Rabid (42 page)

Her left arm was pinned in the air by bright silver stakes.

She trailed the fingers of her gauzed right hand with sadly chipped fingernail polish down her left arm from her shoulder to the pins. Just above the pins, her skin changed from normal skin, sensitive as a tongue, to dull neoprene, like a Novocain-deadened cheek.

A thin beige blanket covered her legs, and she jostled her thighs and calves against each other under the starchy sheet. Sandpaper abraded the skin on each of her legs. Her legs were all right.

She must have done something odd to injure only her left arm. She might have been in a car accident with her arm hanging out the window. The girls might have been in the car.
The girls,
and Bev struggled because she had to go see them right away right this minute now.

“Mrs. Sloan.” Hands pushed her back onto the bed. “I’ll call a nurse. Don’t get up.”

Bev followed the pale hands and arms pushing her against the bed up to Leila.

Bev choked. The hospital room was a prison and this girl was keeping Bev from her little girls.

Leila tapped the nurse call button and said, “Father Petrocchi-Bianchi will be right back.”

Bev’s leg jerked, trying to fling out of bed. Puked-up spider webs wrapped Bev’s tongue. “My girls,” she said. “Christine and Dinah.”

“They weren’t there. They’re okay.” So-young Leila Faris gazed out the doorway and didn’t meet Bev’s eyes.

“You’re not just saying that? They’re really okay?”
Please, God, let her girls be all right.

“They weren’t at Conroy’s apartment. Please lie back. Your arm, the pins.”

Relief settled in Bev’s chest. “What happened? Why is this thing,” she pointed at the shining metal contraption, “on my arm?”

Leila lifted her hands off Bev’s shoulders but she hovered. “I don’t know. You hurt your arm and needed some surgery. Father Petrocchi-Bianchi will be back in a minute.”

Bev leaned back on the pillow. “And Conroy?”

The resigned floppiness in Leila’s neck dissipated, and she drew herself up like a straightening giraffe. “Ask the priest.”

~~~~~

Dante touched the cold door with his reluctant fingertips as he walked in. Everywhere, hospitals were cold, as if trying to avoid the spoilage of so much meat.

Leila was staring at the floor. Bev was half-propped up on her right arm, the sling still levitating Bev’s left arm in midair, staring at Leila.

“Bev?” Dante’s voice croaked, rasped around her name, and he swallowed to clear his throat.

Both women looked up at him, startled, two pairs of brown eyes, one face shrouded by hair shining like a raven’s wing waterfall by night, one topped by tousled oak-colored waves.

Leila said, “See, he’s back,” and walked away.

She checked up next to Dante and grabbed his wrist, and his skin lapped at Leila’s fragile hand. He wanted to jerk away from her skin that abraded his arm, which felt as sensitive as if he was burned. His unleashed body wanted to maul another woman like the idiot beast it was.

Leila said, “She’s asking about her kids.”

From the bed, Bev watched Leila and her hand clamped around Dante’s arm.

Dante said, “They’re with Laura. I haven’t checked on them, but Laura has them.”

Bev curled as if her heart tried to suck her whole body into itself. “Thank you, God.” She sighed and asked, and her voice a tenuous straight line, “Did something happen to Conroy?”

God and all the saints in heaven, how could she not remember?

Leila’s hand loosened and her footsteps clapped away, leaving Dante and Bev alone in the chlorine-permeated hospital.

“Dante?” Bev’s trained voice projected despite a quiver. “
Father
Dante? Is Conroy okay?”

Perhaps it was shock at her husband’s death or guilty repression of a homicidal memory or the physical shock of traumatic injury and subsequent administration of sedatives and previous administration of alcohol or the mercy of God or a lie, but she didn’t seem to remember.

Dante did not want to tell her.

“Bev,” he said. He didn’t know whether to be her priest or her friend or her lover.

She leaned forward in the bed, but her arm was still trapped in the suspended pin cage.

He dragged the chair close to the bedside, and the metal legs screeched.

She watched him warily from the side of her eyes, and barely breathed.

“I am so sorry, Bev, but I have bad news.” Her gauze-bandaged right hand rested on the bedcovers, and he held her clammy fingers in both his palms. Cotton padded her hand. She was strung between his grip and the tractioned pin cage. “Conroy passed away last night, suddenly.”

She blinked a few times. “Did you give him Last Rites?”

A memory or a repetition? “Yes.”

She straightened in the bed—her arm pendulumed—and shook her head. Her fingers slipped out of his hand. “Was it a heart attack? His father died of a heart attack.”

The police had warned Dante not to talk to Bev about that night, but damn the police, he could talk to her about anything in the world because priest-penitent communication was privileged.

He was still a priest.

Even though he had broken his vows and hers, he was still a priest.

“Wait, Bev.” Dante searched his pocket for his purple stole, carried from habit. He muttered the prayer for strength and wisdom, kissed the cross at its center, and laid it around his neck.

“Why are you doing that?” Her gauzed fingers drew a line in the air, indicating the stole.

“Because now we are under the seal of confession.”

“I don’t have anything to confess.”

“Still, it is better this way.”

“All right.” She shook her confused head. A tear dripped, and she rolled her shoulder to wipe it off. “Was it the fighting that caused the heart attack?”

“I do not think so.” Lying with the confession stole around his neck was merely an additional stain on the sullied rite of reconciliation and an additional crack in his parched soul, if he had a soul.

