The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online

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 & 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