The Law Of Similars
Chris Bohjalian
*
Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?
Abraham Lincoln
October 13, 1858
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
Proverbs 17:22
PROLOGUE:
For almost two full years after my wife died, I slept with my daughter. Obviously, this wasn't Abby's idea (and I think, even if it were, as her father I'd insist now on taking responsibility). After all, she was only two when the dairy delivery truck slammed into her mother's Subaru wagon and drove the mass of chrome and rubber and glass down the embankment and into the shallow river that ran along the side of the road.
In all fairness, of course, it wasn't my idea either. At least the two years part. I'd never have done it once if I'd realized it would go on for so long.
But about a week after Elizabeth's funeral, when Abby and I were just starting to settle into the routine that would become our life, I think the concept that Mommy really and truly wasn't coming back became a tangible reality in my little girl's mind--more real, perhaps, than the lunch box I packed every night for day care, or the stuffed animals that lined the side of her bed against the wall. It happened after midnight. She awoke and called for Mommy and I came instead, and I believe that's exactly when something clicked inside her head: There is no Mommy. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever again.
And so she had started to howl.
Forty-five minutes later, she was still sobbing, and my arms had become lead wings from holding her and rocking her and pacing the room with her head on my shoulder. I think that's when I paced out the door of her room and into mine. Into what had been my wife's and my room. There I placed her upon Elizabeth's side of the bed, pulled the quilt up to her chin, and wrapped one pajamaed arm around her small, heaving back. And there, almost abruptly, she fell asleep. Sound asleep. Boom, out like a light.
Later I decided it was the simple smell of her mother on the pillowcase that had done the trick. I hadn't changed the sheets on the bed in the week and a half since Elizabeth had died.
Of course, it might also have been the mere change of venue. Maybe Abby understood that she wasn't going to be left alone that night in that bed; she knew I wasn't going to kiss her once on her forehead and then go someplace else to doze.
The next night it all happened again, and it happened almost exactly the same way. I awoke when I heard her cries in the dark and went to her room, and once again I murmured "Shhhhhh" by her ear until the single syllable sounded like the sea in my head, while Abby just sobbed and sobbed through the waves. Finally I navigated the hallway of the house like a sleepwalker, my little girl in my arms, and placed her upon what had been Elizabeth's side of the bed, her head atop what had been Elizabeth's pillow.
This time as I lay down beside her I realized that I was tearing, too, and I was relieved that she'd fallen instantly asleep. The very last thing she needed was the knowledge that Daddy was crying with her.
Was the third night an exact replica of nights one and two? Probably. But there my memory grows fuzzy. Had Abby asked me at dinner that evening if she could sleep yet again in Mommy and Daddy's room? In my room, perhaps? Or had I just carried her upstairs one evening at eight o'clock--after dinner and her bath, after we'd watched one of her videos together in the den, Abby curled up in my lap--and decided to read to her in my room instead of hers? I haven't a clue. All I know is that at some point our routine changed, and I was putting Abby to sleep in my bed before coming back downstairs to wash the dinner dishes and make sure her knapsack was packed for day care the next day: Her lunch, a juice box, two sets of snacks. Extra underpants in case of an accident, as well as an extra pair of pants. A sweater eight or nine months of the year. The doll of the moment. Tissues. Lip balm when she turned three and developed a taste for cherry ChapStick.
I rarely came upstairs before eleven-thirty at night because I had my own work to tend to after I'd put Abby's life in order--depositions and motions and arguments, the legal desiderata that was my life--but once I was in bed, invariably I would quickly doze off. The bed was big, big enough for me and my daughter and the stuffed animals and trolls and children's books that migrated one by one from her room to mine. And I reasoned that after all Abby had been through and would yet have to endure, it was only fair for me to give her whatever it took to make her feel safe and sleep soundly.
Occasionally, I'd wake in the middle of the night to find Abby sitting up in bed with her legs crossed. She'd be staring at me in the glow of the nightlight and smiling, and often she'd giggle when she'd see my eyes open.
"Let's play Barbie," she'd say. Or, "Can we do puzzles?"
"It's the middle of the night, punkin," I'd say.
"I'm not sleepy."
"Well, I am."
"Pleeeeeeeease?"
"Okay, you can. But you can't turn on the light."
In the morning, I'd see she'd fallen back to sleep at the foot of the bed with a Barbie in one hand and a plastic troll in the other. Or she'd fallen asleep while looking at the pictures in one of her books, the book open upon her chest as if she were really quite adult.
I learned early that she would sleep through my music alarm in the morning. And so I would usually get up at five-thirty to shower and shave, so that I could devote from six-thirty to seven-thirty to getting her dressed and fed, her teeth brushed, and a good number (though never all) of the snarls dislodged from her fine, hay-colored hair. I usually had her at the day care in the village by twenty to eight, and so most days I was at my desk between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty.
