No matter, not now. And so I rang the bell and waited, and then rang it once more. I was beginning to fear that she had somehow convinced Whitney to leave that very night, when she pulled open the door.
It had only been two and a half days since I last saw her, but she looked as if she’d been battling illness for months. For a moment I thought it was merely the fact that I had woken her: Her hair had been puffed out by her pillows as she’d slept, and she had wrapped a tired-looking shawl around her nightgown. But there was more to it than that. There were dark bags under her eyes, and that round, girlish face had grown thin. She looked pale.
She motioned me inside without flipping on the hall light, and then lifted my little girl from my arms.
“God, she’s out like a light,” she whispered as she carried her into the living room and unzipped her coat. For a moment I watched from the hallway, trying to decide whether I should take off my boots. I wondered if I gazed into the kitchen or the dining room—my eyes straining in the dark—whether I would see suitcases.
When she returned to the hallway, she took my hands in hers and told me they were ice-cold. “Have you ever tried gloves?” she asked.
“They’re in the truck. I thought the truck was warm.”
Her face was a drowsy mask. I kissed her lightly on the lips, and she pulled me to the stairs. As we sat down she said, “You need to take better care of yourself.”
“I know.”
“You have Abby to think of.”
“And you,” I said.
She was sitting a step below me, and she rested her head on my leg. I realized I still had my overcoat on.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she murmured.
“Me, too.”
“Someone will see your truck, you know.”
“I’m parked in the back.”
“Still…”
“I know.”
“I’ll be gone tomorrow,” she said.
“I heard.”
“How?”
“I saw Howard and Anne Lansing tonight. It was a little dinner party. Whitney was supposed to baby-sit for them.”
“I’m not coming back until Sunday,” she said.
When she was gone, I knew, I would try not to think of her. But I would. I would think of her all the time. The more, in fact, that I tried not to think about her, the more I would find reasons to recall what her body lotion had smelled like. Or the way she would toy with her eyeglasses. Or sit in her chair with her feet curled beneath her.
And then, suddenly, I’d stop. There would be times when I’d recall her, moments when she would return to me. There would be images and events that would bring her back as an almost tangible presence. But I would stop consciously reminiscing. Obsessing.
This was, after all, exactly what had happened after Elizabeth died. At some point after the first anniversary of the accident, I began going whole mornings or afternoons without once recalling the woman I know for a fact I had loved. It is possible that if I had not had photos of her by my bed, I might have gone a whole day now and then.
“Really? Sunday?”
“It’s a long drive,” she said.
“But you’re getting an early start.”
“Still. It’s a haul.”
I wanted to tell her not to go, but I wanted to make sure I could say it without desperation or panic in my voice. I wanted to be sure my voice wouldn’t break.
“This is awful sudden,” I said simply.
“It is. I don’t honestly know whether it was my idea or Whitney’s. We were talking about when she should leave, and one of us just decided that we might as well go now.”
All this time her head was against my leg. I stroked her hair and asked, “Will you really be back on Sunday?”
She was quiet, and I saw her shoulders rise in either a sigh or a shrug. I couldn’t tell.
“Promise me you will,” I said.
“No.”
The syllable was long but airy. In my head I heard myself whisper, Please.
“Where will you go?” I asked.
“You know I’m going to Colgate. Hamilton, New York.”
“And then?” I ran the tips of my fingers in circles along her temple, occasionally sliding them gently behind her ear. When she didn’t answer, I asked again.
“I don’t know,” she murmured.
“Home to Bartlett,” I said.
She rested one of her hands on my knee and allowed herself a tiny purr. “That sounds nice,” she said, as if she were imagining fresh strawberries in December: impossible, but nice to conceive.
“I went to the hospital today. I saw Richard.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
And so I told her about my visit, and that I thought the worst would soon be over for Jennifer. Her husband would die, and she would begin to heal. I told Carissa that Jennifer seemed to have a wonderful family and that the children would be fine.
“And Jennifer?”
One moment she was cupping my knee in her hand, and the next I could scarcely feel her fingers at all. “Jennifer will be okay. She will. And she no longer blames you, you know. Not at all.”
“She’s being kind.”
“She’s being realistic. Honest. She understands it wasn’t your fault.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“That Jennifer doesn’t blame you?”
“That it wasn’t my fault.…”
“No, Carissa, it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. If you feel that way, it’s because of me. It’s because I had us doctor the notes, it’s because—”
“Us?” she said, sitting up and pulling away from me. “You didn’t tell him to eat cashews! You didn’t give him the idea that his drugs were an antidote to his cure!”
“No. But I—”
“Leland. No. Please stop.” She stood up and shuffled toward the living room, and gazed in at my daughter on the couch. She watched her for a long moment and then returned to the hallway. She pulled her shawl tightly around her and leaned against the front door.
“I’d tell your lawyer friends in your office everything if you didn’t have Abby,” she said. “I really would. I’d tell them everything.”
“Would that make you feel better?”
