The Law of Similars (2 page)

"Hahnemann is buried at Pere Lachaise," she told him.

"If this is about Hahnemann, then why not pick a view from a place where he lived? The book said he lived near Montmartre for a while. The views of Paris from Montmartre are spectacular."

"You've never been to Pere Lachaise?"

"No."

And so she said she'd described for him the small city of aboveground monuments: a hundred thousand tombstones and sepulchers--well over a million bodies--crowded into a mere one-hundred-plus acres. She told him about the thin cobblestone avenues and pathways between the plots, and the fact that there is almost no grass. No space. No fields. Just rows and rows of marble and stone ascending a hill, a series of seemingly endless ranges of magnificent memorials and crypts and mausoleums, some twenty and thirty and forty feet high.

"Balzac is buried there," she told him. "And Proust and Piaf and Richard Wright." As well as, she could have added, Jim Morrison and Frederic Chopin. Isadora Duncan and Simone Signoret.

Now and then the room would scare one of her patients, and it would take her a moment to calm him. For a time she even feared that she'd made a colossal mistake, and the room was doing exactly the opposite of what it was meant to: Instead of offering the sick who had come to her for help a place so surreal and unexpected that they could open their minds to the possibilities of homeopathy, it was jarring them. Alarming them. It didn't matter that only the tips of tombstones or statuary were visible on the walls, and only then in two lower corners. The fact remained, few of her patients had ever seen a ceiling with stars, and fewer still had ever seen a wall that was a painting--in this case, two walls. A trompe l'oeil of spires, towers, and the crosses that stood atop distant churches. Waves of small buildings with roofs of gray slate.

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.

*

PART I

Chapter 1.

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.