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 & 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.
L
AUREL’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&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.”