‘No Goldfish, no pee, no fold.’
‘This is different, Shep.’
‘No Goldfish, no pee, no fold.’
‘That rule doesn’t apply, buddy. We’re not in public now.’
Shepherd wasn’t buying that line of argument. After all, this was called a public restroom, and he knew it. ‘No Goldfish, no pee, no fold.’
‘Listen, buddy, you’ve seen a lot of movies, you know what bad guys are.’
‘Pee in public.’
‘Worse bad guys than that. Bad guys with guns. Killers like in the movies. We’ve got some bad guys looking for us, Shep.’
‘Hannibal Lecter.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they’re that bad. I don’t know. But if you don’t help me here, if you don’t fold us when I ask you to, then for sure things are going to get gooey-bloody.’
The kid’s eyes were active behind his lids, an indication of the degree of his agitation. ‘Gooey-bloody is bad.’
‘Gooey-bloody is very bad. And it’s going to get very gooey and very bloody if we don’t fold back to our room right now.’
‘Shep is scared.’
‘Don’t be scared.’
‘Shep is scared.’
Dylan admonished himself not to lose his temper as he had lost it on the hilltop in California. He must never speak to Shep that way again, never, no matter how desperate the situation became. But he was left with no tactic but to plead. ‘Buddy, for God’s sake, please.’
‘Sh-shep is s-s-scared.’
When Dylan checked his Timex, the sweep-motion second hand seemed to be spinning around the watch face.
Moving to Shepherd’s side, Jilly said, ‘Sweetie, last night when I was in my bed and you were in your bed, and Dylan was asleep and snoring, do you remember the little conversation we had?’
Dylan had no idea what she was talking about. She hadn’t told him about a conversation with Shep. And he was certain that he didn’t snore.
‘Sweetie, I woke up and heard you whispering, remember? You said you were scared. And what did I say?’
Shepherd’s hyperactive eyes stopped moving behind his closed lids, but he didn’t respond to her.
‘Do you remember, honey?’ When she put an arm around Shepherd’s shoulders, he didn’t cringe from contact or even flinch. ‘Sweetie, remember, you said, “Shep is scared,” and I said, “Shep is brave.”‘
Dylan heard noises in the hallway, glanced at the door. No one came in, but the coffee shop had a big lunch crowd; this privacy wouldn’t last much longer.
Jilly said, ‘And you are brave, Shep. You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever known. The world is a scary place. And I know it’s scarier for you than it is for us. So much noise, so much brightness and color, so many people, strangers, always talking at you, and then germs everywhere, nothing neat like it ought to be, nothing simple like you want it so much to be, everything shapey, and so much that’s disgusting. You can put a puzzle together and make it right, and you can read Great Expectations like twenty times, a hundred times, and every time it’ll be exactly like you expect it to be, exactly right. But you can’t make life come together like a puzzle, and you can’t make it be the same every day – and yet you get up every morning, and you try. That’s very brave, sweetie. If I were you, if I were the way you are, I don’t think I could be as brave as you, Shepherd. I know I couldn’t. Every day, trying so hard – that is as brave as anything any hero ever did in any movie.’
Listening to Jilly, Dylan eventually stopped glancing worriedly at the door, stopped consulting his wristwatch, and discovered that this woman’s face and melodious voice were more compelling even than the thought of professional killers closing in from all sides.
‘Honey, you have to be as brave as I know you can be. You have to not worry about bad guys, not worry about gooey-bloody, just do what needs to be done, like you get up every morning and shower and do what needs to be done to make the world as neat and as simple as you can make it. Sweetie, you have to be brave and fold us back to our room.’