Rabid (84 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three: Leila

Leila’s forehead thunked against the door as Dante walked away from her apartment. A blue flash popped into her vision, obscured the white-painted door, and spun away.

Dante
should
walk away from her, Rappaccini’s cloned daughter, a walking apoptosis ligand.

He should
run
.

That last-ditch kiss haunted her. She would have fucked the priest.

But he was Just Dante to her, not a priest. He wasn’t a hypocritical priest who memorized enough Latin to fumble through the Mass and heard your confession and baptized your cousins. He was a scientist and an MD, and he had written an essay supporting her when the journals were brimming with brimstone for her.

And he was a priest. Like a priest always will, he had chosen the Church over her.

She leaned against the door.

Meth nuzzled her palm with his whiskery lips.

The printer, linked to the laptop in the center of the empty floor, grated out another page.

Dante had left her. No drunken Jesuit would darken her doorstep ever again. Her chest felt heavy, like a small hole in her right cardiac atrium was leaking blood into her chest cavity. The right atrium is the small, upper chamber that receives blood from the body after the somatic cells have depleted the oxygen, and then the heart passes the blood to the right ventricle, and that pushes the blood up through the lungs to exchange gasses with the fresh, inhaled air.

Yes, the right atrium must be her problem, because the wound seemed to be impacting her breathing, too, like she couldn’t suck in enough air and her body was starving.

She had almost fucked a priest
again
.

She had wanted to change his mind, to make him fight for her, to make him want her again, but it was better for him if he didn’t.

This way, he might live. He might put together a life for himself.

During that kiss, she had rationalized that she might as well get fucked because nothing mattered, not working or living or dying. When he had turned on her, terror rose but she wasn’t going to give into it this time. It was just fucking. Nothing else.

She walked away from the front door and picked up her cell phone. She scrolled through the contact numbers in the phone’s memory, selected one, and let it dial. The phone was cold and hard against her ear, like pressing a revolver to her head for Russian roulette.

A click traveled through the phone.

Sean’s voice whispered the name of his church in her ear, “St. John’s Rectory. This is Father Sean Gelineau.”

St. John’s served as a nursing home for aged priests. His reassignment had been part of her deal with the Church to not go public or press charges after Leila got pregnant.

Memories of his smooth voice whispering prayers in her ear raised bile in her throat. His voice was hoarse from a few more years of smoke settling on his larynx. He had shared Leila’s first cigarette with her. Every time her cells cried out for nicotine, and every time she gave in, she thought of him.

“Sean, it’s Leila.”

Rustling and clattering littered the phone line. “Leila?
My
Leila? Where are you? I’ve prayed every day that I’d find you again.” His voice was so silky, rehearsed. He had said almost the same thing last time, just before Meth chewed his leg halfway off. He said, “That’s an odd area code, three one nine.”

She closed her eyes and rested her hand on Meth’s warm head. He slurped his furry lips. That three-one-nine area code was for Iowa City, Iowa. She had never lived there. She had opened her cell phone account while on a road trip.

Sean asked, “How old are you now? Eighteen?”

A hot tear squeezed through her closed eyelids, and she rubbed it off her face. When she was fifteen, at the Orthodox church and new high school, the other girls had speculated and gossiped that she had changed schools because she had had an affair with a priest. The rumor was that she had an abortion.

They were wrong. It had been a miscarriage. Even babies died if she loved them.

That had been nine years ago.

Nine years ago: two years of high school, three of undergrad, and four for her PhD. She was all of twenty-five. “No, I’m not eighteen.”

“Ah,” he sighed. “You’re such a beautiful child.” He sounded distracted, distant, like he had sounded on the beach a few blocks from her high school when they had watched sea lions barking and surfing the glittering waves that pounded the shore, like a Pacific Poseidon was trying to smite Sean and save Leila before they climbed in his Corvette and he took her back to the rectory.

