Rabid (80 page)

Bev shook her head again. Her hair shimmied over her shoulders in the darkening church. “Not me.”

“You don’t know that,” he said.

“I’m sure. At least, now, I know. Not knowing was worse. Praying and hoping and not knowing and feeling nothing and dying inside and praying again, every time, was worse. Now I know there was a demon, and now it’s gone, but the sin is still there. I can feel it.”

In the wide, empty church, gem-colored light slashed the air.

“Yet you pray so much.” He had not meant to say it. Watching her pray felt like an alcoholic watching someone savor scotch. Like watching Leila savor scotch.

“Mostly the Rosary. I like the Rosary, the Hail Marys, the Our Fathers.
Thy
will be done
.
It reminds me that it is God’s will that is important. Conroy was so sarcastic about religion, called it the opium of the masses and that thing about man not being free until the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

“Marx and Voltaire.” Sloan had stolen that quote from Leila, like he had stolen everything in his life. Leila had used the Marx quote. The Voltaire must have been from her, too. Whisky rose in Dante’s chest and flushed into his blood.

Light fell from the windows and cast confused rectangles of color, like someone had spilled Vatican treasure on the rows of pews.

He pulled the stole off his shoulders. The cloth abraded the scruff of his neck.

She said, “I like the Lord’s Prayer.
Thy will be done
. My will doesn’t matter.” She smiled. Her silk skin rose on her cheekbones, pulling the slight softness from her jaw.

Dante stood. A priest should find comfort in the Church to withstand the pain of being alone in a world of women. A priest should have faith like Bev’s that asked for God’s will to be done when filled loneliness and absence. A priest, when threatened by guns, should commend his soul to God and, when confronted by the possibility of miraculous intervention or demonic possession, should not diagnose psychiatric pathology.

“I will see you on Sunday,” he said.

“I’ll be here just a little while longer.” She walked past the altar rail, over to the blue-robed mannequin with open arms.

Dante walked out of the church.