“Except for what would happen to Abby? I think so. This afternoon I thought I might allow myself one more lie: I’d tell them about the notes, and what I said in the store. But I wouldn’t tell them you had anything to do with it. I’d say doctoring the notes was all my idea, and I did it all by myself. But that would still put you in a horrible place.”
“I’d come forward.”
“I know that. You’re not the type who could watch me go it alone.”
“No. I couldn’t.”
She smiled at me and shook her head. “What will you do tomorrow? After I’ve gone?”
“Oh, maybe I’ll look at a map on the computer. Maybe I’ll follow your trip. I’ll tell myself you’ll be back on Sunday, because that’s what you’ve told everyone else. Maybe on New Year’s Day, Abby and I will get in the truck and we’ll drive into the village. I’ll insist we drive down your street, so I can be reassured by the sight of your car.”
“And if it’s not there?”
I stood up and went to her, and pulled her against me. We rocked each other, and I imagined I was on a small boat: The waves were comforting and small, and we were together.
“Can you spend the night?” she asked, her voice so quiet that for a second I didn’t understand what she’d said.
“I can.”
“Abby will be okay in a bed she doesn’t know?”
“I’ll be sure to get up before her.”
Outside a dog barked, and I wondered if at that very moment someone was walking down Carissa’s street and noting a strange truck in her driveway.
No, not strange. That’s a truck like Leland Fowler’s. Maybe it is Leland Fowler’s.
“I should tell you,” I said, “that I’m sick.”
“
Really?”
“I mean, it’s not contagious. But I did something Wednesday morning when we were together. It was stupid, but I did it.”
“Go on.”
“I found a vial of arsenic on your desk. And I took it.”
“Do you mean you took it home? Or do you mean you ingested it?”
“The latter.”
“How much?”
“All of it. Every single pill.”
“A full bottle?”
“About half.”
“Why?”
I shrugged, and for a moment I had a vision of one of my daughter’s friends, a five-year-old boy I’d once caught peeing into her sandbox. “Why did you do that?” I’d asked him then, and he, too, had shrugged.
“It made sense when I did it,” I began, and then I tried explaining what her remedy had done for me at first, and how I had felt. I told her how sure I had been that the remedy was harmless, how I’d managed to convince myself that each pill was as safe as a cough drop. I confessed that I’d been taking them one and two and even three at a time since Wednesday morning, viewing them in my head as a sort of homey-tranquilizer.
When I was done, she asked simply, “How do you feel?”
“Right this minute? Okay. A little weak, but okay. But I’ve had a very strange tingling in my fingers and hands, and my stomach’s been a little off.”
“Diarrhea?”
“A bit.”
“Well. This might be one for the lecture circuit.”
“Am I…sick?”
She pushed off my chest and looked at me. “It was homeopathic arsenic. Health-food store arsenic. Five dollars a vial. You’re going to live.”
“Have I poisoned myself?”
“A conventional doctor would tell you no. He’d tell you it’s all in your head.”
“Mind-body hokum?”
She nodded. “Or perhaps a virus. He might believe you’d caught a virus—coincidentally.”
“What do you think?”
“I think you shouldn’t be swiping arsenic.”
“Can you help me?” I asked, and she patted my shoulders through my coat.
“No one can help you, Leland. You’re hopeless. Absolutely and completely hopeless.”
She did help me, of course. She made me drink glasses and glasses of water with lime juice in it, and then she gave me the homeopathic cure called Carbo vegetabilis: wood charcoal. Arsenic and charcoal, Hahnemann had observed, are antidotes of each other.
And then I took a shower and cleaned myself up while Carissa got Abby settled in the bedroom next to hers.
The next morning I was up at five-thirty, and Abby and I were gone fifteen minutes later. The two of us had breakfast together at the diner in town: Though it wasn’t supposed to open until six A.M., the cook had mercy on the father and daughter who showed up at the front glass door a few minutes early.
“Can we have a sleepover at her house again someday?” Abby asked as the waitress, a woman old enough to be Abby’s grandmother, brought us our pancakes.
“Did you have a slumber party at a friend’s house?” the waitress asked her, smiling at the image, perhaps, of two little girls in a bed full of teddy bears.
“No, it was at my daddy’s friend’s house,” Abby explained, and I looked out the window at the streetlights.
A few minutes after that, we went home.
By mid-morning, the sugar from the maple syrup had worked its way through Abby’s system, and we each decided we’d take a nap until lunch. We’d been up early.
By then, I guessed, Carissa and Whitney had almost reached Albany. Perhaps they were already heading west on I-90.
I think, looking back, that I had come a long way since the night before at the Woodsons’. I think I’d managed to convince myself that Carissa really was planning to return.
Number 17
It is possible to create a very grave disease by acting on the vital principle through the power of imagination and to cure it in the same way.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,
Organon of Medicine, 1842
Early Sunday afternoon, Abby sat forward on the living-room floor and picked a Candy Land card from the pile.
“I hope I get a person,” she said, and she allowed herself a small squeal when she saw she had chosen Queen Frostine, the confectionery monarch. This bit of good fortune was going to place her at least fifteen spaces ahead of me.
