Free Delusion by G. H. Ephron

heroic.
    â€œFor him to cut her down, just when …” His voice broke. “Just when …” He shuddered and sat back. “I should have protected her.” His voice turned derisive. “I was a fool. It was pure hubris on my part. I wanted to save her. She came to me, and I failed her.”
    I wanted to save her . His words jumped out at me. Here was emotion more intense than the kind of countertransference I would have expected from a relationship that had lasted six months, even if he had been seeing her twice a week. It made me wonder. It had been awfully easy for Teitlebaum to skate over the border of patient-therapist confidentiality. Why not skate over the intimacy boundary as well? Or was Nick Babikian’s paranoia rubbing off on me?
    Despite the sympathy I felt for Teitlebaum, for his apparently sincere concern and anguish over what had happened, I pulled away. I wanted to come right out and ask, Were you having an affair with your patient?
    Instead I asked, “Did you think she was going to leave her husband?”
    â€œShe didn’t say so,” he said, looking away. It felt like an evasion.
    â€œDid you think she was having an affair?” I asked, pressing the point.

    The look he gave me said I’d crossed the line. “I can’t answer that,” he said and closed up. This line of questioning had come to a dead end, but why? He’d readily violated other boundaries.
    â€œShe liked nursing?” I asked, moving to safer ground.
    He answered this readily. “Loved it. The first time I saw her get truly animated about anything was when she talked about delivering babies.”
    I remembered the rows of just-born snapshots on Lisa Babikian’s refrigerator. “And yet they had no children of their own?”
    â€œ His choice.”
    â€œNick says Lisa didn’t want children either.”
    He gave me a look that said, and you swallowed that? “She went along with it. Just like she went along with pretty much whatever he wanted. She was afraid to argue, to express herself.”
    â€œYou think Nick Babikian was capable of killing his wife?” I asked.
    Teitlebaum’s face collapsed. “God help me.” He stared down at his clenched fists. “His progressive preoccupation with his wife’s whereabouts, the loosening links between his thoughts and reality—I didn’t admit it to myself, but I knew.”

7
    THE NEXT day was a gorgeous New England spring day, a blip between the freeze-dry of winter and the hot-steam of summer. If you blinked, you’d miss it.
    The grass on the rolling grounds of the Pearce Psychiatric Institute was threadbare. The road through was still gritty with sand as it wound past the brick buildings, some with Dutch gables, others with ornate French flourishes, still others encrusted with Victorian gingerbread. Even back at the turn of the century, design must have been by committee. A splash of red and yellow tulips at the back of the Neuropsychiatric Unit was a reassuring sign that months of drear had indeed ended.
    I let myself in and hurried down the hall past our conference room. No one was there yet. I had time to pour myself coffee and check my mail.
    My colleague and best friend, Dr. Kwan Liu, was blocking the entrance to the tiny room behind the nurses’ station. Gloria Alspag, the nurse who really runs the place, was inside peering
at a clipping someone had tacked up on the bulletin board. I should have expected it. Someone, probably Kwan, had pinned up the article and picture of me from the newspaper.
    As she read, Gloria pulled a few dead leaves from Audrey, the philodendron she’d nurtured from a sprout. It had wound its way around the bulletin board and was reaching for the window.
    Gloria was one of those people who look unimposing—not too tall, glasses, short straight hair that she’s always running her fingers through but never tossing. But unimposing she was