Title: Break Me
Fandom: Dexter
Rating: M for language and explicit content
Disclaimer: I do not own Dexter or any of its characters. BUT HOLY SHIT I'M ALMOST DONE WITH THIS LONG-ASS FREAKING FANFICTION THAT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO MONEY AND HAS EATEN UP OVER A YEAR OF MY LIFE, THUS PREVENTING ME FROM DEDICATING AS MUCH OF MY TIME AS I OUGHT TO HAVE SPENT ON ORIGINAL WORKS. So don't sue me. The way I see it, Dexter almost owes me money. Almost. Don't sue me for saying that, either.
Author's notes: Part Two is here, and Part Three is not far behind. It's big, as I said. I tried to break it in logical places to make it manageable and digestible, and to help improve the impact, otherwise it'd be an overload. I haven't quite finished Part Three but I've done enough that I feel comfortable with what's here (I normally go back over recent paragraphs to check for consistency and rethread ideas for continuity, but this is so long that what constitutes 'recent' is variable) to give it up.
Reviewers, you make my day. Seriously. I'll start with chapter 50, the weird one. In my mind, it was a dream of Deb's that she'll remember later as a warning of what Harrison could become if taught the Code outside of the family context. Dexter learnt it from Harry through interactions with Deb; if Harrison learnt it 'academically' from someone outside the family he mightn't naturally develop the same loopholes Dexter did. But the vague nameless style felt deliberate, a way of blurring the lines between Dexter/Deb and Harrison/Mini-Deb, and the chapter actually wanted me to leave the name out at the end, but I reminded the chapter who the author is and decided it would have more impact if all the clues (like the age gap and the technology) added up to a confirmation at the end. ganglingfreak, I loved this play-by-play review of your thoughts as you went over both chapters :P You spoil me. In 49: I KNOW RIGHT? Matthews was SO always in on it. The showrunners dropped a very easy ball with that one. Also, despite having a weird/difficult-to-describe personal take on Debster, I need to agree that for siblings, Dex and Deb are pretty damn hot together when they're killing and torturing. A make-out scene would have fit in well but I didn't have the space and was trying to keep the word count down. LOL. But in seriousness, I really appreciate your analysis and critique and generous praise of my work here, and I would be so honoured to have you read my other works and hear your thoughts on that :) Should I put you down on my list for Review/Request exchange? :) In 50, I hate to think that Harrison could ever hurt Deb in this way (and I am particularly partial to Deb's daughter, despite having only just introduced her – she's very fun and easy to write) but the chapter felt necessary to show Harrison's darker potentials. He could grow up awesome or he could grow up awful and it's really going to come down to one choice of Deb's. Thankyou for riding this bus with me :) bellart, if I don't keep you on your toes, who's going to? :P Just when you think you're safe for another few weeks BAM, update binge! And then BAM, birthday update! And THEN, BAM, updates ON TIME! Glad I was able to keep surprising you. Also glad I beat the birthday karma! Now: what's the theory? Are you happy dancing? "Maybe there is some justice in Dexter's death". This made me smirk and once you've read this chapter you'll see why. the harsh realm, you also gave me reason to smile secretively: "WTF HARRISON!? That's grossly unfair. That's not JUSTICE." Hehe :) I love the review to 49 that took you days to write, but I suppose you know my reaction to that already ;P I'm sorry for scaring you with 50 but at least by now you'll have read far enough ahead to know Harrison's evil act is either not real or hasn't happened yet. Which I'm glad about, too, because Harrison and Mini-Deb are fun to write – maybe funner than young Dexter and Deb. Harrison is definitely less socially challenged and Deb's daughter takes herself less seriously than Deb did. I wish I had room to write more of this pair but I want this fic DONE. Maybe someone will request a oneshot about them? Fingers crossed! Vema, I too love the correlations between the members of this family, how you can see everyone in everyone else, and feel immensely sorry for Deb's daughter for being born into it without any of the necessary qualities required to survive it. She is lovely but I think she lacks Deb's hardiness and natural curious drive, which might be why she doesn't notice signs that I think Deb would have raised an eyebrow at. Totally agree, any sixteen-year-old has said something just as dumb and heartless that they no doubt regret, and despite the number of candles on her last cake she was definitely still a kid. Hope you're enjoying this finale! Writingisfunlol, can I assume you'll be wanting a Mini-Deb to go with your collection of virtual Baby Debras? I too love Deb's daughter and wish I had another ten chapters in which to include her. Except then I'd need to stretch this out another ten chapters… Actually, I love her with Harrison because I think they have great chemistry. I don't think she'd have been as fun without him to bounce off. I hope these epilogue parts are meeting your expectations :) BrianaBree, regardless of when you joined the ride you're definitely one of the cool kids sitting at the back of the bus in my opinion :) There's this big bench seat at the back (with seatbelts, of course! I care about the safety of my passengers) and I can see you in my rear view mirror waving at me at the end of each chapter. I think you must be in a window seat because you keep being stormed on; though I also suspect you recently closed said window as you seem to have beaten that new-chapter-equals-new-storm pattern. Deb is a favourite of mine, too, up there sharing the top spot with Scully, Trinity, Castiel and Obi-Wan Kenobi when it comes to all-time bestest fictional characters. I hope I am doing our Deb appropriate justice here. Thanks, shadow :) Love your rocking chair soodohnimh :P It's X-Files Monday and I just watched another three episodes (and YES, they were great!), but I'll debrief with you once I get through Part Three. I took that break and scoffed my dinner and was like, "Nope, disc is finished, back to laptop!" and walked out with difficulty. I appreciate your appreciation of my woods descriptions. I once went to band camp in the Black Forest in Germany, but we don't have any 'woods' in my latitude so it's an entirely imagined sensory experience that I write from. So I appreciate that you appreciate it! :) AngryHellFish, lol, yes, I'm a bit of a heartless bitch of an author, not to be underestimated – I will kill favourite characters for the sake of a story's integrity – though you've probably come to expect this kind of rug-pulling from me. The 'realness' of chapter 50 is up for debate, as I said above, but if it comes to pass, I think a Deb-vs-Harrison showdown could be extremely interesting!
You people are quick on the uptake and you already have a stack of reviews for 51, and I have this temptation to leave it and answer them on the next one, BUT then of course I'll be in the same position I left myself in here by prolonging it. So, quickly: my apologies to the five people who have reviewed so far for making you sad. soodohnimh, I think you're playing me very wisely by refusing to believe anything I show you. We may never know whether Dexter is inside that coffin but all evidence pointing in one direction doesn't always mean you can discount the alternative, right? LOL at steak knives. Poor Quinn :P He's definitely the side offer of life for Deb but my Deb does care about him and she recognises the strategic advantage being his girlfriend represents in her survival post-Dexter. Kind of cold but she's a changed girl. AngryHellFish, I'm sorry for any embarrassment I may have caused in making you cry in front of siblings. I have found Deb really enjoyable to write. She feels a bit different from Dexter, like, she notices different things, she's a bit quicker to judge and feel angry or upset, and she feels more… erratic? I don't know if that's the word I mean. She jumps between thoughts differently from how Dexter thinks and she thinks less about how she thinks. I'm listening to the song you recommended. It's about 3 mins through now and it kind of kicked up a notch and I like this part of the song better for writing purposes. I will replay it later tonight when I go back to Part Three and try writing to it :) bellart, thankyou for all your lovely words. I accept your salute to my Deb POV chapter – I have been looking forward to it, though it does feel different. Maybe you're right and she's a vessel for the readers? ;P You can definitely count on me to keep your secret about Dexter being off chilling somewhere. I won't discuss it in my authors' notes or anything public like that! Also… I'll see what I can do about that request of yours. BrianaBree, bus buddy, I know you thought you were hopping off at this next stop but I'm afraid it's a boarding-only spot, no departures, because I split the epilogue into three in the end… But I think you'll like it! I am not a crier either so I appreciate the significance of finding a piece of writing that moves you enough to bring that sort of emotion up, and I even more so appreciate you sharing that it's MY work bringing you to tears. Though I shouldn't ignore that the 2:30am factor may also have affected your emotional range :P I too enjoy the Debisms, because they are fun to write, and often when I reread a paragraph I think to myself, 'This is Deb saying this', and I get to go through and insert a bunch of fucks that weren't there before. This isn't conventional Deb, though: this is broken every time Deb and I think that the back-and-forth between her logical acceptance of obvious facts and her refusal to believe something without seeing it for herself is fitting of a Deb in this instance. And thankyou, shadow. One chapter left…
Epilogue Part Two
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Once the soil has been laid and the service is over, the group disperses and clumps in different ways. People familiar and unfamiliar express condolences. Tom sits with me when Joey doesn't. He points out a police presence in the distance, keeping pesky journalists and haters at bay. He admits that the nature of my brother's crimes has meant a significantly lower level of hysteria than what was expected.
"He killed bad people," Tom admits reluctantly, "and the public is pretty split on whether they're happy or disappointed he'd dead."
An older woman I haven't seen in many years comes and sits by me, and her adult daughters stand in a semi-circle behind her, like a fan.
"Your brother committed the crimes my son was hung for," Mrs Doakes informs me, and I feel like I've been stabbed all over again. I rest my hands on my stomach as it turns and twists painfully. James, my one-time partner; yes, I remember. And it was Dexter, all of it. He manipulated that whole investigation, which is why it's so easy to believe he could do it again.
But he destroyed this family. My brother, the destroyer.
"The F.B.I. came to my house and I've already been apologised to and all but had my ass kissed by those fellows," the woman says before I can start to say sorry. I can easily envision the image she puts forth. Admitting that Doakes was a mistake is a massive embarrassment for the Bureau. "I don't want your apologies. I want you to know we forgive your brother."
"We all do," one of James's sisters tells me when I just stare. "We all agree that it was a dick move letting our brother go down for his crimes but James was probably the only man honourable enough-"
"And stupid enough," another sister inserts, and they smile at each other fondly. They recall their dead brother with smiles. Will that be me one day?
"-to be honest and noble and shit in this day and age, and look where it got him. Your brother, the way we see it, had you and the rest of his family to protect from the truth. Anyone else who thought they could get away with passing the buck and saving his family from hurt would have done the same."
"We can't blame a man for wanting to hide his evils from his family," the youngest sister says with more wisdom than I can ever hope to possess. "We're not angry anymore."
"We've been the sisters and family of a 'murderer', too," the first says. "Your brother killed ours and now his darkness has caught up with him, too, and what we really want to say-"
"Is," the mother finishes, and her daughters fall silent, and she takes my hands, "we've all tasted the same tragedy and we're here. We've weathered the looks and the whispers. A killer's family isn't a family of killers." Speak for yourself. "Things will be hard but you don't have to do it alone. We're here, and we can be your family if you want us to be."
The women I once had dinner with each embrace me in turn and leave, reminding me that I know where to find them. I watch them go, heart heavy, but not the same heavy as before. Dexter wrecked that family, left them in shreds. He wrecked me, too. But somehow, in the messy, painful aftermath, Mrs Doakes has found two things: forgiveness, and the loose end of one of my frayed edges, and she's pulling my torn self close and offering a patch job. I am surrounded by support. Maybe I can survive. They did.
When they drive off it occurs to me that I should have introduced Mrs Doakes to Harrison, but when I look around I can't see him with either of his siblings or his grandparents. I get to my feet with difficulty and stagger a few paces towards what remains of the crowd. It's only a few steps and I'm able to see the other side of Rita's headstone, behind which Harrison sits with another small child. I stop and sway in place, dehydrated and exhausted and surprised, because I don't know the toddler and don't recall seeing anyone in the crowd with a stroller.
The other child is also a boy, also golden-haired, though with glorious ringlets that ought to be on a girl because a boy will never appreciate those like a girl would. He's about two years of age and he clutches a blue Matchbox car in his chubby fist. Harrison draws a racetrack with his finger in the dirt behind his mother's headstone and the younger child drives his toy car along the track. And they talk. I realise I've never seen Harrison with other little kids before; even at kindergarten when I've picked him up or dropped him off, I've never noticed him interacting with his classmates. He speaks nicely to the other boy and negotiates the sharing of the car and the curly-haired toddler does whatever Harrison suggests eagerly. It's the most beautiful thing I've seen in so long that I finally feel tears in my eyes, and when I step closer to lean on the headstone to keep standing, the boys look up at me and my breath catches.
