Dexter is delicious

Deborah sat bolt upright. "Samantha Aldovar," she said, and it was not a question.

Ms. Stein answered it anyway. "Yes," she said. "That's right."

SEVEN

BEtween the laws that any school can call upon to protect its students from official harassment and the clout that the parents and alumni of a school like Ransom Everglades could muster, it could have been very difficult for us to gather any information on what was now a double disappearance. But the school chose to take the high road and use the crisis as an exercise in community activism. They sat us down in the same office with the cluttered walls while Ms. Stein hustled around alerting teachers and administrators.

I looked around the room and noticed that there were still the same number of chairs. My leaning spot on the wall no longer seemed terribly inviting. But I decided that our significance in the grand scheme of things had gone up several notches when two of the school's students turned up missing, and, in short, I was now far too important to lean against the wall. And there was, after all, one more perfectly good chair in the room.

I had just settled into Ms. Stein's chair when my cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen, which told me that the call was from Rita. I answered. "Hello?"

"Dexter, hi, it's me," she said.

"That was my first guess," I told her.

"What? Oh. Anyway, listen," she said, which didn't seem necessary, since I was. "The doctor says I'm ready to come home, so can you come get us?"

"You're what?" I said, completely astonished. After all, Lily A

"Ready," she repeated patiently. "We're ready to come home."

"It's much too soon," I said.

"The doctor says it's not," she said. "Dexter, I've done this before."

"But Lily A

"She's fine, Dexter, and so am I," she said. "And we want to come home, so please come pick us up, okay?"

"But Rita," I said.

"We'll be waiting," she said. "Bye." And she hung up before I could come up with any kind of rational reason for why she shouldn't leave the hospital yet. I stared at the phone for a moment, and then the thought of Lily A

"Yeah, I got that," she said. She threw me her car keys. "Get back here as fast as you can."

I drove south in pure Miami style, which is to say fast, moving smoothly in and out of traffic as if there were no real lanes. I did not usually drive so flamboyantly; I have always felt that, contrary to the true spirit of our city's roads, getting there is just as important as maintaining a forceful image along the way. But the moves came naturally to me-I grew up here, after all, and the current situation seemed to call for all the haste and macho firmness I could muster. What was Rita thinking? And more, how had she persuaded the doctors to go along with it? It made no sense: Lily A

I stopped at home just long enough to grab the brand-new infant car seat. I had been practicing for weeks, wanting to be perfect with it when the time came-but the time had come too soon, and I found that my fingers, usually so deft, were icy blocks of clumsiness as I tried to fumble it into place with the seat belt. I couldn't get it through the slot in the back of the thing at all. I pushed, pulled, and finally cut my finger on the molded plastic and flung the whole thing down as I sucked at the cut.

This was supposed to be safe? How could this protect Lily A

I finally got the car seat in place, and then rushed on to the hospital. But contrary to my perfectly logical fears, when I arrived I did not find Rita standing outside the hospital, dodging bullets while Lily A

"Oh," I said, trying to register the fact that somehow everything was fine. "Well, actually, I was sort of nearby."

"You're not going to drive us home that fast, are you?" she said. And before I could point out that I would never drive fast with Lily A

"Hey, here's Daddy," he said. "You folks ready to go?"

"Yes, that's-Thank you," Rita said.

The young man blinked and then said, "All righty then," and he stomped down to release the wheel brake and began to push Rita toward the door. And since at some point even I have to cooperate with the inevitable, I took a deep and resigned breath and followed along behind.

At the car I took Lily A

"Don't drive too fast," Rita told me.

"Yes, dear," I said.

I drove slowly home-not slowly enough to risk the heavily armed outrage of my fellow citizens, but within spitting distance of the speed limit. Each blast of a horn, every thump of an overcranked car stereo, seemed new and threatening, and when I stopped at red lights I found myself glancing anxiously at the nearby cars to see if any automatic weapons were pointed our way. But somehow, miraculously, we got home safely. Undoing the straps of Lily A

I looked at the two of them, and suddenly everything seemed so different now, because for the first time they were here, at home, and just seeing my new baby in this old setting seemed to underline the fact that life was new and wonderful and fragile.

I dawdled shamelessly, soaking it up and reveling in the utter wonder of it all. I touched Lily A