“No, you don’t,” I said. “What you have to do is not do it anymore.”
I watched astonishment blossom on their faces. Cody shook his head with bewilderment and Astor blurted, “But that’s not—I mean, you can’t really—What do you mean?” And for the first time in her life she sounded just like her mother.
I sat down on the couch between them. “What did you do with Uncle Brian that night?” I said. “When he said you went for Chinese food?”
They looked at each other, and an entire conversation went on between them with no audible words. Then Cody looked back at me. “Stray dog,” he said.
I nodded, and anger surged through me. Brian had taken them out and found them a stray dog to learn and experiment with. I had known it was something like that, of course, but to hear it confirmed fed my sense of moral outrage—with my brother and with the children. And oddly enough, even as I drew myself up into a lofty tower of righteous indignation, a small and mean voice whispered that it should have been me who did this with them. It should have been my hand guiding their fledgling knife strokes, my wise and patient voice steering and explaining and teaching them how to catch and cut and then how to clean up when playtime was over.
But that was absurd; I was here to lead them away from darkness, not to teach them how to enjoy it. I shook my head and let sanity flow back in. “What you did was wrong,” I said, and once more they both looked blank.
“What do you mean?” Astor said.
“I mean,” I said, “that you have to stop—”
“Oh, Dexter,” Rita said, bursting into the room wiping her hands on a dish towel. “You can’t let them play anymore; it’s a school night. Look at the time, for goodness’ sake, and you haven’t even—Come on, you two; get ready for bed.” She hustled them up and out of the room before I could do more than blink. Cody turned back to look at me just before his mother pushed him into the hallway, and his face was a jumble of confusion, hurt, and irritation.
And as the three of them clattered into the bathroom and the sounds of running water and toothbrushing came back to me, I felt myself grinding my teeth in frustration. Nothing was going right. I had tried to bring my little family together, and found my brother there before me. When I tried to confront him, he had fled with the words still forming on my tongue. And I had finally begun my important job of shepherding the kids away from wickedness, only to be interrupted at the crucial point. Now the kids were mad at me, Rita ignored me, and my sister was jealous of me—and I still didn’t know what Brian was up to.
I had worked just as hard as I knew how to be the new and squeaky-clean straight-arrow family man I was supposed to be, and at each attempt I had been slapped down, sneered at, and utterly crushed. Irritation grew inside me and morphed into anger, and then that started to change, too, as I felt a cold and acid bath of contempt burble up inside: contempt for Brian, and Rita, and Deborah, and Cody and Astor, for all the dribbling idiots in the whole stumble-footed world—
—and most of all, contempt for me, Dexter the Dummkopf, who wanted to walk in the sunlight, smelling the flowers and watching rainbows curl across the rose-tinted sky. But I had forgotten that the sun is nearly always hidden by clouds, flowers have thorns, and rainbows are always out of reach. You could dream the impossible dream all you wanted to, but it was always gone when you woke up. I was finding that out the hard way, each new reminder grinding my nose further and further into the dirt, and now all I really wanted was to grab something by the throat and squeeze—
The monotonous drone of Rita and the kids saying their prayers came down the hall at me. I still didn’t know the words, and it was just one more annoying reminder that I was not really Dex-Daddy and probably never would be. I thought I could be the first leopard in history to change his spots, but in reality I was just another alley cat forced to dine on garbage.
I stood up. I just needed to move around, try to calm down, collect my thoughts, tame these weird and wild and brand-new emotions, before they carried me away on a flood tide of stupidity. I walked into the kitchen, where the dishwasher was already whirring away at the dinner dishes. Past the refrigerator, its ice-maker clicking. I walked into the back hall by the washer and dryer. All around me, through the whole house, everything was clean and functional, all the machinery of domestic bliss, in its place and ready to do exactly what it was supposed to do—all of it but me. I was not made to fit under the counter of this or any other house. I was made for moonlight gleaming off a very sharp knife and the soothing ratchet of duct tape purring off the roll and the muffled horror of the wicked in their neat and careful bonds as they met their unmaker—
But I had turned my back on that, turned away from all I really w
as, tried to fit myself into a picture of something that did not even exist, like squeezing a demon onto a Saturday Evening Post cover, and I had done nothing but make myself look like a complete idiot. No wonder Brian could so easily take away my kids. I would never bring them away from the dark side if I couldn’t even give them a convincing performance of virtuous normality.