Two pairs of hazel eyes blink innocently at me. Morgan hazels.
I am happy to pass the child off as a hallucination because weirder shit has happened, but I'm robbed of that chance because reality comes calling and the boy's mother comes over and takes my arm.
"You shouldn't be standing," she says, and I cannot fucking believe who she is. That she's here. She pulls me gently back to the plastic chairs and calls the boys over so their play can resume where we can see them. I don't catch her son's name. Mason? Madison? Maddox? Something like that. But I know her name, and I know now where those blonde curls come from. Two years… that adds up. I'm sure Dexter never knew. But I could be wrong and making assumptions here. I don't know what to say to her but luckily she does most of the talking. She speaks delicately and cautiously, because she knows we're not really alone. She says she's giving evidence in my brother's trial but that she has immunity from prosecution. I don't ask how she managed that. I start to gather as she talks, though, that her coming forward as Dexter's only living accomplice is probably what made Reid lay off me, so I have to be grateful for that.
"You almost shot me once," she says, offering me a small smile. I can't bring myself to smile back. I can only look into her face for facts I know now that I didn't know before. Before, she was just Dex's tenant. Now I know she's a victim far more battered and betrayed and defiled than anything ever done to me. How many scars does her glamorous outfit hide?
"I didn't, though," I answer finally, and I go back to watching the boys playing on the grass. Harrison and the other child seem so happy together, and their giggles in the summer sunshine and their shiny golden hair and their bright hazel eyes bring life to the cemetery. The woman beside me lowers her head and her big lovely hat dips with her face.
"I owe you for that," she says, and I refuse, choking on a laugh of incredulity.
"No. You fucking don't. I didn't know it was you and my brother behind that curtain, but knowing wouldn't have changed what I did. I let you go because it was right and what was done to you and the other girls was wrong."
She watches the little boys for a while, too. I wonder what she's thinking. Does she miss Dexter, too? Was she planning to tell him about the boy? Does she feel dirty for giving evidence that solidifies the F.B.I. case against him or is it the opposite for her, a cleansing process? Because no one knew about her – she was free. She chose to come back and give it up. Did she do it for Harrison and the kids and me? A guardian angel sent by my brother from beyond the grave. I'm too scared to ask.
"You and your brother knew a different kind of right and wrong from what most people acknowledge," she says finally. "You're like him, you know."
"A killer?" It slips out. I close my eyes briefly, berating myself, and look around to see who heard. No one is close enough and no one is looking my way. The other woman shakes her head and her massive fucking hat. It's a nice fucking hat.
"No," she says with a polished sort of softness, reclining a little in her seat. "Justice, embodied." She touches my hand for a moment; then she takes it away and folds hers prettily on her lap, too awkward to maintain physical contact for long. She looks polished and together but after all she went through she's even more of an emotional disaster than I am. Wow, Dex, you knew how to pick 'em, didn't you? She leans towards me and drops her voice. "Your brother was a saviour. An angel. Don't let anyone make you forget it."
"He was a fuck-up and a murderer," I correct before she can run off with this perfect fucking picture in her head. She smiles again, this time more of a smirk.
"Who isn't?" She takes a business card from her purse and a pearl-coloured pen and writes something down for me. "I insist."
She presses the card into my hand, stands and goes to the playing children. She says goodbye to Harrison, who looks at her with polite curiosity. I wonder if he recognises her. I doubt it. It was so long ago, and she was only around for such a short time. She scoops up her cute little toddler and walks towards the parking lot. Harrison watches them go with forlornness on his face. The other boy peers over his mother's shoulder to wave goodbye to my nephew. I wonder if the boys will ever meet again. If my family's history is anything to go by, I have to assume that of course they will cross paths at some point.
I read the business card. I'd forgotten the surname, but not that weird fucking first one. She handles loans in a bank in Minneapolis. Not too shabby for someone who dropped off the face of the planet two years ago and came waltzing back like nothing had happened, when in fact her whole world had been brutalised and rewritten. I turn the card over and find an email address and the words For anything. I tuck it into my bra where no one can see I have it with me.
When they get me back to the hospital I know the right thing to do is to stop being a pain in the ass and just go back to my room meekly and lie down, but I make Joey take me on a small detour. To be honest I think he's sick of arguing with me. He wheels my chair into Jamie's room.
I've been feeling sorry for myself and I've got so many wonderful people around me, and Jamie has them too, but I manage to feel even sorrier for her than I am for me.
Her doctors don't think she'll walk again. There's no sensation or nerve activity below her middle spine.
"That doesn't mean she won't recover," Joey adds adamantly, and I realise that this is where he's been whenever he's not with me. He and Jamie only split up two or three weeks ago; he feels responsible for her, too. I feel suddenly so selfish, and so guilty, as if I need any more of that. Joey left Jamie because he was still in love with me. Now her boyfriend is my fiancé and she can't walk.
"The doctors still aren't willing to guess," Jamie tells me. She turns her head to look at me for the first time since she looked away when I first came in. Her eyes touch my left hand and I self-consciously want to hide the ring, or burst into tears and say, "Here, have it; you deserve it and I don't," but I make myself stay still. She takes in my black dress, the bandages and padding that's still visible, the borrowed wheelchair. Her gaze clings to the spokes of the wheel. She says, "Maybe I'll get one of those."
"You get good arms from working the wheels," I offer. She looks like she might smile. She doesn't, but almost.
"Dr Summers is seeing Harrison every day," Jamie says. "She rang me here this morning for some more background information. She wondered how he would handle the funeral. How… How was he?"
She loves my nephew so much. He's lucky; he has so many people around who love him and want to help protect and heal him. Like I do. Like Jamie does.
Dexter fucked up but he didn't leave us all with nothing. He left us with each other, the people who loved him, who he loved, who he protected and who protected him in turn and who he knew would take care of each other.
We talk about Harrison and Jamie tells me what no one else has: Reid is still trying to get access to my nephew.
"That agent has interviewed me three times," she shares. "He wants to talk to Harrison but can't because you're the guardian and you haven't given permission. So the F.B.I. is subpoenaing Dr Summers' notes from each session." My insides twist again. This sensation can't be good for me. I feel it all the time. What is Harrison divulging in therapy? Could all the lies be undone by one beautiful child's innocent honesty? But Jamie says, "I don't know what good it'll do their investigation. Dr Summers says he isn't speaking about Dexter, or what he saw. He says he doesn't remember."
Repression. Dexter repressed the trauma of the brutality he witnessed at a similar age and he grew up socially inept, morally ambiguous and emotionally distant. I don't know what I hope for my nephew. If he saw horrors as we expect, I don't want him to have to remember those; but likewise I don't want the scars of those things hidden away to come back much later with a corrupting vengeance.
"How are you recovering?" Jamie asks, and I tell her fine, and she says, "I heard you nearly died. I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry," I counter, and I don't say what for, because it's for so many things. Is this how Dexter felt every time he said sorry to me? There are too many things to be sorry for so the words 'I'm sorry' just have to do. "It's like everyone involved with Dexter got shafted in the end."
"Dexter didn't do this to me, and he's not the one who hurt you. It was that Dr Vogel." She looks away, mouth tight, and I recognise the look of trying to keep something inappropriate inside the mouth. I wait; it comes out after a moment of restraint. "Dexter was right to kill her, Deb! She shot you and she kidnapped Harrison and she did this to me, and she tried to burn the fucking house down with me in it. She deserved what she got. Those assholes at the F.B.I. are investigating the wrong person. Dexter jumped through a fire and saved my life. He stayed with me until the ambulance arrived and he only left when he knew where Dr Vogel was with Harrison. And Angel and Joey told me Dexter's the reason you were able to be revived. Dexter isn't the monster they're making him out to be. Your brother," she says firmly while I sit in my wheelchair, feeling small and shaky with this onslaught of emotion and fact, "was a hero." She looks down at her useless legs, skinny and still beneath the blankets. "I should have been there today. I should have shouted it out across the whole cemetery. Dexter was a better man than any of this victims."
I should have stood up and said the same thing, because no one believes it like I do, but I'm the asshole sister who sits back and lets Dexter's name and reputation come apart like threads in old fabric. I do nothing to save him. I'm sure everyone thinks I'm the biggest traitor. No one says it but surely that's the thought going around. Dexter's kids must think it when I don't defend him. I hate myself every time I don't smile and explain that my brother was a victim of other people's manipulations and also the one constantly good thing in my life. I hate that I have to lie.
But I know it's what he wanted from me, so for once, I do what he wanted instead of what I want.
That in itself is proof the world's gone upside down, and that Dexter must be dead.
After the funeral I have little choice but to start to accept that Dexter is gone. Not coming back. It hurts every day and some events or conversations trigger the sadness and the missing and make some days worse than others, but regardless, each day dawns and each day ends and time doesn't seem to give a fuck how I feel about its movement.
My recovery is slow and frustrating. Tests and scans and talks with specialists are frequent. I could measure time in specialist appointments. When was lunch? Oh, about two appointments ago. My internal injuries heal slowly and my organs stabilise and one of my many specialists breaks the bad news to me: no more alcohol. Limited processed foods. Oral medication only by doctor's prescription. My internal systems have had enough of me, between the years of casual drinking, the hydrochloric acid poisoning and the knife that went through my stomach and a kidney. The fact that my heart stopped following an aneurysm and a seizure also brings a furrow to my doctor's brow, and she adds that a mostly natural diet would be best for me for now.
All I can think is fuck: tea.
"Oh, thank goodness! Oh, no, that'll be fine," Maura Bennett says with a dismissive smile. Joey is at a hearing so instead she's sitting in on my appointment with me this time, acting the mother. How strange that she should be my 'mom' figure now, considering how far removed along the family tree we are from each other. Yet here she is, and I'm glad. "She's already on one of those fancy organic diets. Oh, Debra," she adds, taking my hand in relief. "I thought it was going to be more serious than that!"
Motherfucking tea.
Visits from loved ones are frequent but become less so as time passes and people start to gather themselves together. Children's Services representatives begin popping in to make their assessments of my capacity to raise and provide for Harrison. Insurance assholes sit on a stool between Gallagher and Tom Matthews and tell me what's being paid out and what's frozen and what the F.B.I. is dictating to them. Reid's investigation moves behind closed doors and I hear very little of it, but as long as my wrists remain uncuffed I assume things are going well. Jacob Elway's body washes up somewhere and there's traces of bacteria in his lungs that match the river everyone thought he'd dumped Hannah McKay into, only now we all know Hannah McKay wasn't fucking dead until I made her that way. His appearance adds another layer of confusion to an already unclear case and I never discover whether it's solved. I choose not to ask. I choose to look like I'm just getting on with my life. Like a victim instead of like a nervous liar afraid of being caught in her own web.
When after five weeks of confinement I'm allowed to leave the hospital, it's like the best fucking thing ever. Joey walks me out and I stand in the car park and enjoy the sun. He takes me to my place and that bestest ever feeling quickly fades.
Dexter. Dexter and I. Me and Dex. Dex and Harrison and me. This place has too many memories and I don't like any of it. I dutifully follow Quinn inside and do the hugging thing with the Bennetts and my nephew, who they've brought to meet me. The Children's Services lady agrees that Harrison is staying in my custody, and I smile at her and I smile at him and I smile at everyone else, and when the lady leaves and Bill and Maura help me with the dishes after a big healthy lunch and take Astor and Cody back to the motel they're staying in, I look at everything I don't want to look at. The couch I kissed my brother on. The glass door, and the beach beyond it, the beach where I fought my frustrations out with Dexter. My bathroom, where I locked myself; my bed, where I laid awake while Dexter slept that first Monday night. And under my bed, all the photos I destroyed while I lost myself and terrified my brother. I tell Joey, "I don't want to live here anymore."
"Me neither," says Harrison, and we spend that night at Joey's.
It's so good to lie down on a proper bed, and I sigh as my head touches Joey's pillow. So fucking good. He lies beside me and his familiar scent and the depression in the mattress made by his familiar weight create a sense of safety and cosiness I haven't felt since… Yeah. Since Dex. I'm sure I would have been asleep in less than twenty seconds, except I hear the door creak. Paranoia I didn't have before I knew what Dexter was brings me to full awareness and I painfully, awkwardly try to sit up.
