The Delilah Complex

Two

The lights on the subway flickered off and then returned. In front of me someone gasped prematurely, as if expecting disaster.

“Boom! Boom! Boom!” A man shouted in the rear of the car.

We all turned but there was nothing to see. An irrational outburst from someone who had already disappeared into the crowd.

Since the terrorist attacks on the city in 2001, we looked out for the stranger among us who might spell danger. And since the killings I’d stumbled on to last summer, and the murderer who hid from me in plain sight, I no longer trusted my ability to identify a threat.

I used to suffer the hubris of thinking I could identify who was dangerous and who wasn’t, blindly enjoying the fallacy that, as a trained psychotherapist, symptoms would present themselves to me as long as I remained aware. But now I know that’s not true.

The genuine lunatic, the real psychotic, can fool me as well as you, so I have become ever more vigilant and ever less sure that I can protect those I love. Questions keep me awake at night: Will I be prepared when someone comes for me the next time? Or worse, if someone comes for my daughter, Dulcie?

Beside me, Dulcie sat oblivious to what I knew could catch us unawares. A pair of expensive headphones-a gift from her father-covered her ears, and her head bobbed to the soundtrack that was audible only to her. Silently, my lovely young daughter mouthed the lyrics to the score of “The Secret Garden,” because in four months, on January 5, she would stand on a Broadway stage and take on the role of Mary Lennox in a new production of the classic. Every day now on our way to and from the rehearsal studio on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan, she burned the nuances of the music into memory, working tirelessly on her part.

A thirteen-year-old girl should not have a job, not even if her talent has bloomed early and she has acting in her blood. But the price of stepping on my daughter’s dream wasn’t something I was willing to pay. And so, more intently than I surveyed the strangers on the train, more doggedly than I observed my patients, I watched my daughter. Carefully. Always monitoring. Maybe too closely sometimes. But if the anxiety or pressure of performing weighed on her too heavily, I wanted to be prepared to step in.

Since she had been chosen for the part back in June, Dulcie was thriving, doing better than she had at her private school where too many label-obsessed kids had goals no more complicated than getting the next Prada bag. The Bartlett School, even with its emphasis on the arts and its high number of scholarships, still had its share of kids with limitless gold credit cards and limos at the ready.

The train doors opened. A middle-aged businessman entered and sat in the seat on the other side of me, despite the empty seats across the aisle. I reached into my bag, pulled out a peppermint, unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth.

As I’m overly sensitive to smells, public places are sensory nightmares for me. I bit down. The intense flavor burned as the cool blue-green scent rose up and insulated me against any possible assault.

I felt his glance.

A dark-haired woman in narrow black slacks, a longsleeved white shirt and a black leather blazer, sitting next to her lithe thirteen-year-old daughter, who was wearing jeans, a pink T-shirt, a jeans jacket and a wristful of purple and light green beads, listening to a CD, was not a threat.

When I turned a minute later and he looked at me, I didn’t turn away. I don’t do that.

No, that’s not true. I look away from myself all too often, especially in the four months since my divorce. I ignore what is not in my life anymore and shy away from facing the one issue I spend my days helping other people deal with: sexuality. Dr. Morgan Snow, in denial. It isn’t something I’m proud of. But it is how I cope.

Once more the lights went out and the train came to a dead stop. It didn’t bother me, but I wasn’t certain about Dulcie. I didn’t have to search for my daughter’s hand. I just reached out, instinctively knowing where it would be, even in the dark.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Yeah. It’s kind of creepy, though. How long do you think we’re going to be stopped here?”

“Hopefully not long.” I squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back and then pulled away to switch on her CD player again.

The lights flickered on but the train still didn’t move.

Down the aisle, a man in a ripped jacket streaked with grime turned and ogled my daughter’s legs. Dulcie didn’t notice him, but I did and stared him down.

Why was his jacket dirty? What had broken his spirit? What had cracked his self-esteem?

Occupational hazard #1: Reading the body language of strangers. Like judging a book by its cover, it is tempting to make a diagnosis based on insufficient information.

A woman with downcast eyes opposite us kept flexing her fingers in a habitual way that suggested she was slightly compulsive. About what? It would take hours on my couch to find out, but I could guess at the darkness that bound her mind like barbed wire.

The lights went off again, suddenly, and we returned to stuffy blackness.

You will be on a dark street and he will jump out at you, his knife gleaming in the lamplight. Or you will be on the sidewalk below a fifty-floor office building and the noise will take you by surprise, as will the glass that rains down and slices your skin. There are so many possibilities of catastrophe that sometimes you do not know how you stay sane.

You manage because you have a child. You accomplish it because you still have hope, which, most therapists agree, is the hardest emotion to give up.

We started moving again and the lights came back on. Another five minutes passed and we were at the stop before ours.

“Hon.” I touched Dulcie’s hand.

Dulcie hit the stop button and turned, cornflower-blue eyes wide and waiting.

“Yeah?”

“Next stop.”

“Really?”

She was always surprised the rides between our apartment on the Upper East Side and the rehearsal studio in SoHo were over so quickly. As she listened to her music, her sense of time deserted her.

Peering out the slimy windows into the blackness, Dulcie looked for a marker, not trusting how much time had passed.

“Mom?” Her face was still focused on the hollow tunnel. “Did you get nervous when the lights went out?”

“A little. I bet a lot of people did.”

“Will I get that kind of nervous if I’m onstage and just forget the words? Will I get sick from it? What will being nervous do to me?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not a bad thing to feel anxiety. We can talk about how you can overcome the feeling and learn from it.”

My job wasn’t to protect this budding teenager from the darkness as much as it was to teach her how to find the switches so she could always turn on the lights.

But I would have preferred to protect her. To wrap her in my arms the same way I had when she was only months old, to keep her away from the open windows, from the cold and the poisons.