Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  I clicked on the link in blue titled Treatment and swore out loud as I read, “The quantity of arsenic that must be absorbed by the body to cause poisoning is relatively small: Don’t expect high levels in urinary excretion in even severe cases.”

  Not even an exclamation point, I noticed. It seemed to me that when someone was writing about severe arsenic poisoning, one should use an exclamation point.

  And the cure? Fresh air, if it was acute. Intravenous fluids, to keep the urine as dilute as possible. Perhaps sodium bicarbonate to keep the urine alkaline.

  Be sure, meanwhile, to watch for renal failure.

  Other treatments? Hemodialysis, whatever that was. And a drug called dimercaprol, though it only worked a small percentage of the time.

  I pulled my hands from the keyboard and rested them in my lap. I tried to remind myself that nothing on the Internet was gospel, that the Web was—in addition to everything else—the world’s greatest source of misinformation. How could it not be when any eleven-year-old who was proud of his little paper on Quito could post it on the Net as a resource on Ecuador?

  Still, this looked bad. I didn’t imagine I was as frightened as I’d be if a plane I was aboard was about to auger into a mountain near Denver, but this sure as hell didn’t look good. I wondered if I should go to the hospital. By now Abby had her suitcase all packed with her toys, and could entertain herself on the floor of the E.R. while the doctors took care of her dad.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the slightest idea what I’d say to those doctors. Would they think to check for arsenic poisoning if I didn’t tell them I was pretty damn sure that was the problem? Probably not. This wasn’t the Middle Ages, after all, and I wasn’t a pope.

  And I certainly couldn’t tell them what had really occurred. At least I didn’t think I could. I tried making up a story that would get me to arsenic poisoning, but there just didn’t seem to be any route there but the truth.

  So you see, I swiped a bottle of her arsenic while we were doctoring her notes so she wouldn’t be charged with a crime or lose her whole world in a civil suit. And I figured the stuff was completely harmless—well, I guess I knew it wasn’t completely harmless, because it sure as shit gave me a rush the first time I took it, but I guess I assumed it wasn’t toxic. Just a really good drug—but not exactly a drug, of course. I’m not like the little shits I prosecute, you know: creepy little turds like Teddy Paquette. I’m not like him. Oh, no.

  I wished I were friends with a doctor. Really good friends. Close enough that my friend the physician would swipe a hemodialysis machine for me. Or that dimercaprol stuff. But I wasn’t. The only doctors I knew were the doctors who actually treated me, or the doctors I’d met as a prosecutor: the physicians who’d testify on behalf of the State, explaining what the wounds meant in the photos of battered women, beaten children, bruised and hammered junkies and dealers and whores.

  Probably my only real friend who’d gone to medical school was the State Medical Examiner, Steve Wagner, and Steve made it clear whenever we talked about good health and well-being that he spent most of his time with bodies sadly lacking in vitality. “I don’t even play a doctor on TV,” he’d said once when I asked his advice.

  Besides, I didn’t want to bother Steve at his home on a Friday night. Usually I only did that when someone had died, and I sure as hell hoped we weren’t about to reach that point.

  No, the closest thing I had to a good friend who happened to be a healer was my homeopath. Former homeopath. Current co-conspirator. I had no idea if she’d have any suggestions or antidotes, but here was clearly one more reason why I had to see her: Perhaps she could undo what I had done.

  It was really only a week of my life. Six days, arguably.

  I suppose I should be grateful. I’ve prosecuted criminals whose sprees lasted far longer. I’ve certainly prosecuted criminals whose crimes were far worse.

  Afterward, for a time I played a game in my mind that was briefly made famous by a substance abuse counselor from Oklahoma. The game, “What if, then what?,” makes some people feel better. It opens some people’s eyes to life’s possibilities. Usually I’d play it when I was alone in my truck, or when I was alone in my bed and unable to sleep. For me, it would go something like this:

  What if I’d told Carissa the night after Christmas when she’d come to my house that I absolutely could not help her? Then what?

