Rabid (62 page)

~~~~~

Bev kneeled in front of the Virgin Mary’s sunset-lit niche.

Touched-up patches of shiny, cobalt blue enamel speckled the Virgin’s pale robe, and new pink paint like square skin grafts lacquered the abraded places on the Virgin’s feet where adorers pressed their hands.

She murmured, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” She continued through the Hail Marys and Our Fathers, looping the rosary beads.

It was no use. Everything was useless.

The worst was that her girls had no father and their mother was so stupid she was going to jail.

Dante knelt beside her and genuflected. His black cassock pooled on the wood floor. He asked, “Are you praying for acquittal?”

“That’s not for me to say.”

He scratched the hair near his temple. “You’re off those pills?”

“Yes.” Her rosary beads lay on the wood floor like fat, black ants caught in a loop. 

“Can you remember anything about that night, yet?”

Bev shook her head.

Dante’s hands condensed into fists. “I had hoped that was the pills, too.”

“I’m afraid it wasn’t.” God wouldn’t be stymied by mere pills.
Sin
repelled Heaven and the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.

“Well, maybe we can do something.” Dante rocked onto his feet and was standing.

“What? What could we do?” Her desperate hand gesture flipped the rosary beads out of her hand. They clattered on the wooden floor.

“Let’s go to the library.” Dante offered Bev his hand, and she grasped his palm with her good hand. Her left hand was still too soft to lift her weight.

He tugged, and her body became weightless and flew. 

~~~~~

In the library, Dante settled into his customary counseling chair and fidgeted to find a comfortable position. His coccyx was bruised from the courtroom’s wooden benches. “I’d like to hypnotize you to help you remember.”

Bev blinked and shook her head. “
Recovered memories
, aren’t those implanted by the therapist or made up?”

Hypnosis. Psychobabble. Gobbledygook. He didn’t believe in it, either. “Sometimes hypnosis can be useful.”

Bev leaned forward in her chair, her eyes wary. “You aren’t hypnotizing the children, the ones who said they were abused, are you?”

She still didn’t want to believe that Nicolai was a predator. He had charmed them all. Most child molesters charmed everyone, and the spellbound parents never questioned why this man spent hours in locked bedrooms with their children, or took them on long trips, or bought them extravagant gifts.

“The children don’t need hypnosis,” Dante said.

She was a doctor’s wife. Perhaps a medical explanation would sway her. “Sometimes, neurons have stored the memories, and you can build new synapses to find the memories.”

Her eyebrows were up and her head was forward, open.

Placebo effect was his aim, here, so the better his baloney sounded, the better the placebo response. If she believed that she was hypnotized, then she would tell him why she was not able to “feel God,” as she put it.

He said, “During intense relaxation, endorphins hyperstimulate the hippocampus, allowing neural stem cells in the hippocampus to mitose and form new neural paths to the memory centers, such as the dentate gyrus and posterior cingulate gyrus, creating bridges to neurons involved in short-term and long-term memory.”

That was industrial-grade hand-waving. Dante was disgusted with his attempt to fool her and yet impressed that he had put that ridiculous sentence together.

“Oh,” Bev said, and her eyebrows arched. “Well, okay then.” She laid her head against the back of the chair. “What do I have to do?”

“Relax.” Dante leaned over to the wall switch and flipped off the overhead lights, which left only his desk lamp behind him. Soft light reflected from Bev’s cheekbones and forehead. She looked younger, perhaps twenty-five, not that he had ever wished her younger.

“Close your eyes,” he said. Her eyelashes furred below her eyes, and her rose eyeshadow looked like petals on her lids.

This was how she must have looked before Sloan stole her away from the Israeli, impregnated her, and cheated on her.

He said, “I am going to hypnotize you, which means you will become very relaxed. You will feel relaxed but alert, and you will still be able to act of your own free will. As I count backwards from ten, you will enter a state of hypnosis.” That sounded trite. He should have invested in spooky music. He counted backward. “Now you are very relaxed. Are you relaxed?”

“Yes.” She whispered, as if even her larynx was relaxed.

His incantation for hypnosis must have worked, or the placebo effect did. “You should now think of the night that Conroy Sloan died, but you will be calm. What can you remember?”

“Laura and the girls went to the movies. You and I were having a drink, several drinks, and we went upstairs.” Her hand touched her collarbone. “You tried to take off my shirt, and I had to keep pulling it down until we got upstairs and I could turn out the lights.” She squirmed sideways.

“You are calm and relaxed,” Dante said. She had tugged at her shirt when he had run his hands under her blouse. “Why would you want to keep on your blouse?”

