The Law of Similars by Chris Bohjalian

Author:Chris Bohjalian [Bohjalian, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3296-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1999-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

When Carissa went upstairs to get dressed a little later, I sat with her cat in my lap and tried to imagine how people would see what had occurred the day before last at the health-food store. A lot would depend upon whether homeopaths were regulated in Vermont. Or psychologists. After all, she was a psychologist, too. Still, no two attorneys would probably view what had happened in exactly the same way.

Some would simply decide Richard Emmons was an idiot who mistook an offhand remark—a joke, for crying out loud—for medical advice. They’d view Emmons as an adult who was fully capable of making his own choices, and it was his decision—and his decision alone—to buy nuts that he knew he was allergic to and then eat them. Even if he had bought them because Carissa had suggested the idea, he was completely free to ignore her advice. Just like someone with arthritis could choose to wear a copper bracelet around her wrist…or not. Or someone else could go to bed wearing cold wet socks under dry wool socks because a naturopath had recommended it as a way to relieve sinus pressure from a cold. Or not.

And if homeopaths weren’t regulated, then she wasn’t even a professional giving bad advice; she was merely a neighbor giving bad advice. A quack he ran into at the health-food store. Richard was free to disregard anything that she said.

Others, however, would see Carissa as a professional and Richard as her patient. Granted, in their eyes she might also be the sort of holistic shaman who shouldn’t be allowed to dispense even garlic or honey, but she was still treating Richard. He was still her charge, and her advice therefore carried enormous weight: She had a duty to answer his questions responsibly. If she had given him the impression, no matter how inadvertently, that cashews wouldn’t hurt him, his coma—his death by now, for all I knew—was her fault. If she’d said he should eat a nut that she knew he was allergic to, then she’d have to pay for this tragedy.

Oh, God, I thought, pay. Until that moment, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of a civil suit, too. Clearly, however, this could be the bloody mother lode for some ambulance chaser.

And so exactly how Carissa had formed her opinion—the way that she’d said it—would be a factor in what everyone thought. What was it she believed that she’d said?

They’re from the same plant family as your remedy.

And then he’d said he was allergic to cashews.

And she’d said she knew that. He’d told her.

Then they had talked about what was in his remedy, the one that he’d taken already. That thing called Rhus tox.

She’d explained to Richard it was poison ivy.

At first, it seemed, he hadn’t believed her. Had he really and truly eaten poison ivy? he’d asked. He was allergic to poison ivy, too, and not like most people were. He was really allergic to it!

And she’d told him he had. Homeopathically, of course.

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