Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  Believe? Mere belief could not endure in a world rife with frailty and evil and sin and damnation: Chairs that flew across the room, elderly priests breaking chains, young girls’ faces transformed into hideous caricatures. “There are things I have seen that I do not understand.”

  “You’re a medical doctor, a scientist.” Sloan gaped at him.

  Dante’s stillness fought his agitation. “I am a priest.”

  Sloan waved one hand in the air as if clearing irrational incense fumes. “I’ll believe in demons when you show me the molecular mechanism for them.”

  Dante sighed. “This is not the subject at hand. The subject is your marriage and adultery, Mr. Sloan.”

  “It’s Doctor.”

  At the tips of his steepled fingers, Dante’s fingernails dug underneath each other. “You have forgotten your urge to confess the sins that so trouble your soul.”

  Being caught in his lies deflated Sloan’s anger. He stared at the blue carpet as if the swirls of color might open under his feet. Dante glanced at the carpet, in case he had missed a flap in the carpeting concealing a subterranean dungeon.

  Sloan pressed one hand to his weathered face.

  Dante waited. He could wait for days if necessary.

  “I don’t know why Beverly wants counseling.”

  “You had sex with another woman.”

  “I’ll break it off.” Sloan rubbed his face. “I don’t know why that idiot woman hid her underwear in my luggage.”

  Dante adjusted his cassock over his thighs. “Because she wants you to leave your wife.”

  Sloan nodded. His silver hair swayed. “She’s hinted, but I wouldn’t.”

  Dante asked, “But why would you have an affair?”

  Sloan caught himself after a chuckle. “Oh, right. You priests are celibate.”

  Derision would poison all the progress he had made, so Dante ignored it. “Tell this woman that the affair is over. Do not see her again. If you do this, after counseling Saturday, I will hear your confession, and you can take communion on Sunday.”

  Sloan nodded. “And no one will know anything.”

  “Yes,” said Dante, negotiating when he should have commanded Sloan. This must be a command. “If you lay a hand on your wife, if you so much as pinch her, this deal is off. I’ll grant her an annulment, I’ll excommunicate you, and I’ll call the police.”

  Both Sloan’s shaggy eyebrows rose. “What?”

  Dante did not feel the need to observe more denial. He glanced at his watch. “I need to speak to your wife.”

  Sloan strode out of the library. He didn’t say goodbye or even glance back.

  But, if Sloan did cease his affair, there might be hope.

  At his desk, Dante stacked boxes and waited for Mrs. Sloan.

  ~~~~~

  Bev knelt before the Virgin Mary and prayed to her and God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit for peace. She strained with praying because, even though she had said the Rosary and was participating in counseling, she wasn’t forgiven because she couldn’t forgive. The situation was impossible: unforgiveness begat unforgiveness begat unforgiven sin.

  A spotlight raked the Blessed Virgin’s left cheek and blue-robed shoulder. The Virgin’s inert, white porcelain face gazed down on Bev.

  The statues crowded into niches ringing the church walls personified stories about God’s Love that she had heard as a child. Some saints were crazy or debauchers or drunks, but God loved them.

  Even though Bev was a stupid doormat, God had loved her.

  Probably.

  Probably not anymore.

  Conroy’s voice whispered, “Beverly!”

  She turned, and dust grated under her knees, bruised from kneeling and praying every day. Conroy wove from side to side like a gray cobra hypnotizing prey as he scanned the lines of pews looking for her.

  She whispered, “Amen,” and stood. “Over here, Conroy.”

  Conroy whipped his head sideways and saw her. His voice echoed in the shifting dark of the cathedral. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t scowling, either. He was grave, serious, busy. “That priest wants to see you.”

  She slipped into Father Dante’s library.

  Father Dante sat at his desk, sorting papers.

  “Father?”

  His shoulders jerked and he turned. “There is one more thing we need to discuss. You would sit?”

  She sat in her chair.

  “Mrs. Sloan,” he looked at her over his knuckles. “If you feel threatened, you should call me or the police.”

  Bev crossed her ankles and arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  In his black cassock, brooding in this library fraught with shadows, Father Dante looked like a medieval Inquisitor. Anxiety rose in her lungs as if he was asking which of her neighbors weren’t good Catholics.

  He said, “The Church offers you protection.”

  She tucked her arms and legs in tighter. “I’m fine.”

  Father Dante came over and sat in Conroy’ chair next to hers. He took her hand—his hand was warm like a leather glove in a sunny car—and he slipped a card into her palm. Black ink curled across the back of the business card, phone numbers.

  He said, “The top number is the rectory. The lower one, it is my cellular phone.”

  Bev turned the card over. “I didn’t know priests had business cards.” The keys and tiara of St. Peter embellished the upper left corner, and Father Dante’s name ran through the center. Italian words surrounded his name. Bev tucked it in her purse.

  Father Dante nodded. “There is one more other thing to talk about, but,” he looked at his watch, “it may take some time. Will you be in the church tomorrow?”

  “I’m substituting for the music teacher. I have a free period at two o’clock.”

  Father Dante nodded. “I’ll be here. Tomorrow, then?”

  Bev left the priest sitting at his desk, sorting papers.

  In the church, Conroy was in the third pew, reading the hymnal.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Conroy snapped the book shut and stood. “I’ll drop you at home. I’ve got to get back to the lab.”

  Bev nodded. He probably had something very important waiting for him.

