"What exactly is echinacea?" I asked.
"An herb," she said, and the word herb had never sounded so sexy. From this woman it sounded like a purr; it was a gentle, cooing, polysyllabic moan: heeerrrrrrrrrbb. "That's all. An herbal extract, to be precise. Do you know what coneflowers look like?"
"My wife grew them."
"Well, the roots of that beautiful plant are the source. The tincture you have in your hands also has burdock in it. And gentian. Wood betony. And goldenseal. We also carry an echinacea without goldenseal, but from what you tell me, I'd recommend your trying some with it."
"Is goldenseal also an...herb?" I asked, hoping I, too, could make the word sound like foreplay. (I couldn't. From my lips, a drawn-out herb sounded more like a stutter than a verbal aphrodisiac.)
"It is. It's an antibacterial. Sometimes it helps clear the sinuses."
"I am pretty sniffly, aren't I?"
"Oh, no. Not at all."
"How much should I take?"
"A couple eyedroppers a day."
"In water?"
"You can. I prefer it in herbal tea."
"I'll bet I would, too," I told her, knowing how much I despised herbal tea. I told myself I was lying to make this woman feel good about her suggestion, and therefore about herself. I appalled myself by looking at her left hand to see if there was a ring.
"Do you need any?"
"Any..."
"Tea?"
"Tea. Yes, sure." And I bought a box of caffeine-free, wild-cherry blackberry tea, exactly the one she recommended. There was a vaguely Nordic, vaguely Grimm-like painting on the top of the box of two little children in lederhosen gathering berries the size of footballs. They were surrounded by birch trees.
That night I tried both the echinacea (an abomination that was acidic and bitter at once) and the tea (less abominable, but only because it was boring and watery instead of acidic and bitter). The next morning, I dropped the precious echinacea into my orange juice, and I discovered that a big glass could mask the taste. At lunch I buried the stuff in my coffee, aware on some level that the coffee was probably neutralizing the benefits of the miracle herb extract, and at dinner I simply swilled it as fast as I could in a glass of tap water.
"What's that?" Abby asked, looking skeptically at the tumbler with swirls of brown. Marsh water, I thought: I'm drinking marsh water.
"I think it's ground-up flowers," I said.
"Yuck! Why are you drinking that?"
I tossed back my head and emptied the glass. "It's supposed to be good for you. Want some?"
"No. I like grape juice."
"Good choice."
For a week and a day I took my echinacea, and suddenly the bottle was empty. I wasn't sure if I was feeling better, but I knew I wanted to return to the health-food store. I wanted to hear that woman say herb again, I wanted to see her toes and her feet and (just maybe) her slender ankles in November.
And so all the way home I thought about what I would say to her. I imagined telling her how much better I felt, how I was so glad--so grateful--that she'd suggested an herb called echinacea.
By the time I arrived in the health-food store's parking lot the sky was dark, but the lights were on in the clapboard building that had once been a home. I didn't see the woman I wanted, and so I told myself she must be someplace in the back.
Once inside, I scanned the aisles, my eyes bouncing over the organic fruits and vegetables trucked in from someplace far to the south, darting between the teas and bulgur and hummus. She was nowhere to be seen.
"Can I help you?"
I turned, hoping against hope that the voice belonged to the lady with the drapes of soft silver hair, but it didn't. I knew that the moment I'd heard it, but still I hoped I was wrong.
"Yes. Sure."
The voice belonged to a woman a decade my junior. Mid-twenties. For all I knew, she was even younger than that. She may have still been in college. Maybe she worked here after class. But in some way she reminded me of the older woman I had met the week before. She, too, was wearing sandals despite the approach of another New England winter, and she, too, was wearing a flouncy peasant skirt. (I tried not to think of it as the shade of red on the Actifed box, but the vividness of the dye was unmistakable.) The top two buttons of her white blouse were undone, just enough that I could glimpse the hint of an ivory bra. I looked away fast. A reflex.
"What do you need?" She smiled. Perfect white teeth. A headband pulling back blond hair that fell just below her ears. Incandescent green eyes.
"I need echinacea."
She nodded and started toward the aisle of dark little bottles. I followed her, my eyes (unavoidably) on her hips. Before I knew it, I was telling her about my months and months of physical unease, vague discomfort, premonitions in the night of profoundly ill health.
"Have you ever thought of seeing Carissa?"
"Carissa?"
"She's a homeopath. Her office is on the green."
"In the Octagon?"
"Yup. She's the one with the painted room."
"Paris?"
"Right."
"Usually I only think of the other lawyers in that building."
"Are you a lawyer, too?"
"I am."
