Free Silent Victim by C. E. Lawrence

There was no one else in the waiting room when he arrived, and he sat listening to the murmur of voices coming from the rooms around him. Dr. Williams’s office was on the fifth floor of a medical building and shared a waiting room with two other therapists. On the left was the office of a short, dapper man with spectacles and a goatee who could have been the young Freud himself. In the office to the right was a tall, willowy woman, an Upper West Side type with long silver-gray hair and owlish glasses. Lee found these women intriguing: they seemed to eschew conventional notions of fashion and beauty, and yet they had a natural quality and style that was its own kind of beauty.
    Dr. Williams’s door opened, and Lee’s heart contracted. His throat felt dry and lumpy. He heard her familiar low, soothing voice, and then a male voice. Moments later a thin, intense-looking young man emerged from the office. He averted his eyes as he passed, focusing on the floor ahead of him. Lee had noticed, there was an elevated need for privacy in therapists’ offices. People who might smile and make friendly eye contact in say, a dentist’s office, studiously avoided noticing one another. He wondered if it was some vestigial feelings of shame or embarrassment, or perhaps the need to protect the tender ego, which could undergo quite a shredding process during the course of treatment. He knew this not only from his own experience, but from years of private practice as a therapist. It was a terrifying and wrenching journey, and sometimes it felt—as it did today—nearly unendurable.
    Dr. Williams stepped out into the corridor and beckoned to him. She was a very tall, elegant black woman with long limbs and a handsome, fine-featured face. Today she wore a long black skirt decorated with African motifs in earth tones, a yellow silk blouse under a short rust-colored jacket. He felt as though he could weep at the sight of her, but he just nodded meekly and followed her inside. She settled herself in her usual spot, a tall, ergonomic leather swivel chair, her back to the window. Lee sat opposite her, in a similar black leather chair with a matching footrest.
    Dr. Georgina Williams had the most amazingly steady energy of anyone he had ever known. Of course, it was always possible he was projecting onto her the ideal personality for a therapist. They even joked about how he sometimes called her Yoda, but she really did seem to possess the perfect combination of calmness and intuition. She never pressed him with unwanted insights, and had an uncanny ability to come up with the perfect metaphor or key question most of the time.
    The room was decorated in a style both comforting and relaxing. The walls were painted in earth tones, the lighting was muted, the prints on the wall were tasteful but not disturbing—a Monet haystack, a Matisse still life of a goldfish bowl, and a colorful Klee in cheerful primary colors. There were also a couple of original landscape paintings that looked to be Hudson Valley scenes. The bookshelf in the back of the room contained mostly works on psychology—classics by Jung, Freud, R. D. Laing, and Alice Miller, among others. There was also a small collection of poetry, in particular a book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Wooden sculptures of African masks served as decorative bookends.
    As always, she looked alert but relaxed. On the table next to her chair was a blue vase with white lilies of some kind.
    “So,” she said, studying him, “you’re not doing well today.”
    “No,” he replied. “I had … an episode.”
    “A bad one?”
    “Pretty bad, yeah.” “How do you feel now?”
    “Better, now that I’m here. But I always feel better here.” “You feel safe here.”
    “Yeah.”
    He looked at the potted palm in the corner next to her—was it his imagination or had it grown rapidly in the last few weeks? It suddenly looked much larger.
    “But not out there,” she said.
    “No. Not out there.”
    She