Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  She thought it was lovely; they—some, not all—thought it was downright disconcerting.

  Over time, however, word of Carissa’s room spread, and eventually most people just viewed it as the local homeopath’s eccentricity. Everyone had one; this was hers. And so when people came to see her, they knew what to expect. A chance for healing. A room with a view.

  Carissa’s office was on the westernmost quarter of the top floor of the old school building in Bartlett. But the clapboard octagon hadn’t schooled children in almost three generations, and for many of those years had been absolutely vacant inside. Had it not been situated between the village’s thriving Catholic church and the post office, it probably would have fallen into complete disrepair. It might have become the hangout in which the town’s teens experimented with illegal substances and tried to discover the difference between short, furtive wrestling matches and intercourse.

  At some point in the mid-1980s, however, as more and more New Yorkers and Bostonians began taking pride in their downward mobility and migrated north to Vermont, even Bartlett developed the need for an office building of sorts, and the three-story octagon was converted into the closest thing the village had to a white-collar skyscraper. Lawyers and a CPA on the first floor. A little insurance company on the second. A massage therapist, a travel agent, and a homeopath on the third.

  I had never met Carissa Lake before I called and we spoke on the phone about my cold. I was vaguely aware that there was a woman in town who was involved in some esoteric form of healing, and I’d heard about the walls of the Octagon. The ones on the highest floor. In hindsight, I’m not even sure that I knew the woman and the walls were related until her niece made the connection clear to me in—and the irony is inescapable—the health-food store.

  When I did make the connection, I don’t believe I was any less interested in seeing her. To the contrary, I probably wanted to meet her even more.

  This is not just my story, of course. Nor is it simply Carissa’s.

  In many ways, it’s Richard Emmons’s story, though I said barely more than a word to the man in his life, and he never, that I can recall, said a single word to me. But I know his wife and I’ve met his children.

  And now Jennifer Emmons knows the peculiar bond that Richard and I share, the strange ways we are linked. Hubris and hypochondria. Homeopathy and hope. Carissa, of course.

  Carissa is what makes our link tangible.

  In that short period in which Jennifer and I had the chance to be friends—that brief window before she heard the rumors of what I had done—she shared her memories with me.

  After all, she thought I was an ally.

  She told me, for example, about that time she was in bed with Richard at the very end of the fall, and she felt him suddenly sit up beside her and wheeze. She remembered how she had opened her eyes and seen darkness.

  The sun had not yet begun to lighten the sky; they were still in the darkest part of the night. She was careful not to allow her eyes to roam toward the foot of the bed, because if they had, she would have seen the digital clock on the bureau near the door, and she would have known exactly what time it was. She would have learned whether she had a mere ninety minutes left to sleep or a languid three or four hours.

  Long ago she had discovered that she fell back to sleep more quickly if she didn’t know the time, if she didn’t know her place in the night. The alarm would wake her when it was time to get up.

  Her mind formed the words, Honey, are you all right? Richard? Are you okay? But she knew the answer. He was, more or less. Not completely fine, not completely okay—he’d needed his inhaler a lot lately, he’d been extremely short of breath—but, for the moment, he was all right. This wouldn’t become a full-blown attack, she had thought. They almost never did. And so she’d remained silent. This, too, would help ensure that she’d fall back to sleep.

  She recalled listening to him opening the drawer of the night table beside him and reaching inside for the inhaler. She heard the click when he popped off the plastic tip that covered the mouthpiece. The half-second-long whistle of the medicine as it was propelled in a spray into his lungs, an initial burst of air that sounded a bit like her son Timmy’s air hockey game when he first turned it on. Richard had used his inhaler twice that night; he’d given himself two blasts. With each one he’d taken a deep breath and held it for what must have felt to him like a long while.

  Jennifer remembered wondering that night if Richard was ever scared. She knew she would be. That night she couldn’t imagine anything scarier than not being able to breathe.

  “I can now,” she said when she related this memory to me.

