Rabid (38 page)

The kitchen was equipped with a coffeemaker, a toaster, a blinking-noon microwave, and a block heavy with knives.

~~~~~

In the kitchen, Conroy unbagged the supplies he had bought for Leila: vodka, scotch, Riesling wine, orange juice, soda. All of it was useless now. He opened a soda. Hissing, sugary mist irritated his nose. “Go home, Beverly. We’ll discuss this later.”

“When? After the
legal things
are delivered?” She grabbed the bottle of scotch.

“Beverly!” He reached for the bottle as it receded past him, but her arm was a thieving ghost. “What are you doing?”

“Having a drink. You’ve had quite a few lately, haven’t you? At the office? With Leila?” She twisted off the top of the bottle and slugged, her smooth throat working to contain the scotch.

Horror,
and he remembered the way she used to be when she was an undergrad and drunk, all shrieking and fists pounding on tables and running. “Beverly! Your rules! You’re not supposed to drink hard liquor.”

She touched the corner of her mouth where a drop of scotch beaded. “Why not? Because I’m the little wife?” She tilted the bottle back and gulped two shots’ worth. She choked but swallowed it down. “I need a drink.”

“Give me the bottle. I’ll drive you home.” He put the rest of the alcohol on top of the fridge, out of her reach.

She rested the bottle on the cheap laminate counter and stared into the coffeemaker. “Looks like you have everything you need here. Alcohol,” she gestured to the other bottles on top of the fridge and opened the refrigerator door to peer inside, “milk, bread, granola bars.”

She stalked around the kitchen opening cabinets as Conroy leaned on the counter, out of her way, waiting.

“Pots and pans,” she pointed to each.

“Silverware,” she inventoried.

“Knives.”

~~~~~

As Dante parked at
51 Vita Place
, his headlights swept a thin girl in a gray coat slouching in the stairwell to dodge the needling wind. She lit a cigarette. The tip glowed red near her black hair. He stopped the car, climbed out, slammed the door.

“Did Bev see you?” he called to Leila as he strode at her.

Leila frowned. “Goddamn priest. What do you care?”

“Did she see you here?”
She was so small, crouched against the wall, and his height and black clothes and Roman collar intimidated even the strongest men but he needed to know if Bev had found Conroy’s mistress at his new apartment.

Leila nodded and turned her face away, swinging her black hair. She lifted the trembling cigarette to the other side of that slick, black partition. Dove gray smoke streamed into the air.

He wanted to knock the infernal cigarette from her hand and stomp on it or smoke it himself.

A smoke or a drink would dull him.

He was a sharp ax, chopping through people’s lives.

He asked, “Where are they?”

With her cigarette pinched between her thumb and fingers, she gestured to a green door past the stairs past them and to the left. Ash fell off and splatted on the frozen cement. “They’re yelling.”

Dante leaned his cheekbone against the icy wall, and his jaw ached as he eavesdropped.

~~~~~

Bev let the cheap three-tined forks and hollow-handled knives fall out of her fingers, clanging. “You gave your mistress one hell of a Valentine’s Day present, didn’t you?”

“What?” He snagged the whisky bottle and cradled it.

“Valentine’s Day. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.” Bev opened the freezer door, stepped into the emanating chill to fingertip the vodka bottle off the top of the fridge, and caught it midair. “You left me for her on Valentine’s Day.”

“Beverly, don’t. You’ve worked so hard to stay sober,” Conroy said.

He shouldn’t talk about what she had done for him. He didn’t appreciate what she had done for him. She twisted the bottle open and the tasteless, odorless liquor stung her throat like a chemical weapon.

She hopped up and sat on the green countertop. It creaked. The whole cheap counter might crumble. He might not get his security deposit back. She leaned against the coffeemaker and the block of knives—the row of knife handles poked her back across her lowest ribs and spine—and pointed at him with the gooseneck of the bottle. “I’ll contest the divorce.”

Conroy looked like he was begging, and he should beg. “Please, Beverly, stop drinking.”

“I’ll get a lawyer and contest it.” That idea seemed better and better. Lots of ideas seemed better and better. “You’ll have to be there for your daughters.”

Conroy grabbed at her bottle but missed. “Beverly, don’t drink any more.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” She reached behind her with the hand not locked around the vodka bottle and grabbed the protruding steak knife that was poking her back.

“Beverly.” Conroy set the scotch on the counter behind him and held out his open, empty hand. The riverbeds on his palm all seemed to run off into a delta where his thumb connected. Some of those lines that crossed Conroy’s pink palm must be love lines. Many, many love lines intersected and crossed and cut each other off.

Her own palm encoded one love line, a fortune teller had told her when she was in college, a short one. Father John, her confessor in Chicago, who had a six percent chance of being a child molester, had told her that fortune tellers were agents of the Devil.

Bev regarded Conroy’s love-line-rich pink palm and gulped another swig of tasteless flame.

“Beverly,” Conroy pled. “You shouldn’t drink that.”

She set the vodka bottle behind her so that Conroy, the thief of everything, couldn’t reach it and stared at her own palm. If she just knew which faint trace on her palm was the love line, she could carve an offshoot, a crease, just so she could hope that when Conroy left she wouldn’t be alone forever.

“Beverly?”

The witch had read her right hand, so Bev tossed the knife to her left hand and stared at her right. On her ring finger, the underside of her right hand ring was worn and sandpaper-scratched. The two major creases across her palm missed each other like airplanes veering off a near-crash. She pressed the tip of the steak knife to the feathered end of the lower contrail and sliced into her skin, just the top layer of the skin because it didn’t hurt, or she couldn’t feel it, and a pea of blood rolled down the groove in her palm to her wrist.

