{"product_id":"the-double-bind-isbn-9781400031665","title":"The Double Bind","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Flight Attendant, \u003c\/i\u003ehere is a gripping psychological novel of obsession and consequence. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont’s back  roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her  photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie  Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he  won’t let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret–a  story that leads her far from her old life, and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers  who claim they want to save her. In a tale that travels between the Roaring Twenties  and the twenty-first century, between Jay Gatsby’s Long Island and rural New England,  bestselling author Chris Bohjalian has written an extraordinary novel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLook for Chris Bohjalian's new novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Lioness\u003c\/i\u003e!\u003c\/b\u003e\"Bohjalian is a master of literary suspense. . . . \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e[His]\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eare the sorts of books  people stay awake all night to finish.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Artfully  constructed and fiercely felt. . . . Bohjalian is . . . rearranging our previous  assumptions, producing the sense of shock we felt viewing \u003ci\u003eThe Sixth Sense\u003c\/i\u003e.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe  Miami Herald\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Terrifying. . . . Laurel is an unforgettable, vulnerable, complicated  character.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"\u003ci\u003eThe Double Bind\u003c\/i\u003e is simply one of the best written,  most compelling, artfully woven novels to grace bookshelves in years. Immediately  after the spellbinding surprise ending, readers will want to begin again. . . . It's  THAT good.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Associated Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The sort of book you want to read in one sitting,  and it packs a twist at the end that will leave you speechless.” —Jodi Picoult\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Harrowing....  \u003ci\u003eThe Double Bind\u003c\/i\u003e has a powerful statement to make about the nature of obsession and  mental illness, as well as the lingering effects of psychological trauma.... A stunner.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe St. Petersburg Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Great fiction ... un-put-down-able.\" —\u003ci\u003ePeople \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Ingenious....  He's compassionate about mental illness, wise about the healing power of art. He  moves easily and convincingly back and forth from different points of view and manages  to create authentic voices.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A psychological thriller . . . a  chilling depiction of the ways we choose to remember as well as what we forget.\"  —\u003ci\u003eNew York Daily News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A page-turner with a wicked twist at the end.\" -—\u003ci\u003eLife Magazine\u003c\/i\u003eCHRIS BOHJALIAN\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eis the #1 \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of twenty-three books, including \u003ci\u003eHour of the Witch, The Red Lotus, Midwives,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Flight Attendant,\u003c\/i\u003e which has been made into an HBO Max limited series starring Kaley Cuoco. His other books include \u003ci\u003eThe Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; and The Double Bind. \u003c\/i\u003eHis novels \u003ci\u003eSecrets of Eden, Midwives,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003ePast the Bleachers\u003c\/i\u003e were made into movies, and his work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. He is also a playwright (\u003ci\u003eWingspan\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eMidwives\u003c\/i\u003e). He lives in Vermont and can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Litsy, and Goodreads, @chrisbohjalian\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePrologue \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLaurel Estabrook was nearly raped the fall of her sophomore year of college.  Quite likely she was nearly murdered that autumn. This was no date-rape disaster  with a handsome, entitled UVM frat boy after the two of them had spent too much time  flirting beside the bulbous steel of a beer keg; this was one of those violent, sinister  attacks involving masked men–yes, men, plural, and they actually were wearing wool  ski masks that shielded all but their eyes and the snarling rifts of their mouths–that  one presumes only happens to other women in distant states. To victims whose faces  appear on the morning news programs, and whose devastated, forever-wrecked mothers  are interviewed by strikingly beautiful anchorwomen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe was biking on a wooded dirt  road twenty miles northeast of the college in a town with a name that was both ominous  and oxy-moronic: Underhill. In all fairness, the girl did not find the name \u003ci\u003eUnderhill \u003c\/i\u003emenacing before she was assaulted. But she also did not return there for any