"Really?"
"I mean, it's not contagious. But I did something Wednesday morning when we were together. It was stupid, but I did it."
"Go on."
"I found a vial of arsenic on your desk. And I took it."
"Do you mean you took it home? Or do you mean you ingested it?"
"The latter."
"How much?"
"All of it. Every single pill."
"A full bottle?"
"About half."
"Why?"
I shrugged, and for a moment I had a vision of one of my daughter's friends, a five-year-old boy I'd once caught peeing into her sandbox. "Why did you do that?" I'd asked him then, and he, too, had shrugged.
"It made sense when I did it," I began, and then I tried explaining what her remedy had done for me at first, and how I had felt. I told her how sure I had been that the remedy was harmless, how I'd managed to convince myself that each pill was as safe as a cough drop. I confessed that I'd been taking them one and two and even three at a time since Wednesday morning, viewing them in my head as a sort of homey-tranquilizer.
When I was done, she asked simply, "How do you feel?"
"Right this minute? Okay. A little weak, but okay. But I've had a very strange tingling in my fingers and hands, and my stomach's been a little off."
"Diarrhea?"
"A bit."
"Well. This might be one for the lecture circuit."
"Am I...sick?"
She pushed off my chest and looked at me. "It was homeopathic arsenic. Health-food store arsenic. Five dollars a vial. You're going to live."
"Have I poisoned myself?"
"A conventional doctor would tell you no. He'd tell you it's all in your head."
"Mind-body hokum?"
She nodded. "Or perhaps a virus. He might believe you'd caught a virus--coincidentally."
"What do you think?"
"I think you shouldn't be swiping arsenic."
"Can you help me?" I asked, and she patted my shoulders through my coat.
"No one can help you, Leland. You're hopeless. Absolutely and completely hopeless."
She did help me, of course. She made me drink glasses and glasses of water with lime juice in it, and then she gave me the homeopathic cure called Carbo vegetabilis: wood charcoal. Arsenic and charcoal, Hahnemann had observed, are antidotes of each other.
And then I took a shower and cleaned myself up while Carissa got Abby settled in the bedroom next to hers.
The next morning I was up at five-thirty, and Abby and I were gone fifteen minutes later. The two of us had breakfast together at the diner in town: Though it wasn't supposed to open until six A.M., the cook had mercy on the father and daughter who showed up at the front glass door a few minutes early.
"Can we have a sleepover at her house again someday?" Abby asked as the waitress, a woman old enough to be Abby's grandmother, brought us our pancakes.
"Did you have a slumber party at a friend's house?" the waitress asked her, smiling at the image, perhaps, of two little girls in a bed full of teddy bears.
"No, it was at my daddy's friend's house," Abby explained, and I looked out the window at the streetlights.
A few minutes after that, we went home.
By mid-morning, the sugar from the maple syrup had worked its way through Abby's system, and we each decided we'd take a nap until lunch. We'd been up early.
By then, I guessed, Carissa and Whitney had almost reached Albany. Perhaps they were already heading west on I-90.
I think, looking back, that I had come a long way since the night before at the Woodsons'. I think I'd managed to convince myself that Carissa really was planning to return.
Chapter 21.
Number 17
It is possible to create a very grave disease by acting on the vital principle through the power of imagination and to cure it in the same way.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,
Organon of Medicine, 1842
.
Early Sunday afternoon, Abby sat forward on the living-room floor and picked a Candy Land card from the pile.
"I hope I get a person," she said, and she allowed herself a small squeal when she saw she had chosen Queen Frostine, the confectionery monarch. This bit of good fortune was going to place her at least fifteen spaces ahead of me.
I gazed at the Christmas tree behind her. I hadn't remembered to water it in days, but it still looked pretty good. Granted, it was drenched in afternoon sun. But it was still hanging on to its needles as if it were standing in the woods in the middle of April, its roots sopping up the last of the snow while its branches stretched high into that long-awaited spring sky.
We put the pillows from the couch right there, I remembered as I looked at the spot on the rug where Carissa and I had made love Christmas Eve. There's the branch where she hung her eyeglasses. And there's the star Abby made. The Sunday-school star. Her first. And here's where I tossed Carissa's panties when I finally pulled them over her hips and down those long and wondrous legs.
"Your turn, Daddy."
"It looks like I have a lot of catching up to do," I said.
"You sure do," she giggled.
I sipped my coffee, inhaling the aroma deep through my nose as I brought the mug to my lips. It was high-test, dark brown pond water that tasted delicious. It was, I realized, the first coffee I'd had in close to a month.
"Well, that doesn't do me much good, does it?" I said when I saw my card was going to move me forward exactly one space, and I tossed it onto the game board in mock aggravation.
"I think I'm going to win," Abby said.
"I think you are."