~~~~~

Bev untangled her fingers from her hair and settled her bandaged hand on her chest. Her heart percussed at an adagio tempo. It was inconceivable that, somewhere, Conroy’s heart did not also abide by the time of a waltz,
lub-dub-pause, lub-dub-pause
.

Somewhere below her, Conroy was lying still amongst the other still, chilled people, and her mind flinched back and her heart somehow, inexplicably, pulsed and shot blood through her body.

She couldn’t believe it, and she couldn’t feel her arm.

A phantom limb is an amputated limb that the brain insists is still there and so creates sensation for it. What was the opposite of a phantom limb, a limb physically there but that the mind can’t reach?

A zombie limb, perhaps.

Her heart worked hard to push blood into her zombie arm.

A lanky form walked past the doorway, and Bev glanced up expecting to see Conroy’s khaki pants visible below the hem of his long white coat, fidgeting with the pens in his left shirt pocket, but the man had citrus-orange hair and a three-quarters, resident-length white coat.

She was surprised that it wasn’t Conroy, and she realized that this is what denial felt like.

~~~~~

Two police officers, Wes and Harlem, stood outside Beverly Sloan’s room.

Wes whispered, “She looks groggy. If we arrest her now, a judge will throw out anything she says because she was on drugs.”

“Yeah, but we’re here now,” Harlem said.

“We don’t have a warrant.”

“No, but if two people are in a room and one of them gets a knife in the chest, we arrest the other one.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t two gang members.”

Harlem frowned at him.

Wes lowered his voice. “A judge should take a look at what the witnesses said before we go around Wyatt-Earping everyone in sight.” Wes gestured to Beverly Sloan. “Her doctors haven’t released her yet. Her arm is tied to the ceiling. She’s got two kids and a priest standing over her. She isn’t a flight risk.”

~~~~~

In the Sloan lab on the third floor of MedLabs, Leila sat at Conroy’s desk and held his brown lab notebook to her chest. She had unlocked his office door with the key they hid in the minus-twenty freezer.

Leila had stayed with Danna during the wee morning hours while Danna wove in and out of consciousness. The nurses said that Danna freaked out if she woke up and no one was there. They were trying the one experimental therapy that had shown a little promise during the English epidemic of nvCJD prions, but it wasn’t helping.

Danna’s illness was driving Leila crazy. She should be able to figure out some therapy to stop the prions’ progress. She was a goddamn PhD-candidate. She was supposed to be contributing to the knowledge of the human race, and she couldn’t even figure out if aspirin or ibuprofen would be a better painkiller for Danna.

Maybe Conroy had written something in his lab notebook about Danna, that her illness might be something else, that he might have thought of another treatment.

Anything. Dear God, please, anything other than an untreatable, fatal, horrible prion.

Leila opened Conroy’s notebook and stared at his amorphous handwriting.

The office fuzzed in and out of her perception, but returning home for a good night’s sleep was too callous to contemplate, considering that Conroy was dead and Danna was going to die of mad goddamn cow damn prions.

The clock wedged into Conroy’s teeming bookshelves crunched as the wrought iron arrow locked into place at quarter past six, and the second hand chewed time as it roved. Dawn would break outside his dark office window soon.

Yesterday, Conroy had been here, thumbing these lab notebooks and stacking ever-higher, teetering paper skyscrapers for her to godzilla around to get to his chair in order to talk to him. His body had imprinted his faux leather chair with the sink of his skinny butt, the curve of his back, the smooth grunge from his hands on the arms. His DNA was imbedded in the chair vinyl. There was enough DNA from the chair and shed skin cells in the shelf dust to clone him.

A thin sliver of cheap steel shouldn’t be able to undo the inconceivable number of chemical reactions that had built and maintained his body over decades. Each reaction started with atoms, was catalyzed by an enzyme, and produced a protein or other molecule within a cell within a tissue within an organ within a system within his body.

Physics doesn’t understand time. Time as a vector has no ordained direction. The equations work just as well backward as forward, so they don’t describe reality. Leila was constantly pinned between the past and the future with no
now
, no point of reference, just her foreboding slowly becoming memory, sliding, draining from her head down into the belly of her soul.

A slip of steel into a pocket in an organ, and Conroy’s arrow of time had ceased, as if the knife had deflated his soul.