For a moment, Brian’s presence made no sense, because his routine was to come to our house for dinner every Friday night, and here he was on my couch on a Thursday night. And my badly damaged mental process was so completely occupied with my Shadow that I could not quite accept that Brian was really here, and I just blinked at him stupidly for several seconds.
“It’s not Friday,” I finally blurted, which seemed almost logical to me, but apparently he found it amusing, because his smile grew two sizes.
“That’s quite true,” he said, and before he could go on Rita rushed in with Lily Anne in one hand and a grocery bag clutched in the other.
“Oh, you’re home,” she said, which in my opinion topped my remark to Brian for obviousness. She dropped the grocery bag beside the couch, and to my great disappointment I saw that it contained a heap of papers instead of dinner. “Brian has a list,” she said, smiling fondly at my brother.
But before I could learn what kind of list and why I should care, Astor’s voice came down the hall, loud enough to crack glass. “Mom!” she yelled. “I can’t find my shoes!”
“Don’t be ridiculous— You just had them on— Here, Dexter,” Rita said, thrusting Lily Anne at me and hurrying down the hall, presumably to keep Astor from yelling again and cracking the house’s foundation.
I settled into the easy chair with Lily Anne and looked inquiringly at Brian. “Of course, it’s always good to see you,” I said, and he nodded, “but why are you here today? Instead of Friday.”
“Oh, I’ll be here Friday, too, I’m sure,” he said.
“Wonderful news,” I said. “But why?”
“Your lovely wife,” he said, tilting his head down the hall toward Rita, probably to make sure I knew he meant Rita and not one of my other lovely wives, “Rita, has enlisted me to help you search for a new house.”
“Oh,” I said, and I remembered that she had said something about this recently—but, of course, it had slipped my mind, since I was dwelling so selfishly on my one little problem of being on the verge of death and dishonor. “Well,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else, and Brian agreed.
“Yes,” he said. “No time like the present.”
Before I could come up with a matching cliché, Rita stormed back into the room, still talking to Astor over her shoulder. “The sneakers are perfectly fine; just put them on; Cody, come on!” she said, picking up her purse from the coffee table. “Let’s go, everybody!”
And so, swept along in the wake of Hurricane Rita, we went.
I really and truly did not want to go house hunting, not now, not when my entire world was creaking in preparation for falling apart. The only thing I wanted to hunt was my Witness, and I could not do that from the backseat of Brian’s SUV. But I didn’t see any choice. I had to go along and pretend to be interested in comparative lanais and relative shrubbery, while the whole time I could think of nothing but the vastly unpleasant fate that was certain to be circling closer and closer with every four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath ranch house we crawled through.
And we spent the next evening after work, and that whole long weekend, and then the first half of the following week riding around in Brian’s SUV and looking at foreclosed houses in our area. My frustration and anxiety grew and ate away at me, and the houses we looked at seemed to be ominous symbols of my coming desolation. Every one of them was abandoned, with ragged shrubbery and lawns gone to weeds. They were all dark, too, their power shut off, and they seemed to loom over their forsaken yards like a bad memory. But they were all available cheap through Brian’s connections from his new job, and Rita tore into eac
h one of them with a savage intensity that my brother seemed to find soothing. And in truth, even though I kept looking over my shoulder, physically as well as mentally, Rita made the process so frantic and all-consuming that I began to experience long periods of time when I forgot about my Shadow—sometimes five or six minutes at a stretch.
Even Cody and Astor got into the spirit of things. They would wander wide-eyed through the desolation of each abandoned house, staring into the empty rooms and marveling that such opulent emptiness might soon be all theirs. Astor would stand in the center of some pale blue bedroom with holes kicked in the walls, and she would stare up at the ceiling and murmur, “My room. My room.” And then Rita would hustle in and herd everyone back out to the car, spewing out staccato monologues about this being “the wrong school district, and the tax base is way too high—the neighborhood has a zoning change on appeal, and the whole house needs to be rewired and repiped,” and Brian would smile with genuine synthetic delight and drive us to the next house on his list.
