This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley Page B

grasps at his shoulder with a thin hand. It doesn’t matter anyway, Duncan, she says. She’ll leave you again. She will. It’s what mothers do.

Chapter 19
    Waiting, Duncan stands on the hill and looks out over the valley. The sun is high, and despite a breeze pushing the long grass this way and that, the air is thick. A small herd of cows lazily chews cud, others flick their tails as they drink from the stream. Cicadas thrum loudly in the trees of the arboretum. Upon the pond the heat of the day shimmers; ducks have been attacking one another all day, and their feathers drift through the air like flax.
    Upon the far slope a row of wire bales trembles, flashes refracted sunlight in Morse code. He sees the dust cloud first, and then the car as it speeds through the valley and up the winding road toward the Home, the dust cloud behind it growing larger and more violent. As it comes nearer, it takes shape: a black Chevy Impala from the late sixties, a decommissioned police car with the outline of the original star-shaped emblems upon its doors, blacker than the rest of the faded metal, and it buckles and bottoms out on the rutted, potholed road spiraling up to the Home.
    After she steps from the car and stretches her long body, she pauses and surveys the land—isolated farmhouses upon yellowed siderite fields, the dark Iron Range stretching like a storm cloud entrenched across the horizon—and then squints up at the sun. Her skin is so white it looks as if it has never seen the sun, and the wind has turned her hair in knots: it’s as red and as wild as flame. Something in her shifts, something indecipherable and almost undetectable—he senses it in her posture, in the conflict of softness and tension that comes to her face, and he wonders if it is fear—and then she straightens her skirt, reaches back into the car for a wide-brimmed sun hat, which she places upon her head, and takes a determined step toward the gate of the monastery. And that is when she sees him. She stops and the world seems to tilt about her.
    Duncan, she says, and he wonders how she knows it is him.
    She crosses the dirt driveway and takes his hand and he searches her face for some truth, some sign of fear or hesitation. Her eyes are the same blue as his own.
    I’m your mother, she says. You probably don’t remember me—and she laughs as if at the absurdity of it all, and Duncan smiles. From the valley below a wind cock clanging hollow on tin, the faraway thock of axes on wood. Within the monastery’s walls children are running and calling to one another and he wonders if Julie can see him from her window.
    So, she says slowly, testing the words for the both of them. Shall we go home? Would you like that?
    Yes, he nods, yes, wanting to say
Mom
yet knowing that he can’t, not just yet, and then she pulls him to her and he holds on tightly, smelling things he will only later be able to identify as her: patchouli, apple-scented shampoo, the pungent red burley of her hand-rolled cigarettes, and strangely, oil and lye-heavy industrial soap of the type men who spend their days working on engines use, as if she had just stepped out of an auto repair shop, and he wonders if this smell comes from the man who might be his father or if her car brokedown on the way here and whether it is capable of taking them the vast distance across America to San Francisco and where he imagines home, whatever such a place is, must be.
    Beneath the Romanesque arches of the main entrance Brother Canice and Father Toibin are waiting with his bags, a bulging tattered brownish-yellow suitcase held together by old clasps spotted with rust and his army duffel bag. There are some of the boys from his dormitory and other children with whom he has shared classes. Most of them look bored or indifferent and he knows that Father Toibin has arranged this for him. Julie stands slightly to the side as if unsure of what to do or say. The sound of