Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  Carissa stood to greet me, and I realized she was almost as tall as I was, and I am close to six feet. Unlike my sister, Diana, however, there was nothing spindly or awkward about Carissa. She moved like water on slickrock.

  “Welcome,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise.”

  She offered me herbal tea, and I declined, and then she suggested that I sit down on the couch beside one of the two large windows that faced west. The sun had long set—I’d come here after work, after a long day that included almost six hours in court—but I had a sense that she enjoyed wonderful sunsets.

  “You know,” I said as I sat, “I’d heard this room was a big painting of a cemetery.”

  “And you came anyway? You’re a brave fellow.”

  “It isn’t a cemetery, is it?”

  “Nope. Paris. It’s just a view of Paris I happen to like.”

  “I don’t see the Eiffel Tower.”

  She smiled. “It’s Paris circa 1843.”

  “Ah.”

  She had a strangely, wondrously cherubic face: Put a long face on a tall woman and you have either a disaster or a supermodel. Put a round face on a tall woman and you have Carissa Lake.

  “Your niece says hi,” I said when she did nothing to fill the quiet between us.

  “Are you and Whitney friends?”

  “Whitney can’t be half my age. Maybe half. Maybe even sixty percent. But she’s much younger than I am.”

  “I guess that means no.”

  “I’m sure she’s a terrific person, but I really just know her from the health-food store.”

  “Oh, she’s a delight. She’s more like a younger sister than a niece. She goes to college in upstate New York, but she’s home for a while.”

  “Taking a year off?”

  “A semester,” she said, as she sat in the chair across a mirrored glass table from the couch. “Now, I’m going to take my shoes off and relax. You’re welcome to do the same,” she went on, as she slipped off her loafers to expose a pair of thin pearl-colored socks dotted with tiny red flowers. She then curled one leg beneath her, and I noticed that her blue jeans were almost white at the knees.

  I looked down at my wingtips. I couldn’t imagine taking them off at that moment, because I had a pretty good idea of the smells that might emerge after almost a full day in Courtroom 3A. Felony status conferences. Arraignments. A public defender’s appalling motion to suppress, coupled with a cop who couldn’t keep his facts straight.

  “I think I’m a shoes-on kind of guy,” I said.

  “Your jacket?”

  “I can do my jacket, sure.”

  “Maybe even loosen your tie?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Wish I had gowns?” Her tone was light, just this side of flirtatious.

  “I’ve just never been to a female doctor before,” I said, hoping this explained my unease.

  “You still haven’t. At least technically. But I am a licensed psychologist. I don’t know if that matters to you.”

  “Should it?”

  “It matters to some patients. It’s how I backed into homeopathy.”

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

  I looked around and noticed that only two of her walls were actually a part of the skyline of Paris: Another was lined floor to ceiling with books, and the fourth—the one with the westerly windows—had small prints of wildflowers hung in an arc.

  “Usually I like to begin by asking if there’s anything you’d like to know about homeopathy. Or the process,” she said, massaging the spot on her nose where her eyeglasses usually rested, before lowering those eyeglasses into place. Tortoiseshell ovals with just a hint of black. “Have you done any homework since Whitney suggested we visit?”

  “A little. I read some magazines at a bookstore in Burlington.”

  She wrapped her hands around her knee and let a pad of paper rest in her lap. “Good for you. What do you think?”

  “I haven’t read that much. I learned belladonna has a cameo in Little Women. That’s about it.”

  Carissa smiled. “Louisa May Alcott had a homeopath.”

  “Yeah, but I probably wouldn’t advertise that. I think the article said she died of mercury poisoning.”

  “Administered by a physician. Traditionally. Not homeopathically.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was during the Civil War. She didn’t die for another two decades.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re a lawyer, Leland. I’m sure you took the time to learn more about homeopathy than the fact that Louisa May Alcott had a homeopath. Why don’t you tell me a little about what drew you here?”

  Although the notion passed through my mind to begin with a pair of women I had found erotic, one who was older than I was and one who was younger, I wanted to make a good impression, and decided almost instantly that lust probably wasn’t a particularly savvy way to curry favor with my homeopath—especially since one of those two women was Carissa Lake’s niece.

  And so I started to tell her about the cold that never went away, and about the days and days I would have to carry a handkerchief with me into court. I described my sore throat and I brought up my watery eyes. I told her my doctor didn’t seem to be able to help me, and how at three in the morning I could vacillate wildly between the profound belief that I was a hypochondriac and the desperate fear that I was dying. At some point she started to write, and I watched her hand move across the pad in her lap as I spoke; I tried not to imagine which were the key words she was choosing to save.

  “You live with your little daughter, right? It’s just the two of you?” she asked.

  “It is.”

  “Are you involved with someone?”

  “No. I’ve had very few dates since my wife died,” I said, emphasizing the word died. I never said “passed away” when I talked about Elizabeth’s death. “Passed away” suggested disease and expiration, a death that took time. Elizabeth didn’t die instantly, but she never regained consciousness in the few hours she lived after the accident.

