Double Dexter Read online

  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.

  I don’t know how I got through that day, and I have no idea what I did on the job until five o’clock, when I found myself sitting in my car once more and crawling through traffic toward home. And my blankness lasted through the first long stretch of homecoming and house hunting, until finally, after Rita had already rejected three very nice houses, I found myself looking out the window of Brian’s car and realizing with growing horror that we were heading down a street that seemed vaguely familiar. And just as quickly I realized why: We were driving down the street toward the house where I had disposed of Valentine, and been caught in the act, the very place where all my misery and peril had begun—and just to make sure I collected my full share of unhappiness, Brian pulled the car over and parked it right in front of that exact house.

  I suppose it made a certain sick sense. After all, I had chosen the house because it was foreclosed, and it was in the general area where we already lived, and in any case it was already clear that the Hand of Fate was working overtime to heap agony on poor undeserving Dexter. So I really should have expected it; but I hadn’t, and here it was anyway, and once again I was reduced to doing nothing but blinking stupidly—because what, after all, could I say? That I didn’t like this place because I had chopped up a clown here?

  So I said nothing, and merely climbed out of the car and mutely followed the herd into that house of horror. And shortly I found myself standing in the kitchen right beside the counter that had been the very stage for Valentine’s final performance. But instead of holding a knife I was clutching Lily Anne and listening to Rita babble on about the high cost of getting mold out of the crawl space under the roof, while Cody and Astor slumped to the floor with their backs against the butcher-block counter. Brian’s eyes glazed over and his fake smile slid down his face and off the end of his chin; my stomach cleared its throat and growled a protest at the harsh treatment it had been getting lately, and all I could think about was that here I was in the one place I really and truly didn’t want to be. I would soon be dead or in jail, and because I was standing in the very kitchen where things had started to go wrong, I couldn’t think straight about anything at all. My stomach rumbled again, reminding me that I wasn’t even getting a decent last meal before my certain demise. Life was no longer even a cruel mockery; it had turned into an endless, pointless piling on of petty torments. And just to ratchet things up one more unnecessary notch, Rita began to tap her toe on the floor, and, as I glanced reflexively at her foot, I saw what seemed to be a small dark stain—was it possible? Had I missed a spot of vile sticky clown blood in my frenzied hurried cleanup? Was Rita really tip-tapping her toe in a dried blotch of something I had overlooked?

  The world shrank down to that one small spot and the metronomic beat of Rita’s toe and for a long moment nothing else existed as I stared, and felt the sweat start, and heard my teeth begin to grind—

  —and suddenly it was all too much and I could not stand another moment of this eternally repeating melodramatic loop and something deep inside me stood up, flexed its wings, and began to bellow.

  And as this wild roar rattled the glass of my inner windows the mild and patient acceptance that had been my disguise for the last few nights shattered and crashed to the ground in a heap of flimsy shards. The real me kicked through the rubble to center stage and I stood there liberated, Dexter Unbound. “All right,” I said, and my voice cut through the blather of Rita’s never-ending objections. S
he paused in midwhine and looked at me, surprised. Cody and Astor sat up straight as they recognized the tone of Dark Command that had come into my voice. Lily Anne shifted uneasily in my arms, but I patted her back without taking my eyes off Rita. “Let’s go home,” I said, with the sharp-edged firmness I felt growing in the depths of my shadow self. “The old not-big-enough home.”

  Rita blinked. “But Brian has one more place for us to see tonight,” she said.

  “There’s no point,” I said. “The roof needs to be repiped and the kitchen clashes with the zoning. We’re going home.” And without pausing to enjoy her blank astonishment I turned from the room and headed for Brian’s car. Behind me I heard Cody and Astor scuffle to their feet and charge after me, and as I reached the car they had already caught up and started to argue about which game they were going to play on the Wii when we got home. Moments later Rita trickled out, with Brian at her elbow urging her along with soothing phoniness and real eagerness.

  A very puzzled-looking Rita climbed into the front seat, and before she was even buckled in, Brian got behind the wheel, started the engine, and took us home.

  FOURTEEN

  RITA WAS UNCHARACTERISTICALLY QUIET ON THE DRIVE back to our old too-small house. And when Brian dumped us at the curb and roared happily away into the sunset, she trudged slowly up to the front door behind the rest of us with an expression of puzzled concern on her face. As I put Lily Anne into her playpen and Cody and Astor settled down in front of the Wii, Rita disappeared into the kitchen. In my ignorance, I thought this might be a good thing—perhaps she would whip up a late dinner to wash away the accumulated grease of all our fast-food meals? But when I followed her a moment later I found that, instead of leaping into action at the stove, she had once again poured herself a large glass of wine.

  As I came into the room, she sat at the table and slumped over. She glanced up at me quickly and then looked away and took a very healthy gulp of wine. Each of her cheeks sprouted a dull red spot, and I watched her throat muscles work as she took a second large sip before putting down the half-empty wineglass. I looked at her and knew I had to say something about what had just happened, but I had no idea what—obviously I could not tell her the real truth. She gulped more wine, and I tried to focus on how to tell her that her house hunting had lost a wheel and she was spinning in tight crazy circles in the ditch. But instead I felt another flush of deep irritation, and I heard once more the slow and careful rustling of hidden wings—wings quivering with an eagerness to unfold and hurl us up and into a warm dark sky—

  “It has to be right,” Rita said, frowning and still looking away from me.

  “Yes.” I nodded, not sure what I was agreeing to.

  “It can’t just be some dump, where somebody crapped in the tub and the crappy wiring will burn the house down.”

  “Of course not,” I said, on much firmer ground now; we were talking about our vastly hypothetical new house. “But sooner or later we have to choose one, don’t we?”

