“That shaman’s the primary-care physician I got with our health plan.”
“Oh, great. You’re going to put your health in the hands of the state. Wise decision.”
“Phil, would you give it a rest?”
“I just think you should take better care of yourself.”
“I appreciate that. But ever since you went out and decided to take care of your body and Margaret went out and married Dr. Strangelove, I can’t go into either of your offices without getting a lecture about something. I’m afraid to open my mouth around either of you.”
“He’s not a doctor.”
“Who?”
“Margaret’s husband. Garrick. He’s a psychologist, not a psychiatrist.”
“I know that. It’s just a nickname.”
“Not a very flattering one. I gather you don’t like him.”
“I like him fine. I just find him a little uptight. Officious.”
“Officious…”
“Inflexible. A real rule-maker.”
Phil swiveled in his chair and rested his wingtips on the radiator. There was snow on the mountains across the lake.
“You know,” Phil said, pressing the fingertips on both hands together. “There are those who would say the same thing about you.”
“About me?”
“Absolutely. Leland Fowler, they’d say, shits in rows.”
“Nice, Phil.” Ever since Phil had discovered natural health, he’d become, in my opinion, way too comfortable with feces.
“See what I mean? You are an extremely uptight fellow. Probably even more uptight than Garrick.”
“That’s not possible.”
“He’s on the state board, you know.”
“The psychology board?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Most people think it’s a great honor.”
“I’m sure.”
He turned back toward me. “Sometimes I think you’re a very angry person.”
“Margaret’s supposed to be telling me that. You’re just supposed to criticize my eating habits.”
“See? You put everything into these little tiny boxes. Your life is too compartmentalized. Don’t get me wrong: It’s clear you’re doing a great job with Abby. And you do very, very good work here. But you’re still incredibly anal.”
Someday, I decided, I would find out who had set Phil and Barbara Hood on the road to better health. And then I’d kill him. I realized I’d been in Phil’s office for close to half an hour and we still hadn’t gotten to the litany of cases I needed to discuss. And now I was due in court to explain why some asshole—now, there was a colorful word I’d be sure to use around Phil the next time we had a chat—who’d blown 2.0 when he was picked up going the wrong way on I-89 shouldn’t be allowed near the keys to his car ever again.
“I’ll work on that.”
“Oh, I know you won’t. At least not yet. Sometimes it’s hard to change.”
I considered informing Phil that I’d actually gone to see a homeopath, but telling him now would sound defensive. Besides, I couldn’t bear to give him that much satisfaction; I couldn’t imagine giving him the notion that Leland Fowler was now among the converted. He might think he had had something to do with it.
“I have to run, Phil, I’m due in court. Will you be around later this morning?”
“I expect so.”
“Can we connect then?”
“Good chance.”
When I went to my office to get the files I needed on Derek Linder, the DWI King of Vermont, I saw a message from Carissa Lake. With any luck, Linder wouldn’t keep me more than half an hour. For all I knew, I might have my remedy in forty-five minutes.
Take that, Phil Hood, I thought. I’ve got myself a homey.
I stopped by the coffee machine on my way back to my office. Most of the time I loved the fact that the state’s attorneys worked in the same building with the state courtrooms, but there were occasional moments when I wished I had an excuse to escape the second and third floors of the illustrious Edward J. Costello Courthouse. I would have loved to have been flirting with Carissa Lake while sipping a decent cup of coffee, for example. Instead I was drinking the paludal muck someone had brewed in our office two or three hours ago. Maybe longer. I wondered if I’d have to confess to my homeopath that I’d gone back on the juice.
“How are you feeling?” she asked me. “Still emotionally wrung out?”
“A little less so.”
“Good. I have some news for you.”
“You have my remedy?”
“I do.”
“I’ve been dying to know. What is it?”
There was a long beat at the other end of the line, and I began to hear in my mind the word tarantula. Shit. I’m going to have to eat a damn spider.
“Do you have your calendar in front of you?” she asked, instead of answering my question.
“I should be sitting down, shouldn’t I? This is going to be one of those ‘Are you sitting down?’ kind of remedies, isn’t it?”
“There’s no such thing.”
“So I’ll like my remedy?”
“That’s not why I called. I called because I want to schedule an appointment to give you your remedy.”
“Won’t you tell me what it is?”
“I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s better that way.”
“Tell me the truth: Are you going to make me eat a spider?”
“That’s not the issue. That’s not why I’d prefer not going into the details of your cure.”
“Will you promise me that it won’t be a spider?”
“No.”
“Because it might be?”
“Leland, you’re the type who’s either done some reading in that book I gave you or would do some once I told you the remedy. You’d look it up.”
“You’ve mistaken me for an informed consumer. Trust me, I’m not.”
“You’re a lawyer!”
“Sticks and stones…”
She laughed briefly, but then went on, “Sometimes it’s for the best that the patient doesn’t know. Sometimes patients read more into the cure than is there. It affects their self-esteem.”
Even if this wasn’t going to be an “Are you sitting down?” kind of remedy, I began to fear that the conversation had the potential to offer an “Are you sitting down?” kind of revelation. And so I sat down.