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s mostly because I’m away from Abby—my four-year-old—five days a week from seven-thirty, quarter to eight in the morning until six or six-thirty at night. The idea of deserting her on top of that to go out to dinner or a movie seems a little unfair.”

  “Selfish?”

  “I guess.”

  “What else? What else keeps you from dating?”

  “Let’s see, what else,” I said as her voice echoed inside my head. I liked her voice, I liked it a lot. It was a competent voice, a fast voice—the sort of voice I always associated with the female prosecutors with whom I worked. And so I told her about a beautiful summer afternoon—not a cloud in the sky, not a drop of water or a wet leaf on the pavement—and what an accident reconstructionist would tell me later had occurred on a road by a river.

  Elizabeth had been running late for a two P.M. appointment with a young entrepreneur at the site (factory was too grandiose a word) where he was manufacturing disposable toothbrushes. The fellow had a loan from the Small Business Administration, and he wanted one from Elizabeth’s bank as well. She was driving fast, but she was on her side of the two-lane state highway.

  The driver of the dairy delivery truck had been trying to get something from the glove compartment of his vehicle, reaching all the way across the front seat—stretching his arm into the drawer under the dashboard, craning his neck to see what his fingers were failing to find. He must have taken his eyes off the road just long enough to miss the fact that the road was curving to his right and he needed to turn the truck accordingly. He didn’t, and thus plowed into the Subaru driven by the thirty-two-year-old loan officer for a Burlington bank, the front end of the truck slamming into the driver’s side of the car at about forty-five miles an hour. Entangled, the two vehicles careened off the road, through the guardrail, and over the bank into the shallow waters of the Lamoille R
iver.

  Much of the milk and cream and half-and-half poured out onto the riverbank and briefly turned a stretch of shore white. It was soon after the accident that I developed a distaste for dairy products and began drinking my coffee black.

  The driver of the truck, a twenty-three-year-old fellow from Enosburg Falls, died instantly, while Elizabeth hung on, unconscious, for close to four hours. She never opened her eyes or awoke while the rescue squad was cutting her from the car, or while they rushed her in the back of their ambulance to the hospital in Burlington. Had the fellow driving the dairy delivery truck been wearing a seat belt, he might have lived: He ended up underneath the crinkled metal sculpture that had once been a truck and a car.

  And though Elizabeth had been wearing a seat belt, it hadn’t made any difference in her case. She had been impaled upon metal shards from the door by her side, gored through lung and spleen and the very back of her neck. The roof of the car had been driven hard into her head.

  “What do they think he was trying to get?” I had asked the reconstructionist a few days later, referring to the twenty-three-year-old. “Sunglasses?” I was aware that the truck driver had been heading west.

  “That’s a good guess, but he didn’t seem to have any sunglasses in the truck, and we never found a pair by the river.”

  I remember nodding, waiting for him to continue. Finally the reconstructionist offered the two syllables that I had been unwilling to share with anyone until that moment in Carissa Lake’s office, because they seemed to lessen the horror of both the young man’s and my wife’s deaths.

  “Tic Tacs,” the reconstructionist had said. “He was probably trying to reach for his Tic Tacs.”

  I even told Carissa how angry I’d gotten inside whenever anyone had told me to take comfort in the notion that Elizabeth had not suffered long: She may have been aware of the accident a split second before it occurred, people said, but no more than that. No more than a second or two.

  But that comfort held little value for the toddler whom I’d now be raising alone. She was a month beyond two when well-meaning people told me that sort of thing, and the only suffering she really understood was her own.

  “You and Abby aren’t all that alone, are you? I don’t get up to East Bartlett very often, but I’ve always envisioned it as a very close-knit community,” Carissa said.

  “There are lots of people who help. Really, lots. And I need every single one of them. Her godparents only live a few houses away—though that’s about half a mile, given where we live. And the church has been remarkable. I don’t think I cooked a meal for three months after Elizabeth died. And now I have the preschool network to help, too. But the fact is, it’s still just Abby and me in the mornings and evenings. I’m the one who’s tickling her awake, or ironing her dresses, or helping her pour her cereal in the morning. I’m the one who’s making sure she has a glass of water by her bed every night, as well as her beloved trolls and her Chapstick and whatever plastic monstrosity happened to fall out of her cereal box that day.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “Not at all: I love her madly. I have no idea what I would have done after Elizabeth’s death without her. Just no idea. I’d probably have gone completely to pieces. Right now I’m just tired.…”

  “And?”

  “And, I guess, feeling guilty because I didn’t pick her up tonight at her usual time.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Having dinner with the family of her sixteen-year-old baby-sitter. She’s about three blocks from here.”

  “And you’re really feeling guilty?”

  “I am.”

  “What about grandparents, or aunts and uncles?”

  “Both of my parents have passed away,” I said. “Cancer in my mother’s case. Alzheimer’s in my father’s.”

  “Your mother went first?”

  “She did.”

  “And Elizabeth’s parents?”

  “They live in Florida. I have a sister two hours away. In New Hampshire, near Dartmouth. That’s where Abby and I spend most of our holidays.”