  ~~~~~

  The next morning at nine, Leila slammed open the door to the mouse facility and found Conroy injecting a small syringe of liquid into a mouse’s belly.

  Her breath puffed. She had sprinted to the lab with her arms full of printouts. She said, “Tony translated the Italian webpage.”

  Conroy looked up from the mouse, startled. Behind the clear visor, his eyes, so oddly blue, were wide, and he glanced past her and then back to her face.

  She said, “You will not believe this. The bottom links lead straight into the Vatican.”

  Conroy frowned. “Of course he has Vatican links. He’s a priest.”

  Conroy wasn’t getting it, and Leila was nearly hopping with wanting to tell him. “He’s not just a priest.”

  “So he says.” Conroy resumed injecting the mouse then released it into its cage. He wrote a note in his lab notebook and turned the page.

  Maybe shaking Conroy would wake his ass up. “First of all, it’s not Father Petrocchi-Bianchi. It’s Monsignor.”

  Conroy cocked his head. “He said to call him ‘Father.’”

  “Then he was being modest. And everyone in his lab has moved on. He doesn’t have a lab anymore.” Leila shoved papers into Conroy’s latex-gloved hands.

  ~~~~~

  Conroy looked over Leila’s sloppy stack of papers. They sat in wheeled lab chairs in the mouse room of the animal facility to examine the translation of the priest’s web pages.

  Her slim, tanned finger pointed to a link for The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Leila’s fingernail polish was the color of champagne.

  He reached for her thigh.

  She pushed him away and her chair rolled out of his reach. “Conroy,” she whispered. “The door is
open. And God only knows what’s on your gloves.”

  “No one could see.” And it didn’t matter if he was caught with her, too. He rolled toward her and reached for her leg again.

  “Conroy! Yuck! You smell like mice.”

  He stripped off his gloves. “Can I see you tonight?”

  Leila’s almond eyes, shaped by her Egyptian father’s genes, slid sideways. “I have lab work.”

  “Me, too.” Both his hands clamped around her thighs just above her knees.

  Leila’s eyebrows twitched. “More labwork? More than these mice?”

  Conroy’s neck stiffened as if the suggestion of mice induced encephalitis. “Tonight?”

  Leila peered into the cages. One black mouse staggered in its shoebox-sized plastic cage, slammed its head into the clear plastic wall, and swayed, stunned. “What in the hell is wrong with that poor thing?”

  “Nothing.” Nothing that she nor anyone should know about until he was good and ready to tell the world. “Tonight?”

  “All right.”

  Conroy’s neck loosened enough to nod. His fingers climbed up the lean meat of Leila’s thigh. “I could give you a ride.”

  Leila shook her head and her hands rose in the air, warding off evil eyes. “Malcolm from Lugar lab drove up after you dropped me off Monday. His headlights almost hit your car, and that black midlife crisis-mobile of yours is too damned distinctive.”

  “Midlife crisis-mobile?”

  “The Porsche. Come on, Conroy. Surely you lead a more examined life than that.” Leila left him sitting in the mouse room, contemplating.

