The Law of Similars (8 page)

When I finally sat down with Carissa's book and my dinner at the kitchen counter, I realized I was exhausted. Carissa had, as Abby would put it, tuckered me. I'd never in my life talked about myself for anywhere near as long as I had with the homeopath; I'd never examined my past with such purpose. I'd recalled things I hadn't thought about in years--some, perhaps, I hadn't thought about since they'd actually occurred.

I realized I'd told Carissa about the hour I'd spent staring into Elizabeth's closet the day after she'd died, when I was supposed to be picking out a dress for her to wear inside the coffin. Although the casket was going to be closed, what she was wearing still mattered greatly to me. Yet when I'd wandered upstairs to our bedroom and stood before the walk-in closet, I froze. Was I supposed to bury Elizabeth in one of the business suits and skirts she might wear during the week, or the sort of casual dress she might wear to a cocktail party on somebody's porch in July?

I still don't know what would have happened if Elizabeth's friend Lorraine hadn't shown up. Who knows if I would ever have made a decision. I might still be standing in that bedroom, a catatonic attorney more mannequin than man, while Abby was being raised by her grandparents in Florida, or my sister in New Hampshire.

But Lorraine had shown up, calling up the stairs to me when she'd found the front door open.

"You know she loved blue," Lorraine had said, choosing a white pleated jumper that was covered with tiny irises.

"It's sleeveless," I remembered telling her, disturbed on some level because even in June the Vermont ground could be cold. But Lorraine had been a step ahead of me: She was already pulling Elizabeth's favorite cardigan sweater from a bureau drawer.

"These always looked nice together," she had said.

And tonight, for the first time in my life, I'd verbalized the fact that I'd never been wild about the teddy bears my father's company had made. They cost a small fortune in upscale toy stores around the country, in part because they were made in Vermont (which mattered to people for reasons I just couldn't fathom--after all, it wasn't like the teddies were made of maple syrup), and in part because they were always eccentrically dressed. Over the years, Green Mountain Grizzlies had dressed its bears in girl group sequins, disco king leisure suits, and some extremely punk leather. In the seventies, there'd been a teddy dressed like a jelly-doughnut-filled Elvis Presley, and another that had looked more than a bit like Henry Kissinger.

No one suspected that my father's big idea of Desert Storm Grizzly was probably a sign of his oncoming Alzheimer's. After all, the camouflage-clad grizzly had been a huge success--due at least in part to my father's suggestion that the teddy come equipped with a toy gas mask.

But I had never cared for the bears, even when I was a boy. I didn't like the way the arms had joints at the shoulders, and the way the paws had claws made of a rubber that felt like a pencil's eraser. I'd just never found the bears very cuddly.

Yet my sister and I owned one or two of almost every single grizzly ever made. Abby must have had a dozen of the things in her room, and at least a dozen more in a sealed moving box in the attic.

With Carissa, I'd gone into the childhood embarrassments that were an inevitable part of what my parents would refer to eventually as their weird midlife hippie phase. There was my father standing beside the tiny bleachers at the Little League field in Burlington in the summer of 1971, his hair in a ponytail. There was my mother picking me up from the school nurse's office one morning in second grade when I had a fever that reached triple digits. My mother was wearing an Indian sari, and what I believe were called "granny glasses," with deep purple lenses.

"We were meditating," she'd explained to the nurse when the other woman had actually had the audacity to ask.

And I'd told Carissa what it had been like to witness my mother die slowly from lung cancer--although it was the treatment, I thought, that had made it so painful to watch. Especially the radiation. The esophageal radiation. My mother couldn't eat because she couldn't swallow, and sometimes after struggling through one of those tiny cans of high-protein shake, the pain in her throat would become too much, and she'd end up vomiting all she'd consumed.

Finally, I had recalled--whether for Carissa or for myself, I hadn't a clue--a few predictably painful teen memories, including the afternoons I would rifle through my older sister's underwear drawer to find bras I could practice unsnapping. And that April morning when I was seventeen, and Laurel Palmore's septic tank had overflowed, and all of the condoms Laurel and I had used our last year of high school had floated onto the stone terrace in the Palmores' backyard. ("I guess I should have carried them home with me," I'd said when she called me, sobbing, the night her mother found them. I knew it would cost me my girlfriend.)

"You really do have a healthy libido," Carissa had said, and while I hoped it was meant as a compliment, I was pretty sure that the homeopath was just trying to be gracious. She must have seen I was on the verge of tears.

That night as I was starting to drift off to sleep, I realized my throat was growing sore. Burning, once more. I tried not to swallow, afraid swallowing would cause pain and that pain would cause me to wake up. But it took an effort not to swallow, and that effort pulled me back from the brink. I opened my eyes, I stretched my neck. I was awake.

Carissa, I decided, was going to prescribe arsenic. And it was going to kill me. I was sure of it. The little book I'd skimmed at dinner had said something about arsenic being a good remedy for people whose symptoms included restlessness. Anxiety. Fear.

A sore throat.

Well, that's me, I thought. I'm going to get arsenic, and I'm going to tank.