I gazed at the Christmas tree behind her. I hadn’t remembered to water it in days, but it still looked pretty good. Granted, it was drenched in afternoon sun. But it was still hanging on to its needles as if it were standing in the woods in the middle of April, its roots sopping up the last of the snow while its branches stretched high into that long-awaited spring sky.
We put the pillows from the couch right there, I remembered as I looked at the spot on the rug where Carissa and I had made love Christmas Eve. There’s the branch where she hung her eyeglasses. And there’s the star Abby made. The Sunday-school star. Her first. And here’s where I tossed Carissa’s panties when I finally pulled them over her hips and down those long and wondrous legs.
“Your turn, Daddy.”
“It looks like I have a lot of catching up to do,” I said.
“You sure do,” she giggled.
I sipped my coffee, inhaling the aroma deep through my nose as I brought the mug to my lips. It was high-test, dark brown pond water that tasted delicious. It was, I realized, the first coffee I’d had in close to a month.
“Well, that doesn’t do me much good, does it?” I said when I saw my card was going to move me forward exactly one space, and I tossed it onto the game board in mock aggravation.
“I think I’m going to win,” Abby said.
“I think you are.”
I stretched my legs and wiggled my toes in my socks. Still no tingles. And none in the palms of my hands. They’d been gone now more than a day.
“Two reds,” she said, and moved even closer to reaching the Kandy King in the Candy Castle.
I glanced at my watch: It was close to one o’clock. Any moment now, Abby’s friend Greta and Greta’s mom would be stopping by to pick Abby up. The two girls were going to another little friend’s birthday party at the sort of indoor family entertainment center in which the acoustics and the video games and the token-fed race cars all conspire to trample the hair cells in the human ear, and guarantee a noise-induced hearing loss by the first grade.
While she was at the party, I planned on visiting Richard and Jennifer Emmons at the hospital. On my way home, I’d drive by Carissa’s house. With any luck, I’d see her car was back in the driveway.
I reached for a card and showed it to Abby. She practically howled with laughter when she saw it was Plumpy the Troll and I would have to return almost all the way back to square one.
It was after two by the time I got to the hospital, and the winter sun was already falling toward the Adirondacks. As I walked from the parking garage to the main entrance, I experienced what any other day I might have called a mere shift in the weather. A storm was coming. Or a warm front and a thaw. But not that moment. That moment when I felt the world around me fill with moist and mild eddies of air, I didn’t think weather. I thought Richard. I took as deep a breath as I could—Be happy in heaven…—and imagined Jennifer was beside her husband when the whoosh of air that was Richard began its ascent from its shell.
I hoped I wasn’t wrong about Jennifer. For a moment I feared she might have stepped away to get a bite to eat. Maybe she was downstairs in the hospital cafeteria when Richard had died, and he’d passed away with only an ICU resident or nurse for company. It was possible.
But I decided it wasn’t likely. Jennifer was diligent about her vigil. She would be there when he died.
Moreover, people, whenever they could, died with a decency that was angelic. They waited. Even Elizabeth had managed to hang on until I’d been notified of the accident—no easy task since I’d been at a deposition across the
lake in Plattsburgh—and had returned across the water to Burlington. I hadn’t been in the room with her when she’d died, of course, since she’d died on an operating room table. But I had been at the hospital. This hospital. I’d sat for over ninety minutes in a chair with an orange Naugahyde seat, standing every so often to make a phone call:
“Hi, Kelly? It’s Leland. Elizabeth won’t be getting Abby today, and I think I’m going to be a bit late.…”
No, if Jennifer had for some reason stepped away, then Richard was still hanging by a thread somewhere inside a torso and limbs that by Friday had forgotten how to respond to a knuckle or prod.
When I reached the entrance, I stepped through the automatic doors and into the hospital lobby. I passed the reception desk and the gift shop, the rest rooms and the long corridors to the mysterious places I hoped I’d never visit. I passed the cafeteria, and I was relieved that Jennifer was not there among the clusters of squat tables.
When I got to the elevator bank I was the only one waiting, and I rode the elevator to the fourth floor alone.
I saw instantly that I’d been right: The swirl I’d felt outside had been Richard. I couldn’t see Richard himself, but I could tell by the crowd in the room, and by the fact that the nurses were keeping their distance behind the counter that formed the ICU’s station.
“You were here Friday afternoon, weren’t you?” asked one of the nurses, a fellow with an immaculate blond mustache and tiny glasses that didn’t hide the inky circles under his eyes.
“I guess you were, too,” I said.
“You related?” he asked, and motioned toward the cubicle in which Richard’s family had gathered. Jennifer was sitting up on the bed, her hands in fists against her mouth, a tissue balled up in one. A girl barely a teen and a boy even younger stood with their backs against the wall with the window facing north. Two other adults were clinging to each other like a couple: No doubt the woman was Bonnie, Jennifer’s sister, and the fellow was her brother-in-law.
Only the teen girl—Kate, I believed, was her name—was crying. Her shoulders were bobbing against the glass.
“No. Not related.”
Law of Similars Page 28
