It was very interesting to hear that “two weeks,” and know exactly how long Brian had been watching us, and we both ignored Astor’s interruption because it quite clearly mattered a great deal. If Deborah were to see Brian here, we would both be in unspeakably hot water. But what Brian said was true: Deborah did not come around very often lately. I hadn’t really thought about why that might be, but perhaps in light of her recent meltdown on the subject of my having a family before she did, I could assume that she found it painful in some way.
Luckily for me, I was spared another lesson in family dynamics, as Rita came bustling in bearing a small milk pitcher, and even a plate of cookies. “There,” she said, putting down her load and arranging things in a more perfect display. After all, she was Rita the Mighty, absolute Ruler of the Domestic and All Things Kitchen. “We had some of that Jamaican blend left that you said was so good, Dexter. Did you use that?” I nodded mutely as she moved things around on the coffee table. “Because after all, you liked it so much, maybe your brother would like it, too.” And she loaded the word “brother” with so much extra weight that I was very sure I had not heard the last of it.
“It smells absolutely wonderful,” Brian said. “I can already feel myself perking up.”
Brian’s words were so patently fake that I was sure Rita would turn on him with a raised eyebrow and a curled lip. Instead, she actually blushed a little as she sank back onto the couch and pushed a cup toward him. “Do you take milk and sugar?” she said.
“Oh, no,” Brian said, smiling right at me. “I like it very dark.”
Rita turned the cup’s handle toward him and placed a small napkin beside it. “Dexter likes a little sugar,” she said.
“Dear lady,” Brian gushed, “I would say he’s found it.”
I don’t know what terrible suffering had turned Brian into the Fountain of Phoniness I now saw sitting on my couch, but I can only believe it was a very good thing that he was incapable of feeling shame. I have always prided myself on being smooth and somewhat plausible; he clearly never learned either. His compliments were coarse, obvious, and quite clearly fake. And as the evening went on—through more coffee, then a pizza, because naturally my brother had to stay for dinner—he heaped it on higher and deeper. I kept waiting for the heavens to open up and shatter him with lightning, or at least for some great voice to urge him to put a sock on it, as Harry would have said. But the more outrageous Brian’s flattery and flummery got, the happier it made Rita. Even Cody and Astor simply watched him in an admiring silence.
And to cap off my discomfort, when Lily Anne began to fuss in the next room, Rita brought her into the living room and put her on display. Brian obliged with the most exorbitant display yet, praising her toes, her nose, her tiny perfect fingers, and even the way she cried. And Rita absolutely ate it up, smiling, nodding, and even unbuttoning her shirt to feed Lily Anne right there in front of us all.
Altogether, it was one of the most uncomfortable evenings I had spent since—well, quite honestly, since the last time I had seen Brian. It was all made worse because there was truly nothing I could say or do—and this was partly because I did not know what I found objectionable. After all, as Rita took such pleasure in saying at least three times, we were all family. Why shouldn’t we sit around together and trade cheerful lies? Isn’t that what families do?
When Brian finally got up to go at around nine o’clock, Rita and the kids were all thrilled with their new relative, Uncle Brian. Their old relative—battered and anxious Daddy Dexter—was apparently the only one who felt nervous, uneasy, and uncertain. I walked Brian to the front door, where Rita gave him a large hug and told him to please come around as often as possible, and Cody and Astor both shook his hand in what must be described as a fawning manner.
Of course I’d had no chance at all to speak with Brian privately, since he had been surrounded by the admiring crowd all night. So I took the chance to walk him out to his car, firmly closing the door on his groupies. And just before he climbed into the little red car, he turned and looked at me.
“What a lovely family you have, brother,” he said. “Domestic perfection.”
“I still don’t know why you’re here,” I said.
“Don’t you?” Brian said. “Wasn’t I obvious?”
“Painfully obvious,” I said. “But not at all clear.”
“Is it so hard to believe that I want to belong to a family?” he said.
“Yes.”
He cocked his head to the side and looked at me with perfect emptiness. “But isn’t that what brought us together the first time?” he said. “Isn’t it completely natural?”
“It might be,” I said. “But we’re not.”
“Alas, too true,” he said with his usual melodramatic flair. “But nevertheless, I found myself thinking about it. About you. My only blood relative.”
“As far as we know,” I said, and to my surprise I heard him say the same words at the same time, and he smiled broadly as he realized it, too.
“You see?” he said. “You can’t argue with DNA. We are stuck with each other, brother. We’re family.”
And even though the same thought had been repeated endlessly all evening, and even though it was still ringing in my ears as Brian drove away, it did nothing to reassure me, and I went to bed still feeling the slow creep of uneasy toes along my spine.
ELEVEN
IT WAS A FRETFUL NIGHT FOR ME, WITH PATCHES OF SL
EEP separated by deep bogs of restless wakefulness. I felt assailed by something I could only think of as nameless dread, a terrible lurking thing egged on by a voiceless unease from the Passenger, who seemed for once to be absolutely uncertain, just as flummoxed as I was. I might possibly have flogged this beast into its cage and found a few hours of blissful unconsciousness—but then, there was also Lily Anne.
Dear, sweet, precious, irreplaceable Lily Anne, the heart and soul of Dexter’s new and human self, turned out to have another wondrous talent far beyond her more obvious charms. She had, apparently, a wonderfully powerful set of lungs, and she was determined to share this gift with all of us, every twenty minutes, all night long. And by some quirk of malignant nature, every time I managed to slide into a brief interlude of real sleep, it coincided exactly with one of Lily Anne’s crying spells.
Rita seemed completely undisturbed by the noise, which did nothing to raise her stock with me. Every time the baby cried, she would say, “Bring her to me, Dexter,” apparently without waking up, and then the two of them would drift off into sleep until Rita, again without opening her eyes, would say, “Put her back, please.” And I would lurch to the crib, put Lily Anne down and cover her carefully, and silently beg her to please, please, sleep for just one small hour.
But when I returned to bed, even in the dark and temporary silence sleep eluded me. As much as I despise a cliché, I did, in fact, toss and turn, and neither option gave me any comfort. And in the few real moments of sleep that came to me, for some reason I dreamed, and they were not happy dreams. I do not, as a rule, dream at all; I believe the act may be connected to having a soul, and since I am quite sure I don’t have one, for the most part I am blissfully brain-dead when I go to sleep, without any disturbance from the subconscious.