“Go on,” I said.
“Some remedies treat a variety of symptoms. Some cure a variety of maladies. I don’t want you to read into my choice something that isn’t there.”
Impotence, I thought. She thinks I’m impotent.
“What if I promise not to look up the cure?” I asked.
“I want to schedule an appointment,” she said, ignoring me. “I want you to come to my office for the remedy, and we can talk about it then.”
“The name of the remedy.”
“Right.”
“How’s tonight?”
“It’s Friday.”
“Ah. Of course.”
“I mean, if you don’t have plans, you could certainly drop by on your way home from Burlington.”
“Do you have plans?”
“I may go to a large, loud party I have little interest in attending. I may not.”
“And you wouldn’t mind giving me the remedy this evening?”
“No, not at all. You’re caffeine-free?”
I paused, balancing my health and my horniness. At that moment, I decided, it was clear my horniness was more important. I could always regain my health when I wasn’t drooling over every woman I met in the health-food store.
Yet even as I opened my mouth to boast that I was caffeine-free, I couldn’t bring myself to lie. Even when the image of Carissa Lake curled in her chair like a very long cat flashed before my eyes.
“I got through yesterday without any coffee,” I said. “But I had to have some this morning.”
“Work-related?”<
br />
“I guess. And sleep-related. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Any cough drops?”
“Well, my throat has been sore,” I said, sounding more like a six-year-old than I would have liked. I hadn’t even realized I was supposed to avoid cough drops.
“Let’s plan on Monday, in that case. Try and go the weekend without coffee. Sunday may be hard, but at least you won’t be at work. And Monday should be a breeze.”
I sighed. I’d have to go the weekend without seeing her. I’d have to go the weekend without knowing my cure. I’d have to go the weekend without coffee.
“Okay.”
“Avoid cough drops, too—any product with menthol, in fact.”
“I’ll try.”
“Would you like to come in before work? Maybe first thing in the morning, right after you drop off Abby at day care?”
“Monday morning looks like chaos. After work might be better,” I said.
“Five-thirty?”
I calculated that that would mean leaving the office by five or ten minutes of five. Doable. Not usually, of course. But for Carissa Lake? One time? Easy.
“Five-thirty’s good,” I said. “Do you think you might be able to tell me the cure in person?”
“Maybe. But more than likely I won’t. At least I won’t want to.”
“Okay.”
“It’s supposed to be a lovely weekend, Leland. Treat yourself: Get outside.”
“I will.”
“And remember: no coffee.”
I looked at the Styrofoam cup on my desk. I couldn’t wait to dump it down the sink.
East Bartlett had been settled at the very end of the eighteenth century, but—unlike its contemporaries with names like Jericho and Chelsea and Bristol—no one had tried finding a few flat acres for a central green or town commons. They knew a few flat acres didn’t exist.
Instead they found three small hills that were somewhat less precipitous than the mountains nearby, and huddled there in their homes, raising sheep—and then cows and then nothing—on the rises around them, which may not have been literal mountains but were nevertheless about as steep as beginner ski slopes.
If East Bartlett had been known for anything in recent memory, it had been known for dairy farming. As recently as 1946, the hill town of barely eight hundred people had forty-five dairy farms. By the time Elizabeth and I had moved there—a half-decade after the federal government’s attempt to stabilize the price of milk by buying whole dairy herds from small farmers—there were five, and by the time Elizabeth died, there were none. Zero. The last herd went to auction the winter before the accident.
On one of those three hills sat the closest thing East Bartlett had to an urban skyline: a church steeple, a weathervane atop the brick monolith that served as the town hall, a twelve-by-twelve roof of a gray general store, and a bell tower atop the volunteer fire company’s two-bay garage.
Abby and I lived about a third of a mile from the center, our house angled so that the village was visible from the den, a porch, and one of the windows in Abby’s bedroom. Like most of East Bartlett, to get to work I drove down a winding, torturously thin road that linked the community with a wider, straighter two-lane state highway that in turn linked us with civilization: Bartlett to the immediate west, and Hinesburg, South Burlington, and—eventually—Burlington to the north. Most of East Bartlett either worked in Bartlett or commuted to Burlington.
My favorite structure in the town was the church, and not just because the congregation that worshiped there had helped me through those months after Elizabeth died. The building itself had merit. It was small, but it had a deceptively high steeple, and the white clapboard additions along the north and south sides made the century-and-a-half-old church look a bit like a seagull with her wings folded underneath her.
Since Elizabeth had died, I had become the congregation’s most enthusiastic volunteer who absolutely, positively could not be counted upon. This had, I believe, nothing to do with what I have heard called a crisis of faith. Nevertheless, in the past year alone, I’d failed to get the garland and ribbons for Pentecost, I’d had to ad-lib every single one of my lines as a Capernaum rabbi during Vacation Bible School, and two days before Sunday school was due to begin, I’d bowed out after promising I’d be a teacher. One of the other state’s attorneys had resigned, and—budgets being as tight as they were—I knew it was unlikely the position would be filled in the foreseeable future (or, to be realistic, in my lifetime). Which meant there would be more work for the rest of the attorneys, and less time for me to figure out how to explain parables and plagues to a group of dubious seven-year-olds.
