“I want to be my own advocate.”
“I understand. But … this will work better. We’ll surprise Dr. Youmans into frankness better if you remain quiet and in the background.”
“Apparently I did that before, and it didn’t turn out so well.”
She lowered her head and shook it. “We have no authority here. Surprise and subtlety are the keys. I know you don’t want to be s—”
“Sold down the river?”
“… to be superseded again. Let me try first. Please?”
I folded my icy hands together and choked back a sudden tide of rage. My heart was pounding and my breath came fast and shallow. Between my fingers, the silver familiar assumed the form of curved surgical scissors.
My blood-fury surprised me. I fought for control, as I must have twelve years ago, not knowing what this place was and what they did here. I still didn’t, quite.
A nurse came in and cast a glance at Helena.
“This is just an annual exam, isn’t it?” she asked me. “I’ll take your blood pressure, and leave the robe and sheet on the examination table. It opens to the front. Strip completely, of course. A nurse will accompany Dr. Youmans, Mrs. Street, but you’re welcome to stay. My, BP one-forty over ninety, a bit high, Miss Street. I know seeing a new doctor can be nerve-wracking. Dr. Youmans is very gentle.”
She left as I hurled Helena a betrayed look.
“I do know how to handle this, Delilah. Trust me. It would be more effective if you donned that paper robe, at least. You don’t have to strip. Just give them the impression this is an ordinary visit.”
“It isn’t?” I asked as I struggled to put the paper robe over my clothes. It was like wrestling a crepe-paper cutout in a cartoon. Laughable.
“It isn’t. Consider this a trial, Delilah,” Helena told me. “I have the evidence in my possession. This doctor doesn’t know it, but he’s on trial here. Don’t give any testimony until I ask you for it.”
“You can’t tell me beforehand?”
“I believe I know what happened here, but I need to frighten him into admitting it. Your striking looks will be the first weapon. I suspect he’ll remember you quickly enough when I get him going. I’m a psychologist, Delilah. I know how to unravel this man.”
“And what about me unraveling?”
“It’s a risk,” she admitted. “You’re a brave woman and you must have been a very brave girl. This won’t be easy, but it’s the only way to get the truth into the open for the peace of mind you need.”
“Does Ric know?”
“No. Listen, I can’t mislead you. My suspicions are ugly, but, in case I’m wrong … I can’t tell you them prematurely. I wouldn’t do this in most cases. Hell, Delilah, only in yours. It’s my professional opinion that the truth, no matter how brutal, will free you. If the facts are what I think, it would destroy most young women. But one must go to extremes for the people one loves. I think you understand that.”
I stared into her eyes through a glaze of tears. Hers, not mine. Then she took a deep breath and the unemotional scientist glared through, icily controlled again.
“Well?”
“You’ve scared the spit out of me, Helena Troy Burnside. But I’m tired of worrying about what I might be afraid to know. You want me to sit on the end of that torture table and swing my feet while we wait for Dr. Frankenstein?”
She smiled tightly. “Yes. Exactly. Look as innocently at ease as you can manage, and let me do all the talking.”
Boosting myself up onto that table with the sinister stirrups took all the gumption I could muster under the circumstances. Everything about this place was conjuring a hellish conjunction of my darkest fears, distant and recent.
I recalled the elaborate but primitive Egyptian mummification chamber with the central stone table for the dead body I’d awakened on only days earlier. I reran the TV mock documentaries I’d seen through the years about alien-abducted victims lying paralyzed with fear on examining tables.
Looking up, the big rectangular milk-glass light in the ceiling and the goosenecked high-power lamp affixed above the stirrups seemed both ancient and alien.
Would white linen–sheathed, sloe-eyed Egyptian waiting women soon file in to witness my blood-draining and sacrifice? Or would dumpy nurses wearing old-fashioned white scrubs surround the table to imprison me?
