I SAT NERVOUSLY in another examining room with one of those freaky tables wearing a paper sheath and steel stirrups. Too bad I wasn’t wearing spurs. It was interesting, but not comforting, that all this “female” scenery unnerved me more than 3-D zombies streaming off the wide vista of an old drive-in movie screen.

“Women really lay themselves down on that sacrificial altar once a year?” I asked Helena in a hoarse whisper.

Yeah. My voice felt like it was being closed up in a black box in my throat.

“More often if they’re pregnant,” Helena said. “I understand.”

“They get used to submitting to this?”

“Women have had to get used to submitting to a lot over the centuries,” she said grimly. “What we’re dealing with now, Delilah, is just modern gynecological practice. Thanks to the Web, I was able to find a woman doctor who’s tops in her field.”

“I still wouldn’t mummify a killer crocodile on that torturous-looking table,” I muttered.

Helena looked both confused and repelled. “Why would anyone want to mummify a crocodile?” she asked.

“You’d be surprised,” I answered direly, confused to hear women laughing together outside the closed door.

I’d never remembered having much to do with doctors, but I sure didn’t like it when the door burst open and a white-coated black woman strode in, her head bowed over a slim manila folder.

“Dr. Youmans refused to release any records, Dr. Burnside,” the woman murmured. “And it says here Delilah Street is a juvenile.”

“Do I look juvenile?” I asked, standing up from the office chair to meet this new doctor eye-to-eye.

She met my demanding glance with her own, then set the folder onto the usual sinister countertop holding a sink and a box of tissues and the array of steel implements.

“Hardly.” Her smile came easy. “I’m Dr. Sabitini Torres,” she told me. Then she eyed the still-seated Helena.

“You said this was an emergency when you made … I should say, demanded … an immediate appointment this afternoon.”

“It is.” Helena wasn’t going to rise and she wasn’t going to give a centimeter.

Dr. Torres eyed us both … tall brunette woman with attitude, clearly past twenty-one years, and seated regal blond woman, clearly past menopause. Both clearly unrelated.

I looked the doctor over, grudgingly approving the sleek fuchsia silk dress glimpsed under her lab coat and the steampunk buckled platform shoes on her feet. Her skin was a glowing negative, an undiluted black like my hair, but her tresses were braided into a cornrow pattern as intricate as a maze. She resembled an ebony version of the famous ancient Egyptian head of Nefertiti, with more Nubian features. She would outclass the ancient vampire sister-pharaoh at the Karnak Hotel in a heartbeat, had both of them been living at the same time.

Meanwhile, Helena had been digging into her over-buckled designer bag to extract a sheaf of papers.

“This is what we hacked out of Dr. Youmans’ computer records.”

Dr. Torres winced. “You hacked his records? The ethics—”

“Read them,” Helena suggested sweetly. Sweet was obviously not her usual modus operandi.

Dr. Torres leaned against the torture table and skimmed them as rapidly as an IRS tax examiner preparing to administer a big fat fine.

Her exquisitely penciled eyebrows went up. And up.

She eyed me with narrowed, incisive black eyes. She looked at Helena, bit her full bottom lip, and nodded. “I see. I’m glad you insisted on getting right in.”

“The records don’t show the type of IUD used,” Helena said.

“The records don’t show anything they ought to. You think this … young woman still has this thing?”

Helena nodded.

“What?” I asked, suspicious of the knowing shorthand these two women exchanged as if they were soul sisters. Ebony and ivory. Like me.

Oooh, Irma crooned in my head. I don’t like this conversational trend, either. Cool doc, though. What the hell lipstick color is she wearing? Be sure to ask. Would look even better on us than Midnight Cherry Shimmer does.

Will you please, I told Irma, not remind me of intimate episodes in a clinical house of horrors like this?

I bit my own lip in turn. I’d made such a huge private emotional and sexual leap with Ric these last several weeks I was having trouble regarding myself as a public plumbing problem.

“That would be … malpractice,” Dr. Torres was saying.

“That would be … obscene,” Helena answered, standing.

“You’re her mother?” Dr. Torres.

“Here and now, yes.”

I let my gaze snap to Helena. I couldn’t believe what she’d said. She was … adopting me.

For the time being.

For a never-adopted child now an adult, that was mind-boggling.

Did even she understand how this would impact me? I veered between choking up and getting furious. Hearing the never-used phrase “her mother” for the first time at twenty-four. Thinking … too little too late.

This visit to Wichita’s medical offices was resurrecting my insecure inner orphan and kick-starting my outer ungrateful bitch. It was giving me emotional whiplash.

“I’m here,” I reminded them.

Jeez, it was like Kipling. “When two strong women meet …” They were east and west and black and white, and both damn scientists.

Helena’s faded eyes turned to me. “Don’t worry. We don’t need more probing, Delilah.” She eyed Dr. Torres. “A sonogram.”

“And how,” I asked, “am I to drape my chic paper sheath for that procedure?”

Dr. Torres’s low chuckle escalated into an infectious laugh, making her the woman in the fuchsia dress first and the doctor second. She eyed me with sympathetic warmth. “Girl, my nurses and I will give you such a runway wrap you will want to wear it outa here.”

