Head lowered, Shep watched his brother set aside the slippers. ‘Nine minutes. One minute for each arm.’
‘Bunny or puppy,’ Dylan said.
Examining the adhesive bandage on her arm, Jilly saw that it was loose but that it still concealed the needle mark.
Dylan peeled the sock off Shepherd’s right foot.
‘One minute,’ Shep said, ‘for each leg—’
Moving closer, Jilly watched as Dylan examined his brother’s bare foot. ‘If he was injected,’ she said, ‘why not in the arm?’
‘—and one minute for the head—’
‘He was working a jigsaw puzzle at the time,’ Dylan said.
‘So?’
‘—and two full minutes to wash everything else—’
‘You’ve never seen my brother work a puzzle. He’s fast. His hands keep moving. And he’s focused.’
‘—two minutes to rinse,’ Shep finished. Then he added, ‘Cat.’
‘He’s so focused,’ Dylan continued, ‘you can’t persuade him to stop until he’s completed the puzzle. You can’t force him to stop. He wouldn’t care what you did with his feet because he doesn’t work the puzzle with his feet. But you couldn’t immobilize one of his arms.’
‘Maybe he was chloroformed, like me.’
Having found no obvious puncture mark on Shepherd’s right foot, Dylan said, ‘No. When I went across the street to get takeout, he was doing jigsaw, and when I woke up taped to the chair, Shep was still flying through the puzzle.’
Inexplicably, Shep interjected, ‘Cat.’
‘If he’d been chloroformed, he wouldn’t have gotten over the effects that quickly,’ Jilly said, remembering the disorientation that had lingered after she’d awakened.
‘Cat.’
‘Besides, having a chloroform-soaked rag clamped to his face would have been even more traumatic for Shep than it was for you. A lot more. He’s fragile. After regaining consciousness, he’d have been either highly emotional or he’d have curled up in the fetal position and refused to move. He wouldn’t have gone back to the puzzle as if nothing had happened.’
Dylan stripped the sock from Shepherd’s left foot.
Shepherd’s Band-Aid featured a cartoon cat.
‘Cat,’ said Shep. ‘Shep bet cat.’
Carefully Dylan peeled off the tape.
‘Shep wins,’ said Shep.
More than half a day after the injection had been administered, the puncture remained inflamed and slightly swollen.
The sight of Shep’s stigmata sent a shiver through Jilly that she could not entirely explain.
She removed her bunny-decorated bandage. The site of her injection looked identical to Shepherd’s.
Dylan’s cartoon puppy proved to conceal a needle puncture that matched his brother’s and Jilly’s wounds. ‘He told me the stuff does something different to everyone.’
Glancing at the wall where the tunnel had been, Jilly said, ‘In Shepherd’s case, something way different.’
‘”The effect is without exception interesting,”‘ Dylan quoted Frankenstein, as he had quoted him before, ‘”frequently astonishing, and sometimes positive.”‘
Jilly saw the wonder in Dylan’s face, the shining hope in his eyes. ‘You think this is positive for Shep?’
‘I don’t know about the talent to… to fold things. Whether that might be a blessing or a curse. Only time will tell. But he’s talking more, too. And talking more directly to me. Now that I look back on it, he’s been changing ever since this happened.’
She knew what Dylan was thinking and what he dared not say, for fear of tempting fate: that by virtue of the injection, with the aid of the mysterious psychotropic stuff, Shep might find his way out of the prison of his autism.
Negative Jackson might be a name she’d earned. Perhaps at her worst she was, as well, a vortex of pessimism, never regarding her own life and prospects, but often regarding the likelihood that most people and society in general would always find a hellbound hand-basket in which to be carried to destruction. But she didn’t think she was being pessimistic – or even negative – when she looked upon this development with Shep and sensed more danger in it than hope, less potential for enlightenment than for horror.
Staring down at the tiny red point of inflammation on his foot, Shepherd whispered, ‘By the light of the moon.’
In his heretofore innocent face, Jilly saw neither the vacant stare nor the benign expression, nor the wrenching anxiety, that had thus far pretty much defined his apparent emotional range. A hint of acrimony colored his voice, and his features tightened in a bitter expression that might have represented something more caustic than mere bitterness. Anger perhaps, rock-hard and long-nurtured anger.