The Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  And so it is not merely the blistering nodules on his hands I can see: I can see also the way he would self-consciously kiss his daughter or his son on the cheek before leaving for work, touching them by design with only his lips. An embrace is out of the question, because that would mean nearing their skin with his.

  I can see him unwilling to run his fingers along his wife's thighs.

  And, like many adults who are no longer young, I, too, have felt aches and pains in my joints. Richard's arrived in the fall of the year he would die, twinges and pricks that came on with cold weather. When he would stretch, the needles would ebb, but it would take time.

  Besides, when we're asleep we don't stretch, and so he had yet one more reason that autumn to be awake in the night.

  And, of course, there was the asthma. But it usually wasn't the asthma itself that frightened him, it was the chemicals he used to control it. It was the idea that his regimen already included a combination of drugs with incomprehensible names, and now his doctor was offering more. There was, I imagine, the fear that he would grow into an old man with a wallet card listing his meds, a cardboard materia medica of the capsules and pills dissolving every day in his stomach.

  Often those cards are twenty names long. I fear them, too.

  And so in his bed in the night, his world would be reduced to his infirmities. Arguably, they were neither debilitating nor incapacitating. Not in reality. But that changes nothing. In the night he'd still fret.

  Yet Richard was, like all of us, more than the sum of his symptoms. There he is with his hands in his pockets, putting up a good front before the young art directors and copywriters who work for him at his ad agency. There he is in the spring, a patient Little League coach, managing somehow to teach eight-year-olds how to bunt. There he is driving home from Boston in a blizzard so bad the airports are closed, so he can see his daughter as Dorothy in a junior-high-school production of The Wizard of Oz.

  And there he is surprising himself with a desire--a wish in some ways more pronounced than the hunger to look at his hands and not find them repellent, to breathe without medication, to grow old with something that resembles serenity--he'd shared with only his wife.

  Richard Emmons really did wish that his kids could have a pet.

  "I don't want to know everything there is to know about homeopathy," I said to Carissa over dinner. "It's enough for me to know it works."

  I'd chosen one of the restaurants in Burlington on the shore of Lake Champlain, and while it was too dark to see a bloody thing but an occasional light from the ferries crossing the water between New York and Vermont, I liked being close to the lake. I heard in my mind the word aura when I suggested the spot, wondering if I'd ever before thought of the word in my life, or whether that, too, was a bonus from arsenic: access to the vocabulary I had stored somewhere in my head that I never bothered to use.

  We'd met at the restaurant so I wouldn't have to drive all the way back to Bartlett to get her--although I had indeed offered--and so for the first few minutes of dinner I found myself ruing the fact there was absolutely no chance we'd sleep together that night. After all, we wouldn't wind up back at her house together since I wouldn't be driving her home, nor would we wind up at mine because one of us had suggested in the warm little cocoon of an auto in winter that we give each other a tongue-bath.

  At some point soon after our menus arrived, however, I stopped wondering where the dinner would go. It might have been the quiet Christmas music in the background, or the red candles on the table. It might have been the wine.

  It might even have been the arsenic.

  And so I shared with Carissa my enthusiasm for the remedy as we sipped herbal tea over dessert.

  "I'm glad you feel so good," she said. "I'm surprised--not by the fact that your remedy seems to be working, but by your confidence in the protocol."

  "Well, it did what it was supposed to do."

  "Apparently."

  "How did you become a homeopath?" I asked.

  "I met one on an airplane when I was going to England. It was eight years ago now. He sat next to me."

  "Were you already a psychologist?"

  "I was still getting my hours for certification, but I'd finished school."

  "Was he British?"

  "The homeopath? No. He lived in London, but he was originally from New Delhi. He's Indian."

  "And while you were chatting about medicine, you grew interested in homeopathy?"

  "There was more to it than that. I was flying to London to see my best friend, my college roommate. She'd been spiraling downhill for months, and she'd just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I wanted to see what was going on firsthand. And the fellow I met on the plane, the homeopath, actually ended up treating her. He took the time to visit her and see what he could do. We're still good friends."

  "Did she see a traditional doctor, too?"

  "He is a doctor. He's a psychiatrist."

  I nodded. I was surprised, and I realized I shouldn't have been. Carissa had already told me that many homeopaths were medical doctors. "Did he treat her with purely homeopathic remedies?"

  "No, it was a combination therapy. He and her doctors gave her some of the more usual medications for schizophrenia, too."

  "But it was the homeopathy part that impressed you."

  "It was."

  "So you've only been doing this six or seven years, then?"

  She leaned back in her chair and smiled. "Suddenly afraid you put your health in the hands of a novice?"

  "No, not at all."

  "I've been a full-time homeopath for just about six years."

  "I gather you've treated Whitney."

  "You and Whitney talk way too much."

  "She's a big fan of yours."

  "She's young."

