The Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Then what is it?"

  "I don't want to lose you. My God, Carissa, you can't know how happy you make me."

  "You just think I'm inept--"

  "I just don't think I can help you! This morning I thought maybe I could, but I was wrong. Jennifer Emmons already has a small army of people interested in making sure the State investigates this."

  "And me."

  I nodded. "It's inevitable."

  She stood, pushing her hands against the countertop, and I knew she was going to step into her shoes and take her coat off the rack by the door. I was going to hear the keys jingle in her hand as her fingers searched for the one that would start the ignition.

  "I just don't want you to go," I said again, and I heard in my head a little boy's whine.

  "Well, I can't stay. Not after what you think I've done."

  I watched her climb into her shoes, wondering why I wasn't standing up. I wondered if it was because I couldn't imagine how I could hold her if I did. Literally. What was I going to do, physically restrain her? Of course not. But a part of me wanted to rise up off the bar stool nevertheless, because a part of me couldn't believe I was letting this woman slip away. It didn't seem reasonable, it didn't seem fair or just or right. Not after all I'd endured. Not after all I had--suddenly, generously, unexpectedly--been given.

  "You know what the damnedest thing is?" she asked as she stood by the door, her coat draped over her arm.

  I shook my head. I was afraid if I opened my mouth to simply say "What?" my voice would crack.

  "Even if there was a way you could help me, I don't think I would let you. I don't think I could. I'm the one who has to live with this."

  For a long moment we looked at each other, and then she put on her coat and left, and I knew she'd be crying by the time she reached her car door. At first I thought she'd be crying only for Richard and Jennifer Emmons, for what she feared she had done, but then I decided she'd be crying for us, too.

  For Leland and Carissa.

  For our ending, for the sudden and unnatural finitude of our relationship--our friendship, our love.

  For the fact that we were winding down before we'd ever really had the chance to get started.

  And so I went to her. I caught her before she had reached the end of the bluestone walk that linked the front porch with the driveway, and together we cried in the cold. She didn't pull away, and I could smell the rum on her breath, and in the light from the porch I could see the almost impossibly slim lines in her eyes: small winding streams on a map. Had she been crying late that afternoon? Apparently. Her eyes were red and slightly swollen.

  For a long moment we stayed like that, and then she murmured, "You must be freezing. Go inside."

  "Is that a doctor's advice?"

  "I'm not a doctor," she said, sniffing.

  "I know."

  "Go inside. Please."

  "I will," I said, "but only if you'll come with me."

  She choked back a sob, but those gently heaving shoulders--I could feel the firm hints of her bones, even through her parka--did not resist when I turned them back toward my house. And braced by the cold, I escorted her back inside with me.

  Upstairs, my daughter slept. And for a long time we sat on the floor before the tree, neither of us saying a word, as I worked out in my mind exactly what I would have needed to prosecute this case if a summer cold had not lasted into the fall, and I had not met Carissa Lake. Once I knew, nothing seemed quite so hopeless, and I began to sketch aloud for her exactly what we would want to create in the morning, and exactly what we would want to destroy.

  *

  PART III

  Chapter 14.

  Sepia

  This brownish black juice is found in a sac in the abdomen of the large sea animal, called cuttlefish. This the animal occasionally squirts out, to darken the water around it, probably in order to secure its prey, or to conceal itself from its enemies.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  The Chronic Diseases, 1839

  .

  It started to snow late morning, and I whispered to Carissa to stay on the couch. I spoke so softly into her ear that I could barely hear my own voice. I watched her pull the quilt up over her shoulders, nodding but not opening her eyes, and then I walked as quietly as I could to the chair before her computer upon which I'd draped my clothes.

  Perhaps because the sky was so gray and the only light on in the room was her desk lamp, it felt nothing at all like midday. It felt like a Saturday afternoon at dusk, one of those cold winter days when Elizabeth and I would make love in the afternoon and then doze until dinner.

  As I pulled my boxer shorts and my socks off the seat of the chair, I noticed for the first time the windmills on her wall, and I realized I was looking at the dramatic hills of Montmartre. When this passes, I thought as I began to get dressed, we really will have to go to Paris together.

  I wished I hadn't thought that: When this passes...

  When we'd made love--holding each other at first with somnambulant hunger, the two of us needy but unaware--the details of what we had done became fuzzy shapes in a fog. They grew distant. When we were through, I was mindful mostly of the idea that Carissa and I were lying naked like spoons, and we were together upon the very same couch on which I'd recounted my medical history the night we met.

  Neither of us had said a word as we undressed, or as we slowly and deliberately had sex. Sometimes we just held each other as tightly as we could, unmoving, with me inside her.

  Occasionally I'd look up at the constellations that dotted her ceiling, squinting at the nebular swirls of white to give them an aura.