"Can I sleep in here?" Harrison asks in a tiny voice, and when I say of course, he lies down on the floor beside me. The same way I used to curl up on my big brother's floor when I had nightmares, or when I felt lost, like when our dad died. It breaks my heart. I lie back down and close my eyes against the darkness and try to hear my little nephew's breaths. Poor baby.
"Don't be ridiculous," Joey grumbles, switching on his lamp and climbing out of bed. I reach for him, wanting to stop him, but he ignores me and rounds the bed. I implore him, murmuring his name miserably – I like having Harrison near. He reaches my side of the bed and Harrison is sitting up, waiting for Joey to reach him. Joey scoops him up and I expect him to return the child to the couch where we made him a bed, but instead he brings Harrison into the bed with us. My nephew looks as surprised as I am. Joey says, "You don't need to sleep on the floor, little guy."
I sleep so long, and so deeply, with Harrison snuggled into my chest. I wake up late the next morning and he's still asleep, and Joey's brushing his teeth, clearly having been awake for hours. He comes and sits on the edge of the bed and watches me as I lovingly brush Harrison's golden blonde hair off his face.
"Dexter really is gone," I say quietly, not a question, just a statement of realisation. Joey takes a moment to answer.
"At least he left you the best part of him."
Joey Quinn was a great boyfriend the first time around, of course, but he surprises me with what a fantastic job he does in his new role as fiancé/surrogate dad/sounding board/counsellor/nurse/dietician/emotional punching bag. He changes my bandages and measures out my medications. He takes Harrison and me to all of our appointments. He fights with me on a near-daily basis on what I should or shouldn't be eating or doing. He fields my phone calls and handles important stuff. Like breaking lease on my beach house. Like the F.B.I. case against my brother. Like Dexter's will. Everything goes into my name. Joey helps me organise to put Dex's stuff into storage so the kids and I can go through it all in the future when we feel up to it. He helps me move Harrison's stuff into his apartment so my nephew can actually have a bed. He helps me reorganise my bank accounts so that I can put all of my brother's money away for his kids when they're older. He arranges for Dexter's apartment to be recarpeted and have the window replaced, and then we lease it out. I want to give it to Astor as an investment when she turns eighteen. Joey renews the lease on the mooring where Dexter kept his boat and ensures it stays registered. I want to give it to Cody when he turns eighteen.
Joey has the time to be good to me because he's suspended without pay indefinitely. Phone records show he called Dexter in the morning of That Day, and Dexter's actions afterward indicate that my partner tipped him off. Which, only I know for sure, is what he did. Because he loves me.
And he shouldn't, but he does. I take advantage of that. I crave love and closeness, and I get it the way I have always tried to get it. Sex is mostly empty but it distracts me when I feel dirty with all the lies and deceit, and it makes Joey happy, though not at first – at first I think my advances scare him, because he's afraid of breaking me. I jump him whenever we're alone, and he doesn't deny me; I'm glad, because this intimacy is when I feel most in control of things. His desire for me makes me feel wanted, whole. Like the lies are okay. Like I'm okay.
We don't talk about marriage. We never talk about 'us'. But I never take the ring off, either. He still has that 'uncomplicated' feel that drew me in the first time, and I think I appreciate it more this time around because I haven't had it for a long while. He takes care of me and my nephew and I let him. He pushes me on issues I don't want to deal with, mostly my health, and I lose it with him and tell him to leave me and that I'm a liar and I don't deserve him, but he never goes anywhere. He just yells back at me, "And where the fuck does that leave you and the kid if I walk out?" and then I cry and beg him to stay and he holds me until I run out of tears. That's the extent of it. It shouldn't work but it does. It's a new cycle, less destructive than the one I played with Dexter because only half of this partnership is a recklessly insane wreck. Joey's, like, normal. His devotion is steady and it keeps me together when I can't manage that task on my own. Fuck, I love him, and I'm fucking glad my brother thought to spend his final weeks trying to match us back up in spite of my efforts against it and in spite of the escalating sexual tension that he and I were exploring between us at the same time. He's right: where the fuck would I be without him? As much as I do care about him, there's also the strategic advantage of being his partner that I cannot deny. He knows shit and if I pull away like I should, how do I know he'll keep it to himself? Whenever I lie awake at night and think of what an awful person I am for even thinking of Quinn like a shield and consider sneaking into my nephew's room and waking him and running away, I always hear my brother's irritable voice. Hide in plain sight. Use them as cover. And I know that the most sensible choice for Harrison and I is to stay exactly where we are, so we do.
Phone records also make things murkier for Reid. It proves that Dex was in contact with Hannah McKay despite his insistence that he hadn't heard from her, but they can't work out her movements or her motives. The packed bags make it look like Hannah and Dex were planning a getaway with Harrison and I as ignorant add-ons, yet Hannah drugged and bound my brother and tried to kill me. No one knows how she escaped Jacob Elway on the night Max Clayton died. No one knows where she hid between that night and the day I killed her.
No one knows how unguilty I feel over that.
No one knows, either, what Harrison may have seen, heard or experienced. He never speaks of it, and Dr Summers is quite sure it's all buried in his mind. Repressed and deliberately forgotten. He sat in the car with me on the drive from Orlando to Miami and I made him dial Dexter non-stop. I saw the number of missed calls this added up to. Let's just say it's a big number. Once in his bedroom at Dexter's he called the ambulance before I told him to, presumably the only thing he could think of doing as he heard me in pain and Dexter screaming for me, and he called again after I gave the instruction, and then crushed the phone under his lamp. Joey Quinn opened the door and found him hiding under his bed. He came to Joey and allowed himself to be carried out with his eyes covered, as Dexter had requested, which I am so grateful for. But after he stayed the night at the Batistas' and was stolen by Evelyn Vogel, no one knows what happened until Tom Matthews brought him, silent and wide-eyed, to snuggle beside me in the hospital. And Tom doesn't want to talk to me about it, either.
"He was covered in blood, Debra," is all he says, shaking his head so I don't have to look into his haunted eyes. "Let's just be grateful it wasn't his own."
The F.B.I. officially closes the case, having handled it in a manner of privacy that has surprised me. Dexter Moser fades to old news. Journalists lose interest when nothing further surfaces and no one involved will talk. They know he was my brother, but the seeming lack of interest in me by the investigation leads the media to divert their attention from me also, and reporters stop calling and leaving messages. Joey gets his job back. I consider returning to work, but when I see one of my specialists for the all-clear to return to desk duties I get a rude shock.
"I can't be pregnant," I argue with the doctor. "How can I be pregnant?"
"I don't know," she replies coolly. I suppose she's used to me and my attitude by now after all our meetings. "Have you had sexual intercourse lately?"
Smart-ass. I take the test results home and hide them in a drawer with the business card I got at Dexter's funeral. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to know. I carry on as normal. I start driving again. I go to the park with Harrison and Astor and Cody and whichever grandparent has driven them down, because they've returned to Orlando now and they drive back weekly to visit me and their brother. I take my nephew to his appointments with Dr Summers and I inquire as to how he's going.
"As well as you could hope," she says. "You have a beautiful little boy there. He's lucky to have such loving and caring people as guardians."
"What's going to be the impact of his experiences?" I ask. Harrison is playing in the corner, dutifully staying out of earshot. So perceptive. Dr Summers and I sit in lush armchairs beside a big bay window.
"I really wish I could tell you," she begins, and then stops herself. "No. Actually, I don't. I can't tell you because I don't know, it's all still up in the air and undetermined. The impact mightn't be clear for months or years or decades. He can still grow to be anything. But he has you and all this support around him to guide him in the right directions. His future is his own."
I like those words. I wonder if I've heard them before – I connect with that idea very deeply. Harrison's future isn't determined. He isn't fated to become another Dexter. I'm not fated to watch it all over again. Thank fuck.
"What could be the effect of… change?" I ask before I think better of it. The children's psychiatrist tilts her head and I just know she's psycho-analysing me.
"Consistency is doing Harrison a world of good right now," she answers without answering. "To what type of change are you referring?"
"More kids," I blurt, stupidly. "Like, more kids around him. His siblings. If he went to live with his grandparents and brother and sister."
"Debra," Dr Summers says gently, leaning closer, "if you're not coping-"
"I am coping," I interrupt. "I am."
"When we first met you asked whether I thought you were really the best person to take care of your nephew. Do you remember asking that?"
"No." Uh, yes. Only one in a line of many stupid things I've ever said.
"I said I didn't know you well enough to make that assessment, and that it wasn't up to me anyway," the doctor reminds me. I shrug, feeling uncomfortable. "Now you're considering sending Harrison to live with other family?"
"No. Harrison belongs with me."
"From what I know of his very eventful little life, you are the one person to have been with him consistently from his birth to this day." Dr Summers gives a little smile. "The one constantly good thing in his life." I stand abruptly; she pretends not to notice. She goes on. "You have suffered as much or even more than he has in recent weeks. You asked me about the impact of change on your nephew, but if we examine his progress and his emotional state we could make the generalisation that he is actually dealing with all this change pretty well. And I know you can see that. So the next question, obviously, is to wonder whether it is you who might be afraid of change?"
I stand there with my mouth hanging open. The one constantly good thing in my life. That was Dexter to me. Now I'm that to Harrison? Because I'm no longer just his aunt, I'm his guardian and his rock, and that's a responsibility that I logically already knew and accepted but apparently hadn't fully processed yet. I am Harrison's everything. Fuck. Something in me snaps and I want to yell but I keep my voice down for the sake of the boy in the corner. "Don't you fucking analyse me. This is not what I'm paying you for. I have to go." And I collect my nephew and walk out. Like a fucking nutcase, which I guess is what this doctor is accustomed to. She doesn't comment on my odd behaviour the next time we meet. She's professional and calm and collected, exactly as she was when I left last time. Damn her.
Vince Masuka comes around one day after I wave goodbye to Bill and the kids. Joey's at work and Harrison's down for a nap so it's perfect timing for him to present me with something I thought I was rid of, but which I am now infinitely glad not to be. He admits he's kept his distance because he was so involved in the case and he didn't want to upset me by accidentally spilling details or having to restrain himself from discussing the case with me.
"I didn't even get the chance to use it," he says mournfully as he gives me a very familiar photograph – the one taken and developed by Jacob Elway a week before Dexter died, of my brother and I wrapped around each other in dark and forbidden passion. I cannot believe Dexter gave this to Masuka! "I thought you'd get more joy out of it than I will now that half of Debster is dead. Kills the boner a bit."
I'm looking at the picture but I glance up at him now. "Debster?"
He looks back at me with those little clueless eyes. Classic Vince. "Yeah. Deb. Dexter. You know?"
I don't. But I get the gist and as usual with anything Vincent Masuka says, I'm both fascinated and sickened by the way his mind works. I hug him and thank him for returning the photograph.
"I don't know if this is too weird to say," he whispers, "but even if the rest of society is too narrow-minded and self-righteous to admit it, your love with your brother was something beautiful." I cringe and I'm glad I'm still hugging him because he can't see my embarrassment. "I hope you're not still mad with him for what he did. He thought you were dead and it killed him – he was dead inside already when he killed Dr Vogel. And I think…" He hesitates as he pulls away, and I sense no one else has reacted with much more than scepticism to this next bit. "I think he had part of you with him right until the next. I think he could see you. Maybe because he knew you'd be there with him if you could be."
I sit back. "What makes you think so? That I would have helped him?"
Blink. "Wouldn't you?"
Yes. Of course I would. I would have run through that storm with him and chased down bad guys and covered him with gunfire if anyone threatened his mission and I would have helped him take down Vogel and I would have held his hands over the hilt of his knife and I would have sunk that fucking blade into that bitch's chest. How sad that he had to do it all on his own; unless Vince is right and Dex had me with him in some way. I hope so.
But I can't say any of that, because even though Vince is our friend, he was also one of the investigators on Dexter's case. I run my fingers over the photograph and choose my words carefully.
"I would appreciate you not sharing that theory with anyone else," I say, "just like I appreciate you not letting on that you knew I was hooking up with my brother."
"Ugh," Vince huffs, frustrated. "Why won't one of you just come clean and admit you were fucking each other's brains out?!"
"Never," I answer, and we smirk at each other. I make a pot of organic tea and we both pour our cups down the sink after the first awful mouthful, and after he leaves I hide the photo in the same drawer as those offensive test results from my stupid fucking specialist.