I grasped at her good humor. I could tolerate only so many life-shattering moments at once.

“Do I get a … a free braiding?” I bargained like a kid. I’d seen Vegas tourists getting that treatment alongside the “beachy” hotel pools. Nobody had ever done my hair for me before, as far back as I could remember.

“Absolutely.”

That is how I ended up drinking an awful lot of bottled water while three nurses braided my thick, wavy Irish hair into a magnificent mass of shiny blue-black plaits. The women were so adept they manipulated a couple paper sheaths into a loose Egyptian-style linen gown.

Was I going to come out of this a Macy’s Parade balloon, a taco wrap, or a fashion model? While I drank the required water, the familiar fashioned itself into an intricate basket-weave ankle bracelet in slow motion to keep me entertained.

Forty minutes later, a fairly relaxed me was shown into another consulting room, where a computer screen sat beside the examination table. Helena was installed on the visitor’s chair.

“I’ll be here all the time, Delilah. This is totally external. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Except the results,” I said, hopping up on the table before anyone could order me to do it.

Helena’s eyelids fluttered shut for an instant. This still wasn’t easy for her. She was being strong for me. I’ve never had anyone do that before but Ric.

Okay, Irma said. Cut the surly ingrate act. We need to know why we are the way we are, or will be.

I nodded, Helena taking the gesture for solidarity and loosing a sigh.

I was no longer a lamb to the slaughter when the nurses came in and unwrapped my torso to spread some gel on my abdomen. I told them I’d get a really naughty tattoo there before any future incidents like this. If you can’t avoid ’em, surprise ’em.

The gel was warm and sticky like blood, and the radiologist, a white-coated woman named Irene, gently but firmly ran a wired paddle over me while staring at the TV screen. The pressure was uncomfortable, but at least it only lasted a few minutes. I was wiped off and told I could use the bathroom and “change back” in a small adjoining cubicle.

What would I “change back” into, I wondered.

My heart was pounding again, my fate in the hands of these two doctors, one for the reproductive organs and one for the head.

Dressed, I was led back into a consulting room. This one had no ominous equipment lurking in it, no stirrup-equipped tables or televised sneak peeks into discreetly hidden organs. Just two women doctors wearing bravely smiling faces.

Uh-oh.

“Sit down, Miss Street.” Dr. Torres gestured me into the chair beside her built-in desk. “You’ve always had severe menstrual cramps.”

“As long as I can remember, which can be … spotty. Could this IUD have caused that?”

“Most possibly. The body doesn’t like foreign objects in it, even donated organs.”

Or blood? I wondered. All of Ric’s had been replaced.

Helena sat forward, impatient. “This is speculative, Dr. Torres. Delilah could have spontaneously ejected the IUD during one of her painful periods and never noticed.”

“Also possible,” the doctor conceded, “but not the case. The IUD is still there.”

An ugly chill—or the silver familiar—climbed my spine. The familiar usually “defaulted” to a thin hip chain. Had it automatically girded the body part that was most compromised?

“If you found the device,” Helena said, “you can remove it.”

Dr. Torres pursed her fluorescently fuchsia lips.

We gotta get that brand and color name before we leave, Irma nagged.

Even Irma was trying to distract me from what was coming. I’d been screwed up for real, my body writhing monthly to rid itself of a parasite that had existed inside me for more than half my lifetime.

“Not necessarily,” Dr. Torres said.

“You can’t remove it?” Helena was disbelieving. “What type is it?”

Reaching a hand with short, unpainted fingernails inside a bottom desk drawer, Dr. Torres finally pulled out what looked like the T-shaped end of those white plastic “strings” on clothing price tags, a tiny, tamponlike string dangling from the end.

Gross, Irma moaned. I am so glad I’m all sass and no moving parts.

“The common form now,” Dr. Torres said, “is a plastic and copper T. It can also have embedded hormones instead of copper. They are very safe and effective, although not for women who’ve never had children.”

Helena’s face had gone almost as white as mine always was. “And for children who’ve never had periods? What would one of these things do? Nothing but cause unnecessary trauma.”

“I understand your anger, Dr. Burnside. It was unconscionable to use such a device. It would, though, prevent pregnancy later.”

“No need,” I burst out. “I had a major phobia about any of that insertion stuff.” No wonder I’d fought off vamp boys so fiercely. “And I’ve been taking the Pill to help with cramps for years. That’s double exposure for no point. I want that thing out of me. Now!”

Hold it, Irma urged. You don’t know that this IUD is the source of all your pain.

There is periodic pain, and then there is unrelenting psychic pain. My brain rebelled at processing all this bad news.

“We can’t take it out,” Dr. Torres said in a soft, sad voice.

“What?” Helena and I expressed simultaneous shock.

The gynecologist stood to pull a thick, spine-worn trade paperback book from the shelf above her desk, riffling through.

“The IUD as a birth control device goes back to prehistory, practically. About sixty years ago, it was modernized and offered as an option to the Pill. They experimented with different shapes, but plastic was the ‘new’ material that offered so much ‘promise.’”

“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.”

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