The Law of Similars (9 page)

"It's not like you're an invalid," she had said. Because, after all, he wasn't. Not at all.

"And I'd love to go off theophylline. You have to wonder what I'm doing to my body long-term with that stuff. Every time I look at the warning about side effects, my stomach gets a little queasy."

"You'd be much worse without it."

"Right now I would be." He'd rinsed the razor, and the Eucerin ointment on the back of his hand glistened like vegetable shortening. The eczema had flared up the other day with the asthma, and even through the skin cream she could see the scabs and patches of red flaky skin.

"But you know what scares me the most?" he'd said. "The prednisone, that's what. I hate the whole idea of pumping my body full of steroids."

"I don't think you've been on prednisone more than six or seven weeks in all the years we've been married."

"Well, it's been more often than that. And two weeks in the last year alone, counting last Tuesday's little debacle."

"It wasn't a debacle."

"A three A.M. race to the emergency room? Waking up Kate in the middle of the night so she knows we're gone in case the house catches on fire?" He'd shaken his head before rolling the razor over a thin strip of white at the edge of his neck nearest his ear. "I don't like being in the hospital, and I don't like being unable to breathe. Trust me: It was a debacle. A complete and utter debacle."

"Have you talked to your allergist about this?"

"About seeing a homeopath? No way. Dawson would never approve. He'd feel much too threatened."

"So you're doing it anyway?"

"Dawson's a drug dealer, for God's sake. The man's a pusher. You know what his response was to Tuesday's attack? New drugs. More drugs. Accolate. Zyflo. Things called pathway interrupters. Well, I don't want new drugs. I want no drugs."

She'd sighed. "Have you checked this woman's credentials?"

"She comes highly recommended."

"Oh, does she now?"

"You betcha. She saw Christine through menopause--"

"Go on! Christine's been through menopause?"

He'd shrugged. "She's forty-eight, forty-nine years old."

"I knew she was older than us. But not six or seven years older than us."

"Yup--"

"She told you she was in menopause?"

"She was having hot flashes in meetings." He'd said it so matter-of-factly that she'd thought to herself, My body would have to be in the midst of a jet-engine flame-out before I'd announce in a meeting, Yikes! Hot flash!

"And she helped Dan go a whole winter without a cold," he'd continued.

Downstairs she heard a replicated explosion--a car crash, perhaps--from one of Timmy's video games. He knew he wasn't supposed to play on the computer before school.

"Maybe you should start by seeing if she has anything for the dermatitis," she'd suggested. After all, it often seemed that the skin thing bothered him more than the asthma. On days when his ad agency had a new business presentation, he'd be miserable. Absolutely miserable. He'd find himself beginning the pitch by apologizing for refusing to shake people's hands.

It had been so bad lately that they hadn't made love since before his attack, because he couldn't bring himself to touch her.

"The dermatitis goes with the asthma," he'd said.

"Well, does she at least have a license or something?"

He'd paused, then put the cap on the shaving cream and the can in the small cabinet by the sink. "Do you think homeopaths need licenses?"

"Oh, God, I hope so."

"Who'd license them? The State Medical Board?"

"I have no idea. But I'd look into it before I put my trust in some holistic hippie."

He'd splashed cold water on his face and then dried himself with the hand towel by the sink. "I'll look into it," he'd said, and his words had made her feel better. He'd sounded so serious.

"Good. After all, most of the time your asthma's completely under control. But this homeopathy thing? Who knows what that could do."

Anyone who's lived in Vermont for any time at all knows the old joke about Burlington: It's a great place to live because it's so close to Vermont.

I had heard the joke all my life. My family had moved to Burlington from a Connecticut suburb of Manhattan when I was a toddler, and it was very soon after settling there that my father founded Green Mountain Grizzlies. My parents, like so many other flatlanders who migrated north to the city on the lake, fell in love with Burlington exactly because they could say that they lived in Vermont without having to endure rural poverty, roads that smelled of manure, and the isolation that was a natural by-product of the mountains of snow and rivers of mud that arrived between November and May.

Burlington sits on a hill that slopes gently into Lake Champlain. At the top of the hill are the rows of stately Victorian homes and Gothic Revival cottages built by lumber and potash barons throughout the nineteenth century, as well as the greens and quadrangles dotting the campus of the state's two-century-old university. The downtown itself has evolved into a lakefront of boathouses and bike paths, with perhaps a half-dozen blocks, all told, of expensive specialty shops, coffee bars, and small office buildings--none taller than seven stories.

The place is constantly cited by magazines and newspapers as one of America's most livable cities, which was probably why Elizabeth and I bought a farmhouse in the mountains twenty miles to the south as soon as we could. The neighborhoods in the city where we were likely to live were just getting too damn mannered.

And while our jobs might demand that we work in the town, we sure as hell didn't have to join the throngs who were drawn there from around the country by the high-tech giants that were employing literally thousands of aspirational Vermonters by the end of the 1980s. After all, if we had stayed in the city long enough, we might have wound up joining a Kiwanis Club, like fully two-thirds of the bankers in Elizabeth's department. Worse, we might have ended up volunteering for the Chamber of Commerce, like Philip Hood.

