“I didn’t know it showed,” I said at last.
Debs snorted. “Dexter. This is me. We grew up together; we work together—I know you better than anybody else in the world. To me, it shows.” She raised an eyebrow encouragingly. “So what is it?”
She was right, of course. She did know me better than anyone else—better than Rita, or Brian, or anybody I had ever known, with the possible exception of Harry, our long-dead dad. Like Harry, Deborah even knew about Dark Dexter and his happy slashing, and she had come to terms with it. If ever there was a time to talk, and a person to talk to, it was now, with her. I closed my eyes for a moment, and tried to think of how to begin. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that, um … a few weeks ago, when I was—”
Deborah’s radio squawked, a loud and rude electronic belch, and then it said quite clearly, “Sergeant Morgan, what is your twenty?” She shook her head at me and held her radio up.
“This is Morgan,” she said. “I’m in Forensics.”
“You’d better come down here, Sergeant,” a voice said over the radio. “I think we found something you need to see.”
Deborah looked at me. “Sorry,” she said. She pushed the button on the radio and said, “On my way.” Then she got up and started for the door, hesitated, and turned back to me. “We’ll talk later, Dex, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.” Apparently it didn’t sound as pitiful to her as it did to me; she just nodded and hurried out the door. And I finished closing up shop for the night and then headed to my car.
NINE
THE SUN WAS STILL BRIGHT IN THE SKY WHEN I GOT HOME. It was one of the very few benefits of summer in Miami: The temperature may be ninety-seven, and the humidity well over a hundred percent, but at least when you got home at six o’clock, there was still plenty of daylight left, so you could sit outside with your family and sweat for another hour and a half.
But, of course, my little family did no such thing. We were natives; tans are for tourists, and we preferred the comfort of central air-conditioning. Besides, since my brother, Brian, had given Cody and Astor a Wii, they hadn’t left the house at all except by force. They both seemed unwilling to leave the room where the thing sat, for any reason. We’d had to make some very strict rules about using the Wii: They had to ask first, and they had to finish their homework before they turned it on, and they could play with it no more than an hour a day.
So when I came into the house and saw Cody and Astor already standing in front of the TV with their Wii controllers clutched tightly in their hands, my first question was automatic. “Homework all done?” I said.
They didn’t even look up; Cody just nodded, and Astor frowned. “We finished it at after-school,” she said.
“All right,” I said. “Where’s Lily Anne?”
“With Mom,” Astor said, frowning deeper at my continuing interruption.
“And where’s Mom?”
“Dunno,” she said, waving her controller and jerking spasmodically with whatever was happening on the screen. Cody glanced at me—it was Astor’s play—and he shrugged slightly. He almost never said more than three words at a time, one small side effect of the abuse he’d received from his biological father, and Astor did most of the talking for both of them. But at the moment she seemed uncharacteristically unwilling to talk—probably a continuing miff over impending braces. So I took a breath and tried to shake off my growing irritation at both of them.
“Fine,” I said. “Thank you for asking, yes, I did have a hard day at work. But I already feel a lot better, now that I’m here nestled in the warm bosom of my family. I’ve enjoyed our little chat very much.”
Cody gave a funny little half smirk and said, very softly, “Bosom.” Astor said nothing; she just gritted her teeth and attacked a large monster on the screen. I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young. I gave up on the kids and went to look for Rita.
She wasn’t in the kitchen, which was a very large disappointment, since it meant she was not busily whipping up something wonderful for my dinner. There was nothing burbling on the stove, either. And it wasn’t leftover night; this was very puzzling and a little bit troublesome. I hoped this didn’t mean we were going to have to order pizza—although it made the kids happy, it simply could not compete with even the most casual of Rita’s efforts.
I went back through the living room and down the hall. Rita was not in the bathroom, and not in the bedroom, either. I began to wonder whether Freddy Krueger had grabbed her, too. I went to the bedroom window and looked out into the backyard.
Rita sat at the picnic table we’d put up under a large banyan tree that spread its branches over nearly half our backyard. She was holding Lily Anne on her lap with her left hand and sipping from a large glass of wine with the right. Other than that, she seemed to be doing absolutely nothing except staring back at the house and slowly shaking her head. As I watched she took a gulp of wine, hugged Lily Anne a little tighter for a moment, and then appeared to sigh heavily.
This was very strange behavior, and I had no idea what to make of it. I had never seen Rita act like this before—sitting alone and unhappy and drinking wine—and it was disturbing to see her doing it now, whatever the reason might be. It seemed to me, however, that the most important point was that, whatever Rita was doing, she was not cooking dinner, and that was just the sort of dangerous inaction that calls for prompt and vigorous intervention. So I wound my way back through the house, past Cody and Astor—still happily killing things on the TV screen—and on out the back door into the yard.
Rita looked up at me as I came outside and she seemed to freeze for a moment. Then she hurriedly turned away, put her wineglass down on the picnic table’s bench, and turned back around to face me. “I’m home,” I said, with cautious good cheer.
She sniffled loudly. “Yes, I know,” she said. “And now you’ll go get all sweaty again.”
I sat next to her; Lily Anne had begun to bounce as I approached, and I held out my han
ds for her. She launched herself toward me and Rita passed her over to me with a tired smile. “Oh,” Rita said, “you’re such a good daddy. Why can’t I just …” And she shook her head and snuffled again.
I looked away from Lily Anne’s bright and cheerful face and into Rita’s tired and unhappy one. Aside from a runny nose, she also seemed to have been crying; her cheeks were wet and her eyes looked red and a little swollen. “Um,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
Rita blotted at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse and then turned around and took a large sip of wine. She put the glass back down again, behind her, and faced me once more. She opened her mouth to say something, bit her lip, and looked away, shaking her head.
Even Lily Anne seemed puzzled by Rita’s behavior, and she bounced vigorously for a moment, calling out, “Abbab bab bab!”