The Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  "I just don't understand why you saw her in the first place," Phil said after I told him. "Why didn't you come get me?"

  For the first time in my life, I actually thought I saw lines in a person's brow. Furrows. Honest-to-God furrows. And while I hoped they were there simply because Phil was angry, I knew in reality they were there because he was disappointed. I had let him down, and now he was hurt. I could see it in his posture: He was actually slumped in the chair behind his desk.

  "I know I should have," I answered. "But I didn't realize where the conversation was heading until we were pretty far down that path. And by that time, I thought it would have been just plain...just plain cruel to tell the poor woman that she had to stop talking, because she'd need a different attorney."

  "Was she that upset?"

  "Wouldn't you be?"

  It seemed to be snowing harder than when I'd left Bartlett just before lunch. I couldn't even see the lake outside Phil's window, much less the mountains across the water in New York. My drive home that night would be a disaster if it kept up. An absolute disaster. Defroster on high, unable to use my high beams with the air filled with white. If I was lucky, I'd wind up behind the snowplow.

  "This just isn't like you."

  "I know."

  "I just can't imagine what you were thinking."

  "It's hard to imagine," I said. "I'm sorry."

  He sighed and shook his head. "I guess it's not really the short-term I'm concerned about. I think I can probably handle this with--it's Jennifer, right?"

  "Right."

  "She might be pissed--God, she'd have every right to be. You understand that, don't you?"

  "I do."

  "But then again, she might not be. Who knows? Especially when I explain to her your reason for not mentioning you know this homeopath. And I think I'll tell her I'll handle the case myself."

  "That's a good idea." In the back of my mouth, I felt the last of the arsenic dissolving. I wondered if the pill just got smaller and smaller, or whether snowflake-sized granules of powder broke off and existed in my mouth for brief seconds before disappearing.

  "And I don't give a damn about the newspaper. They'll only care if Jennifer cares. And even then it might be one story and an editorial."

  "And that's only if Jennifer's angry," I said. I wondered just how angry Carissa would be if she knew I'd taken a vial of arsenic, and a part of me thought she'd be furious. No one, after all, likes a filcher. And no healer wants a patient self-medicating.

  But I also told myself there was a chance she'd see the whole thing as silly. You took a little vial of sugar pills? Leland, why didn't you just ask?

  Either way, however, even if she smiled and called me silly, I was confident she would insist I return the tube. And that idea gnawed at me, because it seemed to suggest the remedy was more risky than I realized, and I shouldn't be quite so cavalier with my cure.

  "Anything in the paper today?" Phil asked.

  "A small story in the local section. It says we're investigating. No mention of the homeopath by name."

  "Really?"

  "Nope."

  Perhaps she wouldn't even miss the arsenic, perhaps she wouldn't even notice the vial was gone. She had at least five or six more tubes in the cabinet, and she had other things on her mind than one little vial of sucrose. And the stuff couldn't have been expensive: Wasn't it mostly sugar? Wasn't it almost entirely sugar? It better be, I thought.

  "Jennifer must have given them the woman's name," he said.

  "She must have. But the reporter probably couldn't reach her"--though not, I knew, for lack of effort. The reporter had left three messages on her answering machine at the Octagon last night, and another two at her home.

  "So how well do you know this woman? Honestly?"

  I shrugged, using the pause to view once more the file card in my head with the outline of my story. A few bullets. Easy. "I've seen her twice in my life. We went on a date the week before Christmas, and then we ran into each other in the parking lot of my church Christmas Eve and sat together during the service."

  "One date? Last week?"

  "That's it."

  "Are you still seeing her? Do you plan to see her again?"

  "I doubt it. It didn't really work out."

  "After one date..." Phil murmured slowly, and I realized I was hearing his incredulous courtroom voice--a tone I had seen him use to great effect with lying defendants and perjuring witnesses alike. But I was the one on the stand now, I was the one being cross-examined, and I wondered if I'd already fallen so far in Phil's esteem that he no longer trusted me.

  "You've been married a long time," I reminded him. "You've forgotten: Sometimes it only takes a single date to see there's no chemistry."

  "And there was none in your case?"

  "Not really," I said. At some point, when this nightmare was behind us and Carissa and I had resumed seeing each other, Phil might remember I'd said that. But there wouldn't be a whole lot he could do.

  "So you've only seen her twice in your entire life."

  "That's right."

  He sat up in his seat, pushing more with his feet than his hands, and then reached inside a desk drawer for a yellow pad. "I'm assuming, in that case, that someone fixed you up," he said, and he began taking notes.

  "Her niece."

  "Name?"

  "Whitney."

  "Whitney what?"

  "I don't know. I guess Lake. She's Carissa's brother's daughter. I don't really know her."