reason  in the years after the attack. It was somewhere around six-thirty on a Sunday evening,  and this was the third Sunday in a row that she had packed her well-traveled mountain  bike into the back of her roommate Talia’s station wagon and driven to Underhill  to ride for miles and miles along the logging roads that snaked through the nearby  forest. At the time, it struck her as beautiful country: a fairy-tale wood more Lewis  than Grimm, the maples not yet the color of claret. It was all new growth, a third-generation  tangle of maple and oak and ash, the remnants of stone walls still visible in the  understory not far from the paths. It was nothing like the Long Island suburbs where  she had grown up, a world of expensive homes with manicured lawns only blocks from  a long neon-lit swath of fast-food restaurants, foreign car dealers, and weight-loss  clinics in strip malls.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter the attack, of course, her memories of that patch  of Vermont woods were transformed, just as the name of the nearby town gained a different,  darker resonance. Later, when she recalled those roads and hills– some seeming too  steep to bike, but bike them she did– she would think instead of the washboard ruts  that had jangled her body and her overriding sense that the great canopy of leaves  from the trees shielded too much of the view and made the woods too thick to be pretty.  Sometimes, even many years later, when she would be trying to fight her way to sleep  through the flurries of wakefulness, she would see those woods after the leaves had  fallen, and visualize only the long finger grips of the skeletal birches.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy six-thirty  that evening the sun had just about set and the air was growing moist and chilly.  But she wasn’t worried about the dark because she had parked her friend’s wagon in  a gravel pull-off beside a paved road that was no more than three miles distant.  There was a house beside the pull-off with a single window above an attached garage,  a Cyclops visage in shingle and glass. She would be there in ten or fifteen minutes,  and as she rode she was aware of the thick-lipped whistle of the breeze in the trees.  She was wearing a pair of black bike shorts and a jersey with an image of a yellow  tequila bottle that looked phosphorescent printed on the front. She didn’t feel especially  vulnerable. She felt, if anything, lithe and athletic and strong. She was nineteen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen a brown van passed her. Not a minivan, a real van. The sort of van that, when  harmless, is filled with plumbing and electrical supplies, and when not harmless  is packed with the deviant accoutrements of serial rapists and violent killers. Its  only windows were small portholes high above the rear tires, and she had noticed  as it passed that the window on the passenger side had been curtained off with black  fabric. When the van stopped with a sudden squeal forty yards ahead of her, she knew  enough to be scared. How could she not? She had grown up on Long Island– once a dinosaur  swampland at the edge of a towering range of mountains, now a giant sandbar in the  shape of a salmon– the almost preternaturally strange petri dish that spawned Joel  Rifkin (serial killer of seventeen women), Colin Ferguson (the LIRR slaughter), Cheryl  Pierson (arranged to have her high school classmate murder her father), Richard Angelo  (Good Samaritan Hospital’s Angel of Death), Robert Golub (mutilated a thirteen-year-old  neighbor), George Wilson (shot Jay Gatsby as he floated aimlessly in his swimming  pool), John Esposito (imprisoned a ten-year-old girl in his dungeon), and Ronald  DeFeo (slaughtered his family in Amityville).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn truth, even if she hadn’t grown  up in West Egg she would have known enough to be scared when the van stopped on the  lonely road directly before her. Any young woman would have felt the hairs rise up  on the back of her neck. Unfortunately, the van had come to a stop so abruptly that  she couldn’t turn around because the road was narrow and she used a clipless pedal  system when she rode: This meant that she was linked by a metal cleat in the sole  of each cycling shoe to her pedals. She would have needed to snap her feet free,  stop, and put a toe down to pivot as she swiveled her bike 180 degrees. And before  she could do any of that two men jumped out, one from the driver’s side and one from  the passenger’s, and they both had those intimidating masks shielding their faces:  a very bad sign indeed in late September, even in the faux tundra of northern Vermont.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd so with a desperate burst of adrenaline she tried to pedal past them. She hadn’t  a prayer. One of them grabbed her around her shoulders as she tried to race by, while  the other was hoisting her (and her bicycle) off the ground by her waist. They were,  essentially, tackling her as if she were a running back and they were a pair of defensive  linemen who had reached her in the backfield. She screamed– shrill, girlish, desperate  screams that conveyed both her vulnerability and her youth– at the same time that  a part of her mind focused analytically on what might have been the most salient  feature of her predicament: She was still locked by her shoes to her bike and she  had to remain that way at all costs, while holding on fast to the handlebars. This  alone might keep her off the sides of Vermont milk cartons and the front pages of  the Vermont newspapers. Why? Because she realized that she couldn’t possibly overpower  her assailants–even her hair was lanky and thin–but if they couldn’t pry her from  the bicycle it would be that much more difficult to cart her into the deep woods  or throw her into the back of their van.