And so I made sure the notes showed clearly that Richard had asked if he could stop taking his inhalers and pills. And then the notes showed equally clearly that Carissa had said no. Absolutely not. She scribbled that she’d told him to not even consider such a thing.
And she’d said it again when she gave him his remedy.
Then, just to be sure there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Carissa would never have recommended he give up his medications, I suggested that the pair had had a similar exchange the Monday he phoned her. And she had taken a few notes during the call, because she had been in the midst of reviewing patient files when he happened to phone.
“Make Richard adamant,” I told Carissa. “And make yourself equally adamant. I think you told him it would be irresponsible and dangerous and stupid.”
“The thing is, I probably did say something just like that,” she murmured, and I nodded.
“Good,” I said.
And I had her layer in what would look like some remarks about cashews and poison ivy and Rhus tox in the second of their two meetings. In her fake—No, not fake. Embellished—notes, she made it clear to her patient that while these plants were all from the same family, he should never consume a cashew. Never. Not with his allergy. Not with his asthma. He just shouldn’t do it, it was just that simple.
In the distance, I saw lights in the oncoming lane. For a second I was sure the other vehicle was going to swerve into mine, since I was just beyond the turn I should have made to get Abby, a right onto the street on which sixteen-year-old Mildred Reinhart lived with her family. So I was sure to have an accident.
Just where were you going, Leland? Phil would ask. Or Margaret. Or Rod Morrow, perhaps. Didn’t matter. They’d all want to know.
The gas station.
But you had almost three-quarters of a tank. And you were almost a half-hour late for your daughter.
Oh.
Fortunately, the oncoming car didn’t slide over the double yellow line buried somewhere underneath the thin layer of snow, and I kept my truck safely in my own lane. We were just two vehicles passing in the night. Harmless, completely harmless. It was simply that I’d gone five or six miles without seeing another car, and for a moment I’d panicked. I’d frightened myself. And so I did exactly what I had done all day whenever I felt a slight twinge of alarm: I popped another one of those teeny-tiny little pills with corpuscular traces of arsenic.
Ironically, in the end, I think it was exactly those jitters that gave me the courage to pull into the gas station on the green. After all, if I was this fidgety and unstrung, how must Carissa be feeling? Far worse, no doubt. No doubt at all. And so I had to call her. Tell her how much I loved her, and that we had most assuredly done the right thing.
Most assuredly.
After we’d finished revising her notes from her meetings with Richard, fabricating entire new sections, we took care of the easy part. The fast part. The part that probably took about eight minutes. We burned the pages of notes she’d scribbled about Leland Fowler. All fifteen of them. We burned them bit by bit in her aromatherapy diffuser, a shallow clay vase filled with lavender oil, with a small burner just below it. It was in the flame in that burner that we torched my homeopathic history. Little by little, the record just disappeared. And it went up in lavender-scented smoke without my stealing a glimpse. Not one peek. It was hard, but Carissa had insisted. Not a single glance, she said, not one single glance.
Then we destroyed the pages in her date book where my name had appeared. Just ripped them out. If anyone ever asked—And why would they? Just why would they?—she’d simply say that she’d used them as scrap paper for grocery lists. Or Christmas shopping lists. That was all. Two missing pages in December? No biggie, no biggie at all.
I parked as far from the station’s streetlight as I could, and I parked so that only the front of my truck faced the commons. If, by some chance, someone from Bartlett who knew my truck should drive by, they’d be less likely to recognize the vehicle this way.
I figured Carissa was at home, and so I tried there first. When her answering machine clicked in, I listened to her entire recorded message before hanging up. For a moment, I actually considered trying to let her know it was me—Carissa, it’s me! Pick up!—in the event that she was simply screening her calls and standing beside the machine that very moment.
But in the end I didn’t dare say a word. I simply hung up and stamped my feet against the cold creeping up my shins through thin socks and pants legs, and wished that Carissa and I had thought to devise some sort of phone code. Three rings and a hang-up means it’s me. Three rings, then two rings, maybe. Something like that.
Next I tried the Octagon, though I didn’t have much hope she’d be there. She wasn’t. Or, at least, she wasn’t answering the phone.
No, I decided, she wasn’t there. She was home. Probably. I began to wonder what would happen—what really would happen—if I simply stopped by her house. What, in reality, would be the big deal if I dropped by for a brief hug on my way to get Abby? It wasn’t as if the state police had a stakeout across the street; it wasn’t as if she was under surveillance.
Maybe I’d even borrow a towel from her and dry off the snow that was piling atop my head and shoulders like frozen moguls of dandruff.
Who’d know? Who’d really know?
I couldn’t name names, but I knew in my heart that someone would know. People are everywhere. Even in snowstorms. If I stopped by her house, I deserved to be making license plates at the correctional center in Windham, it was just that simple.
And so I resolved, finally, to just go and get my daughter. Abby wouldn’t exactly be worried about me, but she understood enough about time to know I was late.
