The Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  And I nodded. I might even have mumbled, "Thank you. Thank you for trying."

  If I said anything, that's what I said.

  Soon after that, I walked into a world that was alien and eccentric and impossibly hard.

  And then I met Carissa, and for a few days--no, a month; I couldn't lose sight of the pleasure I'd gotten from merely being her patient--it had once more grown familiar. Sunny. Easy.

  Jennifer, I realized, was about to wander like a sleepwalker into my world. The world of the widowed with children. She would emerge from Richard's room, and everything would be quiet. There might be a faint ringing in her ears. A gauzy veil before her eyes. A curtain. A fog.

  But at first the world would indeed seem oddly serene. Almost tranquil.

  Later that afternoon I would have a cup of coffee with Jennifer in the cafeteria downstairs. Her sister and brother-in-law had taken the children somewhere, as if they thought Jennifer and I should be alone. The couple had still not disabused themselves of the notion that I was some kind of legal white knight.

  There Jennifer told me fresh stories about Richard, and his history with his homeopath.

  Over the next three days I would see her twice more, including the time we would spend together after Richard's funeral, and she would continue to tell me about her husband's asthma and his eczema and his growing discomfort with drugs. I, in turn, would tell her what the world was like when you were widowed and young.

  It's clear she thought we would be friends in that new world.

  It's less clear what I thought.

  But I think I believed I was helping her.

  Chapter 22.

  Hahnemann's Preface to the First Edition

  If I did not know for what purpose I was put here on earth--to become better myself as far as possible and to make better everything around me, that is within my power to improve--I should have to consider myself as lacking very much.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  The Chronic Diseases, 1839

  .

  Carissa's car wasn't there when I drove by her home late Sunday afternoon, nor was it there Monday morning.

  I wondered Monday evening whether anyone else knew she was gone.

  "Did Mommy know Carissa?" Abby asked me that night over dinner, and I told her she hadn't.

  "Oh," Abby said.

  "Why?"

  "I was just wondering," she said, and then informed me that for a while she would like to be called Abigail instead of Abby. She wanted to see how it felt to have a more grown-up-sounding name.

  Vermont may have a streak of cussedness in its soul, a bit of the curmudgeon in its spirit. But it can also be very humane.

  You may lose your house if a civil judgment against you is enforced, but you will not be left destitute. Among the items that Vermont statute ensures a debtor may retain are:

  A wedding ring

  A cooking stove

  A sewing machine

  Ten cords of firewood

  A cow

  Two goats

  Ten sheep

  Ten chickens

  Enough feed to keep the animals through one winter

  Ten swarms of bees

  One yoke of oxen or steers

  Two chains, two halters, a pair of harnesses

  A plow and a yoke.

  There is yet more. Alimony and Social Security benefits, for example, are protected. So is a percentage from the sale of the crops you've grown on your farm.

  The statute is designed to ensure that after bankruptcy and loss, a debtor will still have sufficient property remaining to make a "fresh start."

  By Tuesday morning, most people knew that Carissa had left. I detoured by her house on my way to work, but her car wasn't there. There had been a dusting of snow on Monday, however, and there were tire tracks in the powder in her driveway.

  Driven more by curiosity than hope, I lined up those tracks with the wheels of my own truck and saw they were roughly as wide. They hadn't been made by Carissa's little Audi. They'd been made by someone who drove a pickup. Perhaps Carissa's brother--Whitney's dad.

  And when I returned from court around eleven-thirty, Margaret told me that Phil had been on the phone that morning with Becky McNeil and Jennifer Emmons. I wondered if Becky and Phil were striking a deal, and I would miss Richard's funeral on Wednesday because it would conflict with my own arraignment.

  But my name never even came up in Becky and Phil's discussion. Or in the conversation Phil had with Jennifer. I know, because I asked Jennifer and Becky the next day.

  Instead, the widow and the lawyers were discussing the power of attorney Carissa had left behind with her lawyer. With Becky. Carissa wanted most of her assets--including her home and all that was there--liquidated, and the ensuing capital turned over to Jennifer Emmons. In return, she merely wanted Jennifer to accept the bounty, such as it was, and agree not to pursue any claims against her.

  I am sure it was Becky who insisted upon that last part.

  There were other, small details: Carissa hadn't any oxen or bees, but there were some investments and a bank account that she was hoping to keep. Not a lot. But enough to help her resume her life somewhere.

  And she'd left behind a letter that Becky was to mail to her patients, informing them that she had closed her practice, but homeopaths in Montpelier and Burlington had offered to expand theirs to include them.

