Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

Chutsky picked up the paper and unfolded it. “Cubana de Aviación,” he read.

“From Havana to Mexico,” I said. “So he can do it and then get out in a hurry.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Uh-huh, could be.” He looked up at me and cocked his head to one side. “What’s your gut telling you?”

Truthfully, the only thing my gut ever told me was that it was dinnertime. But it was obviously very important to Chutsky, and if I stretched the definition of gut to include the Passenger, my gut was telling me that there was absolutely no doubt about it. “He’ll be there,” I said again.

Chutsky frowned and looked down at the drawing again. Then he started nodding his head, slowly at first and then with increasing energy. “Uh-huh,” he said, and then he looked up, flipped the flight schedule to me, and stood up. “Let’s go talk to Deborah,” he said.

Deborah was lying in her bed, which should not really have been a surprise. She was staring at the window, even though she couldn’t see out from her bed, and in spite of the fact that the television was on and broadcasting scenes of unearthly merriment and happiness. Debs didn’t seem interested in the cheerful music and cries of bliss coming from the speaker, however. In fact, if you were to judge strictly from the look on her face, you would have to say she had never felt happiness in her life, and never intended to if she could help it. She glanced at us without interest as we came in, just long enough to identify us, and then looked back in the direction of the window.

“She’s feeling kind of low,” Chutsky muttered to me. “Happens sometimes after you get chopped up.” From the number of scars all over Chutsky’s face and body, I had to assume he knew what he was talking about, so I just nodded and approached Deborah.

“Hey, sis,” I said, in the kind of artificially cheerful voice I had always understood you were supposed to use at an invalid’s bedside.

She turned to look at me, and in the deadness of her face and the deep blue emptiness of her eyes, I saw an echo of her father, Harry; I had seen that look before, in Harry’s eyes, and out of those blue depths a memory came out and wrapped itself all around me.

Harry lay dying. It was an awkward thing for all of us, like watching Superman in the throes of Kryptonite. He was supposed to be above that kind of common weakness. But for the last year and a half he had been dying, slowly, in fits and starts, and now he was very close to the finish line. And as he lay there in his hospice bed, his nurse had decided to help. She had been deliberately and lethally increasing the dose of his pain medicine and feeding on Harry’s death, savoring his shrinking away, and he had known it and told me. And oh the joy and bliss, Harry had given me permission to make this nurse my very first real live human playmate, the first ever I had taken away with me to the Dark Playground.

And I had done so. First Nurse became the very first small drop of blood on the original glass slide in my brand-new collection. It had been several hours of wonder, exploration, and ecstasy, before First Nurse went the way of all flesh, and the next morning when I went to the hospice to report to Harry, the experience still filled me with brilliant darkness.

I came into Harry’s room on feet that barely touched the ground, and as Harry opened his eyes and looked into mine he saw this, saw that I had changed and become the thing that he had made me, and as he watched me the deadness came into his eyes.

I sat anxiously beside him, thinking he might be at some new crisis. “Are you okay?” I said. “Should I call the doctor?”

He closed his eyes and slowly, fragilely, shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” I insisted, thinking that since I felt better than I ever had before, everyone else really ought to cheer up a little, too.

“Nothing wrong,” he said, in his soft, careful, dying voice. And he opened his eyes again and looked at me with that same glazed look of blue-eyed emptiness. “So you did it?”

I nodded, almost blushing, feeling that talking about it was somehow embarrassing.

“And after?” he said.

“All cleaned up,” I said. “I was really careful.”

“No problems?” he said.

“No,” I told him, and blurted out, “It was wonderful.” And seeing the pain on his face and thinking I could help, I added, “Thank you, Dad.”

Harry closed his eyes again and turned his head away. For six or seven breaths, he stayed like that, and then, so softly I almost couldn’t hear him, he said, “What have I done … Oh, Jesus, what have I done …”

“Dad …?” I said. I could not remember that he had ever spoken like this, saying bad words and sounding so very anguished and uncertain, and it was very unsettling and absolutely took the edge off my euphoria. And he just shook his head, eyes closed, and would say nothing more.

“Dad …?” I said again.

But he said nothing, just shook his head a few more painful times and then lay there quietly, for what seemed to me like a very long time, until at last he opened his eyes and looked at me, and there it was, that dead-eyed blue gaze that had moved beyond all hope and light and into the darkest place there is. “You are,” he said, “what I have made you.”

“Yes,” I said, and I would have thanked him again, but he spoke.

“It’s not your fault,” he said, “it’s mine,” and I did not know then what he meant by that, although these many years later I think I have begun to understand. And I still wish I could have done or said something then, some small thing that would have made it easier for Harry to slide happily into the final dark; some carefully crafted

sentence that made the self-doubt go away and let the sunlight back into those empty blue eyes.

But I also know, these many years later, that there is no such sentence, not in any language I know. Dexter is what Dexter must be, always and evermore, world without end, and if Harry saw that at the end and felt a final surge of horror and guilt—well, I really am sorry, but what else is there? Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth—it’s just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation. Believe me, I am very much an expert in what dying people do. If I were to catalog all the strange things that my Special Friends have said to me as I helped them over the edge, it would make a very interesting book.

So I felt bad about Harry. But as a young and awkward geek of a monster, there was very little I could have said to make it easier on him.