by M. J. Rose
Sarah came to see me the next morning and asked me for her files. Her eyes were bloodshot and there were deep circles underneath them. Her hands were shaking. She was wearing a wrinkled shirt and sweatpants—the first time I’d seen her in anything other than fabulous clothes. She was obviously in distress.
In the two years Sarah had been seeing me, she’d never suggested her husband was violent. She was not afraid of him. Actually, the opposite. She lived in fear that he would ignore her physically—deprive her of her fix. She felt raw and cheap after having sex with him. But she also felt alive. It was the only time she really did feel alive.
Their co-dependent relationship worked—until she discovered he was paying women to meet him in hotel rooms and do the same things she did to him in their bedroom.
That’s when she started seeing me.
I took the files out and sat with them in my lap. “Is this what you want, Sarah?”
She stared at them and started to weep. “No. I need you to keep them. I need you to keep them.”
I wasn’t surprised.
____________________________
“Your wife doesn’t want me to give you the files,” I told Michael the second time he came to my office.
“I don’t care what she wants.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but without Sarah’s permission, I can’t give them to you.”
“I paid for them. I paid for her to come here.”
“That’s not the issue.”
He stood up and once again walked behind me and over to my desk. Walked around behind it and sat down in my empty chair.
“Michael. I need you to sit on the couch, or I’ll have to end the session.”
I told Michael I had an alarm. A button on the floor I could step on that rings at the receptionist’s desk and at the police station.
“I’m guessing you don’t want me to bring the police here, do you?” I asked.
He picked up the silver-framed portrait of my daughter, which none of my patients could see from where they sat. I preferred not to share my personal life, but at the same time I liked having her there in the office with me.
He continued holding onto the frame. Looking down at Dulcie. It was a year-old photo. Taken when she’d just turned thirteen.
“Dulcie, isn’t it?” he asked. “Fourteen, right? That’s a lovely age. Poised at that stage where she’s still a girl, but with all the potential of adulthood, you know? All the… responsibilities.”
Hearing her name on his lips, a bubble of panic rose in my chest. How had he found out about her? I realized it would be a trivial matter for someone in his position to find out about me and my family. The thought was nauseating.
“She’s beautiful. Usually divorced parents of only children are overly protective. She must be so precious to you.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I could trust my voice.
“As those files are to me. You understand?”
“If you don’t leave my office right now,” I managed, “I’m going to have the police escort you out.”
“I’m going to have those files, Dr. Snow. The police won’t help you keep them from me. They’re worth a lot to me. How much are they worth to you? How much are you willing to sacrifice to try to keep them from me? Think about that.”
He smiled a horribly chilling smile, then turned and left.
I didn’t move. Not for five or ten minutes. Not until I could get my heart regulated again. He hadn’t really made a threat. He hadn’t said he would do anything. But I was certain that he was as determined as anyone I’d ever met.
And so I went home and made dinner for my daughter and watched her eat a piece of sautéed chicken with mushrooms and spinach and drink apple juice and then wolf down a piece of blueberry pie for dessert. I listened to her tell me about her day, and a test she’d aced, and a girlfriend she’d fought with, and what she’d read, and what she was worried about, and the whole time all I wanted to do was go to her and wrap my arms around her and magically make her tiny enough so I could carry her around and protect her from everything and everyone in the world who might ever want to harm her.
I didn’t give myself away. She had no idea how upset I was. I listened and asked questions and smiled and pretended everything was fine, that the carefully constructed world I’d created for our small family was under no threat at all.
Have you ever thought the thing you loved most in the world was at risk? It overwhelms every moment and poisons every thought.
I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t figure out what to do or who to ask because going to anyone was a breach of ethics. I was ashamed to find myself wishing Sarah had just given me permission to give Michael her files. And to find myself tempted to confide in Sarah, to ask her to let me give Michael her files. But I didn’t know how she’d react. And even if I did know, in asking I’d be putting my interests ahead of those of my patient. She’d already told me she didn’t want him to have the files. I thought about just destroying the files and telling Michael I’d done so, but I needed the files for Sarah’s treatment. Again, I couldn’t protect my interests by abusing hers.
And I couldn’t go to the police. Not even to Noah Jordan, the man I was seeing, who was a NYPD sex crimes detective. Yes, one word from me, and Noah would have Michael in cuffs and under investigation. But what would happen when the higher-ups intervened? When Noah couldn’t prove anything? What would Michael do then?
