"Delilah didn't have a T-type, did she?" Helena asked, sounding sick with worry.
"No. It was this." Dr. Torres started to hand the open pages past me to Helena, but I grabbed the book first.
And there it was, my giant, hovering alien abduction nightmare apparition, reduced in a photo to a speck of translucent white plastic on a palm, maybe an inch high and a bit wider.
Here was the huge white sting-ray-shaped mass suspended over me like a lighting fixture, down to the long thin tail stinger, the IUD's "string." The ray's angel-like "wings" were scalloped and spined like a bat wing, not a boneless manta ray's form. Each tiny "spine" ended with a sharp point.
"You'd put stickery things like that inside the uterus?" I asked, unbelieving. "How'd they get it out?"
"One quick yank," Dr. Torres said with a sigh. "Medicine is still primitive in some respects."
I was speechless. That was insane. What male doctor had thought that one up?
"Can't you do that with Delilah's?" Helena asked. "Prepping her with a sedative pill and a couple local anesthetic injections into the cervix?"
Great. Now the aliens' needle wasn't going into my navel but my cervix. Twice, yet. Who were the "aliens" here? My body tensed to run, my hands squeezing the chair arms, my calves bunching to spring me away.
"We could," Dr. Torres said, "but the IUD has ... altered ... with time."
Helena reached a hand out for mine, but I resisted taking it. I didn't need comfort, I needed escape before they screwed up my insides worse. Right now, I had no allies but Irma, and she had been struck speechless again too.
"It's medically impossible," the gynecologist went on. "I've never seen such a sonogram. The tiny IUD and string you see pictured is gone. Its manta shape has spread and thinned into ... tentacles ... like endometriosis leeching onto the very bones of her pelvis. And it's ... not the same anymore. It's impossible, insane actually, but ... the copper appears to have transformed into sterling silver."
Chapter Twenty-one
I SAT IN ONE of the motel room's two cheap armchairs wondering why the Millennium Revelation was turning me into some million-dollar silver-metal woman.
Well, maybe I was just a thousand-dollar one, given the current price of silver on the stock market.
Dr. Torres hadn't had much explanation, except to say that the new "intertwining" with the bone wouldn't have caused menstrual pain, but that she couldn't recommend I ever have children, given the pressure that puts on the pelvis. Otherwise, I was fine.
The familiar had completely disappeared, unseen and unfelt. I figured it was hiding out among the plaits of my hair the kindly nurses had made.
Quicksilver sat on the floor beside me, my palm on his thick-furred wolfish head.
Ric and Quick had been waiting in Dolly for me and Helena to leave that last doctor's office.
"Delilah, your hair," Ric had said anxiously. "The braids. What about - ?"
"Home, James," Helena had cut him off. "A new hairdo can be a healthy distraction for a young woman."
Ric got the idea fast.
"Love the look," he said, and then drove us back to the Thunderbird Inn without comment, Quicksilver riding in what had become his doggy rumble seat. Leonard Tallgrass finally had found an occasion to get my dog back to me. Just in time.
I'd gotten out and, trailed by Quicksilver, unlocked the motel room door. When I turned back, I saw that the others had remained in the car.
"You relax here on your own for a while, Delilah," Helena suggested. "I'm taking Ric for a drink."
"Banished to the bar again?" he objected, his hopeful expression turning anxious.
I wanted to joke that I was the one who could stand being taken out for a drink, but Helena shut up her foster son with one tough-as-a-nail-gun look and the command "Not a word."
Off they drove while she enlightened him about the bizarre state of my insides.
No one could stop Quicksilver from looking anxious, though. I ran my hand over his head, saying, "I know, I know. Just be patient."
At least dogs didn't need to have the messy facts of female anatomy explained to them.
Helena supposedly knew what stressed people required. I wasn't so sure she did now. Was there anything worse than being stuck alone in a Wichita motel room feeling that alien spawn had set up shop in your very guts for some unholy reason? The past I'd been struggling, successfully, to put to rest had punched a literal hole in