Rabid (82 page)

“Because I’m a priest.”

“No, that’s why
you
shouldn’t want
me
.” She picked an ashtray out of the laundry basket and stubbed out her short cigarette. “I’m not that kind of girl, Dante. I’m not the kind you love.” Her brown eyes were wide and moist, almost tearful, but no remorse blunted her stare. “Oh, I screw around. Casual fucking is fine, but when men love me, it destroys them. Look what happened to Conroy. Look what happened to Sean. If I latch onto you, you’re finished. I’m a walking apoptosis ligand.”

Such a terrible thought, to think that about oneself. His chest hurt for her. “Leila, don’t say that.”

“It’s the best metaphor out there. I must be cardiac tissue specific.”

Dante’s heart seized as this girl described herself as an inducer of orderly, programmed death of the heart. His cigarette left a long smear of black chalk ash in the ashtray as he stubbed it out. “Who told you this?”

“Nobody had to tell me. In ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ the one by Nathanial Hawthorne, the girl was permeated with poison because her botanist father had fed it to her since she was a baby, like a Monarch butterfly that eats digitalis and becomes poisonous so birds won’t eat it, and she killed people she kissed. The first time I read that, when I was twelve, I wanted to be her, and now I am. I destroy men, every man I get close to.”

Twelve years old, after two years of molestation, she had wanted to be poisonous so she could kill her tormenter when he forced her to kiss him, and then she endured several more years of abuse. Intervening years cemented those terrible lessons.

That pedophile priest, Sean, had hurt her so much, so very much.

The memory is, as it were, the belly of the soul,
St. Augustine had said, an agnostic comment. With those searing memories, Sean had immolated Leila’s soul. If Leila believed that she couldn’t love, then it was impossible for Dante to reach her.

Damn that man.

Damn him.

Dante’s damnations filled with weight as though oil poured into them.

The other children, John, Luke, Valerie, Sarah, Zach, and the others, were as spiritually mauled and mangled as she was. Nicolai and Sam and Sean had done this to them.

Damn them all.

His hands pressed his eyes. Smoke lingering in the air circulated with his breath. There were more pedophiles out there.

Beyond his fingers, something rustled.

The pedophiles should be ripped out and thrown into the pits of Hell, if Dante had the stomach for it. He could avenge Leila, and Luke and John and Valerie, and the rest. He could use the savage resolve of the Church.

Damn
that priest who had ripped out Leila’s soul and had convinced this beautiful, beautiful girl that she was poison and that she couldn’t love, that she killed with love. The soul is the source of love, and memory is the belly of the soul. Damn him and all the others like him.

Damn him
. Damning rose out of Dante’s stomach and swirled in his chest. The words ceased to be a curse and became an imperative.

If
Dante were a priest,
since
Dante was a priest, he could
damn
people. If he became a Vatican politician and took control of the CDF, held the reins of the Inquisition, he could change things.

He could make sure that not one of them ever hurt a child ever again.

His hands slid down his cheeks.

Leila was right. For life to have meaning, you must serve something bigger than yourself. Dante could parcel out logical, measured revenge.

She watched him from beyond the laundry basket full of foliage.

“I have to go back.” He stood.

Leila stood behind the basket, hands on her hips, and squinted. “What?”

She might not understand why, or she might think he was the worst of them. He was contemplating sending them to Hell, becoming Leila’s avenger and Bev’s demon. “You’re right. I’m still one of them. I think like them.”

He took a business card out of his wallet and tossed it on her navy blue sleeping bag. The card tumbled through the air and landed carelessly like a whore’s payment. Handing it to her would have been a better gesture.

The white card had landed face-up with the keys and tiara of St. Peter in the top left hand corner. His full name and titles scribbled a black line of minute type in the center. His affiliations were smaller, below his name. “You have entered dangerous territory, religion and science. You might need to discuss something, or need an opinion, or protection. You can call me, if you need to talk.”

She flopped her hand near her side, indicating everything. “I don’t think so.”

“Nevertheless, if you want to talk about anything, about science, about Sean, if you need a priest, call.”

Her chin notched down. “So you aren’t leaving the Church.”

“No.”
Never.

Dante felt like he had turned down dark, long road and begun walking.

“Good,” she said and gazed down and at her foot or the floor. Her voice was flat with suppression. There must be a thousand things she wanted to scream at him.

The printer ground out a last page—
light will be thrown upon the origins of religion
—reset itself with a firm clack, and began printing the bibliography.

