Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  It really is the little things in this world, isn’t it? I thought. It’s the little things that change everything. If Margaret had been sitting across my desk from me then, I might have been completely unable to withhold from Rod the fact that I was indeed into that sort of thing, and that I was actually getting to know the homeopath in question rather well.

  “Are you kidding?” Rod told me. “I can sooner see you getting a recreational enema than wasting your time with some New Age quack.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.

  “That’s just how it was meant,” he said, and then we both said good-bye. In the ensuing silence, I tried not to regret not asking Margaret to wait.

  It was possible, I decided around two-fifteen, that Jennifer Emmons was never going to call. Unlikely. But possible. After all, for one reason or another I’d spoken with a half-dozen of the attorneys in the office, and there had been absolutely no sign of her.

  At least no sign that I’d seen: I reminded myself that there were four or five other lawyers wandering through the courthouse, and any one of them could have heard from Jennifer that morning.

  It was right around then, I believe, that I first decided I really wanted more arsenic. That I really needed more arsenic.

  Not like a junkie, of course, not the way an addict needs drugs. It wasn’t like that, I told myself. Besides, the arsenic I craved wasn’t really a drug anyway. In reality, it was just sugar. Right? It was a little sucrose pellet that belonged in a big bag of candy. Not a tiny pharmacological vial.

  No, I simply needed arsenic the way I’d once needed cough drops. I needed those little white pills as a psychological crutch, and it had absolutely nothing to do with a physiological or chemical dependence.

  Besides, wasn’t homeopathic arsenic safer than cough drops?

  Maybe. Probably. Certainly.

  And it sure as hell worked better. Throughout that interminable summer and fall, lozenges had never done a damn thing for my sore throat, but that arsenic Carissa had given me had worked wonders on my anxieties and fears overnight.

  For all I knew, I might never have found the energy and the courage to court Carissa Lake without arsenic. I might never have asked her to spend Christmas Eve at my house.

  Without arsenic, I might never have beaten back the cold that had lived inside me for a full half a year, I might never have been able to stand in Courtroom 3A without my nose running. My throat burning. My pockets overflowing with handkerchiefs and Halls.

  I might never have risked arguing a case from the seat without the cinnamon bun stain.

  I began to wish I’d gotten more arsenic from Carissa when I was at her house that morning. Surely she kept some in the bathroom cabinet. Like Pepto-Bismol. And ipecac.

  I considered calling her once again—I’d probably left a half-dozen messages on her answering machine at the Octagon and her home already—when Gerianne knocked on my half-open door.

  “Are you doing anything right this second?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too defensive. My desk was a mess, but only because I hadn’t finished a single thing I’d started in over two hours.

  “I mean anything you can’t drop. Or are you due in court in a minute?”

  “No.”

  “Good. There’s a woman in the reception area who had a two o’clock with Bob, and it’s pretty clear Bob isn’t going to be back for a while.”

  “Is he in court?”

  “Yeah, and I just ran down the hall to see how it’s going. There’s no way he can leave. Would you mind seeing her?”

  “I can’t just jump into a case he’s working on.”

  “It’s not like that. It’s a new thing. It’s a woman who wants to talk to an attorney—any attorney—about her husband. I can’t tell, but I think it’s abuse. Domestic abuse.”

  “Fine. Send her back.”

  “Thank you, Leland. She really seems incredibly sweet. I don’t know the details, but I think something horrible happened to her on Christmas Eve.”

  I nodded, hoping Gerianne could not see the blood literally draining from my face.

  “Oh,” I said. I knew I was supposed to say more, but I couldn’t imagine what. I wondered if it was possible to have a stroke without pain, and if at some point in the last half-day I’d had a doozie and done in a sizable number of my once-healthy brain cells.

  “I’ll send her back.”

  “Yes. Why don’t you do that. And why don’t you see if she’d like something to drink.”

  Jennifer Emmons’s hair wasn’t quite as long as I recalled from the few times I’d seen her in church, but it was the same brown-and-henna mix: streamers of orange and red, some more subtle than others, coursing through an otherwise calm river of bay. She usually sat with her husband and children in the pews far to the left, midway to the back. But it was definitely her. The Emmonses weren’t members of the church, but they made it there a couple of Sundays every year.

  And I must have seen her shopping for groceries in Bartlett any number of times, because I had a vision of her pushing a supermarket cart, and hoisting brown bags into the air and then into a car trunk. I could envision her on the cement sidewalk outside the store, wearing the sort of trim cardigan sweater and blue jeans she was wearing right now, perhaps even followed out the door by a boy. A boy bigger than my Abby…but still very little. Surely I’d seen such a thing.

  I guessed she was a few years older than I was.

  “You live in East Bartlett,” she said, taking my hand before sitting across from me. Her mouth quivered just the tiniest bit, as if she might have smiled when she’d spoken if she weren’t in the midst of a disaster. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days, and I wondered if she’d been awake for close to thirty-six hours now—since her husband had collapsed in the middle of the night Christmas Eve.

