Free This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley

have been tumbling from the clouds. Like angels.

Chapter 13
    In Father Toibin’s office Duncan sits in the large leather-backed chair and looks at the way the light gleams off the rosary beads Father Toibin fingers in his hands. The large sleeves of his hemp-brown robe work their way forward, covering his hands, and he grunts, rolls the sleeves up, pushes them back to his elbows. His forearms are thin, freckled, and thick-tendoned, as Duncan imagines a miner’s would be, someone who ate little and yet worked hard: sinew and muscle tightly bound to the bone, a hard, angular body shaped by malnutrition, wasted lungs, and grueling, contorted working spaces. When Father Toibin holds things, the tendons clench and unclench, rise up on his thin arms.
    It is a large, high-ceilinged, sparsely decorated room. At the front of it, high upon the pale terra-cotta wall, a wooden cross blackened with age, which, like a sundial, sunlight moves across throughout the day. A beetle knocks in the wall and the room suddenly seems very small.
    Are you okay, Duncan? Father Toibin asks, and Duncan nods, looks back down to the letters in his hands and reads them again, as if he might find something more in them. There are eight in all, written on blue-lined stationery. The older ones have yellowed slightly, and the envelopes he pulls them from are dry and translucent. The paper smells of bourbon and stale cigarette smoke and there is a perfume also that in the manner of camphor, storax, and cascarilla—the burnt and smoking incense of Mass—he finds comforting, and yet these are smells that he cannot associate with the image of the woman he has in his head.
    His mother has very little to say other than to ask how he is and at other times merely to note that a small check is enclosed and that she will send more when she can. In one of the oldest letters, there’s an article from
Opera
magazine praising one of her performances, but no picture of her, and on the bottom, scribbled in the margin in perfect cursive:
So that you know who I was, love, Maggie
. Duncan tries to fight his disappointment and frustration but feels it pressing at him, falling leaden in his stomach and leaving it hollowed-out. Father Toibin was right in telling him not to have false hope or expectation, but that doesn’t make it any easier. He wants to smile and assure Father Toibin that everything is fine, that it is exactly as he said it would be, and now he can move on.
    As if sensing this, Father Toibin looks at him and Duncan sits up straight in the chair and smiles, and though it is forced—he feels on the verge of crying—he hopes he can convince Father Toibin otherwise.
    Thank you, he says and pauses briefly, waits for the emotion filling his throat to pass. Thank you for showing me her letters.
    What is it, Duncan? I know this is hard. What is it you’re not letting me see?
    Duncan stares at the strange, unfamiliar handprint, at her name, which until this moment he has never known, and the place where she once lived, had lived for years without him.
    Maggie Bright
    34 Divisadero Street
    San Francisco, CA 94114
    Nothing, he says. He shakes his head, but then has to lower it so that Father Toibin can’t see his face and then Father Toibin is at his side and he rests his head against his shoulder and lets the tears come, for somehow now it does feel inevitable and irresolute: He has no power to alter or change the present or the past. His mother left him here for a reason, because she no longer wanted him, and nothing in the world, not prayers—no matter how much he prayed—or hope, would ever change that.

Chapter 14
    After Saturday collation the Brothers direct the children to clear the table and wash and dry their plates in the kitchen sink. There is the clatter of tin cups and plates and the thumping bilge pumping of children submerging hollow vessels in the basin. The children and Brothers move about in seeming bedlam, each