"Cool," she said, and I shivered at the realization that this attractive young woman was clearly a college student. What was I thinking, giving her an extra five years? She couldn't be more than twenty! I'd been staring at the breasts and hips of a child! I'd been sharing my midlife night terrors with someone who was not merely fifteen years younger than I was, but who probably drank keg beer and slept happily in a bed the width of a desk blotter.
I told myself I had to get out more.
"I have her number," she said when I remained quiet, when I was still standing there absorbing the word cool.
"I'd like that," I said, and I watched her rip a small scrap from a brown paper bag and scribble a name and a phone number upon it. She handed the paper to me as solemnly as if it were a business card.
"Carissa Lake," I said, murmuring the woman's name aloud.
"Yup. Ol' Carissa."
"How old is ol' Carissa?"
"Oh, I don't know. I guess she's about your age. You know, mid-thirties. She's my aunt."
"Your aunt."
"Yup." After I had paid for the echinacea--as I was dropping the little bottle in one of the front pockets of my suit jacket--this much younger woman extended her hand and said, "My name is Whitney."
"I'm Leland."
"Say hi to Aunt Carissa for me."
"I will. For sure."
The next day I called Aunt Carissa, and I made an appointment for a consultation. And I was off, crossing the boundaries of conventional medicine.
Is this how it happens for everyone, is this how everyone finds their first homeopath? I couldn't say.
But it was clear that Carissa and I were destined to meet, it was clear our paths were going to cross. And it wasn't simply because Bartlett and East Bartlett are small towns in rural Vermont. I wish it were that simple. Almost three thousand people live in the village, and another eight hundred in the hills to the east. Like me, some of them work in Burlington, one of the few settlements in the state to grow into a city. I am never going to meet even a sixth of the people in the two Bartletts if I spend the entire rest of my life here.
No, if I had not met Carissa Lake because of some malaise or disease or real or imagined unease, I would have met her through the Chittenden County State's Attorneys Office. Had I not already met her--had there not been a somewhat obvious conflict of interest--I might have been the one assigned to her case. Expected to prosecute her.
It easily could have happened that way.
Imagine. Leland Fowler, chief deputy state's attorney, cross-examining Carissa Lake, Bartlett homeopath.
No, I can't imagine that. Even now. Even when I am awake in the middle of the night. Even when I think about what she did and what I did and the things I must someday explain to my
daughter. Even then, I cannot imagine the path to Carissa unfolding before me in any manner but the way that it did: Sniffles. Echinacea. A phone number on the scrap of a brown paper bag.
Chapter 2.
Number 84
The patient tells the history of his complaints....
The physician sees, hears, and observes with his other senses what is altered and peculiar in the patient.
He writes everything down exactly.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,
Organon of Medicine, 1842
.
Of the five senses, only smell goes first to the limbic system, the part of the brain, including the hippocampus, that seems to be involved with memory and emotion and self-preservation.
And so here are the aromas that conjure for me the beginning of the end: Lavender, because that was the oil she put into the diffuser. A match at the moment it's lit. And vanilla, because that was the fragrance of her body lotion, and we made love that morning when we were through burning the original notes.
Of these three, of course, it is the smell of a match that comes back to me most often. From late September through April, I am likely to have a fire burning in the woodstove throughout the weekend, and many weeknights when I return home from work.
Nevertheless, at least once a month I find myself wandering down to the Burlington waterfront and visiting a store there that sells essential oils. The proprietor knows me now, and the moment I walk in the door, she will prepare a small glass vial of peppermint oil for headache relief. It's all I ever buy from her.
But she is aware that I am drawn to the smell of lavender, too, though of course she doesn't know why. And so while we are chatting, she will pour a small puddle of lavender oil into a clay bowl that sits in a wrought-iron holder on a glass counter, and then light the burner beneath it.
And I will lose sight of this woman's face as she speaks, and the sound of her voice--more soothing than a massage--will become an ambient hum, curtained from me by the invisible mist made from hot oil.
I am still not sure whether the aroma is a punishment or a blessing. It probably doesn't matter. I am drawn to it, and to the memories that it triggers.
Sometimes, Carissa viewed her mural as a litmus test for new patients, a way of seeing how receptive they'd be to her work. Men, she knew, were more likely than women to have trouble with it when they'd first come to see her, and businessmen were especially likely to be dubious.
In her experience, if the mural made the patient a little edgy or uncomfortable, it usually meant that he was suspicious of the very premise of homeopathy, and unsure as to why he was there. Perhaps it was too great a leap from what he was used to. Perhaps it demanded too vast a willingness to accept the idea that everything he knew about medicine and healing might be wrong--or, at least, inappropriate. Clumsy. Unsuitable for some kinds of disease.