  “I do indeed.”

  “I’ve seen you around. I guess I just should have called you first.”

  I smiled.

  “You’ve had tragedies of your own,” she went on.

  “I have.”

  “You have a little girl, right?”

  “Abby,” I answered, nodding. I was about to add Abby’s age and then recount her latest malapropism: After viewing her aunt and uncle’s new minivan Christmas Day, she’d said she thought she’d prefer a Mickey van. But I feared if I went on about my daughter it would open the door to a friendship. A fellowship. A bond. It would make us more intimate. It might make me want to help her.

  “Short for Abigail?”

  “That’s right.”

  When I didn’t say more, she nodded, then looked at a small note in her hand. “Did Bob McFarland tell you why we were going to meet?”

  “I haven’t spoken to Bob. But the detective you saw yesterday told me a little bit on the phone.”

  She sipped the glass of water she’d brought with her into my office and sat forward in her chair. She seemed almost to be steadying herself against the front of my desk, holding on to the desktop with both hands once she’d put down her glass.

  “In that case,” she asked, “where should I start?”

  “Start wherever you’d like.”

  “Okay,” she said, and she began by telling me that her husband had not tried to kill himself. Some people seemed to think it might have been a suicide attempt, but that was the last thing in the world Richard would have done. He’d be furious if he knew what some people were suggesting. She then went on to explain her husband’s irritation with his asthma and dermatitis, and his frustration with his disease—“Though it’s under control so much of the time, I don’t think of it as a disease”—and the way he’d started exercising and changed his diet. The way he’d removed the carpets from every room in their house, except the kids’ bedrooms.

  Apparently in the latter half of November, however, he’d nevertheless had an asthma attack—“We went to the emergency room, but in the greater scheme of things, it really wasn
’t that big a deal”—and that attack had been the last straw. That attack, she thought, was what had led him to the homeopath.

  “Did it work at first? The homeopathy?” I asked.

  “No!”

  She told me how the eczema on Richard’s hands and arms had cleared up, but sometimes it just cleared up on its own. It usually ran its course and then went away. Or it would respond to a salve called Eucerin. She certainly didn’t believe it was some homeopathic magic bullet that had cured it this time.

  “And his asthma?”

  “His chest was a little tight that week. But he was doing okay until he stopped using his inhalers and taking his theophylline.”

  “Theophylline’s an asthma drug?”

  “Right.”

  “Why did he stop taking it?”

  “This woman told him to.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Richard told me.”

  “Richard told you?”

  “He told me she said they were affecting his homeopathic remedy—whatever it was she was giving him. She said they were working as an antidote.”

  I folded my hands across my lap, clasping my fingers together. I thought they might shake otherwise. “She used that word?”

  “Antidote? She must have. It’s the word Richard was always using.”

  “And so he stopped taking his drugs?”

  “That’s right. A week ago yesterday. After talking to her.” She let go of my desk and reached into the handbag she’d dropped by her chair for a handkerchief. I saw her eyes were about to start tearing.

  “And his rationale was—”

  “Her rationale,” she corrected me.

  “Her rationale was that the remedy would not be completely effective as long as his body was full of his regular anti-asthma drugs.”

  “Exactly. His eczema had cleared up, but his breathing hadn’t improved.”

  “They had this conversation on the phone?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he went to her office. We live nearby. But it was last Monday, I do know that. And that was the last day he was using an inhaler or taking his pills.”

  “And then his breathing got worse?”

  She dabbed her face with her handkerchief, a white cotton square with delicate blue flowers along the edges. “Not right away. For a couple days, it seemed, he was sort of on a plateau. It was around Thursday, I guess, that his breathing started to get bad. His wheezing sounded worse, that’s for sure. And he said a couple of times that his chest really felt tight.”

  “When did he first get his remedy?”

  “About two weeks ago. Obviously I can get the exact date for you.”

  I nodded. “Why don’t you tell me what happened Christmas Eve.”

  “Should I begin with the cashews?”

  “Sure. Begin with the cashews.”

  “You should know that she told Richard to eat them.”

  “She did.…”

  “There’s a witness.” She crumpled her handkerchief into a ball and looked at her note once again. “Her name is Patsy Collins. She works at the health-food store in town, and she was there when the woman told Richard to eat them. She heard it all.”

  “Older woman? Silver hair?”

  “That’s right. Do you know her?”

  “Not really. But I’ve shopped there a couple of times.”

  “Well, she heard the whole conversation.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I have her number for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I also brought the name of my husband’s allergist. He wants to see you press charges, too.”

  “He does,” I said. I wasn’t sure if it came out like a question or a confirmation. Mostly it just sounded in my head like a monotone.

  “Here’s his card,” she went on, pulling a doctor’s appointment card from a sweater pocket and passing it across my desk. “He thinks it must be criminal for this woman to tell my husband to stop using the medications that control his asthma, and then suggest he eat a food that’s sure to cause an allergic reaction.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “I have. And Patsy Collins.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “No, not really. But Richard just lies there in this bed. And I sit and I sit, and I know I’ll go insane if I don’t do something.” She shook her head and shrugged. “Yesterday I called the state police. Today I called his doctor.”

