Rabid (44 page)

When the priest’s answering service cut in,
‘Allo, this is Father Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi,
she hit
end
and redialed, and it rang more.

This time, a click, a beep, scrambling like an animal clawing its way out of a hole, and the priest’s hoary voice,
“Si?”

“Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi? Dante? This is Leila Faris,” she whispered. She glanced down the hospital corridor. “I’m sorry to call you.”

“Ah, it is all right,” he said. A scuffle. “What time it is?”

“It’s six-thirty, Sunday night.”

“Merda.”
His voice croaked.

“I’m sorry, but the hospital minister isn’t here, and,” Leila pressed the side of her face flat against the chalky plaster wall and shielded herself with her arm from the eavesdropping nurses’ desk and the wandering residents and med students, “and some folks are about to get some really bad news about their daughter, a friend of mine,” Leila’s scratchy throat closed and she blasted a cough to clear it, “and her dad is a minister, and I’m really sorry, but could you come back here?” Leila’s damned vocal cords slapped. “I don’t know who else to call.”

Stupid hot lines dripped down Leila’s cheeks.

~~~~~

Dante looked through the half-open door to the darkened hospital room.

Inside, a shaft of hallway light picked out Leila, dressed in baggy green surgical scrubs, sitting near the foot of the girl’s bed while the girl’s parents wavered on either side.

They didn’t touch the girl in the bed. Her head twitched when one of them came close to her, but the rest of her body didn’t move.

He cleared his throat.

Leila looked up, a trace of silvery light from the hallway lights lining her face.

She left the bed, came over to the door, and whispered to him, “Let’s go down the hall,” and fluttered her hand down the door-lined corridor.

Each door sported a chart. Each chart summarized someone’s life expectancy and organized their remaining time into dosages and intervals. Dante had always balked that aspect of medicine: the cold, clinical assessment of death. He had wanted hope for his patients, even though most of them were in the end stage of Alzheimer’s.

Leila led him to the residents’ crash pad, a small room with a bunk bed, a table, a couch, and a kitchenette.

In her eyes, fine blood vessels covered the whites of her eyes around her black irises like lace. Her lank hair was damp.

She said, “Conroy should have been here, damn him. I tried calling some of the other professors but I couldn’t reach anybody. They have to tell her parents.”

He gestured to her green scrubs and high-heeled black boots. “Have you been home?”

“No. A friend of mine is a resident. He let me shower in the lounge here and gave me the scrubs. I should page the attending.” Her exhausted eyes quavered and she listed to the side. Leila flipped out her cell phone, thumbed keys faster than a video game, and flipped it closed. “He’ll be here in a minute.”

Dante stepped closer, in case he needed to catch her when she keeled over. “Sit down, Leila. Just for a minute.”

Her eyes blinked, slowly, almost falling asleep. Her hand drifted up and pressed her temple. “He went for coffee at Staff Caff.” She looked out the door. “He’ll be right back.”

The lack of sleep was punishing her frail body. Dante had slept a few hours, not enough, but he could make do. “You have not slept at all, have you?”

She smiled, a minimal weary lip curve. “I’m fine.”

Dante didn’t know what his role here was, but he was glad that Leila had called him. He must not have done too badly when she needed a shoulder. “Is she conscious?”

“The paralysis is creeping up her body,” Leila said. “The doctor said it will paralyze her diaphragm and she’ll suffocate. It seems like she should be unconscious but she’s not. She’s aware. She responds. She answers questions.” Leila shook her head. “She’s not demented like you would expect from an organic disease like Alzheimer’s or AIDS-related dementia. Her brain is fine, at least the part that thinks, except that she’s dying of rabies.”

It didn’t seem right, not at all, that this girl was dying. Dante had read all the treatises and papers and dogma that the Church had produced, but he still had no idea what to say. “I am sorry.”

Leila looked out the door. “Marlin’s back.”

Her polished black boots clacked on the hallway tile, and Dante followed her back to the girl’s bedside in the darkened room. Leila whispered introductions: her lab friend Danna Kerry, who flinched even at the whispers, her parents the Reverend and Mrs. Jebediah Kerry, and Marlin Pettid, Danna’s attending physician who wasn’t a marlin at all but a jellyfish with glutinous, translucent skin and a boneless, floating manner.

Leila reeled off Dante’s honorifics and surnames and degrees, which lasted too long and was mortifyingly accurate.

Dr. Pettid waved a hand toward the door. “There’s a conference room down the hall.”

They reached a small, clinically blue conference room with a round table. Marlin Pettid sat between the Reverend and Dante, and Leila sat between Dante and Mrs. Kerry. Mrs. Kerry patted Leila’s hand. “It’s so nice of you to be here,” she said.

Leila stared at the dark wood veneer table. “Dr. Sloan should have been here,” she said, “but he passed away early this morning.”

Mrs. Kerry said, “He didn’t sound sick.”

“It was sudden,” Leila said.

Marlin Pettid efficiently explained the cause of Danna’s viral encephalitis, and his jellyfishiness stiffened.

By the time Marlin had explained the unavoidable, fatal outcome of advanced rabies virus infection and her probable proximate expiration, his face was raw potato white and his clinical vernacular obfuscated connotation. “She was symptomatic at presentation, so vaccination would not have been efficacious. Presenting symptoms were atypical,” he explained, “unlike a canid-origin infection. An inaccurate differential diagnosis of prionic new variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease further complicated accurate diagnosis, before the viral encephalitis was established as due to a neurotropic lyssavirus, rabies virus. Palliative care is recommended.”

Dante, because he was also a medical doctor, understood everything that Pettid had said.

Danna had sought help too late. Bat rabies has different symptoms than dog rabies, and that was why they hadn’t figured out what she had. Conroy told them that she had a prion disease, and they hadn’t questioned it. She had rabies, and she was going to die, but they could make her death less painful, because death by rabies is a horrible way to die.

The Reverend Jebediah Kerry stared across at Dante, unblinking. His gray eyes became shiny.

Hearing such news about his nieces or nephew would have driven Dante eye-gouging insane. He could not imagine hearing such news about his own child.

Mrs. Kerry still gripped Leila’s hand, and Leila’s fingertips were bright red where the woman squeezed them. Mrs. Kerry grabbed Leila’s other hand. “Danna has
rabies
?”

Dante glanced at Leila, but she didn’t look back at him. His thigh was sore where they had injected the first of the vaccinations that morning.

“Yes,” Leila said. “I’m so sorry.”

