“TWELVE YEARS TO young people your age,” Helena Troy Burnside told Ric and me with a rueful smile, “may seem like an eternity. Luckily, it’s just a little over a decade for us old folks.”
She flashed the printout of a Wichita map from the Web. We’d come to her hotel suite that morning to pick her up for the drive to where I’d been sent twelve years ago for a mysterious gynecological procedure at age twelve.
“We have the same cast of characters,” she added. “Not encouraging to you, Delilah, as a patient, but as a reporter you know what that means.”
I nodded grimly. “They know what happened to me there, and why.”
I didn’t add that I’d been freshly armed with several dire hints from my mirror twin. Why hadn’t I ever told Ric about Lilith, the last secret I’d kept from him beside my internal invisible friend, Irma. I knew why.
Who wants to be dating The Three Faces of Eve, even if he’s too young to have ever seen that old movie on multiple personalities?
Of course, I was firmly my own person; I just had these slightly weird add-ons. Some people called that “baggage.” Before and after the Millennium Revelation, some folks called that “haunts.”
Ric rubbed the nape of my neck, massaging away tension, secretly caressing a shared intimate mark, and tapping my inner “chica.”
“We’ll be with you,” he promised.
Yeah. That’s what made it so scary.
Leonard Tallgrass had requisitioned Quicksilver again. While Ric and I were delving the personal side of my Wichita links and past, the local ex-FBI agent was drawing a bead on the area’s powerful paranormal and criminal elements.
Frankly, I couldn’t wait to get my angsty stuff over with, and get back in the field with the crime fighters.
Ric drove us to another bland three-story building. I was beginning to long for the soaring hubris of Vegas with its gouts of spot-lit fire and water and neon spitting up at the cloudless sky.
The office waiting room boasted the usual upholstered chairs and magazine racks, with a huge fish tank framing a lethargic trio of clown fish.
Helena accompanied me to the reception window, leaving Ric to flip through an actual print edition of Modern Mother and Infant featuring Madonna and her latest adopted Third World child on the cover. Menopausal adoptions were the new “Follywood” superstar rage.
“Hmm.” The receptionist frowned. “I don’t find a ‘Delilah Street’ in the records. You’ve been here before?” she asked, her gaze darting between Helena and me.
I looked too old to need escort to the gynecologist’s office.
“It was more than a decade ago,” Helena said so briskly the receptionist almost saluted. “Dr. Youmans was the physician.” She nodded to the door behind us, which read YOUMANS, HORTON, AND FLIEDERBACH.
“And you are Miss Street?” she asked, her flicking glance settling on me.
She knew her patient name game. Helena didn’t look young enough to carry an offbeat name like Delilah.
I nodded.
“First visit, virtually,” the receptionist said. “The doctor will want to do a thorough exam.”
“So will we,” Helena said sweetly.
We went to sit with Ric, where his foster mother proceeded to tell him how the cow ate the cabbage. This cow was in a much better place than the zombie-driven herds moving through the dark of Kansas nights.
“They won’t let you in,” Helena told him. “You’re not related.”
Ric was cool with it. “I’ll wait until I hear the doctor going into the consultation room, then get a ‘family emergency’ call on my cell and barge right in.”
“Ric,” Helena said. “This is women’s business. Did it occur to you that Delilah would prefer to keep it private from you?”
“Yeah,” he said, “and I hate to intrude behind those pink doors, but we don’t have much private from each other, and she knows I can take it.”
And he knew I’d seen his soul stripped bare. Turnabout, fair play.
Helena shook her smooth blond head. “What a different generation. Philip would sooner be waterboarded than set foot in a gynecologist’s office.”
Ric grinned. “You might be surprised, if it involved your well-being.”
She shrugged and smiled to herself.
Then my name was called, for everybody in the waiting room to hear.
“Delilah Street.”
Helena accompanied me through the door. I saw Ric station himself at the brochure rack near the receptionist’s pass-through to keep an eye on the action in the hall and consulting rooms.
“Does this ever change?” Helena asked after we were shown into a room.
We’d sat on two light side chairs. I eyed the rolling stool near the sink counter, and the recliner lounge with the metal stirrups at the foot and a paper cloth down the center. It sat against one wall like a bizarre sacrificial altar.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been in such a place before.”
“You mean this specific place, in your memory.”
“I mean, never.”
“You’ve never had a gynecological appointment?” She sounded shocked. “Not at college, or after?”
“My … phobia.”
“But … you’re in your mid-twenties. Birth control.” She was looking flustered.
“I’m on the Pill for severe menstrual cramps. Have been since college.”
“You had to have had a pelvic exam done then?”
“No. There are underground places where you can get all sorts of pills.”
And I’d managed to avoid such routine school inspections for years. Amazing what a determined minor can do. I was newly impressed by Teen Me. I was also getting tired of apologizing for my back-lying phobia and my monthly pain and my apparently abnormal history.
“The only pelvic exams I’ve ever had were from your foster son.”
Her face produced a raging flush I thought only my ultra-pale skin could show.
“Sorry, Delilah. I deserved that. You were indeed a ‘virtual virgin,’ as Ric said. How clumsy of me to ask those questions. I needed to know what to expect when the doctor comes in and wants to do that procedure.”
“It won’t go well,” I said, “but why would we need to go that far? I just want to ask some questions. You’re certain this is the doctor who saw me when I was twelve, with the result that I buried the experience deep in my subconscious?”
She nodded. “Yes. Even the nurses are the same. The doctor is in his early sixties now and president of the local medical society.”
“Which doesn’t know he was doing pelvic exams and who-knows-what-else on helpless twelve-year-olds?”
“I would think not. Let me ask the questions, Delilah.”
“I was a reporter. I’m good at that.”
“I know. I know his type too. He’s of the doctor-as-God generation. He’d respond better to someone of my maturity. Don’t you trust me to be your advocate?”
“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.