The Law of Similars (23 page)

She wiped her eyes with her fingers and then put on her eyeglasses. "I knew he was allergic to them," she said, staring right at me.

I nodded, aware that we were about to cross some sort of line. Was there a way to ask her my questions, I wondered, that would prevent her from incriminating herself? A way that would give her the chance to say whatever she wanted to say--release whatever was inside her that needed a vent--yet not put me in the position of knowing her absolute guilt or innocence for sure?

I reminded myself quickly that I shouldn't even be thinking about guilt or innocence. I didn't even know what she had done.

Or, more important, what people would think she had done.

"But you didn't actually buy him the cashews, right? It wasn't like that."

"Of course not. It wasn't like that at all." She blew her nose and stood up, and pulled a box of tea from a cabinet. "I used to smoke," she went on. "In college, I smoked like a chimney. A blast furnace. I wish I smoked now."

"No you don't."

"Trust me, I do. You ever smoke?"

If I were a criminal defense attorney, I knew, I'd be sure not to ask any questions that might give her the chance to implicate herself. After all, that was a big part of being a criminal attorney: You wanted to make absolutely sure that the murderer sitting beside you hadn't told you he'd done it. You just didn't want to know, you just didn't want to put yourself in the position of knowingly allowing someone to perjure himself when the case went to trial.

Unless, of course, you wanted to get disbarred. Or handed a suspension for misconduct. Then you might.

"No, I never smoked," I told her.

"Even with all that anxiety inside you?"

"Nails," I said. "Fingernails always seemed to suffice."

I watched her make tea, rallying a bit with each step: Filling the kettle with water. Turning on the burner. Removing the top from a teapot shaped like a cat. Filling a mesh tea ball with leaves and herbs and placing it in the pot. She leaned against the counter as if she expected to wait there while the water came to a boil, and I could almost see the color return to her cheeks. I wondered if it was because we were crossing that line together and she felt less alone. I hoped so.

"I stopped smoking when I first went to England," she said.

"When you were visiting your friend?"

"Yup."

What did she see when she saw me sitting at her kitchen table? Did she see simply her boyfriend the lawyer who understood the Byzantine workings of the law? The man who could help her understand if she was, as she had put it, in trouble?

Or did she see a state prosecutor? Did she even begin to comprehend the nightmarish conflict of interest that waited with us there in the kitchen for...for something to happen? For the water to boil. For the phone to ring. For the state police to call.

Or, perhaps, a reporter.

I glanced at my watch: It was eight-fifteen. Vermont was awake, starting to function. Soon the phone might really ring.

"Why did you quit? Was it the homeopath you met?"

"He might have been a small influence. I know he didn't approve of the habit."

"But there was more?"

"I didn't like British cigarettes. And I felt like an ugly American whenever I'd buy U.S. brands."

"Oh."

Carissa was smart, I decided, but Carissa lived in a different sort of world. A world where friends simply helped friends and you didn't sweat the details. On some level she probably sensed that what I was--what I did for a living--had some bearing on what I was thinking, but I don't believe the idea that I could be of use to her in some vaguely shadowy way had dawned on her.

"We never decided," she said after a long silence. "Am I in trouble?"

Outside her window was a bird feeder, and a pair of phoebes descended upon the wooden bar by the seeds.

"I have a message on my answering machine from Rod Morrow," I told her.

"Should I know that name?"

"He's a friend of mine from high school. Now he's a detective sergeant with the state police."

"So I am in trouble."

"Not necessarily. Like I said, it all depends on what happened."

"Do you want to hear?"

The spoken word has substance. You can't see it, but it's as real as the wind. As breath. A breeze between mouth and ear, a wave against tympanic membranes.

How many sentences had I said in my life--gentle wafts of words, little airstreams of syllables--that once spoken changed everything? Probably not more than half a dozen, but certainly they were the five or six most significant sentences I'd ever formed in my mind. Asking Elizabeth to marry me. Agreeing, almost on a lark, to interview for the opening in the State's Attorneys Office. Telling Whitney Lake I'd like her aunt's phone number.

I knew at that moment in Carissa's kitchen I was about to do it again. I was about to speak words that, for better or worse, could never be taken back.

"Yes, of course," I said as I stood and wrapped my arms around the small of her waist. "I want to know exactly what happened. Tell me everything you can remember."

When Carissa went upstairs to get dressed a little later, I sat with her cat in my lap and tried to imagine how people would see what had occurred the day before last at the health-food store. A lot would depend upon whether homeopaths were regulated in Vermont. Or psychologists. After all, she was a psychologist, too. Still, no two attorneys would probably view what had happened in exactly the same way.