What was really going on here? Did I have an appointment with some long-uncaught pedophile doctor Helena would now expose in his turn, somehow relieving me of anxiety and guilt? Had I been some modern maiden sacrifice, turned over by the social workers, maybe because of the bad rap Lilith had overlaid on me? Was there no end to the betrayals?
I eyed Helena, so calm and competent. Did she really know what she was doing to me, what she was risking? I thought of Ric in the waiting room, where the men were always kept while unspeakable things happened to the women behind closed doors.
Where was Quicksilver? His instincts were supreme. He was my über-guardian, like poor little Achilles. Those were the only “people” whose instincts I could always trust. I was ready to jump up and run out, but a flutter of sound and murmurs outside the room’s door made me freeze with fresh panic. I could hear paper files being shuffled.
Then a white-haired doctor bustled in wearing his white coat, looking just like a bushy-browed kindly old Dr. Gillespie CinSim from Young Doctor Kildare, 1938, except he wasn’t in a wheelchair.
Man not alive! I’d been abused by my favorite CinSim doctor as played by the great Lionel Barrymore?
My hands tightened on the razor-sharp scissors between them. At least the silver familiar could never desert me.
Chapter Eighteen
“MISS … STREET?” Dr. Youmans said, overlooking Helena in his focus on his clipboard of papers and me, the patient in a plain paper wrapper, which said a lot for his focus.
The doctor kept skimming the sheets I’d filled out in the waiting room, glancing toward me, until his glance was finally hijacked by the legendry beauty of Helena Troy Burnside sitting in the chair against the wall.
Even I stared at her. She was suddenly glowing with a Millennium Revelation–bestowed glamour, brimming with charm and confidence. A brilliant, gorgeous trap.
“Mrs. … Street?” the doctor said, dazed. “I see the patient is fairly young. You’re not expecting anything out of the ordinary? Besides dysmenorrhea, the patient has no complaints—”
“No, Doctor,” Helena said, reassuring. “We’re expecting a routine physical. My daughter has been living abroad and I’m afraid she hasn’t been getting regular care.”
“Ah. These young women all feel immortal, especially these days,” he said with an admonishing chuckle. “Young ladies must have their annual checkups.”
His comforting smile as he turned to me slid off his face like melting snow. He glanced back at Helena.
“Your … daughter? But you’re so gloriously fair-haired and she’s so—”
“I’m afraid, Doctor, that my original, natural hair color is long forgotten by all concerned.”
As he automatically moved to the foot of the exam table, it was all I could do to avoid kicking him in the crotch. I wonder how many females who’d had to “assume the supine position” here had entertained that impulse. Probably none.
Me, Irma whispered.
I ignored her. She wasn’t corporeal, and I was. And … I’d been here before. On this table maybe, facing this old guy in a white coat. Only the first time I’d still been innocent and trusting.
“Do you recognize her?” Helena inquired. “You’ve seen her before.”
“Ah, no. She’s quite striking, of course. Rose Red to your Rose White, if you’ll pardon a fairy tale reference, madam.
“But, but …” He pulled the rolling stool behind him under his lying white-coated ass.
I inhaled slowly, gathering.
“She was only twelve,” Helena mused. “A ward of the state. That was before I adopted her, of course.”
&nb
sp; “Oh. Of course,” Dr. Youmans murmured robotically, his parchment skin paling to match his starched white coat.
“Like any new mother,” Helena reminisced, quite convincingly, “I wanted to preserve every detail of my darling’s early years.”
“Of course,” Dr. Youmans murmured, eyeing my shod foot with a frown. Apparently my feet should be bare when placed in the icy steel stirrups.
Helena was on her own feet and flourishing an old-fashioned manila folder.
“You may not recognize me, Dr. Youmans. That’s all right. Not everyone is plugged into the internet media, even these days, especially those in your generation. Helena Troy Burnside is my name, and I’m a doctor of sorts too. Academically. I have some small international reputation for working with … troubled youth. Frankly, they have good reason to be troubled if they had this young woman’s medical history. Why would a twelve-year-old girl sent to a gynecologist for unspecified ‘procedures’ not be troubled by the experience ever after?”