  The funeral was held midday at my little church in East Bartlett. Phil and I drove there together, and the only time we spoke of Carissa or Richard or Jennifer Emmons was when Phil told me he had no intention of spending any more taxpayer dollars on the likes of that homeopath. She was gone, and Jennifer seemed satisfied with the settlement that had been proposed.

  I introduced Phil to Paul Woodson in exactly the same spot in the narthex where I had introduced Paul to Carissa Lake.

  After the funeral, I spoke with Becky, and she claimed that she hadn't a clue as to where Carissa had gone. But she told me she was pleased that Jennifer had agreed to the deal.

  She also indicated that we had one small piece of business to transact: Carissa wanted Abby and me to take custody of her cat. Sepia. At the moment, Becky said, the cat was in the foster care of Whitney's parents.

  That night when Abby and I picked up the animal, Whitney's mother told me she, too, had no idea where her sister-in-law was, and she insisted that her family hadn't heard from her. She asked me not to contact her daughter about Carissa, because Whitney was devastated by her aunt's disappearance.

  And she said she wouldn't even venture a guess as to whether Carissa ever planned to return.

  For most of January and February, I checked the mail with more interest than ever before in my life, and I was calling my answering machine from work two and three times a day to see if there was a message from Carissa. There never was.

  Some nights, I surfed the Internet for hours, trying to find a reference to her, or perhaps an E-mail address. I never found either.

  At some point as the days began growing noticeably longer, rumors about my involvement with Carissa began to spread. As with all gossip, I doubt there was one single source, and when I thought back on December, it seemed there were whole battalions of people who could have seen Carissa and me together. Or heard my little girl mention her name.

  Without ill intent, any one of those people could have started the rumors.

  Sometimes those tales took on a particularly dark cast. One virtual conspiracy theory had me suppressing a criminal investigation into Richard's death. Another portrayed Carissa as a predatory lunatic bent upon her patient's destruction: She'd wanted Richard to die, and had prescribed cashews on purpose.

  Sometimes the rumors were very close to the truth. One local newspaper columnist implied that I'd tampered with Carissa Lake's patient records, and that's why there'd been no action by the State's Attorneys Office. The column was barely this side of libel, and there were people around me who suggested I respond. I never did.

&nb
sp; Eventually, Jennifer and I lost touch with each other, but there was more to it than merely benign neglect or the ordinary busyness of our lives: I heard from a variety of sources that she was saddened by the way she'd concluded I'd used her--especially that Tuesday after Christmas, when she'd first come to my office and I'd allowed her to tell me all that she knew.

  Later, I heard, she'd grown mad.

  Off and on that winter, my sister, Diana, tried to console me. The rumors reached her all the way in Hanover, New Hampshire, and she and her husband and the kids came for a visit one Friday and Saturday in February. Someone had told her about the walls and the ceiling in Carissa Lake's office, and she teased me that weekend that I should have steered clear of a woman with such taste.

  And every few days Abby--now Abigail--would ask me whether Carissa was home yet. She still wanted, she said, to draw pictures of Madeline on the homeopath's walls.

  I went to Paris at the end of March. I'm not sure I expected I'd find Carissa, especially given the fact that the only French I could speak was what I had learned from a sixty-minute self-help audiotape. But certainly that was my hope.

  I chose the last week of March for my hunt because the Hanover schools were closed then for spring break, and my daughter could stay with Diana, and her cousins would be home to entertain her--and she, of course, them.

  My sister and brother-in-law disapproved of my trip, but mostly because they viewed it as a quixotic waste of vacation. They weren't really concerned that I'd find my homeopath.

  But I brought with me a pretty good photograph I'd convinced Whitney to mail me from Colgate, as well as a photo from the newspaper. And I doubted the phone books in the City of Light would be particularly hard to use, especially if you were merely looking for a homeopathie.

  I had never been to Paris before, but the city seemed immaculately well laid out on the maps I studied before leaving. I expected I'd visit the pharmacies in at least two arrondissements each day, and spend from five to seven P.M. on the phone with homeopathic physicians. Someone, I was sure, had met the new kid in town.

  I had no idea what name that new kid would be using. But I knew I would miss Carissa if she had discarded it.

  The real problem proved to be call-backs: I'd leave messages for physicians late in the afternoon, and they'd call me back the next day while I was walking the streets with my photos. I'd return to the hotel and find I had missed a half-dozen calls.

  And so on day four I started visiting doctors' offices, too. Often, they were across the street from the homeopathic pharmacies. Or above them. But it still meant that over the course of the day I'd be unable to cover completely even one accessible little neighborhood like the Marais.

  Sometimes, when the homeopaths or the M.D.s could speak English, I would tell them that Carissa was my sister and she was estranged from her parents, but now her parents had died and she was a very wealthy woman.

