The Law of Similars (20 page)

"One-stop shopping," she'd said when I told her she shouldn't have brought me a gift (though I had gotten her a book about dreams that had just been published, an absolute natural since it had the word butterfly in its title). "It's all from the health-food store. It seemed appropriate to shop there, given the way we met."

When we arrived at my house, she began pulling the items from the basket one by one, laying them side by side on the counter in the breakfast nook: There were truffles made with carob and honey, and cookies sweetened with fruit juice. There were dates rolled in coconut and dates that were plain, neither of which, Carissa told me, she expected me to eat. "I just didn't want to offend a Berber in his own home," she explained. And there were bags and bags of nuts, which she said she wouldn't have thought of bringing if she hadn't run into another patient of hers in the store, an asthmatic who was allergic to cashews.

But it was the whole-wheat English muffins, delivered daily to Bartlett from the natural-foods bakery in Burlington, and the box of breakfast tea that I found most arousing. English muffins weren't usually an aphrodisiac, but I remembered she'd said Tuesday night that she always had an English muffin for breakfast. And while I couldn't imagine that she thought we'd actually be having breakfast together Christmas Day--would there be a worse way to introduce Carissa into Abby's life?--the muffins and the tea were a signal, a gesture that was tender and amorous at once.

And so as she was showing me the remainder of the contents of the basket and explaining the significance of each--the echinacea was obvious, it was sort of like our song, but I wouldn't have understood that a garlic clove smelled a bit like arsenic if she hadn't told me--I kissed her, a brush across her lips barely more passionate than the chaste peck on the cheek I'd offered in the parking lot of the restaurant earlier that week.

"I just had to do that," I said, and she nodded, putting the garlic bulb she was holding on the kitchen counter and wrapping her fingers behind my neck and kissing me back. We kissed there in the kitchen, then on the couch in the living room in the dim light from the bulbs on the Christmas tree, and then on the floor before it. Before we'd opened a bottle of wine or I'd given her the book I had bought about dreams, while the Brie on the table near the woodstove melted untouched, we undressed and I pulled the pillows from the couch and laid her upon them in the midst of the presents and the lowest branches of the white spruce. I insisted she keep on her panties--a ritual red, she murmured, to celebrate the season--so I could lick her through the silk and feel the material get wetter and wetter from my tongue and her lips. Sometimes when I'd pull away the elastic for brief moments, I'd hear in my head the sound of a click as I washed my tongue over her as fast as I could. Then I'd pull her panties back across her vagina and lap at the silk until I thought I'd explode if I didn't taste her--all of her, my tongue probing deeply inside her, along the thin strip of skin buffering vulva and anus, then between those cheeks that smelled slightly of bubble bath.

When she came, her thighs tightening in my arms as I held her, my chin and my neck wondrously--bountifully, beneficently--drenched, I looked up and saw a star. There it was, hanging from a branch by her face. Hanging beside the very branch on which her eyeglasses dangled like tortoiseshell tinsel. A modeling clay star. It was no longer bright, because my daughter had painted it in Sunday school a year earlier and the colors had begun to fade, but it still had a trace of its original canary luster. I hadn't really noticed it or thought about it when Abby and I had trimmed the tree, but there it was. An ornament, the first one my little girl had ever made. And it was right there beside Carissa's eyes, opening slowly now as she took a deep breath and sighed.

I am blessed, I thought. Really and truly blessed.

It had practically killed me to wash Carissa off my face as we showered together before I left to get Abby alone, but when I hugged little Chloe's mom, I was glad that I had. The evening, after all, was a celebration of a pretty darn clean conception.

Carissa was waiting for us back at the house. If it seemed to me that Abby had consumed enough sugar to get through the eight-thirty service, then the three of us would go to church together, and from there we would drive Carissa home.

"A friend of mine dropped by," I told my daughter as I buckled her into the truck, hoping the remark sounded offhand. "Would you like to meet her?"

"Nah. I think I just want to go to church." She had a plate of the cookies she'd made balanced in her lap. Her plan was to leave out the gingerbread ones for Santa because she hated gingerbread, but Santa, apparently, loved it. She also had carrots and celery sticks for the reindeer.

"We will. But my friend's waiting at home. She wants to say hi. It'll just take a minute."

"It's a lady?"

"Oh, yes."

She looked straight ahead and I could tell she was mad. A year ago, when she was three and a half, she might have had a tantrum. Now, I imagined, she'd just grow silent. Make Carissa work extra hard.

Yet when we got home and I introduced her to that friend who just happened to be a lady, she rallied. For a moment she did what I called her "coquette thing," hiding half her face behind my hip, but showing the stranger a single eye and what might have been half a smile. She didn't ask any questions of Daddy's new friend, but she answered in reasonably polite little grunts all of the questions that were put to her, and even corrected Carissa on some of the finer points of cookie decorating.

"Who are those cookies for?" Carissa asked.

"Santa."

"They sure look good. And the carrots. Are they for his reindeer?"

"Uh-huh."

"I love the sparkles you put on that star."