And as Rita found brand-new and increasingly absurd objections to each house we looked at, the novelty wore off. Brian’s smile grew thinner and more patently phony, and I began to get very annoyed every time we climbed into his car to see one more house. Cody and Astor, too, seemed to feel that the whole thing was keeping them away from their Wii far too long, and why couldn’t we just pick a nice big house with a pool and be done with it?
But Rita was relentless. For her, there was always one more house to look at, and every single Next One was going to be the One, the ideal location for Total Domestic Felicity, and so we would all race grumpily on to another perfectly serviceable home, only to discover that a leak in the sprinkler system in the backyard was almost certainly causing a sinkhole under the turf, or there was a lien on the second mortgage, or killer bees had been seen nesting only two blocks away. It was always something, and Rita seemed unaware that she had spun off alone into a deep neurotic fugue of perpetual rejection.
And even more tragically, since our evenings, and all day Saturday and Sunday, were spent on this endless quest, they were not spent at home eating Rita’s cooking. I had thought I could put up with the house search as long as her roast pork turned up now and then, but that was now no more than a distant memory, along with her Thai noodles, mango paella, grilled chicken, and all else that was good in the world. My dinner hour became a hellish maze of burgers and pizzas, gobbled down in a grease-stained frenzy in between rushing through unsuitable houses, and when I finally put my foot down and demanded real food, the only relief I got was a box of chicken from Pollo Tropical. And then we were off into the endless cycle of negativity again, flinging away the chance to own another wonderful bargain, merely because the third bathroom had vinyl paneling instead of tile, and anyway the hot tub didn’t leave any room for a swing set.
And although Rita seemed to be generating real bliss for herself with her constant rejection of everything that had four walls and a roof, the endless quest did nothing for me except add to my feeling that I was watching helplessly as impending disaster roared down at me. I went home from our house hunting hungry and numb, and I went to work the same way. I managed to cross off only three addresses on my Honda list, and although that was not nearly enough, I could do nothing but grind my teeth and carry on with my disguise as it all spiraled upward into dizzy heights of aggravated frustration.
It was first thing in the morning on Wednesday when the great pimple that was Dexter’s Current Life finally came to a head. I had just settled in at my desk and begun to brace myself for another eight hours of wonder and bliss in the world of blood spatter, and I was actually feeling mildly grateful to be away from Rita’s frenetic search for the perfect home. Why did everything seem to go wrong all at once? It may have been sheer self-flattery, but I thought I was pretty good at handling a crisis—as long as they came at me one at a time. But to have to deal with finding a house and living on awful fast food and Astor’s braces and everything else while waiting for my unknown Shadow to strike in some unspecified way—it was starting to look like I would unravel long before I could handle anything at all. I had done so well for so long—why was it suddenly so hard to be me?
Still, I was apparently stuck with being myself, since nobody was offering me any better choices. So in a pitiful attempt to stop fretting and soldier on, I took two deep breaths and tried to put things in their proper perspective. All right: I was in a little bit of a bind, maybe several of them. But I had always found a way out of trouble before, hadn’t I? Of course I had. And didn’t that mean that I would somehow find a way out of the mess I was in now? Absolutely! That was who I was—a true champion who always came out on top. Every time!
And so even though I felt like a cheerleader for a team that wasn’t even in the game, I pasted a horrible fake cheerful grin on my face and got right to work by opening my e-mail.
But of course, that was exactly the wrong thing to do if I wanted to maintain my artificial optimism. Because naturally enough, the very first e-mail waiting for my attention was titled, “Crunch.” And there was absolutely no doubt in my mind who had sent it.
I have to say that my hand was not really trembling as I clicked it open, but that may have been only because of nervous exhaustion. And the e-mail was, in fact, exactly what I had thought: another note from my favorite correspondent. But this time it was brief and personal, rather than one of his long and rambling Shadowblogs. Just a few lines, but quite enough:
I have finally figured out that we are more alike than you might want to think, and that is not good news for you. I know what I am going to do, and I am going to do it your way, and that is even worse news for you. Because now you can guess what’s coming but you can’t guess when.
It’s crunch time.
I stared at those few lines long enough to make my eyes ache, but the only thought that came to me was that I was still wearing my fake smile. I dropped it off my face and deleted the e-mail.