He sounded surprised. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘The way you are with Shep.’
‘My dad raised venture capital to help high-tech entrepreneurs start up new companies. He worked eighty-hour weeks. He might’ve been a great guy, but I never spent enough time with him to know. He got in some deep financial problems. So two days before Christmas, near sunset, he drove to this beach parking lot with a great view of the Pacific. Cold day. No swimmers, no surfers. He connected a hose to the tailpipe, put the other end into the car through a window. Then he got in behind the wheel and also took an overdose of Nembutal. He was thorough, my dad. Always a backup plan. He went out with one of the most spectacular sunsets of the year. Shep and I watched it from the hill behind our house, miles away from that beach, and of course we didn’t know he was watching it, too, and dying.’
‘When was this?’
‘I was fifteen. Shep was five. Almost fifteen years ago.’
‘That’s hard,’ she said.
‘Yeah. But I wouldn’t trade you situations.’
‘So where did you learn?’
‘Learn what?’
‘To take such good care of Shep.’
He switched off the lamp. In the darkness, he said, ‘From my mom. She died young, too. She was great, so tender with Shep. But sometimes you can learn the right lesson from a bad example, too.’
‘I guess so.’
‘No need to guess. Look at yourself.’
‘Me? I’m all screwed up,’ she said.
‘Name me someone who isn’t.’
Trying to think of a name to give him, she eventually drifted into sleep.
The first time that she woke, rising out of a dreamless bliss, she heard Dylan snoring softly.
The room was cold. The air conditioner had shut off.
She had not been awakened by Dylan’s snoring, but perhaps by Shepherd’s voice. Three whispered words: ‘Shep is scared.’
Judging by the direction from which his voice arose, she thought he was still in bed.
‘Shep is scared.’
‘Shep is brave,’ she whispered in reply.
‘Shep is scared.’
‘Shep is brave.’
Shepherd fell silent, and when the silence held, Jilly found sleep again.
When next she woke, she heard Dylan still snoring softly, but fingers of sunshine pried at every edge of the blackout drapes, not the thinner light of dawn, but the harsher glare of midmorning sun.
She became aware of another light, arising from beyond the half-open bathroom door. A bloody radiance.
Her first thought was fire, but even as she bolted out of bed, with that word stuck in her throat, she realized that this was not the flickering light of flames, but something quite different.
23
Shaken out of dreams, Dylan sat up, stood up, into his shoes, before he was fully conscious, like a firefighter so trained in the routine of an alarm response that he could answer the firehouse bell and shrug into his turnout coat while still asleep, and then wake up sliding down the pole.
According to the travel clock on the nightstand, the morning had crept around to 9:12, and according to Jilly, they had trouble, a message she conveyed to him not in words but in a look, her eyes wide and shining with worry.
Dylan saw first that Shep wasn’t in bed, wasn’t anywhere in the motel room.
Then he noticed the fiery glow beyond the half-closed bathroom door. Fiery but not fire. The hellfire-red of a nightmare, scarlet ocher overlaid on aniline black. An orange-red, muddy-red radiance with the bristle-at-your-eyes texture of the light in a nocturnal scene shot with infrared film. The dire-red, hungry-red glow in the eyes of a night-hunting snake. This had all of those qualities, but none of them adequately described it, because it defied description and would defy his talent if ever he tried to render it on canvas.
The bathroom had no windows. This couldn’t simply be morning sun filtered through a colorful curtain. The standard fluorescent fixture above the sink couldn’t produce such an eerie shine.
How odd that mere light could instantly make his gut clench, his chest tighten, and his heart gallop. Here was a peculiar luminosity that appeared nowhere in nature, that was not quite like anything he had seen before in the works of man, either, and therefore it snagged at every fiber of superstition in the fabric of his soul.