Rabid (19 page)

Leila sat on one of the lab chairs and leaned back, glaring. “Shut up.”

Conroy spun around and stared back. “What did you say to me?”

She held her eyes open wide and didn’t allow her body to fidget. “I said, ‘shut up.’ You’re being an ass. You didn’t break down and confess everything to your wife, did you?”

“No.” He slumped in the other chair. His head flopped in his hands and he rested his elbows on his knees, curved around his vestigial stomach paunch. “What did that damned priest ask you?”

Conroy’s vitriol was usually reserved for the anonymous peers who reviewed his papers, but he seemed to be in quite a snit lately.

She shrugged. “He just wanted to know why I didn’t take communion.”

He looked up and Leila was startled anew by his cobalt blue eyes. No, lighter than cobalt. His irises were the electric blaze of methylene blue cell stain. He asked, “What did you say?”

“Nothing. He wants me to go talk to him. I’m not going to.”

Conroy blinked slowly, unattractively. “Fine,” he said. “Fine.” He stood. “I’ve got to work on that grant.” He left the tissue culture room with three strides of his too-long legs.

Leila exhaled and bent over in her chair. She was dizzy from holding her breath, hoping that he wasn’t going to demand to know what experiment required her presence on a Sunday night. He had almost seen what was written on the tops of her dishes.

He would have freaked. He would have thrown her ass out of the program.

She wiped out the hood with two percent bleach solution, which will kill anything from HIV to rabies virus to poliovirus to mad cow prions.

You can’t be too careful when you’re working with human pathogens.

~~~~~

Chapter Seven

Early Monday morning, Conroy was in his office pattering on his computer.

Text filled the sprawling screen, yet the letters still fuzzed together. He was going to have to get stronger reading glasses or a wall-sized monitor.

Leila slammed open his office door. The door bashed his bookshelves.

“What in the hell is this?” Scarlet vegetative mush dripped from her fingers.

She must have twisted the petals off. “Roses. We had an argument.”

Her jaw didn’t move and words squirmed in her clenched teeth. “A florist’s charge on your credit card and yet your wife didn’t get flowers.
Idiot.
Don’t do anything like that again.”

She slammed the door and the window behind him rattled. The apoptosis poster on the back of his door was horizontally creased by the bookshelves.

~~~~~

Monday evening, Dante opened his library door and Bev Sloan walked in alone. Her clothes were monochrome, black skirt and gray sweater. Her smooth hair reflected auburn and dark gold as if her hair had wicked the color out of her clothes.

“Where’s Mr. Sloan?” Dante asked.

“He couldn’t make it.” She placed her handbag on the floor and sat in her chair. “He can’t make it at all this week, or next.”

Couples’ counseling didn’t work with only one participant, especially with the participant who had fewer problems. “Is there another time that is more convenient for him?”

“No.” She folded her hands and stared down.

“All right.” He needed to type his notes for the last three counseling sessions, but Dante took his chair, crossed his ankles, and arranged his cassock over his legs. He would be up late, working, and then lying on his narrow bed in the rectory after saying the Office of Compline, his last prayer of the day. Lines of thought were wearing creases in his mind: the children with the now ex-priest Nicolai in the library, Nicolai with his hand up one little girl’s skirt while another little girl sat on a chair, reading a book, or Nicolai and Dante in a snow-bright monastic cell, with Dante holding a baseball bat or wearing heavy boots.

Obsession would kill him. Separating that part of himself was the only way to save himself from creeping rage.

He settled back in the deep chair. “What troubles you?”

She didn’t look at him. “Everything.”

“Take your time.” Dante could wait. Entire counseling strategies were based on waiting, either allowing the patient to come to you or as a dominance game. In this case, Bev Sloan needed a minute to compose herself.

She stared at the books on the walls of the library, but Dante didn’t flinch. In the week since he had arrived, Dante had cleaned the entire library, book by book, ruffling pages, until gray grit ground into the ridges of his fingers. Afterward, he had blessed the room, sprinkling holy water in the corners, wielding a gleaming crucifix, and grinding out Latin in a voice hoarse from dust. He had added a coda from the Rite of Exorcism:

Begone, now!

It is He who casts you out, from whose sight nothing is hidden.

It is He who repels you, to whose might all things are subject.

It is He who expels you, He who has prepared everlasting hellfire for you and your angels, from whose mouth shall come a sharp sword, who is coming to judge both the living and the dead and the world by fire.

