In addition, she had no interest in sites related to yoga and to other forms of meditation. Even the most brilliant scientist couldn’t take the principles of a meditative discipline, liquify them, and inject them as though they were flu vaccine.
Showered, hair still damp, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and a clean Wile E. Coyote T-shirt, Shepherd returned from the bathroom.
Dylan followed him for a couple steps and said, ‘Jilly, can you keep an eye on Shep? Be sure he doesn’t… go anywhere.’
‘Sure.’
Two additional straight-backed chairs faced each other across a small table near the window. She brought one of them to the desk, intending for Shep to sit beside her.
Instead, he ignored her invitation and went to a corner of the bedroom near the desk, where he stood with his back to the room.
‘Shep, are you all right?’
He didn’t reply. The wallpaper – beige, yellow, and pale-green stripes – had been sloppily joined where the walls met. Shepherd moved his head slowly up, slowly down, as though studying the error in the pattern match.
‘Sweetie, is something wrong?’
Having twice surveyed the paperhanger’s shoddy work from floor to ceiling, Shep stared straight ahead at the juncture of walls. His arms had hung slack at his sides. Now he raised his right arm as if he were swearing an oath: bent at the elbow, hand beside his face, palm flat and facing forward. After a moment, he began to wave as though he were not staring into a corner but through a window at someone he knew.
Dylan came out of the bathroom again, this time to get a change of clothes from his suitcase, and Jilly said, ‘Who’s he waving at?’
‘He’s not really waving,’ Dylan explained. ‘It’s spasmodic, the equivalent of a facial tic. He can sometimes do it for hours.’
On further consideration, Jilly realized that Shepherd’s wrist had gone limp and that his hand actually flopped loosely, not in the calculated wave of a good-bye or a greeting.
‘Does he think he’s done something wrong?’ she asked.
‘Wrong? Oh, because he’s standing in the corner? No. He’s just feeling overwhelmed at the moment. Too much input recently. He can’t cope with all of it.’
‘Who can?’
‘By facing into a corner,’ Dylan said, ‘he’s limiting sensory input. Reducing his world to that narrow space. It helps to calm him. He feels safer.’
‘Maybe I need a corner of my own,’ Jilly said.
‘Just keep an eye on him. He knows I don’t want him to… go anywhere. He’s a good kid. Most of the time he does what he should. But I’m just afraid that this folding thing… maybe he won’t be able to control it any more than he can control that hand right now.’
Shep waved at the wall, waved, waved.
Adjusting the position of her laptop, turning her chair at an angle to the desk in order to keep Shep in view while she worked, Jilly said to Dylan, ‘You can count on me.’
‘Yeah. I know I can.’
A tenderness in his voice compelled her attention.
His forthright stare had the same quality of assessment and speculation that had characterized the surreptitious glances with which he had studied her after they had refueled at that service station in Globe, the previous night.
When Dylan smiled, Jilly realized that she had been smiling first, that his smile was in answer to hers.
‘You can count on me,’ Shep said.
They looked at the kid. He still faced the corner, still waved.
‘We know we can count on you, buddy,’ Dylan told his brother. ‘You never let me down. So you stay here, okay? Only here, no there. No folding.’
For the time being, Shep had said all that he had to say.
‘I better get showered,’ Dylan said.
‘Nine minutes,’ Jilly reminded him.
Smiling again, he returned to the bathroom with a change of clothes.
With Shepherd always in her peripheral vision, glancing up at him more directly from time to time, Jilly traveled the Net in search of sites related to the enhancement of brain function, mental acuity, memory … anything that might lead her to Frankenstein.