Darwin, at the end of
Origins of Species
, had written a similar line about light being thrown upon the origins of man, and Watson and Crick in their seminal DNA paper had referred to that by saying that light would be thrown upon the replication mechanism of DNA.

Such lovely intelligence floated in her.

“I should go,” he said.

The door behind him was too close. Which was appropriate for a spurned lover: a kiss, a handshake, a wave, or merely turning and walking out?

“Yeah.” She set down her ashtray and walked around the basket of plants.

Her slight form led him through the smooth, smoky air toward the door. She was leaving tomorrow for New York, and the hurt children here needed counseling, and then he would return to Roma.

The door gaped open like a portal to the rest of the world.

A kiss from her would fortify him against his long, cold life ahead. Her body in his arms and his bed seemed like wine and oxygen, but she wasn’t the type of woman to be
owned
. She was a more dedicated, celibate priest than he was.

Forcing a kiss would enrage her and she would slam him against the wall and throw him out the door and burn his card and phone numbers in her metal ashtray. There was no doubt she could inflict physical damage. Conroy’s dead, oiled body had borne livid bruises, and Dante would not hurt her to defend himself.

She had wrenched Dante’s own arm and jabbed pressure points when he had provoked her.

And, she had to keep that card.

There had to be a chance, however slight, that someday he would speak to her again.

Despicable thoughts wormed in his mind.

She had softened in Dante’s arms that night in her bed, afterward, when he had held her. Balancing gentleness with a hint of anger, a suggestion of
angry was worse
, would tip her into bed.

He could have her tonight, if he used what he knew about her to manipulate her.

Dante was truly damned if he did that.

At the door, Leila unlocked the several clattering, clicking mechanisms and held her hand between their chests primly for a handshake. “Good-bye, then, Father.”

“Just Dante.” His hand slid past her fingers, and their palms touched. “For you, I am just Dante.”

An odd softness suffused her voice and her chin tipped up. “Just Dante.”

Dante’s joints locked like an engine raced without oil. That tip-up was an invitation to press her back against the blank foyer wall and show her that he could do things for her and to her. He had seen many women do that.

He wanted to touch her.

His head inclined left.

Yet she might be testing his protestation about remaining a priest. If he ducked his head and grabbed her body, she would toss his phone numbers away with the little bits of moving trash in the corners of her sparse apartment, and he would never hear from her again.

No one would ever understand his jokes and his science and the world like she did.

But remaining a priest was impossible when his body locked in rigor mortis at the sight of her slim neck arching the slightest bit. Celibacy and chastity were impossible around her.

She moved one foot toward him, an extension with her toe, a ballet
tendu
.

The option of passivity presented itself, of allowing her to come to him, yet this did not appeal to him in the same way as crushing her lithe body between his flesh and the wall.

She leaned on the toe and moved closer to his body, rising toward his face. Trembling started in his left leg and crawled up his groin, tightening his skin.

But what of Leila? A few minutes ago, she had fallen backward off her sleeping bag trying to get away when he had stretched a few fingers toward her. She had paced and kept most of the apartment and the laundry basket and airbed as impediments between them.

Why on earth would she close her espresso eyes as her face leveled with his?

Perhaps she was trying to overcome her aversion to priests. Desensitization therapy.

How altruistic of him to help her.

He was still a cad,
un donnaiolo
.

Her hand slipped from his and she touched his shoulder.

Maybe she was testing his resolve.

Maybe this was one last kiss goodbye.

So complicated.

Her lips touched his, and she kissed him.

All those nights in Roma, if he had felt like this with a woman, so quiet inside, he would never have become a priest. His arm slipped around her waist just to steady her, not to control her, and he held the kiss a moment.

He let go with his lips and leaned back.

Her gaze was steady. Her large brown eyes hadn’t become drunk with lust nor misty with emotion. She searched for something in his eyes.

His moment of quiet was the sigh of retreating wind before a tornado rips through a house.

His body roared. He whirled with her, slammed the door shut with one hand, and pinned her to the wall and kissed her hard, as hard as he could without hurting her. She held him around the neck and lifted herself up, climbing, and her legs clasped around his waist. He buried his face in her neck, perfume and brimstone smoke. Her skin under his mouth was tight, and her black hair swished beside his eyes.

He pushed her hair back from her neck and ears, and his hand came away wet.

He looked at his damp hand and her face. Tears rolled out of her shut eyes, but she didn’t gasp, and she didn’t tremble.

She touched his neck where he had torn the white plastic tab out of his collar, and her fingers crawled back.

She was
submitting
to him. Even though she had made the first move, it was a feint to draw his inevitable attack and seek some semblance of control.