In the morning, I knew, arsenic would stop scaring me. After all, there really wasn't any arsenic at all in the remedy. Just like there was no tarantula in tarantula. Or gold in gold. Or belladonna in belladonna. That was the beauty of homeopathy. (Or, I thought, why it was such incredible quackery. I wondered if instead of seeing this woman for help, I should be prosecuting her for fraud.) Unlike conventional medicine or naturopathic medicine or even that seemingly wholesome New Age standby herbalism, homeopathic medicine was completely safe. It might not do a bloody thing to heal me...but it sure as heck couldn't hurt me.

The book had even said the whole essence of a homeopathic remedy was dilution. You took a substance and kept diluting it and shaking it, diluting and shaking, until there was virtually nothing left of the original ingredient. The dilution might go from one part arsenic and ninety-nine parts water to one part arsenic and a million parts water. Maybe the ratio would become one to one hundred million.

Homeopaths believed, of course, that even at that infinitesimal a level, the remedy retained a memory of the original substance--just enough to set the body on its path to recovery.

But from a chemist's perspective, it was certainly harmless. And most likely quackery.

No, it was the other way around: Certainly quackery. Most likely harmless.

It couldn't possibly be absolutely, positively--certainly--harmless. After all, who the hell knew how that stuff was made? The fact is, the remedy began with arsenic. Arsenic! Poison! And just as it was possible that there could be a bad batch of a prescription drug--Amoxil or Claritin or Seldane gone wrong--it was certainly conceivable that there could be a bad batch of arsenic.

I imagined a homeopathic chemist--a barefoot blonde in a white lab coat, Carissa Lake in a lab filled with ferns--and saw her holding a pair of beakers, wondering, Let's see, which one is one to one hundred and which one is one to one thousand?

Carissa had said the remedy was usually diluted beyond something called Avogadro's number--beyond a detectable trace. Well, it seemed to me that was fine if this Avogadro fellow was a NASA scientist with a NASA scientist's toys, the tools for a proper, twenty-first-century chemical analysis. But what if Avogadro were some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century alchemist? A guy in a hood who lacked even the tools to weigh himself properly? I decided I'd have to ask Carissa about Avogadro the next time I spoke with her, or look him up on the Web in the morning.

I reached into my nightstand drawer, hoping to find a tube of cough drops. No luck. I'd have to go downstairs for a spray of Chloraseptic. Elizabeth and I had always talked about putting a bathroom on the second floor of the old farmhouse we'd bought, but we had never gotten around to it. And so the only bathroom in the whole place--on the first floor, on the far side of the kitchen--seemed about an acre away in the middle of the night, especially on cold nights in January and February.

For a moment I watched it snow from my bedroom window, the larger flakes rafting in the occasional gusts like leaves in a stream, before settling finally in the grass. I'd suspected the snow had resumed when I'd turned out the light, because the world had seemed so quiet.

Downstairs I passed through the kitchen. There were my dishes in the sink, and there on the counter was the little book Carissa had lent me. And there on the cover was the picture of that old bald guy with a beard. Hahnemann. Samuel Hahnemann. Mr. Homeopath. Dr. Like-Cures-Like.

Carissa had said that Hahnemann had begun his "provings" in the late 1700s and continued them into the nineteenth century.

Provings, of course, sounded scientific, at least in a vaguely mad-doctor-with-a-monocle sort of way. But Hahnemann was also a bark eater. His exploration of what would become homeopathy had begun when he'd started eating Peruvian bark in 1790 in order to try and replicate the symptoms of malaria.

That, in turn, probably meant that Avogadro had lived in the nineteenth century, too. Perhaps even earlier.

Shit. Carissa, I realized, was going to give me arsenic. And I was going to get sicker for sure.

Chapter 4.

Number 74

Among chronic diseases we must unfortunately include all those widespread illnesses artificially created by allopathic treatments, by the prolonged use of violent, heroic drugs in strong, increasing doses.

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

Organon of Medicine, 1842

.

Jennifer realized her husband was serious about homeopathy while she was watching him shave one morning late in November. It wasn't long after their race to the emergency room in the middle of the night, and he may still have been taking prednisone.

She remembered sitting on a small bar stool in the corner of the bathroom off their bedroom, watching his reflection in the mirror as the razor cleared the white foam from his face like a snowplow.

"And you could get a cat," Richard was saying, his eyes on his chin.

"Is that what all this is about?" she'd asked. "You want me to have a cat?"

"You love cats. And the kids could have a dog."

"Timmy talks a good game, but I don't think he really cares one way or the other."

"What about Kate?" he had asked, referring to their daughter. "She brought it up again just the other night."

"She starts high school in a year. Ten months. Trust me, pretty soon boys will matter to her a whole lot more than a dog. She won't even remember she'd wanted a dog."

"Ah, but you'll still want a cat."

"I'm fine, sweetheart. I really am. I see more than my share of cats and dogs at the animal hospital. I get my fix twice a week. Don't feel you need to do this because your family wants pets."

She'd watched him start on his neck, tilting his head back as far as he could, and she'd wondered how men managed to shave there. It didn't just look like it hurt: It looked downright deadly.

"There are other reasons."

She thought she had probably smiled. She knew exactly what he was going to say next. "Such as?"

"No inhalers. I have this great fantasy that someday I won't have an inhaler with me wherever I go. I won't see one every time I open my desk drawer at work. There won't be one taking up space in my attache case. I won't have to sleep with one next to our bed."