‘Sh-shep is scared.’
Horrified by the expression of dread with which his brother regarded him, Dylan withdrew his pinning finger from Shep’s arched eyelid, let go of the kid’s head, and stepped back, shaking with self-disgust, remorse.
‘Shep is scared,’ the kid said, both eyes open wide.
‘I’m sorry, Shep.’
‘Shep is scared.’
‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, buddy. I didn’t mean what I said, not any of it, forget all that.’
Shepherd’s shocked-wide eyelids lowered. He let his shoulders slump, too, and bowed his head and cocked it to one side, assuming the meek demeanor and the awkward posture with which he announced to the world that he was harmless, the humble pose that he hoped would allow him to shuffle through life without calling attention to himself, without inviting any notice from dangerous people.
The kid hadn’t forgotten the confrontation this quickly. He was still plenty scared. He hadn’t gotten over his hurt feelings, either, not in a wink; he might never get over them. Shepherd’s sole defense in every situation, however, was to mimic a turtle: quickly pull all the vulnerable parts under the shell, hunker down, hide in the armor of indifference.
‘I’m sorry, bro. I don’t know what got into me. No. No, that isn’t true. I know exactly what got into me. The old jimjams, the whimwhams, the old boogeyman bitin’ on my bones. I got scared, Shep. Hell, I am scared, so scared I can’t think straight. And I don’t like being scared, don’t like it one bit. It’s not something I’m used to, and so I took my frustration out on you, and I never should’ve done that.’
Shepherd shifted his weight from left foot to right, right foot to left. The expression with which he stared at his Rockports wasn’t difficult to read. He didn’t appear to be terrified anymore – anxious, yes, but at least not electrified with fright. Instead he seemed to be startled, as though surprised that anything could scare his big brother.
Dylan peered past Shepherd to the magical round gateway, at the motel bathroom for which he would never have imagined that he could feel a nostalgic yearning as intense as what swelled in his heart at this moment.
One hand visored over her eyes, squinting the length of the red tunnel, clearer to Dylan than he must be to her, Jilly looked terrified. He hoped that she remained more frightened of reaching into the tunnel than of being left behind and alone, because her arrival here on the hilltop could only complicate matters.
He poured out further effusive apologies to Shepherd, until he realized that too many mea culpas could be worse than none at all. He was salving his own conscience at the cost of making his brother nervous, essentially poking at Shep in his shell. The kid shifted more agitatedly from one foot to the other.
‘Anyway,’ Dylan said, ‘the stupid thing is, I shouted at you because I wanted you to tell me how you got here – but I already knew somehow you must have done it yourself, some new wild talent of your own. I don’t understand the mechanics of what you’ve done. Even you probably don’t grasp the mechanics of it any more than I understand how I feel a psychic trace on a door handle, how I read the spoor. But I knew the rest of what must’ve happened before I asked.’
With an effort, Dylan silenced himself. The surest way to calm Shepherd was to stop jabbering at him, stop overloading him with sensory input, grant him a little quiet.
In the barest breath of ocean-scented breeze, the grass stirred as languidly as seaweed in deep watery gardens. Gnats nearly as tiny as dust motes circled lazily through the air.
High in the summer sky, a hawk glided on thermal currents, in search of field mice three hundred feet below.
At a distance, traffic on the coast highway raised a susurration so faint that even the feeble breeze sometimes erased the sound. When the growl of a single engine rose out of the background murmur, Dylan shifted his attention from the hunting hawk to the graveled driveway and saw a motorcycle approaching his house.