Have some of those details changed for her now? I suppose. The simple act of telling the story to me—that lawyer who, in her mind, went from ally to enemy—must have affected what she remembered. Stories, after all, are merely memories given a certain tangibility with words, and it only takes a few words to subsume a memory completely.
Still, I will always be respectful of Jennifer’s memory, and the way, desiring justice, she had pulled from her mind the fresh details of her horror. What she told me in my office would match, more or less, with what I’d hear later from the first responders—the term we use in Vermont for the EMS volunteers scattered throughout our rural communities, including East Bartlett, who will invariably arrive at an accident scene before an ambulance.
Like most first responders in Vermont, they knew the victim. Their patient. They knew Richard Emmons.
All of them, like me, must now have a vision of what preceded the emergency call. Unlike me, however, they probably do not have the advantage of having heard the story directly from Jennifer, and building that vision from her words: Richard sitting up in bed, wheezing. Jennifer opening her eyes in the dark and telling him to use his inhaler. Maybe it comes out like a command. Maybe, by that point, like a plea.
“Fine,” he says, and it sounds as if he barely can speak. Which is exactly the case. He is getting so little air by this point, he really is having trouble talking.
But then she hears him using his inhaler, and she assumes he will be somewhat better in a moment. Much better soon after that. And so she is relieved.
But then he surprises her: He climbs out of bed without turning the light on, and he starts for the door. She hears him head down the stairs.
Maybe he’s getting something to drink, she thinks. She hopes. At least, even those days just before Christmas, he had been good about fluids.
And maybe—just maybe—he is going to check the presents under the tree. Timmy, after all, will be up in three or four hours. No later than seven o’clock, that’s for sure.
But Jennifer told me in my office that she had known in her heart this wasn’t his reason for going downstairs, she had known even then this wasn’t why he was leaving their bed.
He is getting up because he can’t breathe.
How long has he been off his drugs, she wonders, how many days has it been? Five? Six? She calculates in her mind the last time he used his inhaler before tonight, or the last time he took a pill, and as far as she can recall, it was Monday. Monday morning.
Tomorrow will mark a full week. That’s how long it has been.
It has in fact been so long that bronchospasms are no longer the problem. Inflammation is. His airways have become irritated, swollen, and congested with mucus. His windpipe, normally the width of his thumb, has been reduced almost to a drinking straw: Imagine a half-inch pipe that is choked with debris. Consequently, his reliever medication for bronchospasms, his albuterol inhaler, has become all but irrelevant. It has no effect on the cascade of thick fluid that has built up inside him.
And so now it is the night before Christmas and he is unable to breathe, his inhaler has failed, and he has gone downstairs to try something else. Take a prednisone, perhaps. Take one of the pills he’s been given to help prevent exactly this sort of emergency.
She pushes the quilt off her shoulders and gets out of bed, too, surprised by how cold the floor has become. She always seems to forget. She grabs her bathrobe off the chair and then tiptoes into the hallway. She doesn’t want to wake Timmy or Kate; she doesn’t want them to worry because they can hear their parents wandering around the house in the dead of night.
She listens for a moment outside Timmy’s door, but it is completely silent inside. Then she starts down the hallway, irritated by thoughts of that idiot homeopath.
Had she really thought of Carissa that moment? Or was her annoyance a new addition a day and a half later, a fabrication of which she was completely unaware? Was it an invention to give her anger a channel through which to pass while talking to me the day after Christmas?
Honestly? I believe that she did think of Carissa. Given the way Richard had grown excited over the cure—given my own experience the days immediately after I swallowed my arsenic—I am sure homeopathy was a subject of frequent conversation in the Emmons household in December. Jennifer, I am convinced, had wondered often that month exactly what that homeopath had given her husband.
After all, soon after taking his remedy, his skin had cleared up completely, and the aches in his joints had diminished. Within a week of receiving his cure, Richard had decided to give up the inhalers and pills he took for his asthma.
Even on Christmas Eve, I can imagine Jennifer wondering if that had been the homeopath’s idea, too: It had to be. It just had to be.
And so at the top of the stairs, she has a thought. Not quite a vision, certainly not a premonition. Clearly she has no idea what is before her. But she thinks to herself at the top of the stairs, I am going to end up driving Richard to the emergency room Christmas morning because some irresponsible homeopath has told him to go off his inhalers and his theophylline. Astonishing. Simply astonishing.
That’s what she thinks.
It is as she is wrapping her hand around the knob to the kitchen door that she hears the thud on the other side. Instantly she knows what it is: a body falling to the floor. Richard. She whips the door open and sees first the refrigerator swinging shut in slow motion, and then her husband collapsed on the tile before it.
She told me she heard herself shrieking his name, then her daughter’s name, and she disliked the sound of the howl that was in fact her voice.
“Kate! Get down here!” she screams as loud as she can as she crouches on the floor by her husband.
He is on his back, his eyes open. But he is no longer able to breathe, so now he can’t speak. On some level, she is aware that he has something in his hands, but she is unable to focus upon it. All she can see is the way the muscles along the sides of his neck are billowing like sails as he struggles to breathe, and the desperate panic in his eyes—something like fear and fight at once.
