“Oh, Cody, you didn’t wake him up, did you? Hello, Dexter, we’ve been shopping, we got ALL the things Cody needs for the Cub Scouts, he doesn’t like the shorts, I think because Astor said something, my God, what happened to your head?” she said, running through two octaves and eight emotions without breathing.
“It’s nothing,” I said, “just a flesh wound,” which was something I’d always wanted to say, even though I didn’t really know what that meant. Weren’t ALL wounds flesh wounds, unless they bypassed the flesh somehow and went right to the bone?
Nevertheless, Rita responded with a gratifying circus of concern, shooing away Cody and Astor and getting me an ice pack, a comforter, and a cup of tea before flinging herself down beside me on the couch and demanding to know what had happened to my poor dear head. I filled her in on all the dreadful details—leaving out one or two things with no real relevance, like what I had been doing at a house that blew up in an attempt to kill me—and as I spoke, I watched with dismay as her eyes got big and moist, until they began to overflow and tears ran down her cheeks and across her face. It was really quite flattering to think that minor damage to my skull could cause such a display of hydrotechnics, but at the same time it left me slightly uneasy about what my response ought to be.
Luckily for my reputation as a Method actor, Rita left me in no doubt at all about how I should behave. “You stay right here and rest,” she said. “Quiet and rest when you get a bump on the head like that. I’m going to make you some soup.”
I had not known that soup was good for concussions, but Rita seemed very sure about it, and with a few gentle strokes on my face and a light kiss near the bump, she was off the couch and into the kitchen, where she immediately began a muted clatter that very soon smelled like garlic, onion, and then chicken, and I drifted into a state of half sleep where even the faint throbbing of my head seemed distant, cozy, and almost pleasant. I wondered if Rita would bring me soup if I was arrested. I wondered if Weiss had anyone to bring him soup. I hoped not—I was starting to dislike him, and he certainly didn’t deserve soup.
Astor suddenly appeared beside the couch, interrupting my reverie. “Mom says you got hit on the head,” she said.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said.
“Can I see it?” she asked, and I was so deeply touched by her concern that I bowed my head to reveal the lump and the matted hair around it where it had bled. “It doesn’t look so bad,” she said, sounding a little disappointed.
“It isn’t,” I told her.
“So you’re not going to die, are you?” she asked politely.
“Not yet,” I said. “Not until after you do your homework.”
She nodded, glanced toward the kitchen, and said, “I hate math.” Then she wandered away down the hall, presumably to hate her math at closer range.
I drifted awhile longer. The soup finally came, and while I would not absolutely insist that it was good for my head injury, it certainly did me no harm. As I may have mentioned before, Rita in the kitchen can do things that are far beyond mortal ken, and after a big portion of her chicken soup I began to think that the world at large might deserve one last chance. She fussed over me the whole time, which was not really my favorite thing, but at the moment it seemed kind of soothing and I let her fluff the pillows, mop my brow with a cool cloth, and rub my neck when the soup was all gone.
Before too long, the entire evening had passed, and Cody and Astor came in to say muted good nights. Rita herded them away to bed and tucked them in, and I staggered down the hall to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Just as I got the toothbrush going in a really good rhythm, I caught sight of myself in the mirror over the sink. My hair stuck up in all directions, there was a bruise on one cheek, and the normal sprightly emptiness of my eyes seemed hollow. I looked like a very unflattering mug shot, the kind where the recently arrested is still sobering up and trying to figure out what he did and how he got caught. I hoped it was not an omen of what was to come.
In spite of an evening of nothing more strenuous than lounging on the couch and dozing, I was nearly overwhelmed with sleepiness, and the toothbrushing had taken the last of my energy. Still, I made it all the way to the bed under my own power, and I flopped down onto the pillows thinking that I would just drift off into slumberland and worry about everything else in the morning. But alas, Rita had other plans.
After the hushed murmur of bedtime prayers had died away down the hall in the children’s room, I heard her come into the bathroom and run water for a while, and I had almost fallen asleep when the sheets rustled and something that smelled like very aggressive orchids slid into bed beside me.
“How do you feel?” Rita said.
“Much better,” I said, and giving credit where it was due, I added, “The soup seemed to help.”
“Good,” she whispered, and she put her head down on my chest. For a while she just lay there, and I could feel her breath blowing across my chest and I wondered if I could really get to sleep with the weight of her head pressed onto my ribs like that. But then the pattern of her breathing changed, got slightly percussive, and I realized she was crying.
There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman’s tears. I know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women, that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think, and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying, “There there,” in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is actually about.
But Dexter is nothing if not a team player, and so I slid my arm up across her back, put the palm of my hand on her head, and patted. “It’s okay,” I said, and no matter how stupid that sounded, I thought it was a tremendous improvement over “there there.”
And true to form, Rita’s reply came out of absolutely nowhere that I could hope to predict. “I can’t lose you,” she said.
I certainly had no plans to be lost, and I would gladly have told her so, but she was just hitting her stride now, and the silent sobs were jerking her body and sending a small rivulet of salt water rolling down my chest. “Oh, Dexter,” she sobbed, “what would I do if I lost you, too?”
And now, with that word too, I had somehow joined a completely unexpected and unknown company, presumably of people Rita had carelessly left lying around where they had been easily lost, and she had given me no clue how I had managed to get a seat with that group, or even who they were. Did she mean her first husband, the addict who had beaten and tormented her, Cody, and Astor, until they were traumatized into becoming my ideal family? He was in prison now, and I certainly agreed that being lost that way was a bad idea. Or was there some other string of misplaced persons who had slipped through the cracks of Rita’s life and been washed away by the rains of mischance?
And then, as if I needed further proof that her thoughts were being beamed to her from a mother ship in orbit beyond Pluto, Rita began to slide her face down my chest, across my stomach—still sobbing, you understand, and leaving a trail of tears that quickly turned cool.
“Just lie still,” she sniffled. “You shouldn’t exert yourself with a concussion.”
As I said, you never really know what the program is going to be when a woman switches on the tears.
TWENTY-FOUR
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I WOKE UP AND THOUGHT, But what does he want? I don’t know why I hadn’t asked that question before, and I don’t know why it came to me now, lying in my comfy bed next to a gently snoring Rita. But there it was—it was bobbling around on the surface of Lake Dexter now, and I had to do something with it. The inside of my head still felt stiff, as if it was pac
ked with wet sand, and for several minutes I lay there unable to do anything with my thought except to repeat it: What does he want?