____________________________
I went to a jazz club for Noah’s performance that night. Playing out was, he always said, how he kept his soul intact. And he was damn good at the keyboard. In the lobby was a poster advertising an upcoming gig by an ex-patient. Midori.
I had thought of calling Midori earlier, but was stymied again by the thought of violating therapist/patient confidences, and of involving a client in my personal life. But while I sat by myself at the table, nursing a vodka and tonic, and listening to Noah make love to the keys, I couldn’t stop thinking about the things Midori had told me about the father of her son. And how of everyone, he might offer the solution to my dilemma.
“My son’s father is … dangerous,” Midori had told me after two months of therapy. After two months of never being able to articulate what was bothering her.
“How so?”
“He kills people.”
“Is he a … soldier?”
Her only answer was a single tear, which she wiped angrily away. For the rest of the session she was silent.
The following week I waited for her to come. I knew there was a strong possibility she wouldn’t. Sometimes avoidance wins.
But she did come. Her desire to engage with her life and her problems was greater than her fear.
“I want to tell you about my son’s father,” she said. “But please don’t ask me any specific questions.”
I agreed.
“I couldn’t keep my hands off him even though I knew every second I was with him was a mistake.”
She stopped talking for a moment. Closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.
“The men I was with before him … I look back, and they all seem so insipid. Even before I knew what he was, I think I sensed it. I sensed how dangerous he was, and … God, it turned me on. It still does, when I remember. He gets in my head and I can’t make it work with another man. What’s wrong with me?”
Once again she stopped.
“At some point he was some kind of covert soldier. Now he works on his own. An assassin, although he doesn’t use that word. He says he won’t hurt women or children—those are his rules.” She laughed bitterly. “As if what he does wasn’t hurting us.” Another laugh. “He works alone. Maybe because he prefers it that way—maybe because he’s paranoid. He doesn’t think he deserves anything. He expects to be left out and shunned—and when it happens, I think he’s secretly satisfied. Except something would happen to him in bed. It was as if as much as he wanted to punish himself, his life force was too strong. Some
part of him insisted on that one joy.”
Midori looked down at her hands—turned them over—searched for some solution written in her fingertips. Then she looked up at me. “I once stupidly told him if he ever gets out of that world, he could call me. But he won’t ever get out of it. I thought the baby would be enough, but no. You know what I think? I think he’s addicted to what he does. I think he likes it.”
The conversation came flooding back to me and I could barely wait to get to the office on Monday and call her. It was an awkward call—ending with me asking her to meet me for coffee anyplace convenient for her. She chose a patisserie near her apartment in Soho and was waiting for me when I got there.
“I want you to introduce me to your son’s father,” I said once the waiter had brought over our coffees.
She stared at me as though I was crazy. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I think the best thing would be to not tell you anything.”
“I haven’t talked to him in … years.”
“I know better than anyone what kind of favor I’m asking of you. I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.”
“If you wanted anything else, I’d do it. I owe you so much. You helped me regain my sanity, put my life in order. Be a better mother for my son. But …”
She was sitting still, but I sensed movement. I looked down and saw, under the table, her fingers playing her thigh.
Her discomfort was my fault. But I didn’t have any other choice. “If this was about me I’d never ask you to help me. But it’s not—it’s about … a child.”
Midori had once told me that she would do anything to protect her son. And though she hadn’t elaborated, I sensed she meant it literally.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “I’m not even sure I can reach him.”
____________________________
Two days later I got a text.
“Our mutual friend said you’d like to meet me. I can be at the Boat House in Central Park at 2 pm. Text me back and let me know if that works.”
On Wednesday I was there fifteen minutes early. It was a warm spring day and there were a fair number of people in the park. Walking, bike riding, rollerblading. Mothers with kids, nannies with their charges, dogs walking their owners and owners walking their dogs. There were dogwood and apple blossom trees in bloom, and I knew everything probably looked glorious. But I couldn’t see through the veil of anxiety.
“Dr. Snow?”
I turned and saw an Asian man, maybe fifty, dark hair turning steel gray at the temples. He was wearing jeans and a navy blazer, and though he wasn’t big, he looked extremely fit. There was something about him that was both still and watchful, though I couldn’t articulate exactly why he struck me that way. I didn’t feel the danger Midori had talked of. I did feel like he would be impossible to sneak up on.
“Yes.”