~~~~~

Leila huddled under the priest’s black coat in the passenger seat of his car as he drove her home. The cologne that his coat had rubbed off of his neck smelled like musk and spice.

Her crumpled, autoclaved, steam-damaged clothes and coat filled a bag at her feet. Road grumbled under the tires.

She tried not to flinch every time the car slowed. “I wouldn’t have pictured you as a Volvo man.”

He glanced at her and smiled. “It is the rectory’s car.”

Headlight glare swept over his face. Every third beam picked out the white square on his Roman collar.

Leila wondered if, when he clipped that white plastic strip into the snaps in his collar every day, was he reminded of his decision to take Holy Orders, or had the ecumenical collar become just clothes to him?

When she donned her lab coat every day, it didn’t remind her of her commitment to rational interpretation, the empirical method, and Koch’s Postulates. The lab coat protected her skin and clothes from dyes, acids, alkalis, isotopes, and viruses.

What did that white square insert protect him from?

When he slipped the white lab coat over the Roman-collared black shirt, the juxtaposition of the rational and the supernatural must do something in his mind. The convergence of the lab coat and Roman collar must be like magnesium metal sparking blue fire in the air or lavender metallic sodium skittering and smoking on water.

“I could’ve driven myself home,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“You have not slept. You are exhausted.” His sonorous voice was amused. He sounded like God making the joke to Moses about His name
, I am what I am.
Tell them I-am sent you.

Maybe that was just in the Charleton Heston movie. Movies always screwed up books.

Headlights brightened his collar and Roman centurion face. He might be less a centurion than a patrician, reclining in a Tyre purple-edged toga, watching tigers maul Christians.

Dante might be more an antique Roman than a Dane, like Horatio.

Leila was babbling in her own head, but it distracted her, which was calming.

The other thoughts in her head made her want to scream.

Dante pulled the car into Leila’s parking lot and stopped. She slipped out of the car as soon as it was at rest and waved to the doorman, who smiled and nodded before shaking open his newspaper.

She turned and said, “Thanks for the ride, Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi.”

She heard him say, “Just-ah Dante,” as the car door clanked closed behind her. 

~~~~~

Monday morning, Bev was due to be discharged from the hospital. The doctors had removed the cage of pins around her arm and plastered a cast over the remaining protruding spikes.

Bev wanted to get home to see her girls. Laura had brought them to visit her at the hospital, but she wanted to be home, and see them at home, and be home with them.

The two policemen loitered near the nurses’ desk. One of them was flirting with the nurse.

Dante sat next to the bed, peering out the round window.

Bev asked, “Why are the police here?”

Dante frowned. “I don’t know. They are the same ones who asked questions.”

The nurse came in with the discharge papers and Bev signed the unread forms. The nurse kept glancing out the door, distracted.

Bev smiled at her, but the nurse didn’t see or didn’t care.

“That’s it,” the nurse said and riffled the pages, checking. She inhaled deeply and her voice projected as if speaking to the back row of a theater. “You’re all checked out.”

Bev glanced at Dante, who had also looked up, startled.

Two frowning policemen stepped into Bev’s room. “Beverly Maria Sloan?” one asked. The other stared at his feet.

She nodded.