  Then she would have left.

  And we would not have doctored her notes.

  And she would not have felt even worse than she did. She would not have felt like a criminal.

  And I would not have swiped a vial of arsenic.

  And she would have gotten a good lawyer.

  And, after an investigation, the case would—at the very least—have gone to a grand jury.

  And the grand jury might or might not have recommended prosecution.

  And, either way, there would have been a civil suit.

  And either Carissa would have settled. Or not.

  And so there might have been as many as two trials. Or as few as none.

  And Richard Emmons would still have been posturing in his bed in the ICU in those days before New Year’s.

  Would I have lost Carissa?

  I could never decide. But when I think back on that Tuesday night in my house, I see Carissa standing to leave not because I will not help her, but because she fears that I doubt her. The difference is a chasm.

  And so if I would have lost Carissa, I would have lost her for other reasons. Because she could not invest emotional capital in a new relationship when the State was about to begin prosecuting her. Because one of her patients had misunderstood what she had said and was now in a coma. Because, perhaps, she simply didn’t love me, and we were no longer linked by a crime.

  Sometimes I would tell myself that I did what I did—the notes, the arsenic, the lies—because my wife had died. Because my wife had died and I was raising a little girl on my own. Because, after two and a half years, I was simply exhausted.

  But this is a pretty tawdry justification, a pretty slippery bit of rationalization. It excuses nothing.

  And so the game never once made me feel better.

  Nora Woodson answered the front door and gave Abby and me each a huge hug. Nora was somewhere in her mid-sixties, but I thought she still had more energy than I’d ever had in my life. She was the choir director, she ran the church women’s circle, and she volunteered three or four days a month in Burlington, helping the state resettle the steady stream of Bosnian and Croatian refugees who made their way first to the United States and then to Vermont. Sometimes the deep lines in her face made her look even older than sixty-five or sixty-six, but the wrinkles hadn’t diminished her stam-ina. She was relentless, a deceptively tiny woman with eyeglasses that covered half her face and a fine soprano voice that was only now starting to show its age.

  Once Abby had climbed out of her coat and her boots, she started unpacking her tiny red suitcase. She showed Nora the T-shirts and troll underpants she had brought, and Nora pointed upstairs.

  “They’re asleep on our bed,” she said, referring to the cats. “First bedroom on the left.”

  Abby looked at me to make sure it was okay to disappear, and then ran up the steps with her handful of clothes.

  “Leland, you look like you’ve got quite a…I don’t know, something,” Nora said to me when Abby was out of sight. “I’d say a cold, but you don’t look coldy.”

  I smiled and shrugged. “Maybe I have a bug. But I feel pretty good,” I lied.

  “I got my flu shot in the fall. So do your worst.”

  I handed her the coffee and chocolates as she led me into the living room, and there I saw Paul, as well as my friends Howard and Anne Lansing. The group was standing before the woodstove.

  “I hear I just missed you at the hospital,” Paul said.

  “You were there?” I wasn’t sure why, but the fact that Paul had just been there unnerved me. It shouldn’t have.
Paul was, after all, a minister, and hospital visits were a part of the job description. Still, it seemed to be further proof that events were linked in ways I did not comprehend, that people knew far more than I realized.

  “I was. Maybe if you’d gotten there a little later or I’d gotten there a little sooner, we might have bumped into each other in the ICU.”

  “Could have happened,” I murmured.

  “I didn’t know you knew them,” Anne said to me.

  I tried to smile. Howard and Anne were both schoolteachers. They had two boys in elementary school, one who I thought might be as old as ten. “Only a bit,” I said.

  “Oh, I get it, you were there professionally. You’re going to prosecute,” Howard said. “There’s a case against our local homeopath.”

  “Now, that would be tricky. Aren’t you and Carissa friends?” Paul asked me, and then took a sip from the mug of hot cider in his hands.

