by Jeff Lindsay
Brian blinked at her, and I felt a surge of kinship. It wasn’t just me—Astor had reduced him to mere eye movements, too. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it’s because the relationship is such a surprise to both of us.”
Cody and Astor swung their heads to face me in perfect unison.
“Yes,” I said, and it was very true. “A complete surprise.”
“Why?” Astor said. “Lots of people have brothers.”
I had no idea how to explain, and I stalled by putting down the tray and sinking into the chair. And once again it was Brian and not me who jumped into the silence.
“Lots of people have families, too,” he said. “Like you two. But brother—Dexter and I did not. We were, ah, abandoned. Under very unpleasant circumstances.” He gave her the bright smile again, and I am quite sure I only imagined that there was some real glint behind it this time. “Especially me.”
“What does that mean?” Astor said.
“I was an orphan,” Brian said. “A foster child. I grew up in a whole bunch of different homes where they didn’t like me and didn’t really want me, but they were paid to keep me.”
“Dexter had a home,” Astor said.
Brian nodded. “Yes, he did. And he has another one now.”
I felt cold talons on my back and did not know why. Surely there was no threat in Brian’s words, but still—
“You two need to realize how very lucky you have been,” Brian said. “To have a home—and even somebody who understands you.” He looked at me and smiled again. “And now, two somebodies.” And he gave them a horrible fake wink.
“Does that mean you’re going to hang around with us?” Astor said.
Brian’s smile grew a fraction. “I just might,” he said. “What else is family for?”
Brian’s words jerked me into action, and I leaned toward him as if somebody had burned me on the back. “Are you sure?” I said, and I felt the words turn into cold and clumsy lumps in my mouth. Nonetheless, I stammered on. “I mean, you know, um, it’s wonderful to see you and all, but—there’s a certain amount of risk involved.”
“What risk?” Astor demanded.
“I can be very careful,” Brian said to me, “as we both know.”
“It’s just, you know, Deborah might come around here,” I said.
“She hasn’t come around for the last two weeks,” he said. And he raised a mocking eyebrow at me. “Has she?”
“How do you know that?” Astor said. “Why does it matter if Aunt Deborah comes around?”
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.
But in the sweaty depths of this night, Dexter dreamed. The images were as twisted as the bedsheets: Lily Anne holding a knife in her tiny fist, Brian collapsing into a pool of blood while Rita breast-fed Dexter, Cody and Astor swimming through that same awful red pool. Typical for such nonsense, there was no real meaning in any of it, and yet it still made me vastly uncomfortable on the bottom shelf of my inner cabinet, and when I finally staggered out of bed the next morning I was very far from rested.
I made it into the kitchen unaided, and Rita thumped a cup of coffee in front of me, with not nearly the care she had shown arranging Brian’s cup. And even as I had this unworthy thought, Rita picked up on it, as if she were reading my mind.
“Brian seems like such a great guy,” she said.
“Yes, he does,” I said, thinking to myself that seeming is very far from being.
“The children really like him,” she said, adding to my undefined sense of discomfort, which my pre-coffee partial consciousness had done nothing to dispel.
“Yes, um …” I said, taking a large slurp and silently willing the coffee to work quickly and get my brain back online. “Actually, he’s never really been around kids before, and—”
“Well, then, this will be good for all of us,” Rita said happily. “Has he ever been married?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Don’t you know?” Rita said sharply. “I mean, honestly, Dexter—he is your brother.”
Perhaps it was my newfound human feeling erupting, but irritation at last pushed its way through my morning fog. “Rita,” I said peevishly, “I know he’s my brother. You don’t need to keep telling me.”
“You should have said something,” she said.
“But I didn’t,” I said, quite logically, though admittedly still a bit cranky. “So can we change the channel, please?”
She looked like she had a lot more to say on the subject, but she very wisely held her tongue. She did, however, undercook my fried eggs, and so it was with a sense of real relief that I finally grabbed Cody and Astor and fled out the door. And of course, life being the unpleasant business that it is, they were stuck on the same page as their mother.
“How come you never told us about Uncle Brian, Dexter?” Astor demanded as I pushed the car into gear.
“I thought he was dead,” I said, with what I really hoped was a note of finality in my voice.
“But we don’t have any other uncles,” she said. “Everybody else does, and we don’t. Melissa has five uncles.”
“Melissa sounds like a fascinating individual,” I said, swerving to avoid a large SUV that had stopped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.
“So we like having an uncle,” Astor said. “And we like Uncle Brian.”
“He’s cool,” Cody added softly.
Of course, it was very good to hear that they liked my brother, and it really should have made me happy, but it did not. It simply added to the sense of mean-spirited tension that had been rising in me ever since he had appeared. Brian was up to something—I knew it as well as I knew my own name—and until I knew what that something was I was stuck with my sense of lurking dread. It had not gone away by the time I dropped the kids at school and headed into work.
