Billie Girl

Chapter Twenty

Circular thinking was nothing new to me. I was either thinking about Blake and our tenuous wedding plans, or I would picture this killer and imagine how I might react should he approach me. Would I have a chance to defend myself? How could I, when I didn't have a violent bone in my body? Then I wished my Dad was around to tell me what to do.

And that brought my mental carousel to those memories of Dad when we traveled together through Paris.

I remembered how it was during that special vacation together that I had become obsessed with hypnosis.

While my father and I were staying in a Paris hote,l I hypnotized him and his personality split right before my very eyes. He became a man named Michael Henrahan. At the time I thought he really was channeling. I was not aware that he was pretending to be under my spell and this Michael Henrahan was just a put-on.

I posed many pertinent questions to this mysterious stranger.

"Are you my Dad or are you Michael Henrahan now? I asked in a hushed voice.

"I am Michael Henrahan. But you may call me Mr. Henrahan."

"OK, Mr. Henrahan, tell me what you do for a living?"

"I am a writer."

"Really? That's interesting. One day I would like to grow up and become a writer. What kind of things do you write? Do you write for a newspaper, or do you write for children?"

"I write special love stories."

"What do you mean?"

"I write stories about what men and women do when they love each other and sometimes when they do not."

"I don't understand. What you mean by that?"

"Well, when a man loves a woman, then he feels the need to express that love for her in a way that is special just between the two of them."

I still didn't understand. "What do you mean?"

"I write about encounters of consent. You are thirteen years old now, you must know about such things, certainly if you don't, it is time that you do."

Now I had an an inkling of what this Michael Hanrahan was talking about. At the same time I was not ready to confront these issues. But my father, as Michael Hanrahan, jumped right into it. He said that in his stories, the "act" could happen anywhere. A man could be washing his clothing at a laundromat in New York city and he might meet a woman by accidentally opening up the dryer filled with her clothing. He might then reach inside the machine and pull out her nighties, and then she might be standing behind him tapping him on the shoulder. She might, in this story, be embarrassed, yet strangely excited to have a stranger holding her pink undies. The man in this case was a young writer, who had not had a shave in days and was dressed in old crumpled corduroy slacks and a faded, yellowish T-Shirt. And he had been up all night long working on a chapter that had him on fire and inspired. When he saw this rather thin blonde woman with breasts so small, he knew she was surely a tomboy as a girl.

She had bangs falling over her big brown eyes like Twiggy, an actress famous in the sixties for being Mod and skinny. The two of them laughed uncomfortably at first, and then she began to feel an attraction for the young novelist. who was naturally fit. The two of them would have been completely alone in that laundromat if it were not for the Asian woman who had fallen asleep at the cash register. They felt compelled to kiss. The writer thrust his tongue into this Mod girl's mouth with ferocity and she in turn complied in surrender....and then he came in for the sweet kill... "

The story that my father told me as Michael Henrahan became both graphic, yet at the same time instructional. He went on to use clinical terms like penis and vagina, and he threw in some advise to always use a condom (preferably with spermicidal jelly) to avoid STDs and pregnancy.