I stretched my legs and wiggled my toes in my socks. Still no tingles. And none in the palms of my hands. They'd been gone now more than a day.
"Two reds," she said, and moved even closer to reaching the Kandy King in the Candy Castle.
I glanced at my watch: It was close to one o'clock. Any moment now, Abby's friend Greta and Greta's mom would be stopping by to pick Abby up. The two girls were going to another little friend's birthday party at the sort of indoor family entertainment center in which the acoustics and the video games and the token-fed race cars all conspire to trample the hair cells in the human ear, and guarantee a noise-induced hearing loss by the first grade.
While she was at the party, I planned on visiting Richard and Jennifer Emmons at the hospital. On my way home, I'd drive by Carissa's house. With any luck, I'd see her car was back in the driveway.
I reached for a card and showed it to Abby. She practically howled with laughter when she saw it was Plumpy the Troll and I would have to return almost all the way back to square one.
It was after two by the time I got to the hospital, and the winter sun was already falling toward the Adirondacks. As I walked from the parking garage to the main entrance, I experienced what any other day I might have called a mere shift in the weather. A storm was coming. Or a warm front and a thaw. But not that moment. That moment when I felt the world around me fill with moist and mild eddies of air, I didn't think weather. I thought Richard. I took as deep a breath as I could--Be happy in heaven...--and imagined Jennifer was beside her husband when the whoosh of air that was Richard began its ascent from its shell.
I hoped I wasn't wrong about Jennifer. For a moment I feared she might have stepped away to get a bite to eat. Maybe she was downstairs in the hospital cafeteria when Richard had died, and he'd passed away with only an ICU resident or nurse for company. It was possible.
But I decided it wasn't likely. Jennifer was diligent about her vigil. She would be there when he died.
Moreover, people, whenever they could, died with a decency that was angelic. They waited. Even Elizabeth had managed to hang on until I'd been notified of the accident--no easy task since I'd been at a deposition across the lake in Plattsburgh--and had returned across the water to Burlington. I hadn't been in the room with her when she'd died, of course, since she'd died on an operating room table.
But I had been at the hospital. This hospital. I'd sat for over ninety minutes in a chair with an orange Naugahyde seat, standing every so often to make a phone call:
"Hi, Kelly? It's Leland. Elizabeth won't be getting Abby today, and I think I'm going to be a bit late...."
No, if Jennifer had for some reason stepped away, then Richard was still hanging by a thread somewhere inside a torso and limbs that by Friday had forgotten how to respond to a knuckle or prod.
When I reached the entrance, I stepped through the automatic doors and into the hospital lobby. I passed the reception desk and the gift shop, the rest rooms and the long corridors to the mysterious places I hoped I'd never visit. I passed the cafeteria, and I was relieved that Jennifer was not there among the clusters of squat tables.
When I got to the elevator bank I was the only one waiting, and I rode the elevator to the fourth floor alone.
I saw instantly that I'd been right: The swirl I'd felt outside had been Richard. I couldn't see Richard himself, but I could tell by the crowd in the room, and by the fact that the nurses were keeping their distance behind the counter that formed the ICU's station.
"You were here Friday afternoon, weren't you?" asked one of the nurses, a fellow with an immaculate blond mustache and tiny glasses that didn't hide the inky circles under his eyes.
"I guess you were, too," I said.
"You related?" he asked, and motioned toward the cubicle in which Richard's family had gathered. Jennifer was sitting up on the bed, her hands in fists against her mouth, a tissue balled up in one. A girl barely a teen and a boy even younger stood with their backs against the wall with the window facing north. Two other adults were clinging to each other like a couple: No doubt the woman was Bonnie, Jennifer's sister, and the fellow was her brother-in-law.
Only the teen girl--Kate, I believed, was her name--was crying. Her shoulders were bobbing against the glass.
"No. Not related."
"Friend?"
"Neighbor."
"The family's been great. I see a lot of families just go fucking nuts when they have to go through this--Forgive me, I was supposed to be off today, and it's been a long shift."
"Jennifer's very strong."
I gazed at the cubicles on either side of Richard's, and at the rows of glass rooms that extended in a line along the wall. The very old in them probably would die. But what of the ones Richard's age? Were they likely to get better, move to an HMO-sanctioned hospital double, and then go home? Or were the odds against them, too, once they wound up in here? Unlike the surgical ICU one floor below, the people here had not just endured major surgery--coronary bypasses and organ transplants, colostomies and hip replacements; they'd come here because their bodies were tanking and there wasn't a damn thing surgery could do. It was stopgap medicine: Intensive, most certainly, but it wasn't the knife that had brought them together. Rather, it was the litany of ways the body can fail on its own, or be felled by the world through which it moves: Cancer in some cases. Car accidents in others. Cashews in at least one.
"You want me to give her a signal you're here?" the nurse asked me.
"Thank you, but you don't have to. I'll wander over in a couple of minutes," I said.