Dante hadn’t sensed an evil presence lurking in the corners, no black wraith flitting among the shadows on the walls and flowing into the darkness behind the bookcases. Yet, the specters of fear and hate wafting in the children’s eyes, watering their eyes when they entered the library and stared at certain objects—the DVD player and the TV, a now-expunged stack of magazines, a certain slim candlestick—were like possession.

Still, speaking the words of the rite invigorated him.

In his years as an exorcist, Dante had stared too long into Nietzsche’s abyss, and the abyss had stared into him until he understood it better than the Light, and so fought it on even footing.

Bev Sloan spoke. “Conroy can’t come to counseling because he’s busy in the lab.”

Ah, the dominance game.

Sloan had sent Bev as his proxy. Clever, and a cowardly tactic that dovetailed with his use of email to end an affair. “This week must have been very upsetting for you.”

Tears filmed her eyes. “I’m fine.” She stared past him at the bookcase beside his desk, beside the well-taped, Roma-addressed boxes. “My husband stopped having an affair. Everything is back to normal. I’m fine.” Her hands, folded on her lap, hardened into a statue of repose.

In this case, silence covered the truth.

He prodded, “Your husband had sex with another woman.”

Her hands clawed each other and settled into a cramped knot. “But it’s over now.”

“He wronged
you
. He broke
your
vows.” A little thrill of the hunt quivered.

Tears flipped over her lower eyelids. “I
prayed
for a husband like Conroy, successful, a good father, a Catholic. I prayed and I got him and I’m
fine
.”

Dante stayed still, almost non-existent. “What did you give up, for Conroy?”

“I don’t want to talk about this. My husband had an affair. That’s all.” Her shoulders slouched, relaxed. She was moving out of the moment.

“Did you give up your family?”

“My parents passed away years ago.” Her shoulders remained down, her face softened, and she blinked.

Wrong question.

“Tell me about your marriage.”

Bev fumbled with her hands. “Marriage is a sacrament. It’s being loving and
faithful
, having children and being a family.”

Odd emphasis. Conroy’s affair may have been in revenge. “Did you have an affair?”

“Of course not.” Still calmly, and thus he was wrong.

She said she prayed for a
Catholic
husband. This suggested a non-Catholic man existed. “Was the other man not a Catholic?”

She jumped to her feet and clutched her purse.

Dante was on his feet and between her and the door, trapped. “Was he not Catholic?”

She stood before him and stared at the carpet. Gold and brown hair swirled from the crown of her head and fell over the tops of her ears. “It was a long time ago.”

Ah, that was it. There was a
he
and he wasn’t Catholic. “Did you love him?”

“It was before Conroy. I
married
Conroy.”

The moment was gone. She had returned to Conroy. In a cognitive-behavioral sense, it was emotionally mature in that she did not dwell on the past and she sought to fix the marriage.

In the Freudian-analysis sense, she was repressing emotions and memories.

Dante held his hand out to Bev and gestured toward her chair. “Shall we sit?”

She looked up at him, defiant. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

“Conroy’s affair.”

“I’ve forgiven him.”

Dante doubted this. Children were better at facing their anger because they hadn’t been brainwashed to be
nice
. He held her elbow and steered her to the chairs. “I’m worried about you.”

She didn’t answer. Her head bowed as if she were pulling against a heavy weight. They reached her chair and she sat. Her hair fell forward and curtained her face. She snatched a tissue from the box by her chair and pulled it inside the veil of her hair.

He bent his knees so that he was at the level of her face, though her eyes were hidden. He wanted to brush her dark gold hair away from her face. “I want you to keep coming to counseling, even if Mr. Sloan doesn’t.”

She sniffed. “What good would that do?”

Her left hand clutched the chair arm. He laid his hand over her tiny, pale hand, just as he had his first day in America when she had been distraught. “We could discuss coping strategies. I will expect you Wednesday. Are you eating enough?”

“I’m fine.”

“Eat something when you get home.”

She still didn’t look up. She probably wouldn’t eat.

“Do you still have my card with the phone numbers?”

She nodded, and her hair rippled like ruffled feathers.

“Call if you need to talk, anytime. I don’t sleep much.”

“Okay.”

She slipped her hand out from under his, and the chair arm was warm where their hands had crossed. He said, “I’ll see you Wednesday.”

She left.

The mere marriage counseling was such a relief, compared with his other counseling. He wanted that break in his day.

Everyone at this parish was hunted, stricken, damaged. Though Nicolai had been the predator, Samual had not protected the children, or their parents, or the women. Even Dante could have done a better job than this.

Dante brushed his temple, where a headache was beginning to worm in. What a thought, that Dante should have been a parish priest rather than a Vaticanista, and he smiled at the incongruity.