  “I know her,” I said.

  “If I remember correctly, you introduced us Christmas Eve,” he said.

  “I did.”

  “So your visit wasn’t professional,” Howard observed.

  I shook my head. “Nope. Just moral support.”

  “What can I get you?” Nora asked me, and I wanted to answer a tranquilizer. But I restrained myself and asked for hot cider instead.

  “And a glass of water,” I added, figuring I should be doing all I could to keep my urine dilute.

  “We don’t know Carissa very well, but we like her brother and sister-in-law. And we think the world of her niece,” Anne said.

  “Whitney?”

  “Whitney,” she repeated. “Until she went off to college, she was our number-one baby-sitter. The boys love her.”

  “Colgate, right?”

  “Yup. She was going to sit with them tonight, as a matter of fact, but then had to cancel.”

  “She hadn’t planned on going back to school for another two weeks,” Howard explained, “but apparently she changed her mind. She’s going back tomorrow instead.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. Her aunt’s driving her.”

  “Carissa?”

  “Uh-huh. Whitney says they’re leaving at the crack of dawn.”

  “Tomorrow? Carissa’s leaving tomorrow?”

  “Carissa and Whitney,” he answered, emphasizing the younger woman’s name.

  “Oh,” I said, aware that the sound had come out like an agonized grunt. Like I’d just been hit hard in the stomach. All I’d meant to say was, Oh, how nice, but somehow I’d never gotten as far as the second part. I was starting to feel sick once again, and it was coming on fast: a nor’easter blowing hard and swift into my stomach, the storm triggered by the realization that Carissa was going to flee. I was sure of it. This was not just arsenic-inspired paranoia, a poison-induced panic: This was the sort of incomprehensible but often life-saving intuition that’s triggered by adrenaline, hormones, and fear.

  Carissa was going to leave. She was going to drop off Whitney in upstate New York and then continue on to Toronto. Or Ottawa. And then get on an airplane and fly…

  Anywhere.

  Paris, maybe. Perhaps someplace she had found where there was no reciprocity with the U.S. No extradition.

  “Leland?”

  The timing was perfect. Colgate was far enough away that everyone would expect her to spend the night in New York and drive home the day after that. No one would expect her home until Sunday night. And so no one would expect to see her until Monday morning. New Year’s Day.

  By then she could have been flying for thirty-six hours. Since Saturday night. And one can fly far in a day and a half.

  Quickly I sat down on the arm of the couch. This time I’m really going to puke, I thought. I’m about to be sick all over Paul and Nora’s beautiful living-room furniture.

  “Leland, you’re getting pale! Do you want some water?” It was Howard’s voice, and I knew the man was right beside me, leaning over me, but the fellow still sounded like he was talking to me through a pillow. I stared down at the carpet—Was that an Oriental rug I was about to ruin?—and tried to breathe in deeply and slowly.

  “Get him some water,” Anne said.

  I put my head between my knees and reached for my feet. There was that tingling. There were those splinters.

  “I’m fine,” I mumbled. “I’m fine.”

  Somewhere nearby were a woman’s feet in blue pumps, and I could sense Howard backing away. Then before me were a woman’s shins and her dress, and I saw Nora putting my mug down on the coffee table and kneeling beside me.

  “Leland, do you want us to call a doctor?” she asked, her lips almost in my ear.

  “No, Nora, please don’t. I just need a minute,” I said quietly.

  “Do you want to go upstairs and lie down? We’ll entertain Abby.”

  I did, but I wasn’t sure my feet would function. The tingling seemed so bad, it was like both of my feet had fallen asleep. And so I shook my head and tried to focus upon nothing but the argyle swirls on my socks.

  “He really didn’t look well when he arrived,” Nora was saying to someone, and I imagined Paul nodding and adding, He hasn’t looked well for days. You should have seen him the other night by the pay phone in town. In the storm. Looked awful. Just awful!

  “Flu?” Paul asked his wife.