For once there were no freshly discovered headless bodies lying in the streets of Miami and frightening the tourists, and as if to underline this great mystery, Vince Masuoka had even brought in doughnuts. Considering the ragged assault my home life was making on me, this was very welcome indeed, and it seemed to me to call for some positive reinforcement. “Hail, doughnut, well brought,” I said to Vince as he staggered in under the weight of the pastry box.
“Hail, Dexterus Maximus,” he said. “I bring tribute from the Gauls.”
“French doughnuts?” I said. “They don’t put in parsley, do they?”
He flipped open the lid to reveal rows of gleaming doughnuts. “No parsley and no escargot filling, either,” he said. “But they do include Bavarian cream.”
“I shall ask the Senate to declare a triumph in your honor,” I said, quickly grabbing one. And in a world built on the principles of love, wisdom, and compassion, that would have marked an end to the very uncomfortable course my morning had been following. But of course, we live in no such blissful world, and so the doughnut had barely had a chance to settle happily into my stomach where it belonged, when the phone on my desk began to rattle for my attention, and somehow, just from the way it sounded, I could tell it was Deborah.
“What are you doing?” she demanded without saying hello.
“Digesting a doughnut,” I said.
“Do it up here in my office,” she said, and hung up.
It is very difficult to argue with someone who is already off the line, as I am certain Deborah knew, so rather than go through the huge physical effort of redialing, I headed to the Homicide area and Deborah’s desk. It was not, to be fair, actually an office at all but more of an area within a partition. Still, she seemed in no mood for the quibble, so I let it lie.
Deborah was in her chair at the desk clutching what looked like an official report. Her new partner, Deke, stood over by the window with a look of detached and vacuous amusement on his unreasonably handsome face. “Look at this,” Deborah said, smacking the pages with the back of her hand. “Can you believe this shit?”
“No,” I said. “That’s because from this far away I can’t even read that shit.”
“Mr. Chin Dimple,” she said, indicating Deke, “went to interview the Spanos family.”
“Oh, hey,” Deke said.
“And he found me a suspect,” Debs said.
“Person of interest to the investigation,” Deke said very seriously in official reportese. “He’s not really a suspect.”
“He’s the only fucking lead we’ve got, and you sit on it all night,” Debs snarled. “I have to read it in the goddamn report at nine-fucking-thirty the next morning.”
“I had to type it,” he said, sounding slightly hurt.
“With two teenage girls missing, the captain on my ass, and the press about to blow up like Three Mile Island, you type it and don’t tell me first,” she said.
“Hey, well, wh
at the fuck,” Deke said with a shrug.
Deborah gnashed her teeth. I mean, really; it’s something I’d only read about before, mostly in fantasy stories, and I’d never believed it happened in real life, but there it was. I watched, fascinated, as she gnashed her teeth, started to say something very forceful, and instead threw the report on her desk. “Go get some coffee, Deke,” she said at last.
Deke straightened up, made a clicking noise as he pointed a finger at her, and said, “Cream and two sugars,” and sauntered away toward the coffeepot down the hall.
“I thought you liked your coffee black,” I said as Deke disappeared.
Deborah stood up. “If that’s his last fuckup, I am the happiest girl in the world,” she said. “Come on.”
She was already moving down the hall in the opposite direction from Deke, and so once again any protest I might have made was largely irrelevant. I sighed and followed, wondering if Deborah had learned this kind of behavior, perhaps from a book called The Management Style of Bulldozers.
I caught up with her at the elevator and said, “I suppose it would be too much to ask where we’re going?”
“Tiffany Spanos,” she said, hammering at the “down” button a second time, and then a third. “Tyler’s older sister.”
It took me a moment, but as the elevator doors slid open I remembered. “Tyler Spanos,” I said, following her into the elevator. “The girl who’s missing with, um, Samantha Aldovar.”
“Yeah,” she said. The doors slid shut and we lurched down. “Nimnut talked to Tiffany Spanos about her sister.” I assumed Nimnut meant Deke, so I just nodded. “Tiffany says that Tyler has been into that Goth shit for a while, and then she met this guy at a party who was, like, Goth squared.”
I suppose I lead a very innocent life, but I had thought that “Goth” was a sort of fashion statement for teenagers with bad complexions and a particularly repulsive form of angst. As far as I knew, the whole thing involved cultivating a look of black clothes and very pale skin, and perhaps listening to Euro-tech pop music while looking longingly at a DVD of Twilight. It seemed to me something that would be very hard to conceive of squared. But Deborah’s imagination knew no such boundary.