This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley Read Free Book Online Page B

curls above their heads through the ridged, tinctured glass. Duncan can hear children in the playing field. Others helping the Brothers in the gardens.
    I hate my mother, Billy says, and for a moment Duncan is convinced that he has misheard him, and he laughs and Billy stares at him.
    What are you laughing at?
    You, saying you hate your mother. That’s funny.
    But Billy merely stares at him, and it is the first time Duncan has seen such anger in his eyes. He knows that Billy is suddenly creating a picture of his mother in his mind, the mother who abandoned him, and because his love is so great, so too is his hurt—the betrayal that he believes, wants to believe, he will never forgive. And even as Duncan understands this, he is also confused and startled by it.
    Shut your mouth, shit-ass! My mother isn’t important. She doesn’t matter. It’s my dad that’s going to come back for me. He’s going to be wearing his uniform and his medals and he’s going to introduce me to all the men he saved and he’ll tell them I’m his son and if it wasn’t for them, he would have been with me and just how lucky they are … And then, although he continues to glare at Duncan, Billy seems to run out of words.
    Billy, Julie begins, and reaches out to touch him, but he slaps her hand away.
    Sunlight fades from the room and the darker hues of painted blue upon the ceiling take prominence and Billy, Julie, and Duncan watch, stilled, as the room turns to night. The painted clouds fade into the background and the brushed stars merge in glittering cadence with the sudden nightscape visible through the skylight, the row of twelve double-arched windows that encircle the top of the dome. Duncan feels a thickening in his throat, a constriction as if he might cry. Billy has never been angry at him before.
    I’m sorry, Billy, he says.
    Why? My dad’s coming to get me. Ain’t nothing sorry about that, fuckwad. You’ll see.

Chapter 10
    May 1981
    After Vespers and collation, NBC’s
Saturday Night at the Movies
or ABC’s
Movie of the Week
plays on the wide color console in the priests’ lounge. Officially the children aren’t allowed in the priests’ quarters except on Movie Night, which is usually on Thursday when there are no Holy Days of Obligation, but Julie, Billy, and Duncan often find a way to sneak behind the large settee that crowds the room before the priests have made their way from chapel or the dining hall, and this is where they’ll be when
Saturday Night at the Movies
begins playing.
    But this night is different. Instead of a recent release, the television is playing a special on the Apollo lunar landing. They peer from behind the feather-down pillows thick with cat hair at the edge of the settee, and Duncan is struck by the sharp, melancholy black-and-white images on the screen. There is the young President Kennedybefore a crowd of students at Rice University, his mouth working without sound. Brother Wilhelm fiddles with the cantankerous, loose knob, and Duncan hears John F. Kennedy’s voice:
    We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
    We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard …
    Billy nudges Duncan. What is he saying?
    Shhhhh. I’m trying to hear.
    We shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced …
    Duncan, Billy says, tugging at his sleeve.
    It’s the moon, Billy. They’re sending a man to the moon.
    â€¦ on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body.
    I know, Duncan,