The Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Leland. Hi."

  "Merry day after Christmas."

  "Oh, God. Thank you."

  "Is everything okay?"

  A sigh. Then: "No."

  The old Leland would have begun to fear from the tone, You are about to be dumped. But it was clear that whatever was tormenting Carissa was about her. Not about me. Not about us. A big part of hypochondria and anxiety is narcissism, and there may be no better way to kill that awful piece of oneself than with a little arsenic. Just enough. A homeopathic hit.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "I think one of my patients is going to die."

  "My God, Carissa, I'm so sorry. Is this sudden?"

  "Yeah. Oh, yeah."

  "Is there anything I can do? Would you like me to come over?"

  She was silent for a moment, and I couldn't tell if it was because she was tearing or deciding whether to accept my offer.

  "Don't you have to go to work today?" she asked finally.

  "I do, but I can be late. I don't have to be in court."

  "Do you mind?"

  "Coming over? No, of course not. I'm happy to. Can you tell me anything?"

  "I really don't want to go into it on the phone...."

  "Fine. I'm already dressed. I can be there in fifteen or twenty minutes--as soon as Abby's settled in with her baby-sitter."

  "Thank you."

  "Can I bring anything?"

  "No. Just come."

  My eye caught the blue and gold diamonds dancing across the screen saver on my computer. I wondered if it was the computer that made me recall Richard Emmons, or the fact that only a moment before I'd had to restrain myself from calling Rod Morrow about the asthmatic. It may even have been the reference to cashews in the USA Today paragraph about my neighbor: Hadn't I, too, eaten cashews Christmas Eve? Hadn't they been in Carissa's basket of goodies?

  For all I knew, the connection came to me because of all three, because of the computer, the phone call, and the cashews combined. In any case, it didn't matter. Before I could decide whether this was a question I really should ask, the words were out there and impossible to take back.

  "Does this have something to do with a fellow in town named Richard Emmons?" I asked.

  I heard just the whisper of a moan, and I understood that I'd hit a nerve.

  "Carissa, I'm leaving now. Okay?"

  "Thank you," she said once again, no longer hiding the fact that she was crying.

  Carissa sat at her kitchen table in a red flannel nightgown. Sometimes Sepia, her cat, would rub up against her legs, expecting, perhaps, that her owner would reach down and pet her. Perhaps pick her up and drop her into that soft, warm, red flannel lap.

  "Have you slept at all?" I asked Carissa.

  "A little bit. Sometimes I'd doze off in spite of everything. But it was never for very long."

  Her house was on Mountain Terrace, one of the two residential streets north of the commons. I could tell instantly that it was one of the homes built shortly after the Civil War by the local coffin company for the families of the workers who toiled in the mill. Until the early twentieth century, the Bartlett Casket Company was producing more coffins than any other factory in the country, and at one point in the 1890s the selectmen had put a tremendous boulder beside the main road into the town reflecting a well-intentioned but somewhat artless attempt at civic pride. "Bartlett, Vermont," they had chiseled into the boulder, "Home of the long homes people remain in forever." The boulder was moved away soon after the coffin company closed in the early 1930s, but almost every merchant in town had at least one magnificent black-and-white print of the rock somewhere in his or her shop. Even the health-food store, no doubt, had one of those coffin rock prints. Next time I was there, I decided, I'd have to check.

  "How did you hear about Richard?" I asked. "It couldn't possibly have been in yesterday's newspaper."

  "No, I heard about it the way most people who live here in the village did. Through the grapevine. Through people talking."

  Like many of the mill houses in the village, Carissa's had changed dramatically since a coffin builder had last lived in it. It looked to me as though different owners had affixed a family room of sorts to the first floor, and added a third bedroom upstairs. Someone had built a garage and constructed a glass sunroom facing west. And at some point someone--and I had no idea if the house had had two or three or even four owners between a Bartlett Casket employee and a homeopath--had decided to build a ramshackle passageway between the garage and the kitchen, so it was possible in the winter to walk from the house to the car without ever having to brave the worst that winter could offer.

  In the process, the small house had gone from a tidy little box with a porch and a pitch to an unruly pile of packages thrown atop and beside one another without any conscious design. Lots of homes in Vermont were like that. And while virtually anyone could have been responsible for the exterior alterations, the interior was distinctly Carissa's. My homeopath, I was sure, could take credit for putting in the jet-black kitchen counters and having different constellations painted in yellow upon cabinets the color of the night sky at dusk. A blue that was almost sapphire. It was Carissa who'd decorated the kitchen with beautiful hand-painted bowls and replaced the conventional doorknobs with handles the shape of sickle moons.

  "Who told you?" I asked.

  "Travis Patterson. His brother David is on the rescue squad and only lives a house or two away from the Emmons family. Travis said his brother was the first one at their house Christmas Eve."