  “How?” she said. “Because it’s just— I mean the kids, and …” She stared at me and her eyes filled with moisture. “And you,” she said, looking away from me. “I don’t even know if …”

  Rita shook her head and took another large sip of wine and gulped it down. She put the glass on the table and pushed back a strand of hair that had flopped onto her forehead. “Why is the whole thing so— And why is everybody fighting me?” she said.

  I took a breath and felt satisfaction gleam inside. At last the chance had come, and I could tell her, simply and clearly, without the distraction of her maniacal full-bore scattershot jumping around, that she was driving us all off the edge of the map and into the tangled scenery of frustration and madness. I could feel the words forming on my tongue: cool and reasonable syllables that would lead her cheerfully away from her fugue of eternally berserk rejection and into a calm, enlightened place where we could all relax into a rational, methodical approach—something that included eating real food again—until we found an acceptable house. And as I opened my mouth to lay out my careful, compelling words in front of her, a terrible screeching sound came from the living room.

  “Mom!” Astor shrilled in a tone of angry panic. “Lily Anne threw up on my controller!”

  “Shit,” Rita said, a very uncharacteristic word for her. She gulped the rest of her wine and lurched up out of her chair, grabbing a handful of paper towels as she hurried away to clean up. I heard her telling Astor in a scolding voice that Lily Anne should not have had the controller in the first place, and Astor saying firmly that her sister was more than a year old and they wanted to see if she could kill the dragon yet, and anyway they were sharing and what was wrong with that? Cody said, “Yuck,” quite distinctly, Rita began muttering short and jerky instructions mixed with, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and, “Really, Astor, how can you even?” and Astor’s voice slid up the scale into a rising whine of excuses combined with blame for everyone else.

  And as the whole thing climbed the conversational stairs into absurd and pointless confrontation I let out my cool and careful breath and felt a new one rush in, hot and tight and full of dim red highlights; this was my alternative to exposure and prison? Squealing, squabbling, screaming, and the sour-milk vomit of endless emotional violence? This was the good side of life? The part that I was supposed to miss when the end came, at any minute now, to trundle me off into the dark forever? It was beyond endurance; just listening to it in the next room made me want to bellow, spit fire, crush heads—but, of course, that kind of honest expression of real emotion would only guarantee my reservation in prison. And so rather than steaming into the living room and laying about me with a club, as I so desperately wanted to do, I took a deep breath, stalked out through the turmoil of the living room, and went into my office.

  My Honda list lay in its folder, practically growing cobwebs from the last few days of neglect. There was still time tonight to see a couple of addresses; I copied the next two entries from the list onto a Post-it and closed the folder. I went to the bedroom, changed into my running clothes, and headed for the front door. Once again I had to pass through the hideous bedlam at the front of the house, which had devolved into Astor and Rita grumbling at each other as they wiped almost everything around them with paper towels.

  I had thought I might slip past them and out into the night without comment, but like all my other thoughts lately, that one was wrong, too. Rita’s head snapped up as I hurried by, and even out of the corner of my eye I could see her face grow tighter, meaner-looking, and she stood up as I put a hand on the front door.

  “Where are you going?” she said, and the tone of her voice still carried the edge she had used on Astor.

  “Out,” I said. “I need exercise.”

  “Is that what you call it now?” she said, and although her words might as well have been in Estonian, for all the sense they made, her tone was very clear, and it did not hold even the memory of anything pleasant.

  I turned all the way around and looked at Rita. She stood beside the couch with her fists knotted at her sides—one of them held a clutch of soiled paper towel—and her face was so pale it was almost green, except for matching bright red patches on her cheeks. The sight of her was so odd, so completely different from the Rita I knew, that I just looked at her for a long moment. Apparently, that didn’t soothe her; she narrowed her eyes at me even more and began to tap her toe, and I realized that I had not answered her question.

  “What should I call it?” I said.

  Rita hissed at me. It was so startling that I could do nothing but gawp, and then she threw the balled-up paper towels at me. They opened up in midair and fluttered to the floor a few feet away from me, and Rita said, “I don’t give a damn what you call it.” And she turned around and stomped into the kitchen, returning a moment later with more paper towels, and very pointedly ignoring me.

  I watched a little longer, hoping for some clue, but Rita only ignored me even more thoroughly. I lik
e a good puzzle as much as anybody else, but this one seemed much too abstract for me, and in any case I had more important answers to find. So I decided it was just one more thing I didn’t understand about human behavior, and I opened the door and trotted out into the late afternoon heat.

  I turned to the left at the end of my front walk and started jogging. The first name I had copied from the list was Alissa Elan: a strange name, but I took it as a good omen. Elan, as in zest, zeal, panache. It was exactly what I had been missing lately: Dexter’s Deadly Dash. Perhaps I would rekindle it tonight when I saw Ms. Alissa’s Honda. And as if there really was some kind of magic in that first name, “Alissa,” I suddenly felt like I had been smacked on the head with something large, heavy, and wet, and I stopped dead in the middle of the street, and if there had been any traffic at all I wouldn’t have noticed if it ran right over me because I had just realized that Alissa began with the letter “A.”

  My Shadow had blogged endlessly about the Evil Bitch known only as A, and yet until now I had not checked the list for “A’s.” I had obviously been watching too much TV—far too many gray cells had gone off-line and my once-mighty brain was in a sad state of decrepitude. But I did not linger and indulge myself in an appreciation of my own stupidity. Better late than never, and I had found it. This was it, I was sure of it, the one I had been looking for, and I let that surge of unreasonable glee push me into a trot, down the street and away into late-afternoon certainty.