But when I'm sitting there alone waiting for Harrison to wake up and for Joey to get home I rest my hand on my stomach uneasily. I refuse to believe I'm pregnant. I suffered extensive internal injury. I haven't had a period in months, since before the stabbing, and my specialists said that this was normal following stress and trauma and that it might take all year for my cycle to get back to normal. My hormones are all over the place. I'm on a million and one different medications. My body is in no way capable of carrying a healthy child. Yes, I'm having regular sex with Joey Quinn but Hannah McKay told me when she stabbed me that it was to ensure I would never be a mother. I believed her. Harrison's my kid now, the only child I am ever likely to have, I always said. So how?
Unless… I don't know why I think this, why I let myself, because I was doing so well, but I wrench the drawer back open and rip that photo back out. My knees either side of Dexter's hips, my hands on his face, our mouths locked, his hand underneath my shirt. I can remember the silk of his hair, the gasp of his breath in my mouth, the heat of his lips on my neck… We kissed and it was hot as fuck and I found in him those things I'd always wanted from him – intimacy, warmth, love, devotion – and it was fucking awesome but it wasn't sex. He said so. He said we weren't going to sleep together, and we stopped it. And things got better after that, and we woke up the next morning entwined on the couch… I don't remember getting from the beach back to the couch but I guess we must have, somehow, in our exhaustion. And…?
I press my hands over my ears and stare at the photograph on my lap. We didn't, I'm fucking certain we didn't, I would remember something as fucked and noteworthy as that, and if I was a week pregnant when I was stabbed I would have lost the baby, and if I didn't one of those thousand fucking tests would have picked up another goddamn lifeform inside me, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?! A single stupid test at hospital could tell me exactly which day I conceived, putting all my dumb fears to rest. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to focus on all these logical facts but the grey fog of insanity, the same nasty little voice that wants me to believe my brother is alive somewhere, won't stop suggesting what if?
I keep the photo hidden with the tests. I don't tell anyone, not Joey, not the kids, not the Bennetts, not Angel or Vince or Jamie or Tom or anyone else I see. It's easier to pretend I never received those results because lying and pretending and denying have become my norm and truth has become something scary that leaves me open and vulnerable.
My denial ends when I take Harrison and Joey to Mrs Doakes' place for lunch one Sunday. She's delighted to have us and fusses over Harrison something chronic, but I suppose she doesn't have any grandchildren and all her kids are grown up. She's an amazing cook, just as I remembered, and she keeps filling up our plates, and when we're done and she's cleared the table she gives Harrison a bowl of icecream and gathers her white wine glasses out of a cabinet.
"I should have opened it earlier and we could have had it with our meal," she chastises herself as she comes over with the bottle Joey brought with us. She pours a glass and offers it to me. I want to take it but I decline. She looks confused. I drank last time I was here, most of a decade ago. "Why not? Are you pregnant?"
I say nothing.
"No, she's not," Joey answers easily. "Because of her injuries she can't have any alcohol or harsh medications."
There's more awkward silence. Mrs Doakes hands her glass to Joey and keeps looking at me. She knows. I know. And now Joey frowns.
"What?" he asks. He looks between us. "You're not. Are you?"
Mrs Doakes cottons on to the fact that this poor guy has just found out he's going to be a father, and smoothly breezes on, "Well, good on you if you are, and don't worry if you're not – it'll happen eventually. You'll be great parents when you're ready."
"Yeah," Joey says sarcastically an hour later in the car on the way back. Harrison is asleep in his booster seat behind us. "When we're ready. What the fuck was that, Deb? How long have you known?"
I shrug. I feel lousy for him finding out like this but I had honestly, childishly hoped that if I ignored it long enough it would just go away. It doesn't quite work like that, it turns out. I'm still pregnant, I still didn't tell Joey myself and I'm still a shit of a partner.
"Is it mine?"
"What?" His question shocks me because I thought I was the only one stupid enough to ask the same question. I get defensive. "Who else has had their dick in me?"
He should cringe at my crassness and back down but this is serious and he stands his ground. "I don't know. You tell me."
I sit back in my seat with an irritable huff, but really I feel shaken and panicky, like the rug's been pulled out from under my feet at the same time as someone's tipped out a jar of marbles and I'm skittering on unstable ground, trying to regain my footing. Everything I was starting to count on just got turned over. Dr Summers was right. It's me who needs consistency right now.
"I'm not fucking around on you, Joey," I mutter, hurt he would even think so, but really, why wouldn't he? I tell him constantly that I'm a liar and I don't deserve him; I'm pregnant and didn't tell him; I am secretive and disturbed. I'm a walking disaster, and his experience with me, from the time we met right through to now, would not provide any viable evidence to dissuade him of this view. "I just didn't want to know about it, alright?"
We don't talk that night. The next morning Joey curtly requests I return to hospital and have a paternity test and a scan.
"Fine," I agree, grabbing the keys and Harrison's shoes. I call my nephew away from the TV and his morning cartoons. "For you."
"For me?" Joey repeats quizzically, probably because I'm the most selfish person he's ever been with and I never express appropriate gratitude or devotion to him. I nod and help my nephew into his shoes.
"I'll do it for you," I repeat, "but the tests are for you. I don't want to know what it is, how far along it is, anything. I don't want to know." I stand and look straight into my fiancé's eyes. "I'm not keeping it."
He doesn't argue with me but I can see in his eyes that he wants to. He wants to demand why he doesn't get a say. He wants to call me a selfish bitch and shake me and tell me to grow the fuck up. But he doesn't say anything. He takes Harrison's hand and walks him to the car, and I lock up and call Angel and check if it's okay to drop Harrison at his place for a few hours.
I take the tests and they're as fucking humiliating and uncomfortable as the nurses are fucking painfully cheery. "You must be so happy!" "Is this your first?" "Congratulations!" "Oh, you and your man are going to make wonderful parents!" I'm sour and rude and undoubtedly bring down the mood of everybody around me. I tell anyone who asks that I want none of the information they're gaining. I am not meant to be a mother. I am a killer, a liar and a blood traitor. This baby, whatever sex it is, whosever it is, however many weeks gestation it is, whatever, this baby is better off dead than with me for a mom. So I will do it a favour and save it from a life as my child. God – now I know why Dexter said he was thinking of not being a dad to Harrison, back when Rita was first pregnant. Are these the thoughts he had? What an ignorant ass-clown I was to punch him and tell him he had to.
It's almost a week before we're called back to collect the results. I tell Joey to go on his own and to keep the information to himself.
"I don't want a fucking bar of it," I inform him briskly as I breeze about the apartment, picking up Harrison's toys. "I'll see you at dinner."
He goes. I immediately wish I'd gone, too. I think on what he'll be finding out, what it could mean for us. He might come back and tell me to get the fuck out. He might come back in tears and say it's got some awful congenital disease and we have to abort it anyway. He might come back and say fuck you Deb, we're keeping it, and demand we get married now so our kid isn't born a bastard. He mightn't come back at all. That's a frightening thought.
I gain a new understanding of Hannah McKay's compulsion to obsessively tidy my house when she was my unwelcome houseguest while I wait for Joey to return. When he does he's on the phone so once he's given me an acknowledgement wave he turns away and carries on his conversation while he goes about his return-to-the-house routine. He kicks off his shoes. He puts down his keys. He puts the milk he bought into the fridge door. I hold my breath for what seems like minutes, but then he's finished the call and he looks over at me.
"Well?" I demand, because I feel like I've been waiting all day for his reaction. His expression offers me nothing.
"It was good," he says coolly. "I found out everything I need to know."
"And?" Fucking fuck, Joey, is it yours? Am I going insane, thinking I did something impossible that I don't even remember and that there could be impossible repercussions of that impossibility? And is the baby okay? It is one, two, three babies? Does it have no heart, like I sometimes feel I myself have become?
"You said you didn't want to know," he reminds me in the same tone. He cocks an eyebrow. "Unless you've changed your mind?"
I only need a moment to think on that. "No. I don't want to know. I'm not having it, anyway."
He takes a beer from the fridge. He sits down on the sofa and looks up at me. I feel like we should fight this out, the way I would have challenged my brother, but Joey Quinn knows me differently from how Dexter did and he plays me differently. He measures his words and says, slowly, "Alright. I can understand that. Shit's been heavy for us, for both of us but for you particularly, and being parents isn't something we want to do unless we both want to do it. But if you're going to get rid of it, you're going to have to deal with that on your own, because I don't want any part of it. You book your own appointment; you don't tell me when you're going. I don't want to know."
He's so fucking reasonable about it that I have no comeback. I have to nod and withdraw.
I do book that appointment. And I miss it. So I book another one. I make myself attend. The lady behind the desk hands me a clipboard of forms to fill in. I accept it and thank her. I read the first line of print. It seems to ask for Name but I only read Killer. I walk back through the reception, place the clipboard on a chair and walk back out to my car.
I can't do it, I realise when I'm behind the wheel. I can't kill it. I believe in abortion and euthanasia and I support the right to choice completely but it's not the choice for me. I place my hand across my belly again. I don't feel anything yet but apparently something – someone – is alive and growing in there. I can't kill it. I hate what I am; I can't kill again, especially something so small and harmless. Hannah and Maria posed threats to my family. This baby, I suppose it could be argued, does the same, but in a totally different way that is not known or intended by the baby itself.
I drive home. Joey looks up at me from the TV screen. He and Harrison are playing X-Box or Playstation or whatever console Joey currently has plugged up.
"I'm keeping it," I announce, "but not keeping it."
Joey leaves Harrison to select a paintjob for his virtual racing car and corners me in the kitchen.
"What are you talking about?" he asks me in a low voice. I try not to meet his eyes.
"I decided I won't get rid of it," I answer. I don't mention that I attempted to and chickened out. "I'll have the baby." Ugh; baby. I've tried not to think of it as a baby because that would make it seem like a little Harrison, and then I'd never be able to part with it. "When it's born I'll put it up for adoption. Or you can have it, if you want it so fucking bad," I offer when his eyes light up at I'll have the baby and dim at I'll put it up for adoption. "I just don't want to be its mom. You don't have to feel guilty for wanting the baby, Joey. You can have it. Harrison and I can go live someplace else." I'll miss you and the good influence you've been on my life but I'll do it if you'd prefer the innocent little baby over me. I'm sure anyone would take that.
Joey allows himself a short, longing glance at my stomach.
"It's not really a choice, is it?" he says finally, and kisses me quickly. I feel like I melt in his arms with relief – I'm such a bitch to him, so undeserving and cruel. I torture him like Dexter tortured Vogel, only with different tools and without motive or just cause. I dangle his future in front of him and say he can't have it. Yet he stays. And when he releases me and leaves me standing there, shocked with my own good fortune, he returns to Harrison, and they select their race track and play their game. Joey's so fucking good with Harrison that it seems a massive pity not to give him his own child, but I'm such a horrible human being that I can't picture any good coming of a child born of me.
Dexter would understand, I think. He would sit and listen to me pour my heart out over this. He would nod at all the right places and sip his beer thoughtfully and we'd both stare off into the distance from the balcony of his apartment, and then he'd tell me he believed I would make the right call. He'd get frustrated with my own issues of self-worth, so small and unfounded they would seem to him, and insist that I was good, and he would draw parallels with the rest of my life to justify his argument. He'd point out Harrison, sitting happily in my partner's apartment playing Playstation and always being polite and obedient and affectionate despite that he's a traumatised orphan, and remind me I'm doing a commendable job with his son and ask why I would think I'd do anything but a perfect job of raising mine?
Soon my pregnancy starts to show, since I'm rail-thin at the best of times and after my hospital stay and now my ongoing morning sickness I am even thinner, and I have to start telling people. I start with Harrison.
"Is it going to be a girl or a boy?" is his first curious question, and I admit to him that I don't know, but Uncle Joey might because he's seen an early scan. Joey mentions now that the first scan I had was too early and it'll be a surprise for him, too.
"We mightn't get to meet this baby, though," Joey warns my nephew, levelling with him. "Your aunt is having this baby but then it's going to go and live somewhere else, with another family, who will love it a lot."
"Why?" Harrison doesn't understand. Can't.