He swiveled on the stool seat to face her. She had him pinned between the stirrups, and me. He looked up at my face for the first time, recognition drawing his benign aging features into a mask of horror and fear. He began babbling.
“Dr. Burnside. Naturally, I’ve heard of your ground-breaking work. I was a volunteer for Child Protective Services for many years. Social service groups always have insufficient budgets.”
“So you were a cost-cutter. On a minor?”
“Some cases were extreme. I was told this … child was deemed potentially … ah, promiscuous.”
I opened my mouth, but Helena leaped into the breach, evidently expecting that.
“On what evidence?”
“It was the first year of the Millennium Revelation, for God’s sake. These … predatory supernaturals were showing up everywhere. Some were half human and had to be housed somewhere. The group homes were festering with adolescent boys, who are ordinarily randy little beasts and now we had half-breed supernatural boys on our hands. Half-werewolf and half-vampire and all lusty, bloodthirsty, powerful young monsters. This girl … you’ve adopted, this Delilah. Yes, I remember her now. She was underage, but that didn’t stop the vampire punks from going after her like she was bait. They’d have propagated some drastic hybrid on her. The social services could hardly deal with first-generation supernaturals, much less second-generation ones. She had to be stopped … protected from generating. The damage to her physical system alone—”
“Of course,” Helena said sardonically, while my mind struggled to understand what he had confessed to, and he had confessed to something. “Inflicting damage to prevent damage. How original.”
Helena shook her papers. “Old records never die, Doctor, nor old sins. What did the social workers want you to do?”
“It’s obvious.”
“Not to Delilah. She still doesn’t know what was done to her here.”
He glanced at me, cringing.
Helena’s District Attorney act was so fascinating I’d finally done as she’d advised: just watched and listened. It distanced me from the trauma. Also, I really liked to see the old doc cringe. No one was ever going to find me on an ob-gyn examination table again.”
“So.” Helena was pacing, digging her heels into the room’s mushy vinyl tile. “You were paid by the state to do what to this underage young girl?
“It was for her own protection.”
“So they all say.”
“A very simple, safe procedure.”
“A procedure utterly mystifying to a young girl who’d never even had a pelvic exam, don’t you think, Doctor?”
“Yes, of course, but every young girl must face that sooner or later.”
“Without any knowledge of what’s about to happen to her? Without informed consent?”
“She was a minor. A ward of the state. No consent was needed.”
“Exactly, Dr. Youmans. She was a minor.”
Damn! I couldn’t help not personalizing for a moment. Perry Mason would have been proud of Helena. I was.
Meanwhile, the door had been pushed ajar as the hall outside the room started buzzing. The office staff was assembling like Howard Hughes’s attendant vampire nurses in Vegas. My personal horror story had become a courtroom drama, and the theatrics of the scene gave me a strange sense of it not really being about me.
“And what did you do to her?” Helena demanded in a ringing voice.
The sound of doors being slammed against walls indicated that Ric was no longer content to eavesdrop from the waiting room.
The office door hit the wall and sprung off its hinges. The nurses flooded in after Ric.
“Sir,” a nurse objected. “This is a private office.”
“Not when it commits crimes against the public,” Ric said in his deepest, darkest crime-busting voice. “Delilah! Take off that obscene paper sheet.”
I readily complied, then hopped off that obscene table and took a place against the wall beside Helena. It was her show.
Ric came over to hook an arm around my shoulder and touched the surgeon’s scissors in my grasp with a questioning look.
I couldn’t answer it. The silver familiar would be what it would be. Maybe since they were armed with superior knowledge, I needed to be armed somehow. The over-crowded room finally took me back in time, to my first personal appearance here.
I was small, lost, and fearful, back in the don’t-go-to place, where even Irma was silent. This was in the time before Irma, and even before Lilith. Maybe even the time when Lilith came out, dark debutante that she had been and still was.