"Those aren't sparkles. That's colored sugar. You can't eat sparkles, because sparkles are just for projects."

"Projects?"

"Arts and crafts," I said.

When the three of us went to church, I downplayed the idea that we would all sit together. I tried to present it as, more or less, a coincidence that Abby might happen to sit on my right and Carissa on my left.

But I knew my joy in the fact that Carissa was with us was evident when I introduced her to Paul Woodson in the narthex. Woodson was the church's ageless pastor, a fellow my parents' age whom I had come to view as a godfather of sorts ever since Elizabeth had died.

"We have a guest tonight," Paul said, speaking more to Abby and Carissa than me. "A minister from Korea."

"Terrific," I said.

Paul leaned over so he was closer to Abby. "I wanted you to know ahead of time, because he's going to teach you a little song with your name in it."

"My name?"

"Yup. You'll see."

Briefly, I tried to come up with a hymn with the word Abby or Abigail in it, but I realized quickly it was a lost cause, and found myself focusing instead on the lobe of Carissa's ear, and the channel I'd licked just beneath it along the back of her jaw.

Soon into the service, however, after the children had placed the doll-sized figures of donkeys and wise men and a virgin in the creche by the tree, Paul had them surround him in a half-circle at the front of the church. There an elderly Korean joined the group, squatting before the children and telling them that he wanted to teach them a song that youngsters sang in his own land. The moment he said it was inspired by a verse in the 124th Psalm, I knew instantly where Abby's name would fit in:

"Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord..."

I hadn't thought of the psalm in years, but I'd certainly become aware of it soon after moving to Bartlett. Paul had told me about the verse the first time Elizabeth and I had come to his church, and shown it to me in the Bible.

"A fowler's a kind of hunter," he'd said. "You must be a very good prosecutor."

When the children sang the chorus--Our help is in the name of the Lord!--I saw the back of Abby's head bobbing up and down to the strains of the song, and I felt the side of my hip pressing against Carissa's. I wasn't sure if I'd been that happy for a single moment since Elizabeth had died, and then I decided I hadn't. No way. Not a prayer.

And when Paul had the deacons pass out the candles and dim the lights a few moments later, and when the choir members started passing the flame to the congregation in preparation for "Silent Night," I thought I might cry.

"You okay?" Carissa whispered.

I nodded, unable to open my mouth. I felt her take my hand and squeeze it as we stood, and then give it back to me so I could help Abby with her candle. I listened to the congregation begin murmuring the words to the carol, singing each line a bit louder than the one before it. When Carissa sang, her voice was slightly higher than when she spoke, but it still radiated confidence and beauty and calm.

I watched the long rows of small candle flames slowly rise and fall, each pew packed as it was no other day or night of the year, and I saw my daughter gazing enrapt at her own teardrop-shaped bubble of incandescence. She was holding her candle with both hands.

When the hymn ended, Carissa and Abby blew out their candles almost as one. Abby looked up at me, smiling, and then I saw her face abruptly turn worried.

"Daddy? Are you crying?"

"I am," I said, aware that my face was indeed growing wet. "But it's because I'm happy."

"Happy," she repeated.

"Happy," I said. This is happiness, I thought, desperately in love with the woman and the little girl who surrounded me. This is what it feels like to be happy. Complete. To see a family intact.

I couldn't imagine a better present at Christmas.

Chapter 11.

Number 1

The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy.

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

Organon of Medicine, 1842

.

We are no longer a body with all that word means in the particulars of a unified whole. An indivisible system of organs and flesh, tissue and synapse and soul. We are parts. We are divisible.

Sometimes we say the brain is dead though the heart is alive: The heart is working, in other words, but no thanks to the brain. The brain is gone.

Well, not all of the brain. Even when someone is by all accounts brain-dead, there may still be an infinitesimal bit of cerebral matter continuing to signal the pituitary gland to create the hormones that help the kidneys produce urine.

But most of the brain has expired.

Somebody somewhere had to invent the concept of brain-dead. For millennia we based death on the heart. But then we discovered that hearts were more transferable than passports--they were recyclable cherry-shaped pumps that could be reconnected to a second set of hose lines--and so we broke the body into components. Take the heart though it's beating: He's brain-dead, that's what counts.

Someday we'll get to a point where we'll only need a part of the brain to be dead to begin the harvest.

His brain stem is working--the section that controls his heart rate, his blood pressure, the ways his eyes might be moving beneath his lids. But those parts of the brain that allow him to think, that make him sapient and feeling and present? Gone. No electrical activity whatsoever. He's as good as dead, I assure you. I mean, he's still alive. Technically. But he's no longer...there.

It was Jennifer's sister, Bonnie, who had asked whether Richard Emmons was an organ donor. And it was Bonnie who told me she had handled the inquiry badly.

"They'll want to know at some point, you know. I guess sometimes they learn these things from a driver's license or something. But of course he didn't have his wallet with him in the middle of the night," she told me she'd stammered when she saw the anger and astonishment that had transformed her sister's face after she had made the mistake of broaching the subject.