“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.”
“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 and 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.
Helena’s voice was shaking with fury now.
“Can any of you med-school robots imagine her confusion, her fading trust, her growing panic, her incredible agony? Grown women have a tough time with the pain of cervical dilation, because you can’t give a patient anesthesia in a medical office. You didn’t even give this twelve-year-old any ibuprofen before she came in. I see nothing to reduce pain on the chart. Nothing to make it easier, or make her suspect that something bad was coming. Can you imagine the nightmare you became in her psyche? You heard her cries and screams. Several nurses must have had to hold her down. She’d not yet been culturally trained to lie on a gynecological table and handle pain like a super-soldier.”
Heads hung, but mine was among them. The humiliation was profound. I’d been a lamb to the slaughter. I had been trained by then. Don’t move no matter what, they’d said. It’ll make it worse if you move. Still, the nurses had to hold my arms, I remembered.
I remembered …
“I was cold and shaking afterward,” I heard my own dazed monotone. “So dizzy I kept almost passing out. I remember they had me sit in an office and they gave my first cup of hot coffee to drink, because I’d been ‘a big, brave girl,’ and crackers.”
Helena went ballistic. “She went into shock? You obviously treated her for it. That’s not on the record, Doctor. How could you conspire with self-serving social workers who were afraid they’d have to answer to a juvenile pregnancy to make the innocent object of possible assault pay like that, and let the boy would-be rapists run rampant? Why didn’t you put the males on drugs?”
The old man spoke up, his voice hollow. “You know. Prescriptions are recorded and must be justified. Putting adolescent boys on medications reserved for sex offenders … too many in the system would question it.”
“Too many male supervising doctors and lawyers and administrators, you mean,” Helena corrected. “That’s why there’s still no systemic male contraceptive pill, promised since the sixties. Let the women take all the risk.”
Helena held up the beautiful silver instrument so like an Art Nouveau wine bottle opener. “You needed the cervical dilator to force open her immature cervix and insert an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. That was the ‘unspecified procedure.’ The social workers couldn’t control the boys, so the girl had to pay, to bear the risks and pain.”
“You don’t understand, Dr. Burnside,” trembling old Dr. Youmans said. “Delilah was an exceptionally beautiful child, like the young Elizabeth Taylor, if you remember the actress that far back. They were all after her. We had to protect her from the consequences of a juvenile pregnancy, from birthing some half-supernatural monster.”
His words, sincere, but representing years of denial, stirred me to speak for my lost self at last.
“I had ways of defending myself against them, the vampy-boy creeps, you old fool!” I felt the shout torn out of me. “But I had no defense against you. Not against my group-home keepers. They could take me anywhere, order anything done.”
I stepped away from the wall on trembling legs. The silver familiar had gone into hiding, as if I had to stand alone, without any of my guardians.
“You unethical cowards should never be allowed to practice medicine again,” I shouted. “Look at you! Was it easy money, a contract with the social services? Yes, those creeps were threatening me. Did nobody think about really protecting me where I had to fight day after day? Were you willing to let me be gang-raped as long as no evidence showed up? As long as no ‘helping’ medical or social professional would be held accountable for being unable to control the group homes?”
I grabbed the goosenecked lamp and yanked it, wrenching the electrical cord out of the wall. I swung the metal lightbulb hood at the overhead light fixture, bringing huge splinters of the plastic lens and then the shattering fluorescent tubes down on the examining table, dimming the awful glare, making the table a sea of sharp shards.
“I remembered you all as aliens,” I told them all, “aliens who’d abducted me, and you are. You are alien to the human race, the real unhuman ones.”
I started tearing the paper covering off the wave-shaped examining table. I kicked over the foot-operated white trash can that would have held the bloody cotton. I grabbed the tray and crashed all the metal instruments to the floor. I launched myself at the table itself and somehow pushed it off center and into the wall.
When I paused for breath and brushed my hair off my face, the room was a shambles and the nurses were cowering in a sheeplike clot by the wall rack crowded with torn, years’-old magazines now out of print. One title read Modern Contraception.
“T-t-this is my office,” Dr. Youmans said. “You’ve trashed it. I could s-s-sue you.”
Helena stepped into the mess to put a hand on my shoulder. “You sue us? I didn’t find any place in the buried records where you ever actually removed the IUD from your underage patient.”
The silence said everything I needed to hear.
I lashed out with my boot-toe, dead center of where it hurts a guy the most.
“And you gave me hideous menstrual cramps for eternity? May you have phantom ball pain for the rest of your days, Dr. Malpractice.”
I held back from contact, but he cringed, writhed, and cupped his privates anyway.
A nurse objected from the corner of the consulting room. “This is … this is a physical attack. The police—”
Ric stepped between us. “I’m a Fed. You don’t want to involve the locals.” He glanced to the doctor’s clenched knees and protective, palsied hands.
“You’re lucky she’s taking it out on … uh, inanimate objects, Doc, and only figuratively. Me, if she wrung all your necks, I’d just call it in as self-defense. Who’s to say different? The last time Delilah was here she was assaulted against her will by all of you.”