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 nothing 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.
This silk strap has touched her shoulder, I would think as I'd hold it some nights in my hands.
Those tapes meant more to me than the encyclopedia-length shelf of photo albums that were filled with pictures of Elizabeth, because on the tapes she moved and she talked and in at least two she sang to our daughter.
Abby had no idea that the tapes of her mother existed. In the months immediately after Elizabeth had died, they would just leave me sobbing and angry, and so I'd stopped watching them. But I'd still kept them in my armoire with the few other items in my life that had totemic value: The letters Elizabeth had written to me over the years, the studs I'd worn in my shirt the day we were married. My diploma. My law degree. A pair of my father's wristwatches.
And I'd been in no condition to follow my two-year-old around the house with the video camera after the accident. Before Elizabeth had died, I'd filmed Abby all the time--with little plush dolls, her bath toys, while pushing her play lawn mower across the living-room rug--but not once in the year after.
At some point soon after Abby had turned three, when the first anniversary of Elizabeth's death was behind me, I bought some blank tapes on a whim during my lunch hour in Burlington, and that summer night filmed Abby and her friend Greta while they'd played in my daughter's sea serpent-shaped sandbox. I'd told my daughter the video camera was brand new.
After that, I couldn't bring myself to tell Abby that the tapes of her mother existed. I wasn't even sure if I should. After all, she seemed to be perfectly satisfied meeting her mother in the two-dimensional snapshots that filled easily a dozen photo albums. She knew exactly what her mother looked like, the sorts of things her mother liked to do. She knew what she herself looked like in her mother's arms, in her mother's lap, in a Snugli upon her mother's chest.
What would it mean to Abby, I wondered sometimes, to suddenly hear her mother's voice? To see her mother singing to her when she was a toddler barely a year and a half? To see her mother pregnant one Easter Sunday? Hamming it up on a fallen tree in the river?
I was afraid it would be too much for her; I feared it would anger her in a way she'd never known--make real, once again, the loss, but with the added burden this time of a four-year-old's sense of the world. And so I'd kept the tapes to myself, watching them in the dark when the house and the hills were quiet and I was completely alone.
Chapter 7.
Number 25
Administered properly...this medicine will rapidly, thoroughly, and permanently destroy the totality of the symptoms of the disease, which means the whole disease itself, changing it into health.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,
Organon of Medicine, 1842
.
"Like cures like," Carissa explained to me. "That's essentially what we mean by the Law of Similars."
Her socks were black that night, just like mine, but she was wearing orange flats. I found myself gazing at her shoes so I wouldn't stare at the almost miraculous way her floral leggings (black like her socks, but silhouetted with flowers) were pasted to her calves and her thighs. I hoped whoever had invented Lycra spandex had been awarded some sort of Nobel Prize.
"The remedy you're about to receive begins with a substance--a natural substance--that might cause symptoms in a completely healthy person, but will cure those symptoms in someone who's ill."
"Someone like me."
"Someone with your symptoms. But understand, I'm not treating your symptoms. And I'm not treating the microorganism inside you that's giving you burning sore throats and a runny nose. I'm not giving you an antibiotic. As a matter of fact, I'm not giving you an anti-anything."
"If you're not treating my sore throat and runny nose, what are you treating?"
"I'm treating you."
"You're treating me," I echoed, nodding. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me. Could she see that I needed to lose a few pounds? Probably not. Not in a button-down business shirt. And if she had noticed my feet, she'd noticed my socks were GQ perfect. New, as a matter of fact. And surely she'd noticed them, because I'd slathered powder on my feet in the morning so that I could take my wingtips off that night in her office. Cheerfully I wiggled my toes.
"Right. I'm treating you. Your system. There's something going on in your body that's making it the perfect environment for the virus inside you to live. My goal tonight is to give you a remedy that will replicate your symptoms and restore your body's natural ecology. This way, your body can heal itself."
"Since the remedy will imitate--"
"Not imitate. The cure simply begins with a substance that causes symptoms similar to the ones you currently have."
"Does that mean I'll get one heck of a sore throat tonight?"
"That's a wonderful question."
"Thank you."
"You might."
"Oh, good."
"And you might not. In the remedy I'm about to give you, there's only the barest trace of the original substance. Only an infinitesimal genetic template remains. Make no mistake, it's going to be a strong, highly potentized dose...but still only enough to strengthen your body's ability to fight the infection on its own."
When she looked at me, I decided, she probably hadn't even noticed my socks. She took things like socks and bare feet for granted. Sort of like a doctor. But she wasn't a doctor, she was a homeopath. That was the whole point, wasn't it? She treated the patient, not the disease.
And so while she might take things like socks and bare feet for granted, she was likely to think of me as more than a symptom, more than a sore throat and a runny nose. If that was the case, I thought, then perhaps she saw before her a successful lawyer. No, it was better than that. She saw a successful state's attorney. A criminal prosecutor. One of the good guys. Granted, my hair had begun to recede, but whenever my mug appeared in the newspaper in the midst of a trial, I was always surprised to see I had pretty good cheekbones.
