Dylan waded through grass all the way around to the back of the portal, out of sight of his brother.
Viewed from a point 180 degrees opposite his first position, the gateway offered the identical sight as from the front. The shabby motel bathroom. Jilly anxiously leaning forward – squinting, worried.
Not being within sight of Shep made Dylan nervous. He quickly continued around the gate to the point at his brother’s side from which he had begun this inspection.
Shep stood as Dylan had left him: arms hanging slackly at his sides, head cocked to the right, gazing west and down upon a familiar vista. His wistful smile expressed both melancholy and pleasure.
Rolling hills mantled in golden grass lay to the north and south, here and there graced by widely separated California live oaks that cast long morning shadows, and this particular hill rolled down to a long meadow. West of the meadow stood a Victorian house with an expansive back porch. Beyond the house: more lush meadows, a gravel driveway leading to a highway that followed the coastline. A quarter of a mile to the west of those blacktop lanes, the Pacific Ocean, a vast mirror, took the color of the sky and condensed it into a deeper and more solemn blue.
Miles north of Santa Barbara, California, on a lightly populated stretch of coast, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, this was the house in which Dylan had grown up. In this place, their mother had died more than ten years ago, and to this place, Dylan and Shep still returned between their long road trips to arts festival after arts festival across the West and Southwest.
‘This is nuts!’ His frustration burst from him in those three words much the way This sucks! might have erupted from him if he’d learned that his lottery ticket had missed the hundred-million-dollar prize by one digit, and as Ouch! or something more rude might have passed his lips if he’d hit his thumb with a hammer. He was confused. he was scared, and because his head might have exploded if he’d stood here as silent as Shep, he said again, ‘This is nuts!’
Miles farther north, in the deserted parking lot of a state beach, their father had committed suicide fifteen years ago. From this hill, unaware that their lives were soon to change, Dylan and Shep had watched the spectacular December sunset that their dad had viewed through a haze of Nembutal and carbon-monoxide poisoning as he had settled into an everlasting sleep.
They were hundreds of miles from Holbrook, Arizona, where they had gone to bed.
‘Nuts, this is nuts,’ he expanded, ‘totally, fully nuts with a nut filling and more nuts on top.’
Warm sunshine, fresh air faintly scented by the sea, crickets singing in the dry grass: As much as it might feel like a dream, all of it was real.
Ordinarily, Dylan would not have turned to his brother for the answer to any mystery. Shepherd O’Conner wasn’t a source of answers, not a wellhead of clarifying insights. Shep was instead a bubbling font of confusion, a gushing fountain of enigmas, a veritable geyser of mysteries.
In this instance, however, if he didn’t turn to Shepherd, he might as well seek answers from the crickets in the grass, from the fairy midges that swooned through the day on lazy currents of sun-warmed air.
‘Shep, are you listening to me?’
Shep smiled a half-sorrowful smile at the house below them.
‘Shep, I need you to be with me now. Talk to me now. Shep, I need you to tell me how you got here.’
‘Almond,’ Shep said, ‘filbert, peanut, walnut—’
‘Don’t do this, Shep.’
‘—black walnut, beechnut, butternut—’
‘This isn’t acceptable, Shep.’
‘—cashew, Brazil nut—’
Dylan stepped in front of his brother, seized him firmly by the shoulders, shook him to get his attention. ‘Shep, look at me, see me, be with me. How did you get here?’
‘—coconut, hickory nut—’
Shaking his brother harder, violently enough to make the litany of nuts stutter out of the boy, Dylan said, ‘That’s it, enough, no more of this shit, no more!’
‘—chestnut, kola nut—’
Dylan let go of Shep’s shoulders, clasped his hands around his brother’s face, holding his head in a ten-finger vice. ‘Don’t you hide from me, don’t you pull your usual crap, not with this going on, Shep, not now.’