Rabid (12 page)

Conroy lifted the membranous glove off the vial of viral stock in the hood. The liquid was thoroughly thawed. He held it, and chill poked his palm through the latex glove.

Thank Whomever couldn’t be proven to not exist, the virus hadn’t gotten too warm. Virus stocks are notoriously delicate.

~~~~~

After Bev and Dante finished the Chianti, Bev’s ears felt tickly and her balance was bobbly. She had tried to let Father Dante drink most of the wine, but he had to drive home, so she had helped. As a rule, she didn’t drink in front of the girls, but the girls should see how responsible adults could imbibe a little.

She sent the girls upstairs for baths. “Father, would you like to sit down?”

His unrelieved black clothes, Mediterranean skin, and black hair were an impossibly dark hole cut into the bright room. The incandescent light streaming from the harsh bulbs and rebounding from the white ceiling found him untouchable.

“I shouldn’t,” he said. “There is work to be done.”

She walked him to the foyer and held out her hand. “Thank you for coming.”

Father Dante took her hand and held it, not shaking. He smiled shyly, or wryly, just a curve of his lips. Expressions melted in her eyes when she was tipsy. “It was lovely. Thank you, Mrs. Sloan.”

“Bev, call me Bev.” She thought he was going to kiss her knuckles, so European, but he didn’t lift her hand. Hand-kissing would have been too continental for this East Coast college town, for this Midwestern girl. “Everyone calls me Bev.”

“Thank you, Bev.” Father Dante walked into the porchlight, and the dark night gathered him in.

Her head spun as she closed the door and leaned on it, listening to his car drive away.

The alcohol buzz drifted in her mind and felt like the peace of God, but it wasn’t. No Divine Grace could reach her until her penance was complete, until she forgave Conroy.

A tipsy plan formed itself.

She waltzed back to the dining room. The glass bottle tapped her teeth as she drank the last astringent swallow of the Chianti.

~~~~~

Conroy saw the light in the master bedroom window when he pulled into the garage at eleven. Beverly must be waiting for him, ready to start a fight. He sighed. He probably deserved it, but it didn’t mean he wanted to fight with her.

Inside, the house was dark. A green, empty wine bottle slanted in the recycling bin. He picked it up. The sketchy label read
Chianti
.

Surely Beverly hadn’t been drinking.

She wouldn’t drink in front of the girls or, good God,
alone
.

He let the bottle slip into the bin, and it clanked against the jars and bottles.

Upstairs, he checked on the girls in case Beverly hadn’t gotten them to bed, but they were fine. Dinah’s stuffed unicorn had fallen on the floor. He tucked it under the covers with her.

Conroy opened their bedroom door, expecting to find his wife full of the wrath of Hell or passed out drunk.

Inside, candles flickered on every glass-topped piece of furniture: dressers, nightstands, Beverly’s vanity table. Red pillars, yellow votives, green tea lights, white tapers, emergency power-outage beeswax, and an orange three-wick pot flickered. Beverly lit the last one and clicked off the gooseneck lighter. She was wearing the blue silk penoir set with lace froth at her bust and thighs. She always wore a robe of some kind until they turned out the lights. The scars still embarrassed her, even though he had told her a hundred times that he didn’t care.

“Beverly?” he asked, as if he didn’t know who she was. “Have you been drinking?”

Her hands flipped and fluttered in the air for longer than if she had been sober. “Father Dante brought over a bottle of wine.” She walked over to him. “What was I supposed to do?”

Beverly and ethanol were too miscible. Her personality was highly soluble in ethanol and chemically unstable. She had an edge to her when she was drunk. When they were younger, her sharp edge had attracted him, added volatility to their conversations and encounters. A thrill of uncertainty shivered in his flesh. “Was it just wine? Was it just one glass?” he asked.

“Maybe one and a half.” She slid her arms around his neck. Wine soured her breath, a whiff of danger and promise. She was beautiful with pink cheeks and a hot glow to her body.

He laughed, picked her up in his arms, and tossed her on the bed.