  "How's your friend now? The one with schizophrenia?"

  "She's doing fine. Maybe you'll meet her someday."

  The waiter returned to our table with the check, and while I was dropping my credit card onto the plastic after-dinner mints tray, I heard a sentence form in my head and was unable to stop it from escaping my lips: "Spend Christmas Eve with me."

  Instantly the waiter retreated.

  "Spend Christmas Eve with me," I said a second time, hoping when I said the words again I'd understand exactly what I meant. Was I asking her to visit me in the early evening for a chaste dinner while my daughter was off baking sugar cookies, was I merely asking her up to see the tree? Certainly that's what I'd had in mind when I told my sister my plans that morning.

  Was I now, however, asking her to, literally, spend the night with me? Did I really just ask this woman to sleep with me? I wondered.

  I realized I wasn't sure what I'd meant. Immediately, of course, I began hoping she'd come to the worst--no, not the worst, simply the most erotic--interpretation and answer yes. I hoped she'd assume I had just asked her into my bed. Or onto the couch by the tree. Or onto the thick rug on the floor by the woodstove.

  She ran her fingertips along her collarbone and stared at the black window facing the lake, and then at me. There was a tiny hint of candle flame in her eyeglasses.

  "Sure," she said, "that would be nice," her answer not offering me the slightest clue as to what she'd heard in my invitation. As with our dinner together that night, I'd just have to wait and see where Christmas Eve would go.

  I had not honestly expected we would make love Christmas Eve. I'd hoped we would, but I certainly hadn't expected it. Carissa had been unable to get her car started, however, and so after dropping my daughter off at her friend's house, I'd driven into Bartlett to get her. And when she'd climbed into the truck a little past five and shown me the wicker basket of food she'd assembled as a present, I'd decided there was a pretty good chance we'd wind up in my bedroom before Abby returned.

  "One-stop shopping," she'd said when I told her she shouldn't have brought me a gift (though I had gotten her a book about dreams that had just been published, an absolute natural sin
ce it had the word butterfly in its title). "It's all from the health-food store. It seemed appropriate to shop there, given the way we met."

  When we arrived at my house, she began pulling the items from the basket one by one, laying them side by side on the counter in the breakfast nook: There were truffles made with carob and honey, and cookies sweetened with fruit juice. There were dates rolled in coconut and dates that were plain, neither of which, Carissa told me, she expected me to eat. "I just didn't want to offend a Berber in his own home," she explained. And there were bags and bags of nuts, which she said she wouldn't have thought of bringing if she hadn't run into another patient of hers in the store, an asthmatic who was allergic to cashews.

  But it was the whole-wheat English muffins, delivered daily to Bartlett from the natural-foods bakery in Burlington, and the box of breakfast tea that I found most arousing. English muffins weren't usually an aphrodisiac, but I remembered she'd said Tuesday night that she always had an English muffin for breakfast. And while I couldn't imagine that she thought we'd actually be having breakfast together Christmas Day--would there be a worse way to introduce Carissa into Abby's life?--the muffins and the tea were a signal, a gesture that was tender and amorous at once.

  And so as she was showing me the remainder of the contents of the basket and explaining the significance of each--the echinacea was obvious, it was sort of like our song, but I wouldn't have understood that a garlic clove smelled a bit like arsenic if she hadn't told me--I kissed her, a brush across her lips barely more passionate than the chaste peck on the cheek I'd offered in the parking lot of the restaurant earlier that week.

  "I just had to do that," I said, and she nodded, putting the garlic bulb she was holding on the kitchen counter and wrapping her fingers behind my neck and kissing me back. We kissed there in the kitchen, then on the couch in the living room in the dim light from the bulbs on the Christmas tree, and then on the floor before it. Before we'd opened a bottle of wine or I'd given her the book I had bought about dreams, while the Brie on the table near the woodstove melted untouched, we undressed and I pulled the pillows from the couch and laid her upon them in the midst of the presents and the lowest branches of the white spruce. I insisted she keep on her panties--a ritual red, she murmured, to celebrate the season--so I could lick her through the silk and feel the material get wetter and wetter from my tongue and her lips. Sometimes when I'd pull away the elastic for brief moments, I'd hear in my head the sound of a click as I washed my tongue over her as fast as I could. Then I'd pull her panties back across her vagina and lap at the silk until I thought I'd explode if I didn't taste her--all of her, my tongue probing deeply inside her, along the thin strip of skin buffering vulva and anus, then between those cheeks that smelled slightly of bubble bath.

  When she came, her thighs tightening in my arms as I held her, my chin and my neck wondrously--bountifully, beneficently--drenched, I looked up and saw a star. There it was, hanging from a branch by her face. Hanging beside the very branch on which her eyeglasses dangled like tortoiseshell tinsel. A modeling clay star. It was no longer bright, because my daughter had painted it in Sunday school a year earlier and the colors had begun to fade, but it still had a trace of its original canary luster. I hadn't really noticed it or thought about it when Abby and I had trimmed the tree, but there it was. An ornament, the first one my little girl had ever made. And it was right there beside Carissa's eyes, opening slowly now as she took a deep breath and sighed.