  Sometimes I said I was a lawyer and I had wonderful news for her of a personal nature, but I needed to find her to tell her.

  And sometimes I simply told them the truth.

  On day six, I finally visited Pere Lachaise and walked among the stone tombs. Briefly I considered hiking to the top of the hillside necropolis, but it looked like a pretty good haul on the cemetery map, and I hadn't the time. Besides, I reminded myself, I already knew the view. So I merely wandered for half an hour among the crypts and sepulchers that lined the side near the metro stop. Seurat. Bizet. Jim Morrison. I saw the massive and wholly dispiriting Monument aux Morts--a long, wide statue of the dead, naked and sobbing, being led through the entryway to an afterworld that horrifies them--and then I turned back and returned to the Boulevard de Menilmontant.

  There was a neon cross nearby with the words homeopathie and herboristerie upon it, and for a moment I was sure someone there would know Carissa. Briefly I imagined I'd be laughing at myself in a very few minutes, because it had taken me six days to finally get around to the neighborhood near Pere Lachaise: Of course, Carissa settled here. Of course! Wasn't it obvious?

  But the pharmacists there knew nothing about a new American homeopath, and the physicians with whom they worked hadn't heard of any recent arrivals from the U.S.

  On my next to last day in Paris, I ran out of business cards. I'd brought about a hundred with me, and scribbled my home phone number and E-mail address on the back of each one. Someday Carissa might meet one of those homeopaths, and just maybe that homeopath would call me or send me an E-mail with the news. Maybe that homeopath would tell Carissa I was looking for her.

  At the end of eight days, I came home. Because of those business cards, I was able to convince myself that the trip had not been a complete waste of time.

  *

  PART IV

  Chapter 23.

  Phosphorus

  Dreams vivid, can be partly recalled.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  The Chronic Diseases, 1839

  .

  Some people do not believe that I know how to grieve. Probably they're right. I've never been very good at sobbing or howling or simply retreating, wordless and inert, into a shell.

  But I am capable of mourning. I've been doing it for years now, and it's become second nature to me. I mourn, therefore I am.

  I mourn for Elizabeth and the life that I know we once had. The specifics have grown foggy now, but not the sense that I was happy.

  And I mourn for Carissa, and the what-ifs that surround the astonishingly brief time that we shared.

  Recently I concocted a new and particularly punishing version of "What if, then what?"

  What if I had not been so bold as to invite Carissa to my house Christmas Eve? Then what?

  Then she wouldn't have been shopping for me at the health-food store.

  And she would not have run into Richard.

  And the subject of cashews and Rhus tox would never have come up.

  And Richard might still be alive.

  And Carissa might be practicing in Bartlett. Happy.

  Me, too.

  Though I am not, in all fairness, unhappy.

  When people see Abigail and me chatting as she waits for the school bus at the end of our driveway, they see a father and daughter--he with a mug of steaming hot coffee in his hand, she with a navy blue knapsack overflowing with loose-leaf binders and Magic Markers and the software she can't wait to share with her friends--and they often see the two of us laughing. We do laugh often.

  She has dance class on Monday nights, and she plays soccer two afternoons a week in the fall. When people see me watching her, they see a father as content as he is proud.

  When people see my picture in the newspaper--and now that Phil has retired and I have his job, I am there often--they see a fellow nearing forty who seems awfully successful. Those rumors about me that circulated in the months after Richard died? They came and they went. Like all rumors. Rumors will always be less substantial than love, and there are a great many people in this world who love me very much.

  I have now received four letters from Carissa. They are long letters she writes over days, but she only mails them when she is away from her home. Wherever that is. But I believe it is somewhere in Europe, because two of the letters were mailed from Italy, and one was postmarked in Germany. One was sent from London, where she was visiting her best friend from college.

  I, of course, am unable to write back. There is never a return address.

  But here is what I know of her: If my barometer for sentience is mourning, then her measure is remorse. Rightly or wrongly, she will always blame herself for Richard's death, and her letters are filled with her recollections of her last Christmas Eve in Vermont. That night, for her, has become protean: One moment she is standing at the health-food store with Richard Emmons, and the next she is lying on the floor with Leland Fowler. There she is singing, standing in a pew beside Leland and his little girl, while small flames quiver atop their three candles.

  Carissa has indeed resumed
practicing homeopathy, though she has not revealed where.

  And she says that she thinks of me far more often than she writes.

  When I line up her four letters chronologically, I convince myself that she is starting to recover.

  Whitney, who has seen her aunt once, concurs. When she graduated from Colgate, they spent a week together in Paris. They stayed in a little hotel in Montparnasse, and Whitney said no one in the neighborhood seemed to know or to recognize Carissa. No one in Paris seemed to view her as anything other than the older of two American tourists.