Rabid (3 page)

His pants chafed his groin, and he shifted. “I will be here only for few months.”

Mrs. Sloan nodded. “That’ll be long enough to know if we’re going to stay together.”

Stay together, she meant divorce.

He should not counsel them. He had a job to do here, and it had nothing to do with normal parish duties. “The girls, sitting outside the confessional. They are your daughters?”

“Yes. Christine and Dinah.”

Her daughters, they were so small, a little younger than his nieces. His sister had not divorced because of the children.

He removed his covering hand from their grasping fingers. Mrs. Sloan held onto his other hand. “
Si
, yes. I do it.”

“Can we come tomorrow?” she asked.

So soon. “Six and a half o’clock. For a moment, to meet. We will do real counseling later.” Her hand still clamped his hand to the table between them. “How old, your daughters?”

“Eight and ten. Why?”

“Some things about the school, I should like to ask them about, too.” Dante loosened his grip on her fingers and flinched, to suggest she release his hand. His palm was sweaty, encased in that morass of hand flesh and fingernails.

He liked it too much, so he let go.

“Um,” Mrs. Sloan fluttered her eyes. “All right.” She touched her eyes with the tissue and untangled her small hand from the raw meat of his paw.

They prayed the Act of Contrition together and Mrs. Sloan rose to leave. She smeared another wet streak from her eyelashes to the pale brown hair at her temple. “We’ll see you in a few days, Father Dante.”

It was odd, hearing the English
Father
instead of
Padre
or
Monsignor
or
Professor
.

He was so far from Roma, but he had volunteered for this. Rooting out an evil as ancient as the Adversary itself was more important than his creature comforts and routine of Roma. He could shout above a screaming demon-possessed man or dodge flying chairs, but this assignment in New Hamilton—his primary assignment, not this tangential marital counseling—required delicacy and empathy, which were qualities he did not exercise as an exorcist.

She smeared another blossoming tear from her eye to her hair.

Her tears infused the library with suffocating humidity.

Dante said, “Mrs. Sloan, the sex, to men, it is nothing. It is animal instinct. Friction. It is appetite or domination or an attempt at their own damnation, for a man, but it is never love.”

~~~~~

Conroy opened the door from the wintry garage to the house. As his face broke into the warm air, browning meat scent lingered in his nose and traveled up the neurons to his brain.

Ah, the olfactory bulb, a source of stem cells that migrated from the hippocampus and, when damaged, cause olfactory hallucinations, phantom scents.

“Hello, ladies!” he called.

Dinah, his younger daughter, clattered over the tile. “Daddy!” She flung herself at him.

Beverly hadn’t hollered hello. “Dinah, where’s your mom?” he asked the little girl who was clinging to his leg.

“Making supper,” she said. “It’s late ‘cause we went to confession. The new priest took her away somewhere.”

New priest?

“Beverly!” he yelled. “You here?” He walked into the house.

Priests were twisted creatures, repressed by a sick corporate structure that wrung them into castrated caricatures of men.

~~~~~

Bev heard Conroy yell from the mud room but she didn’t yell back.

She stirred the gravy, scraping up the browned bits. The rich scent of reducing gravy rose through the yellow kitchen and ascended with her soul, seeking God.

She had to get Conroy to counseling. She had to do this right.

A fragment of the Rosary hovered in her head,
Be with us now and at the hour of our deaths.

Footsteps clacked on the tile. Conroy’s arm slipped around Bev’s waist, and he kissed her ear with a smacking sound. “Beverly,” he whispered.

Bev’s angry spine wound tight at the touch of his body, still slimy from Washingtonian sex.
Be with us now and at the hour of our deaths.
“Hello, Conroy.”

“Sorry I had to run this afternoon.”

He moved away, and her spine, no longer touching his defiled body, unkinked.

“Did you see your friend Mary at church?” he asked.

“No.” She tossed the vegetables. Parti-colored bits showered down into the pan.

Not Mary, but Father Dante.

He had seemed kind when he took her hand, but he was so young. Priests should be older, aged men with the manliness in them burned away so that they were beyond gender, beyond handsomeness, a black robe wrapping an emissary of God.

There was no reason a priest shouldn’t hold her hand when she was distraught. He belonged to God. It was as if God were holding her hand.

“I’ll herd the girls to the table.” Conroy walked out of her kitchen.

Bev was a swamp of revenge and spite.

She breathed deep into her soul and created space for God and the Blessed Virgin to fill her with peace, but They didn’t.

Anger whirled faster behind her smarting eyes as she finished cooking and plated four suppers.