“It’s too much for her, Helena,” Ric’s voice rumbled against my side.
“Who is this man?” the head nurse demanded, coming to the defense of her doctor. “Who is this strange girl? She’s never been a patient here. You lied,” she accused Helena, even as her worried face betrayed uncertainty.
“Ric,” Helena told him, “Delilah has to face the reasons for her fear, just as you did.”
“I was a lot younger,” he argued. “Still malleable. Delilah’s grown past whatever it was. Look at her! You’re sending her back to childhood.”
“Tough love, Ric. And it’ll get tougher. Stay with me. Fear is an infection worse than its cause.”
She turned to the alarmed doctor again, then brushed past him to a cloth-covered tray on the sink counter, lifting it and then the cloth like a magician producing a trick.
I stared at the horrible array of instruments revealed. Again, I was jerked into a terrifying moment of my past, one just days ago, when I’d awakened paralyzed with panic on the Karnak mummification table, doomed to be forced to watch the blood slowly drained from my veins.
The wall behind me felt ice-cold, like a stone embalming table, even though I was still standing. The solid cold surface and being upright were the only things that kept me clinging to a shred of sanity.
“This,” Helena said, lifting a long, thick steel tube, “was what you used on a twelve-year-old girl. She’d never even bled, until you forced this into her.”
“God, Helena,” Ric said, turning my head into his chest and clapping a hand over my only exposed ear. “You’re putting her through worse than that old medical rapist did. Don’t move an inch, you slimy bastard. I can still strangle you with one hand.”
The emotions of other people’s fear and anger swirled around and above my still, small center, absorbing what to me was a grotesque reality and blending it with the disguised reality that had haunted my nightmares ever since.
Lord, I was a textbook case.
Staring at the implement Helena brandished, I’d recognized the “turkey baster” wielded by the white-skinned or garbed “aliens” of my nightmares. It was my industrial-strength version of the “needle in the navel” procedure alien abductees claimed had happened to them … only it hadn’t been anything so fine and small as a needle and it hadn’t been aimed at my navel.
I could feel Ric’s anger and tension, his muscles taut a
nd strained to their breaking point. Any minute he could spring on the old man to tear him apart, like Grizelle the Inferno Hotel’s shape-shifting white tiger.
“What is that thing?” Ric demanded.
“An old-fashioned speculum,” Helena said. “Modern ones aren’t cold steel, but warmer plastic. A woman finally had some say in how her body was examined.”
“This place is medieval,” Ric said.
“Men are wimps,” Helena answered. “You have no idea. You have no idea of how severe a menstrual cramp can be, nearing labor even.”
I wanted to say “Amen,” but words were caught into a mute ball at that icy center of my gut. I watched Helena pull open the top drawers in the sink cabinet.
“Here we are,” she announced, “the next thrilling stage of the ‘unspecified procedure.’”
She held up something, steel again, that looked like a fancy eight-inch-long bottle opener, something with a wing nut on one end and a long undulating Art Nouveau stem and a silly fluted bottom.
“A cervical dilator, isn’t it?” she asked one of the gathered nurses.
She poked it in their directions and they retreated like Hammer Film vampires at the sight of a silver cross.
No one in this room dared leave. Helena’s expertise and anger held the medical personnel at bay, and if Ric relaxed his convulsively comforting grip on me, he’d probably tackle someone. Or I would.
He had his own childhood reasons for justifiable murderous rage. Now, the still-vague wrong done me, a wrong that violated me where he was most intimately involved … for the first time I feared that the truth could break him as well as me.
What was Helena doing to us all? Could she put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
She was not about to stop her avenging angel act now. I knew in my soul that to intimidate the truth out of the medical staff, she had to risk damaging me, and possibly Ric, more. She must believe that the outcome would free us both, but even a Millennium Revelation–assisted shrink could be wrong, as wrong as whoever had ordered my … institutional rape … had been wrong twelve years earlier.
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