"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