Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  He has been in a coma since he was rushed to the hospital by ambulance early Christmas morning.

  At the time, Emmons was being treated for his asthma by Bartlett homeopath and psychologist Carissa Lake, in addition to seeing a conventional physician and allergist.

  Sources close to the investigation believe that Emmons may have been told that cashews were a homeopathic cure for asthma.

  According to Burlington homeopath Jerome Walsh, M.D., homeopathy is a 200-year-old medical system founded on the exact opposite premise of conventional medicine. Walsh, who is a licensed physician, says he uses homeopathy as a part of his practice, as well as herbs and conventional drugs.

  “Whereas modern medicine focuses upon remedies that counteract a symptom, homeopathy operates on the principle that ‘like cures like,’” Walsh said.

  A homeopath will therefore treat a patient with a substance that would actually cause a “symptom” in a healthy person.

  The substance, often made from a common plant or mineral, is applied in infinitesimal doses. Homeopaths like Walsh, however, believe there’s just enough there to help the body to heal itself.

  The investigation is complicated by the fact that Vermont does not regulate, certify, or license homeopaths.

  “Homeopathic remedies aren’t medicine,” explained Rosemary Haig, a director of Professional Regulation with the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office.

  Psychologists are regulated, however, and it is here where a criminal investigation may wind up focused.

  “If a homeopath tells someone to eat a cashew even though she knows it will make him sick, and that person does, it may not be a crime,” said Garrick Turnbull, a psychologist and the director of the Vermont Board of Psychological Examiners. “But if a psychologist says to a patient to eat that cashew, there may be a clear breach of duty. Possibly criminal negligence.”

  Emmons has now been in a coma for three days.

  Dr. Jan Dubuisson, one of the neurologists treating him, said the longer he remains in a coma, the less likely it becomes he’ll ever awake.

  Lake did not return calls to her home or office.

  The story could have been a lot worse, I decided. The AP had been careful not to libel Carissa.

  And I wasn’t in it. Jennifer hadn’t told a reporter that the first person she spoke with in the State’s Attorneys Office was some sleazy lawyer who allowed her to babble for half an hour without mentioning that he knew Carissa Lake.

  After all, surely AP reporter Deborah Fairchild would have called me if she had. And Fairchild hadn’t phoned.

  No, the only thing that should concern me, I decided, was the statement Carissa was going to give to the police later that day. And even that shouldn’t concern me. It was just that it was all happening so fast. It was just that I hadn’t spoken to Carissa since I’d left her office on Wednesday. It was just that I no longer knew what the fuck was going on.

  I wondered if it was worth trying to connect with Carissa through Whitney. See how she was doing.

  No, I shouldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that.

  And so I wouldn’t.

  But, of course, I did. Whitney was at lunch when I called, but the young man who answered the phone volunteered the information that she’d be back about one and done for the day about five. He never even asked who I was. Naturally, I was waiting outside for her when she emerged from the shop for the night.

  When she saw me, she pulled her scarf up further around her neck and pulled her wool hat down to her eyes. Already it was covering her ears. Her long coat looked a bit like a giant cape of Mexican or Central American origin: There was a giant bird on the back that seemed to belong on the front of a Cancún travel brochure.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “My aunt said you two need to keep your distance.”

  “She tell you why?”

  “Not really. She said it wouldn’t look good with her being investigated and all. But I know there’s more to it than that. Like, I’m not supposed to tell anyone she had a really nice time at your place Christmas Eve. Or she was up there again the other night.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  She started to walk down the residential street around the corner from the health-food store, and it was clear I was supposed to walk with her. “Slimy,” she said. “And I’ll feel even worse if I have to lie to somebody.”

  “Like an investigator?”

  “Is that who’s going to interrogate me?”

  “No one is going to interrogate you. Maybe someone will interview you. But I promise, there won’t be any gorillas with cigarettes, or any harsh lights in your face.”

  “I mean, what if someone sees us right now?” she went on. “Isn’t even that a problem?”

  “It’s five degrees outside. Have you seen anyone but us on the street?”

  “Any minute now, Reed Pecor will be out walking his dog. Or Ginny Mayo with hers. They always walk them right before dinner.”

  “Let’s talk fast, then.”

  “We’ll have to talk real fast. I live at the end of the block.”

  “Fine.”

  The sidewalk had small ridges of rock-hard ice, and I found myself moving gingerly in wingtips, the stupidest shoe a man can wear in the winter. I noticed Whitney was wearing big heavy boots over those small feet that I imagined always naked in sandals.

  “So you’re mad at us because we’ve made you feel slimy,” I said.

  “Us? I’m not pissed at Carissa. I’m pissed at you!”

  “Me?”

  “Duh. I don’t know what you two did, but I’m sure you’re behind it.”

  “Now, why is that?”

  “I know my aunt!”

  “Does your aunt feel slimy, too?”

  “God, of course! Come on! I don’t know exactly what’s going on, I don’t know what you did. But whatever it was, it was exactly the wrong thing to do. I have never in my life seen Carissa the way she was today.”