  “Maybe,” she said, and I saw her legs disappear as she stood, taking a step back to give me some air.

  “It’s going around. Apparently, half the doctors and nurses up at the hospital have it.”

  Oh, but I’ve been taking echinacea, I wanted to say. As a matter of fact, I’ve been taking echinacea with goldenseal. And I’ve been in the care of a homeopath. A wonderful homeopath. You all know her. So how could I possibly have come down with the flu?

  “I’m sure school will be half-empty next week,” Howard said.

  “I was up visiting Eleanor Atkins this morning, and she’s not doing well at all. Her spirits are failing, too.”

  “She must be eighty-five, eighty-six years old?”

  “About that.”

  I breathed in through my nose, a stream of calm, steady breaths, and with as much relief as I’d ever felt in my life understood the nausea was starting to subside. I looked up and saw Anne smiling down at me with pity and love in her eyes—What a teacher she must be!—and Howard sipping his coffee cup of hot cider.

  “How are you doing?” Anne asked.

  “Better.”

  “I think the color’s coming back to your cheeks,” she said, and I tried to offer back a small smile.

  Nora scurried over to me. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go upstairs for a few minutes?”

  “I think I’m going to be okay.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “I’m positive. Maybe it was something I ate at lunch.”

  “Well, my feelings won’t be hurt if you don’t touch a thing tonight.”

  I stretched my legs, hoping the tingling had disappeared enough that I could stand, and stifled a yawn. I had no idea what nausea and yawning had to do with each other, but I’d noticed in the last few days that they seemed to be somehow related.

  “I don’t think it’s possible to sit down at your table and not eat everything,” I said. “But I’ll be careful. I won’t overdo it.”

  “Let’s make it an early evening, and get you and Abby home soon,” Nora said. “I think dinner’s ready and I can start serving. Paul, can you help me?”

  “Let me lend a hand, too,” Anne said, and suddenly, I realized, I was left alone with Howard.

  “That was quite a scare you gave us,” he said.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It happens.”

  “It does.”

  “I guess you didn’t know she was leaving.” Howard’s face was a blank, completely unreadable.

  “Guess not.”

  He wasn’t smiling or frowning; there certainly wasn’t a hint of judgment.
But it was a signal between us that he knew. Everyone knew. Not everything, not by a long shot. But something.

  “How long have you known her?” he asked.

  “Not long.”

  “You two have plans for tomorrow?”

  “Not really,” I said, rising slowly from the arm of the couch. “Well. I should probably go find my daughter.”

  He nodded. Poor Leland, I imagined him thinking. Wrong woman. Wrong time.

  Number 93

  Anything shameful that has precipitated the disease…the physician should try to uncover.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  I decided during dinner that I would go and see her that night. Anne was playing on the floor with my daughter, and Nora was bringing out coffee and pie, and the plan grew real in my mind: I would stay at the Woodsons’ until Abby had fallen into a deep sleep, and then I would bundle her up and carry her to the truck, and together we would drive into the village. Abby, I knew, would sleep through it all.

  It was almost nine-thirty before Abby curled up on Paul and Nora’s living-room couch and nodded off, and so it was well past ten before I went to the truck to turn on the heater. It was ten-thirty before I had said my good-byes and sat Abby upon my lap—a rag doll without a spine that bobbed, eyes closed, as I pulled the sleeves of her coat over her arms and slipped her feet into her snow boots—and thanked Nora and Paul one last time.

  Somehow, it was nearing eleven o’clock by the time I lifted my sleeping daughter from her booster seat and carried her to Carissa’s front door.

  Though it was late, I’d parked my truck at the rear of her driveway, partway into a snowdrift that marked the beginning of her backyard: You could see the truck from the street if you bothered to look, but you’d have to crane your head and stare.

  When I got to the front door, I paused for a moment before ringing the bell. I had expected she’d still be awake, packing, but there were no lights on. My plan did not include waking her up.