Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Friend?”

  “Neighbor.”

  “The family’s been great. I see a lot of families just go fucking nuts when they have to go through this—Forgive me, I was supposed to be off today, and it’s been a long shift.”

  “Jennifer’s very strong.”

  I gazed at the cubicles on either side of Richard’s, and at the rows of glass rooms that extended in a line along the wall. The very old in them probably would die. But what of the ones Richard’s age? Were they likely to get better, move to an HMO-sanctioned hospital double, and then go home? Or were the odds against them, too, once they wound up in here? Unlike the surgical ICU one floor below, the people here had not just endured major surgery—coronary bypasses and organ transplants, colostomies and hip replacements; they’d come here because their bodies were tanking and there wasn’t a damn thing surgery could do. It was stopgap medicine: Intensive, most certainly, but it wasn’t the knife that had brought them together. Rather, it was the litany of ways the body can fail on its own, or be felled by the world through which it moves: Cancer in some cases. Car accidents in others. Cashews in at least one.

  “You want me to give her a signal you’re here?” the nurse asked me.

  “Thank you, but you don’t have to. I’ll wander over in a couple of minutes,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “Richard never had a chance, did he?”

  The nurse was picking up a clipboard, and he bounced it softly along the counter while he thought about his response.

  “He did, maybe,” he said finally. “Slim, of course. But maybe if there’d been a way to prevent herniation…”

  “Herniation?”

  “Swelling. The brain doesn’t have a lot of room to move when it starts to swell.”

  I nodded. I tried to push from my own mind an image of the brain trying to press through the cracks in the skull, failing, and then oozing like Jell-O through the base.

  “So, you live near them?” the fellow asked.

  “I do.”

  “I like Bartlett. East Bartlett, actually. You know, up in the hills? I really don’t get to the village much. But I love to go cross-country skiing up in those hills.”

  “That’s where I live—East Bartlett. Up in those hills.”

  I saw Jennifer glance at the nursing station. Wide blue eyes with a good dose of red. Clearly she was surprised to see me, and for a long moment we stared at each other.

  We’re two people from the mountains who didn’t really know each other back in Bartlett, I thought. But here in this foreign country? This depressing world of ventilators and monitors and tubes, which isn’t at all like back home? How wonderful it is to see a friend’s face! To run into each other…here!

  I started toward the room and saw everyone else in the cubicle note my imminent presence at once. None of them had the slightest clue who I was, and only Kate—though sniffling and wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater—seemed to have observed that her mother knew this strange man in the navy blue overcoat. And so she went to Jennifer, pushing her way between her aunt and her uncle, and then stood beside her mother on the side of the thin bed closest to the door.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured when I was inside the glass sarcophagus with them, and Jennifer surprised me by nodding and standing, and wrapping her arms around my back as I embraced her. No pugilist’s pose this time: no fingers in fists, no arms curled in defense. Her fingers on my spine gave me the chills, despite the buffer of a wool coat, a sweater, and a turtleneck shirt.

  “Thank you,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant.

  “Shhhhh,” I whispered as softly as I could, rocking her just the tiniest bit. “Shhhhh.”

  I looked over her shoulder at Richard and found myself marveling at how much he had changed since Friday. He was no longer merely a small, sleeping man with a silver circle embedded into his forehead. His skin had gone from pale to the gray of cigarette ash, and his face had fallen slack. I knew from my own parents’ deaths that the transformation had occurred almost instantly, with silent but seismic force: One minute he was dozing, the next he was dead.

  I decided he had probably been handsome before this happened, and he might be again if they would only remove that metal disk and replace the hair that had been shaved from the sides of his skull.

  Surely they’d make him handsome, more or less, for the funeral.

  When we pulled apart, Jennifer turned to her family and addressed her children by name. “Kate, Timmy: This is Leland Fowler. He’s a member of the church we go to sometimes, and he’s a lawyer for—what is your title? I just realized, I don’t even know.…”

  “Chief deputy state’s attorney for Chittenden County. I’m a prosecutor,” I said, trying to direct my answer to everyone in the room.

  The children looked at me suspiciously, but it was clear instantly that Bonnie and her husband were pleased I was there. In their eyes, I realized, I was suddenly both an emissary from the local country parish and the legal equivalent of the cavalry.

  Bonnie’s husband extended his hand to me across the bed—over Richard’s bare knees—and said, “Hank Marshall. This is my wife, Bonnie.”

  I noticed as I shook Hank’s hand that a respirator mask no longer covered Richard’s mouth and nose, and the machine had been shut off. I wondered when Jennifer had given them permission to pull the plug. Had it been as recently as when I was playing Candy Land with Abby? When I was driving here in my truck? It had probably been before that. She’d had plenty of time over the last two or three days to decide what to do when this eventuality came.

  I watched her sit back down on the bed beside her husband and take one of his hands in hers. She stroked his palm with her fingers and stared into his face.

  “You want some more time alone with him, Jen?” Bonnie asked quietly.

  Jennifer looked up at the people around the bed and then focused on her sister. Her lips were curled into her teeth, and she nodded.

  I chatted with Hank and Bonnie Marshall for a few minutes in the waiting room and learned the details of Richard’s last hours. He had passed away no more than fifteen minutes before I arrived, but he had been brain-dead since early morning. Jennifer had not seemed surprised when she was told, and she’d remained calm for the children.

  Someone had left the double doors into the ICU open, and I could see a corner of the nurses’ station. When I saw the nurse with the massive circles under his eyes glancing toward Richard’s room, it dawned on me that Jennifer might emerge at any moment. After all, she’d been saying good-bye to Richard for days now, and perhaps needed only a few minutes more once the body had grown cold.

  What had I said, I wondered, to the surgeon who told me that Elizabeth had died? And then I remembered: The surgeon didn’t say a thing. Technically he didn’t say a word. The fellow just pushed through the double doors into the room where I was sitting and shook his head. No, she didn’t make it, he meant. She didn’t make it, she’s gone.

  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 themsel
ves 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.

  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.

  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 Ma
rch. 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 homéopathie.

  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.