Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  I wanted a cup. I needed a cup. And it was important that I was alert. If I had any chance of getting through the last workday of the year, it was important that I was…together.

  I stood up, felt the small prickles I’d come to know well run across the soles of my feet, and immediately sat back down. I didn’t need coffee. I needed arsenic. That’s what I needed. I pulled the tube from my pocket, tapped the pills that remained into a small anthill in the palm of my hand, and with the tip of my tongue speared the pair that had bounced to one end of my lifeline.

  And then, just to be sure, decided to seize another two.

  Just before nine, Phil Hood came into my office without his jacket and closed the door. “So you honestly saw this homeopath a total of two times,” he said. He looked tired and sad. He was leaning against the back of the door, his hands behind him.

  “Good morning, Phil.”

  My boss nodded. “It isn’t good, Leland.”

  “It’s sunny.”

  “Two times?”

  “Two times.”

  He sat down across from me, and I thought the lines in his face looked deeper in the morning sun.

  “Why do you ask, Phil?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.…”

  “No.”

  “Did she give a statement?”

  “She did,” he said, and he looked away from me, out the window at Burlington. “At Becky McNeil’s office. A mere three blocks away. A delightful little walk most days of the year.”

  “You waited in the next room?”

  “I did.”

  “You almost never bother with statements.”

  “I wanted to make sure the right questions were asked. And given the…the runaround Jennifer Emmons got from you, I thought it was the politic thing to do.”

  “A public-affairs gesture?”

  He turned to me, and I realized instantly that I’d just said exactly the wrong thing. The weariness that masked his face had been transformed by my four words into disgust. “A human gesture,” Phil answered, and his lips went thin.

  “I see,” I said. I hoped I sounded as chastised as I felt.

  “You really don’t drink coffee anymore, do you?”

  I shook my head. “Oh, but I still hanker for some.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” Phil crossed a leg in his lap and wrapped his hands around his knee. “Ever hanker for a homeopath?”

  I took a breath and tried to decide whether I should sound indignant or merely perplexed. The words that came out, I thought as I said them, were somewhere in between: “Is this badgering? Or does this line of questioning have a purpose?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Phil said.

  “Because two days ago, you made it clear to me you didn’t want me anywhere near Carissa Lake or this case. And now you’ve come into my office and all you want to do is talk about her. Have I missed a step?”

  “Know what?”

  “No. What?”

  “I’m not sure there is a case.”

  “Really?”

  “Surprised?”

  I shrugged, hoping I looked unconcerned.

  “I was,” Phil said.

  “Surprised…”

  “You bet. I think that’s why it doesn’t seem like a very good morning to me. There’s a very nice man in a coma at the hospital and a very nice woman who’s going to have to raise a couple of kids on her own. And there’s a homeopath who I am absolutely convinced is responsible, but who we can’t touch.”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Better now than when I was actually speaking. Then Phil would assume anything I was saying was a lie—which, of course, it probably would be.

  “Every week there’s a case like that in this office,” I said finally. “Every week we come across someone we know is guilty as hell—and who, for one reason or another, we’ll never, ever prosecute. Why does this one disturb you so much?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Because this one has the taint of our office.”

  “Taint? Taint? Give me a break, Phil. I went out to dinner with the woman one time.”

  Outside my shut office door I heard laughter. I wondered how long I’d have to endure Phil mano a mano before I could escape into the hall for a drink of water. Or a run to the toilet. I didn’t dare, I decided, cut short our conversation.

  “One time,” he murmured.

  “Yes. One time.”

  “It’s just…No, it isn’t just anything. It’s everything. It’s everything your friend said in her statement. It’s everything she had ready for the detectives at Becky’s office.”

  “Not my friend. That’s not fair.”

  “Forgive me. Your acquaintance.”

  “Thank you.”

  “She brought her notes with her. Lots of notes.”

  “I’d expect that.”

  “Of course you would. Would you expect them to be perfect?”

  “Perfect?”

  “Perfect. At least from the perspective of a woman who doesn’t want to be charged with a criminal offense. Or face a civil suit that would make her gray before her time, and not leave her a dime for a rinse.”

  “You’ve already gone through them?”

  “Carefully.”

  “And?”

  “And it was like she knew exactly what we’d be looking for, and what she’d need for an airtight defense. There’s Richard Emmons asking Carissa Lake if he can stop taking his asthma drugs. And there’s Carissa Lake saying no. ‘Told him not to consider it.’ No, wait, it was better than that: ‘Told him not to consider such a thing. Told him to stay with his inhalers and pills.’ Isn’t that terrific? Told him not to consider such a thing.” His voice had gone almost liquidy-sweet.

  “Terrific,” I said.

  “The notes show the two of them had a similar exchange when she actually gave him his homeopathic medicine. And then, when he called her a week or so later, they show her telling him that going off his regular drugs would be dangerous and stupid and…and irresponsible.”

  “Most doctors keep pretty good records.”

  “I guess.”

