The Law of Similars (33 page)

"It sounds serious. What happened?"

Paul smiled and shrugged. "When you're ninety-three, everything's serious. A cold is serious."

"Is that what it was? A cold?"

Paul pulled his glove back on as he spoke, and then wrapped an exposed earlobe underneath the wool of his cap. "Pneumonia, probably," he answered.

"I'm sorry."

"Old man's friend, you know. But I'm not writing Ray's eulogy just yet. He's still got kick in him. Refused to go to the hospital for what he called a little winter hack, so he's still in his bed at the home. His son put a terrific little Christmas tree in his room and covered it with ornaments the great-grandchildren made--all seven thousand of them."

"Very nice."

"On your way to get Abby?"

"I am."

Paul motioned to the truck beside us and said, "Doesn't technology drive you wild sometimes? Here you spend all that money on a car phone, and when you need it most--like in the middle of a snowstorm--it doesn't work. You have to pull over and use a regular pay phone like it's 1971."

"It's true."

"Snow or hills?"

I thought for a moment, trying to follow the minister's train of thought. When I realized I didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about, I repeated, "Snow or hills?"

"I was just wondering: Think it was the weather or some mountain that forced you to pull over? I've always heard how car phones don't work in Vermont because the state's so hilly. Think that's why you had to stop? Or was it the snow maybe?"

"Maybe both."

Paul nodded. "Can I buy you a cup of coffee for the road? Our six or seven miles up to East Bartlett is going to seem like a hundred, and this place actually brews a surprisingly drinkable pot of coffee."

"I shouldn't."

"Oh, come on, it's on me. You look a little peaked. A little pale."

"Just frozen."

"More the reason you should come in for a minute."

"I'd love to, but I'm already running late. Mildred and Abby must be wondering where I am. But thank you."

Paul clapped me once more on the back. "You're very welcome. Are we still on for Friday night? Nora plans to cook up a storm."

"We are," I said. I had completely forgotten that Abby and I were having dinner there in a couple of days.

"Good, good. We'll see you then."

"You bet."

"Drive safely."

"I will," I said, and I watched the minister duck into the gas station and beeline for the coffeepot on the warmer across from the register. Then I ripped off the icicle that clung to my wiper blade like a frozen leech and heaved it against the brick wall of the station.

"At Kelly's today, I named my new Barbies Elizabeth and Carissa," Abby said. Kelly was the woman who ran Abby's day care.

I nodded, hoping my face betrayed nothing. I watched as my daughter looked down at the pile of books on one of her pillows, ostensibly preoccupied with choosing the next story she would want me to read.

"Was that a good idea?" she went on when I was silent.

"Elizabeth is a beautiful name. So is Carissa."

She had insisted on wearing her cotton summer pajamas because they were covered with flowers, and so I had insisted that she wear her bathrobe as well until she climbed under the covers for the night.

"They went on a picnic," she said as she handed me the next book to read. "Elizabeth was the boss. She was in charge. She picked out where they went, and she made all the food."

"Your mother loved picnics," I said, and I wondered if in some small, accessible part of her brain Abby remembered the picnic the three of us had taken less than a month before the accident. I'd carried her in a backpack, and we'd hiked to the top of Snake Mountain, a scant ninety-minute walk with even twenty-plus pounds of toddler upon my back. Perhaps because Elizabeth and I had been told before starting that the mountain was a mere thirteen hundred feet--a foothill, really, a glorified bluff--we'd never expected the vista to the west that greeted us at the summit. The Champlain Valley farmlands spread out in the perfect squares I'd seen before only from an airplane, with Lake Champlain rippling just beyond. And across the water were the Adirondacks, much higher than the serpentine Snake, but so close, it seemed, they were peers.

Once there had been a small hotel at the edge of the cliff, but it burned down a century ago. The stone foundation remained, however, and for a moment Elizabeth and I thought the spot would be a fine place to unpack the picnic and settle down for lunch. I had actually emancipated my daughter from the backpack, and Elizabeth had already begun removing the sandwiches and cookies and Abby's blue juice box from her knapsack, when we realized just how steep the nearby ledge was, and how easy it would be to slip over the side. A person wouldn't fall anywhere near thirteen hundred feet, but it would nevertheless be a pretty rocky tumble before finally landing--with a more than ample complement of bruises and broken bones--in the midst of the trees that seemed to grow almost parallel to the ground from the cliff walls.

Quickly I had taken Abby's hand and we retreated to a clearing a few hundred yards away from the peak.

"Barbie Elizabeth loves picnics, too, you know," Abby said.

"I'm glad."

I'd thought of that final family picnic together often the summer Elizabeth died, and, occasionally, in the two summers since. It had been one of those fantasy days that was absolutely wondrous at the time, but managed, somehow, to grow even better with age.

"Does Carissa--real Carissa--like picnics?" Abby asked.

"I don't know. Why don't you ask her someday?" I smiled, if only to repress the whine that sometimes overwhelmed me: After all I had lost and all I'd endured, was it asking too much to be picnic-happy again?

