By the light of the moon

part of their family.
    Staring through Dylan at young Shep, their mother said, 'It's
okay, sweetheart. You're not alone. Never alone. Dylan will always
take care of you.'
    In the story of her life, Death placed his comma, and she was
gone.
    'I love you,' Dylan said to her, the doubly dead, speaking
across the river of the past ten years and across that other river
that has an even more distant shore than the banks of time.
    Although he'd been shaken to his deepest foundations by bearing
witness to her death, he had been equally shaken by her final
words: You're not alone. Never alone. Dylan will always take
care of you.
    He was deeply moved to hear her express such confidence in his
character as a brother and as a man.
    Yet he trembled when he thought of the nights he had lain awake,
emotionally exhausted from a difficult day with Shepherd, stewing
in self-pity. Discouragement – at worst, despondency –
had been as close as he'd ever gotten to despair; but in those
darker moments, he'd argued with himself that Shep would be better
off in what the masters of euphemism called 'a loving,
professional-care environment.'
    He knew there would have been no shame in finding a first-rate
facility for Shep, and knew also that his commitment to his brother
came at a cost to his own happiness that psychologists would
declare indicative of an emotional disorder. In truth he regretted
this life of service at some point every day, and he supposed that
in his old age he might feel bitterly that he had wasted too many
years.
    Yet such a life had its special rewards – not the least of
which was this discovery that he had fulfilled his mother's faith
in him. His perseverance with Shepherd, all these years, suddenly
seemed to have an uncanny dimension, as if he'd somehow known about
the pledge his dying mother had made in his name, although Shepherd
had never mentioned it. He could almost believe that she had come
to him in dreams, which he did not remember, and in his sleep had
spoken to him of her love for him and of her confidence in his
sense of duty.
    For ten years, if not longer, Dylan had thought he understood
the frustrations with which Shepherd lived, had thought he fully
grasped the chronic sense of helplessness in the face of
overwhelming forces with which an autistic person daily struggled.
Until now, however, his understanding had been woefully incomplete.
Not until he had been required to stand by helplessly and watch his
mother shot, had tried to hold her in her dying moment and could
not, had longed to speak with her before she passed but couldn't
make himself heard – not until this terrible moment had he
felt a powerlessness like that with which his brother had always
lived. Kneeling beside his mother, riveted by her glazed eyes,
Dylan shook with humiliation, with fear, with a rage that could not
be vented because it had no single and no easy object, a rage at
his weakness and at the way things were and always would be .
A scream of anger built in him, but he didn't let it out because,
displaced in time, his shout would go largely unheard – and
also because this scream, once begun, would be difficult to
stop.
    Not much blood. Be thankful for that.
    And she didn't linger. Suffered little.
    Then he realized what ghastly spectacle must come next.
'No.'
    * * *
    Holding Shepherd close, looking over his shoulder, Jilly watched
Lincoln Proctor with a loathing that heretofore she had been able
to work up only for her father at his meanest. And it didn't matter
that ten years hence, Proctor would be a smoking carcass in the
ruins of her Coupe DeVille: She loathed him bitterly and none the
less.
    Shot fired, he returned the pistol to the shoulder holster under
his leather jacket. He appeared to be confident of his
marksmanship.
    From a coat pocket he removed a pair of latex gloves and worked
his hands into them, all the while watching ten-year-old Shep.
    Even to Jilly, who knew how to read the subtleties of expression
in Shepherd's guarded face, the boy appeared to be unmoved by his
mother's death. This couldn't be the case, for ten years later he
had brought them back in time to bear witness; in his older
incarnation, he'd come to this scene with palpable dread, repeating Shep is brave .
    Features slack, no tremor at the mouth, without tears, the boy
turned from his mother's body. He walked to the nearest corner,
where he stood staring at the meeting of the walls.
    Overwhelmed by traumatic experience, he reduced his