She glared at me, and I realized she really wanted an answer, but all I could think of to say was, “Semper fi…”
Deborah looked at me a little longer. Then she leaned back in her chair. “I wake up at night, and I think about all the people you killed. And I think about all the people you’ll kill if you get out again. And if I help you get out, I am as good as killing them myself,” she said.
“I thought you were okay with—I mean, Dad really did set it up, and…”
Once more her expression was enough to make me trickle to a stop.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “It’s wrong. It goes against everything I ever—” Her voice was rising, and she caught herself, stopped, and went on calmly. “You belong here,” she said matter-of-factly. “The world is a better and safer place with you locked up.”
It was difficult to argue with her logic, but it would have been rather counterproductive not to try. “Debs,” I said. “I’m in here for something you know I didn’t do. You can’t let them hang it on me—you’re better than that.”
“Save it,” she said. “I’m not the fucking Innocence Project. And if I was, I’d pick somebody who deserved to be saved.”
“I’ve got nobody else,” I said, trying very hard not to sound whiny.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You let them all get killed.”
“That’s not—”
“And you don’t have me, either,” she said. “You’re on your own.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“You’re goddamned right I mean it,” she said. “I help you get out, I do nothing but turn a killer loose—and just incidentally kill my career, too.”
“Oh, well,” I said. And I was so unhinged at her attitude that I sank into sarcasm. “Of course, if it’s a question of your career—I mean, what does my life matter compared to your career?”
She ground her teeth audibly, and her nostrils flared out and turned white, which I knew from our childhood meant she was about to lose it. “If I can save my career, keep a killer in jail, and help the department at the same time—”
“You’re not helping the department,” I said, and I was peevish now, too. “You’re not helping anyone but Anderson. And you’re doing it by abandoning your own brother!”
“Adopted,” she spat. “Not my real brother.”
For a very long moment those words just hung between us. For my part, I felt as if I had been poleaxed. For her to think that, let alone say it, was so far beyond any possible propriety that I couldn’t believe she’d really said it. Surely I had imagined it? Deborah would never…I mean, would she?
And for her part, Deborah spent a long stretch of that eternity grinding her teeth at me. There was one small, quick flash of something in her eyes: a frail and fleeting thought I could almost see that said she knew she should never say such a thing, and she couldn’t believe she’d said it, either. But that thought was gone, faster than a speeding bullet, and she settled back into her chair and got comfortable, nodding slightly, as though she was actually quite glad she’d finally said something that had been troubling her for a while. And then, just to be sure I was completely and utterly crushed, she said it again.
“Adopted,” she said with matter-of-fact venom. “You were never really my brother.”
She glared at me for another eternity or two, and then she stood up, gathered her papers, and walked away.
FOUR
I don’t know how long I sat there. It seemed like a very long time. But at some point I became aware that Lazlo’s hand was on my shoulder and he was urging me to my feet. I let him lead me back to my cell and button me in, but I didn’t actually see or hear anything that happened along the way. There was room in my poor battered brain for only one thing, and it played in an endless loop: You were never really my brother.
She’d said that. Deborah had actually said those words, and then looked perfectly satisfied with herself for saying them—and then, on top of that mind-melting sequence, she had repeated them, just in case I didn’t hear her the first time. But I heard her. I heard her over and over and I could not hear or think anything else but that.
You were never really my brother.
I know a great deal about Me. I know that I am not, for
instance, ever going to change. I will always be Dexter the Monster, human-appearing, but walking through life with one foot always in perpetual Darkness. And I am also not able to feel Real Human Emotions. This is a fact, and it cannot change either. I do not feel. I am not capable.
So what were these terrible things surging through me, smashing at the tight slick walls that held Me in perfect cold indifference? This stomach-twisting dread, the sensation of everything around me and in me being diseased, dead, rotten, and empty? What could they possibly be? They certainly felt like Feelings.
You were never really my brother.
Barely, only just almost, I could understand Deborah’s decision not to help me. Her career was everything to her, and I really was, after all, all she said I was and feared I would be again. I was and I would be, undeniably, unchangeably, and eagerly. It made a certain sense for her to think that way, and while I could never endorse it as a plan of action, I could at least comprehend the mental process that had led her there.