the Law Of Similars (1998)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  "What do you do?"

  "Well, I kill them. Sometimes I try to sort of bat them intact to the ground. I've always figured spiders don't mind falling thirty-two feet. And it's probably better than being squashed. I really don't want to kill them, because I know it's supposed to be bad luck to kill a spider, and the last thing I need at the top of a thirty-two-foot ladder is bad luck."

  She laughed, and I took more pleasure from that than I thought was appropriate. It made me want to flirt. Seriously flirt. Tell her how much I liked her socks. The fact that the fabric was thin. And flowery. I wondered if socks were like lingerie.

  "Do you have other superstitions?" she asked.

  "Yeah, probably. But most of the time I'm not sure if they're superstitions or part of an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive personality disorder."

  "Such as?"

  "Well, whenever I leave my office, I have to tap the light switch four times. Whenever I leave my house, I tend to check the stove a zillion times to make sure it's off. And whenever I'm in Courtroom 3A--like I was a big part of this morning and afternoon--I have to sit in the chair with the small white stain on the cushion. That's my stain, I put it there. It's from this cinnamon bun I was eating one morning before a trial began."

  "Why do you have to have that specific chair? Did you win that case?"

  "I did. But it wasn't just that we sent the guy away for a long time--though we did. It's that I was good. I mean really good. Clarence Darrow good."

  "What else? What other aversions do you have?"

  I thought for a moment, returning to the image of spiders with egg sacs the size of my eyeballs, and began an eclectic litany that included mushrooms and flying and finding my shaving stubble in the sink. I told her I was afraid of singing in public--even in church if I wasn't in the very first pew--and of dying. Death scared the hell out of me. Prostate cancer and pancreatic cancer really terrified me, the former because it might leave me impotent, my bottom bagged, before I finally withered away, and the latter because it was just so horrifically incurable.

  "What about cravings?" she asked when it seemed I was through.

  "Are you thirsty?" I asked. I knew I was.

  "Ah, right now you crave water." She got up for the first time, stretched the leg that had been underneath her--toes pressing against the thin cotton sock, and in my mind I saw the smooth sole of her foot, her arch, her ankle--and went to a water cooler on the far side of her desk.

  "Yeah, I really am thirsty. I'm not used to...to talking about myself so much. I feel like a bore--like a guy in a bar who meets a woman for the first time and just spends hours talking about himself. I'm really sorry, Carissa."

  "You're very entertaining," she said.

  "I know this is your job and all, but...but still."

  She handed me a coffee mug filled with water and returned to her chair.

  "Want to tell me about your cravings?"

  You, I thought as I took a long swallow. Right now I really crave you.

  The consultation lasted almost two hours. It was past eight o'clock by the time we left the Octagon and discovered how cold it had become while we'd been talking inside. There were no stars in the sky, and I saw the first flakes of snow were starting to fall.

  "Your house is on the Huntington Road?" she asked as she turned up the collar on her parka.

  "It is," I said. "I thought long and hard about selling the place after Elizabeth died, and moving into Burlington. It would have saved more than an hour of driving each day--which would have given me more time for Abby. And any place I bought in the city would have been easier to maintain than the money-and-time sucker we live in right now. But Abby loved her day care and her friends, and I just didn't want to drop another big change into her life."

  "Or into yours."

  "I guess. I have a lot of wonderful memories tied up in that house."

  Carissa opened the back door of her station wagon and tossed the good-sized shoulder bag she carried with her onto the seat. "You said you'd lived in Burlington before moving to East Bartlett. Is there anything you miss?"

  I opened the front door of her car for her, and for a moment we stood with the metal shielding our legs from the crisp November wind.

  "The view, maybe. Elizabeth and I had an apartment that was right on the lake. It had a really amazing view of the Adirondacks."

  "Anything else?"

  "Oh, I don't know. Maybe being able to walk to restaurants and movies. Who knows? Perhaps I wouldn't be able to count my dates on one hand if Abby and I had moved to the city."

  "I think you know that would be a good thing."

  "Moving to Burlington?"

  "No, not at all. Dating. That's all I meant. Dating."

  I nodded, and waited for her to slide into her car. When she was settled behind the wheel with her key in her hand, I asked, "Want to join me some night, then? For dinner?"

  She smiled, but she was shaking her head with what looked like great resolve. "It's very sweet of you to ask, but you know that's completely impossible. It would be wildly inappropriate."

  "Wildly," I repeated.

  "Yes. Wildly. But thank you for asking."

  "Are you seeing someone?"

  "I'm not even going to answer that, Leland."

  "Wildly inappropriate?"

  "Wildly." She started the car and reached for the door handle. "I'll call you in a day or two--probably two--with a remedy," she said, then pulled shut the door. She mouthed good night through the glass, and then that foot with the thin cotton sock was pressing down on the brake as she shifted her car into reverse and backed it into the street bordering the green.

