Eventually Jilly in fact became a member of their church choir, partly to convince her mother that her heart remained pure, partly because she fantasized that she was destined to be a world-famous pop singer. A surprising number of pop-music goddesses had sung in church choirs in their youth. A dedicated choirmaster – who was also a voice coach – soon convinced her that she was born to sing backup, not solo, but he changed her life when he asked, ‘What do you want to sing for anyway, Jillian, when you’ve got such a big talent for making people laugh? When they just can’t laugh, people turn to music to lift their spirits, but laughter is always the preferred medicine.’
Here, now, along the interstate, far from church and mother, but longing for both, sitting as straight-backed on a steel guardrail as ever she had sat on a choir bench, Jilly put one hand to her throat and felt the systolic throb in her right carotid artery. Although the beat was faster than the pulse of a devout choirgirl calmed by hymns of divine love and by a beautifully raised Kyrie eleison, it didn’t race with outright panic. Instead it counted a quick cadence familiar to Jilly from several early turns on comedy-club stages, when her material had not connected with the audience. This was the hurried heartbeat of a rejected performer when humiliating minutes remained in the spotlight before a hostile crowd. Indeed, she felt that telltale clamminess on her brow, that damp chill on the nape of her neck, in the small of her back, and on her palms – an icy moistness that had but one name dreaded from the high proscenium arches of Broadway to the lowest stages of boondocks honkytonks: flop sweat.
The difference this time was that the troubled heartbeat and the cold sweat weren’t merely the consequences of her standup-comedy act collapsing under her, but arose from a dreadful suspicion that her life might be falling apart. Which would make this the ultimate flop sweat.
Of course, maybe she was being melodramatic. More than once she had been accused of that tendency. Yet undeniably here she sat in a desolate desert, far from anyone who loved her, in the company of a decidedly odd pair of strangers, half convinced that any authorities to whom she turned would prove to be in league with the men who had blown up her cherished Cadillac. Worse, with every heartbeat, her blood carried an unknown corruption deeper into her tissues.
On consideration, she realized that in this instance, reality involved more frantic action, inspired more exaggerated emotions, and encouraged less respect for cause and effect than any melodrama ever staged. ‘Melodramatic, my ass,’ she muttered.
Through the open back door of the Expedition, Jilly had a clear view of Dylan O’Conner sitting beside Shep and talking – ceaselessly, earnestly talking. The roar and whistle of passing traffic prevented her from hearing anything he said, and judging by Shepherd’s faraway gaze, Dylan might as well have been alone, bending no ear but his own.
At first he held his younger brother’s hands to put a stop to the self-administered blows that had brought a thin flow of blood from the kid’s left nostril. In time, he released Shep and simply sat beside him, bent forward, head lowered, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped, but still talking, talking.
Jilly’s inability to hear Dylan over the traffic noise created the impression that he spoke in a discreet murmur to his brother. The dim light in the SUV and the posture of the men – side by side, close and yet apart – brought to mind a confessional. The longer that she watched the brothers, the more completely the illusion developed, until she could smell the wood polish with which the confessional booths of her youth had been maintained and also the steeped-in scent of decades of smoldering incense.
A strangeness overcame her, a sense that the scene before her possessed meaning beyond what the five senses could perceive, that within it wound layers of mysteries and that at the core of all the mysteries lay… something transcendent. Jilly was too firmly rooted to this world to be a medium or a mystic; never before had she been seized by such a peculiar mood as this.