And with such a vast amount of wickedness in the world, how could I beat my bright blade into a dull and functional plowshare? There was so much yet to do, so many playground bullies who needed to learn the new rules to the game, Dexter’s rules—there were even cannibals abroad in my very own city. Could I really just sit on the couch and knit while they worked their horrible will on the Samantha Aldovars of the world? After all, she was somebody’s daughter, and someone felt about her just the way I felt about Lily Anne.
And as that thought hit home a red-hot surge of anger roared up inside me, burning away all my careful control. It could have been Lily Anne. Someday it still could be, and I was doing nothing to protect her. I was a self-deluded fool. I was being attacked from all sides, and I was simply letting it happen. I was allowing the predators to stalk and slay, and if someday they came for Lily Anne—or Cody and Astor—it would be my fault. It was in my power to protect my family from a very nasty world, and instead I was pretending that kind thoughts would keep the dragon away, while in fact it was roaring at my very own door.
I stood at the back door and looked out the window into the darkness of the yard. The clouds had rolled in up above, covering over the moon and bringing complete darkness. That was it, a perfect picture of all that was real; just darkness, hiding a few patches of brown grass and dirt. Nothing worked. Nothing ever worked, not for anyone anywhere. It was all just darkness, decay, and dirt, and trying to pretend there was anything else got you nothing but grief, and there was not a thing I could do about it. Nothing.
… And the clouds rolled open to let one small moonbeam trickle through to light up the darkness, and the sibilant whisper tickled and teased once more and said, There is one thing….
And that one simple thought made all the sense in the world.
“I’ll be right back,” we said to Rita as she sat on the couch with the baby held close. “I left some things at work.”
“Back?” she warbled in confusion. “You mean you’re going to—But it’s night!”
“Yes, it is,” we said, and we let a cold gleam of teeth show in our face at the thought of that welcoming velvet darkness just outside the door.
“Well, but don’t you—Can’t it wait until morning?” she said.
“No,” we said, and the happy madness of it echoed in our voice. “It can’t wait. It’s something I need to do tonight.”
The truth of it clearly showed on our face. Rita frowned but said no more than, “Well, I hope you—Oh! But I emptied the diaper pail, and it’s really—Could you take the bag and—” She jumped up and went into the hall and the cold acid roiled through me at the interruption, but she was back in mere seconds, clutching a garbage bag. She thrust it at me and said, “On your way out, if you—You really have to go in? I mean, it won’t take too long? Because, I mean, drive carefully, but—”
“It won’t take long,” we said, and then impatience flooded in and we were out the door into the welcoming night with its thin fingers of moonlight trickling through the clouds and promising that one wonderful thing that could wash away all the cramped misery of trying to be something we were not and never would be. In a hurry now, we flung the garbage bag onto the floor of the backseat with our playtime toys and got into the car.
We drove north through thin traffic, north to work, just as we had said we would, but not the daytime work of office and disorder; we went to a much happier task, beyond the dull and into delight, north past the airport, onto the off-ramp that led to North Miami Beach, and slower now, carefully nosing down the trail in our memory, to a certain small pastel yellow house in a modest neighborhood.
The club doesn’t even open until eleven, Deborah had said. We drove past with care and saw the lights on, inside and out, and a car in the driveway that had not been there before. The mother’s car, of course, and it made perfect sense—she took it to work during the day. Closer to the house, half into the shadows, was the Mustang. He was still here. It was not yet ten o’clock and the drive to South Beach was not a long one. He would be inside, enjoying his unjust freedom and thinking that all was once more right with his little world, and that was just the way we wanted it. We had made it with plenty of time and we felt a cold and pleasing certainty that we would not be disappointed.