Her mouth was dry. Swallowing creased her throat. “Sean, I talked to someone. I told him about us. He’s a priest, too.”

“Another priest? You were with another priest?” Sean asked. “Did you seduce him, too?”

“No.” Her throat clamped on sobs. She lay down on the sleeping bag and curled sideways around a pillow.

“Leila, you can’t help it. You seduce men because, in women, carnal lust is insatiable. I couldn’t stop myself and now you’ve seduced another priest.” His voice sharpened. “Now, who was this other priest you fucked?”

Her chest flapped like a rabid bat in a mousetrap. “He’s with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

“The Holy Office?” Sean’s voice cracked. He sounded afraid.

“Sean, have you heard what’s happening to priests who,” her heart dry-heaved, “mess with kids?”

“
You told the Holy Office?
” Even his voice beat her, cracked her open like a walnut and scraped out flesh. “I’ll make you sorry. I’ll find you. I’ll find you and make you sorry.” His voice acquired that raging note, and she coiled more tightly around the beaded pillow and wept with her palm pressed over the phone.

Dante’s business card nudged out from under her arm.

Air rushed into her lungs, and she was breathing for the first time instead of drowning. “They’re coming for you.”

Vatican things filled the front of the small card, even the long title of Consultor for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Leila turned over Dante’s business card. On the back, Dante had written in black ink with even, block letters,
If you need anything at all, for any reason, call.
Phone numbers with area codes or city and country codes alternated with black lines.

From the phone lying beside her head, Sean said, “No one can run away from the
Vatican
, from the
Inquisition
. They’ll find me, no matter where I go, no matter what I do.”

She breathed, deeply and evenly, with no terror, no anxiety about who was waiting around the corner, for the first time in so many years. “I know.”

She hung up the phone and sobbed until the printer finished grinding out her thesis.

When she could breathe right, she thumbed Dante’s phone numbers into the memory of her cell phone, even though she could never call him.

He might answer.

He might come back, and she couldn’t take that chance.

The silence lulled her to sleep, alone, exhausted, though her arms flinched at every pop and groan in the tower of apartments.

~~~~~

The next day, Leila deposited her thesis with the sullen thesis office clerk and drove away from New Hamilton.

Meth the dog sat in the passenger seat, panting and hanging his grizzled head out the passenger side window, ears flapping, flying toward New York.

~~~~~~~

TK Kenyon

TK Kenyon
is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, novelist, award-winning short story writer, pharmaceutical industry regulatory consultant, technical writer, molecular virologist, neuroscientist, minivan-driving mom, happy wife, cat slave, P90X devotee, surfer, high-handicap golfer, scuba diver, gourmet chef, mostly vegetarian, chocolatier, gardener, capsaicin addict, caffeine junkie, Apache and Scot descendant, native Arizonan, New Englander, nouveau feminist, political moderate with extremist tendencies, radical atheist, Buddhist-curious, occasional UU, Tamil Ayer Brahmin Hindu by marriage, ex-actress, grown-up child beauty queen, PhD, MFA, BS (in so many ways), ASU Sun Devil, Iowa Hawkeye, UPenn Quaker, and always looking for something interesting to do.

American Stories: 7 Award-Winning Short Stories by TK Kenyon

A compilation of seven award-winning stories by TK Kenyon, previously published in literary journals, now together for the first time. Includes: “Hungry Ghosts,” “The Law of Large Numbers,” “Macho,” “Old Testament Biblical Sacrifice,” and “Communion Is A Kiss,” the prequel to RABID.

Jitterbugging with The Bomb: Stories about WWII by TK Kenyon

A compilation of four short stories previously published in literary journals, now together for the first time. Includes: “Kings,” “Hooligan Navy,” “Jitterbugging with The Bomb,” and “Heart Mountain.”

Callous: A Novel by TK Kenyon– Coming Soon

Selling Handcuffs (An Angel Day Thriller)– Coming Soon