Touch Read online

  Touch

  By

  MJ Knight

  Copyright © 2014

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For questions and comments about this book, please contact us at [email protected]

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  Dr. Lange’s Diary

  I fired a patient today and it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. Tamara M. and I have not been able to make any sort of meaningful progress for the last year. I fear she is not being truthful with me which makes treatment impossible.

  Initially I felt that we could make progress similar to that which I have made with Julianne T. Tamara and Julianne have similar issues, both having been sexually abused as children. Julianne has made good progress over the last two years, fighting her haphephobia. In the past she had feared the touch of men to the point where it had become debilitating.

  Julianne now speaks of her phobia as if she understands that it is both treatable and curable, while Tamara and I go over the same territory in session after session. Early in our professional relationship I told her that she needed to get all of these thoughts and feelings out, and we had some very productive sessions as a result. But now, a year later, she is still venting rather than assimilating her experiences and moving past them. It seemed to me that she was talking not to rid herself of her feelings of anger and betrayal, but because they have become the mode by which she defines herself, presenting herself to the world as Abuse Victim. I have tried to explain that so long as she defines herself as a victim, the world will treat her as one, but she doesn’t seem to understand. I am not doing my job with her.

  I have given Tamara a short list of therapists who I think will suit her better than I. She was shocked when I raised the subject and accused me of betraying her trust. I tried to explain to her that sometimes caring for others isn’t about doing the work yourself, but about finding someone who can do it better than you can. I told her, “That’s why you’re in therapy, Tamara. You are not able to do these things for yourself.” When she left she was still angry.

  At times I feel quite useless and wonder why I ever thought that becoming a therapist would be a good idea. On a purely pragmatic level, I’m not unhappy to have that last appointment open on Friday afternoon. It’s one more hour in which I can decompress after weeks which are often difficult and disturbing.

  Chapter One

  It was a big day for Julianne. She had finished a job, and after a lot of thought and much hesitation, she decided that she would take the work to the client herself instead of sending it by a messenger. The client was downtown and Julianne would have to take public transportation to get there.

  The realization of that had nearly made her change her mind. The panic, the shortness of breath, the way her monster whispered to her about how many men she might have to have long-term contact with as she traveled, sitting arm-to-arm or thigh-to-thigh; standing with bodies pressed against all sides. The ideas began to prey on her mind until she was on the verge of not going. But she had promised herself she would and she knew how important it was to keep her promises.

  As a compromise she decided she would take a cab one way and then see how she felt about getting home on the bus. She did that when she went to her therapist, took a cab one way and then decided whether she would cab home or take a more public mode of transport. Since she’d moved into her own apartment and her father or mother had stopped taking her to her appointments she had taken cabs both ways every week, but she felt she was coming closer to being able to step onto a bus, find a seat, and ride peacefully back to her apartment building without getting the shakes or fleeing the bus in a blind panic. When she could see herself do it, imagine it from door to door, she would be ready for the bus ride.

  Other than the transportation issue, her plan had been well thought out. She had never been to her client’s office, but had mapped out a route, had looked at photos of the building, knew what it was she’d be seeing. It was in a downtown high rise, a challenge certainly, with all of those people so close. But she told herself that the men wouldn’t even notice her. They were there for business, not for her.

  She had never actually met her client who seemed like a nice enough older man. But the problem was that he was the wrong age. He was about the age Uncle Gerald had been when... when...

  She still couldn’t easily frame the words in spite of practicing with her therapist.

  “I was seven when Uncle Gerald r—ra—” she would start to suck air, her chest heaving like a bellows.

  “Just stop for a moment, Julianne. Just breathe. Breathe more deeply, the oxygen will help calm you.”

  She trusted what Dr. Lange told her. Dr. Lange had never lied to her or pushed her too hard, or told her that it was all in her head.

  “My client is the same age Gerald had been when he molested Julianne.” Sometimes speaking of herself in the third person helped. She got the words out. They didn’t kill her. Her monster sulked in a corner of her mind.

  “Does he resemble your uncle?”

  “No, not at all,” she replied, feeling an enormous release of tension. Uncle Gerald was a big man, tall, husky, with thinning dark hair. Mr. Westin was small, almost elf-like, with a shock of pure white hair, and eyes that expressed joy even via the computer. “He’s nothing like my uncle.”