"It's going to be adopted," I explain as best I can, trying to smile to make it seem less like I'm giving him a cousin and taking it away. In his eyes I see accusation and I wonder what he's not saying. "Like your daddy was. My mom and dad adopted Dexter and he became my brother. This baby is going to make a family so happy and lucky. It might be a family who don't even have any babies yet or can't have any babies. We're already lucky. We have you."
The accusatory look leaves his beautiful eyes. He seems to accept this. He asks if he can do some drawing.
I tell the rest of the people in my life. Tom is shocked but delighted. He asks if there's anything I need, anything at all, and makes me promise to come to him if I think of anything he can do to make things easier for my little family. Angel hugs me a dozen times. Jamie can't help raising her eyebrows in surprise and hurt when she works out how quickly Quinn has moved on from her, but she offers congratulations. Vince bursts into tears and says he's never heard better news in his life, and tells me way too many stories of his newfound daughter Niki. Bill and Maura exclaim in delight and embrace me. Astor squeals and says she can't believe it and asks if she can put her hand on my belly. Cody watches his sister's hand on me and finally asks if he can see my scar, so I pull up my shirt to show him the red-pink line under my ribs. He informs me it's very impressive; in the pause that follows this assessment he gazes at my belly, less flat now, and asks me what my baby's surname will be.
"I still don't know if I'm keeping it," I admit. "I'm still pretty messed up by what happened, you know? I don't know if I can be what this baby needs."
"I think Dexter thought the same thing about being a parent," Cody comments, and it's the first I've heard him say his stepfather's name since his death. But that's all he says. He doesn't say whether he thinks Dexter managed well or poorly. I don't know what to make of that comment.
My pregnancy is a hellish fucking ordeal. I'm sick all the time. My latest specialist puts me on medication that conflicts with my other ones and burns my delicate insides, and I wake up in hospital when Joey finds me on the bathroom floor vomiting blood. My emotions and hormones are all over the place, and if I wasn't insane before I surely am now. I go back to crying at the drop of a hat. I get angry over nothing. I can't or won't eat. I'm listless and depressed. Shit's fucking rough and on more than one occasion I tell myself I'm glad I won't be keeping this baby because I hate the baby.
Harrison doesn't hate the baby. He doesn't mention it often – he doesn't speak often about any topic, really, at least nothing serious – but when he does he takes me by surprise. He asks out-of-the-blue questions like Dexter used to, just spontaneous queries born of a curious and unfiltered mind. "Do you think the baby can hear me?" "Will the baby remember me if I say hello to it before it goes to its new house?" "Does the baby know its colours yet?" On my birthday he asks, "Is it the baby's birthday, too?" I run his bath one night when I'm halfwayish through the pregnancy (I don't know how far I am because I'm refusing to acknowledge the baby, and I still haven't accessed any of the information in my tests or scans; only Joey is aware of how the baby is going) and he gazes at my stomach thoughtfully.
"How big is the baby going to be?" he asks. I look down at my growing midsection and the tightened fabric of my shirt over it. I have refused to buy new clothes to accommodate the baby. Fuck the baby and the impact it's having on my body and my family and my life. It can fit in with me and my current wardrobe. So naturally the baby knows nothing of my grudge and I'm the one growing slowly uncomfortable in a poorly fitting wardrobe.
"Small," I answer awkwardly. I put my arm out and think of how tiny Harrison was that first time I held him. With Dexter standing at my side, hovering anxiously. I can almost feel him beside me while I imagine baby Harrison's head in my hand and his body along the length of my forearm. "It'll fit in one hand and one arm, like this." I show him the hold with an imaginary baby.
"That's not that small. How does it fit in your tummy?" he asks, still looking at the bump and his head tilting to the side, thoughts clicking loudly through his head. Spatial awareness tells him a foot-long child cannot fit inside his aunt's stomach at the size it currently is. I feel the water for temperature.
"It hasn't grown that big yet," I explain. "It's going to keep getting bigger and making me get bigger and bigger until it's all done being made, and then it will come out." I'm not looking forward to that at all.
Harrison helps me swish the water surface about to mix the bubble bath and create bubbles. He is quiet and I think he's done, but then he says, perceptibly, "The baby makes you sick."
"Yes." I didn't think he'd noticed but he's special, my nephew. He's amazing, incredible.
"And sad. That's why it can't stay at Uncle Joey's house with us," he adds, justifying things in the best way he knows how. "It has to go somewhere else."
I turn the taps off and look away so he can't see the tears gathering in my eyes.
"I wish it could stay here," Harrison admits, "but maybe it can go to a new house and get a new sister like my daddy did. And then maybe you can be happy again."
Those tears are still in my eyes but I can't help turning to him. It's the first time he's brought up his father on his own at all since he died. And God, Dexter, your kid is so fucking wise and mature. So fucking caring and compassionate and selfless, concerned for my happiness over his own. I look at him and he looks at me and for a second I feel like there's someone else with us in the bathroom.
Someone who's been with us ever since he died months ago.
"I am happy," I insist, "because I have you."
I have you both.
Life happens and inside me this baby is growing all the time. Harrison returns to school and he goes without Dexter. He has to hold my hand instead of his dad's. It was Dexter who held mine. It should have been Dexter who held Harrison's.
Harrison is trouble at school from day one, which shocks his teacher, who was expecting the boy the kindergarten teacher knew and informed her of, and shocks me even more, because this isn't the boy I know. I'm called into the school at ten-thirty to collect my nephew, who has absolutely lost the plot because the teacher told him he had to join the rest of the class for story time. Apparently he hadn't finished writing his letter to his aunt's baby. I wince – this baby is causing problems for more people than just me – as I sit in the principal's office for the first time since I broke two of Billy Jensen's teeth. I don't even have this fucking baby yet and already here I am, a mom, playing the balancing act between advocating for my child and accepting his shortfalls. The school is very understanding but their expectations are high. Harrison sits in the seat beside me, demure and quiet like I have always known him and with the grace to look embarrassed.
"I just got really angry," he admits sadly when the principal asks why he knocked over three desks, threw a chair and pushed another child onto the ground. "I don't know why. Miss Hattie wasn't mean and neither was Taylor. I should say sorry."
Dr Summers isn't terribly surprised when I ring her and, panicking, share the experience with her over the phone.
"He's shown remarkably little anger or emotion in general since the death of his father," she reminds me. "We only see him in familiar, controlled, adult environments. A school setting brings out different traits in children. This is the first time he's been away from family and friends since the loss, and he has a new classroom with new routines and expectations. Transitions between activities can be very stressful for children when they aren't expected. It makes sense that some of the emotion he has bottled up might come out when he's feeling vulnerable, like when an activity suddenly changes and he doesn't feel he's finished the last one."
I try to take her explanation as an assurance that this is normal but it does become the norm. Harrison is in constant trouble. His teacher does her best – she caters to him by warning him before she changes activities, and letting him choose his own spot in the line, and allowing him make-up time at the end of each day to complete activities he doesn't feel he had the chance to complete, as he becomes more and more pedantic with detail and correctness – but he's still a challenging student. He refuses to answer direct questions in front of the class and won't contribute to class discussion, though one-to-one questioning later always proves he listens attentively. He does his written work beautifully but struggles to deal with corrections when he forms his letters incorrectly or misspells a word. He obsesses over learning how to write things properly. I remind him he's only nearly five. He always apologises to me when he knows I've had a call from the school about his behaviour. He always says it's because he got suddenly angry but can't explain why commonplace events like someone using his pencil or Miss Hattie having to cancel show and tell because of a timetable change trigger such massive reactions. He's still my angel at home and I'm at a loss as to how to help make him better at school.
My birthday comes and goes and I spend it without Dexter. Thanksgiving comes and goes without Dexter. So does Harrison's fifth birthday. I learn how to bake a cake and Harrison shyly asks me if he can help me make the icing. It's the best part of the whole day when we muck around in the kitchen laughing together, mixing up that chocolate icing, and eating it out of the bowl with our mixing spoons. It doesn't make it onto the cake. Joey frowns when he gets home from work and sees us groaning in discomfort on the couch with chocolate on our faces and an un-iced cake. Harrison weakly insists it was wonderful fun. He doesn't throw up this time. I do. Joey sits beside me in the bathroom while I vomit and asks me why I do this to myself, especially since I knew my now-delicate body would react this way.
"Because this is what I do," I whisper, and I cry and he has no idea why. The chocolate icing is still bad for me, it's still toxic, but I'd still take it if it was offered back to me. I would have Dexter back in a heartbeat. He could help me handle Harrison. He could stand back with Joey with his arms folded and agree that my current condition is my own dumb fault. I wouldn't care. I would just be happy to have him.
Christmas is made a big deal by the people around me, and I try to do the family thing and I have to admit I enjoy playing Santa with Joey to Harrison and seeing his excited expression on Christmas morning as he unwraps his presents. Nothing excites Harrison anymore so it's wonderful and relieving to see it. Astor and Cody are relaxed and happier than I've seen them in a long time. Astor, I notice, wears the gold locket and the golden bangle all the time. Harrison confirms with her that she still has her jewel box and she assures him she uses it every day. Cody is still closed down and I still don't know how he's going, not really, but he smiles and plays with his brother and he thanks me for his presents. I wonder what he thinks of me. I wonder what he thinks of Dexter. I wonder what he thinks of the Morgan name, even though it wasn't as tarnished as it could have been, thanks to Tom Matthews. I wonder what he has done with that pocket watch of my dad's.
It's fun and colourful and festive but it still lacks Dexter. Fuck. I don't know when I'll stop missing him, if ever.
A new year dawns and it dawns without my brother. On New Year's Eve last year I shot an innocent woman to save Dexter from a future he eventually faced anyway, and I walked, shell-shocked, with him across a beach under fireworks. This year I sleep right through it, curled against Joey. No excitement for me. I don't need it.
I keep getting sick. I don't know when the baby's due and I tell myself I don't care but I know it's getting closer. Several times my health is severely threatened and I'm rushed to hospital with high blood pressure or low blood sugar or dehydration or vomiting or whatever and even though I insist I hate the baby, I find myself terrified of what could be happening to it. I don't want it to die. Yet somehow it clings to life each time, and Joey talks with the doctors somewhere out of hearing distance of me to respect my wish to remain in the dark, and he comes back each time looking relieved.
He doesn't hate the baby, either.
On the last night of January I feel crippling pains in my stomach and I wake in the night in agony. There's blood on my blankets. I manage to get out of bed but a flurry of pain flies through me like a fire and I collapse, moaning. I lie there for two or three minutes, in such pain that I feel winded, breathless, unable to call out, until I manage a pitiful "Joey." Joey is working so poor Harrison is the one who wakes and comes to check on me.
He switches on a light and it blinds me temporarily. I hear his gasp of horror and I'm glad to be spared his expression.
"Daddy," he whispers brokenly at the sight of me lying in blood.
"Call an ambulance," I sob, and he scampers over to the charger where my phone is glowing with fresh energy. "And call Joey. Tell them the baby's sick."
Joey brings Angel to meet me at the hospital and our Lieutenant takes my nephew. By the time I'm being rushed to emergency with Joey clutching my hand I'm bleeding profusely and the doctors around me are trying to find a heartbeat for my baby. It's erratic, they say, and weak. They can't stop the bleeding, though the paramedics tried the whole way over. I'm covered in sweat and my pulse is racing. They say I've gone into shock and they sound very worried about my blood pressure. The baby is dying; if it doesn't come out, I will die, too.
"She's in labour," the doctor explains tensely to Joey. He and I look at each other, shocked. It's too early. Even I know that and I don't know any fucking thing about this baby. "If we operate we might be able to save her and the baby, but it's extremely premature and the chance of its survival at this stage of development is quite low."
"Operate?" I repeat as they wheel me into the operating theatre. I grab for Joey's hand with my other one, panic rising in me. "What does that mean?"
"An emergency caesarean section might save your baby," the doctor explains, but fear explodes in my chest and I shake my head, pulling my hands free and laying them across my stomach.
"No," I refuse. "No cutting. No knives."
"It's not a knife, Debra, it's-"
Pain rips through me and I scream, and the next minute or so is awful as my condition worsens and Joey covers his mouth with his hand and my doctor tries to convince me to do what's logical and I know I should but I can't, I can't let them cut into me. Not there. Not my stomach. It's the nightmare all over again. I survived Hannah but Dex didn't survive Vogel, and I can't. I'll die and the baby will die, I'm sure of it. I didn't know I'd developed such a complex around knives and stomach wounds but it becomes apparent now as I shriek and scream at my doctor and his staff to stay the fuck away from me with their motherfucking knives.