  “Ever consider a nanny or housekeeper?”

  “I have, but it’s complicated. There’s no day care in East Bartlett, and I want Abby to be around other kids, so that means she has to be in the village of Bartlett during the day—where there is day care. And that, in turn, means a nanny would just be filling in around breakfast and dinnertime. And I want to have breakfast with Abby, so that just leaves the gap before dinner, and I’ve got that covered right here in the village: I’ve found people in town who’ll look after her from the moment the day care closes until I get here from Burlington.”

  “What about friends?”

  “Oh, she has plenty of friends. She has friends from day care, and Sunday school, and now preschool. The Sunday-school kids and preschool kids are pretty much the same batch. The East Bartlett batch. But then there’s also this whole other batch from here in the village. In Bartlett. The day-care batch. But between Greta and Chloe and Cole and—”

  “I meant you.”

  “You mean, do I have friends?”

  “Yes. You.”

  “Of course I do. I just never see them. Sometimes I talk to them on the phone. Mostly I send them E-mail.”

  “But isn’t there someone you, I don’t know, play squash with during lunch?”

  “When I actually have a free lunch hour, it’s usually spent buying Pocahontas underpants and little tiny socks. Or grocery shopping for nonperishables so Abby and I don’t have to ruin a Saturday stocking up on cereal and toilet paper for the week. Recently I tried squeezing in visits to the health club, but it didn’t last. And that really wasn’t about bonding, anyway. It was about not dying any sooner than I have to.”

  “Who do you talk to—or E-mail—most?”

  “Probably Steve Wagner.”

  “I know that name.”

  “He’s the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Vermont.”

  “And he’s your best friend.…”

  “It’s not as ghoulish as it sounds,” I said, but I nevertheless found myself thinking back on what I’d told her so far. I wondered if I sounded pathetic.

  “You said you don’t date much because of Abby. If Elizabeth had died before you two had any children, do you think you’d be dating now?”

  “Meaning?”

  She shrugged. “Do you think your libido survived Elizabeth’s death?”

  Well, I thought, there’s my answer: I do sound pathetic. And ridiculous. Downright ridiculous.

  And yet, usually, I didn’t view myself as either pathetic or ridiculous. Just overweight. Just a slightly overweight guy with a cold.

  “Oh, God,” I asked, “must I do this?”

  “It helps me,” she said, her voice even. “But no, you don’t have to.” She stared at me and then scribbled another note.

  “Oh, what the heck. I’ve never been to a therapist.”

  “Even after the accident?”

  “Even then.”

  “So my professional advice is to go for it. You’ve already shared a very great deal with me.”

  And so I was off and running once more, telling her that my libido—a word I wasn’t sure I’d ever verbalized in my life until then—was just fine. Teenage boys, I heard myself saying, spent less time surfing the Internet for smut than I did, and were certainly less creative about it. After all, how many fifteen-year-olds would think to search linking the words female and ejaculation?

  “But you have so little time to begin with,” she said.

  “Oh, you know, just the morning routine: Shave, shower. See what the Web has to say about cunnilingus while sipping my coffee.”

  I watched Carissa think for a brief moment, then jot a quick note. Abruptly I became aware of the sorts of things she might or might not read into my body language, and so I spread my arms like an eagle’s wings across the back of the couch and uncrossed my legs.

  “Let’s talk a little bit about
your digestion,” she said.

  “My digestion.”

  “How is it?”

  “It works. Given the five—okay, ten—pounds I should drop, my appetite seems fine.”

  “Do you lean toward constipation? Or diarrhea?”

  “I don’t have a preference. Neither, in my experience, is especially pleasant.”

  “You know what I mean. ’Fess up.”

  “I think I tend toward the…the solid end of the spectrum. I guess I get a lot of iron in my diet.”

  “Once a day? Twice a day?”

  “Every other day.”

  She reached for the hardcover book without a dust jacket on the table beside her chair and glanced at a page. The cloth cover reminded me of her jeans: once entirely blue, now faded in parts to white.

  “Any aversions?”

  “Aside from talking about my stools?”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s see. Dates—the food, not the male-female go-to-a-movie thing. There’s another attorney in my office who must live on them. She’s eating them constantly, and they’ve always looked to me like big Palmetto bugs. Roaches. Once she insisted I try one, and it only reinforced my disgust. It was exactly like eating a bug—or what I’ve always imagined eating a bug would be like.”

  “Do all bugs make you a little squeamish?”

  “I hope not.”

  “How do you feel about spiders?”

  “Oh, I guess I hate them. Especially mother spiders, late summer and early fall. They hang out like gigantic marbles with legs in exactly the spots outside the house where I’m scraping and painting. It’s inevitable. I’ll be at the top of a thirty-two-foot ladder, underneath the eaves maybe, a scraper in one hand and a brush in the other, and there’s Charlotte, staring right at me. Big and fat and about to unleash into the world a gazillion little Charlottes. I’m amazed I haven’t stared up at one and fallen to my death.”

  “What do you do?”