  I waved, and she waved back. In my other hand I was holding the little paperback book on homeopathy she had loaned me. A more thorough introduction, she had called it. I dropped the book into my wide overcoat pocket to protect it from the snow and then burrowed my hands under my arms. The pizza parlor in town was still open. I'd get a calzone I could reheat once I'd put Abby to bed, and then I'd read all about arsenic, tarantula, and belladonna.

  Please don't prescribe tarantula, I thought to myself. Spiders really do repulse me.

  I would not be present when Carissa gave her statement to the police three days after Christmas, but my boss, Philip Hood, would wait in the very next room.

  He was not in the same room, because he didn't want to risk being called as a witness in a trial. But he was a presence during her statement nevertheless, making absolutely certain that the questions that mattered to him as State's Attorney were asked.

  Sometimes I envision that meeting; I see Carissa and her attorney in her lawyer's Burlington office.

  She used the counsel I recommended, a woman named Becky McNeil who had beaten Phil and me and at least one or two other prosecutors at some point in her career.

  In my imagination, Carissa is sitting beside Becky, the two of them on the same side of the massive cherry table in the meeting room in her firm that overlooks College Street. The detectives from our office are sitting across from them, and because they both happen to be male, it looks a little bit like a settlement conference for a divorce: the men on one side of the divide, the women on the other.

  But of course the stakes are considerably higher. Richard Emmons has not yet been declared brain-dead, but there is little doubt in anyone's mind that brain-dead is where the body in the ICU bed is going.

  Three times, one of the detectives excuses himself from the table and leaves the room, and tells Phil exactly what Carissa has said. He tells Phil about the pages and pages of handwritten notes the homeopath wants to turn over to our office. Then, with instructions from Phil, the detective returns to the conference room and closes the door behind him.

  And as the spools in the tape recorder twirl in their place in their box, Carissa resumes speaking, her hands in her lap, repeating exactly the lies I've concocted.

  Chapter 3.

  Numbers 9 and 11

  In the state of health the spirit-like
vital force (dynamis) animating the...human organism reigns in supreme sovereignty.

  It is only this vital force thus untuned which brings about in the organism the disagreeable sensations and abnormal functions that we call disease.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  .

  In that period before it became clear to Jennifer Emmons that friendship with me would be intolerable, she told me doctors would come into the ICU room in which Richard was lying, and they would talk to her with the complete confidence that her husband couldn't hear a word they said. "The surgery won't relieve the intracranial pressure," one physician informed her, her husband so close that either could touch him. "But that's not its purpose. What the procedure will do is allow us to implant a switch over his brain so we can monitor the pressure."

  "A switch?" she had whispered. The nurses, unlike the doctors, all behaved as if Richard could hear them. They'd talk to him as they worked over him, as if he had merely broken his leg. Or had just had a gallstone removed. An appendectomy, maybe. When the nurses wanted to share something with Jennifer that might have upset the patient, they would motion her into the corridor, or they would whisper.

  Jennifer appreciated the nurses' hopefulness and their faith, and so she always whispered, too, when she had a question for a physician. Just in case. Likewise, she recalled, she had explained to the children that although their father was in a coma and was unable to speak, he probably heard them when they told him they loved him.

  Some moments, she said, she believed this herself, but those moments grew less and less frequent as the days passed by after Christmas.

  "An electrode monitoring device," the doctor had continued. "The surgeon will drill a small hole through the front of Richard's skull and lower the device in place. It really doesn't take very long. And to you, or anyone who comes here to see Richard, it will just look like there's a little watch battery in his forehead."

  She had probably nodded, she told me, if only because she recalled nodding all the time. She either asked questions or she nodded. That's all that a person who knows nothing really can do.

  Jennifer, I would learn, was the sort who would nod with the doctors but ask lots of questions of lawyers.

  I was lying beside Abby in the bed in her room, our noses within inches of each other. I watched her eyes close for a second longer than a blink, then abruptly open wide. She was fighting sleep as long as she could, determined to make it to the end of the story. She was adorable.

  "And even though the trolls were only four and five inches tall," I murmured, making the story up as I went along, "they stood on each other's shoulders so that they could reach the handle on Abby's door...."

  She looked so comfortable and content, I grew envious of the fact that she was already in her pajamas and under the covers. I hadn't even taken my necktie off yet. And because I'd spent so much time with Carissa, I'd decided to allow Abby to stay up with me until ten o'clock, which meant I wouldn't be in bed before midnight.

  "The troll on the top of the living troll ladder had to use both of his incredibly pudgy hands to turn the knob, and it took all of his strength...."

  I thought to myself that I might not even bother to reheat that calzone.

  "God's really strong, isn't he?" Abby asked. The question seemed sudden, but I knew there was a natural connection somewhere in my four-year-old's brain. The word strength, maybe. The fact that I'd told Abby earlier that night that I'd been to a lady who was sort of like a doctor.

