Rabid (39 page)

Her hand holding the knife above them was limp, loosening, and he relaxed his grip to compensate, in case she dropped the knife.

If he went back, he had to be the one in control, the alpha male, the big fish.

He said, “And if I come back, I want an open marriage. No more fights and sulking. If I come home at night, then I’m home; and if I don’t, it’s none of your business.”

~~~~~

Leila rolled against the chilled wall and glanced up at the priest. “It’s too quiet in there.”

The priest shook his head, and his hair swished in his eyes. “Maybe they are talking.”

At least he had that funky Italian accent rather than an Irish one. An Irish accent is stereotypical of hypocritical, evil priests.

The two of them skulked closer, two shuffling spies skirting the circles of hallway light that stuck to the breezeway wall and concrete floor. When Leila touched the brick wall with her head, harsh voices infiltrated the bricks, talking.

Talking meant they had a chance. When Leila was a child, her parents had had horrible screaming fights, but even the shouting was better than the last fight, when her mom and dad had sat across from each other in the living room, not speaking, frozen. Leila had crept out of her bedroom that night and listened from the hallway of the ranch-style house.

For hours, one of them inhaled, held it, and then leaked out a wordless breath.

And then the other did the same thing.

~~~~~

Bev touched her temple. The pain felt like a bullet slowly working in.
An open marriage.
He was crazy.
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, help me,
she prayed to the silence.

“After all,” he said and looked up near the ceiling, past her head, past his hand imprisoning her left hand and the knife, “it’s not your fault. Women want marriage.”

“Stop it,” Bev said. Poison laced his words and shut down her body. She was numb.

“Men want sex. It’s only natural.” He shrugged, and his shoulder bobbed his hand that pinned hers to the kitchen cabinets.

“It’s not
natural
.” Bev wanted to cover her ears but Conroy still jammed her hand with the knife against the cabinets above their heads and stretched her shoulder and chest.

“Of course it’s natural. Men spread their seed. That’s why they make many sperm. And, when a man becomes powerful enough, famous enough, he has the chance to do that.”

“
Stop.
” All this was stupid. It was against God’s plan. It was the slobbering of beasts. It reduced Man, created in the likeness of God, to a sperm maker.

Conroy strangled her hurting left arm, and the knife was hot in her cold hand.

Here was the break in her life: her perspective shifted, and her focus changed from
maintaining the family
to
dealing with the divorce
.

Her face changed, from the naked, raw soul of an intimate family relationship to a defensive posture that she might take with a stranger. Her foreign face was stiff.

“No,” she said. “I want a divorce.”

His face contorted on one side, an asymmetry of unbelieving. “Come on, Beverly. We have to be honest, here.”

Bev refused to be a party to this travesty. Dinah and Christine could not be subjected to such degradation. They shouldn’t be indoctrinated that infidelity and selfishness were acceptable. Conroy, her older, wiser, doctor husband, who had kneeled with her before the altar—how she had loved him!—wasn’t worth it.

She struggled again but his fist still bolted her hand to the cabinet. Her wrist crushed inside, sharp bones snagging vessels and tendons in sharp pains.

She said again, “I want a divorce.”

“What about the girls?”

“I’ll get custody. You were screwing around.” Numbness crawled down her left arm that he had jammed against the wooden cabinets. “You told Dante you were.”

“That was under the seal of confession or doctor-patient privilege, and Leila will deny it, too. You can’t prove it.”

Proof? The bastard wanted proof? He had harangued her with science all these years, belittling God and religion and her faith. Those who live by science should die by science. “I kept those pink panties from your suitcase. The DNA on them will prove you were screwing around.”

“You can’t mean this.” His entire face drew up at a point in the middle, forehead, eyebrows, upper lip, as if a fishhook snagged his hairline.

“I mean it.” And she did. She was ready to do anything to get away from him.

The incredulity in his face collapsed and he
laughed
. The
bastard
laughed. “Oh, come on, Beverly. We’ll have an open marriage. It doesn’t matter if I screw Leila or Peggy or Valerie or anyone else.” 

She mattered. Marriage mattered. Dinah and Christine mattered.

Peggy? Valerie?

She had to leave. She had to go to the Church and to Dante because Conroy’s words were killing her.

Adrenylated or God-granted strength rumbled in her body and geysered up her pinned left arm.

With her other hand, Bev grabbed his wrist from her arm and yanked, and his hand lifted off her arm and flung back through space.

She had been straining against his weight and stringy strength, and her hand he had crushed against the cabinet, holding the silver steak knife, fell and arced, a whipping golf swing.

