Rabid (41 page)

~~~~~

Dante stood beside Conroy’s body on the surgery table and watched the monitors. Lines flowed straight across, but the alarms were silent.

Dante’s horrified breath caught in his throat. He tried to swallow, but he still couldn’t breathe.

The blue-clad surgery team stood around them, silent.

Conroy’s chest was an open barrel of bloody organs, his broken ribs splayed. His dripping lungs swelled and collapsed with the whooshing ventilator. His pale skin was bluish on his torso, and sun damage peppered his limbs but not his feet, which were like closed white tulips.

“I can’t wear the gloves,” Dante said. “It has to be done correctly.”

The blood-splashed surgery team stood back, masked and gloved and goggled.

The surgeon, Dr. Lakshmi Kumar, said, “It’s procedure to glove until we disconnect him.” She wouldn’t look at Dante, tacit understanding or unease in the presence of unscientific religious ritual.

“It has to be done with bare hands.” Dante stripped off the condom-thin, nitrile gloves, inside out and inside one another. He tossed them in the biohaz waste bin.

The male nurse wearing mint green scrubs, his flowered mask trailing behind him by its strings, sprinted in, holding a tiny vial. “There was some in the chapel.”

Dante took the glass vial and turned it over. A computer-printed label read
Oil for Extreme Unction – Catholic – blessed by Bishop Thomas O’Henry.
“Thank you, Luis.”

He twisted open the vial of oil and tipped it. The olive oil moistened his thumb and a green-tinged bead ran into the crevices of his wrist, near the green surgical gown that covered his clothes.

Extreme Unction confers grace sacramentally; that is, all Conroy’s sins were forgiven as if he had confessed and been reconciled. By fiat, he was destined for Heaven, the selling of indulgences all over again.

If Conroy had sinned since his confession, his sins would slide off with the application of the oil. Greasing him with olive oil wouldn’t prevent damnation, if God willed. Surely.

Such blasphemy, such sin, to think of the last Catholic rite as no more than a dash of olive oil to prepare the faithful for a hellfire sauté.

Dante recited, “Through this Holy Unction and His own most tender mercy, may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed,” Dante painted Conroy’s freckled forehead with an oily cross below his moonlight hair, “by sight,” wiped olive oil over Conroy’s closed eyelids, taped down for surgery with papery strips, “by smell,” touched the enlarged pores on Conroy’s nose, “by taste,” moistened Conroy’s pale, thin lips around the white, plastic ventilator tube that ran down his throat, and bloody trickle speckled the hydrophobic oil, “by touch,” he dribbled warm olive oil on his own hands and slipped unguent lines down Conroy’s cool palms, leaning over Conroy’s open chest stuffed with raw meat chunks to reach his other hand, “by walking,” and anointed the thin, calloused soles of his bare feet that protruded from under the green surgical drape, “or by carnal delectation,” lifted the surgical drape and smeared the remaining oil on Conroy’s rusty disinfectant-smeared naked lower belly and catheterized, shriveled penis. 

Buzz, a quivering among the surgical staff. “What was that?” They bobbled like shoving, green penguins. “That’s not how I’ve seen it done.”

Dante raised his blood- and oil-streaked bare hands and prayed over Conroy’s open chest, scarlet organs, sawed ribs, and papyrus skin. Machines pumped his lungs, though his stilled heart did not push the blood through his dying body and tattered soul. “Amen.”

One of the green-gowned nurses muttered, “Amen,” and genuflected.

It was all over now. Everything that Conroy was doing, had done, was over.

Dante wished he could call Conroy back.

He hoped that, somehow, Bev had not killed her husband.

Oh, Lord. Those poor girls. Christina and Dinah would be devastated.

Everything had gone to Hell, and even though he was a damned priest, Dante was powerless to stop it.

“All right.” Dante stepped back from Conroy’s dead body on the table. “Call it.”

The staff surrounded Conroy’s stringy, blown-open body.

Luis said, “Time of death, One-oh-seven A.M., February fourteenth.”

~~~~~

The automatic glass doors rushed out of her way and Leila walked into the ER. In the sherbet-colored chairs, the black-draped priest hunched, his miserable head caught in his hands.

She wasn’t here to console anyone. On the phone, the nurse had said Sloan was conscious and responding at admission and would be out of surgery soon.

Her heart had leapt up. Conroy was going to be okay. She wasn’t in love with him like some stupid wifey, but she sure as hell didn’t want him to die.

Two fluttery male nurses wearing baby blue scrubs manned the nurses’ desk, running back and forth, shouting anxious numbers at each other,
eighty over thirty, two liters, three units, twenty bucks for Taste of China.

Leila approached the priest and stared down at him. “Are you all right, Monsignor?”

Dante the priest swiveled and blinked in the fluorescent glare. “Leila.”