Some would simply decide Richard Emmons was an idiot who mistook an offhand remark--a joke, for crying out loud--for medical advice. They'd view Emmons as an adult who was fully capable of making his own choices, and it was his decision--and his decision alone--to buy nuts that he knew he was allergic to and then eat them. Even if he had bought them because Carissa had suggested the idea, he was completely free to ignore her advice. Just like someone with arthritis could choose to wear a copper bracelet around her wrist...or not. Or someone else could go to bed wearing cold wet socks under dry wool socks because a naturopath had recommended it as a way to relieve sinus pressure from a cold. Or not.

And if homeopaths weren't regulated, then she wasn't even a professional giving bad advice; she was merely a neighbor giving bad advice. A quack he ran into at the health-food store. Richard was free to disregard anything that she said.

Others, however, would see Carissa as a professional and Richard as her patient. Granted, in their eyes she might also be the sort of holistic shaman who shouldn't be allowed to dispense even garlic or honey, but she was still treating Richard. He was still her charge, and her advice therefore carried enormous weight: She had a duty to answer his questions responsibly. If she had given him the impression, no matter how inadvertently, that cashews wouldn't hurt him, his coma--his death by now, for all I knew--was her fault. If she'd said he should eat a nut that she knew he was allergic to, then she'd have to pay for this tragedy.

Oh, God, I thought, pay. Until that moment, I hadn't even considered the possibility of a civil suit, too. Clearly, however, this could be the bloody mother lode for some ambulance chaser.

And so exactly how Carissa had formed her opinion--the way that she'd said it--would be a factor in what everyone thought. What was it she believed that she'd said?

They're from the same plant family as your remedy.

And then he'd said he was allergic to cashews.

And she'd said she knew that. He'd told her.

Then they had talked about what was in his remedy, the one that he'd taken already. That thing called Rhus tox.

She'd explained to Richard it was poison ivy.

At first, it seemed, he hadn't believed her. Had he really and truly eaten poison ivy? he'd asked. He was allergic to poison ivy, too, and not like most people were. He was really allergic to it!

And she'd told him he had. Homeopathically, of course.

But nothing happened to me! he had said. Astonished. Impressed.

Of course not, she'd said.

And then he'd asked what she meant by her remark that poison ivy and cashews were in the same family.

She'd been in a hurry--shopping, after all, for her boyfriend, the prosecutor--but she recalled elaborating a bit. But just a bit. She'd said they were both in the Anacardiaceae family: Cashews and poison ivy, pistachio nuts and poison sumac. Mangoes. They all had resinous and sometimes poisonous juice, nuts or fleshy fruit, and small flowers.

Like cures like, remember? The Law of Similars?

And so he had asked what would have happened if she'd given him a small dose of cashews--and here, I decided, their exchange had the potential to get real muddy--and she'd answered, Nothing.

Or, as precisely as she could recall, Probably nothing.

She told me she had meant: It probably wouldn't cure you.

She had not meant: Probably nothing will happen to you.

But the thing was, if he had ingested cashews homeopathically--one part cashew, a million parts water--nothing would have happened, in all likelihood. After all, a dose that size probably would have been insufficient to cause an allergic reaction.

What Richard had heard in her response, however--those simple words "probably nothing"--could mean everything. Perhaps he'd assumed she'd meant nothing would happen if he ingested them normally, as whole nuts--though still, of course, in what was in his mind just a small dose.

He had, Carissa was quite sure, used those two words: Small. Dose.

But what really constituted a small dose in his opinion? Was it what Jennifer, a veterinarian, would consider a small dose? Or what his homeopath would regard as one?

Clearly they were very different. Jennifer told me she had once been treating a cat for diabetes and on the first day of therapy had given the animal the absolute minimal dose of insulin recommended: four units, or about an eighth of a syringe. And the cat's blood glucose level had plummeted from diabetic to normal to hypoglycemic within ninety minutes, faster than any of the vets in the practice had ever seen. Here they had barely begun to monitor the cat, and the animal was practically falling off a cliff to his death, and so an hour and a half after giving the cat insulin, they were actually giving him glucose to prevent fatal seizures.

Eventually the cat would be getting a mere one unit of insulin a day: One quarter of the recommended dosage. About a thirtieth of a syringe. And the cat had responded.

No, it was clear that no two individuals were likely to view a small dose in quite the same way.

And for some people, a thirtieth of a syringe of certain homeopathic substances, undiluted--a small dose to some, a huge one to others--could be fatal.

Nothing? Richard had asked her, trying to confirm what she'd said. Thinking, perhaps, that a cashew or two was a small dose.

Nothing, she thought she might have repeated, shrugging.

Really?

She'd wanted to finish filling her own basket, she'd been in a hurry. She wasn't exactly irritated with Richard, but he had been phoning her off and on for almost two weeks, insisting that she give him another dose of his remedy. Whatever it was. Just a little bit more.

And so she was growing tired of his questions. His persistence. His neediness.

His demand for more medicine.

Look, remember what I told you about Hahnemann and his provings? Well, pretend you're Hahnemann, and try some. Do the proving and record the results. We'll talk after Christmas.