As I brushed the hillocks of snow off my overcoat and climbed back into the truck, a little shiver coursed through me: What if Carissa had gone to the hospital to see Richard Emmons? Highly unlikely…but she’d said at least twice the night before and once in the morning that she knew she’d feel better if she could just say something to his wife. Maybe stroke Richard’s arm.
“He’s in intensive care. They might not even allow you to touch him,” I recalled saying, wishing my response had been a tad more sympathetic.
Carissa also felt an acute need to embrace Jennifer, to wrap the poor woman up in a generous, unreserved, peace-love-and-tie-dye sort of hug. She wanted to say she was sorry: not sorry because she had done something wrong, but sorry, pure and simple, that it had happened.
Did I want to go to the hospital, too? I did, though I should also confess that in those first two days after Christmas it took very little restraint not to visit either Richard or his wife. But I did feel for them: Here was a sweet, loving, capable woman—Good God, was she capable!—who through no fault of her own was faced with the daunting task of raising two kids on her own and coping with a husband in a coma.
And, apparently, Richard was not in the sort of coma from which people awoke. At least not very often. He might, Phil had told me at the end of the day; there was at least a chance because Richard’s brain was still alive. But the level of insult to the brain cells had been profound: somewhere between seven and nine minutes without oxygen. Maybe even longer. Consequently, it was likely that Richard would simply remain in a coma for weeks or months, and then die.
“It’s a bad coma,” Phil had said with characteristic piety. “This isn’t one of those good ones we read about in the tabloids, where a fellow wakes up one day and smiles at his wife like he just took a nap.”
I had nodded. It was worse than being a widow. Being a widow was what she had to look forward to, for God’s sake!
A piece of ice was frozen solid to the wiper blade on the driver’s side of the windshield, leaving a milky smudge in my line of vision every time the blade clicked before me like a metronome. If I wanted to see the road—which would certainly increase the likelihood that I’d get to Mildred’s and then home in one piece—I decided I’d better climb back
out of the truck before leaving the gas station and clean off the wiper. Once more I pulled the collar of my overcoat around my neck and jumped back into the storm.
“Leland? That you?”
I turned, hoping I hadn’t really heard my name.
“Leland, what are you doing out on a night like this? By now you should be home eating dinner with that little girl of yours.”
Approaching me was Paul Woodson, the pastor of the small church in East Bartlett. My church. My daughter’s and my church. Paul was crossing the strip of snow-covered asphalt separating the pumps from the station and the pay phone, navigating the slick surface with far more confidence than I imagined I would when I was somewhere past sixty.
“I could ask you the same thing, Paul,” I said, trying to smile.
The minister took off one of his thick ski gloves, extending his hand to me and clapping me on the back with the other. “I was visiting Ray at the nursing home in Middlebury,” he said, referring to the congregation’s oldest member. “There was some talk this afternoon that he might have to go to the hospital.”
“It sounds serious. What happened?”
Paul smiled and shrugged. “When you’re ninety-three, everything’s serious. A cold is serious.”
“Is that what it was? A cold?”
Paul pulled his glove back on as he spoke, and then wrapped an exposed earlobe underneath the wool of his cap. “Pneumonia, probably,” he answered.
“I’m sorry.”
“Old man’s friend, you know. But I’m not writing Ray’s eulogy just yet. He’s still got kick in him. Refused to go to the hospital for what he called a little winter hack, so he’s still in his bed at the home. His son put a terrific little Christmas tree in his room and covered it with ornaments the great-grandchildren made—all seven thousand of them.”
“Very nice.”
“On your way to get Abby?”
“I am.”
Paul motioned to the truck beside us and said, “Doesn’t technology drive you wild sometimes? Here you spend all that money on a car phone, and when you need it most—like in the middle of a snowstorm—it doesn’t work. You have to pull over and use a regular pay phone like it’s 1971.”
“It’s true.”
“Snow or hills?”
I thought for a moment, trying to follow the minister’s train of thought. When I realized I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, I repeated, “Snow or hills?”
“I was just wondering: Think it was the weather or some mountain that forced you to pull over? I’ve always heard how car phones don’t work in Vermont because the state’s so hilly. Think that’s why you had to stop? Or was it the snow maybe?”
“Maybe both.”
Paul nodded. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee for the road? Our six or seven miles up to East Bartlett is going to seem like a hundred, and this place actually brews a surprisingly drinkable pot of coffee.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Oh, come on, it’s on me. You look a little peaked. A little pale.”
“Just frozen.”
“More the reason you should come in for a minute.”
“I’d love to, but I’m already running late. Mildred and Abby must be wondering where I am. But thank you.”
Paul clapped me once more on the back. “You’re very welcome. Are we still on for Friday night? Nora plans to cook up a storm.”
“We are,” I said. I had completely forgotten that Abby and I were having dinner there in a couple of days.
“Good, good. We’ll see you then.”
“You bet.”
“Drive safely.”
“I will,” I said, and I watched the minister duck into the gas station and beeline for the coffeepot on the warmer across from the register. Then I ripped off the icicle that clung to my wiper blade like a frozen leech and heaved it against the brick wall of the station.
“At Kelly’s today, I named my new Barbies Elizabeth and Carissa,” Abby said. Kelly was the woman who ran Abby’s day care.