Her shoulders turned sideways. “I thought, after I married Conroy, I’d never have to explain the scars again.”

“Scars?” He had never noticed scars.

Her shoulders turned. Her spine curved, squeezing her into a ball.

He wanted to reach over to her to comfort her. Her pain made his chest hurt. “You are hypnotized. You are calm. Your breathing is slow and calm.”

As a psychiatrist, he should prescribe antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications until these thoughts didn’t trouble her at all.

If he were her psychotherapist, he could probe farther, discover how this memory was causing psychic damage and help her cope.

As her priest, he should delve just far enough to discern that she was blameless of sin and commend her soul to God.

As an exorcist, he should not ask superfluous questions and expel the demon.

If he were her friend, he would back off and allow her not to tell him.

As her lover, he should have known about scars under her shirt.

His own uselessness humiliated him, and he just wanted to help her.

Dante leaned his forehead against his hand. “You are calm and relaxed. You view these memories as if watching television. Who has made the scars?”

“My mother.”

Breath escaped him. The thought of
scars
hung like choking smoke in the air, as if the scars had smoldered for decades on her back.

He hadn’t known.

Her bedroom was always dark.

He should have noticed that she was hiding something,
scars
.

“With what did she hurt you?”

Bev shrugged. “Belts. Cigarettes. Spatulas. Electric cords.”

Oh, God. She had said a
spatula
, a kitchen implement.

Dante asked, “Knives?”

Bev’s head dropped, and her chin touched her chest. “Knives.”

Knives.
Bev had been hurt with
knives
.

He had only tried this stupid hypnosis thing to relax her, to make her believe that she could feel touched by God again. He was a fool. “Bev, is this memory troubling you, such that you believe that you cannot feel God?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“All right. Let’s go back to that night, the night Sloan died.”

“We went upstairs.” Bev uncoiled a quarter of a circle. “We found the note.”

“Yes.” Dante smoothed his hair away from his eyes.

“I went to Conroy’s apartment.”

He dropped his hand away from his face and watched Bev. “Tell me.”

She lay on the chair, half turned sideways, crouched. “The walls were white, and there was a bowl of red wax apples on the coffee table. I wanted to throw an apple at the wall and watch it splatter like paint.”

“Yes. You are very relaxed. Tell me what happened.”

“And there was a green kitchen countertop, and I stumbled, and I couldn’t work the cell phone. My thumbs missed the buttons, and my left thumb wouldn’t work at all. I had to set the cell phone on the counter and press the keys with my right hand.”

“Do you remember anything about knives?”

Her neck straightened, and she pondered this. “Knives poked me in the back.”

Poked? Dante frowned. “Sloan poked you in the back with a knife?”

Her head tipped sideways. “I don’t know.”

“What else do you remember from that night?”

“Floating, and my arm hurting, and then nothing. Colors turning to black.”

“All right.” He rubbed his face, and evening stubble grated his palm. “All right. Was this the night when you stopped feeling the presence of God?”

“No,” she whispered again. “Before, too.”

“Do you know why you can’t feel the presence of God?”

“I don’t know, but I must have done something.”

Ah, she was inferring that something must have happened because she did not feel this God presence. He had thought she knew that something had happened and so she shouldn’t feel the whatever-it-was. He had mixed up the order of cause and effect.

Now, he had to explore the other side. “So what does this
presence of God
feel like to you?”

Bev smiled and her legs extended to the floor. “Warm.”

“Just warm?” Might be hot flashes. She was young for peri-menopause.

“No, like someone wrapping their arms around you. Like something bad was happening but it stopped. For those few moments, you’ll never be lonely again.” The wrinkles of worry and stress smoothed out of her face, and her smooth skin reflected the falling lamplight. Her face shone as if she was in love, as if with the light of God he had heard described.

His hand dropped to his worn chair. “Go on.”

Bev’s hand strayed up to her shoulder, and she smiled. “It’s like feeling everything, from the angels up in Heaven and all the people on the Earth to everything swirling around in your soul, and knowing them all.” Her smile drooped. “But I can’t feel it anymore.”

Dante had stopped breathing, waiting for the end of her recitation. He didn’t know if she was manic or schizophrenic or a saint. “How often did you feel that?”

She smiled wistfully. “When I took communion, when I prayed.”

He had never felt what she described and was glad he was so benighted because being cut off from that must be torturous. Her bruised knees jutted out below the hem of her black skirt.

It must be psychosomatic, or psychotic. She must be creating this aura or projecting it or else she had soul-level proof of Divinity.