  She’d hoped that night that he would call the doctor in the morning. They’d discussed it earlier in the evening, and he’d said he would if his breathing didn’t improve. After all, this had been going on for a couple of days. God, the poor thing, she had thought. But then she had reassured herself that this, too, would be fine in the end, because Richard was reasonable and Richard would call his doctor, and his doctor would give him some prednisone.

  And maybe something for his hands—for that skin thing that had come back. It was, she knew, the eczema that seemed to tag along with the asthma that really disturbed Richard. He was sure it repulsed other people, because he himself found it so disgusting. And, of course, it itched. It could itch like chicken pox.

  Maybe the doctor would have something better this time than Eucerin cream. Sometimes the Eucerin worked. But sometimes it didn’t.

  At the very least, however, the doctor would give Richard some prednisone. That’s what had worked the last time. Last year. A few days on prednisone, and he’d been as good as new.

  Prednisone. Theophylline. The white inhaler. The blue inhaler. That thing that looked like a pistol, with a barrel he put in his mouth. An AeroChamber.

  Sometimes, Jennifer told me, she would come home from the animal hospital aware that she might be making his asthma worse. After all, he was allergic to cats. And so she never wore in the house the fleece sweatshirts and sweaters and turtleneck shirts that she donned the few days a week she was neutering kittens or giving adult cats their annual vaccinations. She had, essentially, two completely separate wardrobes: one covered with dander she stored in a closet at the animal hospital and wore Thursdays and Saturdays, and one she kept at home and wore the rest of the week.

  Still, she knew well that feeling of worry: I’m making it worse.

  That night when he’d finally lain back in bed, his face toward the nightstand, she’d rolled over and pulled him close and then drawn the quilt over them both.

  She was unsure whether he called Carissa the very next morning, or whether it was a day or two later. She was certain it was within a week or ten days. But only the very basics of the chronology will ever be fully clear: A half hour after she pulled the quilt over their shoulders, she was driving as fast as she could to the hospital. To the emergency room. There he was given steroids and oxygen, and the attack subsided.

  And Richard indeed called his physician the next morning, and he in fact saw him that afternoon.

  But had he already phoned the homeopath as well? Or would he make that call days later? Perhaps when he was, once more, off prednisone?

  Jennifer told me that she wished she knew exactly when the end had begun. She said she wished she hadn’t thought to herself that night after he’d used his inhaler and she’d snuggled against him, At least people don’t die of asthma.

  Because of course they did. Especially, in her opinion, if they were in the wrong hands.

  Number 7

  A single symptom is no more the whole disease than a single foot a whole man.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  When I awoke after sleeping alone for the first time in almost two years, I hoped I was wrong about the cold. I was pretty sure it had made itself right at home behind my eyes and deep in my throat, but I still wanted to fight it. I was too
busy for a cold, it was just that simple.

  Wasn’t it hard enough just getting Abby out the door in the morning, and then keeping up with the endless pageant of wife beaters, drunk drivers, and petty thieves who paraded through the Chittenden County court system every day?

  And wasn’t my house alone sufficiently burdensome? I was determined to raise Abby in the only home she’d ever known, a century-old farmhouse I’d purchased with Elizabeth in East Bartlett—a small collection of houses, a church, and a general store in the hills six miles east of the main village itself. It was on a paved road and it had a paved driveway, but otherwise a realtor would have been hard put to call it convenient—especially for a single father working almost twenty miles away.

  Often it was a nightmare just leaving Burlington in time to be back in Bartlett by six-thirty at night so I could retrieve my daughter from the various homes around the day-care center where she would stay between five P.M.—when the day care closed its doors for the day—and the moment I arrived in the village. Some months, Abby would spend that hour and a half at the home of the neighbors to the north of the center, with a nice, playful sixteen-year-old with the inappropriately elderly name of Mildred. But Mildred played field hockey in the fall and softball in the spring, and so other months Abby would wind up in the house just to the south, spending those ninety minutes with the legitimately elderly—and aptly named—Henrietta Cousino.