  I think we were both surprised by how sad the sex had made us feel. Afterward, Carissa was so still it was like she was napping beside me, her shoulder rising and falling in barely perceptible little sighs.

  Only when I had climbed off the couch did the fuzziness in the mist grow clear. When this passes...

  I glanced at the clock on her desk. Eleven forty-five. I'd dropped Abby off at day care a good half-hour early, arriving there by seven-fifteen. I'd read her two books with the speed of an auctioneer, and kissed her good-bye before seven-thirty. And then, just as Carissa and I had discussed in front of the Christmas tree the night before, I had gone straight to the Octagon to meet her at her office.

  I tried not to think about what we had done before we made love, focusing instead on the twin towers of Notre Dame. And while I could push it from my mind for brief moments as I buttoned my suspenders into my suit pants, once I had knotted my tie and pulled on my jacket, it grew completely impossible.

  Even her cat seemed to be passing judgment. Apparently, some days Carissa brought the animal with her to work, and today was one of those days. Sepia sat on the windowsill and watched me get dressed from a distance. She didn't lick herself or scratch herself or amuse herself with the cord for the blinds the way I imagined most cats would: Instead she just stared at me as if I were a small rodent or bird too poisonous to pursue, but interesting enough as entertainment.

  I tied my shoes. I guessed we'd worked for about two and a half hours. That's how long it had taken. The length of a baseball game. A long movie. And then it was done.

  Outside, a town snowplow rumbled down one of the streets around the green, and Sepia turned away from me toward the noise. I worried briefly about the roads: I am a good driver, but I know better than most how hazardous the act of driving can be.

  That morning, of course, it was easy to find other worries. Witnesses, for instance. There were always witnesses, it seemed. At some point, someone would emerge from the woodwork with the news that Carissa Lake and Leland Fowler had had dinner together the week before Christmas.

  Someone had seen us.

  But, I would reassure myself, that would be fine because I would not hide that fact.

  And there was Whitney. She knew as well as anyone how long the chief deputy state's attorney had been interested in her aunt. This, too, would come out--i
t was inevitable--and titillate the press a short while. But then it would fade into the irrelevant void of memory that swirls about us.

  Irrelevant for most people. Not for Jennifer Emmons.

  And, finally, there was the church. My church. Some people had certainly noticed that Leland and Abby Fowler had arrived at the candlelight service with a very attractive woman who had never before been inside the sanctuary. Some, no doubt, would recognize her as that homeopath, the one from the village. The one with the walls. Some would even know her name was Carissa Lake.

  Without question, someone had seen me introducing her to the pastor.

  But had anyone actually seen the two of us holding hands? Unlikely, I told myself. It was dark, and people were focused on their candles. They were focused upon each other, their children. The images that were conjured for each of them by the hymn.

  For long moments that morning, I was able to convince myself that as long as I spoke with Phil Hood that afternoon, nothing any witness might say would present a problem. Phil would give me some grief about not coming forward the day before, and he would surely subject me to a lecture about talking to Jennifer: That, Phil would tell me, was an inexcusable lapse in judgment. He might even suggest to me in his Fit for Life tone of voice that I was allowing myself to be led around by my dick.

  Well, yeah.

  My only real worry, I decided, was that someone might make the connection that it had been my pretty good-sized four-by-four that had been parked near the Octagon in the village on the morning of the twenty-seventh.

  Then things might go from embarrassing to problematic. Problematic? Try cataclysmic.

  After all, I was going to claim I'd gone home after dropping off Abby at day care, and climbed back into my bed until midday. Resting. Trying to beat back the flu. That was why I was not struggling in to work until the middle of lunch.

  I fastened the leather strap of my watch around my wrist. I had just enough time, I decided, to leave Carissa a note that I loved her, and kiss her once more. I'd already warned her that we'd have to avoid each other--no phone calls, no dates, no slumber parties at one or the other's house--for a while. At the very least, for a couple of weeks. Perhaps for substantially longer.

  Then, for what I told myself was the last time, I picked up the vial of tiny pills I'd noticed near her computer soon after I'd arrived. Arsenic. Arsenicum album, technically.

  Off and on that morning, whenever Carissa hadn't been looking, I'd found myself picking up the small tube, rolling it around the palm of my hand, and then dropping it back onto the desk. I wondered if Carissa would miss it if I took it, or whether she'd even notice the vial was gone. It was, after all, only sugar and water. It really didn't have any arsenic. Or value. Except for me.

  For me, it had tremendous worth. It hadn't been so long since I'd discovered just what those little sugar pills could do. At the time, I couldn't have begun to explain how they worked. Just sugar, I might have said if someone had asked me how I'd gotten better so fast, so it must have been a placebo effect. You know, my head did all the work.

