Behind Dylan, as they reached the ramp to the interstate, his brother whispered, ‘By the light of the moon.’
Shepherd breathed those words only once, which was a relief, considering his penchant for repetition, but then he began to cry. Shep was not a weepy kid. He had wept seldom in the past seventeen years, since he’d been a child of three, when his retreat from the pains and disappointments of this world had become all but complete, since he had begun to live most of each day in a safer world of his own creation. Yet now: tears twice in one night.
He didn’t shriek or wail, but cried quietly: thick sobs twined with thin mewling, sounds of misery swallowed before they were fully expressed. Although he labored to stifle his emotion, Shep could not entirely conceal the terrible power of it. Some unknowable grief or anguish racked him. As revealed by the rearview mirror, his usually placid countenance – under his hat of stacked hands, framed by his elbows – was wrenched by a torment as disturbing as that on the face in Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Jilly asked as they arrived at the top of the ramp.
‘I don’t know.’ Dylan worriedly shifted his attention between the road ahead and the mirror. ‘I don’t know.’
As though melting, Shepherd’s hands slid slowly from the top of his head, down his temples, but firmed up again, hardening into fists just below his ears. He ground his knuckles against his cheekbones, as though he were resisting a fearsome inner pressure that threatened to fracture his facial structure, stretch his flesh, and forever balloon his features into a freak-show face.
‘Dear God, I don’t know,’ Dylan repeated, aware of the tremor of distress in his voice as he transitioned from the entrance ramp onto the first eastbound lane of the interstate.
Traffic, all of it faster than the Expedition, raced through the Arizona night toward New Mexico. Distracted by his brother’s whimpers and groans of despair, Dylan couldn’t match the pace set by the other motorists.
Then good Shep – docile Shep, peaceful Shep – did something that he had never done before: With his clenched fists, he began to strike himself hard in the face.
Awkwardly balancing the potted jade plant on her lap, turned halfway around in her seat, Jilly cried out in dismay. ‘No, Shep, don’t. Honey, don’t!’
Although putting distance between themselves and the men in the black Suburbans was imperative, Dylan signaled a right turn, drove onto the wide shoulder of the highway, and braked to a stop.
Pausing in his self-administered punishment, Shep whispered, ‘You do your work,’ and then he hit himself again, again.
11
Having gotten out of the Expedition to allow Dylan O’Conner a degree of privacy with his brother, Jilly parked her not-yet-big butt on the guardrail. She sat with her unprotected back to a vastness of desert, where venomous snakes slithered in the heat of the night, where tarantulas as hairy as the maniacal mullahs of the Taliban scurried in search of prey, and where the creepiest species native to this cruel realm of rock and sand and scraggly scrub were even more fearsome than serpents or spiders.
The creatures that might be stalking Jilly from behind were of less interest to her than those that might approach on the eastbound lanes in synchronized black Suburbans. If they would blow up a mint-condition ’56 Coupe DeVille, they were capable of any atrocity.
Although no longer nauseated or lightheaded, she didn’t feel entirely normal. Her heart wasn’t jumping like a toad in her chest, as it had been during their flight from the motel, but it wasn’t beating as calm as a choirgirl’s, either.
As calm as a choirgirl. That was a saying Jilly had picked up from her mother. By calm, Mom hadn’t meant merely quiet and composed; she had also meant chaste and God-loving, and much more. When as a child Jilly had fallen into a pout or had flung herself high into a fit of pique, her mother reliably recommended to her the shining standard of a choirgirl, and when Jilly had been a teenager excited by the smooth moves of any acne-stippled Casanova, her mother had suggested somberly that she live up to the moral model of the oft-cited and essentially mythical choirgirl.