“I’m John Rain. Why don’t we take a walk?”
As we walked along the pathway that looped around the lake, I told him about my patient and the threat. I told him how scared I was and how desperate I was and why I couldn’t go to the police.
“Why don’t you just give him the files?” he said.
I told him about therapist/patient confidentiality. About how Sarah didn’t want her husband to have the files.
“And I can’t destroy them for the same reason,” I said. “I have to put my patients’ interests first.”
“First before your daughter’s?”
That hurt. I said, “I’m trying not to have to make that choice.”
We walked in silence for another moment. “There is another way,” he said.
“What?”
“This guy has told you in the clearest terms how much of a threat those files are to him, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then use them. Make a copy, give the copy to a trusted friend with clear instructions, and explain to the guy that if anything ever happens to you or your daughter, the files get released and the whole world learns of what he likes done to him in bed.”
“I couldn’t live with the uncertainty—with the waiting to see how he copes with that. I need to do something now and know it’s been handled.”
“You’re afraid he’d think it was a bluff? Because, from what you’ve told me, having the world know his proclivities is about this guy’s greatest fear.”
“He’s a master at manipulation. I don’t want to guess and wonder. I want it to end. Isn’t that what you do—bring things to an end?”
I was watching him as we walked. And he was watching me. For the first time in a long time, I felt as if someone were seeing more than I might have wanted him to. As if he were seeing a ruthlessness in me that I didn’t even know I had until that moment.
“Dr. Snow, it sounds like you’re asking me to kill someone.”
I didn’t know how to answer. I could only think of the way Michael had picked up the picture of Dulcie—about how much he’d found out about her—about how powerful he was.
“Am I mistaken?”
“I want the threat to go away.”
I was shaking. The words had come out of my mouth. They were mine. But what I was saying was horrific—even given the circumstances. Could I do this? Ask for this?
“Is that the only way for you to make the threat disappear?” I asked him.
A woman walked by then. Dark. Slight. About thirty. Lovely and sexy in a subtle way. Rain followed her with his eyes and I sensed—almost smelled—a response in him. Like an animal he reacted physically. He came awake.
The request forgotten for the moment, I observed Rain as if he were in my office. The conversation had aroused him.
He became aware of my observations.
“What?” he said.
“Talking about this—you’re excited by it, aren’t you? You want me to give you the charge. You want to take on my request… . It’s energizing you sexually.” I realized what I was doing. Shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Occupational hazard. I can’t seem to get away from wanting to help people reach insights about their psyches and psychology. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“I’m not. I’m intrigued.”
“Have you ever been in therapy?”
“An army psychiatrist had a go at me a long time ago.”
I shook my head.
“You’re good Dr. Snow,” Rain said. “I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but … yes. Maybe it is sexual.”
Suddenly, sadly, watching Rain respond to my analysis, I understood something about myself.
“I don’t think I can ask you to help,” I said.
“No?”
“I just realized how much I’d lose of myself if I were ever responsible for someone’s death. What I do is help people come alive. Help them realize their full potential as sexually, emotionally, intimate beings. I could never interfere with a life. Even for Dulcie’s sake.”
“I wish things could really be that simple.”
“What do you mean?” I asked
“When a soldier has to make a decision.Or a cop. Or a doctor. You might save one life, at the expense of another. You might save the wrong life, and sacrifice the wrong one, too.”
“You’re trained to make those decisions. I’m not. You’re taught how to cope with the results. I’m not.”
“Will that matter if you make the wrong decision here?”
“Have you ever made the wrong decision?” I was thinking about Midori and Rain’s son—even in this very private and secret conversation I couldn’t break the patient/doctor confidentiality code and refer to either of them unless he wanted to talk about it. And even then I’d have to tread carefully.
“My whole life is a wrong decision. One more one way or the other is a statistical rounding error. For you, it would be the whole game. But you still have to decide.”
“You want me to say yes. Everything in your body language is telling me that. I can feel your energy.”
“No.
I want you to answer honestly. With precision. And clarity. And you’re avoiding that, Doctor. And perhaps projecting, too.”
“I’m being who I am . . . ” I stopped. Thought about what I’d just said. Thought about Dulcie. About Michael. About his wife. About this man walking with me down a tree-lined path who no longer knew his own son. “I’m going to have to find another way.”
“Are you sure? I think you also want to feel what I’m feeling. What you think I’m feeling. Don’t you?”