  But I didn't really believe that: I knew even then there was something magic in the remedy, something tangible that could at once break up the porridgelike slough of anxieties in which I'd been mired for more than two years, and cure the cold that for me was not merely common, it was continuous and everlasting.

  Yet I was absolutely convinced the remedy was harmless.

  As harmless as Halls.

  And I was entirely comfortable with this paradox--preternatural efficacy, completely benign.

  Nevertheless, once more I placed the vial back upon Carissa's desk blotter. Maybe after I'd kissed her I'd go back for it. See if the tube wanted to jump into my suit pocket and leave with me.

  When I emerged into the snow outside the Octagon a few moments later, I was relieved to see my truck was coated with powder. It looked exactly like any one of the dozen pickups that dotted the main street of the village.

  "Someone gave you Barbies for Christmas?" I asked Margaret, more than a little surprised. I tried to figure out whether Dr. Barbie was wearing panties, or whether the white under the doll's incredibly tight dress was merely a part of the plastic figure's torso. But it was clear I was going to fail unless I rolled up the skirt, and if I tried that, I knew, Margaret would nail me for lewd and lascivious with a doll.

  "Just that one," she said.

  "I wish my doctor wore dresses this slinky."

  "You have a female doctor? I'd never have thought that of you, Leland. Bravo."

  "Well, I don't. But I might if female doctors started dressing like this."

  She reached across the desk and took the doll away from me. "Sometimes I want to wash my toys in bleach after you've handled them."

  "I have very clean hands."

  "But just a filthy, filthy mind!"

  "I only say the things most guys think."

  "Then you're a very sick gender. All of you."

  "Only at moments. I assure you, my mind doesn't work like this when I'm playing Barbies with Abby. Santa brought her a pair of the dolls, and not a single lurid thought passed through my brain when I was picking them out at the store."

  "You know Barbie's very bad for little girls, don't you? Just a terrible influence. Even with her new shape. She--"

  "If you and Garrick have kids someday and figure out how to tell them Barbie's forbidden, I'll listen. I promise."

  She adjusted the stethoscope around Dr. Barbie's neck and sat her down beside the other toys on the credenza. "Did you hear I arraigned Jesus on Christmas Eve?"

  "No, I missed that."

  "Yup. It just isn't Christmas Eve if we don't bust the Messiah."

  "And at least one sex offender."

  "Isn't it awful?"

  "What did he do? Jesus?"

  She glanced at a note on her desk. "Disorderly conduct. Unlawful mischief. Simple assault."

  "Jesus did that?"

  "Yeah, he did. But this one spells the Christ part with a Y."

  "Where was this?"

  "A bar on College Street."

  "Did the fellow look like Jesus?"

  "Not a bad likeness, I guess. At least at first. Long brown beard. Kind of thin. But when you got up close, you saw he had lizard tattoos on the backs of his hands, and it was pretty clear they went way up his arms."

  "You didn't check to be sure?"

  "No, I did not check."

  "Was there room at the inn?" I asked, referring to the state psychiatric hospital.

  "Yup. For the moment, anyway, he's in Waterbury. On a happier note, did you and Abby have a nice Christmas?"

  "We did. We were at my sister's in Hanover."

  "Santa was good to Abby?"

  "Santa was excellent to Abby."

  "I was actually a little worried about the two of you. I was kind of afraid something had happened. You spent all yesterday afternoon holed up in your office."

  "I was busy."

  "On?"

  "A variety of things."

  "And then you didn't come in this morning...."

  "I feel much better. Really."

  "What did you think of Jennifer Emmons?"

  "You know Jennifer?" I asked, instantly fearful that I'd sounded more scared than surprised. This wasn't supposed to happen. I'd planned on telling Phil first about Jennifer, and explaining to my boss before anyone else that I happened to be a casual acquaintance of the homeopath who'd treated her husband. But Phil had been on the phone, and so I'd wandered into Margaret's office to see how she was doing while my boss finished his call.

  "No. But she spoke to Garrick yesterday morning, after connecting with someone in the Attorney General's Office in Montpelier. The fact that the homeopath's a psychologist will probably be our saving grace."

  "Jennifer Emmons is nothing if not resourceful."

  Margaret raised her eyebrows. "Are you being sarcastic? Is she going to be an irritant or something?"

  I shook my head.
"No, not at all. She's a...she's probably a perfectly wonderful person. I didn't mean anything by that remark. I really didn't."

  "It's just that it's all so murky. Is that it?"

  "Yeah, that's it. It's..."

  "Murky."

  I smiled, hoping I looked sympathetic--agreeable--as I felt inside the front pocket of my suit jacket. There beside my keys was the vial of tiny pills I'd taken off Carissa's desk before I left. I'd need another one for sure before I saw Phil.