"The baby could die," the doctor says urgently. "Labour is traumatic and your baby isn't coming fast enough. It's in the wrong position and your body isn't ready, either. There isn't much time."
"I can't have the baby tonight," I try to explain, looking up at the clock in horror. No, no, no; it's too fucking tragic, too fucking ironic. There's 365 days in a year – how the fuck can Fate choose this one? My vision starts to cloud and my brain starts to ache, at the front on the left. "It needs to wait a couple of days, at least… It needs to stay… another fucking month or something…"
"At least," the doctor agrees. "Ideally, yes. But it's coming now and you're not doing so well yourself. We can't do anything about your condition until the baby's out."
"Deb, just listen to them," Joey implores over the doctor's shoulder. "Deb-" He bites his own fist in helpless frustration as another contraction tears through my body; my poor fucking body that isn't ready, isn't fit enough or healthy enough for this trauma. I scream and he looks like he isn't sure whether to grab my hand or run away. "Deb, please…"
I don't know what they do but they don't perform a C-section. My blood pressure rises and the machines I'm being connected to even now begin to blare with warning. Everyone in the room looks at the machines simultaneously just as my vision goes black.
When I next open my eyes I feel fucking awful and things around me are chaotic. I take it I've been out for a few minutes. There's a doctor beside me flashing lights in my eyes and trying to get me to respond. I blink and try to say "Fuck off with that flashlight, would you, Dr Dickhole?" but all that I hear from myself is a slurred "Fuh…" Not even close. Joey is in the corner, crying, in the comforting arms of a nurse, and in my foggy state I feel a flash of jealousy. He should be coming to me for comfort. But it's over me he's crying, I realise, because I hear him sobbing, "Not again. I can't watch this again."
"Debra? Can you hear me?" The doctor looks over his shoulder to tell the others he thinks I'm coming around. Joey breaks away from the nurse to look over, eyes wide with hope and terror, and he rushes to my side.
"She's blinking. Does that mean she's going to be okay?" Joey is desperate and tearful. "Can you save her?"
"If we don't get the baby out now we're going to lose it," the doctor says, and though my heart already feels tight and sore it breaks in two. The baby is going to die. On Dexter's birthday.
"Say…" I mumble, but I wanted to say Save it. It's innocent. I'm not. Let it live, give it to Joey and Harrison, the best family in the world, and let me die and go to my brother.
I'm sure he'd be equal parts pissed off and delighted to see me so soon.
"Save my girlfriend," Joey instructs my doctor. "Don't worry about the baby. Save Deb. She's what matters."
"If we perform the C-section now we can-"
"Fuck!"
"She's spiking," a nurse calls, and things go blurry and patchy from there on. I don't remember the next hours well. I hear Joey crying and refusing the operation on my behalf, since the situation is stressful enough and the stress of the thought of having my stomach cut into is jeopardising my life. I feel like my body is torn in half as my pregnancy ends and labour forces the infant out of me prematurely. I keep blacking out in pain and coming back around. It's the worst, the lowest, I've ever felt, and it's now, in this dark moment, that I finally see him.
"Debra. Deb, look at me," he orders, worried, and I know that voice and I try to listen. I open my eyes and see without seeing. Looking down into my eyes are eyes like mine, under a furrowed brow, upside-down. My brother stands behind my head and lays his cool hands on the sides of my face and I try to calm down but my heart still races, my breaths still won't draw deep enough, my body still rips and bleeds and my tears still run. I know I just had a seizure and I'm at risk of another one. The disruption of oxygen and rush of chemicals could kill my baby. Or me. But Dexter is here, though no one else can see him, and he demands I pay attention to what he has to say. "Deb, are you listening to me? You're dying."
"It hurts…" I mumble, and cry out when the next contraction erupts in my midsection. Dexter strokes my face once and pats my cheek twice when I don't look immediately back to him.
"I know. Look at their faces; it's bad." I look where he tells me and take in the distressed and distraught expressions of my medical team and my partner. My ordeal is killing Joey. He saw me die once before. He won't allow himself to leave this time because he left last time and I was saved. Dexter takes my chin and tilts my head up so we're looking into each other's eyes again. "Let go. Give it to me."
"I can't," I sob. "I don't fucking know… how…"
"Close your eyes and let me in – the dark feeling. It'll wash it all away. You won't feel anything else tonight."
I get beyond speech. I'm hysterical with pain and fear and panic. I don't want to hurt anymore but I can't imagine giving pain to Dexter deliberately, regardless of what capacity he's here in, living or otherwise. I've done enough damage. He leans down and kisses my forehead firmly.
"You can't hurt me anymore," he whispers. "Nothing can. Let me have your pain. Let me take a bullet for you this time. Let go. This is what I'm here for…"
I must do as he says because then I'm drifting, and the pain fades, and the noises and faces and shapes around me soften and disappear. I fall into a darkness I never want to leave, and I stay there a good while. I am sure Dexter is there with me.
The human body is an amazing thing. I black out as my baby's delivery is completed. Doctors must whisk it away while they work on stabilising me. Blood transfusions, drips, more medication. Somehow, incredibly, my body survives this ordeal, though perhaps just barely. I take hours to wake. When I do it is darkened and I am in a different room, and I am alone. All alone, except for Dexter. My eyes are shut but I know he's there.
"Dex…"
"Shh," he whispers. "Don't wake up. I'm not really here. I just had to see that you were okay. You, and the baby." He strokes my hair lovingly. He feels real. Why does he feel real? "You did so well, Deb. I'm so proud of you. You wait 'til you see her." He presses another kiss to my forehead, longer this time, harder, and I am so fucking sure it's real. My consciousness slips again but not before I hear my brother tell me, "She's beautiful."
She is. She really fucking is. When I wake next, my brother is gone and I'm in recovery. I'm highly medicated. Everything hurts and everyone is speaking in hushed, worried tones. Déjà fucking vu. Joey has tears on his face when he sees me awake and talking. He pulls me upright in bed and holds me tight.
"I thought you were gonna try and die on me again," he confesses, and I don't have anything to say to that because I think I might have been close. Instead I ask, "What happened to the baby?"
Joey looks away and I fear the worst. I don't know why I'm so immediately upset at the thought that the baby might have been lost. I didn't want it in the first place. It divided Joey and me. It caused me hell for six months. It tried to fucking kill me. Joey looks back at me and I see embarrassment in his eyes.
"She's in twenty-four hour care," he says. "I've… I've been with her." Instead of with you. He doesn't say that bit but I hear it in his guilty tone. "She was too early. Her little heart's not finished. They had to operate. Heart surgery, on a newborn – can you believe it?" He's shaking his head and wiping away tears. I try to imagine his heartache, watching me screaming and labouring and bleeding and refusing logical treatment and seizing again and then blacking out, and then hoping against hope that the baby might still be okay and finding out she needs life-saving surgery…
"But she survived?" I need to know. This poor baby. Perhaps I should have terminated her when I had that chance months ago, saved her from this traumatic entry into the world, especially if she's already died or is suffering a slow, needless death even now. Born with a broken heart, on my dead brother's birthday – how fucking tragic.
"She's alive. The doctors in the neo-natal unit are amazing. They're taking great care of her."
"Can I see her?"
Joey is surprised. But he eagerly helps me out of bed and into a wheelchair – déjà fucking vu, as I said – and he takes me to the neo-natal ward. There are two babies in big plastic incubators. Joey takes me to the furthest incubator, which contains the smaller baby. My baby. It's the tiniest thing ever, and so pitiful, all pink and scaly and dressed in an oversized nappy and a little yellow beanie that looks like it might be a doll's. There are tubes and wires running from everywhere, all over her, one taped to her cheek and another to her skinny little arm, and everything looks oversized compared with her. Her bare little chest is bandaged and her heart rate and temperature are monitored by more wires. There's a light on her and her eyes are tightly shut. But she's awake. I see her wriggle slightly and I am sure of it.
"Would you like to hold her?" a nice nurse dressed in pink asks me, and for once I'm nice back to a medical professional and I say yes please, and she opens the door on the capsule and carefully lifts my baby out. She lays it in my arms.
I never thought I would replace Dexter. I thought Harrison and Joey were it. I loved the fuck out of my brother, I love Joey dearly and I love Harrison like I love breathing but this is a love I never knew I could experience. From the moment my baby is in my arms I know she is mine, and I would kill a thousand people and wear that guilt proudly before I allowed an ounce of pain into her life. She's fucking perfect, everything about her, and I love her wholly and fully immediately. My heart breaks with love and adoration for her, and I cannot remember now that I didn't want this baby or that I hated the pregnancy or that the birth almost killed me and her. I just love her. That's all that there is.
"I don't want to give her up," I whisper to Joey. "I want her to stay with us." I can't look at him for long; that involves looking away from my baby, and I can barely do that for five seconds. "She should be with us."
"I couldn't agree more," Joey admits, kneeling beside me. He touches the baby's soft dark hair with tenderness you don't see in men until you see them with their own infant. He can't look away from her, either. He says to me, in wonderment, "She's our daughter, Deb."
That's going to take some getting used to. I keep staring at my baby, my daughter, and I feel like I can't stop finding new things about her to admire. Like her tiny toes. Like her little fingers, constantly curling and uncurling, and her fingernails, the size of a few grains of sea salt. Like her little button nose, which is so freaking cute even though there's an oxygen tube taped into it. Like her legs, wriggly and long even though she's tiny. And she's so fucking tiny. Too tiny. She's way smaller than Harrison was when he was born, and way lighter. She's like a doll. I feel afraid of breaking her.
"What's her name?" I ask Joey, since I've been unconscious all day and I assume he's been thinking on it, hoping I'd come around and change my mind on the adoption thing. It was only a minute ago but that's already faded into memory. I was still months away from delivery, as far as I knew, and I hadn't done anything about setting that into motion. So she's mine, mine to keep.
"I assumed you'd want to name her after Dexter," Joey confesses. I look up at him sharply. "First of February and all."
I know he knows the significance of the date, since I've been getting anxious all week at the thought of living through a birthday of Dexter's on which I not only don't get to see him, but he doesn't get to turn another year older. Instead of having to face that fear I've simply slept through the day and I've given birth to a Dexter replacement. Well, not a replacement. My baby is something new. She is not my brother reincarnated or anything creepy like that. I hope.
"Would you be okay with that?" I ask, and Joey is fine with whatever I want, since he's still revelling in the notion that I want the child at all. The thing is, I do want to name my daughter after Dexter. But not Dexter, because that's not a girl name, and one day or another I'll have to explain to my child why she's got a boy's name, and I'll never be able to talk about Dex again without having to clarify which Dexter I'm talking about, and having to say, "So then Dexter – my brother, I mean, the serial killer I was in love with who got himself stabbed and killed after he escaped police custody in the middle of a hurricane thinking I was dead, not you, honey – said…" My life is plenty complicated enough, thanks. So instead I name her Justice, and that seems like the perfect tribute to my brother and what he was to me.
Joey thinks it's a pretty name. He removes her little hat so he can touch her soft dark hair, and I take a moment to look up from the baby. It's difficult to drag my attention from her. I look at Joey and admire the expression of true love in his eyes. It's for her, for Justice, and I recognise it. There's nothing more attractive than seeing yourself in someone else and I lean over to kiss him. It takes him by surprise. I never initiate romantic contact unless I'm looking for distraction, and never simply to display my affection. This is different. I just realised that he's my partner, and we're going to raise a baby together, and that we've found our common ground – her – and all the fighting and hurting and demanding and general difficulty that led us to this point just became fucking irrelevant because what we want just became exactly the same thing. We're a couple. We're parents.
We are great from then on. By which I mean he continues being great and I stop being an ungrateful, undeserving bitch.
I'm in hospital for two weeks and Justice is there for two months. Joey brings Angel, Jamie and Harrison to meet her. Harrison can't believe it. He's fully prepared to hate the baby now because she's what made me bleed, and Harrison feels the same way towards pooling blood as I do towards cutting instruments around my stomach. But when I say I've forgiven the baby and it wasn't her fault, and that she's going to be part of our family and I would love for him to meet her, he too forgives the baby and can't get to the neo-natal ward quick enough. He rides everywhere on Jamie's lap now that she's proficient with her wheelchair, and he eagerly rushes her down the halls. When he sees Justice he is captivated. I see in his eyes a curiosity he's not really shown since Dexter died, except whenever he's enquired about the pregnancy.
