The voices screaming obscenities in my head lessen their snarky tones when I spot him crossing the street three police cruisers just whizzed down. Red goop is oozing from his hands, and several blobs have splattered on his black boots.
It’s warm out today, but he still chose his usual getup of long pants, a long-sleeve shirt, boots, and a low-riding cap. He has the swagger of the rock star he no longer wants to kill but with a dangerous edge that announces your most wicked thoughts will never be as deviant as the ones that regularly fill his head.
He is as deranged as they come, and he loves us with everything he has.
I was worried that wasn’t going to be the case when I first broke him out of Drakes. Within a second of slotting his backside behind the steering wheel of a truck big enough to carry the cutout of a moose, he steered our borrowed ride to Ravenshoe.
It was only the coo from a basket wedged behind the passenger seat that slowed him down. He thought we had a stowaway rodent. I laughed about the fret on his face for almost a minute before whipping off the blanket keeping our new friend hidden from prying eyes.
“Whose kid is that?” Dexter roared as his eyes darted between the little bundle of blue and me.
I never thought anything would top the expression on his face when he heard me talk for the first time, but my stammered, “Y-You,” that night still occasionally pushes through the nightmares that frequent my dreams almost every night.
I thought Dexter knew the cause of my delay. I telepathically spoke to him every day during our mutual incarcerations, but it was only when he double-checked the truth in my eyes did I realize the silly internet towers popping up all over the country most likely skewed my endeavors to communicate with him.
I wasn’t with Nick, who is still breathing today solely because he kept my heart pumping until medics arrived. I had severe sepsis from the cuts in my stomach and the punctured lung I endured when we crashed into a tree. I was clinically dead, but with Nick keeping my heart pumping and Dexter marking my forehead to keep the heathens away, my brain didn’t suffer any negative side effects from me flatlining.
Well, not any more than it had already suffered from my childhood.
After a four-week stay in a fancy hospital owned by Nick’s brother, I was to be transferred to a mental hospital that’s adept at handling mothers-to-be without the fetus-harming medication most hospitals for the clinically deranged use.
I was shocked I was pregnant. So much so, I was admitted with only the slightest protest. I broke one guard’s nose before shoving a sedative full of murky liquid into a second guard’s neck.
I’d still be fighting now if the man in the pricy suit didn’t tell me I could hurt my baby with Dexter if I didn’t settle down. He promised the new hospital would take care of us both, and they’d do it without harming my infant or me.
Once his honest tone calmed me down, he also explained that my mother lied when she told the bad men I couldn’t have babies. That, along with the super-hot baths she made me take every time they visited saved me from an entity who breeds babies for a living.
I’m still supposed to be at Winterville now, my incarceration was for seven years minimum, but with our son born and the diaper delivery guy far too friendly with the loonies every guy wants to bed at least once in their lives, I stuffed my baby with Dexter into a laundry basket and hatched an escape plan.
Since I spent the nine months of my pregnancy strapped to a bed like Dexter, getting him out was going to take more than a handful of compliments. It only took remembering his substitute teacher ruse for me to devise the perfect plan.
People are willing to do almost anything when you’re carrying a newborn baby in your arms. They’ll even let a stranger inside their fortress home to warm up a bottle.
The guard’s willingness to help saw her tied to the boiler in her basement instead of ruining the mattress in her master suite with the blood that’s meant to be in her veins.
My thoughts snap back to the present when Dexter gestures for Damien to join us. He’s been tackling the fort at a playground only a few hundred miles from Ravenshoe the past thirty minutes.
We only returned stateside earlier this year. Our first three and a half years as a family were spent abroad with Dexter’s grandparents Isaac informed him about. They were a nice couple in their late sixties, but they could have been a lot nicer. They said Damien was the devil’s spawn, and that he needed to be medicated to make sure the long list of mental illnesses that have run in Dexter’s mother’s side of the family the past three centuries weren’t passed down to Damien.
You can imagine how Dexter handled that situation.
If you can’t, you’ll be in the dark just as much as me because despite my wish to scratch the old biddy’s eyes out, Dexter said Damien was too little to go to work with his father just yet, so I had to take him on a playdate instead.
It was as eventful as Dexter’s gory afternoon—and I see that being the case again when Damien’s sprint across the glossy grass is cut short by a boy with an ugly face and a fat tummy. He’s so eager to chase down the ice cream truck Dexter fetched our raspberry gelatos from, he took a shortcut across the grass instead of following the footpath, which meant he bumped straight into Damien during the process.
“Wait,” Dexter snaps out when my first thoughts are to jump to Damien’s defense. I’m not going to hurt the little boy. His horrible haircut and chubby thighs reveal his parents are already mistreating him. I am merely going to comfort our son like I do Dexter when the nightmares of his past resurface stronger than ever. “Let’s see what he does first.”
With his brain having none of the worm holes my father accused mine of having, Damien gets back onto his feet, wipes his grazed knees with his even more grazed hands, hesitantly smiles at his bully, then makes his way to Dexter and me.
I’m proud of his tear-free face.
Dexter seems to be on the other end of the spectrum.
He hates bullies, but even more than that, he hates when the bully is groomed by one several years older than the person they’re belittling.
Damien’s original accoster was happy to let bygones be bygones, his eyes are still locked on the ice cream truck, but like most spoiled brats around these parts, he isn’t at the park alone. He’s here with his mother, a socialite I’m confident spends more time on her cell phone than caring for her offspring.
“You need to tell your boy to watch where he’s going,” she spits out after covering the speaker of the cell phone attached to her ear. After dragging her eyes down my floral dress and wedged sandals, she mutters, “This park is reserved for residents who reside here. It isn’t an open free-for-all.”