Contrary to her stiff spine, an apology bubbled up. “I won’t cause a scene. I just want to see that he’s okay, and then I need to run over to the lab. If she’s in his room, I won’t go in.”

The priest rubbed his left temple with his thumb. “Please sit.”

“I’m just going up to see Conroy when he’s out of surgery. Do you know if he’s out?”

“Oh, God, Leila. Please sit down.” The rasp in his voice was a warning.

Her hands fluttered in the air. Turquoise fluorescent light reflected on their shocking paleness. “I’m just here to see Conroy.”

The priest’s tan fingers interwove with her pale hand and tugged. Her body followed her hand down, and her denying knees folded. The metal seat chilled her legs.

“I’m sorry, I’m very sorry,” the priest whispered, “but he didn’t make it.”

Ridiculous.
“I called. They said he’s in surgery and that he’ll be fine.”

“They are wrong. Beverly Sloan is in surgery. They must have mixed them up.”

“It was just a tiny little knife,” Leila said, and her shrill voice rang in the ER despite the bright, new acoustic ceiling tile, replaced after last summer’s leaky pipe epidemic. Father Dante held her one hand but her other hand floated and signed complex emotions that someone else must be feeling. “It was only a steak knife.”

Dante fished her grasping hand out of the air and held it low between them.

“It was this big.” Her spidery fingers formed a void an inch, two and a half centimeters, twenty-five millimeters apart, and in unreal parallax it looked like she was pinching his sanctified head between her fingertips. “
This big.
He couldn’t have died from
that
.”

“The surgeon said that the injury was to his left ventricle.” 

The heart’s muscular left ventricle collected oxygenated blood and pumped it into the entire body. A slash to the left ventricle would gush blood and push it nowhere, like clapping in water.

Her own heart sloshed, and the waiting room seemed big and cold.

“I’m sorry,” the priest said. Both his hands wrapped around her pale, cold hands but she couldn’t feel them. “I’m so sorry.”

~~~~~

Dante read a Bible he had found in a drawer while he sat beside Bev’s hospital bed, waiting for her to wake from the anesthesia.

Bev had been out of surgery for—he consulted his wristwatch that read four o’clock—an hour, yet she hadn’t regained consciousness.

Bev coughed. The cylindrical steel cage on her arm bristled with steel pins and hovered midair in a sling, like a multi-antennae satellite flying in space, radioing messages. Bev’s eyes cracked open, each an edge of bloodshot sclera interrupted by brown iris, rimmed by lashes and faint, radiating lines. Her free, uninjured hand pushed a hair wisp off her forehead.

Dante flipped the Bible over and laid it on his lap. He leaned toward her. “Bev?”

She whispered, “Conroy?”

The lump in Dante’s throat sharpened, but this wasn’t the time to tell her Conroy had passed away.

Another sharpness, a thin glass sliver, cut deeper near his sternum.

Her eyes crimped shut.

~~~~~

Pancha looked up from the romance novel she was hiding at the nurses’ desk and glanced at Beverly Sloan’s door.

Father Dante, who spoke Spanish so nicely, had said he would alert her when Mrs. Sloan woke because Pancha needed to take Mrs. Sloan’s vitals when the anesthesia wore off.

Maybe he had fallen asleep. Four o’clock in the morning was a tired time.

Madre Dios knew that Pancha had read three times the passage describing Izabella’s frothy, flowing, voluminous, lavender gown that scantily clad her heaving bosoms.

~~~~~

Leila waited in the doorway until Beverly Sloan went back to sleep.

The priest was leaning forward almost off his chair, positioned to fall on his knees beside the hospital bed. His black eyes were open and raw. He touched the white sheet near Beverly Sloan’s leg.

It wouldn’t have surprised her if he had scooped Beverly Sloan into his arms, or howled to God, or wept, but he sat back, and his throat under his Roman collar clenched as he opened the Bible again.

Leila breezed into the room as if she had been walking down the hall and hadn’t seen a thing.

The priest looked up, professional and cool.

She flipped her hand at the hallway. “The cops want to talk to you. They’re eating chips in the vendo-land down the hall.”

“She should not be alone when she wakes. Tell her I will be back soon.” He said it offhandedly, casually, as if a moment ago he hadn’t been heart-wrenchingly reaching for her.

Leila did not want to be alone with Conroy’s wife. Widow. Conroy’s widow. “I’ve got to go see a friend of mine. She’s two floors up.”

The priest frowned, and it stopped Leila from walking out. He said, “I will be back in a moment.”

He left, and Leila was alone with the sleeping Beverly Sloan, who twitched and bobbed her head, almost waking, until Leila wanted to run out of the room screaming.

~~~~~

The yellow-painted room was not Bev’s bedroom.

It was a hospital, the university hospital.

Yellow walls.

Yellow meant orthopedics. She had volunteered in the hospital before the girls were born.

Both Bev’s hands were bandaged.

Her right hand was wrapped with gauze across the palm, and her fingers stuck out.