  "And you saw Travis yesterday?"

  She nodded. I'd noticed that she'd wrapped her arms around her chest the moment I'd arrived--easily fifteen minutes ago--and she hadn't uncrossed them since. With the exception of an occasional nod of her head, I wasn't sure she'd moved any part of her body.

  "Walking home from my brother's," she added.

  "Why did Travis tell you? Did he assume there was a connection between you and Richard?"

  "No, no. No. He was just telling me because it's...it's news. And his brother had told him."

  "How long have you been treating Richard?"

  "Not long. You two probably became patients about the same time."

  "Just after Thanksgiving?"

  "I think so. I think if I looked back at my records--"

  "You keep records?"

  "Of course I keep records," she answered, sounding slightly hurt. "I took notes with you, didn't I?"

  "I didn't mean anything by that, I'm sorry. It was just the lawyer in me." I realized that until I'd opened my mouth, she hadn't comprehended she was talking to an attorney. She had simply been talking to Leland. Her lover, her--please, I thought--boyfriend. She knew she was talking to a lawyer now, though. No doubt about that.

  "Am I in trouble?" She hadn't looked at me as she'd spoken; she'd stared straight at the box of tissues on the table. "I mean, I know I'm in trouble emotionally. Or spiritually. But am I in..."

  "Legal trouble?"

  She nodded again.

  "I don't know. I'd need to know what happened to get a sense of that," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. A fuzzy notion in the back of my head began to come into focus: I should leave. Right that second. I should tell Carissa to call a good attorney--a guy like Oren Candon, maybe, or Becky McNeil--and then not talk to anyone. Not a soul. Then I should stand up and say, Don't tell me another word, don't tell me a single thing. And then I should go. Just get the hell out. That was the appropriate thing to do. The reasonable thing to do. The ethical thing to do.

  Yet it wasn't, I told myself, the moral thing to do. At least not necessarily. After all, she might need me.

  And I'd only be obstructing justice if it turned out in the end that she had committed some kind of criminal offense. If whatever she'd done with Richard Emmons turned out to be a crime.

  "Do you know him?" she asked.

  "Richard? No, not really. I mean, I think I know who he is. But that's about it."

  And
it wasn't as if I could even bring myself to stand up and go in the first place. I put my hands on the arms of the chair to see what would occur--to see if they would press down on the wood and propel me to my feet--and not a thing happened. I was simply a guy sitting there with my hands on the arms of a ladder-back chair instead of in my lap. Maybe my hands would have sent me to my feet if Carissa had been only my homeopath, but she hadn't been only that for a week now. That day was the one-week anniversary of our very first date.

  "I never thought he'd really buy the nuts and eat them," she said, her voice growing animated for the first time since I'd arrived. "I guess I knew he was very intense about homeopathy. And of course I knew how badly he wanted me to give him more of his remedy. But I would never have told him about cashews if I thought he might buy some."

  No, I decided, I wasn't going to leave. It didn't matter that Phil would expect me to. Or that the other attorneys in the office would want me to. Or that certain investigators and police officers would view my behavior as somewhere between sleazy and illegal. None of that mattered that moment; I just didn't care.

  "You suggested he eat the cashews?" I asked.

  "Sort of."

  "Sort of?"

  "It was a joke."

  "You knew he was allergic to them?"

  "Yes."

  "Like, I don't know, seriously allergic to them?"

  She wiped her eyes with her fingers and then put on her eyeglasses. "I knew he was allergic to them," she said, staring right at me.

  I nodded, aware that we were about to cross some sort of line. Was there a way to ask her my questions, I wondered, that would prevent her from incriminating herself? A way that would give her the chance to say whatever she wanted to say--release whatever was inside her that needed a vent--yet not put me in the position of knowing her absolute guilt or innocence for sure?

  I reminded myself quickly that I shouldn't even be thinking about guilt or innocence. I didn't even know what she had done.

  Or, more important, what people would think she had done.

  "But you didn't actually buy him the cashews, right? It wasn't like that."

  "Of course not. It wasn't like that at all." She blew her nose and stood up, and pulled a box of tea from a cabinet. "I used to smoke," she went on. "In college, I smoked like a chimney. A blast furnace. I wish I smoked now."

  "No you don't."

  "Trust me, I do. You ever smoke?"

  If I were a criminal defense attorney, I knew, I'd be sure not to ask any questions that might give her the chance to implicate herself. After all, that was a big part of being a criminal attorney: You wanted to make absolutely sure that the murderer sitting beside you hadn't told you he'd done it. You just didn't want to know, you just didn't want to put yourself in the position of knowingly allowing someone to perjure himself when the case went to trial.

  Unless, of course, you wanted to get disbarred. Or handed a suspension for misconduct. Then you might.

  "No, I never smoked," I told her.

