The Law of Similars (37 page)

"I appreciate that."

"But your...misfortune," he said, choosing his words with great care, "awesome as it was, is still no excuse to start cutting corners. Especially now. Especially after keeping body and soul together for so damn long."

"I'm fine, Phil."

"I'm worried about you, Leland. That's all," he said, and then he was gone. And I ran my handkerchief over my forehead.

In my mind, I saw somebody's fingers closing Richard Emmons's eyes for him, the fingers a part of an arm that was draped in loose hospital scrubs. I saw Jennifer in a chair beside the bed, whispering a sentence now and then, her lips close to her husband's ear. I saw children, a teenage girl and a younger boy, staring out the window at the sky.

I had no delusions that a visit to the ICU would offer atonement.

But something--no, some things--were beginning to bubble beneath the surface of my world. I could feel it. Something in Phil's head. In Whitney's. No doubt in Carissa's, too. Soon one of those somethings was bound to erupt, and the mess was going to be monstrous.

And so I decided I would visit the man in the coma. I would go that very day, and I would witness, if only through glass, the way Richard's whole world had shrunk to a bed and some tubes and his wife's fingertips on his shin.

Chapter 18.

Number 276

Excessively large doses of an accurately selected homeopathic medicine, especially if frequently repeated, are, as a rule, very destructive. Not infrequently, they endanger the patient's life or make his disease almost incurable.

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

Organon of Medicine, 1842

.

I was back from my ten o'clock by ten-twenty, having agreed that justice would be served if Teddy Paquette endured a year on probation for two counts of possessing marijuana. I told myself that the little hustler had learned his lesson, but I didn't really believe it. I just didn't hear a whole lot of contrition in his voice when he told the judge he understood well he had made some mistakes.

And he certainly wasn't the physical wreck I was; he certainly didn't look like he felt any guilt. My body, on the other hand, had become a mass of tingles and bowel spasms, my stomach a fishbowl on the seat of a speedboat.

When I returned to my office I placed my last two tabs of arsenic in separate envelopes and then licked and sealed them. One I would open when I got to the hospital that afternoon, and the other I'd have before bed. Tomorrow, I was positive, I would see Carissa. And while we were together, I'd be sure, somehow, to get more.

"Do you remember the name of the woman you first met at the health-food store?" Phil asked me near the water fountain just before lunch.

"No," I lied.

"It's Patsy. Patsy Collins. Just think of how much it sounds like that old country western star, and you'll never forget it again."

"Thank you."

"Happy to help," Phil said. "She seems like a very nice woman--also all too happy to help."

When I neared Margaret's office early that afternoon, I heard her talking on the phone. Something--a word, a phrase, perhaps the anxiety in her voice--led me to believe she was talking about me. And so I paused just before the doorway, just beyond her vision if she should happen to look up from her desk.

Quickly I realized the concern in her tone was indeed for me, but at that moment she was actually talking about Carissa Lake.

"I know Phil would like to subpoena her notes, medical records--I think he'd cart away half her office if he could get a court order," Margaret was saying, and I could tell she was sharing the news with her husband.

"Oh, he definitely thinks Leland's involved," she said a moment later. "He just hopes the involvement isn't criminal. You know how fond he is of Leland. He really cares for him."

I turned around and went straight back to my office. I didn't want her to worry that I'd overheard what she'd said.

In my truck in the parking garage at Fletcher Allen Hospital, I ripped open one of the envelopes with arsenic, and I heard myself sigh when I slipped it under my tongue. I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes, bracing myself for a vision--raw, real, unabridged--of Richard Emmons. Maybe Jennifer, too.

No, not maybe. If I got Richard, I got Jennifer. I'd been afraid to call ahead, fearing that she wouldn't want me to come because I hadn't told her I knew that homeopath, and so I had no idea if she was actually at the hospital that moment. But I assumed she was.

I wondered if another reason I hadn't called ahead was because deep inside I was hoping there'd be no family members present in the ICU, and the nurses would keep me away. Far away: no family, no visitors. I'd never have to see the man in the coma, yet I could tell myself that I'd made a good-faith effort.

But I didn't really think that was the case, either. I honestly wanted to see Richard. I honestly wanted to be a presence for Jennifer.

I'd always been pretty good with the dying, including, of course, my own parents. But I wasn't half-bad with elderly neighbors and distant uncles, either, or with the few acquaintances my own age who'd died young. Leukemia. AIDS. Lou Gehrig's disease. With them, I had discovered that I was fully capable of sitting passively in a chair by a bed, listening to the raspy breathing and the incom-prehensible murmurs--witnessing the twitches and spasms and seizures--that marked a body in shutdown. Some people found it difficult to brush the back of the hand of a man in a deep morphine sleep, but I wasn't among them. A hypochondriac, I'd realized, actually had a very great deal to offer the authentically sick: a profound empathy combined with genuine vitality.