"Is she really going to stay with us?" he asks for the fifth time, staring at his new cousin through the plastic capsule of the incubator. "Is she really coming to live at your house, Uncle Joey?"
"We're going to get another place to live, so we'll need to move soon," Joey warns, not that Harrison gives a shit right now, "but yes, once she's strong enough, the baby's coming home with us."
"No other family can have her?" Harrison confirms suspiciously, and I know this is my fault for maintaining all the way through the pregnancy that this was my plan for it. Joey shakes his head and shows Harrison the tag on Justice's ankle. It says Morgan. It always shows the mother's name. Her birth certificate says Justice Quinn but seeing his own surname attached to this baby lights up my nephew's face. It's like it finally becomes real for him. He's perched on Jamie's lap and the two of them are watching Justice squirm and wriggle with extreme fascination. "Is it okay to touch her?"
Jamie puts her hand through the hole in the side of the incubator to gently stroke the baby's arm and encourages Harrison to do the same. Nervously he reaches in as well. He hesitates a long moment, and then lays two fingers on Justice's nose and mouth. Angel and Joey share a loaded glance that I don't understand, although for some reason I too am struck with familiarity with the gesture.
"She's breathing," Harrison notes in wonder. He takes his fingers away. "What's the pipe for in her nose?"
"She's a sick baby," Joey explains. Harrison looks back at him worriedly, and it hurts us to have to scare him but the reality is that Justice is sick and weak and though she's stable now, she could also destabilise very quickly. She could be dead in an hour from now. Her life is still being measured in hours and we have to be grateful for each one and keep hoping she'll pull through. "She was born too early and some of her body wasn't finished being made yet. She's not very good at breathing so the tube in her nose gives her air to make it easier for her."
"The doctors here are very good," I assure my nephew. "They watch her all the time, and they feed her, and they keep her warm, and they even fixed some parts of her already."
Harrison turns back to look at Justice. His gaze is thoughtful. He remarks, "She needs lots of taking care of. She's very tiny." Tinier than he was expecting, I know. "And not very good at much stuff if she isn't even good at breathing. But maybe I can help her learn." He frowns and he asks me, "Is a big cousin a bit like a big brother?"
"Harrison, I think she would love to have you as her big brother," I answer, hearing the true desire in his question. "There couldn't be anyone better for the task than you."
Justice kicks with her scrawny little legs and one tiny foot catches on her blanket. She kicks twice more but can't dislodge it. Harrison tenderly reaches into the incubator and disentangles her foot. She opens her eyes, something she doesn't often do because of the light over her head. Her eyes are a dark bluey brown at the moment but the nurses say babies' eyes change colour. I wonder what colour they'll grow to be. Justice blinks and looks straight at Harrison. He puts his fingertip into her hand and her fingers reflexively close over it.
"Hello, baby Justice," he whispers into the incubator. "My name's Harrison. I'm going to be your big brother." He adjusts her woollen yellow cap when she twists and it comes loose on her head. "That means I'm going to look after you."
It's bittersweet, watching them together. I wonder how my first meeting with Dexter went, whether it was as adorable and precious as this is. Because I see Dex in Harrison and I see myself in my own daughter and I see us in the way my nephew nods eagerly when I ask if he wants to hold her. I love the way he settles back against Jamie and waits patiently for Joey to bring him the baby.
"Be very careful," Joey reminds Harrison as he nestles Justice into her cousin's waiting arms. "Don't drop her."
But I know that's a useless reminder, because I see in my nephew's face that he will never drop her, not ever in his life. He loves her immediately. I wonder again whether Dexter and I loved this quickly and this fully; whether our meeting was as healing for him as this seems to be for Harrison. Seeing my two babies together is so beautiful and no matter how many photos we snap on our phones it's not enough. Harrison cradles my daughter with such gentleness and he looks at her with such fondness and a wisp of unease flickers through my mind. I have seen this love before and it ended very, very badly. Will Harrison and Justice grow so interdependent that they cannot sustain healthy relationships with anybody else? Will they love so hard and so dangerously that they break each other over and over and eventually die for each other? Will he grow up into a psychopath like his father and team up with his likewise psychotic half-brother to seduce and ruin and destroy my daughter? Am I condemning my Justice to the same fate I suffered?
Harrison looks up at me when I climb out of my wheelchair and kneel beside Jamie's. His expression is full of graciousness. I see none of the darkness that eventually ruled my relationship with my brother. That came later. Maybe it will here, too. Harrison smiles as I touch his beautiful golden face.
"I wished for her, Aunt Deb," he whispers to me. "I wished for her on Astor's birthday candle and she came true." He goes back to looking at her. "I wanted my own sister, like Cody has Astor and Daddy had you. One that was just for me."
A familiar voice, my brother's voice, in my head insists, She is just for you, Harrison, but I stop short of saying that. Possession isn't healthy. Possession doesn't last. I wasted my wish on feelings of possession and look what it got me. Nothing.
Still, Harrison's wish has been granted and I am so glad for him. I kiss him and I kiss my baby girl and I clearly imagine my brother standing beside us with one comforting hand on my back and one on Harrison's head. He and I were fuck-ups. We wrecked our own lives through lies and manipulations and unfair demands and we loved each other to death. Harrison and Justice have futures of their own. There is no knowing what they will become, who they will be, what they will do. I have to guide them the best as I can as their mother.
Tom Matthews arrives with a big bunch of flowers and a soft white teddy bear that's bigger than my baby. Harrison tightens his arms almost imperceptibly about his new cousin and watches Tom as he comes closer. I stand and accept the affectionate hug and the congratulations. Tom is so delighted, mostly that I've decided to keep the baby. He says Justice is the perfect name for the daughter of two detectives and the granddaughter of another. He shakes Quinn's hand and says how pleased he is for us, how worried he was when he heard I was admitted to hospital so early.
"They said you had another seizure," he adds anxiously, turning back to me. "What's going on? Is it from that?" He nods significantly at the scar in my hairline, where Dr Vogel's bullet sunk into my brain. Joey tells him I'm booked for an MRI this morning and the attack seemed to have been brought on by the stress of the birth. I can see Tom is still worried for me. He hugs me again. "You scare me sometimes, Morgan."
He finally lowers himself to crouch in front of Jamie and Harrison. My nephew doesn't react. He rhythmically strokes Justice's little arm. I have noticed numerous times by now that Harrison is shut-off towards the deputy chief. I am sure it was Tom Matthews who found the child in Dexter's blood and carried him out before he had fully determined Dexter's state of health. I don't blame Tom, of course. Dexter must have appeared dead on first glance and anyone's first reaction would have been to save the crying toddler. I know Harrison doesn't remember what he saw at Vogel's place but I've wondered whether his subconscious associates Tom with the blood and so closes off emotionally to protect Harrison from having to remember.
"Hello, Harrison," Tom says with a soft smile. My nephew doesn't respond. Tom looks down at Justice. "Your new cousin is very cute, isn't she?" Harrison looks at me but I can't read his expression. Tom asks him, "Can I see her?" and I see a flurry of unexpected emotion cross the boy's face – mostly anger. This is how his teacher describes the onset of his meltdowns at school and I move closer, worried; but Harrison cannot drop Justice, so he pulls himself under control and relaxes his arms reluctantly and allows Tom to take the baby from him.
It kills him, I can tell, to give her up.
Tom coos over the baby and claims to see Harry in her, "Mostly in the cheeks." He recalls holding me for the first time, though he adds I was never this small. I was chubby and heavy and only thinned out after toddlerhood. "Then your poor mother could never fatten you up no matter what she fed you!" He smiles down at Harrison, who has stayed on Jamie's knees and is watching my friend with my daughter with a blank stare. "I met you in this hospital, too, when you were born." Harrison doesn't seem to care.
Justice hangs on and remains stable. There are some scares but the doctors are incredible and they manage to keep me calm and save her each time. Everyone visits the baby. Astor and Cody come with their grandparents and they fuss over her for as long as the hospital staff will allow them. Cody shows more happiness and affection in his interactions with her than I have seen from him in months. He cuddles her close and speaks softly and eagerly accepts when a nurse asks if he'd like to feed her. He holds the tiny bottle and lifts it periodically away to give my tiny early baby a chance to swallow and catch her breath. His brother and sister curl around him to watch and be close with Justice. Everyone loves a baby, and no one loves a baby more than other children. Dexter's kids and mine are a picture of familial beauty and I see one of those moments I will return to when things are dark.
"She's our cousin, too, right?" Cody demands of me when Harrison smugly informs him that Justice is his cousin. Astor gives her brothers a superior look when they share a jealous, contentious glare.
"If Aunt Deb's your aunt then her baby's your cousin," she says, and both boys reluctantly accept that explanation. Harrison settles on it easily and I'm sure he's assuring himself that while Justice is also Astor and Cody's cousin, too, he's the only one who gets to call her 'sister'.
Vince Masuka brings piles of gifts. "I didn't know what to get so I asked this hot MILF at the baby store and I bought everything she suggested," he admits, and bestows me with heaps of legitimately useful things, like bottles, nappies, onesies, socks, blankets and baby soaps. The clothes are all too big but one day Justice will get big enough to wear them.
Mrs Doakes knits and makes Justice booties and bonnets and sweaters that fit. Sari can't visit but Cody brings a dream catcher his eccentric now-ex-girlfriend-but-still-close-friend made and I hang it on Justice's incubator. Jamie is independent enough now to have Harrison at home with her and she's a great help while I'm in hospital. Angel does the school pick-up for us. Joey and I are blessed. We definitely aren't ready for this baby, any more than I was ready to lose my brother or Joey was ready for Harrison and I in the emotionally tattered condition we came to him in. But we deal, and the people around us hold us together, and I'm constantly made grateful for what I have.
The MRI and other tests (hello again, specialists) only show grey where my bullet wound struck my frontal lobe. Nothing new. The doctors explain that my seizure was an epileptic one, but that I don't necessarily have epilepsy; the stress of the aneurysm six months ago and now the stress of the birth caused disruptions to the electrical activity in my brain and set off the convulsions.
"It could be a sign of a greater problem," they warn. "Keep note of lost time or black-outs and keep us updated if you have any further events. You may develop epilepsy and require medication. Or there could be an even more serious condition."
Fuck that. I decide they're wrong and I'm fine.
We find a bigger place and move out of Joey's apartment. It's a lovely place, with a garden and a big lawn, four bedrooms with wardrobes and big, wide windows. It's two suburbs over from where Dexter and Rita bought their first place together. Harrison and I set up his bedroom just the way he wants it. He wants photos framed on the wall. I get out my photo albums and go through what's left from my photography massacre the week before Dex died.
"I want the pictures my daddy had at our house," Harrison admits after much searching. I am surprised but I promise we will go to the storage place and find them once I'm able to drive again. He disagrees and says he's not sure he wants to go there, and asks if he can help me dress Justice's room. That's a longer task. Tom has bought us a crib, which Harrison and I sit on the floor for over an hour trying to put together, and a change table, which is so difficult that we call Vince to come and help. Joey comes home to find the three of us sitting on the floor surrounded by bits of furniture and no closer to done.
Justice gets bigger and stronger and she gets to come home. Harrison brings a tin lunchbox out from his room and tips the contents onto Justice's nursery floor. It's full of letters he wrote for her while she was growing inside me and while she was in hospital. He shows her each one, thrusting the paper between the bars of her crib and pointing out the pictures he's added to each letter. He reads them to her. She blinks at him and lies there while he talks. Cute.
My baby remains a sick one, and she's always small. She grows but I can never fatten her up, and she reacts to so many foods that I burst into frustrated tears on more than one occasion and demand of Joey, "What the fuck am I meant to feed her?" She's allergic to everything. After the first three terrifying anaphylactic reactions I invest in a fuckload of EpiPens and ensure everyone in her life knows how to administer them. She catches every cold, every bug, every single fucking sniffle that Harrison brings home from school, and every time she gets sick I'm terrified that this will be the illness that catches up with her, because she's so perfect, so wonderful, there's no way I deserve her and she must be here only on borrowed time. My greatest fear is of losing her. I understand Hannah McKay's final words to me now and though I still am glad I killed that bitch I understand. There's nothing like losing a baby, and I never want to have to experience that.