  "I think so," I answered. "Why?"

  She took a deep breath in through her nose and then wiped a strand of hair that had fallen across her eyes. She reached over and began to toy with my tie, her thumb disappearing momentarily behind the silk.

  "Wellllllll," she said, drawing the word out the way she did whenever she was figuring something out, "my mommy died. And your mommy and daddy died. And God had to carry them all up to heaven."

  I kissed her once on her nose. "He sure did," I said, ignoring the literalist inside me who had started to murmur, Well, they all died a few years apart, Abby, so God didn't have to carry them up to heaven at exactly the same time. He probably took a couple of trips.

  "Yeah, I thought so," she said. She released my necktie and sat up for a moment in bed, and turned her pillow over so the cotton pillowcase felt cool once again. Then she lay back down upon it and curled her hands up beside her head.

  "Should I go on with the story of the night the trolls came to life?"

  "Please," she said, and I resumed with the moment the trolls escaped from her room and started down the stairs of the house. She was sound asleep by the time they'd gotten to the kitchen and had started to raid the refrigerator.

  I must admit, I was disappointed when Carissa said she wanted to think about my case for a few days before suggesting a remedy. I'd hoped she would simply open a cabinet that I imagined was filled with homeopathic potions, and give me a first dose of something that would magically restore me to what I'd begun to think was as close as one gets to perfect health. There had been a time, I'd begun to realize, when I really had felt so good that I'd never even thought about my health--a time when the pockets of my jackets and pants weren't constantly filled with the tiny scraps of paper that surrounded each cough drop.

  The first thing I did once I'd put Abby to bed was to pick those wrappers out of my pockets and throw them away. I even thought that the next morning, when I stopped at the gas station outside of Burlington for my newspaper and coffee, I might start weaning myself from the cough drops: I would not allow myself to buy one of those inviting little square tubes. Good-bye, Mentho-Lyptus. I'm going cold turkey.

  I decided I should eat something after all, and so I zapped the calzone for a few minutes in the microwave while I changed into my pajamas, hanging up my suit and putting wooden shoe trees into my wingtips, and then I listened to the pair of messages on my answering machine. The professor of the criminal justice course at UVM had called to thank me for speaking to her class the other day, although it was clear she thought my view of the system was a tad one-sided. "You took a group of aspiring public defenders and turned them into a lynch mob," she'd said, more than a trace of an edge in her voice. And Howard Lansing, a friend of mine and a church trustee, had phoned, wondering if the rails I had volunteered to build for the church's handicapped-access ramp back in April would be up in time for the Christmas tea in December.

  The Christmas tea was on the tenth this year. I figured I'd have a chance to take care of the railing if the weather was decent over the weekend, especially since Abby would be at a friend's birthday party most of Saturday afternoon. Of course, I also figured there was a chance that between the wife beaters and drunks who peppered a state's attorney's view of Vermont, I might be tied up for some part of Saturday or Sunday, since it was my turn to be on call.

  I scribbled the words hardware store on a yellow Post-it note and pressed the sticky strip against the inside of my front door. I was pretty sure I didn't have a lunch scheduled the next day, and so I'd try and use that time to pick up the materials for the railing.

  When I finally sat down with Carissa's book and my dinner at the kitchen counter, I realized I was exhausted. Carissa had, as Abby would put it, tuckered me. I'd never in my life talked about myself for anywhere near as long as I had with the homeopath; I'd never examined my past with such purpose. I'd recalled things I hadn't thought about in years--some, perhaps, I hadn't thought about since they'd actually occurred.

  I realized I'd told Carissa about the hour I'd spent staring into Elizabeth's closet the day after she'd died, when I was supposed to be picking out a dress for her to wear inside the coffin. Although the casket was going to be closed, what she was wearing still mattered greatly to me. Yet when I'd wandered upstairs to our bedroom and stood before the walk-in closet, I froze. Was I supposed to bury Elizabeth in one of the business suits and skirts she might wear during the week, or the sort of casu
al dress she might wear to a cocktail party on somebody's porch in July?

  I still don't know what would have happened if Elizabeth's friend Lorraine hadn't shown up. Who knows if I would ever have made a decision. I might still be standing in that bedroom, a catatonic attorney more mannequin than man, while Abby was being raised by her grandparents in Florida, or my sister in New Hampshire.

  But Lorraine had shown up, calling up the stairs to me when she'd found the front door open.

  "You know she loved blue," Lorraine had said, choosing a white pleated jumper that was covered with tiny irises.

  "It's sleeveless," I remembered telling her, disturbed on some level because even in June the Vermont ground could be cold. But Lorraine had been a step ahead of me: She was already pulling Elizabeth's favorite cardigan sweater from a bureau drawer.