  No, I told myself, I could not cope with a cold. At least not a bad one. And so that night I went to bed early. With Abby’s help, I whipped up a batch of Kraft macaroni and cheese, allowing my four-year-old to pour the packet of neon powder into the pot and onto the counter, and then add the milk—slopping no more than a quarter-cup onto the floor. I remember it was Abby’s turn to pick the vegetable (“Can mayonnaise be our vegetable tonight?”) and say grace (“Thank you, God, for the food and the stars and my new Barbie Dream House. Amen.”), but it was my turn to choose the movie we’d watch after dinner, and so I picked the shortest tape in my child’s ever-swelling collection: three antique Gumby stories her aunt—my sister—in New Hampshire had recorded.

  I managed to get Abby upstairs in her room by eight, and I was done reading to her by eight-thirty. I left the downstairs a shambles—the macaroni-and-cheese pot in the sink, the plates on the counter, Abby’s Barbies and trolls and plastic dwarfs scattered like confetti across the den floor—and was in my own bed by quarter past nine. The last thing I did before going upstairs was pop a cold reliever rich with chemicals I still can’t pronounce, and chase the tablet with a big glass of orange juice.

  I hoped that the pill would, as the box warned, cause drowsiness. Sleep was exactly what I wanted that night.

  When I awoke in the morning, the cold was worse. I ached and my eyes were two spheres of itch. The back of my throat was raw from the waterfall that had begun cascading behind my nose as I’d slept.

  Of course, the idea of calling my doctor didn’t even cross my mind. This was, after all, a cold. The important thing was to wash my hands and face like a madman around Abby. Pour Lucky Charms and Kix, wash hands. Pour milk. Wash hands again.

  Eventually, over the next day or two, my nose did stop running. The nasal glacier in the back of my head receded, and my eyes no longer yearned to be rubbed and pressed and scratched.

  The problem was that I still felt…out of sorts. Out of kilter. Out of whack. I just didn’t feel great. As the summer slowly gave way to the fall, I told myself that I was simply exhausted, beaten down by the demands of the way I had chosen to live my life. I decided that sometime that winter, perhaps in January, Abby and I would take a vacation. I’d find a Caribbean resort with the hemisphere’s most creative and nurturing children’s program, and the two of us would go someplace warm and fun.

  On that island I might even meet a woman, and the two of us would have monster amounts of sex. Maybe, in addition to being the author of a best-selling handbook on sex, she’d be the perfect new mother for Abby.

  That summer I seemed to be fantasizing often about finding the perfect woman for both father and daughter. But I also thought frequently of Elizabeth. Sometimes it would be the desperate way that I’d loved the small of her back—the river of spine that disappeared abruptly into the land just below her waist—and sometimes it would be the astonishingly quick and clever way she could make Abby’s lunch those nights it was her turn. Juice box, pieces of apple or apple sauce, pretzels, cookies, a small tangle of spaghetti and sauce in a dish that could be zapped in the center’s microwave oven. Maybe a banana and some goldfish-shaped crackers.

  She’d worked in Burlington, too, and some days we’d have lunch together, a luxurious treat in the middle of our harried, gray-suited lives. She was a commercial loan officer in the main branch of a bank only two blocks from the courthouse where I spent most of my days.

  Somehow, she was always back in Bartlett by five.

  To this day, I have no idea how she did it. Just no idea.

  In an effort to feel better, I started to make small changes in my life that seemed, at first, easy to implement. I cut back from seven or eight cups of coffee a day to a mere five or six, and I made some of those cups decaf. Then I threw my old toothbrush away, even though I knew that my body had already built an immunity to any germ on those pathetic, curlicue bristles.

