The Law of Similars (27 page)

"Yes."

"Certainly. I'll hang on to it." I put the Baggie in a corner of my desk and already saw it on an evidence cart in a courtroom, marked with a number by the State. "So...Christmas Eve. What exactly happened?"

She took a breath and started to speak, beginning with Richard's troubled breathing at dinner. It had gotten worse as the evening progressed, and she thought he was wheezing rather badly as they wrapped the last of their children's presents later that night. She'd practically begged him, she said, to use his inhaler, but again he'd refused. He didn't want to go back on the drugs, he'd insisted. About three-fifteen in the morning he'd woken up, and she'd asked him once more to use the inhaler. Finally he had. Grudgingly, she thought. But at least he had used it.

And it hadn't worked, at least not right away, and he'd gone downstairs.

"I was hoping he was going to go take a prednisone. Maybe get a drink of water."

"He wasn't?"

"No. He was getting the cashews. They were in the refrigerator. I didn't know that at the time, but that's where they were. I didn't even know he'd bought any."

Jennifer then managed to recount for me the sound of the thump she'd heard before she even got to the kitchen, and her discovery of her husband on the floor, gasping for air. Whenever she thought she might cry, she would stop speaking and allow herself a short, quiet moment.

When she was through, she said simply, "And now my husband's in a coma. A coma."

"Any change since Christmas Eve?"

She shook her head no and bit her lip.

"I can't tell you how sorry I am this happened to you. To him."

"Thank you."

"We'll look into it all, of course," I went on as gently as I could. "But I should tell you right now--so you don't get your hopes up too high--that it might not be a criminal affair. A lot will depend on whether homeopaths are regulated by the state."

"I understand."

"And--"

"And so I thought it might be helpful that the woman is also a psychologist."

"Uh-huh. Really?"

"And they are regulated by the state."

"You've already checked?"

"I have. I wanted to know as much about this woman as I possibly could."

"Well, okay. Thank you." I made a show of looking at the appointment calendar on my desk, hoping to signal that our meeting was over. When she didn't move, I asked, "Is there anything else you need? Is there anything else we can do?"

"Don't you want the woman's name?"

"Yes," I said, "why don't you tell me." And as she said the words Carissa Lake--spelling for me the homeopath's first name, then providing me with her home and office phone numbers--I couldn't imagine there was any way in the world I could help my healer. There was absolutely nothing to do but make sure she'd linked up with someone like Becky McNeil. And then, perhaps, say a prayer for the Emmons family.

"That's the Eiffel Tower," Carissa was saying to Abby that night after we'd all arrived at my house, as she pointed at the picture in Madeline's Rescue. "It must be very far from Madeline's house in this drawing. It's actually very tall."

"Madeline doesn't have a mother, you know," Abby explained, a connection I understood instantly. It came up whenever we read a book in the Bemelmans series. "She died. At least I think she died. See, her mother didn't visit her in the hospital when she had her operation."

Carissa looked up at me while Abby was gazing at the picture in the storybook, and in the brief second we made eye contact, I nodded, hoping my small motion reassured her: It's okay. We talk about this stuff all the time.

"The operation's an appendectomy, isn't it?" she asked Abby.

"Uh-huh."

Though Abby was sitting on the den floor next to Carissa, my daughter was pressing her free hand on her hip exactly the way her mother once had--her palm upon the velour of the dress, her fingers pointing down her leg toward her knees.

Sometimes I would be surprised when I'd see Elizabeth in Abby. It wasn't that the little girl didn't look like her mother, because most certainly she did. They had the same brown eyes, and the same rosebud-shaped mouth. Actually, the only part of Abby that seemed to be mine was her hair: lion-colored, and of a texture so fine that even after two-plus years of trying, it was still impossible for me to get a barrette to stay in.

"And, let's see, on these pages you can see a big church called Notre Dame--"

"Quasimodo lives there! I have the movie! And his friends are these three talking gurgles."

"Gargoyles," I said.

"And this is the Hotel des Invalides," Carissa continued, thumbing through the book for landmarks she knew. "And here's the merry-go-round in a big garden called the Tuileries. The horses are painted the most magical colors you've ever seen."

"Are the horses magic, too?"

"Sort of. They won't come to life or anything like that. But the world spins by when you're on them, and the music's lovely. When you ride them, it's as if you're in a very special and beautiful place."

Abby seemed to like Carissa, but I wondered if she was simply putting up a good front because she hadn't a choice. First this woman had joined us at the church Christmas Eve, and now, two days later, she was at our home reading to her before dinner. Abby was indeed adaptable, but she was also very smart: I figured she probably knew she could get this lady to read her a few extra books. Maybe she thought she could even convince Carissa to invent some new voices for the small world of Barbies she liked to build on the floor.

"And this is my favorite part of Paris. It's a cemetery called Pere Lachaise. Madeline and all her friends are running through the tombstones looking for the dog that rescued Madeline."