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt one point the more muscular of the  two, a thug who smelled like a gym– not malodorous, not sweaty, but metallic like  weights– tried to punch her in the face, but she must have ducked because he slammed  his fist into the edge of her helmet and swore. His eyes beneath his mask were the  icy gray of the sky in November, and around each wrist she saw a coil of barbed wire  had been tattooed like a bracelet. He yelled for his partner– who had a tattoo, as  well, a skull with improbable ears (sharp ears, a wolf’s) and long wisps of smoke  snaking up from between the fangs in its mouth– to put the god-damn bike down so  he could rip her foot from the cleat. Briefly, she considered releasing her foot  herself so she could kick him with the hard point of her bike shoe. But she didn’t.  Thank God. She kept her foot pointing straight ahead, the metal clip in the sole  snapped tightly into the pedal. He tried yanking at her ankle, but he knew nothing  about cleats and so he wasn’t precisely sure how to twist her foot. Frustrated, he  threatened to break her ankle, while his partner began trying to wrench her thumb  and fingers from the handlebars. But she held on, all the while continuing to scream  with the conviction that she was screaming for her life– which, clearly, she was.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMeanwhile, they called her a cunt. In the space of moments– not minutes, but maybe–  they called her a cunt, a twat, a pussy, a gash. A fucking cunt. A stupid cunt. A  teasing cunt. Fish cunt. Slut cunt. Dead cunt. \u003ci\u003eYou \u003c\/i\u003edead cunt. No verb. Even the words  were violent, though initially three sounded to her less about the hate and the anger  and the derision: Those words were spoken (not shouted) with a leer by the thinner  of the pair, an inside joke between the two of them, and it was only after he had  repeated them did she understand it was not three words she was hearing but two.  It was a made-up brand name, a noun, a flavor at her expense. He had reduced her  vagina to an aperitif on the mistaken assumption that there could possibly be even  a trace of precoital wetness lubricating her now. \u003ci\u003eLiqueur Snatch\u003c\/i\u003e. That was the joke.  Get it, get it? Not \u003ci\u003elick her snatch. \u003c\/i\u003eA French cordial instead. But the joke elicited  nothing from his partner, no reaction at all, because this was only about his unfathomable  hatred for her. What therapists call that moment of arousal? For all Laurel knew,  it would come for him the moment she died. The moment they killed her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinally,  they threw her and her bicycle onto the ground. For a split second she thought they  had given up. They hadn’t. They started to drag her by her bicycle tires as if she  and the bike were a single creature, a dead deer they were hauling by its legs from  the woods. They were dragging her to the van, her right elbow and knee scraping along  the dirt road, intending to throw her–bicycle and all–into the back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut they couldn’t,  and this, too, is probably a reason why she survived. They had so much gym equipment  crammed into the rear of the vehicle that they couldn’t fit her inside it while she  was attached to her bike. She glimpsed discus-shaped weights and benches and metal  bars when they lifted her up, and what looked like the vertical components of a Nautilus  machine. And so they tossed her back down onto the hard dirt while they made room  for her in the van, shattering her collarbone and leaving a bruise on her left breast  that wouldn’t heal completely for months. She felt daggers of pain so pronounced  that she was instantly nauseous, and it was only adrenaline that kept her from vomiting.  Still, she continued to grasp the bicycle’s handlebars and keep her feet locked to  its pedals. One of the men barked at her not to move, which, for a variety of reasons,  wasn’t an option: She wasn’t about to let go of the bike, and with a broken collarbone  it was highly unlikely that she could have managed to release her feet, stand up,  and ride away in anything less than half an hour.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHow long did she lie there like  that? Ten seconds? Fifteen? It probably wasn’t even half a minute. Her assailants  saw the other cyclists before she did. There, approaching them down the road, were  three vigorous bikers who, it would turn out, were male lawyers from Underhill on  their way home after a daylong seventy-five-mile sojourn into the Mad River Valley  and back. They were on road bikes, and when they heard Laurel screaming they stood  up on their pedals and started streaking toward the van. It was the sort of into-the-fire  valor that is uncommon these days. But what choice had they? Leave her to be abducted  or killed? How could any person do that? And so they rode forward, and the two men  raced into the front cab and slammed shut the doors. She thought they were going  to drive away. They would, but not instantly. First they spun the van into reverse,  trying to run her over and kill her. Leave her for dead. But she was, fortunately,  not directly behind the vehicle. They had dropped her just far enough to the side  that even clipped in she was able to claw the foot or foot and a half away that she  needed to save her life. They ran over and mangled both bicycle wheels and bruised  her left foot. But her bike shoe and the bicycle’s front fork probably spared it  from being crushed. Then the men sped off, the vehicle’s wheels kicking small stones  into her face and her eyes, while the exhaust momentarily left her choking.