Rabid (13 page)

Footsteps pounded behind her. A masculine shout, “
Alto!
Stop!”

Grabbed from behind and pushed, Bev stumbled and lost a shoe. She grabbed the chair.

Father Dante held her arm and nearly lifted her. “You should not look there. You are all right?”

Bev sucked in air. “Fine,” she said.

“
Mi dispiace.
I am sorry.” He stepped back and rubbed his face.

“No, I’m fine.” Bev toed around until she found her shoe and slipped it on.

Dante was still breathing hard. “You shouldn’t look in those.”

Bev sat on the chair arm. “Good grief, what’s wrong?”

Father Dante laid his hands on the boxes, as if to assure himself that they were still closed, as if he could divine whether she had looked or not. “It’s evidence.”

Evidence
. Evidence was for crimes.

Bev’s breath caught. “Oh.”

Father Dante’s face was contorted and murderous. “I’m sending it to Roma, for evidence. Nicolai made videos of himself, on the computer, of himself with the children. I had to watch, to identify the children. I want to
kill him
. I want to beat him to death. The things he did, oh God,
the things he did.
”

His voice was rough, like he had been raging. His eyes shone, almost like tears.

Before, she had understood the accusations, but now she
believed
them. “Oh, my God.”

“
Yes
.”

“
Father Nicolai
.” Her stomach cramped.