  "Even with all that anxiety inside you?"

  "Nails," I said. "Fingernails always seemed to suffice."

  I watched her make tea, rallying a bit with each step: Filling the kettle with water. Turning on the burner. Removing the top from a teapot shaped like a cat. Filling a mesh tea ball with leaves and herbs and placing it in the pot. She leaned against the counter as if she expected to wait there while the water came to a boil, and I could almost see the color return to her cheeks. I wondered if it was because we were crossing that line together and she felt less alone. I hoped so.

  "I stopped smoking when I first went to England," she said.

  "When you were visiting your friend?"

  "Yup."

  What did she see when she saw me sitting at her kitchen table? Did she see simply her boyfriend the lawyer who understood the Byzantine workings of the law? The man who could help her understand if she was, as she had put it, in trouble?

  Or did she see a state prosecutor? Did she even begin to comprehend the nightmarish conflict of interest that waited with us there in the kitchen for...for something to happen? For the water to boil. For the phone to ring. For the state police to call.

  Or, perhaps, a reporter.

  I glanced at my watch: It was eight-fifteen. Vermont was awake, starting to function. Soon the phone might really ring.

  "Why did you quit? Was it the homeopath you met?"

  "He might have been a small influence. I know he didn't approve of the habit."

  "But there was more?"

  "I didn't like British cigarettes. And I felt like an ugly American whenever I'd buy U.S. brands."

  "Oh."

  Carissa was smart, I decided, but Carissa lived in a different sort of world. A world where friends simply helped friends and you didn't sweat the details. On some level she probably sensed that what I was--what I did for a living--had some bearing on what I was thinking, but I don't believe the idea that I could be of use to her in some vaguely shadowy way had dawned on her.

  "We never decided," she said after a long silence. "Am I in trouble?"

  Outside her window was a bird feeder, and a pair of phoebes descended upon the wooden bar by the seeds.

  "I have a message on my answering machine from Rod Morrow," I told her.

  "Should I know that name?"

  "He's a friend of mine from high school. Now he's a detective sergeant with the state police."

  "So I am in trouble."

  "Not necessarily. Like I said, it all depends on what happened."

  "Do you want to hear?"

  The spoken word has substance. You can't see it, but it's as real as the wind. As breath. A breeze between mouth and ear, a wave against tympanic membranes.

  How many sentences had I said in my life--gentle wafts of words, little airstreams of syllables--that once spoken changed everything? Probably not more than half a dozen, but certainly they were the five or six most significant sentences I'd ever formed in my mind. Asking Elizabeth to marry me. Agreeing, almost on a lark, to interview for the opening in the State's Attorneys Office. Telling Whitney Lake I'd like her aunt's phone number.

  I knew at that moment in Carissa's kitchen I was about to do it again. I was about to speak words that, for better or worse, could never be taken back.

  "Yes, of course," I said as I stood and wrapped my arms around the small of her waist. "I want to know exactly what happened. Tell me everything you can remember."

  When Carissa went upstairs to get dressed a little later, I sat with her cat in my lap and tried to imagine how people would see what had occurred the day before last at the health-food store. A lot would depend upon whether homeopaths were regulated in Vermont. Or psychologists. After all, she was a psychologist, too. Still, no two attorneys would probably view what had happened in exactly the same way.

  Some would simply decide Richard Emmons was an idiot who mistook an offhand remark--a joke, for crying out loud--for medical advice. They'd view Emmons as an adult who was fully capable of making his own choices, and it was his decision--and his decision alone--to buy nuts that he knew he was allergic to and then eat them. Even if he had bought them because Carissa had suggested the idea, he was completely free to ignore her advice. Just like someone with arthritis could choose to wear a copper bracelet around her wrist...or not. Or someone else could go to bed wearing cold wet socks under dry wool socks because a naturopath had recommended it as a way to relieve sinus pressure from a cold. Or not.

  And if homeopaths weren't regulated, then she wasn't even a professional giving bad advice; she was merely a neighbor giving bad advice. A quack he ran into at the health-food store. Richard was free to disregard anything that she said.

  Others, however, would see Carissa as a professional and Richard as her patient. Granted, in their eyes she might also be the sort of holistic shaman who shouldn't be allowed to dispense even garlic or honey, but she was still treating Richard. He was still her charge, and her advice therefore c
arried enormous weight: She had a duty to answer his questions responsibly. If she had given him the impression, no matter how inadvertently, that cashews wouldn't hurt him, his coma--his death by now, for all I knew--was her fault. If she'd said he should eat a nut that she knew he was allergic to, then she'd have to pay for this tragedy.

  Oh, God, I thought, pay. Until that moment, I hadn't even considered the possibility of a civil suit, too. Clearly, however, this could be the bloody mother lode for some ambulance chaser.