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen  she was able to breathe again, she finally threw up. She was sobbing, she was bleeding,  she was filthy. She was an altogether most pathetic little victim: a girl trapped  on the ground in her cleats like a turtle who has wound up on its back in its shell.  She would realize later that one of her attackers had broken her left index finger  at some point as he had tried to force her to loosen her grip.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGingerly, the lawyers  turned her ankles so she could release herself from her pedals and then helped her  gently to her feet. The van was long gone, but Laurel had memorized the license plate  and within hours the men were apprehended. One of them worked with bodybuilders at  some hard-core weight-lifting club in Colchester. He didn’t live far from where she  had parked, and he had followed her the week before. When he realized that the Jetta  wagon with the girl with the yellow hair that fell out the back of her helmet had  returned, he saw his chance. Laurel was the first woman he had tried to rape in Vermont,  but he had done this before in Washington and Idaho before coming east, and he had  slashed the wrists of a schoolteacher on her morning jog in Montana and left her  to bleed to death in a field of winter wheat. He had left her tied to a barbed-wire  fence, and the tattoos on his wrists– like many a tattoo– was a commemoration. A  piece of art that he wore like a cherished memento.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis partner, apparently, hadn’t  had any idea that his new friend was a murderer: He was a drifter who had come to  Vermont and presumed now they were merely going to have a little fun together at  the expense of some young female bicyclist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfterward, Laurel went home to Long  Island to recover, and she didn’t return to college in Vermont until January. The  spring semester. She took courses the following summer to catch up– she was in Burlington  that July anyway for her assailants’ trials– and by the autumn she was back on the  same schedule with the rest of her classmates and would graduate with them in a couple  of Junes. Still, the trials had been difficult for her. They had been brief, but  there had been two to endure. It was the first time she had been back in the presence  of either of her assailants since the attack, and the first time she had studied  their faces in the flesh. The drifter, who would dramatically reduce his sentence  by testifying against the bodybuilder, had pale skin the color of cooked fish and  a nut-brown goatee that elongated a face already tending toward horsey. His hair  was completely gone on top and what remained was gray mixed in with the brown of  his small beard. Even though it was the summer, he wore a shirt with a high collar  to hide his tattoo. A part of his defense was the contention that he had dropped  acid before the attack and wasn’t in his right mind.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bodybuilder was a lumberjack  of a man who, while awaiting his trial, had continued to work out in the exterior  pen where the weights were stacked at the prison in northwest Vermont–lifting, someone  said, even on those frigid days when he would have to brush snow off the Nautilus  machines–but it was once more those gray eyes that had struck Laurel. His head was  shaved that summer, but she gathered that the autumn before he had merely kept his  hair cropped to a tight bristle cut. After his sentencing in Vermont, he was extradited  to Montana, where he was tried and convicted of the schoolteacher’s murder. He was  serving a life sentence in a prison forty-five minutes from Butte. The drifter, following  his conviction, was incarcerated in the correctional facility just outside of Saint  Albans, relegated to the lowest, most demeaning rung of the prison in the eyes of  the inmates: the pod with the sex offenders.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCertainly the assault changed Laurel’s  life in myriad ways, but the most obvious manifestation was that she stopped biking.  The cleats had saved her life, but the sensation of being clipped in– of pedaling–  brought her back to that dirt road in Underhill, and she never wanted to go back  to that place again. She had always been a swimmer growing up, however, and so after  a few years away from the water she returned to the pool, taking comfort both in  the miles she would mark and the way the smell of chlorine in her hair instantly  would remind her of the safe haven of her childhood in West Egg.