By the light of the moon

jacked in,
and cruised onto the Internet. She had begun to search for sites
concerned with scientific research into enhanced brain function by
the time that Shepherd, in the bathroom, cried out 'Ding!' and the Minute Minder rang off the final second of his nine-minute
shower.
    She ruled out sites related to improving mental acuity through
vitamin therapy and diet. Frankenstein had not seemed to be the
kind of guy who'd been devoted to natural foods and homeopathic
medicine.
    In addition, she had no interest in sites related to yoga and to
other forms of meditation. Even the most brilliant scientist
couldn't take the principles of a meditative discipline, liquify
them, and inject them as though they were flu vaccine.
    Showered, hair still damp, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and a
clean Wile E. Coyote T-shirt, Shepherd returned from the
bathroom.
    Dylan followed him for a couple steps and said, 'Jilly, can you
keep an eye on Shep? Be sure he doesn't... go anywhere.'
    'Sure.'
    Two additional straight-backed chairs faced each other across a
small table near the window. She brought one of them to the desk,
intending for Shep to sit beside her.
    Instead, he ignored her invitation and went to a corner of the
bedroom near the desk, where he stood with his back to the
room.
    'Shep, are you all right?'
    He didn't reply. The wallpaper – beige, yellow, and
pale-green stripes – had been sloppily joined where the walls
met. Shepherd moved his head slowly up, slowly down, as though
studying the error in the pattern match.
    'Sweetie, is something wrong?'
    Having twice surveyed the paperhanger's shoddy work from floor
to ceiling, Shep stared straight ahead at the juncture of walls.
His arms had hung slack at his sides. Now he raised his right arm
as if he were swearing an oath: bent at the elbow, hand beside his
face, palm flat and facing forward. After a moment, he began to
wave as though he were not staring into a corner but through a
window at someone he knew.
    Dylan came out of the bathroom again, this time to get a change
of clothes from his suitcase, and Jilly said, 'Who's he waving
at?'
    'He's not really waving,' Dylan explained. 'It's spasmodic, the
equivalent of a facial tic. He can sometimes do it for hours.'
    On further consideration, Jilly realized that Shepherd's wrist
had gone limp and that his hand actually flopped loosely, not in
the calculated wave of a good-bye or a greeting.
    'Does he think he's done something wrong?' she asked.
    'Wrong? Oh, because he's standing in the corner? No. He's just
feeling overwhelmed at the moment. Too much input recently. He
can't cope with all of it.'
    'Who can?'
    'By facing into a corner,' Dylan said, 'he's limiting sensory
input. Reducing his world to that narrow space. It helps to calm
him. He feels safer.'
    'Maybe I need a corner of my own,' Jilly said.
    'Just keep an eye on him. He knows I don't want him to... go
anywhere. He's a good kid. Most of the time he does what he should.
But I'm just afraid that this folding thing... maybe he won't be
able to control it any more than he can control that hand right
now.'
    Shep waved at the wall, waved, waved.
    Adjusting the position of her laptop, turning her chair at an
angle to the desk in order to keep Shep in view while she worked,
Jilly said to Dylan, 'You can count on me.'
    'Yeah. I know I can.'
    A tenderness in his voice compelled her attention.
    His forthright stare had the same quality of assessment and
speculation that had characterized the surreptitious glances with
which he had studied her after they had refueled at that service
station in Globe, the previous night.
    When Dylan smiled, Jilly realized that she had been smiling
first, that his smile was in answer to hers.
    'You can count on me,' Shep said.
    They looked at the kid. He still faced the corner, still
waved.
    'We know we can count on you, buddy,' Dylan told his brother.
'You never let me down. So you stay here, okay? Only here, no there . No folding.'
    For the time being, Shep had said all that he had to say.
    'I better get showered,' Dylan said.
    'Nine minutes,' Jilly reminded him.
    Smiling again, he returned to the bathroom with a change of
clothes.
    With Shepherd always in her peripheral vision, glancing up at
him more directly from time to time, Jilly traveled the Net in
search of sites related to the enhancement of brain function,
mental acuity, memory ... anything that might lead her to
Frankenstein.
    By the time that Dylan returned, shaved and showered, in