  "Do you always go on blind dates initiated by people you barely know?" he asked as he scribbled.

  "Not always."

  "Tell me about this Whitney Lake."

  I told him about the health-food store, and my conversations with the younger woman about herbal remedies and rice and tea. I explained that she'd given me Carissa's number on a piece of paper she'd torn from a brown paper bag.

  "Whitney thought you two should go on a date?"

  "Something like that."

  "So you called Carissa..."

  "I did. And we met at the Buttery for dinner."

  "The Buttery is very nice."

  "It is."

  "How did you leave it? After your...date?"

  "We left it very open-ended. I said I'd enjoyed meeting her, and maybe our paths would cross again someday."

  "You said that to someone after a first date? Pretty curt, don't you think?"

  "We had nothing in common. Absolutely nothing. It was clear to us both before our entrees had arrived that we'd both made a howling mistake. She felt exactly the same way I did."

  "Yet you sat together at the church Christmas Eve?"

  "We did, and I'm sure half the congregation probably thinks we're an item. But we're not. We just ran into each other in the parking lot before the service began, and it would have been rude not to sit with her. It was awkward, but there was nothing I could do."

  "What about Abby?"

  "I introduced them. It wasn't a big deal. Abby was much more interested in the chance to hold a lit candle."

  Phil looked up from his notepad and stared at me. I hoped I hadn't been touching my nose as I'd answered his questions, a sure signal in his mind that a person was lying. And I'd tried not to fidget, another indication that someone was uncomfortable. Phil looked for both in depositions and trials.

  "Tell me about Carissa Lake," he said.

  I wrapped my fingers together in my lap and planted the soles of my wingtips into the carpet. I am a shrub. I don't move. But I'm a happy shrub. I smile as I speak. That morning I'd made a list in my mind of all the points I'd want to convey to Phil Hood, and the order in which I'd present them. I'd begin with Carissa's competency and her reasonableness, my sense that she was a careful, cautious, and thoughtful healer. Then, once I'd established her proficiency, I could elaborate on the reasons why I hadn't pursued a serious relationship with her: the notion that she was too, well, New Age for me. Too Birkenstock. Too granola.

  "My sense is
she's no shaman or quack," I heard myself saying to Phil. "My sense is she's extremely competent. I got the impression at dinner that she has a lot of training--schooling--and she's incredibly knowledgeable."

  "This appraisal is based on your extensive understanding of homeopathy?"

  "It's based on the sensible way that she spoke."

  "Do you know anything about homeopathy, Leland?"

  "Just what she told me at dinner that night. Do you?"

  "A bit."

  "Does it work?"

  For a long moment Phil and I watched each other, unmoving. I hadn't meant to challenge him, but I had. In his mind, I'd just questioned his assertion that he knew a bit about homeopathy. Moreover, I'd asked a question from the witness stand, and there was no quicker way to piss off a lawyer than to become a recalcitrant or disobedient witness.

  "Let's postpone our discussion of the pros and cons of alternative medicine for another time, shall we?" Phil suggested. "We both have a great many things to accomplish today. At least I do."

  "Look, Phil, I know I fucked up yesterday, and I'm sorry. I'm really and truly sorry. But do I deserve that tone?"

  "You tell me."

  "No. You're interrogating me. You're treating me like a criminal. You're acting like you don't trust me."

  He tossed his pen onto the pad on his desk. "I trust your ethics. Completely. I'm not sure I trust your judgment."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Something's going on in your head. Or in your pants."

  "Oh, for God's sake, Phil, give me a break. I hardly know the woman. We've seen each other twice in our whole lives."

  "And both in the last week or so."

  "It happens. Bartlett's a small town. Vermont's a small state."

  "I understand that, I do. But I also know how this will look to some people. And so I want to know every single thing you know. Comprende?"

  "Absolutely. But you're still making me feel like--"

  "I don't care how I'm making you feel. I'm disappointed in you, Leland."

  "I know...."

  "And here's another thing: I do not want you to see this homeopath again while she's under investigation. Understand? I don't want you to go to the Buttery together, or attend church together. I don't want you two to wind up in the damn grocery store together. Or that health-food store. Or wherever the fuck it is you hang out in Bartlett or East Bartlett. Are we clear?"

  I had a powerful desire to scratch my nose, but I kept my fingers linked in my lap. I nodded. A part of me was surprised at the depth of Phil's anger, but another part of me saw it as about what I'd expected. Not necessarily what I deserved--Lord, Phil, if you only knew. I deserve far worse....--but certainly about what I'd expected. And while it hadn't been pleasant, it hadn't been unendurable, either.

  The hardest part, really, might be living for a few weeks or months without Carissa.

  When this passes...

  "Leland?"

  "Yes?"