  ~~~~~

  Bev clutched her jacket around her and hurried from the music room to the library. January mist drifted through the lines of plaid skirts and navy blue slacks and into the unbuttoned front of her coat. The cathedral nosed out of the winter fog ahead of her.

  She knocked on the library door.

  The priest’s muffled voice said, “Yes?”

  She bustled in.

  Father Dante was slumped in his chair. His hands covered his face.

  “Father, are you all right?”

  She dumped her soggy sheet music on her blue chair and stood beside him. If Conroy or one of her girlfriends had been slumped over so, she would have put her arms around them, but a priest, how could she comfort a beleaguered priest? Priests moved in the company and grace of God, beyond her fumbling. She patted his shoulder with a tentative, arrhythmic tapping.

  Under his black shirt, his shoulders were rounded with muscle.

  He rubbed his face. He stood and reached toward her arm but his hand stopped in midair and pointed to her arm. “Why you are wearing the long sleeves?”

  “It’s January.” She tugged a sleeve over her wrist self-consciously.

  His hand hovered inches away from her face. “And the collar, it is high on your neck?”

  She sat on the other chair. “The music room is chilly.”

  Father Dante’s hand dropped away, but he leaned closer, like when a man angles for a kiss but doesn’t know whether the woman will acquiesce, and he whispered, “Did he hit you?”

  “What?” Conroy hadn’t hit her. Conroy had never hit her. “No. No. He didn’t. He wouldn’t.”

  Father Dante watched and seemed satisfied. His hands came together on his chest and his fingers formed a sort of cage. “You see most of the children in this school?”

  “I substitute often.” She crossed her ankles, lady-like, as behooved her with a priest, especially a young priest who still looked like a man. “Sister Benedicta has health problems.”

  Father Dante leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. His fidgets reminded Bev of her daughters’ machinations to delay admitting petty guilt. “Do you know of any children who were initially good students here, happy children, who became sullen and angry?”

  Bev couldn’t stop her wide eyes from blinking. She had learned the symptoms of sexual abuse in her primary education courses in college. “That couldn’t happen here.”

  Father Dante sighed.

  “You mean like someone’s uncle? One of the parents?”

  “No.” He pulled his hand through his black hair, raking it away from his eyes.

  “That new janitor? The soccer coach?”

  “No, Mrs. Sloan.”

  The rumormongers had stalwartly avoided that particular accusation about Father Nicolai’s disappearance. Diocese politics, the school’s deplorable standardized testing scores, poor box embezzlement, whiskey priest, sacrilegious snacking on consecrated Host, Alzheimer’s, selling the Host to Satanists, those things had been mentioned, but molesting children was the sort of thing that happened in other places.

  Bev folded her hands in her lap primly. “That’s patently ridiculous. Father Nicolai was one of the nicest men I’ve ever known.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “All of us just walk right into the rectory, without knocking, without yoo-hoo-ing. His sermons are about the transparent lives we lead, how God sees into out hearts and loves us. And about how we need to be compassionate, reach out to others, live with open hearts. He’s so compassionate.”

  “Yes.” He drew a hand through the black curls fringing his face. “Pedophiles are some of the nicest people I’ve ever known. They have a special rapport with children. Absolutely charming.”

  Bev would be able to tell if someone was a pedophile. She could tell if a person was gay or straight. Father Dante had watched the women’s sections of the choir, and he had opened his posture, hesitantly, toward Laura Dietrich. He was straight but restrained.