I climbed from the truck, adjusted my suit jacket under my overcoat, and started across the cement of the parking garage. The sun was about to set, and the garage had the feel of night. I wondered if Jennifer, too, sat alone in her car in this lot, trying to find the grit to go in.

Madame Melanie Hahnemann, Samuel Hahnemann's much younger wife, was tried in Paris for practicing medicine without a license, and she was found guilty.

Her mistake? She'd gotten too brazen with her business cards. And she'd placed an announcement in the newspaper, advertising her practice.

Samuel had been dead for about three and a half years at the time, and some people said his widow was being prosecuted because she was a woman. But certainly she was being prosecuted as well because she was a homeopath.

Even then--1847--orthodox medicine was apprehensive when it came to alternatives. Even in Paris, where the Hahnemanns had settled within a year of their meeting in Kothen.

Yet it was clear the court didn't see Melanie as a villain. They were merely enforcing the exact letter of the law. She wasn't a doctor, but she had patients. Her only accreditation was from an American academy, and it had been granted simply because Samuel had written the school's founder, insisting that his wife was a brilliant healer and deserved recognition. As a courtesy to Hahnemann, they'd sent Melanie a diploma.

And while the French medical authorities might have recognized the diploma had she submitted it to them for consideration, she'd never bothered. After all, she explained during the trial, she was a woman. Though there was a female obstetrician in Paris, obstetrics and medicine were then viewed as wholly separate universes: There were certainly no female medical doctors at the time in the City of Light.

There were no medical schools in Europe that even admitted women.

Melanie's sentence? She was asked to pay a fine of one hundred francs. About what she was paying for her annual newspaper subscription. Or what she charged a patient at a first consultation.

And she was asked to stop practicing medicine.

Apparently she paid the fine in full.

And then continued her practice.

She was simply more discreet than before the trial.

But, much to her patients' relief, she continued to heal them, treating them without poisonous doses of mercury, or strychnine, or opium. Without subjecting them to venesection.

She merely stopped passing out business cards.

Jennifer Emmons smiled when she saw me in the windowless waiting room outside the ICU, and for a second I was surprised. I hadn't expected a smile. But there it was, that small but sincere, close-lipped little grin I had gotten before from the partners and children of the not-quite-dead: the smile of thanks. Thank you for coming. Thank you for remembering us. Him. Me. Thank you for not making me do this alone.

I surprised myself by giving her what I'd come to call my friend-of-the-family hug--arms around the shoulders instead of the lower back, a scapula pat to signal separation--and she surprised me by staying there a second longer than most people, her arms against my chest in a variation of what my friend the M.E. described as the pugilist's pose: her fingers balled into fists, her elbows bent and pressed flat against her ribs. It was one of the basic postures of death.

"How nice of you to come," she said when we finally parted, her voice soft and hoarse.

The television on the wall behind her was tuned to the Weather Channel, although the sound was all the way off. A pair of elderly women in slacks and scarves had been playing gin rummy on a couch when I'd arrived, occasionally looking up at the screen. I'd offered to turn up the volume for them--I was standing, after all, and they were sitting--but they'd passed. Then a nurse had come in and told one of the women that her brother was cleaned up and they could resume their visit.

"I wanted to come sooner," I said. "But I let the...the awkwardness get in the way."

"You shouldn't have felt awkward. Vermont's a small state."

"Still..."

"We all know people. You know Carissa Lake, so what? I must have three or four friends who know Carissa Lake."

"They're not prosecutors."

"No. But you won't be prosecuting her, either now, will you?"

"Nope."

I noticed most of the doctors and nurses who passed between the ICU and the waiting room were wearing surgical scrubs.

"Probably nobody will be," she continued, just the tiniest hint of frustration in her voice. "Phil Hood told me it isn't likely you'll ever file a criminal charge."

"The case is still open. It's only been three or four days. An information--an indictment--often takes months."

"I don't expect anything. There isn't even much chance of a civil suit, I'm told. My Richard just...he just did this to himself. Made a mistake. I wanted to blame that woman because I wanted to blame somebody--God, wouldn't you?--but it doesn't seem like she did anything wrong."

On the radar map on the TV screen, a swirl of clouds was stretching in a wide band through Minnesota, the Dakotas, and most of Iowa. It looked like we'd be getting more snow in Vermont in another day or two.

"It must all seem pretty complicated," I murmured.

"It did. It doesn't anymore. At first, we all thought for sure she was responsible. I did. Richard's allergist did. The state psych board did," she said, and then gave me that thin little smile once again.

"What do you do, Jennifer?"

"I'm a veterinarian. But I went part-time after our second child was born. Timmy. So now I only work Thursdays and Saturdays."

"In Bartlett?"

"Uh-huh," she said, adding, "I guess I'll be going back full-time as soon as I can."

"How is he?"

She puffed out her cheeks for a brief second. "He flexed his arm this morning when they knuckled his chest."

"That sounds like progress."