"My mommy's buried in a cemetery. But it's not in Paris. It's right here in Vermont."

"I'll bet it's very pretty."

"I guess. It's different from this," she said, pointing at the picture in the book. "Nothing looks as big."

"There's something to be said for small, Miss Abby Fowler. Don't lose sight of that."

Abby twirled a tuft of her hair, unsure whether she agreed. When she was silent, Carissa went on, "The markers at Pere Lachaise just happen to be very large. Some people would say too large. And there are lots and lots of them, and they're all very close together. The statues, too. See this one? It's a statue of a famous musician." She tapped the spot in the illustration where Bemelmans had drawn Chopin's headstone, and then quickly turned the page.

"These are called domes," she said, referring to a picture of Madeline and the girls near the Sacred Heart Basilica in Montmartre. "They're a part of the church on the highest hill in the city. When you stand on the hill, you can see almost all of Paris."

"Daddy, someday can we go to Paris? I want to see those domes and those statues. And that tower."

"Absolutely," I said. I wondered if showing Abby Paris via a Madeline book was helping Carissa to press Richard Emmons from her mind, or whether--perhaps like Abby--she was being polite. This little girl, after all, was the daughter of the man she was sleeping with. Slept with. Slept with one time. Either way, Carissa seemed to be content. And Abby was entranced.

"If you go, you have to let me come, too," Carissa said. "I love Paris."

"You can see a really big picture of Paris on the walls in Carissa's office," I told Abby.

"How big?"

"Floor to ceiling."

"Is Madeline in it?"

Carissa abruptly reached under the girl and picked her up, then dropped her into her lap. "Nope, she's not. Maybe someday you'll have to bring your crayons and markers and put her there."

"In the picture?"

"Sure."

"You'd let me draw on the wall?" Abby sounded at once incredulous and pleased.

"Well, it sounds like I need a Madeline."

"I'm not allowed to draw on the walls here, you know."

I climbed to my feet and began to roll up my sleeves. "I'm going to make dinner," I said. "I don't think I even want to know where this conversation is going."

When Hahnemann began his provings two centuries ago, medicine had been in an especially grotesque phase. Doctors were still bleeding their patients with leeches. They were giving them tartar emetic to make sure they would vomit, they were filling their bodies with mercury. They were still drawing out what they called the bad humors.

And so even if you had little faith that a homeopathic remedy would heal you, at least you could be fairly certain it wasn't going to make you any worse.

Ask a homeopath if conventional medicine is like that today, and you will be reassured it is not. But you might also see her raise an eyebrow and remind you--her voice rich with sarcasm--that chemotherapy often adds three to six to nine months to a person's life. And not all of that bonus time is spent vomiting into toilets and lobster pots, or fearing you're about to. Much of it is. But not all of it.

And perhaps she'll bring up modern medicine's brief but tawdry infatuation with the artificial heart: No one lasted on one for very long, and the dying pioneers who had them implanted into their chests seemed particularly unhappy in the newspaper stories that dogged their last days.

Maybe she'll mention the fact that we can now remove the organs from a healthy baboon and place them inside an ailing human being. We can keep a person alive on a respirator. We can keep him alive in a coma.

The message underneath the rant? At least a homeopathic cure won't leave you nauseous or cause your hair to fall out in great handfuls; it won't leave you entombed in a machine that does for you what your lungs no longer can.

It won't put you in a coma.

Yet conventional doctors have always been wary of homeopathy, and--viewing the debate with the somewhat dispassionate perspective of a lawyer and not a physician--I don't believe their unwillingness to embrace it has been due solely to the sense a reasonable person might have that the very notion of homeopathy is nonsense. After all, the homeopaths were often successful in the great epidemics of the early and mid-nineteenth century after the heroic physicians had failed. It was their patients who were surviving influenza. Yellow fever. Cholera.

Not the sick who were being bled by freshwater species of worms.

In a nineteenth-century cholera epidemic in Cincinnati, homeopaths would claim they had cured over 97 percent of their patients--well over 950 people--printing the names and addresses of both the living and the dead in the newspaper.

Some mainstream physicians in that city would convert. Others would keep bleeding the dying. And some simply got mad.

In 1846 doctors banded together and formed the American Medical Association, and then added a membership clause that excluded homeopaths.

And when even that didn't work to dissuade people from the idea that they could get better without being cut apart or filled with toxic heavy metals, in 1910 the association received help from the Carnegie Foundation in what has come to be called the Flexner Report--educator Abraham Flexner's examination of the quality of medical teaching in this country. The paper suggested that all medical schools use science-based curricula that by necessity ruled out homeopathy, and recommended that every medical school in North America earn a similar license.

Before the report was published, there had been twenty-two homeopathic medical schools in the U.S. By 1940, every single one had been forced to close.