  She thought she probably couldn’t shake Mr. Westin’s hand, but she was going to walk into his office, smile and put her portfolio on his desk. She was going to deliver a job she was proud of to a man who had been both kind and patient in their dealings, understanding that Julianne was, well, a little different, a little wounded and hesitant.

  Once when they were Skyping to talk about the work she was doing, she caught sight of a photo on his desk, a photo of a young girl. Her hands began to shake, her voice tightened and in spite of her efforts not to show any reaction at all, her client heard and asked her if she was all right.

  “I—will be—fine,” she managed. And a few moments later when she could speak normally again, she said, “Who’s the little girl in the photo?”

  “That’s my granddaughter, Lisa. She lives in Germany with her parents. Her father is i
n the military. I’m very proud of her.”

  “She’s lovely.”

  He nodded and smiled in the sweet way of a doting grandparent.

  The monster told her it was something else. She told it to shut up. She wanted to like Mr. Westin, but more than that, she wanted to stop thinking of all older men as child molesters.

  Her cab arrived and she settled comfortably in the back seat, separated from the driver by a bulletproof panel. When she paid him, she dropped the money onto the seat and pretended it was accidental. “Oh, I’m sorry. But keep the change,” she said and fled the cab.

  With her portfolio held like a shield, Julianne waited in the lobby of Mr. Westin’s offices. It was a warm, friendly space filled with good art that made her happy. She was happy she’d decided to do this.

  “Ms. Taylor, I’m surprised to see you, but you are most welcome.”

  “I thought it was a good day to get out.”

  Mr. Westin nodded. “May is a lovely month here in Chicago. Please come into my office. I’m anxious to see what you’ve brought me.”

  She laid the portfolio on his big mahogany desk, opened it and stepped back, grateful that he didn’t crowd her. When she was clear of the desk, he stepped up and looked through her work.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is exactly what I’m looking for. Very good. Can you do more?”

  A little thrill ran through her. “As many as you need.” She needed the money, but more than that, she had promised herself that if he asked for more work, she would shake his hand before she left the building. It was a promise she’d made to herself and now she had to do it. The prospect both terrified her and made her feel elated because it was as if the universe was giving her not just the opportunity to earn more money, but to take another step forward.

  They spoke for nearly half an hour, Westin explaining what he needed and Julianne making notes, sketching a little. She knew she could do this, could see his project through to a mutually satisfying ending.

  “I look forward to doing the work, Mr. Westin. I’ll let you know when I have some preliminaries.”

  “Very good.” He glanced at his watch. “And now I’m afraid I have a meeting.”

  She held out her hand. He was taken aback, she could see it, but he recovered smoothly. Took her hand and shook it with a gentle firmness, then released it. Six seconds from gesture to finish. She’d felt every one of them ticking off. “It’s been lovely meeting you at long last,” he said.

  “I... Yes. Thank you. I’ll call you.” She grabbed her empty portfolio and almost sprinted out of the office.

  But she wasn’t shaking, she wasn’t sweating, she wasn’t dizzy with fear. She had shaken a man’s hand and come through it in good shape. She really had done it.

  Julianne was so elated that she went into the coffee shop in the lobby of the building and ordered herself a big, frothy, cold coffee drink, and when her fingers touched the fingers of the dreadlocked barista ever so slightly, she neither flinched nor jerked her hand away. It was okay. She was okay. She was proud of herself for pushing the monster back into his hidey place.

  And then she stepped onto the sidewalk and the crowds were coming at her so fast. Men in suits, men looking at her, men thinking god-knows-what as they passed much too close.

  “TAXI!” she shouted, and a cab swerved through two lanes of traffic to pull up at the curb. She hopped in and gave her address.

  Next time she’d take the bus. Next time for sure.

  Chapter Two

  “I remember the look on her face so clearly,” Adrian said. He was staring into the middle distance, seeing his mother again, watching her as she read the letter from his school. “I can even see the suit she was wearing, one of those man-tailored numbers that were so popular back then. She looked at me like I was a bug that needed squashing. Please don’t ask me how that made me feel. I think you already know.”

  The ghost of a smile crossed Dr. Lange’s face. “I don’t ask that for myself, Adrian, I ask it because I believe that verbalizing your feelings about a situation is an excellent early step.”