  “And the health-food store…”

  “No, I actually went there. I went there during lunchtime, after I’d gone home to get a change of clothes.”

  “What made you think to go there?”

  She reached once again into her purse and pulled out a small plastic bag filled with cashews. “When I went home for my clothes, I remembered this. It had been on the floor beside Richard in the kitchen. It’s what he was eating. Can I give it to you?”

  “You mean, like, officially?”

  “Yes.”

  “Certainly. I’ll hang on to it.” I put the Baggie in a corner of my desk and already saw it on an evidence cart in a courtroom, marked with a number by the State. “So…Christmas Eve. What exactly happened?”

  She took a breath and started to speak, beginning with Richard’s troubled breathing at dinner. It had gotten worse as the evening progressed, and she thought he was wheezing rather badly as they wrapped the last of their children’s presents later that night. She’d practically begged him, she said, to use his inhaler, but again he’d refused. He didn’t want to go back on the drugs, he’d insisted. About three-fifteen in the morning he’d woken up, and she’d asked him once more to use the inhaler. Finally he had. Grudgingly, she thought. But at least he had used it.

  And it hadn’t worked, at least not right away, and he’d gone downstairs.

  “I was hoping he was going to go take a prednisone. Maybe get a drink of water.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “No. He was getting the cashews. They were in the refrigerator. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s where they were. I didn’t even know he’d bought any.”

  Jennifer then managed to recount for me the sound of the thump she’d heard before she even got to the kitchen, and her discovery of her husband on the floor, gasping for air. Whenever she thought she might cry, she would stop speaking and allow herself a short, quiet moment.

  When she was through, she said simply, “And now my husband’s in a coma. A coma.”

  “Any change since Christmas Eve?”

  She shook her head no and bit her lip.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am this happened to you. To him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’ll look into it all, of course,” I went on as gently as I could. “But I should tell you right now—so you don’t get your hopes up too high—that it might not be a criminal affair. A lot will depend on whether homeopaths are regulated by the state.”

  “I understand.”

  “And—”

  “And so I thought it might be helpful that the woman is also a psychologist.”

  “Uh-huh. Really?”

  “And they are regulated by the state.”

  “You’ve already checked?”

  “I have. I wanted to know as much about this woman as I possibly could.”

  “Well, okay. Thank you.” I made a show of looking at the appointment calendar on my desk, hoping to signal that our meeting was over. When she didn’t move, I asked, “Is there anything else you need? Is there anything else we can do?”

  “Don’t you want the woman’s name?”

  “Yes,” I said, “why don’t you tell me.” And as she said the words Carissa Lake—spelling for me the homeopath’s first name, then providing me with her home and office phone numbers—I couldn’t imagine there was any way in the world I could help my healer. There was absolutely nothing to do but make sure she’d linked up with someone like Becky McNeil. And then, perhaps, say a prayer for the Emmons family.r />
  “That’s the Eiffel Tower,” Carissa was saying to Abby that night after we’d all arrived at my house, as she pointed at the picture in Madeline’s Rescue. “It must be very far from Madeline’s house in this drawing. It’s actually very tall.”

  “Madeline doesn’t have a mother, you know,” Abby explained, a connection I understood instantly. It came up whenever we read a book in the Bemelmans series. “She died. At least I think she died. See, her mother didn’t visit her in the hospital when she had her operation.”

  Carissa looked up at me while Abby was gazing at the picture in the storybook, and in the brief second we made eye contact, I nodded, hoping my small motion reassured her: It’s okay. We talk about this stuff all the time.

  “The operation’s an appendectomy, isn’t it?” she asked Abby.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Though Abby was sitting on the den floor next to Carissa, my daughter was pressing her free hand on her hip exactly the way her mother once had—her palm upon the velour of the dress, her fingers pointing down her leg toward her knees.

  Sometimes I would be surprised when I’d see Elizabeth in Abby. It wasn’t that the little girl didn’t look like her mother, because most certainly she did. They had the same brown eyes, and the same rosebud-shaped mouth. Actually, the only part of Abby that seemed to be mine was her hair: lion-colored, and of a texture so fine that even after two-plus years of trying, it was still impossible for me to get a barrette to stay in.

  “And, let’s see, on these pages you can see a big church called Notre Dame—”

  “Quasimodo lives there! I have the movie! And his friends are these three talking gurgles.”

  “Gargoyles,” I said.

  “And this is the Hôtel des Invalides,” Carissa continued, thumbing through the book for landmarks she knew. “And here’s the merry-go-round in a big garden called the Tuileries. The horses are painted the most magical colors you’ve ever seen.”

  “Are the horses magic, too?”

  “Sort of. They won’t come to life or anything like that. But the world spins by when you’re on them, and the music’s lovely. When you ride them, it’s as if you’re in a very special and beautiful place.”