She settled into her place at the end of the dining room table, opposite Conroy. The glass chandelier reflected in the glass table top and twinkled in the silver structure below. Christine and Dinah sat between them on the long sides of the table.

Conroy sat with his back to the bay window. He flapped open his paper napkin and said, “Study section was interesting. The usual assortment of solid work  and this one wild, off-the-wall submission.”

Wild, off the wall, against the wall,
was he still talking about grants? Bev ate a carrot and chewed slowly to avoid grinding her teeth.

Conroy shook his head. “He thinks he can vaccinate against cholesterol. It’s not even a peptide.”

Bev ate a bite of something. “Insane, thinking he could fool you like that.”

“Yes,” Conroy said. “Dr. Lindh made some interesting comments.”

Dr. Lindh, Bev couldn’t remember him or her. “I’m sure
he
did.”

“Valerie Lindh.
She
did.”

Bev knifed her beef. “Such talk about business. Didn’t you do anything fun?” and she couldn’t believe she had said that.
Mary,
be with us now and at the hour of our deaths.

“No. Didn’t even go out for dinner. Just ate in the hotel.” Conroy smiled at Christine. He asked, “Did you score this weekend, honey?”

Conroy had certainly
scored
this weekend. Bev tried to breathe slowly.

Christine said, “No, but I stopped the other team from scoring twice.”

Dinah swung her legs, bouncing in her chair. “Mommy, can I have some more potatoes?”

On Dinah’s plate, the vegetables and meat huddled, trying to look small and eaten.

Bev turned to Christine. “Honey, would you help Dinah dish up some potatoes?”

Christine mumbled, “Yes,” and folded her napkin.

“Thank you, dear. Just one spoonful.”

Dinah and Christine went to the kitchen. Christine held Dinah’s hand.

Bev turned back to Conroy and whispered, “I found
panties
in your suitcase. Pink ones. Whose are they?” Her harsh stage whisper carried through the dining room, bounced off the modest chandelier, and reflected back to her in fragments.
Found. Pink. Whose.

Conroy leaned back in his chair, his palms pressed against the table. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what I’m talking about.
Do you love her?
”

Conroy blinked, his gray lashes and crumpled eyelids flapping over his fluorescent blue eyes. He breathed slowly and looked like he was thinking fast. “What are you going to do?”

Bev leaned back. Her fork clattered onto her plate. “We need counseling.”

Conroy launched into the old routine. “We know all the counselors in town.”

From the kitchen, a spoon clinked and potatoes splatted on a plate. Dinah said, “More.”

Bev said. “There’s a new priest down at the Church.”

Conroy rolled his eyes. “Priests aren’t doctors. They’re not even
married
.”

Her voice dropped. “Our first appointment with Father Dante is tomorrow at six-thirty.”

“
Dante
, for our own private trip to Hell
,
that’s appropriate.”

“I mean it. We’ll get counseling,
or else
I’ll take the girls and walk out right now.”

“You can’t take the girls.” He picked up his fork and held it in his fist.

Bev leaned forward. “I will.”

His hands balled into fists and shuddered in the air like a baby preparing to wail. He said calmly, “People will talk.”

“That’s right,” Bev said, “Everyone will know, all your friends, the administration, the committee.”

“You wouldn’t.” His hands dropped below the table. Through the white twinkles in the glass tabletop, she could see his fingers curling around the cushion on the metal chair seat. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

“I thought you would never do this to
me
.”

Conroy’s jaw was clenched hard. He looked away and whispered, “Fine.”

“And you will break it off with whoever she is.”

The skin over his nose and cheekbones reddened. “Obviously.”

Bev sat back in her chair. From the kitchen, again there was a spoon clinking and the splatting of potatoes.

Dinah said, “More.”

Bev called over her shoulder, “Girls, that’s enough.” To Conroy, “Then it’s settled.”

Conroy smiled tightly at the girls coming back in. Potatoes covered Dinah’s plate and were puddled with three gravy pools.

~~~~~

Conroy hid in his home office, reading scientific papers.

In the kitchen, Beverly splashed and clanked.

In the
Journal of Virology,
an article detailed a glowing-green virus that traced nerve connections from a pig’s eye to its brain. The virus was named pseudorabies virus because PRV caused symptoms similar to rabies—foaming, hallucinations, psychosis, photophobia, encroaching paralysis—but so did a host of other neurotropic viruses, including mad cow prions. Conroy had been particularly interested in rabies and other neuropathological viruses, lately. He made a couple notes in the margin about the fusogenic action of the viral glycoprotein.