“Kate!” she shrieks again. She wants her daughter to go to the bedroom and get the inhaler—though a part of her understands her husband has already tried this and it hasn’t worked.
But…but…what else can she do?
She stumbles over Richard to get to the telephone, and when she has the receiver in her hands, she swears—“Goddamn it! Goddamn it!”—because their part of Vermont does not yet have 911 emergency service.
Had she therefore actually had to look up the number for the local rescue squad in the phone book? No, she recalled with me, it hadn’t come to that: She’d remembered that the number of their first-responder neighbor was stuck to a label inside the receiver of the phone.
She punches in the seven digits, and she recognizes her friend David’s voice instantly.
“Richard can’t breathe,” she says. “Get over here, please!”
“Jennifer? Is that you?”
“Yes! Help us!”
“I’m on my way,” he says, and she hears him hang up just as Kate appears in the kitchen, and then Timmy behind her.
“Daddy!” her daughter screams, and she falls back against the doorway, her hands on her mouth.
“Get his inhaler!” Jennifer says, and for the first time since she has seen her husband collapsed on the kitchen floor, she hears more determination than panic in her voice: The rescue squad is coming. Kate is getting the inhaler. This will, in the end, be okay.
She kneels beside Richard, wishing to God she knew CPR, when he slams the back of his hand onto the floor so hard it sounds to her like a rifle shot. She sees his eyes roll back in his head, and then his lids fall shut.
“What’s happening?” Timmy whimpers.
Already his lips have begun to swell, and the first hives have begun to form on his neck.
Though she doesn’t know the details of CPR, she figures she understands the basics: Yo
u hold the nose and blow air into the mouth. And so she curls her body over Richard’s and pinches his nose, and then takes a deep breath. Before she can exhale into his mouth, however, she feels his body spasm and—her face almost touching his—she smells the vomit a split second before she sees it, before his body throws up whatever remains of his Christmas Eve supper.
She remembered, she said, looking away, trying not to vomit herself, as Kate had returned with her father’s inhaler.
But then she turns back and reaches into Richard’s mouth with her fingers to make sure his throat is clear. When she sees that it is, she squeezes his inhaler inside his lips. Nothing happens, and she does it again. Still nothing. And so she starts trying to breathe for him once more, the smell of all that he’s retched more apparent when she sits up and breathes in herself than when she exhales into his mouth. I can do this, she thinks. I haven’t a choice…so I can do this.
She isn’t sure how many times she has tried breathing her husband back to life—it might have been five times, it might have been ten—when she hears David pounding at their front door.
“Let him in,” she tells Kate, but her daughter has already started for the door.
She sits back on her legs, catching her own breath. For a split second her eyes skip over the tile floor, and her mind finally registers what her husband was holding when he collapsed. Instantly she recognizes what it is, what is inside. It is a clear bag with a label, the kind that are sometimes closed with a twist-tie. The kind of thing she would get at the health-food store. But she can’t believe what she sees inside it; it doesn’t make any sense. Cashews.
Richard is allergic to cashews.
David—a huge man, she realizes, especially when you’re kneeling on your kitchen floor—pounds over to her in his boots, and she scoots a step back so he can get to her husband.
“He can’t breathe,” she hears herself saying, but clearly he has figured this out. From his satchel he pulls a clear plastic mask and a bag linked by a tube, and places the mask over Richard’s mouth. “Give me the phone,” he says as he starts squeezing the bag.
Behind her she hears a car in the driveway, and then the front door opening once more. Someone else is arriving, another volunteer.
“I think he was eating these,” she says to David. Her words, in her mind, sound more perplexed than urgent. Cashews? What was he thinking?
Then she hands him the clear little bag of nuts.
“He allergic to them?” David asks.
“Yes.”
“He know that?”
She nods, thinking: Good God, of course he did!
Her daughter brings David the cordless phone, and he rests it on his shoulder after dialing. Someone at the other end answers instantly, and she hears words and expressions that she doesn’t understand. Anaphylaxis. Agonal breathing. Epinephrine. Then she hears one that she does: cardiac arrest. It will happen any second now.
“I’m giving him epi, one to one thousand, sub-q,” David says on the phone before putting the receiver down, rolling up the sleeve of Richard’s pajamas, and giving her husband a shot.
She leans back against a cabinet. Within moments, it seems, her husband is surrounded by men and women in the khakis and the jeans they’d thrown on half-asleep. There is Stephen and Ruthie and Doug. They open a little suitcase with a machine inside and start pressing patches with wires to Richard’s chest. The wires lead back into the box.
“I.V. Ringer’s,” David says to one of the other volunteers, then murmurs, apparently speaking now to her husband, “Hang in there. The ambulance is coming.”
“How long?” she asks, referring to the ambulance. How long till it gets here?
“It usually takes at least seven or eight minutes before the damage is irreversible,” Ruthie answers, and Jennifer realizes that Ruthie thinks she has meant something else.
