more unnerving-at no one. But, clearly, she was worrying for naught. The homeless men who wandered through BEDS were frequently among the most gentle people on the planet. Sometimes it was bad luck and (yes) bad choices that had driven them down, not mental illness. And even when they were bipolar or schizophrenic-like Bobbie Crocker-when they were properly medicated often the madness would become manageable. And less frightening. Whenever Laurel looked at the contact sheets that she had made of these men, she was struck either by how broadly they were smiling or how wistful and unthreatening their eyes really were.

In the fall of her senior year, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Serena came to the family shelter. Serena told Laurel that things in her life had begun to unravel when she was fifteen. The final straw? Her father, who had been raising her alone and smacking her around since her mother had disappeared when she was five, pounded a sixteen-ounce glass jar of mayonnaise into the side of her face, blackening her eye and giving her a deep purple bruise the size of a softball along her cheek. For the first time in her life, she didn’t try to hide the marks with makeup, partly because she couldn’t-she would have needed an ice hockey goaltender’s mask, not a little powder and blush-and partly because she just couldn’t stand being beaten up anymore by her dad and wanted to see what would happen if people knew. She figured that things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

She was right. But they didn’t get better, either, at least not for a very long while. After all, is it worse to have a roof over your head but a father who pummels you weekly, or to move from house to house-a night here, a night there, living often with strangers-before eventually winding up on the street?

Serena hadn’t been in homeroom that day sixty seconds when her teacher asked to see her, and within an hour her father was arrested and she was in foster care. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an emergency placement available, and so she spent most of the next three weeks bunking with the families of different friends. She’d never been much of a student, and soon she gave up completely. Just stopped going to school. Within months, she wasn’t exactly off the foster care radar screen, but she was one of five or six dozen system runaways and no one was even sure if she was still in the state.

A week after Serena had arrived at the shelter and she and Laurel had grown comfortable with each other, Laurel asked to take her portrait, too. The homeless woman agreed. As Serena talked-continually rolling her black T-shirt up over her small stomach, trying to pull her jeans a bit farther down over her hips, pushing her long amber hair away from her eyes-Laurel photographed her. She would use the images for credit in a photography class, as she did many other pictures of the homeless she took. In addition, she planned to give Serena a set of the prints. The young woman wasn’t exactly beautiful: She had been on the street far too long for that. Her face was hollow-cheeked, hard, the bones apparent and sharp, and she was thin to the point of emaciation. But she had eyes the blue of delft china, her nose was pert and small, and her smile was fetching. There was something seductive and wanton and undeniably interesting about the whole package.

At the time, Laurel knew enough not to make any of the women or children who passed through the family shelter a personal reclamation project, both because she was still a student herself and because she was a volunteer who really didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing. She had experience, but no formal training as a social worker. Nevertheless, it was almost too tempting not to want to play God with a girl-and that’s what she was, it was delusional feminism to call this starving sprite a woman-like Serena. She told herself that she could buy Serena some clothes that didn’t make her look like a slut. She could help her find a job. Then an apartment. Isn’t that what the BEDS professionals did?

It was, of course, never that easy. Even if Laurel had been able to wave a wand and whisk Serena behind the counter of the McDonald’s within walking distance on Cherry Street, the girl wouldn’t have been paid nearly enough to afford an apartment in Burlington. At least not without subsidies. Or the help of one of the landlords in the city who worked with BEDS. Or, perhaps, a Rotarian father who was wealthy and generous and all too happy to foot her rent, as well as make sure she had extra money for groceries.

Three days after Laurel took Serena’s pictures, she returned to the shelter with a half-dozen prints that she thought the girl would like. It was a gloriously warm Indian summer afternoon, and she had imagined that she would share the photos with Serena and then walk with her west to the lake. There they’d find a bench by the boathouse with a view of the Adirondacks across the water, and they would discuss life’s possibilities. Laurel would tell her about her family since Serena had volunteered so much about hers, and she would try to describe for her a world where normal people had normal relationships. She’d learn whether Serena was looking for a job, and she would give her plenty of encouragement. She might even tell Serena of her own brush with death, of the men in the masks who had attacked her, a topic she broached with almost no one.

The conversation never occurred because by the time Laurel returned to the shelter with the photographs, the apparition called Serena was gone. She spent a week and three days there, and then disappeared.

And that, Laurel figured, was that. She didn’t expect she would ever see Serena again.

She was wrong. It was BEDS alumna Serena Sargent who brought Bobbie Crocker-literally leading him by the hand-to the shelter. Just about four years later, when Laurel had been working at the shelter as an actual paid employee for close to three years, Serena appeared out of the blue one August evening with a hungry old man who was insisting that he had once been very successful. He was homeless, Serena was not. Laurel wasn’t there at the time, but later both Serena and a BEDS night manager named Sam Russo told her the story.

