Intensity

away.
        Besides policemen, Chyna saw numerous physicians. In addition to the necessary treatment for her physical injuries, she was more than once urged to discuss her experiences with a psychiatrist. The most persistent of these was a pleasant man named Dr. Kevin Lofglun, a boyish fifty-year-old with a musical laugh and a nervous habit of pulling on his right earlobe until it was cherry red. "I don't need therapy," she told him, "because life is therapy." He didn't quite understand this, and he wanted her to tell him about her codependent relationship with her mother, though it hadn't been codependent for at least ten years, since she had walked out. He wanted to help her learn to cope with grief, but she told him, "I don't want to learn to cope with it, Doctor. I want to feel it." When he spoke of post-traumatic stress syndrome, she spoke of hope; when he spoke of self-fulfillment, she spoke of responsibility; when he spoke of mechanisms for improving self-esteem, she spoke of faith and trust; and after a while he seemed to decide that he could do nothing for someone who was speaking a language so different from his own.
        The doctors and nurses were worried that she would be unable to sleep, but she slept soundly. They were certain that she would have nightmares, but she only dreamed of a cathedral forest where she was never alone and always safe.
        On April eleventh, just twelve days after being admitted to the hospital, she was discharged, and when she went out the front doors, there were over a hundred newspaper, radio, and television reporters waiting for her, including those from the sleazy tabloid shows that had sent her contracts, by Federal Express, offering large sums to tell her story. She made her way through them without answering any of their shouted questions but without being impolite. As she reached the taxi that was waiting, for her, one of them pushed a microphone in her face and said inanely, "Ms. Shepherd, what does it feel like to be such a famous hero?" She stopped then and turned and said, "I'm no hero. I'm just passing through like all of you, wondering why it has to be so hard, hoping I never have to hurt anyone again." Those close enough to hear what she said fell silent, but the others shrieked at her again. She got into the taxi and rode away.

    
        The Delane family had been heavily mortgaged and addicted to easy credit from Visa and MasterCard before Edgler Vess had freed them from their debts, so there was no estate to which Ariel was heir. Her paternal grandparents were alive but in poor health and with only limited financial resources.
        Even if there had been any relatives financially comfortable enough to assume the burden of raising a teenage girl with Ariel's singular problems, they would not have felt adequate to the task. The girl was made a ward of the court, remanded to the care of a psychiatric hospital operated by the State of California.
        No family member objected.
        Through that summer and autumn, Chyna traveled weekly from San Francisco to Sacramento, petitioning the court to be declared Ariel Beth Delane's sole legal guardian, visiting the girl, and working patiently-some claimed stubbornly-through the Byzantine legal and social-services systems. Otherwise, they would have condemned the girl to a life in asylums that were called "care facilities."
        Although Chyna truly didn't see herself as a hero, many others did. The admiration with which certain influential people regarded her was at last the key that unlocked the bureaucratic heart and got her the permanent custody that she wanted. On a morning late in January, ten months after she had freed the girl from the doll-guarded cellar, she drove out of Sacramento with Ariel beside her.
        They went home to the apartment in San Francisco.

    
        Chyna never finished her master's degree in psychology, which she had been so close to earning. She continued her studies at the University of California at San Francisco, but she changed her major to literature. She had always liked to read, and though she didn't believe she possessed any writing talent, she thought she might enjoy being a book editor one day, working with writers. There was more truth in fiction than in science. She could also see herself as a teacher. If she spent the rest of her life waiting tables, that was all right as well, because she was good at it and found dignity in the