Rabid (20 page)

The smile tightened the muscles in his temple, and the headache probed farther.

~~~~~

Mary, Laura, and Lydia and the rest of the choir watched Father Dante watching Bev Sloan as he wedged himself beside her on the piano bench and she paged through the hymnal. The stained glass windows above were dark. The atrophied winter sun had fallen off the horizon.

Lydia asked, “Do you think he’s going to nail our Bev?”

Laura whispered, “Stop it!” and the ferocity of it slapped Mary and Lydia, who leaned back. “Stop it!” Laura whispered. “Father Dante is a good man. He’s a good
priest
. He wouldn’t do anything like that.” She turned away from the both of them, disgusted. “And Bev is the sweetest woman. She would
never
do anything like that,
never
.”

Lydia raised her eyebrows at Mary, who raised her blonde, feathered brows in return.

Mary said, “Of course she wouldn’t.”

“Well,” Lydia said, “Did you hear the one about Jesus walking though Heaven?”

“No,” Mary said. Laura still wouldn’t look at them.

Lydia said, “Jesus is walking through Heaven, and He sees a gambler running a dice game and prostitutes lounging around. Farther down the street, He sees a drunk lawyer screaming wrathfully at tobacco farmers. Finally, He can’t take it, so He goes over to St. Peter and asks him why he’s letting all these sinners and miscreants into Heaven.”

Mary reached over and patted Laura on the shoulder, and Laura touched her hand without looking back.

It hadn’t been an accusation. There was something else.

All right, something else.

Lydia rubbed Laura’s other shoulder. “And St. Peter says to Jesus, ‘I keep turning them away, but Your Mother keeps letting them in the back door.’”

Laura chuckled a sad, low huh-huh-huh like a car engine straining to turn over after an icy night, and they sat, Lydia and Mary patting Laura, until Bev announced the next hymn.

~~~~~

Wednesday morning, Conroy sat at his desk—the gels in his grant filled the wide computer screen—and watched Leila walk by his doorway through the lab outside like a blue-clothed, black-haired bruise walking through the glaring day.

He watched the word-processing screen, and the black bands on the white gels blinked, shivered, and transformed into giant, red X’s. “Leila!”

Danna, his other female grad student, pretty in a scrawny and frowsy way, peered into his office. “She’s taking off her coat.”

Conroy’s fist shook to dispel the athletic anger. He wanted to punch the huge screen and under his fist feel it break or bend or do whatever plasma screens did when someone pummeled them. “Grant, gels, screwed up.” He caught his breath. “Turned into big, red X’s again.” He stopped. “Danna, you wouldn’t know what’s wrong with it, would you?”

Danna turned sideways and yelled, “Lie-la! Dr. S. wants you!”

Lazy-ass grad students.

Leila walked in, holding coffee and scratching her sleek head. “What happened now?”

“This, this grant.” He held his hands toward the screen as if preventing it from lunging at him. “It keeps turning the gels into god-damned red X’s.”

Leila flapped a hand at him to move him over so she could see the screen. He moved. She said, “You’re overloading the memory again. There, I’ve spliced it into three documents. Work on ‘braingrant3’ and grab me the day before you mail it to format the page numbers.”

“Okay.” His beautiful gels were back.

“You’ve got to teach me how to run a gel that clean.” Leila pointed one slim finger to the glowing screen.

Damn, if she suspected the gel was faked, he couldn’t show it to her anymore, even if the sonofabitch computer mutated his gels into red X’s again. “Western blot, monoclonal. Lots of blotter.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“And a fetal calf serum block.”

She probably didn’t suspect him of fabricating the gel. Everyone knew he was hopeless with computers, and graphics software was especially obtuse, and there was no way that he could drag-draw ellipses, fill them, warp, blur, pixilate, and paste them onto a gray rectangle. Maybe he should add some smudges for non-specific binding, maybe a fingerprint.

“Leila,” he whispered and cleared his throat. “Are you free tonight?”

~~~~~

The email that was received at noon, Wednesday:

Dearest Beverly,

I’m going to have to work through dinner again. If I get the grant, it’ll mean that I have three R01s, which will better my position with the Medical College Dean search committee.

Yours, Conroy

The email that was sent at one o’clock, Wednesday:

Father Dante,

Since my husband is working late again tonight, why don’t we have dinner about seven?

Bev

The reply:

Si. Grazie.

~~~~~

Wednesday evening, Bev laid the good silverware and the contemporary china on the table. She rinsed wine glasses in case Father Dante brought wine again.