She's delicate and fragile – "Funny that the two toughest cops I know produced the softest offspring imaginable," Vince comments – but she must also be strong, in her own way, because she doesn't die, no matter how many times she returns to hospital. We go from measuring her life in hours to days to weeks to months and then to years. She turns one and we have a huge party. I lost all of my family and Joey doesn't have any either, but when I bring out Justice's cake I realise that family is a matter of perception because I am once again surrounded by it. Justice has Maura and Bill and Mrs Doakes and Tom for grandparents, and they are all hugely involved in her life. She has Jamie and all of James's sisters for aunts and Angel and Vince for uncles, Astor and Cody for cousins, Harrison for a brother and Joey and I as parents. She could do better than me for a mom, admittedly, but no one loves her more and she doesn't seem to notice that her mother is an unstable brain-damaged murderer.
After I put Justice to bed on her birthday I silently wish a happy birthday to my brother, too, and I'm sure I feel a breath on the back of my neck as I stand and leave the room. She has one other uncle, one she'll never meet, but one I'm certain adores her from his side of the curtain.
I become a mom. I warm bottles, make lunches, change nappies, kiss ouches and blow on warm foreheads when someone's got a fever. I run baths and learn how to plait when Justice's thick dark hair grows long. I do the playgroup thing and talk about boring shit like laundry powders with other moms at the Saturday morning soccer game. When Harrison tackles for the ball and isn't penalised and an overzealous mother behind me mutters something about the coach letting "that Morgan kid get away with murder" I vividly imagine sneaking into her house at night and slicing her throat and letting her bleed like Hannah McKay did and getting away with real murder. But I restrain myself and don't even look at her and I only cheer louder for my nephew. I cut up the oranges and hand them out at half-time. One morning after my shower I'm standing alone in front of my mirror and I wonder, how the fuck did this become my life? I'm not anyone my self of a decade ago would recognise. I have a mother's patient smile and a detective's badge and a victim's scarred skin and a psychopath's secrets. I turn before my mirror to look at the way all the injuries I gathered in my life make a mosaic across my body. Would my brother cry to see me, to know his actions led to each and every one? The scar in my hairline is the first one people see because I can't hide it under clothing but it's small. The jagged lines of Hannah's stab wounds are the most obvious, but I always notice the thinner, whiter lines of Vogel's cabinet. I touch the one on my shoulder, remembering. I remember Dexter's rough tenderness as he held me still so he could pull the shards out of me. I remember the splintering pain and the warmth of his embrace while I calmed down.
I remember his absent-minded kisses, my hair, my forehead, my throat. I remember pulling him in and him freezing up, realising what he'd invited, and I remember his hip pinning my thigh to the wall and his body against mine and his racing terrified pulse and his ragged breaths and fuck I miss him. Even after so long.
But would he know me, if he walked in now? I have the same face and the same eyes and I sit at the same desk at work but I wonder whether he would see through me as no one else can. Would he know I've changed? Would he see the shield I carry everywhere of sweet and innocent Debra, victim sister of a damaged brother, loving mother and partner, and know what was underneath? Because the me that everyone else speaks to and relates to and sees does not match with who I feel I am.
Underneath it all I feel like I am absolutely my brother's sister and I often feel like he might be the only person who would still love me if I were to shed the lies. Too bad he's not around; and so the lies stay intact.
Years pass. Harrison is absolutely wonderful with Justice. He does anything I ask to help with her and when she learns to talk she has him completely wrapped around her little finger. He learns to read the packaging of food to check for allergens and he keeps an eye on her everywhere we go. He has to administer her adrenaline shot himself when she's about two and a half and they're alone in the backyard and she's stung by a bee. He's so good for her and I can't believe I ever wondered whether he could be anything but. For her part, she adores her big cousin. She follows him around the house and is most content at homework time when I settle her on my knee and have Harrison read his library book to us.
Everyone else gets on with their lives, too. Astor learns to drive and brings Cody down to Miami every month for visits with my two, and we go for picnics at the cemetery and enjoy the Miami sunshine at Dexter and Rita's gravesite. It would be weird for any other family but it becomes a tradition and we love it. We place new flowers and catch up on recent events and it feels like Harrison's parents are there, listening, enjoying our company. Justice revels in the attention of her three cousins. I don't like to think of her as spoilt but she is, she so fucking is, and I don't even care. Everybody loves her. She's perfect. Still much smaller than other kids her age but perfect all the same, even with that little scar on her chest and that constant fear of further complications hanging over her head.
Astor turns eighteen. I give her Dexter's apartment. She rents it out for a while and then tells me she's moving to Miami to go to college. She moves into Dex's place. The way she dresses the apartment up it hardly looks like the place I remember so many good and bad times, but the air conditioner is the same, and I think of my brother every time I see it.
Angel finds love, fucking finally. He starts dating Jamie's occupational therapist, a French woman whose love for cooking is comparable only with her love for Angel and an annoying little yappy dog she takes everywhere with her. Angel and Angelique Batista marry and the reception is at his restaurant. Tom Matthews scoops up a princess-like flowergirl Justice, who squeals and giggles and hugs his neck, and he nudges me cheerily.
"You next?" he suggests, reminding me of the ring I still wear. I laugh and pull Joey out of his seat to dance. I'm happy with the way we are. I love him and there isn't anyone else alive I'd rather be with and our family is perfect the way it is. He's happy, too. He's got me and he doesn't question my commitment to him. He knows I won't go anywhere. So maybe we'll marry someday but if we don't that's fine with us.
Harrison remains troublesome at school. He gets a bad reputation and other kids don't invite him to birthday parties or for playdates. I'm called at odd times throughout the day, only every month or two, to please come quickly to the school to calm my nephew down. I walk into the gymnasium on one particularly violent occasion to find Harrison curled up underneath the balance beam with blank unseeing eyes. I have to talk to him for a few minutes before he comes back to me and he crawls out and into my arms, where he sobs for a good fifteen minutes. I'm shown the scratches on the gym teacher's arms and face where Harrison attacked him after the poor teacher tried to lift him up onto the balance beam without warning to demonstrate the skill to the class. Harrison can only say, "I was angry." I attend countless parent-teacher interviews and I have numerous people on the school's emergency contact list in case the office can't get hold of me in the middle of a meltdown. Grandma Doakes is good with him. She gives him a list of chores to do at her house when he's suspended from school for fighting. Dr Summers remains his treating psychiatrist, although as he ages we cut back his sessions with her to once every second month. Overall she's pleased with his progress and says that the occasional angry outburst at school is a godsend compared with what we might have seen out of his trauma. I have to agree, having seen the alternative.
My nephew is smart and observant but his grades are poor. His teachers explain that he refuses to sit tests and they find him difficult to assess. By nine years of age he hasn't been assessed for reading in over two years and he is failed on each report card for it but he finds my copy of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from my dad and sits and reads that in a week, so I know he can read. Joey tells me not to stress.
"You know what he can do; one day it'll matter to him that no one else does and he'll pull his socks up," he says, and I hope he's right.
Justice starts kindergarten and it's a game-changer for Harrison. He wants to walk her to her classroom on her first day and I feel a twang in my heart, thinking how I wanted to take myself and wouldn't let my mom come and how sad must that have made her feel. My brother took me instead. But my Justice looks at me with big hazel eyes and asks, "Aren't you coming, too, Mommy?" and I take one hand and Harrison takes the other and we walk her in. I stand back with my nephew while she wanders inside with the other kids and settles on the carpet. Miss Hattie has this class this year and I see her smile set a little to see that Justice Quinn is connected to the infamous Harrison Morgan, but within weeks I'm assured that my little girl is a different kettle of fish altogether from her cousin. She's the classic good girl, quiet, obedient, helpful, attentive – nothing like me, nothing like Harrison, nothing like Joey. More like… Dexter, golden child. She's not the top of her class or anything but the fact that she isn't the lowest is all that matters to me, because she's premmie and her development doesn't match her birth age. She learns to count, she learns to read, she learns to write her letters, she socialises with other children, and she doesn't fall behind. That's all I'm worried about.
Harrison gets both better and worse once Justice is there. His reactions are less frequent but more violent. He lays his fists into another nine-year-old boy who hears that Justice is allergic to nuts and sneaks into the kindergarten eating area to offer her a peanut butter sandwich to see what Harrison will do about it. Apparently he thought it would be funny; Harrison, and the teachers, don't agree, and luckily the other boy is chastised, too, though it's Harrison who spends a week in detention. But Justice is a good influence, too. I'm out at a crime scene with Batista and Masuka when I get a call from the school to say Harrison's lost the plot and obliterated his classroom. Desks flying, pictures torn off walls, threats screamed, exercise books ripped apart. They want me there now. The teacher has evacuated the rest of the class. Evacuated. Fuck.
"I'm forty-five minutes away," I say, feeling panicky. "Have you tried my partner?" They have. No answer. He's out of range, up town conducting an interview with Miller. There are other people the school could call but none would be there fast enough to defuse the situation. Inspiration strikes me. "My daughter, Justice Quinn, is in the kindergarten class. Put her in the room with him."
I wonder if the lady in the office even knew Justice was my kid, since they never have to call me about her. The school is hugely reluctant to send one of their kindergarteners, especially one so tiny and placid and well-behaved, into the warzone of Harrison Morgan's evacuated classroom. But I'm her mother and I say it's okay and they don't know what else to do, so they chance it. Harrison will never hurt her, I remind myself. I hope I'm right.
I rush to the school and the headmistress meets me at the classroom door.
"It was amazing," she confesses in a hushed whisper. We open the door slowly and go slowly inside.
"Harrison?" I call nervously. "Justice?" The room is obliterated and I totally understand the teacher's decision to remove the other children. If a kid in Justice's class was doing this I would want Miss Hattie to react the same way. Harrison has unturned everything, torn the star chart from the wall and left classroom resources strewn across the floor. I have never seen him in this sort of rage but he's tall for his age now and strong; there would have been no stopping him.
But now I see him. He's curled in the book corner on cushions with Justice, and in the quiet stillness of the room I hear her soft little voice. She's reading to him. I don't think she can really read properly yet, except for a few words and names, but she's telling him a story based on the pictures. I hear something about a princess and a unicorn – two of her favourite things – as I tiptoe between chairs and broken pencils. Justice hears me but she finishes her page before she can look up. She seems completely unaffected by the devastation and destruction around her, content to sit here with her cousin and let him soak in her presence. Does she not see what Harrison is, what he does? Of course she doesn't. Did I ever see it when it came to Dexter, even when it was shoved in my face? Both of my babies look up at me with their matching hazel eyes as I join them and slowly sink onto the cushions beside them.
"What's the story?" I ask, and Justice snuggles into my side, and Harrison accepts my arm when I offer it, and we listen to Justice finish her story. My darling girl, the fixer. Dexter said I fixed things for him; he said I was his conscience. Justice, though, is a lifesaver for my nephew. I doubt I was ever this good for Dex.
"Harri was angry," Justice explains. She's the only one to call him that. I don't stop her but it bothers me a little because Harry wasn't the best human being either. Better than me, though, I guess. She turns the page matter-of-factly, unconcerned. "He's better now."
Later we sit in the headmistress's office. Harrison won't admit what set him off but he agrees that his reaction was unfair on his classmates and his teacher. He asks whether he can help put the room back together. He's very reasonable and mature, Dexter's boy. Joey comes to pick up Justice and take her home while Harrison, his teacher and I clean the classroom up for hours after school. While Harrison is stacking books back into the shelf the teacher tells me in a quiet aside that she overheard what upset him: another child had heard from his parents that Harrison's father was a deadbeat serial killer and that's why Harrison is always so naughty at school. The thought of the bullying makes my blood boil and I want to slaughter the bully's entire family, but I only shake my head and say I'm sorry to hear it. The teacher promises to get on top of it – she agrees with me that it's not fair on Harrison to have to hear that. Personally, I'm surprised it's taken this long to catch up with him. It's sad and Tom did what he could by pushing the Moser name but the Morgan name still got dredged, too, and Dexter's son will always have that cross to bear.