Often, she said, those doubters became believers. Like the CPA in the Octagon two floors below her. Or the Burlington developer, the fellow responsible for bringing chain stores the size of airplane hangars to the cow fields six and seven miles southeast of the city. And, certainly, Richard Emmons: advertising executive, asthmatic, and father of two.
But, equally often, Carissa saw people--frequently men who had come to her at the insistence of wives or lovers or friends--who remained absolutely unwilling to give what she did half a chance.
And that usually meant that even if they took the remedy, it didn't work. Or, if it did, they'd attribute their recovery or the abatement of their symptoms to something else. A conventional remedy, perhaps, or a change in their diet. Sometimes, they'd simply assume their bodies had healed themselves because the time was right.
When Carissa became wearied by the most profound skeptics, she'd wonder why she was even bothering to practice in Vermont at all, and she'd imagine how different her life would have been had she hung out her shingle in Paris.
After all, France--most of Europe, in fact--regards homeopathy as a commonplace alternative method for treating a disease. You walk down almost any street in Paris, and there's the perfectly square, blinking neon cross: the word Homeopathie above it, Herboristerie below it. There's the butcher, the baker, that store full of chocolates. There's the homeopathie.
They're just drugstores, of course, everyday pharmacies. But that's the beauty of it. They look just like any drugstore in America, except the packaging for the products we use all the time seems more elegant. Prettier. Especially the skin creams and lotions.
But then there is always that small cabinet beside the pharmacy counter where the homeopathic remedies are stored. The belladonna and the chamomile, the Rhus tox and the Ignatia. A few dozen little drawers, each one no more than two or three inches high, filled with the cures.
In France, you can even get them in the form of suppositories.
But Carissa didn't believe that she could have settled in Paris when she first started her practice. Her family lived in Vermont, the man she assumed she would marry lived in Vermont. All of her life she herself had lived in Vermont.
And she liked the state. She liked hiking the small hills in the summer and skiing the larger ones in the winter. And once her mural had been completed, she found that she liked the celebrity that went along with being a bit of an oddball in a small town: Mysterious. Esoteric. Exotic. But still, in the eyes of her neighbors who knew her, very talented.
That was, after all, what had drawn most of her friends and lovers and patients to her. She was good at what she did. And she was unique.
She was a native plant with some strangely foreign flowers.
I had no foreshadowings of upheaval when I met Carissa Lake the next to last day in November, no inklings that our relationship would become controversial. Problematic. Insane. If I felt anything when I first walked into Carissa's office and looked down from the stars on her ceiling to find her sitting comfortably before her computer, it was relief that I wasn't going to have to exchange my clothes for one of those open-backed little gowns that barely stretched to mid-thigh.
Briefly, when we'd first spoken on the phone to schedule an appointment, I'd feared that I would. "No gown?" I had asked, not at all pleased that this New Ager was going to expect me to sit around some examining room in the buff, but not exactly surprised. In my experience, people trekking down alternate paths had always been way too comfortable with their bodies, even when they had bodies like mine.
"Of course not. Why would I give you a gown?"
"Modesty, maybe?"
"You won't be taking your clothes off, Leland."
"Oh."
"I mean, I guess you could if it's important to you. But based on what you've told me so far, there doesn't seem to be any reason."
"Will you examine me?"
"Yes, absolutely."
Carissa had a professional woman's short hair--manageable and fast in the morning--just a shade closer to blond than brown. A round, girlish face. Eyeglasses that she'd slid to the top of her head like a hair band. She was wearing a V-neck sweater the night that we met, and when she swiveled in her chair to face me, I was immediately drawn to the creamy triangle of skin above the black cotton--no shirt between fabric and flesh. A thin gold chain hung like a smile against her collarbone.
With the mural of buildings behind her, it looked for a brief moment as if she was working on the balcony or the roof of a brownstone.
"Well," she said when she saw me. "Right on time."
I smiled, regretting that my recent enthusiasm for the health club had lasted at best a dozen visits. I wasn't fat as that winter approached, but I'd noticed when I shaved that my extra ten pounds were particularly gelatinous, and had a tendency to shimmy across my midsection whenever I swung my arm toward the sink to rinse my razor.
Carissa stood to greet me, and I realized she was almost as tall as I was, and I am close to six feet. Unlike my sister, Diana, however, there was nothing spindly or awkward about Carissa. She moved like water on slickrock.
"Wel
come," she said. "It's nice to meet you."
"Likewise."
She offered me herbal tea, and I declined, and then she suggested that I sit down on the couch beside one of the two large windows that faced west. The sun had long set--I'd come here after work, after a long day that included almost six hours in court--but I had a sense that she enjoyed wonderful sunsets.
"You know," I said as I sat, "I'd heard this room was a big painting of a cemetery."
"And you came anyway? You're a brave fellow."