Rabid (15 page)

The email:

Re: an apology

> Dear Peggy,

> I apologize for what I have to say to you, and for what I have to do. I’m sorry, but it is

> best if we end the affair. > You knew that our affair wasn’t meant to be anything other than some fun.

> I apologize if I hurt you, if I led you to believe that our relationship was anything

> other than it was, or if you believed so anyway. > I’m sorry.

> Conroy

Dante was stunned by the callousness. “You sent the woman an
email
?”

“Well, yes,” Sloan said.

Dante shook his head. The woman, Peggy, was reduced to a recipient, which was indicative of Conroy’s view of her. Dante asked, “When did you send this?”

“Thursday,” Sloan said.

“And she replied?” He could see from the brackets that this section was cut from her reply.

“Friday morning.”

“Where is her reply?”

Sloan blinked slowly, delaying. He said, “I deleted it.”

How like Sloan to tap the delete button so that her objections were erased. “And it said?”

Sloan bobbed his leg. “That she understood and that we could still be friends. She was very nice, very understanding.”

That answer was obviously a fabrication. The physical twitches were indicative of unease. The rest of Sloan’s answers were, most likely and rather troublingly, true. At the very least, Dante could not allow Sloan to confess while he continued to lie about the woman’s reply. “Tell me what her email really said.”

The smug curve in Sloan’s expression drew taut. “What do you mean?”

Sloan had never been called to account for his lies before. This must be a troubling week for him, the discovery of his affair, calling to account for his actions, and the ease with which Dante saw through his lies. “Your explanation of what this woman, Peggy, said in her email is false.”

“You don’t know that!” Sloan’s voice rose, indignant.

Dante’s work afforded him many opportunities to see such tiresome displays.
You can’t prove I did that! The child is lying! I am not possessed by a demon!

“Her reply was different than what you told me. If your student brought you a micrograph of a cell, and the cytoskeleton and the nucleus were labeled with fluroprobes,” such that the cell looked like a glowing island in a black sea webbed with lime green topographical lines and capped with a scarlet pillbox hat, “and he told you that the picture was of a virus, you wouldn’t believe him. A virus looks like a virus, and a cell looks like a cell. Upon examination, truth looks like truth, and a lie looks like something else.”

Sloan blinked, again stalling. Dante waited. Sloan’s fingers curled around the arms of the chair. “She was angry,” Sloan said. “She said I’d lied to her.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I never said that I would leave my wife.” The last part rang desperately of truth. “And besides,” Sloan said and glanced up into the corner of the library, “the affair was actually a good experience for me. It tested my marriage, and now I know that I love Beverly and my family. It’s brought me and Beverly much closer.”

More lies, as much to himself as to Dante. Dante pinched his nose. A headache blossomed behind his eyes. “What about the other woman?”

“I broke it off,” Sloan said.

“You used this woman.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and he tried not to allow the diatribe to emerge
again
.

Those words lurked in him, always ready to leap and devour. Dante had tried to counseling pedophiles for a week before he decided to work with the victims. The men could barely talk about their crimes because they didn’t understand that their victims were children, who had souls, who had dreams, who should have grown up whole. Pedophiles were all spiritually stunted and could not imagine what it was like to repeatedly raped. Dante had broken a chair against a wall in his effort to not smash it over the pedophile’s head.

Sometimes, Dante was tempted to turn the men over to the American justice system so they could learn that lesson like John Geoghan had, but that was not what the Vatican had decided.

He said, “You think only of how this woman affected
you
, but she is a soul, a soul that you damaged. You are not closer to God. It could not draw you closer to God or help your marriage to use this woman and damage her. This has destroyed your marriage.”

Sloan slouched in his chair, his eyes slitted and lower lip curled in. “It’s over with. What did you want me to do?”

The anger tore free. Dante’s hands were tangled in each other, an enormous, wrathful fist. “Confess,” he said, “confess with an open heart and know that you have offended God. You’ve broken your marriage vows, a sacrament. You’ve broken your wife’s heart. She trusted God and she trusted you. You’ve hurt this other woman, this Peggy, by lying to her. It was
rape
, having sex with her when she believed that you loved her, when she believed she was worshipping you with her body, but you were just screwing her.”

The next morning, Sunday morning, Dante confessed his wrath and his despair to Brother Samual before early Mass, and his heart felt like abraded, flayed muscle, as he pressed his palms on his knees, and whispered,
My brother Jesuits were recounting their affairs, enumerating the ways they had broken their vows and how this had benefited them as priests and brought them closer to God, and I shouted, ‘What about the women? What did you do to them?’ Wrath is my personal foible. Wrath stems from pride, an unjustified pride because I have not committed these particular sins since taking Holy Orders. But I am a sinner, too, in my pride and wrath.