Twilight covered the parking lot and the street beyond that led downtown to the Dublin and, past that, toward Leila’s apartment.

~~~~~

Leila was reading a book on her tablet as she lay on a sleeping bag draped over an air bed and was ruffling Meth’s velvet ears while he napped on a blanket.

The printer on the floor cabled to her laptop computer scraped across the paper, printing five final drafts of her three hundred-page thesis. A file folder under the laptop held the five original thesis signature pages with each of the five required signatures in thick, black ink. The new dean of the medical school had signed on Conroy’s line,
Dr. Linus Petering, PhD for Dr. Conroy Sloan, MD.

A knock on the door was far louder than the printer’s mechanical scratching.

Irritated, she pushed herself off the bed and meandered through her bare apartment.

The peephole conferred acromegaly to the priest’s features, jutting his jaw, overhanging his brow ridges, and flattening his nose like a pugilist.

She leaned her head against the door. She had thrown him out, tied him up and attacked him, and threatened him with a gun. He was insane to show up again.

She had not shipped her gun with the rest of her toys.

Leila opened her door to the crazy priest.

His empty black collar flopped open two buttons, exposing tan skin and chest fuzz below his collarbones. The top black button dangled from a black thread.

Leila asked him, “Why are you here, at midnight, again?”

Blood vessels were a riot of ivy in the whites of his eyes, swollen by alcohol or smoke or emotion. “Can we discuss a matter?” His desolate voice was harsh and his head turned, staring down the hallway, not meeting her eyes.

Leila opened the door wider. “There’s no place to sit. The couch is already gone.”

Dante walked past her into her cleared-out apartment that smelled like fresh paint and wood floor cleaning solution. The wall behind her did not yield as she flattened herself to avoid touching him.

The Tiffany chandelier he had admired was gone. A rudimentary fixture forged to resemble shaded candles hung in her empty dining area and cast blocks of shadow up her walls and ceiling.

The conservators had rolled up the tapestries and boxed the paintings and crated the plaster facades, leaving her white walls dull.

He touched the chalky paint and said, “I guess now someone would hear me.”

“I’m sorry,” not enough air filled her lungs, “for threatening you.”

Dante waved his fingers in the air as if dispersing cigarette smoke.

She continued, “I was going to write you a letter to explain, but that’s such a cowardly way to do it. I was going to call, but whenever I picked up the phone, I couldn’t think straight.”

“Yes,” Dante said and his black eyes widened. “I cannot think straight.” He pulled a pillow off her air bed to sit on the floor. He patted the bed beside him to indicate she should sit on the bed, away from him.

It was less threatening for him to sit beside the bed, not to try to sit on it with her. That was nice of him. She sat on the middle of the bed. The ends ballooned.

The laundry basket, full of odds and ends, was behind her.

The printer hissed and spat pages of text.

“How could you love him, this Gelineau?” Dante rubbed his fingers into his temples. “He is a pedophile, a monster.”

“He was my first lover.” Two blunt ribs curved in and prodded her heart.

Dante lowered his hand near Meth’s nose, offering. The dog sniffed, whuffed, and closed his eyes. “He raped you.”

Her fingers trailed over the cheap, nylon sleeping bag that rustled on her bed. “No.”

“Leila, he was brutal.
Angry was worse.
”

Leila’s hands crept up. She wanted to hold her hands over her ears. “Dante, stop.”

“It’s brainwashing, Stockholm syndrome, something.”

“It’s complicated.” Meth was asleep, not guarding her like a proper watch dog. She prodded him with her bare toe. He snorted and flopped his head on his paws. Insolent pooch.

“You did not love him.” He touched the floor as if to push himself up, lifted his fingers, and settled his hands on his knees. “Sex is power. Love is mercy.”

“That’s facile.” But it sounded right.

“But it is true.”

“I still love him.” Her hair clung all over her face in single strands and clumps. Pushing it back charged it with static.

“But how can you love him?”

“Because that’s the way it is.” Her head dropped into her hands. All that black hair flipped forward and itched. Her pulse patted her palms.

“You wanted to get away from him. You ran away from your father’s when it was time to go back.”

All this reminiscing was sickening. “I don’t want to see him again.” But she did. She would give anything to see him again, except that she would freak and sob if she did. She felt like a piece of herself was missing, even though that piece had been cancerous.

“Have you seen him recently?”

“He showed up in California a few years ago, before I moved here. Meth cornered him.” She ruffled the sleeping dog’s ears. He declined to wake but grunted. “You should have seen Meth when he was young. He was magnificent.” He was grayer around the muzzle than last week, it seemed.

“But you said you love him.”

“It’s complicated.” Her voice echoed on the paint and cheap fixtures.

“You do not love him.”

It couldn’t be brainwashing because she had felt his heart beating under her palm when he had pressed her hand against his bare chest after they had made love for the first time and told her that she was the only woman he had ever loved. Her throat swelled at the terrible thought.
“It’s complicated.”

“You were
ten years old
,” Dante said. He touched the floor as if to push himself up. “You probably hadn’t learned fractions yet.”

Dante didn’t understand and she didn’t think she could make him understand. “But sometimes I missed him. Sometimes I called him during the summers to talk to him, but I don’t want to see him now. He doesn’t know where I am.”

“But how could you
love
him?
Still
love him?”

“I just do.” Her pulse patted her wrists. Panic lit her vision. The priest was lounging on her pillow like triumphant Caesar. “Do they already have him?”

“No.”

“Well, they aren’t going to, right? You wrote that letter and I sent it.”

Dante turned his head away. “Yes. Correct.”

He was a terrible liar.

“Then why are you here
again
?” She grabbed a pillow off the end of the bed and stuffed it against her abdomen, something to curl around.

The priest leaned back on his hands, his long legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles like an ad for Versace Clerical Wear for the fashionable Vatican wonk. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

The printer slid a mostly blank sheet of paper into its tray and started chewing out a new chapter.

She said, “It’s past midnight, and I have to deposit my thesis tomorrow morning before I leave for New York, Father Dante.”

“Not ‘Father.’ I am leaving the priesthood.”

“No, you’re not.” Her lungs simpered, wanting nicotine. She shook out a cigarette and lit it.

He crossed his ankles the other way. “The only time I feel anything is during an exorcism. I believe in the Devil more than I believe in God. I have seen more evidence for the Great Diabolical than of anything else. A priest should not be excited by battling the unholy. My ordination and Holy Orders will be nullified.”

“You’re getting an annulment from God.”

He scratched a thick eyebrow, ruffling it, and smiled. “So to speak. ‘Laicized’ is the term.”

“Sorry.” Sarcasm was uncalled for with this man who had not called the police when she had threatened him with a gun or when she had assaulted him, who had offered a friendly ear because he was the only person alive who knew about Sean, and who had wrapped his body around hers that one perfect night that still defied definition in her head.

He hadn’t tried to fuck her.

She still didn’t know how to deal with him.

He smiled. “No one else would joke about my leaving the priesthood. ‘An annulment from God.’ I love your sense of humor.”

“You like my bitter sense of humor?” Unease wafted around her head. His vocabulary was weird. She didn’t like it.

His legs bent, and he rested his elbows on his knees as if idly tossing twigs into a campfire. His inhalation was too deep for casual conversation. “It is one of the things I love most about you.”

The drifting uneasiness grabbed her scalp and dove under her skin, racing toward her extremities and compacting her flesh. “
Stop.
”