I nodded, hoping my face betrayed nothing. I watched as my daughter looked down at the pile of books on one of her pillows, ostensibly preoccupied with choosing the next story she would want me to read.
“Was that a good idea?” she went on when I was silent.
“Elizabeth is a beautiful name. So is Carissa.”
She had insisted on wearing her cotton summer pajamas because they were covered with flowers, and so I had insisted that she wear her bathrobe as well until she climbed under the covers for the night.
“They went on a picnic,” she said as she handed me the next book to read. “Elizabeth was the boss. She was in charge. She picked out where they went, and she made all the food.”
“Your mother loved picnics,” I said, and I wondered if in some small, accessible part of her brain Abby remembered the picnic the three of us had taken less than a month before the accident. I’d carried her in a backpack, and we’d hiked to the top of Snake Mountain, a scant ninety-minute walk with even twenty-plus pounds of toddler upon my back. Perhaps because Elizabeth and I had been told before starting that the mountain was a mere thirteen hundred feet—a foothill, really, a glorified bluff—we’d never expected the vista to the west that greeted us at the summit. The Champlain Valley farmlands spread out in the perfect squares I’d seen before only from an airplane, with Lake Champlain rippling just beyond. And across the water were the Adirondacks, much higher than the serpentine Snake, but so close, it seemed, they were peers.
Once there had been a small hotel at the edge of the cliff, but it burned down a century ago. The stone foundation remained, however, and for a moment Elizabeth and I thought the spot would be a fine place to unpack the picnic and settle down for lunch. I had actually emancipated my daughter from the backpack, and Elizabeth had already begun removing the sandwiches and cookies and Abby’s blue juice box from her knapsack, when we realized just how steep the nearby ledge was, and how easy it would be to slip over the side. A person wouldn’t fall anywhere near thirteen hundred feet, but it would nevertheless be a pretty rocky tumble before finally landing—with a more than ample complement of bruises and broken bones—in the midst of the trees that seemed to grow almost parallel to the ground from the cliff walls.
Quickly I had taken Abby’s hand and we retreated to a clearing a few hundred yards away from the peak.
“Barbie Elizabeth loves picnics, too, you know,” Abby said.
“I’m glad.”
I’d thought of that final family picnic together often the summer Elizabeth died, and, occasionally, in the two summers since. It had been one of those fantasy days that was absolutely wondrous at the time, but managed, somehow, to grow even better with age.
“Does Carissa—real Carissa—like picnics?” Abby asked.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her someday?” I smiled, if only to repress the whine that sometimes overwhelmed me: After all I had lost and all I’d endured, was it asking too much to be picnic-happy again?
Happy the way I’d been with Elizabeth?
When I’d been one-third of a family? One-half of a couple?
I looked at my daughter, aware that she was saying something to me.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said, “I think I was in a fog.”
“Pensive?” she asked, a word I’d recently taught her when she’d thought I was mad. No, I’d explained, just pensive.
“Yes. Pensive.”
“Can we read this one?” she said, handing me another book.
“Of course we can,” I said as she climbed into my lap. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing her tight against my chest. “Forgive me when I’m pensive,” I said. “I love you.”
“I know.”
“I love you like crazy.”
“I know.”
I sighed, and tried to press my guilt from my mind. Forgive yourself. You’re entitled to be tired.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetheart?�
� You’re entitled to be selfish. You’re entitled to try and snag a bit of happiness with Carissa Lake. You’re entitled—
“Have you known Carissa a long time?”
“No. Not long at all. We only met a few weeks before Christmas. How come?”
“Kelly asked.”
I felt a rush of dizziness surround me like a cloud, and then the peripheries of my vision grew dim. I leaned back against the wall by Abby’s bed and willed myself not to faint. In my head I heard the two words of my daughter’s small sentence once more, Kelly asked, and it sounded now like she’d been speaking underwater. In slow motion. In a nightmare voice.
“Why?” I mumbled.
“I don’t know.”
“Were you talking about Carissa with Kelly?”
“No. I was just playing Barbies,” she said, and then I realized instantly what had happened. Kelly had heard little Abby Fowler calling one of her new Christmas dolls Elizabeth and the other one Carissa, and understood at once that the child’s dad was now dating that homeopath. The one with the stars on her ceiling. The one with the weird painting on the wall. The one who—and Kelly might or might not have heard this part, it depended entirely upon whether she’d heard the latest gossip that day—might or might not have put Richard Emmons in a coma.
“Was that okay?” she asked, and I could see she could tell she’d upset me. She looked almost alarmed.
“Oh, it’s fine.” I saw I was shaking, and locked my hands together so Abby couldn’t see the spasms in my fingers, and then pulled her against me once more. “You use any names you want with your Barbies,” I said. “You call them anything your beautiful heart desires.”
I recalled praying alone at night in the church at least a dozen times when my mother was dying of cancer and Elizabeth’s accident was still years away. I’d fall to my knees before the altar and pray, “Lord, please give my mother a miracle. Do for her, please, what we can’t.”
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