Sloan, sitting in his chair across the library from Dante, drew one ragged breath.

Dante looked up from his hands, which cramped from clenching.

Sloan pressed his hands to his face so hard that his arms quivered.

Dante waited.

Sloan rubbed his eyes with his palms and stretched the skin from his eyelids to his temples. He said, “It never occurred to me.”

Finally, finally, Sloan’s focus shifted from himself to the people he had wronged. If Dante trod gently, he might coax Sloan along, save his marriage, and maybe his soul.

Sloan’s spine bent, and his breath rasped and he rested his arms on his knees as if recovering from a belly punch. His pink scalp skimmed under the thinning, silver hair.

Dante said, “If you want to confess your sins, I will hear your confession.”

Sloan nodded without looking up.

“I’ll be right back.” Dante walked out of the library, past Mrs. Sloan praying in a pew in the cathedral, to the rectory to retrieve his stole so he could hear Sloan’s confession.

Dante had been, perhaps, too confrontational, but what can one expect from an exorcist accustomed to casting out demons by the force of his will and God’s grace in his voice?

~~~~~

Bev pushed the door to Father Dante’s library open with her fingertips. Her husband slumped in the chair, his hand covering his mouth, staring at the floor. “Conroy?”

His eyes, when he looked up, were glassy. “I’m sorry.”

She hadn’t realized that her chest had hurt for days, since she had found those horrible panties in Conroy’s suitcase, but now it didn’t hurt anymore.

She laid her arms around his shoulders and he leaned into her. Small shudders ran through him, not crying, just trembling, as if from the aftershocks of adrenaline.

Surely, since Conroy had repented, she could forgive him and love him again. Maybe that loosening in her heart was the beginning of grace. Maybe, if she went back to the altar and prayed now, hard, maybe the Virgin Mary would come to her and she wouldn’t have to bother Father Dante with her inability to feel the kind stillness of God.

~~~~~

Conroy rocked in Beverly’s arms. He had been a selfish prick, screwing Peggy when she wanted a real relationship, ripping apart his marriage and his wife, and gambling that no one would find out.

The priest returned with his purple stole around his neck, the ends hanging free. “Mrs. Sloan, another moment alone, if you would?”

She smiled at Conroy as she slipped out of the door.

Conroy had been a cad, and he needed to toss away these stupid things he had done. Confession was as good a place to start as any. If he did this, maybe the priest would help him with Beverly.

Conroy stiffly lowered himself to his knees and whipped through the prayer before confession, asking the Holy Spirit, Virgin Mary, and the archangels, angels, and saints to aid in his confession.

Strange how there was no direct imploring of any masculine deity in that prayer, only the neuter Spirit, the female Virgin, and the multitudes. This irking concentration on the girly aspects of God was meant to feminize men, humble them, emasculate him so he could beg.

Not to mention that he was kneeling in front of a guy in the blow-job position. Maybe gay priests thought about getting blown while penitents recited their sins, down on their knees.

The priest’s black-robed arm moved above Conroy’s head, tracing a cross in the air, and the priest blessed him. At least the priest’s black robe was more than an arm’s length away. The priest said, “May the Lord be in your heart and help you to confess your sins with true sorrow.”

Conroy’s knees hurt. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been,” Conroy stopped and counted to seven, considered, and lied, “two years since my last confession. These are my sins. I had sex with a woman who was not my wife.”

“On how many occasions,” the priest prompted.

This is where priests got their reputation for dirty minds, prying for details. “A lot.”

“Fine. Are there any other sins you wish to confess?”

Conroy stared at the wooden boards under his knees. “Only mortal sins, right?”

“Correct.”

“No.”

The priest said, “Think harder.”

Conroy glanced up. The Italian priest was staring above and past Conroy’s head at the far end of the room. On the underside of his chin, black stubble poked through his swarthy skin. Conroy said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Bearing false witness, lying,” the priest said quietly.

“Oh, the email. All right, I bore false witness.”

The priest asked, “Why?”

The stupid priest sounded like Dinah when she was two years old.
Why? Why?
“Because Peggy was pissed.”

“What did you do to make her angry?”

“Broke up with her.”

The priest sighed, more heavily this time. “She was angry because you lied to her.”

“Oh,
lied
, that’s right.”

“And you lied to me about her reply.”

“Yes.”

“And you lied to your wife about being faithful.”

When Conroy had gone to confession before, he had just knelt down, said his piece, and it was over. It wasn’t fair that the priest had inside information. “Right,” he said.