“Drunk?” I said. “Me?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Certainly not,” I said firmly, giving him my very best dignified frown. “Possibly a little bit tipsy, but that’s not the same thing at all.”
“Oh,” he said, and his sister chimed in, “Are you staying for dinner?”
“Oh, I think I should probably be going,” I said, but Rita put a surprisingly firm hand on my shoulder.
“You’re not driving anywhere like this,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Tipsy,” said Cody.
“I’m not tipsy,” I said.
“You said you were,” said Cody. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him put four words in a row like that, and I was very proud of him.
“You did,” Astor added. “You said you’re not drunk, you’re just a little tipsy.”
“I said that?” They both nodded. “Oh. Well then-”
“Well then,” Rita chimed in, “I guess you’re staying for dinner.”
Well then. I guess I did. I am pretty sure I did, anyway. I do know that at some point I went to the refrigerator for a lite beer and discovered they were all gone. And at some later point I was sitting on the couch again. The television was on and I was trying to figure out what the actors were saying and why an invisible crowd thought it was the most hilarious dialogue of all time.
Rita slid onto the couch next to me. “The kids are in bed,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“I feel wonderful,” I said. “If only I could figure out what’s so funny.”
Rita put a hand on my shoulder. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it? Letting the bad guy go. Children…” She moved closer and put her arm all the way around me, laying her head on my shoulder. “You’re such a good guy, Dexter.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, wondering why she would say something so very strange.
Rita sat up and looked from my left eye to my right eye and back again. “But you are, you KNOW you are.” She smiled and nestled her head back down on my shoulder. “I think it’s… nice that you came here. To see me. When you were feeling bad.”
I started to tell her that wasn’t quite right, but then it occurred to me: I had come here when I felt bad. True, it was only to bore Doakes into going away, after the terrible frustration of losing my playdate with Reiker. But it had turned out to be a pretty good idea after all, hadn’t it? Good old Rita. She was very warm and she smelled nice. “Good old Rita,” I said. I pulled her against me as tight as I could and leaned my cheek against the top of her head.
We sat that way for a few minutes, and then Rita wiggled to her feet and pulled me up by the hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
Which we did, and when I had flopped down under the top sheet and she crawled in beside me, she was just so nice and smelled so good and felt so warm and comfortable that-
Well. Beer really is amazing stuff, isn’t it?
CHAPTER 6
I WOKE UP WITH A HEADACHE, A FEELING OF TREMENDOUS self-loathing, and a sense of disorientation. There was a rose-colored sheet against my cheek. My sheets-the sheets I woke up to every day in my little bed-were not rose-colored, and they did not smell like this. The mattress seemed too spacious to be my modest trundle bed, and really-I was quite sure this was not my headache either.
“Good morning, handsome,” said a voice somewhere over my feet. I turned my head and saw Rita standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at me with a happy little smile.
“Ung,” I said in a voice that sounded like a toad’s croak and hurt my head even more. But apparently it was an amusing kind of pain, because Rita’s smile widened.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “I’ll get you some aspirin.” She leaned over and rubbed my leg. “Mmm,” she said, and then turned and went into the bathroom.
I sat up. This may have been a strategic mistake, as it made my head pound a great deal more. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and waited for my aspirin.
This normal life was going to take a little getting used to.
But oddly enough it didn’t, not really. I found that if I limited myself to one or two beers, I could relax just enough to blend in with the slipcover on the couch. And so several nights a week, with ever-faithful Sergeant Doakes in my rearview mirror, I would stop over at Rita’s house after work, play with Cody and Astor, and sit with Rita after the kids were in bed. Around ten I would head for the door. Rita seemed to expect to be kissed when I left, so I generally arranged to kiss her standing in the open front door where Doakes could see me. I used all the technique I could muster from the many movies I have seen, and Rita responded happily.
I do like routine, and I settled into this new one to a point where I almost began to believe in it myself. It was so boring that I was putting my real self to sleep. From far away in the backseat of the deepest darkest corner of Dexterland I could even hear the Dark Passenger starting to snore gently, which was a little scary and made me feel a tiny bit lonesome for the first time. But I stayed the course, making a small game of my visits to Rita to see how far I could push it, knowing that Doakes was watching and, hopefully, beginning to wonder just a little bit. I brought flowers, candy, and pizza. I kissed Rita ever more outlandishly, framed in the open front door to give Doakes the best possible picture. I knew it was a ridiculous display, but it was the only weapon I had.
For days on end Doakes stayed with me. His appearances were unpredictable, which made him seem even more threatening. I never knew when or where he might turn up, and that made me feel like he was always there. If I went into the grocery store, Doakes was waiting by the broccoli. If I rode my bicycle out Old Cutler Road, somewhere along the way I would see the maroon Taurus parked under a banyan tree. A day might go by without a Doakes sighting, but I could feel him out there, circling downwind and waiting, and I did not dare hope that he had given up; if I could not see him, he was either well hidden or waiting to spring another surprise appearance on me.
I was forced into being Daytime Dexter on a full-time basis, like an actor trapped in a movie, knowing that the real world was right there, just beyond the screen, but as unreachable as the moon. And like the moon, the thought of Reiker pulled at me. The thought of him clomping through his unworried life in those absurd red boots was almost more than I could stand.
Of course I knew that even Doakes could not keep this up forever. He was, after all, receiving a handsome salary from the people of Miami for performing a job, and every now and then he had to perform it. But Doakes understood the rising interior tide that battered at me, and he knew that if he kept the pressure on long enough, the disguise would slip, HAD to slip, as the cool whispers from the backseat became more urgent.
And so there we were, balanced on a knife edge that was unfortunately only metaphorical. Sooner or later, I had to be me. But until then I would see an awful lot of Rita. She couldn’t hold a candle to my old flame, the Dark Passenger, but I did need my secret identity. And until I escaped Doakes, Rita was my cape, red tights, and utility belt-almost the entire costume.
Very welclass="underline" I would sit on the couch, can of beer in hand, watching Survivor and thinking of an interesting variation of the game that would never make it to the network. If you simply add Dexter to the castaways and interpret the title a bit more literally…
It was not all dismal, bleak, and wretched. Several times a week I got to play kick the can with Cody and Astor and the other assorted wild creatures of the neighborhood, which brings us back to where we began: Dexter Dismasted, unable to sail through his normal life, anchored instead to a gaggle of kids and a ravioli can. And on evenings when it was raining, we stayed inside around the dining table, while Rita bustled about doing laundry, washing dishes, and otherwise perfecting the domestic bliss of her little nest.