  She would know if Father Nicolai was a child molester. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Most,” Father Dante glanced at the white-painted ceiling, “of these kinds of people,” he sighed, still staring up, “are efficient at concealing their crimes. They induce guilt in the children, or shroud the abuse as a game, or utilize their clerical authority. Two months ago, when the allegations about Father Nicolai reached Roma, a priest was sent here to watch and intervene.”

  Father Domingo had appeared two months ago, ostensibly to update the school’s benighted curriculum that had caused the free-falling test scores, and both he and Father Nicolai had left last week. “Was he reassigned to some other parish?”

  “No. Nicolai is in Italia, in a place where there are no children. I need to know if there are any other children who you think might display these behavior patterns. I am here to counsel them, to try to help them. That’s why they sent a psychiatrist.”

  Oh, Lord. Father Dante had asked to see Laura. Laura had choked when Bev called her last night. “He hurt Luke, didn’t he?”

  Father Dante leaned back in his chair, and his eyes slid away from her.

  “Luke Dietrich. You saw Laura after choir practice. She’s been taking Luke to all kinds of doctors for his ADHD, but he hasn’t gotten any better, and it came on suddenly last year.”

  Father Dante stared at the blue carpeting. “I cannot speak about any particular child. I cannot confirm or deny anything about any particular child. It would invade their privacy. Surely, they deserve their privacy.”

  Bev’s chest caved in at the thought of anyone hurting Luke. “Oh, God.”

  If that man had touched her daughters, she would, she would, and violence welled up. “My girls, did he hurt them?”

  Father Dante said, quietly, “When I talked to your daughters a few days ago, I did not see anything to concern me. I asked them about rumors in the school.”

  “What did they say?”

  Father Dante paused, seemed to consider, and said, “The children had a system to not go to Father Nicolai’s office alone, to go in pairs or groups, especially junior high boys, or to have Sister Mary Theresa waiting outside, but it didn’t always work.”

  Her daughters had been in danger, and they knew they were in danger, and they hadn’t told her. They had found a way to defend themselves from rape. “Was it just boys?”

  “Nicolai
appears to be a primary pedophile. He was attracted to children. Their gender was not as important as their age, between ten and thirteen,” he said. “I trust you will not say anything about this.”

  Bev nodded.

  “Because some families will want to keep this private.”

  Father Nicolai was her friend. Bev would have known.

  Bev’s eyes were so dry they felt burned.

  “I just can’t believe it.”

  ~~~~~

  Bev picked up her email later that afternoon:

  Dearest Beverly,

  I have to work late tonight, so I won’t be home for dinner. I’ve attached the proof.

  Love,

  Conroy

  Fwd: an apology

  > I can’t see you anymore. > It was all a mistake. I love my wife. You know that.

  > I apologize if I hurt > you, if I let you believe that our relationship was anything other than what it was, or if you > believed so anyway.

  Conroy

  ~~~~~

  Conroy waited in his Porsche outside Leila’s apartment building. The kung pao and mu shus were stinking up his car but he couldn’t roll down the window because the rain would ruin the leather seats.

  Something knocked on his window and he jumped. Outside, Leila was so rained-on that frigid water streamed from her long, black hair and dragged her clothes against her shoulders. She motioned him toward her apartment building. Her mincing shadow dodged through the foggy January rain. She unlocked the building’s door and flung it back.

  The paper bag crackled in his hands as he followed her. Her elevator closed its doors before he caught up.

  His elevator beat hers to the twelfth floor, so he ambled down the hall, rolling and unrolling the top of the bag. She strode past and unlocked the deadbolt on her door.

  Inside, Conroy set the bag on her dining table. A freaky blue chandelier above the table looked like a church stained-glass window and threw spider shadows on the walls’ blue and green molding and ceiling medallions. The funky, faux plasterwork looked like the Palace of Versailles had relocated to New Hamilton.

  Leila peeled off her soaked clothes and tossed them in the kitchen sink. Her black hair trailed water behind her. “Meth,” she called. The old dog sauntered over, all black fur and muscle, claws scritching on the hardwood floor. It stood up beside her and sniffed her breath, nuzzling but not licking.