"Besides," she added, "the sore throat is only one manifestation of the way your entire body's tipped out of balance." She slipped off her eyeglasses, ran one of her long, elegant fingers across the bridge of her nose and underneath one of her eyes, and then reached down--she's going to slip off her shoes, I thought, and I'm going to moan out loud if I'm not careful--and briefly massaged her ankle.
I realized my mouth was dry. Really dry. Drier even than the last time I'd been here. "So?" I croaked. "My remedy is..."
"Leland, there are just so many reasons why I don't want to tell you that."
"I know, I know. You're worried I'll think less of myself. I promise, I won't. I'm not even sure that's possible."
"And I really fear if I tell you the cure, you'll look it up. And then the symptoms will indeed grow worse for a time."
"I can live with a sore throat a little longer."
"That might be your chief complaint, but it's only one symptom."
"I'm not going to win this argument, am I?"
"That's not the point."
"Okay, then. Let's do it," I said, trying to sound confident and eager and willing at once, but pretty sure I'd sounded only sickly and thirsty and hoarse.
"You're ready?"
"Absolutely."
"Had any coffee this weekend?"
I shook my head no: "Crisp and clean and no caffeine."
"Honestly?"
"I swear it. I mean, I paid the price on Saturday and Sunday. But today's been pretty easy."
"Good. Any cough drops?"
"Nope."
"Excellent. How do you feel?"
"Thirsty."
She smiled and stood, adjusting the monster ski sweater she was wearing. "I'll get you some water."
When she had started toward the water cooler at the other end of her office, I noticed a tiny vial of pellets in the cushion of her chair. It looked a little like a drugstore bottle of prescription pills, right down to the typewriter type on the label, except for the fact that this vial was clear instead of tinted and the contents were...tiny. The white dots inside were even smaller than the Claritin I scarfed down through the late spring and early summer. Now, those were small pills.
I was about to sip my water as she was standing beside me--over me--when I suddenly felt the urge to stand, too. She was tall and I was sitting, and it made for a bad combination. It wasn't that I minded feeling small and vulnerable as she towered over me, it was the fact that I was staring right into her stomach. Or her chest, I realized, if I rolled my eyes one way, if I leaned my head back to finish my water. Her groin, I realized, if I rolled my eyes down. It didn't matter that Carissa was wearing a bulky sweater that hung to mid-thigh, it was my simple proximity to paradise. I couldn't stand it, and so I stood beside her to drink.
"Better?" she asked when I finished.
"Better," I said, and she went to her chair for the little vial.
"As I said, at first your symptoms might get worse. Or they might stay the same. Either way, you shouldn't fear that nothing has happened. Give yourself a week or two," she said, and she popped off the little container's top.
"I understand."
"Now. Make like a baby bird," she murmured, and she tilted her own head back as a model.
When I did, I thought immediately of her view of my nose hair, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do.
"This will taste sweet. These are sucrose pellets."
"How many am I getting?"
"Four or five."
"That precise, huh?"
"Downright clinical," she said. "Open wide, and hold the pellets under your tongue. Don't swallow them, and don't chew them. Just let them dissolve."
"Okay."
She tapped the pellets into my mouth, and before I felt the sweet that she'd promised, I felt something burning. It was brief but real. Hot. It was as real as the sugar candy now melting atop my tongue. But of course it wasn't sugar candy. It was a sugar pill hiding tarantula. Or belladonna. Or sulphur.
Perhaps even arsenic. Maybe that was the burning I'd experienced. Maybe the burning was the medicine. Then, not just under my tongue, but everywhere, I felt a prickliness rolling inside me.
"I feel a little tingly," I said.
"That's natural."
I swallowed, careful not to swallow the pills in my mouth. "I really do feel strange."
"Good."
"I'm not going to overdose, right?" I asked, smiling, hoping she'd think what I'd said was a joke, but reassure me nonetheless.
"Nope."
"Because I really have the...the creepy-crawlies."
"Why don't you sit down, then?"
I sat down on the couch and she sat down in her chair, and I turned toward the windo
w and sighed. At night, the glass looked like a mirror coated with stovepipe paint, a black hole beside the skyline of Paris.
"How much longer?" I asked without looking at her.
"Till the pills dissolve?"
"Yes."
"It varies. Maybe another two or three minutes. No more."
I nodded. I was thinking that nighttime was the worst time in the world for hypochondriacs, when waves of goose bumps streamed over my arms, and I felt a shiver ripple along the back of my neck. It was as though that prickliness on the inside was now on the outside. And then, suddenly, I felt a rush I could only call good. Then great. Then...well, it wasn't just that I no longer felt anything in the back of my throat, it wasn't just that I no longer felt even thirsty. I felt happy. Really happy. Not happy like when I would realize the food I was eating actually tasted pretty good, or happy like when I'd leave a theater thinking a movie had been worth seven-fifty; I was happy, I realized, like that day when I was seven, soon after my family had moved to Vermont, and my parents had gotten my sister and me the puppy we'd wanted so badly. That amazing, perfect, half-springer mutt we'd named Herman. That happy. A-little-boy-rolling-in-the-Vermont-grass-with-his-dog happy.