Hood, the State's Attorney for Chittenden County, had the sole corner office, and the only one that faced Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. That was, in my mind, a perfectly reasonable perk, given the fact that Phil actually spent more time at his desk and less time in court than any of the other lawyers.

As Phil's chief deputy, I knew I had the best office of the dozen other state prosecutors in Burlington--the best view of the city, the most light, the shortest walk to the copier and the printer and the coffee machine--but it was Margaret Turnbull who had the best toys. That made sense, of course, because she handled easily eighty percent of the child-abuse cases that came our way. And so whenever she wanted to discuss whether a case should go to trial or what sort of sentence to offer the accused--that human litany of fathers and uncles and new boyfriends of Mom, that group of men who were despicable, unrepentant, and (in Margaret's and my minds) patently guilty, even if the evidence wasn't there--I'd go to her office. I liked beaching the plastic whales beside the glass snow globes (one of which was filled with a real starfish and actual sand), and walking her Barbies and Kens around the edge of the desk. I liked the small cubes and puzzles and blocks.

Sometimes the toys would remind me of Abby, and in the back of my mind I'd be thinking of new games I could invent to entertain my daughter. Other days, however, I'd see the dolls and lose complete sight of the fact that I was a father: I'd view them instead as profoundly erotic little models of people--men with washboards for stomachs, and women with fetish-thin waists--and I'd forget the fact that these were the very same sorts of dolls around which my four-year-old crafted whole worlds.

I remember I met with Margaret in her office the morning after my very first consultation with Carissa. The clouds that had dusted the ground with snow were well to the east, and the sky was the neon blue that comes only in winter. It was freezing out, but with the sky that crisp, I lost all fear that the homeopath would make me down arsenic. She'd give me something that sounded vaguely magic, like belladonna. Or Gelsemium. Or Ignatia.

Ignatia, I decided, that's what I'd like. Sounds just like a saint.

There were three cases Margaret wanted to discuss: an at-tempted sexual assault, an "L and L" with a minor--a lewd and lascivious act--and a possible murder.

"Let's start with the murder," I suggested, sitting archaeologist Barbie on the arm of the chair I'd taken opposite her desk, and resting the chocolate doughnut I'd bought in my lap. I'd never seen this Barbie before; she was new. Dark, dark hair. A wide-brimmed hat to protect her plastic shell from that searing hot desert sun, a fossil hunter's fatigues. A colorful map in one hand, a tiny magnifying glass in the other. I made a note in my mind to be sure this particular doll would be among Abby's new Christmas Barbies.

Margaret dove right in. "Remember that guy in Underhill who died in a hunting accident on Sunday? When he shot a deer, his gun blew up in his face?"

"I do." How could anyone forget? The poor son of a bitch had ended up bleeding to death in the woods, but his younger brother--a guy in his twenties--was one hell of a hero nevertheless. He'd carried his older sibling on his back close to three miles in the bitter cold that comes after Thanksgiving.

"The gunsmith who repaired the gun might have rigged it to burst."

"What makes you think so?" I wondered what a homeopath would do for a guy who'd had most of his face blown away by a defective gun. It began in my mind as a snide little inquiry but then grew merely curious: Maybe Ferrum phosphoricum stopped bleeding. For all I knew, nux vomica--now, there was a remedy that needed public relations help--was a coagulant.

"The victim was sleeping with his wife."

"Oh, that's clever," I said, "using one buck to bring down another," but I knew Margaret wouldn't smile. Margaret was profoundly earnest about her work, perhaps because she was still, technically, a newlywed. I imagined she was so happy with her older, wiser psychologist husband--Margaret was twenty-eight, but Dr. Strangelove was somewhere in his late forties or early fifties--that she was all business in the office. In the ten months she'd been married, she'd arrived promptly at eight every morning and left like clockwork at five. Even those weeks when she was in the midst of a trial, she'd managed the seemingly impossible feat of going home almost the moment court recessed for the day.

"But the gunsmith's record is clean," Margaret said, ignoring me. "Not even a parking ticket."

"And the widow's?"

"We haven't checked."

"Do it. Any kids?"

"Nope. Thank God."

I placed archaeologist Barbie on Margaret's desk, and started my doughnut. "Does the gunsmith know he's under investigation?"

"Yup. Already has counsel. Oren Candon."

"He's a very successful gunsmith."

"Guess so."

"Where's the gun?"

"What's left of it? At the crime lab. It's a muzzle-loader."

The regular deer season when rifles were allowed had been over for almost a week, and so the victim had been one of the small group of Vermonters who took to the woods with "primitive weapons"--antiques or replicas of antiques--like muzzle-loaders.

"Since he has a lawyer, he's probably not doing much talking himself," I said. "So make sure the detectives are talking to his friends. Maybe he said something."

"Customers, too?"

"Customers, too. And see if there's a history of these guns blowing up. I think we'll both be very interested in what the ballistics report says."