  For a while, I even had fruit for breakfast—and nothing but fruit—instead of the doughnuts or bear claws that I usually bought on my way into work. And yet while I discovered that Abby loved melon, it was hard to find the time to split a honeydew each morning, or pull the seeds from a watermelon slice. It was difficult to finish getting dressed with banana peel slime on my hands. A doughnut at my desk was just so much easier.

  But no one said good health was going to be easy, and so for a time I went to the health club I’d joined before Elizabeth died. Clearly it was going to be impossible to go there before or after work, and so I tried working out during lunch. But then what seemed to be my annual murder trial began, and this one would take some effort because there was no witness or weapon. The defendant, an auto dealer whose affluence stemmed from the enormous amounts of hashish he was floating into the country via Lake Champlain and not from the cars that he sold, had shot a fisherman who’d stumbled upon his operation in a cove just south of the border.

  I’d probably gone to the health club next to the courthouse a dozen times before the trial began. Once it was under way, though, I had to begin relying instead on isometrics in the car and in meetings and while sitting through testimony that was particularly irritating because it was perjurious.

  And then the cold came back in full force, just about the time that the trial ended and the dealer was sent to prison for whole generations. In all likelihood, I decided, I’d never kicked the disease. It had been lurking inside me all along, resting, rallying, and now it was back. I really never had gotten better.

  This time I didn’t expect to defeat it with mere OTC cold relievers or big glasses of juice. I decided to get a physical. It had been, after all, years.

  “What’s wrong?” my doctor asked, and I told him that I hadn’t been feeling well for months, and I had a cold that seemed to want to stick around.

  He nodded. My doctor was tall and trim and muscular. He was probably fifty, but it was clear he could bench-press 240 pounds and run two miles without breaking a sweat.

  I, on the other hand, was pretty sure I couldn’t walk two miles without needing cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

  And so the physical began. I squatted and breathed, I gave up blood and blood pressure. I lay flat on my back for the EKG, I rolled on my side and curled my knees up to my chest for the glove. I grew embarrassed about the ten or fifteen too many pounds I couldn’t hide on the scale.

  And then I listened as my doctor told me that I really must start getting some exercise. I really must drop ten pounds. I really must start eating right.

  The lab results would be back in a few days.

  �
��My cholesterol might be a little high,” I heard myself saying, and then I thought: A little high? Oh, please. It’s going to be interplanetary.

  A week later, I got a letter that said my blood work was indeed normal and my cholesterol was indeed high—though, actually, it wasn’t as high as I’d feared. That week without bear claws might really have helped.

  Overall verdict? Healthy.

  Perhaps as a consequence, for a week or two my cold symptoms seemed less severe, and my throat felt less raw. I rarely felt woozy or light-headed; I slept through most nights. I told myself I was on the mend.

  Eventually, however, it grew clear to me that I wasn’t. The cold was still inside me somewhere; I still felt out of sync.

  Some days, I’d wonder if I was a hypochondriac. Maybe that’s it, I’d tell myself. You’re a wimp. It’s your head that’s screwed up, not your body.

  Of course I’d take some pleasure in this possibility. Not only did it suggest that my body was doing, more or less, what it was supposed to, it meant I was still growing as a person: Thirty-five years old, and I was still gaining new insights into what it meant to be Leland Fowler, even if Leland’s nose happened to be running like a snow-swollen river in March.

  Yet it was difficult to see a bright side to all this in the middle of the night. In the middle of the night, I woke up really and truly frightened. When I’d been sick and Elizabeth had been alive, there was always her reassuring presence at three in the morning. Often, her nearness alone would remind me that there was more to my world than my cold or my flu or my twenty-four-hour bug.

  I hope I’m not keeping her awake, I would think, as I tossed and turned. I hope I’m not so restless she, too, is losing sleep.

  I began to wonder if I had allowed Abby to stay so long in my room because I had needed someone else there. I thought I’d been doing it for my little girl, but perhaps I’d been doing it for myself instead. Perhaps I’d needed a focus away from my own sadness and grief and fear.