  A little geyser of defensiveness spouted inside me. There were a variety of reasons why Carissa might have seemed out of sorts that day, including her own conversation with Richard Emmons Christmas Eve. But I kept that thought to myself.

  “She was depressed?” I asked.

  “Like catatonic.”

  “She say anything?”

  “Not really. She stopped in to get some stuff a little while ago. And she must have spent ten minutes just staring at bulgur.”

  “Could her depression have something to do with her statement this afternoon?”

  “What do you mean, ‘her statement’?”

  “She met with the police. She and her lawyer. Didn’t she?”

  “I’d think you’d know.”

  “I don’t. I only said about five words today to the attorney who’s handling the case.”

  “Well, her meeting went fine. At least I think it did. She was a zombie this morning, and that was before she’d said word one to you lawyers.”

  “You saw her this morning, too?”

  “She had breakfast with my mom and dad.”

  I nodded. Of course Carissa’s family would rally around her right now. Of course they would circle the wagons.

  Whitney motioned with her face toward a gray clapboard Victorian on the corner. “This is where I get off,” she said. “That’s my family’s house.”

  “Is there anything I can do for your aunt?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Would you give her a message for me?”

  “Why don’t you just go and throw some pebbles against her window?” I remained silent, and her anger abated a bit—just enough that she rolled her eyes and asked, “All right: What?”

  “Tell her, please, that I’m thinking of her. Every minute.”

  She tilted her head and raised a single eyebrow. “Now, that,” she said, “is one very sickening thought.”

  I had just about run out of patience with Whitney and her
barely post-adolescent self-righteousness. But the last thing I wanted to do at the moment was alienate her any more than I already had, and so I tucked away my courtroom scowl—a combination of contempt and disgust—and said in the most sincere voice I could muster, “I have no idea what you mean by that. Care to translate?”

  She took a deep breath, shuddering, it seemed, somewhere underneath that wool coat. Or cape. Or shawl. Then she turned away from me and started up the steps of her home. I thought she was done, and I was about to walk back up the street to get Abby when I saw her look back at me from the porch. Her eyes were tearing and I hoped it was due to the cold, but something told me it wasn’t. Holding the glass storm door open in one hand, the fingers of her other one wrapped around the brass knob of the main door, she hissed, “My aunt didn’t do anything wrong, but you made her think she did! Don’t you get it? You’re the one who’s making her feel like a criminal!”

  And then she was inside the house and the doors—both glass and wood—were shut tight against the cold and the night and the prosecutor in the street.

  Had I not gone straight home after getting my daughter, I might have run into Carissa in Bartlett. She went to the Octagon that night, where she dozed and read and for a time surfed the Web. She was searching for examples of homeopathic malpractice. She was trying to find homeopaths who’d been charged with manslaughter or criminal negligence.

  She was doing, essentially, the sort of thing the lawyers around her might be doing very soon. And while she did not find everything a lawyer in my office would have discovered because she did not know exactly where to look, she found enough. Once when she felt a spiky pain in her lower back, she looked down and saw that she had curled her legs up against her chest and was sitting in her seat like an egg.

  At one site, she read about a California homeopath who was being sued by the family of a young man who’d died of AIDS. When the chemical regimen that had kept the virus in check for five years started to fail, he turned to homeopathy to bolster his vital force. He stopped taking the drugs that had kept him alive half a decade, replacing them first with Gelsemium, or the Carolina jasmine: a beautiful climbing flower with yellow petals and long green leaves that remind me of phlox. Then, when that didn’t work, he tried aconite, a European plant known also as wolfsbane because its juice is so deadly that hunters once dipped the tips of their arrows into it before hunting wolves. Aconite, the word, is actually derived from the Latin word meaning dart.

  Then he died.

  In their suit, the family was alleging that the homeopath had encouraged his patient to stop trying to manage the disease with the accepted, customary treatments.

  On another site, she discovered a baby who had died of a ruptured appendix. The infant’s parents had assumed her howling was due simply to colic, and treated her with Chamomilla—the homeopathic version of an herb that in one form or another has been a medicinal standby for centuries. By the time the parents concluded the crying was due to something more acute than colic and taken their baby to the pediatrician, it was too late.

  She found a psychiatrist who’d treated a patient’s depression with Ignatia and then had to cope with the fact that the patient would take his own life. She discovered a naturopath who’d offered an elderly cold sufferer Pulsatilla, only to learn later that the cold had become pneumonia and the patient had died alone in her bedroom.

  Arguably, homeopathy was blameless in every single death. The remedies themselves did no one any harm.

  But isn’t that usually the case with conventional medicine, too? At least modern conventional medicine?

  Most of the time, it isn’t that a physician has given a patient a medicine that has made him sicker. Usually, the physician has simply failed to see something someone else will believe he should have seen. Or done something someone else will believe he should have done. Or done that something differently.

  Most of the time, medicine itself is blameless. It’s the doctor who has made a mistake.

  And while Carissa reminded herself that physicians were sued for their mistakes—real or imagined—all the time, the realization did not make her feel any better. Nor did the fact that physicians had patients die all the time.

