Mermaids of Glendale - a novel

Chapter 3

“Miss O’Shene,” said the receptionist. “Dr. Ambrose will see you now.”

“Thank you,” said Lorna, closing the three-month-old copy of InStyle magazine she’d been leafing through. She stood up from the familiar grey leather couch in the waiting room and walked down the short hall to Dr. Glenn Ambrose’s office. After having talked to her dad and her sister, Lorna decided that maybe her transformation was a medical condition. She thought of herself as a logical, rational person, and as such there had to be a logical, rational explanation for what was happening to her. This led her to make an emergency appointment with her family doctor, whom both Lorna and Marina had been going to for years. Dr. Ambrose was also her father’s regular physician.

He was Mom’s doctor, too, thought Lorna as she walked into Dr. Ambrose’s office.

“Hello, Lorna,” said Dr. Ambrose, standing up and coming around his desk. “Good to see you again.”

He gestured for Lorna to sit in a chair at the desk, then closed the office door.

“Thank you, Dr. Ambrose,” said Lorna, sitting down as Dr. Ambrose walked back around his desk and settled into his high-backed black leather Herman Miller office chair, the suspension settling under his weight. As a child, Lorna thought of Dr. Ambrose as some sort of storybook giant, sitting in his chair with his hands held across his belly, his glasses perched on his nose like a wire-framed bird while he contemplated symptoms and diagnoses.

“How is your sister? And your father?” asked Dr. Ambrose.

“Fine, thank you.”

“Is your father following the dietary changes we discussed last month?”

“He’s following them,” replied Lorna. “Keeping his cholesterol down.”

“Good,” said Dr. Ambrose. “That’s good.”

Lorna didn’t mention the croissant she’d bought for her father at HeyMuffin.

“How can I help you today, Lorna?” asked Dr. Ambrose.

“Well, Dr. Ambrose,” said Lorna, shifting nervously in her seat. ”I’m not quite sure where to start.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“It’s kind of unusual.”

“What’s unusual?” said Dr. Ambrose. “I’ve been in this profession some forty-odd years, Miss O’Shene. One person’s unusual is another’s run-of-the-mill.”

“Oh, no,” said Lorna. “Not this.”

Dr. Ambrose leaned forward in his chair like the side of a mountain collapsing, moving inexorably closer from his side of the desk that separated them. He clasped his hands together on the blotter – hands that had felt Lorna’s swollen glands during a bout of mono, palpated her belly during a stomach bug, wielded tongue depressors during a summer flu. These hands had held a stethoscope, his breath warming the steel before placing it against her chest, her back, listening to her lungs and heart, witnessing Lorna’s physical development over the years. In short, if there was anything to know about her body, he’d know it.

“Try me,” said Dr. Ambrose.

Lorna told him about her first transformation at the Glendale Galleria. She told him about her second transformation at Neiman Marcus.

“I think,” said Lorna, “I’m turning into a fish.”

Dr. Ambrose blinked twice, slowly, and appeared to have for the briefest of moments lost his composure. This was not, after all, something he had expected to hear.