Serena was living in Waterbury, a town twenty-five miles southeast of Burlington known for being the home to both Ben amp; Jerry’s Ice Cream and the Vermont State Hospital for the severely mentally ill. She was living with an aunt who had returned to Vermont two years earlier from Arizona-precisely the sort of good luck that most of the young and homeless needed in order to find their way in off the street-and working at a diner in Burlington.

Apparently, the fellow had spent some time in the state hospital, though whether this was months or years before he had made his way north to Burlington and Serena’s diner was unclear to the waitress. Into whose custody he had been released remained a mystery as well. Bobbie himself no longer seemed to know. He wasn’t violent, but he was delusional. He insisted that Dwight Eisenhower owed him money, and he was fairly certain that if his father knew where he was the man would write him a big fat check and all would be well. Serena guessed that his father, whoever that was, had to be at least a hundred by then and was very likely very long gone. Bobbie had been living on the streets of Burlington for weeks-in ATM cubicles, in the kiosks where the attendants would sit in parking garages, in a boiler room at a hotel near the waterfront-and he couldn’t seem to care for himself. He wandered into her diner and paid for a cup of coffee and a couple of eggs with money he boasted proudly he’d raised Dumpster-diving for recyclable bottles and cans. He told her that once, a long time ago, he had been from a wealthy family on Long Island and that he had seen more of the world than she’d believe: He had met, he said, people she’d read about in books and magazines and encyclopedias.

Serena presumed that most of his babble had only the most tenuous connection to reality. But she remembered her week and a half at BEDS, and how the people there had been very nice to her. She didn’t know whether Laurel might still be there, but she figured that even if that other woman wasn’t it would be a reasonable place for her new friend to get help. And so Serena brought him to the shelter, where Sam Russo got him a bed in the men’s section. In conjunction with a doctor at the state hospital, a chemical cocktail was found that stabilized his behavior and again synchronized his personal reality with the rest of the world. Bobbie didn’t see the planet precisely the way most people did, but he was no longer a danger to himself. Then, once the shelter had established that he was capable of living independently-he was even using a food stamp debit card to buy groceries-BEDS found him a room at the Hotel New England. Two-hundred and forty-five square feet, a single bed, a closet. A hot plate and a dorm-room-size refrigerator. He would share a bathroom with the other tenants on the floor and a kitchen with the other residents of the building. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was a room with a roof and plenty of heat in the winter and excellent ventilation in the summer. It beat the street, and with federal subsidies it cost him almost nothing.

LAUREL ’S BOYFRIEND that autumn was nearing forty-four. This meant that although he was eighteen years older than she was, he was considerably closer to her age than her previous boyfriend, a fellow who had insisted he was a mere fifty-one but Laurel was quite sure was lying. He used a face cream for wrinkles (though he called it a hydrating lotion), and he seemed to be popping Viagra-and then Levitra and Cialis-like M amp;M’s. This made the bedroom a frequent location for petty squabbles, because while he was on Viagra (needlessly, in her opinion, given that his unenhanced libido would have been impressive on a nineteen-year-old fraternity letch) she was still taking an antidepressant. It was a small dose and she had been tapering off it as she gained both distance and perspective on the attack. But while she was chemically slowing her sex drive, her boyfriend was souping up his with every drug he saw advertised on Monday Night Football.

Still, that isn’t why they broke up. They broke up because he wanted Laurel to move into the meadow mansion he had built on a parcel of what had once been a dairy farm ten miles south of Burlington-he was a senior executive with a group that had pioneered some kind of hospital software-and she didn’t want to live in the suburbs. She didn’t want to live with him. And so they parted.

Her current boyfriend, David Fuller, was an executive as well, but he was profoundly commitment-phobic-which she considered at the time an endearing and helpful part of his nature, and thus far it had actually given their relationship considerably more longevity than most of her romantic liaisons. Laurel still had moments when she needed to be around people, especially nights, hence the importance of her friendship with Talia. But as her therapist had observed, she was still, apparently, unprepared for an adult commitment herself.

And while David was content to allow their relationship to idle in neutral, he wasn’t cold. Part of the reason why he was uncomfortable with their relationship maturing into something more serious was that he was a divorced father of two girls, the older of whom was an eleven-year-old aspiring drama diva who Laurel thought was adorable. She wished she got to see more of the girl. His children were his priority, especially since his ex-wife was getting remarried in November, and Laurel respected that.

David was the editorial page editor for the city newspaper. He had a glisteningly modern, beautiful co-op apartment overlooking Lake Champlain, but because of the time he wanted to devote to his girls and because his first marriage had wound up a train wreck there was no chance he was going to pressure Laurel into moving in with him anytime soon. Consequently, she spent no more than two or three nights a week at his place. The other evenings he either had custody of his daughters, a sixth-grader named Marissa and a first-grader named Cindy, or he was working late so that on those days when he did have them he could lavish his full attention upon them. Thus she only saw the girls a couple of times each month, usually for picnics or movies or (one time) to go skiing. Twice she had convinced David to let her have Marissa alone for a Saturday, and both times they’d had a spectacular day shopping at the vintage clothing stores Laurel frequented and experimenting at the endless cosmetics counters at the one elegant department store in the city’s downtown.