  That night in her mind there was really only one reality: She had told Richard Emmons that his conventional drugs might be acting as an antidote to his cure. And she had told him to eat a cashew.

  Granted, she did not believe she had ever said he should give up the drugs he’d been taking for years. Nor did she believe she could have sounded serious when she’d said in the store that he should pretend he was Hahnemann and try a nut they both knew he was allergic to.

  But she kept thinking of something I’d told her the day after Christmas: It’s not so much what you say that matters, it’s what people hear.

  And as much as a part of her wanted to despise Richard Emmons for his obstinacy and his persistence, for his idiocy and his determination—for what he had done to his wife and his children and now to her—she kept coming back to the things she had said to him, and the last of her confidence waned. The despair conceived inside her Christmas Day promptly hatched, and the void in her soul was replaced almost wholly by doubt.

  Imagine a vase that is watertight but cracked. Now imagine it poured full with regret.

  She grew less and less interested in whether she’d be prosecuted or sued; she cared less and less about the law.

  She cared less and less about how I’d tried to help her.

  I, after all, had been working on the supposition that if I didn’t protect her, she might lose everything in her life that mattered.

  Neither of us understood at the time that she already had.

  I can see her alone in her room that night, gazing up at the stars on her ceiling. Staring at the windmills and church spires on her walls. Sainte-Chapelle. Notre Dame. The great gold dome of the Invalides.

  Perhaps she pretended she saw Madeline, the figure drawn by the hand of a little girl.

  Perhaps she looked out the window and saw the moon over Bartlett.

  Perhaps not. Perhaps she just sat in her chair and shook.

  Number 96

  Not even the most extreme hypochondriacs will entirely fabricate their complaints and symptoms.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  I was getting paranoid. I’d found my exchange with Whitney so upsetting that I’d almost run back to her house and pounded on the door, and demanded that she come outside and let me defend myself. And while on one level I understood she was merely a kid who was spending her last few weeks home from college on a higher moral plateau than the rest of us mortals, it still gave me yet one more thing to worry about: Exactly what did that young woman believe I had done? Just how loose was that cannon she was calling her mouth?

  Clearly I wasn’t cut out for a life of crime. It was making me nauseous and giving me the trots. It was making my hands and feet tingle. All the time. Tingle.

  I felt a pressure building up in my bowels and walked with haste to the bathroom, stopping only briefly as I passed by the hall closet: My arsenic was still in my overcoat pocket, and I recalled the little book on homeopathy saying something about arsenic being a good remedy for the runs. And so I shook another two pills into the palm of my hand on my way to the bathroom and dropped them under my tongue.

  Tomorrow, I decided, I’d try and connect with Carissa. Definitely. I had to know if she was aware of her niece’s anger with me, and whether she understood what was really behind it. Maybe she could nip it in the bud.

  Abby woke up early Friday morning, and then woke me up, too. She carried Candy Land into my bedroom, plopped the game board upon my bed, and handed me the green gingerbread man.

  “I’m littlest, so I go first,” she said.

  We played the game for half an hour, and for thirty minutes I don’t think I thought about Carissa Lake’s statement or Whitney Lake’s accusation, or the fact that Jennifer Emmons was a
bout to start raising two children on her own.

  I don’t believe I thought of Richard Emmons on his back in a coma, shrinking a bit each day because he was living on glucose and vitamin water.

  I was not exactly happy. But I was still dazed with sleep and I was with my little girl, and so I was content.

  Later that morning, I found myself wondering who would benefit that day from my uncharacteristic mercy. It was the very last workday of the year. I glanced at the date book on my desk as soon as I’d hung up my coat and opened the venetian blinds in my office—it was sunny, and I wanted all the daylight and cheer I could secure—and saw the usual litany of wife beaters, larcenists, drunk drivers, and drug dealers. As far as I knew, however, none of them was a full-fledged justice obstructor. Or whatever the hell the noun was.

  I looked at my ten o’clock, still almost ninety minutes away. It was a thirty-one-year-old guy named Paquette with no apparent source of legitimate income. He’d been charged with two counts of delivering marijuana, each one a felony. But each bag he’d been delivering was a whopping five ounces, and the guy had no priors. So I could envision exactly what would transpire in Courtroom 3A later that morning: The two charges would be amended from delivery to possession, and would therefore become mere misdemeanors. Paquette would be sentenced to six months for each count, with both terms suspended. He’d walk out the door with a year of probation.

  Normally, I knew, I wouldn’t cave to possession. Not with two counts and ten ounces. But I was positive I would today.

  “Your Honor,” I imagined myself saying, “at least Mr. Paquette did not fabricate evidence to preclude a possible criminal charge, and destroy the evidence of his own involvement with a woman being investigated for criminal negligence.”

  I sat back in my chair and decided I was going to have a cup of coffee. I was going to stand up, walk to the coffee machine I hadn’t touched in a month, and make a full pot—twelve killer cups—of joe. Fuck the fact that I already had a case of the trots. And I was a little bit nauseous. And I had the weirdest tingling in my fingers and toes.