"Sure."
"Richard never had a chance, did he?"
The nurse was picking up a clipboard, and he bounced it softly along the counter while he thought about his response.
"He did, maybe," he said finally. "Slim, of course. But maybe if there'd been a way to prevent herniation..."
"Herniation?"
"Swelling. The brain doesn't have a lot of room to move when it starts to swell."
I nodded. I tried to push from my own mind an image of the brain trying to press through the cracks in the skull, failing, and then oozing like Jell-O through the base.
"So, you live near them?" the fellow asked.
"I do."
"I like Bartlett. East Bartlett, actually. You know, up in the hills? I really don't get to the village much. But I love to go cross-country skiing up in those hills."
"That's where I live--East Bartlett. Up in those hills."
I saw Jennifer glance at the nursing station. Wide blue eyes with a good dose of red. Clearly she was surprised to see me, and for a long moment we stared at each other.
We're two people from the mountains who didn't really know each other back in Bartlett, I thought. But here in this foreign country? This depressing world of ventilators and monitors and tubes, which isn't at all like back home? How wonderful it is to see a friend's face! To run into each other...here!
I started toward the room and saw everyone else in the cubicle note my imminent presence at once. None of them had the slightest clue who I was, and only Kate--though sniffling and wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater--seemed to have observed that her mother knew this strange man in the navy blue overcoat. And so she went to Jennifer, pushing her way between her aunt and her uncle, and then stood beside her mother on the side of the thin bed closest to the door.
"I'm sorry," I murmured when I was inside the glass sarcophagus with them, and Jennifer surprised me by nodding and standing, and wrapping her arms around my back as I embraced her. No pugilist's pose this time: no fingers in fists, no arms curled in defense. Her fingers on my spine gave me the chills, despite the buffer of a wool coat, a sweater, and a turtleneck shirt.
"Thank you," she said, and I knew exactly what she meant.
"Shhhhh," I whispered as softly as I could, rocking her just the tiniest bit. "Shhhhh."
I looked over her shoulder at Richard and found myself marveling at how much he had changed since Friday. He was no longer merely a small, sleeping man with a silver circle embedded into his forehead. His skin had gone from pale to the gray of cigarette ash, and his face had fallen slack. I knew from my own parents' deaths that the transformation had occurred almost instantly, with silent but seismic force: One minute he was dozing, the next he was dead.
I decided he had probably been handsome before this happened, and he might be again if they would only remove that metal disk and replace the hair that had been shaved from the sides of his skull.
Surely they'd make him handsome, more or less, for the funeral.
When we pulled apart, Jennifer turned to her family and addressed her children by name. "Kate, Timmy: This is Leland Fowler. He's a member of the church we go to sometimes, and he's a lawyer for--what is your title? I just realized, I don't even know...."
"Chief deputy state's attorney for Chittenden County. I'm a prosecutor," I said, trying to direct my answer to everyone in the room.
The children looked at me suspiciously, but it was clear instantly that Bonnie and her husband were pleased I was there. In their eyes, I realized, I was suddenly both an emissary from the local country parish and the legal equivalent of the cavalry.
Bonnie's husband extended his hand to me across the bed--over Richard's bare knees--and said, "Hank Marshall. This is my wife, Bonnie."
I noticed as I shook Hank's hand that a respirator mask no longer covered Richard's mouth and nose, and the machine had been shut off. I wondered when Jennifer had given them permission to pull the plug. Had it been as recently as when I was playing Candy Land with Abby? When I was driving here in my truck? It had probably been before that. She'd had plenty of time over the last two or three days to decide what to do when this eventuality came.
I watched her sit back down on the bed beside her husband and take one of his hands in hers. She stroked his palm with her fingers and stared into his face.
"You want some more time alone with him, Jen?" Bonnie asked quietly.
Jennifer looked up at the people around the bed and then focused on her sister. Her lips were curled into her teeth, and she nodded.
I chatted with Hank and Bonnie Marshall for a few minutes in the waiting room and learned the details of Richard's last hours. He had passed away no more than fifteen minutes before I arrived, but he had been brain-dead since early morning. Jenn
ifer had not seemed surprised when she was told, and she'd remained calm for the children.
Someone had left the double doors into the ICU open, and I could see a corner of the nurses' station. When I saw the nurse with the massive circles under his eyes glancing toward Richard's room, it dawned on me that Jennifer might emerge at any moment. After all, she'd been saying good-bye to Richard for days now, and perhaps needed only a few minutes more once the body had grown cold.
What had I said, I wondered, to the surgeon who told me that Elizabeth had died? And then I remembered: The surgeon didn't say a thing. Technically he didn't say a word. The fellow just pushed through the double doors into the room where I was sitting and shook his head. No, she didn't make it, he meant. She didn't make it, she's gone.