A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher Read Free Book Online Page A

please see to it that this is hand-delivered,” he said as she approached us. “Use a Western Union courier at the airport. Then meet us at the plane.” He stood up.
    Turning on her heel, she left without a word.
    “Plane? Where are we going?” I said. Despite all I had heard, and the letter I had signed, and the fact my fear had momentarily been supplanted by the enormous curiosity the old man’s story had aroused, I still had it in my head that I would have the option—however slim—of slipping away if I wanted to. That I had an out. Thinking ahead, I had imagined another car ride; it had not occurred to me we might travel a great distance that very day.
    “We’re going to Las Vegas,” he replied, the s’s soft off his tongue. “And from now on you must call me Uncle Junius. And you must try to trust me. I apologize to you for the way you were brought here: while under my roof, you will never again be held against your will. You will be free to come and go as you please. I would ask only that you not attempt to contact your aunt again. It will serve no useful purpose—for her, or us—as I hope you understand now. Can you promise me that?”
    I nodded slowly.
    “Good.” He reached into the same pocket that had held the birth certificate. “This is your mother,” he said quietly.
    He handed me a color snapshot of a pale thin woman, very pretty, with long blond hair parted cleanly and grazing her shoulders. Wearing a red sleeveless dress, she was smiling in sunlight against an expanse of yellow sand, one of her eyes squinted half shut. The shadow of the photographer—a tall, broad-shouldered man with long legs—extended into the upper right-hand corner of the frame. And at her side the young woman was clutching a black hat, a man’s hat, which he must have handed to her just before he snapped her picture.
    “I never learned his identity,” he went on, “but I do know that the man who took this photograph must have been your father.”
    “My father?” I had wondered so often about my real parents over the years that it seemed incredible I might actually be holding tangible evidence of their existence. An image of my mother and the shadow of my father. It wasn’t exactly like one of those memories Alma had told me about, that she had of her father. But it was close enough: if that shadow really belonged to my father, then this image would constitute a memory of his. One to which I was suddenly privy, and I felt a certain intimacy in that.
    The image of my mother, that shadow, and the black hat combined to fill a place in my imagination where, until then, there had only been a vacuum. For a long time, they would be all I had of my father.

6
The Hospital Ship
    The band of blood across the waist of my white uniform, where I leaned against the X-ray table, had dried and darkened by the time I got off duty and went on deck. The nurses had their own sundeck, which was off limits to all other personnel. By day, we could stretch out in the blistering sun or play cards at a fold-up table. At night, we stood at the railing smoking ganja and drinking White Angels—iced gin with a dash of bitters—from a stainless steel thermos with a red cross on its cap and US NAVY down the side.
    I had scrubbed down quickly and still had blood under my nails. Sharline had bitten her nails all the way down and so didn’t have this problem, I observed as she expertly rolled a joint. She stood close beside me, droning a song under her breath and never taking her eyes off the distant jungle that was lighting up, as it did every night, with flares and rockets—blue, green, and gold—like dragonflies whirring insanely in all directions.
    Sharline shared a ten-by-ten cabin with double bunks with me and two other nurses. From Tulsa, Oklahoma, she was an operating room nurse, with five years of training, on her second tour of duty. I was an X-ray technician, the lowest rung of military nurse, trained in six months, with a