“He is a devil.” Father Dante rubbed his hands together as if to warm them.

~~~~~

Leila lay on her bed on top of the scarlet, tasseled duvet, reading
Middlemarch.
Pale red light filtered through the chiffon curtains around the bed and stretched long stripes on the duvet and wall. In rhythm with her reading, she batted the glass-beaded fringe that edged the curtain.

Meth, her old black Labrador, snoozed on the floor. His spindly tail thumped intermittently.

Finally, a knock at the door. Leila kicked her nightstand drawer closed as she rolled off the bed. Her pistol clunked as the drawer shut.

At the door, Leila peered through the peephole and saw Conroy, holding booze.

Good. That bottle would put a dent in her looming bar tab. This weekend was always an expensive one.

She unlatched the locks in a drumroll of rattling bolts.

The brown bag in Conroy’s arms clanked as he set it on her table.

More than one bottle.
Good
.

“I feel like I’m contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” he said.

“That’s not funny.” Even if Conroy had pedophile or adolescent-o-phile—
ephebophile
—fantasies, she didn’t encourage shit like that. No cheerleader outfits hung in her closet. She swallowed hard to push down the shaking sickness in her throat and casually inspected bottles in the bag: whisky, beer, and vodka. “What, are you throwing a party?”

Conroy said, “I thought I’d have a beer. Maybe some vodka. What the hell.”

Leila recited, “Liquor before beer, in the clear. Beer before liquor, never sicker.” Someone at O’Malley’s party last night should have reminded her of that.

“Okay,” Conroy said. “Got orange juice?”

Leila’s fridge held towers of salad ingredients and two cartons of skinless chicken breasts. “Some pineapple-orange juice.”

“Sounds like a screwdriver to me.”

She poured one finger of the umber Macallan in a shotglass for herself and slammed it down—it burned so good, like a whiff of hellfire—and poured a jigger of vodka into Conroy’s glass of orange juice. She stirred it with a blunt table knife.

Conroy frowned at her. “Why aren’t you using a spoon?”

Leila poured herself another shot. “People sniff spoons when they’re looking for evidence of secret drinking.”

“You live alone.” Conroy turned her television over to the all-golf channel.

Leila handed him the pine-screwdriver and sniffed her own burning creosote-scented scotch. “It’s January twenty-ninth, and it’s even a Friday. Shall we raise a glass to my dad?”

From the couch, Conroy raised his glass to the height of her eyes.

Leila raised her shotglass until it eclipsed Conroy’s orange tumbler and his balding head and his blue, blue eyes. She said, “May he not be burning in Hell.”

Conroy’s glass dipped, breaking the alcoholic juxtaposition. “Your father passed on?”

Leila pounded the shot, and it burned, too, but less. “Yep.” Leila went back to the kitchen to replenish. Her next shot went in a highball glass with bottled water. New Hamilton tap water had a pesticidal, nitrogenous finish.

Conroy said, “My father passed away, too, when I was a ten.”

“I was sixteen.” Nine years ago. Leila’s arm fell in slow motion, and she guided it down to the counter. The honey-colored liquid swirled in her highball glass. She had bought good barware a couple of years back. Her father would have liked it, good scotch in good crystal. Pouring a shot on his grave would have been a fitting tribute, but he had been cremated, and flinging a shot into the Floridian waves seemed like a waste of good scotch, and she was nowhere near Florida.

“Heart attack,” Conroy said. “I don’t even remember much about him.”

“My dad was sick.” She raised her amber-filled glass. “This was part of it.”

“You should be careful about drinking. Alcoholism is genetic,” he said.

“Bullshit.” Her drink caught flickers from the blue glass chandelier above the kitchen table. “Phenylketoneuria is genetic. Huntington’s Chorea is genetic.”

Conroy looked serious, older, wiser,
older
. “A predisposition, then.”

“Tay-Sachs is genetic.” The glass-enclosed chandelier warped and wefted through the lens of scotch and water. The cups of stained glass walked on the ceiling like an upside-down octopus in round boots. “Sickle cell is genetic.”

Conroy was beside her, and he steered her toward the couch. “Your definition of ‘genetic’ narrows when you drink.”

Pressure on her shoulder, and she sat. She held her drink with cupped hands. “Thalassemia and albinism.”

Conroy set his drink on the coffee table. “I haven’t thought about my father for years.”

Leila didn’t want to talk. She just wanted to drink. “I think about mine all the time.”

Every time she saw the red gauze above her bed, morning and evening.

Every time her mother said he was burning in Hell.

Every time she drank.

Conroy shook his head. “You should talk to somebody.”

“Like who, a shrink?”
A priest?
Her stomach wrestled with the scotch.

“Me?”

“You are just about to leave.” In Leila’s hands, the dilute scotch seemed to permeate the crystal. It spilled into her hands and ran through the veins in her arms. “Jody’s coming over at seven. We’re going out.”

Conroy sat beside her and leaned back. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

“So am I.” She gazed into her amber drink as if trying to penetrate the mythical veil, the one that charlatans and mediums and psychics talked about, that separated the Living from the Departed, or Crossed-Over, or some other such euphemistic bullshit for
dead
.

The flavors in the scotch separated in her mouth. Her dad described the flavors in booze as smoke and fruit and berry, but scotch tasted more varied to her than food flavors. They were almost colors, and she resisted calling the top note
honey
, because that suggested bee clover honey, but it was rich and sweet, maybe more like honeysuckle, or honey-yellow silk, or cold gold coins. One of the compounds that registered on the back of her tongue wasn’t salty, but it had a mineral taste, cloudy-white like gypsum.

Conroy took the drink out of her hands and set it on the coffee table. She didn’t protest or reach for it. It was going to be a long night. There was plenty of time.

He said, “Tell me about your father.”

Leila retrieved her scotch. The anniversary was not for morbid reminiscences. The anniversary was for drinking and her own memories in her own head. Her dad had hated whispers and rumors and cattiness.

“What did he do?” Conroy prompted.

“Lawyer.” She sipped. “He moved to Florida when my mom divorced him.”

“Did you see him much?”

“Summers.” Three sunny months every year when she was freed from plaid and penguins and priests and to-do lists and the big, dry-erase schedule on the wall, scrawled with
Mass, Youth Group, tutoring w/Fr. Sean,
and
piano
. Those six years, she had been a divided soul, a multiple personality. “Read any good books lately? I’m reading
Middlemarch
.”

Conroy sighed. “I wouldn’t think you’d like George Eliot.”

Leila blinked, a darkness dropping over her apartment and lifting like sped-up night. “Why not?”

He sipped his pine-screwdriver. “All the women do is get married, and who they marry is of such importance. It’s practically a romance novel.”

“But George Eliot told the story.” Leila set down her drink and lay back on the couch, one arm above her head. She knew she was inviting being jumped on. “George Eliot was her own woman. She traveled. She lived with a man she wasn’t married to, then married a buck twenty years younger than she was. Even Virginia Woolf thought Eliot was cool.”

Conroy shrugged.

Fine. He didn’t get it, the philistine. “In Victorian times,
marriage
meant
sex
. Eliot was talking about
sex
. Women don’t want marriage. Women want sex.
Middlemarch
is porn.”

“Of course women want to get married.” Conroy was far too dismissive for a guy in a bad woman’s apartment. “It’s all they talk about.”

Interesting that he used the exclusionary
they
, as if no one present qualified as a woman. “Women don’t want marriage. Men do.”

He laughed more than just a snort. “That’s not true.”

“Women want sex. Women risk childbirth and death to have sex.” She rolled to her feet and picked up her glass. “Eliot was a pre-Raphaelite,” she muttered and walked into the kitchen.

“You didn’t tell me about your father.” Conroy sat on the couch, watching muted golf.

“My father has nothing to do with this,” Leila said. “Do you know why you’re here?”

Conroy looked from the television to her, wary. “In your apartment? Now?”

~~~~~

Conroy was at Leila’s apartment because he didn’t want to go home. If he went home, Beverly might be drunk again, or might have talked to that priest again, or might want to talk to him some more.

“On Earth and in my apartment,” Leila said. “It’s to pass on your genes.”