He was always careful to drop Laurel off at her apartment first when his children were with them. She never left any sign of her occasional presence-a toothbrush, a robe, a couple of tampons-at his co-op.

David was known professionally for tough, sardonic editorials when he felt there was either a colossal injustice or a monumental stupidity that needed to be addressed. He was firm-jawed and tall, easily six feet and change, and despite his age he still had thick, straw-colored hair: He kept it cut short now, but when he had been younger-before he became the editorial page editor and had a persona to project-he had actually looked a bit like a surfer. Laurel had seen the photographs. He didn’t swim, but he ran, and so, like his girlfriend, he was in excellent shape.

Sometimes when they were together at a restaurant, a young waiter would say something that would suggest he presumed that David was Laurel ’s father, but this happened less often with the two of them than it had with her other boyfriends in the years since the attack. After all, he wasn’t quite two decades her senior; most of the others had been at least that. Moreover, she was getting older, too.

She had a date with David the night Katherine shared Bobbie Crocker’s photographs with her, and it was the first time they had seen each other in four days. They went to a Mexican restaurant not far from the newspaper’s offices. Whenever they tried to talk seriously about what they had done in the days they had been apart, however, Laurel found herself steering the conversation back to the once-homeless man and his pictures. She grew a little light-headed and excited whenever she contemplated the images that existed in the box. Over coffee, she brought up Crocker again, and David said-his tone characteristically dry, every syllable distinct-“I think it’s fine that you’re interested in this fellow’s work as an artist. As a photographer. I applaud that. But I hope you see that Katherine is foisting on you a serious time sucker. From what you tell me, this project has the potential to eat every spare moment you have-and then some.”

“She’s not foisting it on me.”

He smiled and sat back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “I have known Katherine a long, long time. Years longer than you. I have watched her in board meetings, at fund-raisers, at phonathons. I’ve stood beside her and read the names of the homeless at the annual BEDS service at the Unitarian church. I’ve probably interviewed her a dozen times for stories. Foist may not be the right word for her methods. She’s far too seductive to be a…foister. But she’s a seducer, and she’s very good at getting what she wants. What her people need. And right now her people need a lot. Hell, you know that better than I do. You see the effects of the federal budget cuts daily.”

She had actually met David the previous December, when the two of them had wound up walking beside each other in the candlelight parade that followed the BEDS vigil down Church Street. It had been one of those nights when it’s so cold the air stings, but the flickering line of candles stretched nearly two blocks, and when they reached City Hall the two of them had melted into a dark little restaurant for hot chocolate. “Well, if she doesn’t mind my focusing on Bobbie’s work, why should I?” Laurel asked. “Why should you?”

“I don’t mind. That would suggest I have more antipathy to the notion than I do. But I don’t believe for one moment that Katherine expects you to curate this show-research the pictures, restore the pictures, annotate the pictures-on BEDS time. You’ll be spending your nights and weekends in the darkroom, and when you’re not in the darkroom you’ll be at your computer trying to figure out who these people are.”

Laurel didn’t honestly believe this was a sudden burst of midlife male selfishness on David’s part. She understood that he wasn’t concerned the endeavor would take her away from him on those evenings when he wasn’t with his children. Nevertheless, there was a hint of condescension in his remarks, and it made her defensive. This wasn’t the first time he had tried to lord over her the wisdom that he thought came with age. And so she responded by telling him, “If you’re worried about me not being available when you want to play, don’t. It’s not like there’s some kind of deadline. I’d work on the photos when I felt like it, and only when I felt like it. It would give me something more to do when you’re with your girls.”

“Honest, Laurel, this isn’t about me. It’s about you. Once your initial enthusiasm for this elephant of a project wears off, I think you’ll find it profoundly frustrating to be printing and processing someone else’s work.”

“Then I’ll stop.”

He toyed deliberatively with the stem of his coffee cup, and she thought for a moment he was going to say something more about the subject. But David was a man who took great pride in the sheer equanimity of his personality with his family, with his friends, and with his young girlfriend. He saved his volatility and his righteous wrath for the politicians and the policymakers who offended him, and he unleashed it only in print-never in person. In the nine months Laurel had known him and the seven in which they had been lovers, she had never once heard him raise his voice; nor had they ever endured a serious fight. It could be-he could be-maddening.

Finally, he reached across the table and gently massaged her fingers. “All right, then,” he said. “I don’t mean to pressure you one way or the other. I have some incredibly decadent hot fudge sauce left over from my dinner the other night with the girls, and some vanilla ice cream in the freezer. Let’s go have dessert in bed. If we leave now, we can be naked in time for the last of the sunset over the lake.”

A moment after he released her hands, the young waiter arrived at their table. “So,” he said abstractedly, hoping to make a little small talk as he reached into the pocket of his apron to find the folder that contained their bill, “are you two in town looking at colleges?”