  “Anything about cashews?” I decided I would probably have asked that question even if I’d known nothing about what was actually in those nineteen pages of notes.

  “Ah, the cashews. The notes are quite clear about the cashews, Leland. About cashews and poison ivy. Seems they’re in the same plant family.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, indeed. And Carissa Lake told her patient that he should never, ever eat cashews. Not with his allergy. Not with his asthma.”

  I wondered briefly if Carissa and I had overdone it, if we’d gone too far in the Octagon Wednesday morning. But we’d had to go far, that was the point: We had to be absolutely sure we’d built such a strong defense that the State wouldn’t bother to prosecute. Of course Phil Hood was going to be angry. That was to be expected. It was the suspicion—the mistrust and the cynicism—that surprised me.

  “Have you broken the news to Jennifer Emmons?”

  “What news is that?” He looked directly at me for the first time in minutes.

  “The news that we’re not going to prosecute.”

  “No.”

  “Telling her will be hard. You have my sympathies.”

  “Does she, too?”

  “She?”

  “Jennifer Emmons. Does she also have your sympathies?”

  “She does. Of course.”

  “I’m glad. Because you know what? While the odds are slim to none that we’ll ever build a case, I’m not prepared to close the investigation just yet.”

  I felt something ripple across my stomach. “No?”

  He stood and glanced once more at the city from my window, squinting for a moment against the sun, and then went to the door. With his fingers on the knob he said, “Nope. Want to know why?”

  I wasn’t at all sure that I did. In fact, I was pretty sure that I didn’t. I knew that what
ever Phil had to say would make me sick. “Sure. Tell me why.”

  “Her car wouldn’t start. I left Becky’s a couple minutes before she did, but I had to stop at that little gourmet shop on Bank Street. We’re having a few people over for dinner New Year’s Eve, and Barbara asked me to pick up some wild rice. Well, when I came out, who should I see but your friend—excuse me, your acquaintance—standing beside her slick little Audi with the hood up. She was parked at one of the meters beside the diner, and a young fellow was about to jump her car. ‘No problem,’ she said to me, smiling. ‘This happened Christmas Eve, too.’”

  Was I sweating? I doubted it. But I did feel sickly and nauseous and warm.

  “‘Before or after church?’ I asked, just being polite. And Leland? That smile on her face evaporated, it just disappeared. ‘Before,’ she mumbled, and I nodded—there wasn’t a damn thing I could say; we both knew I didn’t dare ask her another question without Becky present. And so I just said good night and went to the parking garage to get my own car.

  “But all the way home, I kept thinking to myself: That lady must have had one hell of a strong desire to go to Leland’s church Christmas Eve. After all, she’d had to find someone willing to jump-start her car. But that kind of interest seemed a little unlikely, since she’d never, ever been there before. So then I thought, What if someone picked her up and drove her there? That’s possible. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Of course, then you’d expect her to have sat with them. And not with you.”

  “I don’t recall seeing her car Christmas Eve.”

  “No. I don’t think it was there. I think Carissa was telling the truth about that. I think she really is having trouble with her battery. Or her alternator, maybe.” He pulled open the door. “See why I’m not quite ready to close the investigation?”

  “I do.”

  He looked into the hallway, and I thought he was going to leave. But then almost abruptly he asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve felt better. But I’m okay.”

  “You don’t look okay. Take advantage of the three-day weekend. Get some rest. Sometimes…” His voice trailed off uncharacteristically.

  “Sometimes what?” I asked.

  “Look, I know we don’t talk about Elizabeth very often these days, but don’t think I don’t think about her. And you. Everyone in this office remembers what you went through. Everyone respects how you’ve handled yourself since the accident. How you’ve lived your life.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “But your…misfortune,” he said, choosing his words with great care, “awesome as it was, is still no excuse to start cutting corners. Especially now. Especially after keeping body and soul together for so damn long.”

  “I’m fine, Phil.”

  “I’m worried about you, Leland. That’s all,” he said, and then he was gone. And I ran my handkerchief over my forehead.

  In my mind, I saw somebody’s fingers closing Richard Emmons’s eyes for him, the fingers a part of an arm that was draped in loose hospital scrubs. I saw Jennifer in a chair beside the bed, whispering a sentence now and then, her lips close to her husband’s ear. I saw children, a teenage girl and a younger boy, staring out the window at the sky.

  I had no delusions that a visit to the ICU would offer atonement.

  But something—no, some things—were beginning to bubble beneath the surface of my world. I could feel it. Something in Phil’s head. In Whitney’s. No doubt in Carissa’s, too. Soon one of those somethings was bound to erupt, and the mess was going to be monstrous.

  And so I decided I would visit the man in the coma. I would go that very day, and I would witness, if only through glass, the way Richard’s whole world had shrunk to a bed and some tubes and his wife’s fingertips on his shin.