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe other changes  were more subtle: a penchant for older men that her therapist suggested might stem  from a need to feel protected– cosseted– by father figures who would shield her from  harm. An avoidance of the gym and the weight room. A diary. An even greater immersion  in her photography. A distancing from the social world at the college, particularly  the fraternities where she had spent most weekend nights her first year. And then,  her senior year, the decision to move from the dormitories to an apartment at the  edge of the campus. Laurel didn’t want to live by herself– though she was no longer  an especially social person, she could still have moments of Zoloft-resistant anxiety,  especially when she was alone in the dark– and Talia Rice, her roommate since they  had both arrived in Vermont at eighteen, volunteered to come with her. They found  a couple of bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen they could share in a rambling  Victorian that offered Laurel quiet and detachment, but was still close enough to  the campus for her decidedly more extroverted roommate. It was also very sunny, which  Talia insisted any place they chose had to be– for her friend’s sake.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStill, some  people thought Laurel had grown aloof. She could tell. But she shrugged this off  and further curtailed her more casual friendships.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOf course, the change that mattered  most is this: If Laurel had not been fiercely attacked, she would not have resumed  swimming laps. That sounds prosaic, anticlimactic. But life is filled with small  moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain  of large moments they unleashed. Pure and simple, if Laurel had not started venturing  most mornings to the school’s natatorium, she would never have met the University  of Vermont alumna who ran the homeless shelter in Burlington and continued to stay  fit years later in the UVM pool. And then she would never have wound up working at  the shelter, first as a volunteer while she was still in school and later, after  she graduated, as a bona fide employee. And if she hadn’t wound up at the homeless  shelter, she would never have met a patient from the state mental hospital, a gentleman  (and he was indeed gentle) fifty-six years her senior who went by the name of Bobbie  Crocker.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLaurel’s father gave her some advice, too, when she was growing up: Smart  is boring. Effort matters. And, yes, she should never forget that while she was being  raised in a nice home in an impressive neighborhood with a mother willing to drive  her to soccer games and swim team practice, most of the world lived in serious, dispiriting  poverty and thus someday she would be expected to give something back. He did not  mean to suggest in ominous tones that a karmic payback loomed before her because  she always had enough to eat and never came home from the mall lacking in clothes  or CDs or boys with whom she might want to hook up.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHer father knew everything  about the consumption, but nothing about the boys. At least nothing of consequence.  He died soon after she finished college with nary a notion of either the sexual appetites  or the experimentation that occurred in the high school circles in which she had  traveled, or the sexual carousel that had marked her first year at the University  of Vermont.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe was a Rotarian, which meant that he was a sizable target for comic  abuse. But he was firm in his belief that when his two daughters were grown they  would have a moral obligation to reach out to others who lacked their advantages.  His Rotary Club actually paid for and built an orphanage in Honduras, and he went  there himself annually to inspect it and make sure the charges there were content  and well cared for. And so Laurel always was careful to defend the Rotary when people  around her made jokes about the organization, making it clear to the glib and sarcastic  that in her opinion you didn’t make fun of people with full-time jobs who put roofs  over the heads of children whose parents had died of AIDS or had lost their homes  in a hurricane. Her sister, a stockbroker five years her senior, became an active  member of that very same Rotary Club.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLaurel was twenty-three when her father died  abruptly of a heart attack. She was confident that he knew how much she had loved  him, but that didn’t necessarily make the hole his death had left in her life any  easier to fill. He and her mother had arrived at the hospital in Burlington the night  she was attacked in less than three hours. How? A fellow Rotarian was a pilot with  a small plane, and he flew them north as soon as she called.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLaurel and her childhood  friends were well aware that the country club on Long Island Sound where they all  learned to swim and sail and play tennis had once been the home of Jay Gatsby. But,  in truth, they didn’t much care. Even their parents didn’t much care. Their grandparents  probably did. But as nine- and ten- and eleven-year-olds, Laurel and her friends  didn’t care much at all about anything that mattered to their grandparents. The clubhouse  and broad, sweeping dining room had been Jay Gatsby’s stone mansion, and there were  dusty black-and-white photographs of his parties from the early 1920s decorating  the foyer. In every image everyone was overdressed. Or pickled. Or both. Laurel sensed  that her friends– the boys, anyway– might have been more intrigued by the club’s  history if the swimming pool in which they spent whole summer days had been the marble  one in which George Wilson had shot Gatsby, but it wasn’t; that pool was long gone,  replaced by an L-shaped monster with eight twenty-five meter lanes along the letter’s  vertical length, and a twelve-foot deep diving section along the shorter, horizontal  span. There was a one-meter board and a three-meter board, and in the grass along  the western and northern sides there were long rows of stately crab apple trees.  