By the light of the moon

the right decisions and work hard...
but, yeah, I believe all of us can shape our futures if we apply
enough willpower.'
    Still suppressing her frustration, keeping her tone light, she
said, 'Then why aren't you a famous billionaire artist?'
    'I don't want to be famous or rich.'
    'Everyone wants to be famous and rich.'
    'Not me. Life is complicated enough.'
    'Money simplifies.'
    'Money complicates,' he disagreed, 'and fame. I just want to
paint well, and to paint better every day.'
    'So,' she said, as the lid flew off her boiling pot of sarcasm,
'you're gonna imagine yourself a future where you're the next
Vincent van Gogh, and just by wishing on a star, you'll one day see
your work hanging in museums.'
    'I'm sure going to try, anyway. Vincent van Gogh – except
I'm imagining a future in which I keep both ears.'
    Dylan's persistent good humor in the face of dire adversity had
an effect on Jilly no less distressing than the damage that would
be wrought with sandpaper vigorously applied to the tongue. 'And to
make you get real about our situation, I'm imagining a
future where I have to kick your cojones into your
esophagus.'
    'You're a very angry person, aren't you?'
    'I'm a scared person.'
    'Scared right now, sure, but always angry.'
    'Not always. Fred and I were having a lovely relaxed evening
before all this started.'
    'You must have some pretty heavy unresolved conflicts from your
childhood.'
    'Oh, wow, you get more impressive by the minute, don't you? Now
you're licensed to provide psychoanalysis when you're not painting
circles around van Gogh.'
    'Pump up your blood pressure any further,' Dylan warned, 'and
you'll pop a carotid artery.'
    Jilly strained a shriek of vexation through clenched teeth,
because by swallowing it unexpressed, she might have imploded.
    'All I'm saying,' Dylan pressed in an infuriatingly reasonable
tone of voice, 'is that maybe if we think positive, the worst will be behind us. And for sure, there's nothing to be
gained by negative thinking.'
    She almost swung her legs off the seat, almost stomped her feet
against the floorboard in a fit of frustration before she
remembered that poor defenseless Fred would be trampled. Instead,
she drew a deep breath and confronted Dylan: 'If it's so easy, why
have you let Shepherd live such a miserable existence all these
years? Why haven't you imagined that he just magically comes out of
his autism and leads a normal life?'
    'I have imagined it,' he replied softly and with a poignancy
that revealed a plumbless sorrow over the condition of his brother.
'I've imagined it intensely, vividly, with all my heart, every day
of my life, since as far back as I can remember.'
    Infinite sky. Trackless desert. A vastness had been created
inside the SUV to equal the daunting immensities of darkness and
vacuum beyond these doors and windows, a vastness of her making.
Succumbing to fear and frustration, she had unthinkingly crossed a
line between legitimate argument and unwarranted meanness, needling
Dylan O'Conner where she knew that he was already sorest. The
distance between them, although but an arm's length, seemed now
unbridgeable.
    Both in the glare of the oncoming headlights and in the softer
pearlescent glow of the instrument panel, Dylan's eyes glimmered as
though he had repressed so many tears for so long that within his
gaze were pent-up oceans. As Jilly studied him with more sympathy
than she'd felt previously, even dim light proved bright enough to
clarify that what had resembled sorrow might be a more acute pain:
grief, long-sustained and unrelenting grief, as if his brother were
not autistic, but dead and lost forever.
    She didn't know what to say to make amends for her meanness.
Whether she spoke in a whisper or in a shout, the usual words of an
apology seemed insufficiently powerful to carry across the gulf
that she had created between herself and Dylan O'Conner.
    She felt like a pile of toilet treasure.
    Infinite sky. Trackless desert. The bee hum of tires and the
drone of engine wove a white noise that she quickly tuned out,
until she might as well have been sitting in the dead silence that
abides on the surface of an airless moon. She couldn't hear even
the faint tide of her breathing or the slogging of her heart, or
the singing of her old church choir that occasionally came to her
in memory when she felt alone and adrift. She had not possessed a
voice fine enough to perform a solo, but she'd shown a talent for
harmony, and among her choral sisters