I think it was a few weeks after Abby's fourth birthday, when she was taking a bath and I was on the floor beside the tub skimming the newspaper as she pushed a small menagerie of toy sharks and sea lions and killer whales around in the water, that I looked up and saw she was standing. She was placing one of the whales in the soap dish along the wall, and I realized all of her baby fat was gone. At some point she had ceased to be a toddler, and in my head I heard the words, It's time to move out, kid. We're getting into a weird area here.
The next morning at breakfast I broached the notion that she return to the bedroom in which she'd once slept, and which still housed her clothes and all of the toys that weren't residing at that moment on my bed. Our bed. The bigger bed. And she'd been fine. At first I'd feared on some level her feelings were hurt, or she was afraid she had done something wrong. But then I understood she was simply digesting the idea, envisioning herself in a bed by herself.
"And you'll still be in your room?" she asked me.
"Of course."
That night she slept alone for the first time in almost twenty-three months, and the next morning it seemed to me that she had done just fine. When I went to her room at six-thirty, she was already wide awake. She was sitting up in bed with the light on, and it was clear she'd been reading her picture books for at least half an hour. The pile of books beside her was huge.
I, on the other hand, wasn't sure how well I had done. I'd woken up in the night with a cold--what I have since come to call the cold. A runny nose, watery eyes. A sore throat. The predictable symptoms of a profoundly common ailment, the manifestations of a disease that decades of bad ad copy have made us believe is wholly benign. Unpleasant but treatable, if you just know what to buy.
There was, in my mind, no literal connection between evicting my daughter and getting sick, no cause and effect. But it was indeed a demarcation of sorts. The cold came on in the middle of that night, the cold that--unlike every cold I'd ever had before--would no
t respond to the prescription-strength, over-the-counter tablets and capsules and pills that filled my medicine chest.
The cold that oozy gel caps couldn't smother, and nighttime liquids couldn't drown.
Indeed, things began spiraling around me right about then. Not that night, of course, and not even the next day. It actually took months. But when I look back on all that I did and all that I risked--when I look back on the litany of bad decisions I made--it seems to me that everything started that night with that cold: the very night my daughter slept alone in her room for the first time in two years.
People who meet me now would be astonished to know there was a point in my life when I was wary of what I once called alternative medicine.
My mind, to them, must seem open and tolerant and wide. After all, I have a small vial of peppermint oil for headaches. When Abby and I fly, we take ginger instead of Dramamine. And when others tell me they have regained the lost parts of their health with Reiki or reflexology, with kinesiology or craniosacral therapy--with color therapy, music therapy, myotherapy, or hypnotherapy--I no longer nod warily, secretly relieved that we're not a part of the same HMO.
And I know well that the bridge between body and mind is sturdy. Sometimes I'm more convinced that we can worry ourselves ill than that we can will ourselves well, but for better or worse, I understand that the link between what we think is going on inside us and the daily battles that occur in our bones and bladders and spleens is more pronounced than we understand. We know a lot more than we realize.
Carissa Lake, my first homeopath, taught me that.
When what would prove to be the longest week of my life was over--longer by far than even the week after my wife died, since most of that week I spent in a fog--my sister, Diana, said I should have seen it coming. She said the walls and the ceiling of Carissa Lake's office should have tipped me off the moment I stepped through the door.
Maybe. But Carissa had had a lot of patients before me, and none of them did what I did. Most of them, I know, would simply have given Carissa testimonials that ranged from glowing to benign. And I've yet to find a homeopath who would quibble with the remedy she prescribed for me. The fact is, it worked.
Nevertheless, those walls of hers were controversial. They still are. Even now no one has rented the space she was using, and the building's owner hasn't bothered to paint over the walls. (I understand there was some talk that the family was going to roll gallons of primer and sealer across the murals, but I think that talk was just rumor. Apparently, it was even suggested at a selectmen's meeting that the town pay the landlord to have the walls repainted, but that idea smacked of salting the rubble of Frankenstein's castle, and the discussion didn't last very long.)
There is, as far as I know, no room like it in all of Vermont. There are other ceilings with paintings, of course, though not very many. But certainly there are no other replicas of the night sky over Paris. Over Le Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise.
Actually, replica is inaccurate. The constellations are perfectly aligned, and the view of Paris that fills the northern and eastern walls is essentially what one would have seen from the highest point in the twentieth arrondissement in 1843--the year homeopathy founder Samuel Hahnemann died. But the real vault of heaven is never the eddies of purple and black and gray that the painter chose in consultation with her for the sky. Had the night sky been authentically dark, the room would have been depressing and dim--especially since she had one of the three large windows in the room walled up, so the spire of Sainte-Chapelle would not be conspicuously absent from the vista.