  “I felt like a bug.” He closed his eyes to block out the image. “The thing is, I’d never been in trouble before. I was a good kid until the day I got into that fight. But she looked at me as if I’d been a constant trial since the day I was born. I don’t know why she had me, I really don’t. She had no use for me or for my father. She dumped him not long after I was born.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  Adrian’s smile was bleak. “Maybe he wasn’t worth keeping, I don’t know. I never actually met him.”

  “You’ve never considered meeting him?”

  “Not really. When she left him he basically left me, and all I know is what she’s said about him, which isn’t complimentary. You can imagine. And she calls him “Your father” like she had other kids with different fathers. Your father. As if he was in no way connected to her.”

  “Let’s get back to the day the letter came. What did she say?”

  “Nothing. That was the creepy part. She didn’t talk to me about it. But by the next day my clothes were packed and I was on my way to boarding school.” He could still feel the fear and confusion.

  “How long were you in school there?”

  “Ten years.”

  “And did your relationship with your mother change because of that?”

  “Because of my absence? No, I doubt she noticed it. She never visited, called or wrote. I spent Christmas at school and summers... sometimes at school, sometimes at camp, sometimes I went home but she was rarely there. If I said fifty words a year to my mother I’d be surprised.”

  “I recall that you implied that your school years were quite positive. Am I correct?”

  “They became positive. The first year was hell. I was bullied, I was a trouble-maker, I considered suicide at one point.”

  “What changed?”

  “I met Carolyn. Ms. Weisz. She taught art which even at that age was important to me. One day in her class I threw paint all over one of the boys who was tormenting me and she pulled me out of class and told me to sit outside and not move a muscle or she’d know. I actually believe she would have; she was kind of scary like that.”

  “And what happened?” Lange asked.

  “She came out after class and said “Come with me” and she took me to a room filled with plaster casts of famous statues. The older students, the ones who wanted to pursue art in a more serious way, drew them because live models were frowned upon by the parents and the administration. “No naked people in front of our boys!”

  Lange chuckled.

  “She told me I was going to have to dust all of them. I told her that the fight wasn’t my fault, and she said she knew that, she’d been watching, and she’d made the other boy clean up the mess. But for her, the important thing was seeing that I lacked the discipline to ignore the other boy’s pettiness and teasing. I told her she should try it sometime, and she told me that one day she’d tell me the story of her life, but until that day I was going to dust the statues.”

  “And?”

  “And I dusted them. She came back and told me I’d done a good job, then handed me a drawing pad and a pencil and told me to draw them from memory.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if I’d paid any attention to them or whether I’d spent the whole time thinking about the other boy and our fight, and how I was going to get even.”

  “I’m going to guess you couldn’t do it.”

  “I couldn’t even remember what they looked like,” Adrian admitted with a laugh. “I couldn’t remember how many there were or what the subject matter was. She didn’t explain right off, just took the pad back and told me to come in the next day and dust the statues. I did, and I memorized them, but that day she didn’t ask me to draw. She made me come in every day but it was a week before she handed me the pad again.”

  “What an interesting process.”

  For a minu
te or two Adrian lost himself in those memories. He’d been angry and frustrated, he’d tried to second guess Ms. Weisz and failed. And finally he started to understand what it was she was doing. “She was teaching me focus and discipline. I learned to concentrate, I learned to look at those casts, I learned to see with my hands as well as my eyes. And one day I did some good sketches.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  He took a deep breath. “For the first time in my entire life I felt as if I was worth something.”

  The session had started badly with Adrian in a terrible mood. Thinking about his mother always put him in a terrible mood. But by the end of the hour, he felt as if he had shaken off the oppressive memories. Thinking about Carolyn usually made him feel good, and talking about her influence on his life was always uplifting. If his biological mother had been nothing but an obstacle to him, Carolyn had been his spiritual guide.

  He was smiling as he left the office, and his good mood spilled out onto the young woman in the waiting room. He’d seen her before, a pretty brunette with big blue eyes and a thick psychic wall wrapped around her. But today the wall wavered as she saw his smile and returned it.

  “Good session,” he said by way of explaining.

  “Well, good!”

  And that seemed to be that, so Adrian nodded at her and headed for the door. Just as he was on his way out he heard her say, “See you!”