  I am blessed, I thought. Really and truly blessed.

  It had practically killed me to wash Carissa off my face as we showered together before I left to get Abby alone, but when I hugged little Chloe's mom, I was glad that I had. The evening, after all, was a celebration of a pretty darn clean conception.

  Carissa was waiting for us back at the house. If it seemed to me that Abby had consumed enough sugar to get through the eight-thirty service, then the three of us would go to church together, and from there we would drive Carissa home.

  "A friend of mine dropped by," I told my daughter as I buckled her into the truck, hoping the remark sounded offhand. "Would you like to meet her?"

  "Nah. I think I just want to go to church." She had a plate of the cookies she'd made balanced in her lap. Her plan was to leave out the gingerbread ones for Santa because she hated gingerbread, but Santa, apparently, loved it. She also had carrots and celery sticks for the reindeer.

  "We will. But my friend's waiting at home. She wants to say hi. It'll just take a minute."

  "It's a lady?"

  "Oh, yes."

  She looked straight ahead and I could tell she was mad. A year ago, when she was three and a half, she might have had a tantrum. Now, I imagined, she'd just grow silent. Make Carissa work extra hard.

  Yet when we got home and I introduced her to that friend who just happened to be a lady, she rallied. For a moment she did what I called her "coquette thing," hiding half her face behind my hip, but showing the stranger a single eye and what might have been half a smile. She didn't ask any questions of Daddy's new friend, but she answered in reasonably polite little grunts all of the questions that were put to her, and even corrected Carissa on some of the finer points of cookie decorating.

  "Who are those cookies for?" Carissa asked.

  "Santa."

  "They sure look good. And the carrots. Are they for his reindeer?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I love the sparkles you put on that star."

  "Those aren't sparkles. That's colored sugar. You can't eat sparkles, because sparkles are just for projects."

  "Projects?"

  "Arts and crafts," I said.

  When the three of us went to church, I downplayed the idea that we would all sit together. I tried to present it as, more or less, a coincidence that Abby might happen to sit on my right and Carissa on my left.

  But I knew my joy in the fact that Carissa was with us was evident when I introduced her to Paul Woodson in the narthex. Woodson was the church's ageless pastor, a fellow my parents' age whom I had come to view as a godfather of sorts ever since Elizabeth had died.

  "We have a guest tonight," Paul said, speaking more to Abby and Carissa than me. "A minister from Korea."

  "Terrific," I said.

  Paul leaned over so he was closer to Abby. "I wanted you to know ahead of time, because he's going to teach you a little song with your name in it."

  "My name?"

  "Yup. You'll see."

  Briefly, I tried to come up with a hymn with the word Abby or Abigail in it, but I realized quickly it was a lost cause, and found myself focusing instead on the lobe of Carissa's ear, and the channel I'd licked just beneath it along the back of her jaw.

  Soon into the service, however, after the children had placed the doll-sized figures of donkeys and wise men and a virgin in the creche by the tree, Paul had them surround him in a half-circle at the front of the church. There an elderly Korean joined the group, squatting before the children and telling them that he wanted to teach them a song that youngsters sang in his own land. The moment he said it was inspired by a verse in the 124th Psalm, I knew instantly where Abby's name would fit in:

  "Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord..."

  I hadn't thought of the psalm in years, but I'd certainly become aware of it soon after moving to Bartlett. Paul had told me about the verse the first time Elizabeth and I had come to his church, and shown it to me in the Bible.

  "A fowler's a kind of hunter," he'd said. "You must be a very good prosecutor."

  When the children sang the chorus--Our help is in the name of the Lord!--I saw the back of Abby's head bobbing up and down to the strains of the song, and I felt the side of my hip pressing against Carissa's. I wasn't sure if I'd been that happy for a single moment since Elizabeth had died, and then I decided I hadn't. No way. Not a prayer.

  And when Paul had the deacons pass out the
candles and dim the lights a few moments later, and when the choir members started passing the flame to the congregation in preparation for "Silent Night," I thought I might cry.

  "You okay?" Carissa whispered.

  I nodded, unable to open my mouth. I felt her take my hand and squeeze it as we stood, and then give it back to me so I could help Abby with her candle. I listened to the congregation begin murmuring the words to the carol, singing each line a bit louder than the one before it. When Carissa sang, her voice was slightly higher than when she spoke, but it still radiated confidence and beauty and calm.

  I watched the long rows of small candle flames slowly rise and fall, each pew packed as it was no other day or night of the year, and I saw my daughter gazing enrapt at her own teardrop-shaped bubble of incandescence. She was holding her candle with both hands.