~~~~~

Conroy wanted to snatch the knife away from her because she looked like she might do herself harm in another one of those cry-for-help suicide attempts but, with the point poised so daintily on her palm, grabbing it might cut her. Little tendons and muscles crisscross palms and wire the fingers, and Beverly was a pianist. “Beverly, give me the knife.”

“No.” Overhead light rained on her wavy brown hair, which fell in folds around her elfin face.

A tear leaked down one cheek, and she brushed it away with the back of her hand, the hand that held the knife.

The knife was near her throat but pointing out and away from her face, toward the cabinets.

Conroy jumped, grabbed her knife-wielding hand, and slammed it into the cabinets above her head. The steak knife, pointing out, swiveled in her fist like a snake head.

He thumped her hand against the cabinets again, but she didn’t drop the knife.

Her other hand slapped and smacked his head and shoulders. A scramble, kicking, and he pushed her knees to the side and away from his balls.

Her eyes widened and she struggled. Her arm rippled from his hand clamped around her wrist down to her shoulder. Her other hand flailed. Trembling attacked her body. “Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me.”

He strangled her wrist in his fingers and against the wood cabinet above their heads, trying to open her fist and drop the knife. “Give me the knife.”

“No!” Tears tinged with mascara soot striped her skin.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said, still holding her wrist. His own eyes heated, and shameful tears impended. “If that priest hadn’t butted in, it wouldn’t have been like this.”

“I needed him.” Her voice was harsh in her throat, as if the words shredded her larynx fighting their way out.

“But I wasn’t going to leave until that priest screwed everything up.”

“
Don’t blame him
. You did this. You
left
. You
left
me and Christina and Dinah.
Let me go.
”

Beverly sucked in a sob, and she keened a wavering note. The vibration rattled up her knife-holding arm and into his hand pressing it against the cabinet. Her keening grief rose in the kitchen and hovered. She hadn’t been as distraught and enraged as this when she had found Peggy’s underwear. Whatever she and the priest were conspiring on, it wasn’t divorce. If it had been, she wouldn’t have been grief-stricken at his leaving. She would have been vindicated.

It was just as Leila said, that Beverly wanted him to stay.

He could have Beverly back, if he worked things right.

Indeed, if he worked things very right, he could demand concessions for his return.

He readjusted his grip on Beverly’s wrist, and her hand clutching the steak knife swiveled as if the knife was seeking something to bite, but his hand was below the slashing orbit. “You and that priest ganged up on me and I had to leave, but I didn’t want to. I don’t want a divorce.”

Beverly sucked in air with a moist slurp. Her arm clutching the knife that he wedged against the cabinet stilled. “What?”

“It was the priest, and you two ganging up on me. I thought
you
wanted a divorce.”

“I never wanted a divorce.” She glanced back at him. Makeup smeared from her eyelashes to her temples.

He had to tread delicately. He had to work her around to his advantage. First, that priest had to be out of the picture. “I didn’t want to leave. It was that priest.”

She blinked rapid-fire, more vibration than movement.

“He meddles. I don’t want him around. If I come back, that priest stays out of our lives.”

Beverly rubbed her temple as if from a migraine, and earthy eye makeup feathered up. Tears popped out of her eyelashes and ran down her nose and cheekbones. “Okay.”

He tightened his grip on her hand, pressed against the cabinet doors, above their heads.

He had worked so hard to twist away from his marriage. All the men who moved and shook science ended up with beautiful, young wives of dense mass and high gravitation who gathered vortexes of admiration at parties and drew yet more powerful men into the man’s circle. A spectacular wife was every bit as important as a prestigious grant or a prominent publication record.

He needed someone
attractive
.

Beverly was losing mass and gravitational pull. The skin on Beverly’s wrist that he held against the cabinets seemed loose, compared to Leila’s flesh when he grabbed her young arm.

But Leila had dumped him, and being alone was worse than a less-than-premium wife. Alone provoked pity.