Her children lean against her, Timmy practically burrowing into her nightgown. She wraps one of her arms around each of them, and watches her family’s friends work on her husband. One of the volunteers—it happened so fast, she wasn’t able to tell if it was Ruthie or Doug—had batted the bag of cashews across the floor when it got in the way. David, at some point, must have put it down.
Stephen picks it up, evidently deciding it must be important.
“Why was he eating them?” he asks her, standing.
“I don’t know.”
“But he knew he was allergic to them?”
“Yes! He has asthma, and he’s allergic to them! He knows that!”
“Shit,” she hears David hiss. “No pulse. Shit. Hit press-to-analyze.”
“Hands off,” Ruthie says. “Clear.”
The EMTs sit back on their heels, and the room becomes quiet. Jennifer expects an electrical charge will rip through her husband any second now, and his body will bounce off the floor—they all expect it—but then a metallic voice from the little machine informs them, “No shock indicated.”
“What does that mean?” Jennifer says. “What?” But none of them answer. Suddenly even Stephen is back on the floor with the volunteer rescue workers, helping Ruthie to insert a plastic tube into Richard’s mouth, while David is back on the phone with…someone.
“He went bradycardic, and now he’s gone flat-line! There’s just no heartbeat!” David is saying, his voice loud with the desperation that often precedes defeat. Then: “We’re working the airway, that’s just what we’re doing! But we’re not moving any air!”
She watches them press on his chest with two hands at a time. They tilt his head back, they battle his ever-swelling tongue. They try tightening the seal on the mask on his face. Finally David drops the phone, nodding at no one, and shoots more epinephrine into Richard’s system.
Outside, the night sky over their driveway is filled with the flashing red strobes atop two of the rescuers’ parked cars. Jennifer can see the lights through the kitchen window.
She feels her daughter pressing her forehead against her chest, and Timmy’s little fingers squeezing her side. Cashews, she cries in her mind even then, cashews! What in the name of God was he thinking?
What indeed?
No one will ever know for sure. But there is, in my opinion, a good deal we can assume.
We can assume, for instance, that he was frightened when he awoke in the night and couldn’t breathe, because he finally broke down and tried his inhaler. Six days away from his usual pharmacopoeia—almost, as a matter of fact, seven—and he had at last succumbed to his body’s dependence upon it.
Unfortunately, it was already too late for that. He was already too far gone for albuterol, the drug in his reliever inhaler. He was probably, by then, too far gone for even his prednisone to have been of any use.
No, by then Richard was in need of emergency medical help; by then he was in need of a hospital.
Did he know this? Did he understand what he had done to himself? Maybe. And so, perhaps, he was desperate and panicked and scared. He could barely breathe, and he was thinking with that peculiar lack of judgment that seems to mark the middle of the night.
It is at night, after all, when without fail the strangest crimes in this world occur, and some of the biggest mistakes are made. I know. For years, I have helped clean up the mess that is left in their wake.
Whether Richard did what he did because of Carissa—because she, too, had made a mistake, evidenced a peculiar lack of judgment herself—is still debated with gravity and ardor in some circles in Vermont.
What was he thinking? Jennifer had told me she’d wondered. What?
I did not try and answer her question then; there had not been a need. After all, she had not expected an answer—and if she had, I most certainly would have lied. I can’t imagine, Jennifer. I just can’t imagine.
But if I had responded, and if for some inexplicable reason I’d told her what I honestly believed, I suppose I would have told her this: He was thinking in some fashion about the Law of Similars. Look at what an infinitesimal trace d
id for me, his frenzied, oxygen-starved mind had concluded, look at what it did for my skin. Maybe all I need now is a little bit more: one nut. That’s really not very much, is it? It’s not very much at all.
It can’t be enough to hurt me. Isn’t that what Carissa had said at the health-food store?
He’d been clamoring for more medicine for almost two weeks, calling Carissa practically every other day. And consistently she had refused to give him another dose.
Well, now he had more. Right there in his hands. Same stuff, essentially, as his cure. Right?
Right?
And so he had put that one cashew into his mouth, and then he had bit into it.
And then his wife had found him on their kitchen floor.
I could feel Margaret and Phil watching me. Waiting for me to crack. To rise in my chair before Margaret’s desk, walk past Phil—leaning in the doorway like one of the rubber trees near the receptionist’s desk that were always fighting like hell to get to the sun—and stroll with seeming casualness to the coffee machine. But I really didn’t feel like a cup. I just didn’t want one.
“Procuring another person to commit a felony is five years,” I said to them. “Have you read the computer transcripts? They were serious, completely serious.”
“They both pleaded innocent,” Margaret said. “She looked it. He didn’t.”
I disagreed. In my mind, they’d both looked like war criminals at the arraignment: defensive, indignant, and angry at once. And guilty as hell. The pair were married, though not to each other. That was the problem. They were having an affair, and at some point had concocted an absolutely lunatic scheme to have the woman’s husband kidnapped and beaten, in order to convince him to grant her a divorce in which she would get most of the couple’s worldly possessions—including their cottage not far from Lake Champlain. Kidnappers, of course, don’t advertise in the yellow pages, and so they had gone on-line to a variety of chat rooms on the Internet to try and find one.