  "Are we clear?"

  "You bet," I said, finally allowing myself to unclasp my fingers. I bounced the palm of my hand on my suit jacket pocket, the shape of the vial behind the wool a small totem of hope: This, too, shall pass....

  Chapter 15.

  Number 281

  If...traces of the previous disease symptoms are still manifesting at the end of this period without medicine, they are remains of the original disease, which has not yet been completely extinguished: treatment must be resumed with higher degrees of dynamization.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  .

  I knew I had seen the roads worse. I'd driven on pavement I couldn't find because the plows couldn't keep up with the snow, and it was only the muscle memory in my hands--Straight here past the Fullers' barn, a slight right beyond the manure bank--that had gotten me home. And I'd probably spent the equivalent of whole days of my life navigating highways in the midst of the worst that winter could offer: an inch or two of ice cube-colored slush on the asphalt and more in the air, so that neither tires nor wipers worked the way they were meant to.

  The roads that night weren't nearly that bad. They weren't good, because a steady snow was falling and there was a layer of powder on the pavement. But it was pretty dry snow, and there wasn't a whole lot of it. Yet I'd already slipped into a pair of skids, one of which should have sent me into the ditch beside Lewis Creek. I had no idea why I wasn't standing in the snow in my wingtips that very moment, thumbing for help by the side of the road.

  I tried to focus on my driving, convinced it was negligence that was getting me into trouble. My mind was wandering too far from the snow and the road and the speedometer: I'd found myself going forty-five at one point, which was just plain dumb in a truck in a storm. But my day kept coming back to me, and not merely my conversations with Margaret and Phil about Jennifer Emmons.

  I kept thinking of that fellow--now in the Chittenden Community Correctional Center--who'd cracked open his landlord's skull with a wrought iron skillet. I had assumed at first that they had fought over the rent or the apartment conditions, but they hadn't: The landlord had been sleeping with his tenant's girlfriend. The assailant would be arraigned in the morning. The landlord would be in the hospital through New Year's. And no one knew where the girlfriend was, though her parents told us she had called from Montreal and was perfectly fine.

  When I stood before the judge that afternoon, I'd planned to ask that bail be set at twenty thousand dollars. Yet when I opened my mouth to speak, out had come the number five thousand. I surprised both myself and the p.d. I probably surprised the judge. The skillet swinger was no more likely to be able to post five than he was five hundred thousand dollars, but it was still a sum that suggested--at least to me--an exceptional beneficence.

  I recalled in detail the time I'd spent in court watching two twenty-one-year-olds get suspended sentences and probation for stealing adult videos and beer from a general store. The pair had claimed that they planned to return the videos after watching them, but the store's owner had a list of missing films going back to Labor Day, most of which were found in the dark little garage-apartment one of the defendants rented nearby.

  "Exactly how many times did you plan on watching them? Until your VCR broke?" Judge Townsend had asked, before deciding to be kind and spare the pair even a night or two behind bars.

  And was it only fifteen minutes later, I wondered, that I'd asked that very same judge to give a computer executive with three kids thirty days in jail for his third DWI...but had suggested that all but two be suspended? It was. And I'd been pleased when the judge agreed. I'd been downright relieved.

  Looking back, I wasn't sure why. Normally I would never have suggested such a thing, and I would have been livid if a judge had made such an offer. I would have been furious. The guy was an irresponsible drunk, kids or no kids, high-power job or not.

  But, at that moment, I'd been satisfied. Just like when those petty larcenists were told they wouldn't be going to jail for a night. They'd seemed contrite. And embarrassed. And in the afternoon that had seemed to me to be enough.

  I pumped the brakes as I started down the last hill before Bartlett and then shifted into second gear. I'd been going forty-two when I felt the truck hurtling forward into the slope.

  I wondered if I was going soft. I wondered if I'd turned some corner in my life and I no longer felt the need to be a hard-ass. After all, those twenty-one-year-olds had been sneaking into a general store in the night for months now, pilfering videos and beer. Normally, at the very least, I would have wanted them to endure a few days in the county correctional center--not escape with probation.

  But people make mistakes, I'd told myself. We all make mistakes.

  There was no reason to believe the snow had slowed or the roads had improved, but I decided both had to be true. On some level, I knew I was deluding myself--if anything, the snow was falling harder and the wind was picking up. But I planned to stop at the Texa
co on the village green before getting Abby: The gas station had an exterior pay phone along a side wall, and I could use it to phone Carissa. Not only did I want to know how her meeting had gone with Becky McNeil, I had an almost palpable longing to hear the sound of her voice.

  That husky and low and deeply confident voice.

  Once-confident. Now wounded.

  From that pay phone I could call Carissa, and the exchange could never be traced back to me.