Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

So I had no illusions about my worth to the rest of the world. I did what I did and didn’t ask for any thanks. But always before, every time since the very first, I had done it by the rules laid down by Saint Harry, my near-perfect adoptive father. This time I had broken the rules, and for reasons that were not clear to me, that made me feel like I deserved to be caught and punished. And I could not convince myself that this was a healthy feeling.

So I battled the Blahs until quitting time and then, without any real increase in energy, I drove over to the hospital again. The rush-hour traffic did nothing to cheer me up. Everybody seemed to be just going through the motions without any real, genuine homicidal rage. A woman cut me off and threw half an orange at my windshield, and a man in a van tried to run me off the road, but to me they seemed to be doing it mechanically, not really putting their hearts into it.

When I got to Deborah’s room, Chutsky was asleep in his chair, snoring loud enough to rattle the windows. So I sat for a little while, watching Deborah’s eyelids quiver. I thought that was probably a good thing, indicating she was getting her REM sleep and therefore getting better. I wondered what she would think of my little mistake when she woke up. Considering what her attitude had been just before she got stabbed, it didn’t seem likely that she would be terribly understanding about even such a minor slipup. After all, she was as much in the grip of Harry’s Shadow as I was, and if she could barely tolerate what I did when it was Harry Approved, she would never go along with something outside his careful limits.

Debs could never know what I had done. Not a big deal, considering I had always hidden everything from her until recently. But it didn’t make me feel any better this time, for some reason. After all, I had done this one for her, as much as anything else—the first time I had ever acted out of noble impulses, and it had turned out very badly. My sister made a really poor Dark Passenger.

Debs moved her hand, just a twitch, and her eyes blinked open. Her lips parted slightly and I was certain she actually focused on me for a moment. I leaned toward her and she watched me, and then her eyelids drifted closed again.

She was slowly getting better, and she was going to make it, I was sure. It might be weeks rather than days, but sooner or later she was going to get up out of that awful steel bed and get to work at being her old self again. And when she did …

… what would she do about me?

I didn’t know. But I had a very bad feeling that it wouldn’t be much fun for either of us; because as I had realized, we were both still living in Harry’s shadow, and I was pretty sure I knew what Harry would say.

Harry would say it was wrong, because this was not the way he had designed Dexter’s life, as I remembered oh so well.

Harry usually looked very happy when he came in the front door from work. I don’t think he ever was truly happy, of course, but he always looked like it, and this was one of my first very important lessons from him: make your face fit the occasion. It may seem like a small and obvious point, but to a fledgling monster still figuring out that he was very different, it was a vital lesson.

I remember sitting in the great banyan tree in our front yard one afternoon because, frankly, that is what the other kids in the neighborhood did, even long after what one what might call optimum tree-climbing age. Those trees were a great place to sit, with their wide horizontal branches, and they served as a clubhouse for everyone under the age of eighteen.

So I sat in mine that afternoon, hoping the rest of the neighborhood would mistake me for normal. I was at an age when everything was starting to change, and I had begun to notice that I was changing in a very different way. For one thing, unlike the other boys, I was not totally consumed with trying to see under Bobbie Gelber’s skirt when she climbed up into the tree. And for another…

When the Dark Passenger started whispering wicked thoughts, I realized that it was a Presence that had always been there; it just had not spoken until now. But now, when my contemporaries were starting to pass around copies of Hustler, it was sending me dreams of a different kind of illustration, perhaps from Vivisection Monthly. And although the images that came to me were disturbing at first, they started to seem more and more natural, inevitable, desirable, and finally, necessary. But another voice, equally strong, told me this was wrong, crazy, very dangerous. And for the most part the two voices fought to a tie and I did nothing but dream, just like all the human boys my age.

But one wonderful night the two whispering armies came together when I realized that the Gelbers’ dog, Buddy, was keeping Mom awake with its nonstop barking. And this was not a good thing. Mom was dying of some untreatable mysterious thing called a lymphoma, and she needed her sleep. And it occurred to me that if I could help Mom sleep, this would be a very good thing, and both voices agreed that this was so—one somewhat reluctantly, of course, but the other, Darker one, with an eagerness that made me dizzy.

And so it was that Buddy, the loudmouthed little dog, launched Dexter on his way. It was clumsy of course, and much messier than I had planned on, but it was also oh so good and right and necessary …

In the following months there were a few more minor experiments; carefully spaced, playmates more carefully chosen, since even in my hot-blooded phase of self-discovery, I understood that if all the pets in the neighborhood disappeared, someone was bound to ask questions. But there was a stray, and a bicycle trip to a different area, and somehow young Luke Darkwalker got by, slowly learning to be happily me. And because I felt so attached to my small experiments, I buried them close at hand, behind a row of bushes in our backyard.

I certainly know better than that now. But at the time, everything seemed so innocent and wonderful, and I wanted to look out at the bushes and bask in the warm glow of the memories from time to time, and I had made my first mistake.

And so that lazy afternoon I sat in my banyan tree and watched as Harry parked the car, got out, and paused. He had on his work face, the one that said, I have seen it all and don’t like most of it. And he stood beside the car for a long moment with his eyes closed, doing nothing more complicated than breathing.

When he opened his eyes again he had an expression on his face that said, I am home and feel very good about that. He took a step toward the front door and I jumped down out of the tree and went to him.

“Dexter,” he said. “How was your day at

school?”

In truth it had been just about like all the others, but even then I knew that wasn’t the appropriate response. “Good,” I said. “We’re studying communism.”

Harry nodded. “That’s important to know about,” he said. “What’s the capital of Russia?”

“Moscow,” I said. “It used to be St. Petersburg.”

“Really,” said Harry. “Why did they change it?”

I shrugged. “They’re atheists now,” I said. “They can’t have a Saint anything, because they don’t believe in them.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and we started walking to the house. “That can’t be much fun,” he said.

“Didn’t you, um, fight communists?” I asked him, wanting to say kill but not quite daring. “In the Marines?”

Harry nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Communism threatens our way of life. So it’s important to fight it.”

We were at the front door, and he gently pushed me in ahead of him, into the smell of the fresh coffee that Doris, my adoptive mom, always had ready for Harry when he came home from work. She was not yet too sick to move, and she was waiting for him in the kitchen.