She giggled, and her light brown hair bounced and shone in the candlelight.

~~~~~

The next morning, Bev gathered her terrycloth robe around her and pressed the waffle iron closed. If she got to the school early, she might have a moment to kneel at the altar, to see if her heart had mended.

Ah, last night, the wine had been so tasty, like chocolate, a glorified sugar buzz, a cell-level happy glow. She had the munchies for wine, just a little, just one glass.

Conroy wandered downstairs. The girls were finishing their waffles at the kitchen table, watching the empty swings outside meander in the chill breeze. Christine continued her diatribe about
Anne of Green Gables
, “And I have to read
a hundred pages
this weekend.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine, honey.” Bev set waffle-laden plates on the table.

Conroy ran his fingers through his hair so that it stood on end, obscuring the thin spot in back. “What was that priest doing over here last night?”

She poured coffee for herself and Conroy. “He came over for supper. He’s alone in a strange country. He doesn’t have any family here.” She sat across from her husband.

“And the priest got you drunk?” Conroy asked.

“He brought one bottle of wine. I’m such a lightweight anymore.” Bev tucked into her waffle.

“It’s strange,” he said, “the priest coming to dinner. The priest bringing over wine.”

“It’s not strange,” she said.

~~~~~

Chapter Five

Friday morning, Leila was walking down the hall toward the lab. Her toe dragged on the hallway’s industrial tile floor, and she hopped over the stumble. Her coffee sloshed in its cup but didn’t splash out.

She didn’t bother to look back to feign that a pebble had caused the stumble. Except for that damn experiment, she would have called in sick.

Today was a day to be in a bar, drinking oneself unconscious.

Conroy was working at his computer, typing furiously, and she had almost sneaked past when he waved her into his office. “This gel turned into a big, red X again!” He flicked his middle finger at the monitor.

On the oversized screen, a square was slashed by a red, graphic X.

She drank coffee. A scalding line extended down her throat to her chest. Her cells waved, trying to catch the cascading caffeine. “What did you do to it?”

“I didn’t do anything,” he protested. “I was writing, and I scrolled up to look at the gel, and the computer hung for a minute and, when it started scrolling again, all I got was this damned, red X! And now they’re
all
like that!
X’s!
”

“All right, Dr. S. Let’s see what you did. Get up.”

His chair was still warm under her legs. Leila closed five other memory-sucking programs that he had running in the background. She scrolled the grant up, and the gel was back in its place. “There.”

“How’d you do that?” Conroy leaned over her shoulder and squinted at the monitor.

“Magic.” She walked toward the door. Her timepoint was already late. After that, she could get the hell out of the lab. He caught her forearm and she jerked away. “Don’t you grab me.”

Conroy asked, “I’m not prying, but are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Nope.” She was too slow in reaching for the doorknob.

“Do you have a few minutes around six tonight?”

“Sure,” Leila said. “Bring booze.”

A rough scrog might be just the way to begin her long, terrible weekend.

~~~~~

Outside Conroy’s office in the Sloan lab, Danna sat on a tall lab chair and swung her legs.

On the paper-covered counter beside her, beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, and graduated cylinders stood in glittery rows like fine crystal, waiting for the undergrad dishwasher to put them away.

Danna said, “I think he’s taking advantage of her.”

Joe laughed. “Leila can take care of herself.”

“He always has a computer problem.” She scratched at the welt on her arm. It had been there for weeks but it hadn’t grown or gotten infected, it was just kind of rashy, so she ignored it.

Virus crawled up the neurons in her arm, chewing toward her brain. Conroy had rescued them from that icy hell of liquid nitrogen. He must have a divine design, a purpose-driven life planned for them, something more than just those dishes and mice. They chewed and flitted and swung among the neurons, praying for grace.

Danna played with a pipetter, squirting distilled water in swirls on the white waffled paper covering the counter. “I think he’s going to hold her back from graduating.”

“He wouldn’t.” Joe pipetted microliters of blue-dyed DNA into a block of gelatinous agarose. The thought that naive Leila needed their protection was enough to make him snort, but he didn’t. He respected Leila’s privacy, and she had mentioned a pub crawl that evening. After one of Leila’s pub crawls last year, he had awakened with a leather snake-toy wrapped around his waist and wondered what Leila was up to, but then the leathery toy moved like an enormous penis and he had had an alien-abduction homosexual rape moment before he realized he was sleeping next to an elephant in the Bronx Zoo, and its trunk was snuggling him.

Danna shook her head and her frizzy pony tail swished. Dr. S. was monopolizing Leila, and he grimaced every time he looked at Leila as if demonic thoughts assailed him.

Danna clasped her hands to her bony chest. “I’ll pray for her.”

Joe snorted. “You do that.”

~~~~~

Bev knocked on the library door.

No answer.

She pounded harder on the dark varnish.

Nothing.

She knocked again, a shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm.

Nothing.

She went ahead and opened the door.

No one was among the bookcases and chairs and desk and cardboard boxes littering the room. Two large boxes stood on the desk. Father Dante might be throwing away something useful. She walked over to them. The flaps were interlaced closed. One box was taped with fiber-embedded strapping tape.