And then, of course, there was that railing for the handicapped-access ramp. I’d volunteered to build it in April. It was now December. Human babies became viable in less time than it had taken me to get around to the project.
I couldn’t figure out why that was, because Abby was growing into an extremely undemanding little person. And while my job was time-consuming, most of the things I was failing to accomplish weren’t that hard. Would it really have been all that difficult to have dropped by the dime store two blocks from my office to pick up the ribbons for Pentecost?
Nor was it simply that my spirit was strong but my flesh was weak: The fact was, for most of my life I’d been excellent at doing what I’d said I would do; for most of my life I’d been the sort of person people could count on.
Not lately, it seemed. As Phil had said, I was still doing a pretty good job as a taxpayer-funded good guy, and at least a reasonable job with my daughter. But everything else?
There was nothing else.
Whenever I tried to layer in anything else, I botched it. Became a complete nincompoop.
And so the Saturday after scheduling my follow-up appointment with Carissa, I was determined to become the vaguely dependable person I’d once been, I was determined to complete the handicapped-access ramp at the church. I hoisted what had once been my father’s Delta crosscut miter saw into the back of the pickup, along with all the lumber and brackets I’d purchased that week, and drove a third of a mile to the center of town. It was an absolutely beautiful afternoon, one of the warmest days I’d ever seen in December. The temperature, I’d heard, was supposed to sneak into the mid-fifties, and already much of the snow on the ground had melted. Abby was at a little friend’s party until dinner, and so there really wasn’t even any pressure to work fast.
Yet here’s what I remember most about that afternoon: I am staring briefly at the saw, anchored that moment on the back hatch of the pickup, and I am pressing the yellow foam plugs into my ears to make sure they are snug. I glance once again at the church ramp, switch on the saw, and then run another long, tube-shaped piece of pressure-treated pine through the blade.
And, once more, nearly cut off my thumb.
Normally I am a pretty able guy with a saw; my father taught me well. But that day? That was at least the third time I’d come within a fraction of an inch of losing a sizable part of a finger. If I wasn’t careful, I’d end up trick-or-treating as a logger next Halloween.
At the time, I attributed my incompetence entirely to caffeine withdrawal. I was a junkie, I decided, and while I might finish the banister, there would be a price to pay and it wouldn’t be pretty: Good evening, I imagined myself saying Monday night to Carissa Lake. I have a new chief complaint. Shooting pains at the edge of my hand where I once had a thumb.
But while caffeine withdrawal might have been a distraction, it wasn’t the only one. It hadn’t yet crossed my mind, however, that I just might be falling in love.
Late Sunday night when Abby had long been asleep, I pressed into the VCR one of my tapes of Elizabeth and watched her swimming in the river that ran through the woods along a part of East Bartlett. I watched her telling me to turn off the camera while she was sitting in her bathing suit on one of the tremendous boulders that were virtual islands in the slow current. She was wearing the black maillot with nothi
ng but webbing along the sides, the one she’d bought the January we’d gone to Aruba.
I watched her smile, then pretend to be annoyed, then slip back into the water and swim under the surface until she was out of sight behind the rock.
She reappeared a moment later before the birch that had fallen that winter into the river, the trunk buoyed above the water by another big rock, so the tree was like a bridge that spanned half the stream. She climbed onto the woody overpass, the wet Lycra molding itself to the line of her spine and the thin crevice between her cheeks, and then she turned around and faced me once more.
“Leland,” she said, trying to sound exasperated. Using the fingers of both hands to push that long, creosote black hair behind her ears. Pulling the elastic edge of the suit back down over the sharp bones of her hips, over the demarcation line between olive skin and merely tan.
Elizabeth could look tan in December. In the summer, when I would have to smear an SPF 28 on my face and my arms, she could have slathered her body with baby oil and not gotten burned.
“Lord, Leland,” she said when I hadn’t stopped filming, but by then she had settled onto the wide birch on her knees and gotten into the spirit. Smiling, she offered an impromptu parody of the uncomfortable poses that were demanded of the models in page after page of the swimsuit and lingerie catalogs that seemed to pepper our mail as Valentine’s Day approached.
“Note my expression,” she said to the camera. “There’s a knot digging into my shin right this second, but you don’t know that because I’m a professional. Beauty before pain.”
We’d just gotten the camera, and it seemed I was taping her constantly. There she was weeding the carrots in the garden, playing croquet with friends, leaving the house in a business suit for the bank. Putting on lipstick. Brushing her hair. One time just sleeping.
The next time she appeared on a tape, that long hair would be cut.
And the time after that, she’d be pregnant, but no one knew but the two of us, and she certainly didn’t look pregnant on the tape.
A few tapes later, she would.
The tapes had become small, treasured icons for me, more meaningful than the pearls Elizabeth had worn around her neck that I was saving for Abby, or the deep-green chemise that she had always thought she looked sexiest in.