She turned the knife and pushed out and pushed Conroy and his
stupid
ideas away from her and poked Conroy’s chest, on the right side of his bleached white shirt.

The knife slid between his third shirt button and his pocket that contained two ballpoint pens, one blue, one red, all the way up to its simulated maple wood handle. 

~~~~~

Chapter Thirteen

Conroy watched the knife fall and intersect with his chest. The knife was hot, not scalding or searing but gently burning, like sunburn.

His heart, which had thumped routinely, grabbed the knife, fought it, and slashed itself on the serrated edge.

He flopped to the linoleum floor.

Beverly’s astonished face followed him down. Her hands flapped in front of him and her knee knocked his thigh. She scooted her knees under her and ran. Her footsteps floated. The door banged open, hitting the wall.

His legs swam on the floor and, finding no traction, flailed bonelessly. “Beverly!”

She stood in the kitchen doorway, clutching her keys. “Conroy?”

He tried to roll over and crawl to the phone, but his arm jostled the knife in his torn chest and he fell back. He gasped, and his lungs’ breathing ripped his heart against the serrations of the knife’s edge, forged to slice meat. “Help.”

Beverly grabbed the kitchen phone. Banging, clanging. “It’s dead. There’s something wrong with the phone.” She dashed about. A clatter, a ruffle in time with his tripping heart, the rattle and jangle of her purse spilling on the counter, three beeps, and she said, “Hello? Hello!”

His heart swung on tough cardiac muscles lifted onto the knife by his lungs. He tried not to breathe, and it was easier than he had thought.

Beverly’s voice whispered into the phone, “I think it’s his heart,” and “Fifty-one.”

Beverly’s hands were on his chest. The knife vibrated all the way to his flipping, ripping heart.

He grabbed her hands. She shouldn’t pull it out. It should be removed in an operating room. Ripping it out would drag the serrations through his chest and cause more damage.

“Conroy.” Her whisper raced at him and zoomed away, like he was falling asleep.

Gravity descended and settled over Conroy, pressing on his chest. Indigestion bloated and squeezed him, and his organs shifted.

~~~~~

Stop, stop, stop. Make it stop.

Undo it all.

Please God. Please, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Every time Bev blinked, the instant of darkness relieved her that it was all a dream, and every time her eyelids parted Conroy was still splayed on the linoleum, squirming.

She had just tried to get away from him. She had just wanted him to let her go. His hand had crushed her wrist and it hurt and she had just wanted to get away from him.

Please, Mary Mother of God, if you can hear me, make it stop.

Be with us now and in the hour of our deaths.

~~~~~

Dante lifted his head away from the cold bricks. “Can you hear anything?”

“It’s too quiet.” Leila glanced around, back and forth, skittish. “I don’t like it. Let’s go.”

Dante’s cellular phone rumbled in his pocket, and his chilled skin retracted from the vibrating. The screen read
Sloan, B.
He flipped it open. “Hello?”

Bev’s terrified whisper: “Dante? Something terrible.” Her voice crackled with crying. “Can you come to 51 Vita Place? Near University Hospital.”

“I am here.” He ran to the door and thumped on it with his fist. “I am here.”

A thud on the other side of the door, fumbling, and the door opened. “Oh, Dante. He’s hurt, he’s hurt,” she whispered and rocked toward him. Bev looked past him and her whisper focused to a hiss. “What’s
she
doing here?”

Leila nudged Dante aside and ran through the apartment.

Dante followed Leila inside and tucked Bev under his arm. Bev leaned on him.

“Where is your husband?” Dante asked.

“In there.” Bev said and hid her face against Dante’s coat. “He’s hurt.”

Dante snatched the cellular phone out of her hand and scrolled back through the numbers called to make sure that she had called an ambulance. The number below his own was 9-1-1.

Leila ran past them. She hit the door to the kitchen and it slammed behind her and she screamed a hoarse, wordless burst.

Dante untangled Bev’s arms from his waist and ran.

~~~~~

In the kitchen, Leila grabbed Conroy’s pulseless throat and tried to listen to his gasping chest, but the knife bumped her forehead.

She had stabbed him. His bitch wife had
stabbed
him.

Conroy’s breath gasped, shuddered, and pressed out. He needed more air. No one could live on so little air. He was suffocating.

Leila wrenched his head back, pinched his nose, and blew into his gaping mouth. She did that three times, and she should pound his chest but she couldn’t find a way to do that without wrenching the knife deeper so she kept blowing in his mouth.