Sometimes I said I was a lawyer and I had wonderful news for her of a personal nature, but I needed to find her to tell her.
And sometimes I simply told them the truth.
On day six, I finally visited Père Lachaise and walked among the stone tombs. Briefly I considered hiking to the top of the hillside necropolis, but it looked like a pretty good haul on the cemetery map, and I hadn’t the time. Besides, I reminded myself, I already knew the view. So I merely wandered for half an hour among the crypts and sepulchers that lined the side near the metro stop. Seurat. Bizet. Jim Morrison. I saw the massive and wholly dispiriting Monument aux Morts—a long, wide statue of the dead, naked and sobbing, being led through the entryway to an afterworld that horrifies them—and then I turned back and returned to the Boulevard de Menilmontant.
There was a neon cross nearby with the words homéopathie and herboristerie upon it, and for a moment I was sure someone there would know Carissa. Briefly I imagined I’d be laughing at myself in a very few minutes, because it had taken me six days to finally get around to the neighborhood near Père Lachaise: Of course, Carissa settled here. Of course! Wasn’t it obvious?
But the pharmacists there knew nothing about a new American homeopath, and the physicians with whom they worked hadn’t heard of any recent arrivals from the U.S.
On my next to last day in Paris, I ran out of business cards. I’d brought about a hundred with me, and scribbled my home phone number and E-mail address on the back of each one. Someday Carissa might meet one of those homeopaths, and just maybe that homeopath would call me or send me an E-mail with the news. Maybe that homeopath would tell Carissa I was looking for her.
At the end of eight days, I came home. Because of those business cards, I was able to convince myself that the trip had not been a complete waste of time.
Phosphorus
Dreams vivid, can be partly recalled.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,
The Chronic Diseases, 1839
Some people do not believe that I know how to grieve. Probably they’re right. I’ve never been very good at sobbing or howling or simply retreating, wordless and inert, into a shell.
But I am capable of mourning. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s become second nature to me. I mourn, therefore I am.
I mourn for Elizabeth and the life that I know we once had. The specifics have grown foggy now, but not the sense that I was happy.
And I mourn for Carissa, and the what-ifs that surround the astonishingly brief time that we shared.
Recently I concocted a new and particularly punishing version of “What if, then what?”
What if I had not been so bold as to invite Carissa to my house Christmas Eve? Then what?
Then she wouldn’t have been shopping for me at the health-food store.
And she would not have run into Richard.
And the subject of cashews and Rhus tox would never have come up.
And Richard might still be alive.
And Carissa might be practicing in Bartlett. Happy.
Me, too.
Though I am not, in all fairness, unhappy.
When people see Abigail and me chatting as she waits for the school bus at the end of our driveway, they see a father and daughter—he with a mug of steaming hot coffee in his hand, she with a navy blue knapsack overflowing with loose-leaf binders and Magic Markers and the software she can’t wait to share with her friends—and they often see the two of us laughing. We do laugh often.
She has dance class on Monday nights, and she plays soccer two afternoons a week in the fall. When people see me watching her, they see a father as content as he is proud.
When people see my picture in the newspaper—and now that Phil has retired and I have his job, I am there often—they see a fellow nearing forty who seems awfully successful. Those rumors about me that circulated in the months after Richard died? They came and they went. Like all rumors. Rumors will always be less substantial than love, and there are a great many people in this world who love me very much.
I have now received four letters from Carissa. They are long letters she writes over days, but she only mails them when she is away from her home. Wherever that is. But I believe it is somewhere in Europe, because two of the letters were mailed from Italy, and one was postmarked in Germany. One was sent from London, where she was visiting her best friend from college.
I, of course, am unable to write back. There is never a return address.
But here is what I know of her: If my barometer for sentience is mourning, then her measure is remorse. Rightly or wrongly, she will always blame herself for Richard’s death, and her letters are filled with her recollections of her last Christmas Eve in Vermont. That night, for her, has become protean: One moment she is standing at the health-food store with Richard Emmons, and the next she is lying on the floor with Leland Fowler. There she is singing, standing in a pew beside Leland and his little girl, while small flames quiver atop their three candles.
Carissa has indeed resumed practicing homeopathy, though she has not revealed where.
And she says that she thinks of me far more often than she writes.
When I line up her four letters chronologically, I convince myself that she is starting to recover.
Whitney, who has seen her aunt once, concurs. When she graduated from Colgate, they spent a week together in Paris. They stayed in a little hotel in Montparnasse, and Whitney said no one in the neighborhood seemed to know or to recognize Carissa. No one in Paris seemed to view her as anything other than the older of two American tourists.
The hotel reservation was under Carissa’s name.
Whitney says she doesn’t believe her aunt will ever return home, but I disagree. The fact that she writes encourages me.
And even if she never comes back to Bartlett, I believe she will come back to me. Or she will let me come to her. But she will emerge. I am confident she will emerge, and as she once—no, twice—healed me, she will let me heal her. And this time my head will be as sound as my heart, my judgment unclouded by loss.
And I will succeed.
In the meantime, I raise my daughter. I go to work. And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have written The Law of Similars were it not for the generosity of several extraordinary people: Lauren Bowerman, State’s Attorney for Chittenden County, Vermont; Edward Kent, M.D., allergy and asthma specialist; Elizabeth Macfarlane, C.C.H.; and Shaye Areheart and Dina Siciliano at Harmony Books. They gave me the great gifts of their wisdom and their time.
I used a number of books while writing this novel, some of which I found indispensable. Stephen Cummings and Dana Ullman’s Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicines and Richard Gros-singer’s Homeopathy: An Introduction for Skeptics and Beginners were consistently reliable resources. Rima Handley’s thoughtful and moving history of the Hahnemanns, A Homeopathic Love Story: The Story of Samuel and Melanie Hahnemann, provided valuable biographic information.
The quotations from Samuel Hahnemann’s Organon of Medicine come from the translation by Dr. Jost Kunzli, Alain Naude, and Peter Pendleton; the excerpts from The Chronic Diseases come from L. H. Tafel’s translation.
I imposed upon a great many friends and experts to read all or part of the novel in manuscript form, including: Alicia Daniel, a naturalist and botanist with the University of Vermont; attorney Susan Gilfillan; Stephen Kiernan; Ellen Levine; Dan Manz, director of Vermont’s Emergency Medical Services Division; Wayne Misselbeck, M.D.; Ken Neisser; Mike Noble, a public relations specialist with Fletcher Allen Health Care; Bill Pendlebury, M.D.; Reverend Randy Rice; and Bill Warnock, N.D.
Finally, my deepest thanks go, once again, to my wife, Victoria, a reader whose patience is endless and whose love is immense.
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents either ar
e the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2000
Copyright © 1999 by Chris Bohjalian
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Acknowledgment is gratefully made to Cooper Publishing for use of the Samuel Hahnemann quotes from the sixth edition of his Organon of Medicine.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Harmony edition as follows:
Bohjalian, Christopher A.
The law of similars / by Chris Bohjalian. — 1st ed
I. Title.
PS3552.0495L39 1999
813’.54—dc21 98-15807
eISBN: 978-1-4000-3296-9
Author photograph © Victoria Blewer
www.vintagebooks.com
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Chris Bohjalian, Law of Similars
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