Her rules were strict. No buying alcohol. No keeping alcohol in the house. No drinking alone. No hard liquor. For social alcohol, none before six o’clock at night. No more than three drinks a week, and no more than two in an evening.

Her girls would not have a drunk for a mother. They would not be embarrassed by their drunk mother showing up at school, stinking of whiskey. They would not have to hide from their drunk mother.

Because their own mother was a better example, they would not endure delirium tremens before their own weddings.

The girls were upstairs, being quiet. The occasional cascade of girly giggles reassured her that they were not
too
quiet, like the time they had given their dolls crew cuts or tweezed out each others’ eyebrows—
all
their eyebrows.

The doorbell chimed its five-note cascade.

Bev answered the door a little out of breath. Father Dante was so Italian in the trim black silk shirt fitted with the Roman collar. She kind of liked it, though she knew she shouldn’t.

“Supper is almost ready,” she said. “Chicken and risotto.”

Father Dante drew in his breath and he smiled. “Risotto.” He offered her a green bottle.

The girls vaulted down the stairs and stopped short of the priest.

“Hello,” said Christine, and Dinah said, “Hello, Father Dante.”

They prayed without prompting this time. They had practiced saying grace every night that Conroy missed supper, which was every night. 

Not saying grace when a priest was in the house, good Lord, why didn’t she just curse God, commit adultery, and kill someone, too?

~~~~~

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Leila said, “what is wrong with you, Conroy?” They had gone back to her place and now, standing in her bedroom, he wanted to
talk
. “I was drunk. Let it go.”

Meth, the black Labrador, frowned at Conroy and began circling in preparation for a nap. His toenails clicked on the wood floor as his unbalanced circling wandered away from his blankets heaped by the side of Leila’s crimson-draped bed.

“If you wanted to talk,” Conroy said, “I’m here for you.”

“Strip and get on the bed.” She unlaced her boots. The bones in her feet decompressed.

Meth, having meandered too far from his bed, ambled back to the blankets and initiated the circling routine again. Poor dog. He was getting so old.

“Do you only talk about important things when you’re drunk?” Conroy unbuttoned his blue shirt and pulled it off.

“Nope. I only
decide
important things when I’m drunk.” She yanked at her boot. The damned thing wouldn’t come off, and she pulled so that her foot was almost eye-level. She was looking at her own stiletto heel. Leather frays hung off the saddle-stitched seam.

“Like what?” he asked.

If he didn’t shut up, she was going to throw him out. In two hours, the Irish pub was going to be full of her rowdy, drunken friends who expected her to show up and would call her cell phone mercilessly if she didn’t. “When I seduced you at the conference in San Diego last summer. When I committed to your lab. When I opted for grad school instead of medical school.”

Meth groaned as he lowered his tired dog body onto the blankets.

“Those decisions deserved careful consideration. They affect your whole life.”

She wrenched off her other boot. “Shut up.” She pulled off her socks, top and jeans but left on her push-up bra and panties. Lingerie is power.

Conroy had slipped under the covers, demurely. He looked like a spirochete, a skinny gray-and-white blood worm, cozy in a crimson nest. She flipped away the comforter.

“Hey!”

She crawled on top of him and pushed him down into the bed, kissing him hard. The red gauze twisted up in the wrought iron bed frame fell around them, enclosing the bed in a claustrophobic bower, tinting the lamplight creeping in the window from the parking lot outside and pinkening Conroy’s skin.

“It’s cold,” he said under her lips and groped for the comforter. His legs and arms dragged the sheets, trying to reach it.

She grabbed his left arm, wrenched it above his head, and clipped the handcuffs hanging from her headboard around his wrist.

“Hey, what the hell?”

She handcuffed his other hand.

He grabbed the chains and dragged his skinny body across the red sheets. “Don’t you want to talk?” 

Maybe she should threaten him with the handgun she kept in her nightstand to get his attention, but she shoved that idea aside. You didn’t aim a gun at anything you aren’t planning to
destroy
. Leila had never pointed it at another human being. It was only for self-defense. 

Leila sat back, butt on her heels, hands on hips. “What is
wrong
with you?”

His blue eyes were sappy. “I’m concerned about you.”

Oh, God.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Conroy’s lined face was earnest. “Your father,” he said. “You miss him.”

“It was an anniversary.”

“You must have loved him.”

“That’s it.” She stood up, pushing aside the red film of the bed’s curtains, and tossed the keys from the nightstand on his naked, small belly above his garter snake dick. She struggled into her jeans. “Unlock yourself and get out.”

“But you should talk about it. And I can’t reach the keys.”