Apparently, the French-Canadian painter had known nothing about homeopathy when they met, but before he started to work, he dutifully skimmed the books she had given him about Hahnemann, and the one specifically about Hahnemann's much younger wife, Melanie. She, too, was a homeopath. And it was clear that the painter also read the books she loaned him by renegade Jungians about something they called the soul, some of which had been bubbling along on best-seller lists for years.
She said that they talked all the time as he labored, and he'd asked her all kinds of questions about homeopathy and her work. He knew she was a psychologist as well as a homeopath.
"Why," she remembered him asking one evening, his voice heavily accented from his childhood in eastern Quebec, "do you want the view to be from a cemetery? This Pere Lachaise? You're a healer. It seems to me you'd want the view to be from someplace about life."
"Hahnemann is buried at Pere Lachaise," she told him.
"If this is about Hahnemann, then why not pick a view from a place where he lived? The book said he lived near Montmartre for a while. The views of Paris from Montmartre are spectacular."
"You've never been to Pere Lachaise?"
"No."
And so she said she'd described for him the small city of aboveground monuments: a hundred thousand tombstones and sepulchers--well over a million bodies--crowded into a mere one-hundred-plus acres. She told him about the thin cobblestone avenues and pathways between the plots, and the fact that there is almost no grass. No space. No fields. Just rows and rows of marble and stone ascending a hill, a series of seemingly endless ranges of magnificent memorials and crypts and mausoleums, some twenty and thirty and forty feet high.
"Balzac is buried there," she told him. "And Proust and Piaf and Richard Wright." As well as, she could have added, Jim Morrison and Frederic Chopin. Isadora Duncan and Simone Signoret.
Now and then the room would scare one of her patients, and it would take her a moment to calm him. For a time she even feared that she'd made a colossal mistake, and the room was doing exactly the opposite of what it was meant to: Instead of offering the sick who had come to her for help a place so surreal and unexpected that they could open their minds to the possibilities of homeopathy, it was jarring them. Alarming them. It didn't matter that only the tips of tombstones or statuary were visible on the walls, and only then in two lower corners. The fact remained, few of her patients had ever seen a ceiling with stars, and fewer still had ever seen a wall that was a painting--in this case, two walls. A trompe l'oeil of spires, towers, and the crosses that stood atop distant churches. Waves of small buildings with roofs of gray slate.
She thought it was lovely; they--some, not all--thought it was downright disconcerting.
Over time, however, word of Carissa's room spread, and eventually most people just viewed it as the local homeopath's eccentricity. Everyone had one; this was hers. And so when people came to see her, they knew what to expect. A chance for healing. A room with a view.
Carissa's office was on the westernmost quarter of the top floor of the old school building in Bartlett. But the clapboard octagon hadn't schooled children in almost three generations, and for many of those years had been absolutely vacant inside. Had it not been situated between the village's thriving Catholic church and the post office, it probably would have fallen into complete disrepair. It might have become the hangout in which the town's teens experimented with illegal substances and tried to discover the difference between short, furtive wrestling matches and intercourse.
At some point in the mid-1980s, however, as more and more New Yorkers and Bostonians began taking pride in their downward mobility and migrated north to Vermont, even Bartlett developed the need for an office building of sorts, and the three-story octagon was converted into the closest thing the village had to a white-collar skyscraper. Lawyers and a CPA on the first floor. A little insurance company on the second. A massage therapist, a travel agent, and a homeopath on the third.
I had never met Carissa Lake before I called and we spoke on the phone about my cold. I was vaguely aware that there was a woman in town who was involved in some esoteric form of healing, and I'd heard about the walls of the Octagon. The ones on the highest floor. In hindsight, I'm not even sure that I knew the woman and the walls were related until her niece made the connection clear to me in--and the irony is inescapable--the health-food store.
When I did
make the connection, I don't believe I was any less interested in seeing her. To the contrary, I probably wanted to meet her even more.
This is not just my story, of course. Nor is it simply Carissa's.
In many ways, it's Richard Emmons's story, though I said barely more than a word to the man in his life, and he never, that I can recall, said a single word to me. But I know his wife and I've met his children.
And now Jennifer Emmons knows the peculiar bond that Richard and I share, the strange ways we are linked. Hubris and hypochondria. Homeopathy and hope. Carissa, of course.
Carissa is what makes our link tangible.
In that short period in which Jennifer and I had the chance to be friends--that brief window before she heard the rumors of what I had done--she shared her memories with me.
After all, she thought I was an ally.
She told me, for example, about that time she was in bed with Richard at the very end of the fall, and she felt him suddenly sit up beside her and wheeze. She remembered how she had opened her eyes and seen darkness.
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