  Number 276

  Excessively large doses of an accurately selected homeopathic medicine, especially if frequently repeated, are, as a rule, very destructive. Not infrequently, they endanger the patient’s life or make his disease almost incurable.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  I was back from my ten o’clock by ten-twenty, having agreed that justice would be served if Teddy Paquette endured a year on probation for two counts of possessing marijuana. I told myself that the little hustler had learned his lesson, but I didn’t really believe it. I just didn’t hear a whole lot of contrition in his voice when he told the judge he understood well he had made some mistakes.

  And he certainly wasn’t the physical wreck I was; he certainly didn’t look like he felt any guilt. My body, on the other hand, had become a mass of tingles and bowel spasms, my stomach a fishbowl on the seat of a speedboat.

  When I returned to my office I placed my last two tabs of arsenic in separate envelopes and then licked and sealed them. One I would open when I got to the hospital that afternoon, and the other I’d have before bed. Tomorrow, I was positive, I would see Carissa. And while we were together, I’d be sure, somehow, to get more.

  “Do you remember the name of the woman you first met at the health-food store?” Phil asked me near the water fountain just before lunch.

  “No,” I lied.

  “It’s Patsy. Patsy Collins. Just think of how much it sounds like that old country western star, and you’ll never forget it again.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Happy to help,” Phil said. “She seems like a very nice woman—also all too happy to help.”

  When I neared Margaret’s office early that afternoon, I heard her talking on the phone. Something—a word, a phrase, perhaps the anxiety in her voice—led me to believe she was talking about me. And so I paused just before the doorway, just beyond her vision if she should happen to look up from her desk.

  Quickly I realized the concern in her tone was indeed for me, but at that moment she was actually talking about Carissa Lake.

  “I know Phil would like to subpoena her notes, medical records—I think he’d cart away half her office if he could get a court order,” Margaret was saying, and I could tell she was sharing the news with her husband.

  “Oh, he definitely thinks Leland’s involved,” she said a moment later. “He just hopes the involvement isn’t criminal. You know how fond he is of Leland. He really cares for him.”

  I turned around and went straight back to my office. I didn’t want her to worry that I’d overheard what she’d said.

  In my truck in the parking garage at Fletcher Allen Hospital, I ripped open one of the envelopes with arsenic, and I heard myself sigh when I slipped it under my tongue. I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes, bracing myself for a vision—raw, real, unabridged—of Richard Emmons. Maybe Jennifer, too.

  No, not maybe. If I got Richard, I got Jennifer. I’d been afraid to call ahead, fearing that she wouldn’t want me to come because I hadn’t told her I knew that homeopath, and so I had no idea if she was actually at the hospital that moment. But I assumed she was.

  I wondered if another reason I hadn’t called ahead was because deep inside I was hoping there’d be no family members present in the ICU, and the nurses would keep me away. Far away: no family, no visitors. I’d never have to see the man in the coma, yet I could tell myself that I’d made a good-faith effort.

  But I didn’t really think that was the case, either. I honestly wanted to see Richard. I honestly wanted to be a presence for Jennifer.

  I’d always been pretty good with the dying, including, of course, my own parents. But I wasn’t half-bad with elderly neighbors and distant uncles, either, or with the few acquaintances my own age who’d died young. Leukemia. AIDS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. With them, I had discovered that I was fully capable of sitting passively in a chair by a bed, listening to the raspy breathing and the incom-prehensible murmurs—witnessing the twitches and spasms and seizures—that marked a body in shutdown. Some people found it difficult to brush the back of the hand of a man in a deep morphine sleep, but I wasn
’t among them. A hypochondriac, I’d realized, actually had a very great deal to offer the authentically sick: a profound empathy combined with genuine vitality.

  I climbed from the truck, adjusted my suit jacket under my overcoat, and started across the cement of the parking garage. The sun was about to set, and the garage had the feel of night. I wondered if Jennifer, too, sat alone in her car in this lot, trying to find the grit to go in.

  Madame Melanie Hahnemann, Samuel Hahnemann’s much younger wife, was tried in Paris for practicing medicine without a license, and she was found guilty.

  Her mistake? She’d gotten too brazen with her business cards. And she’d placed an announcement in the newspaper, advertising her practice.

  Samuel had been dead for about three and a half years at the time, and some people said his widow was being prosecuted because she was a woman. But certainly she was being prosecuted as well because she was a homeopath.

  Even then—1847—orthodox medicine was apprehensive when it came to alternatives. Even in Paris, where the Hahnemanns had settled within a year of their meeting in Kothen.

  Yet it was clear the court didn’t see Melanie as a villain. They were merely enforcing the exact letter of the law. She wasn’t a doctor, but she had patients. Her only accreditation was from an American academy, and it had been granted simply because Samuel had written the school’s founder, insisting that his wife was a brilliant healer and deserved recognition. As a courtesy to Hahnemann, they’d sent Melanie a diploma.

  And while the French medical authorities might have recognized the diploma had she submitted it to them for consideration, she’d never bothered. After all, she explained during the trial, she was a woman. Though there was a female obstetrician in Paris, obstetrics and medicine were then viewed as wholly separate universes: There were certainly no female medical doctors at the time in the City of Light.