In the high summer, the young mothers would sit among them in the shade with their  toddlers. Laurel spent five years at the pool on the swim team and another three  as a diver.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn addition, everyone knew that the northernmost of the three houses  across the cove in which they capsized their canoes had once belonged to Tom and  Daisy Buchanan. Daisy was the Louisville belle Gatsby had longed for and Tom was  her husband. The Buchanans’ Georgian Colonial was the oldest of the three homes,  the other two having been built when Pamela Buchanan Marshfield– Tom and Daisy’s  daughter– subdivided the estate in the early 1970s. Where there had once been a half-acre  of roses there was now a north-south tennis court that belonged to a family named  Shephard; where there had once been a barn housing Tom Buchanan’s polo ponies there  was a sprawling replica Tudor owned by a family named Winston. Pamela sold the remaining  property– the house in which she grew up and where she lived as a married adult until  she was almost sixty– in 1978, the year before Laurel was born.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConsequently, Laurel  never knew Pamela when she was growing up. They wouldn’t meet until she was an adult  herself.  But her father knew Pamela. He hadn’t known her well, but that wasn’t because  she was an eccentric recluse. Pamela and her husband simply traveled with a much  older (and, yes, even wealthier) crowd than Laurel’s parent’s, and for fairly obvious  reasons were not members of the relatively casual country club across the cove. Instead,  they belonged to a far tonier marina farther east on Long Island.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNonetheless,  when Laurel contemplated her childhood, more times than not the names Gatsby and  Buchanan never even entered her mind. If she thought of them at all, she viewed them  as insubstantial ghosts, wholly irrelevant to her life in Vermont.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut then she  saw the dog-eared photographs that Bobbie Crocker–indigent, good-tempered (most days),  and mentally ill– had left behind after he died at the age of eighty-two. The old  man suffered a stroke in the stairwell on his way to his dormitory-like studio in  what had once been the city’s Hotel New England, but was now twenty-four heavily  subsidized apartments the formerly homeless could rent for about 30 percent of their  disability benefits or Social Security, and as little as five dollars a month if  they hadn’t any income at all. Bobbie had no family that anyone knew of, and so it  was his caseworker who discovered the carton of old photographs in his one closet.  They were badly preserved, the images stacked like paper plates or wedged upright  into folders like old phone bills, but the faces were clearly recognizable. Chuck  Berry. Robert Frost. Eartha Kitt. Beatniks. Jazz musicians. Sculptors. People playing  chess in Washington Square. Young men tossing a football on a street in Manhattan,  a Hebrew National billboard towering overhead. The Brooklyn Bridge. A few clearly  more recent ones from Underhill, Vermont, including some of a dirt road–one with  a girl on a bike–that Laurel knew all too well.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd in a separate envelope designed  for a greeting card, the snapshots: smaller, though equally as distressed. She recognized  instantly the home of Pamela Buchanan Marshfield. Then the country club from her  childhood, including the Norman-like tower, when it was owned by a bootlegger named  Gatsby. The original swimming pool, with the tower behind it. Parties, such as those  that were celebrated on the walls of that country club dining room. Pamela Buchanan  Marshfield as a little girl, standing beside a boy a couple years younger, a tan  coup off to their side. Gatsby himself, beside his bright yellow roadster– the car  that Tom Buchanan dismissed at least once as a mere circus wagon.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere were just  about a dozen of these smaller photos, and hundreds of negatives and larger prints  that she presumed Bobbie Crocker had taken himself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLaurel did not know instantly  who the little boy was beside Pamela. But she had a hunch. Why couldn’t Pamela have  had a brother? Why couldn’t he have wound up homeless in Vermont? Stranger things  happened every day. But she certainly did not suspect the whole truth when she first  tried to make sense of the box of dingy pictures, or imagine that soon she would  wind up alone, estranged from her lover and her friends, once more pursued and shaken  and scared.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301660020965,"sku":"NP9781400031665","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400031665.jpg?v=1767739064","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-double-bind-isbn-9781400031665","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}