Happy the way I'd been with Elizabeth?

When I'd been one-third of a family? One-half of a couple?

I looked at my daughter, aware that she was saying something to me.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," I said, "I think I was in a fog."

"Pensive?" she asked, a word I'd recently taught her when she'd thought I was mad. No, I'd explained, just pensive.

"Yes. Pensive."

"Can we read this one?" she said, handing me another book.

"Of course we can," I said as she climbed into my lap. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing her tight against my chest. "Forgive me when I'm pensive," I said. "I love you."

"I know."

"I love you like crazy."

"I know."

I sighed, and tried to press my guilt from my mind. Forgive yourself. You're entitled to be tired.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, sweetheart?" You're entitled to be selfish. You're entitled to try and snag a bit of happiness with Carissa Lake. You're entitled--

"Have you known Carissa a long time?"

"No. Not long at all. We only met a few weeks before Christmas. How come?"

"Kelly asked."

I felt a rush of dizziness surround me like a cloud, and then the peripheries of my vision grew dim. I leaned back against the wall by Abby's bed and willed myself not to faint. In my head I heard the two words of my daughter's small sentence once more, Kelly asked, and it sounded now like she'd been speaking underwater. In slow motion. In a nightmare voice.

"Why?" I mumbled.

"I don't know."

"Were you talking about Carissa with Kelly?"

"No. I was just playing Barbies," she said, and then I realized instantly what had happened. Kelly had heard little Abby Fowler calling one of her new Christmas dolls Elizabeth and the other one Carissa, and understood at once that the child's dad was now dating that homeopath. The one with the stars on her ceiling. The one with the weird painting on the wall. The one who--and Kelly might or might not have heard this part, it depended entirely upon whether she'd heard the latest gossip that day--might or might not have put Richard Emmons in a coma.

"Was that okay?" she asked, and I could see she could tell she'd upset me. She looked almost alarmed.

"Oh, it's fine." I saw I was shaking, and locked my hands together so Abby couldn't see the spasms in my fingers, and then pulled her against me once more. "You use any names you want with your Barbies," I said. "You call them anything your beautiful heart desires."

I recalled praying alone at night in the church at least a dozen times when my mother was dying of cancer and Elizabeth's accident was still years away. I'd fall to my knees before the altar and pray, "Lord, please give my mother a miracle. Do for her, please, what we can't."

Whenever I prayed alone, I knelt. On Sundays, the congregation always prayed standing up or sitting down, and I missed the submissiveness that I felt on my knees. The sense of absolute deference. Humility. Obedience.

Before I climbed into bed that night, I fell to the floor and prayed, "Lord, please forgive me if what I have done is wrong." Almost instantly I opened my eyes and shook my head. Even in prayer I was hedging. And so I started again, this time trying to be clear that I knew I had made a mistake: "Lord, please forgive me. Please forgive Carissa. And please, somehow, heal Richard Emmons."

That, I decided, was what I really wanted: I prayed that God would open Richard's eyes and the fellow would abruptly sit up in his hospital bed. I prayed that Richard would get better. I prayed, almost as I'd prayed for my mother, that the Lord would do for the man in the coma what mere mortals could not.

Outside I heard the wind gusting against the sides of the house, the sound a low rumble against the clapboard walls of my home. I stood up, listened to make sure the gale had not frightened my daughter, and then turned out the light in my room.

Once, I kept a square tube of Halls in the nightstand beside my bed, and now it was a vial of arsenic.

In the night I awoke and I reached for the container, and I shook a tablet into my hand. Then I sucked on the minuscule pill, and within moments I had fallen back into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Chapter 16.

Arsenicum Album

WHITE ARSENIC

When I have done with the wiseacre, who ridicules the small doses of Homeopathy as a nonentity, as effecting nothing, and who never consults experience, I hear on the other side the hypocritical stickler for caution...inveigh against the danger of even the small doses used in homeopathic practice.

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

The Chronic Diseases, 1839

In the morning, before waking my daughter, I checked my computer to see if there was an E-mail from Carissa. I'd fantasized briefly there would be--I knew she was on the Internet, too--but I also feared I'd have a heart attack in my chair if this particular fantasy came true. Though Carissa and I had not specifically discussed E-mail, I assumed she was smart enough to avoid it. These days, it was almost easier to build a case with E-mail than with phone records, because the actual contents of an E-mail message remained in existence for months on a main server's computer: Not only did you have proof of contact, you had the details of the exchange.

And so I was relieved when I saw that the only message I had was a post-Christmas greeting from my friend the medical examiner.

But still I was desperate to know how Carissa was doing. I shut down my computer and went to the kitchen for a banana, and stared longingly at the coffee machine as I passed it. I hadn't had coffee in weeks, and though I'd had powerful cravings, it didn't make sense to me that I'd be having one now: I'd certainly given myself a pretty solid arsenic booster in the last eighteen hours.