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

head lowered against the rain. I’m jumping the next train out of here.
    Duncan stops as Billy yanks his hand free and the cruiser flashes its light in their eyes. Fuck you, coppers! Billy shouts and is off running down the street with Duncan caught in the cruiser’s spotlight and not knowing what to do as the car door opens and Billy is a small, hunched shape scrambling toward the darkness of the rail yards with a cop in a shimmering black slicker chasing after him. Beyond is the blackness of unlit pastureland stretching out toward theplains, and when Duncan looks about him, the dead children are gone.
    That night in the Stockholdt County Children’s Facility, Duncan and Billy lie in beds next to each other as a storm moves across the country. Duncan listens to the sound of a dozen boys breathing, pulls the blankets about him, and cranes his head to look out at the storm building in the distance and then the wind and rain as it presses against the glass. It is cold. He glances at the sleeping shapes around him, the small bulk of them huddled in the darkness. The top of a head, a tuft of ratty hair, pokes out here and there but faces are mostly covered, hidden. The room collects and holds their mist-breath; it fogs the air and the glass. A boy groans and then farts wetly in his sleep.
    We almost made it, Billy says, and when Duncan looks over at him, Billy is grinning, but his voice is thick with phlegm and his breathing sounds shallow. Duncan watches as his chest slowly rises and falls.
    He smiles. We almost did.
    After a moment: Thanks for taking me with you.
    Duncan shrugs. I wouldn’t have made it without you.
    A flame flickers in the dark; there is a raspy breath followed by a cough and the flame is extinguished. At the far end of the room, at a desk in a small wire cage that separates the room from the hall and the bathrooms beyond, sits a figure smoking. The cigarette flares and dies, its tip glowing amber, and the smell of cigarette smoke carries the length of the room.
    Sorry that we have to go back, Duncan says.
    Billy closes his eyes and his head nods. It’s okay. That’s what happens. It’s like the astronauts and the moon.
    What is?
    Getting there, that’s what’s important even if you can’t get back.They knew that and they went anyway. It’s why they went on those other space missions as well, the ones we never hear about. Them and the Russians. If we’d jumped on a train, there’s no way we’d be coming back—we’d be just like the astronauts, like Michael Collins and the rest of them.
    Billy continues to smile with his eyes closed. Imagine if we had made it, Duncan, he murmurs. Just imagine that.
    Duncan watches lightning flashing beyond the wire mesh of the windows and thinks of Michael Collins alone aboard his fiery coffinship hurtling farther out into the dark, forever chasing the curve of the earth and already emerging into daylight upon its far side.
    Goodnight, Billy, he says.
    Goodnight, Duncan.
    Duncan waits until Billy is asleep and then slowly he lowers himself into the bed, lies awake staring at the ceiling and the walls. He listens to the thrum and sigh of boys breathing as the storm lashes at the trees outside, shakes the window grates in their posts, while the lone figure in his cage wheezes and chokes slowly on his cigarettes and holds his vigil through the long hours of the night.
    The next day, when the police car pulls up to the monastery gates, Father Toibin is standing there, waiting, his brow deeply furrowed as he squints into the sun, the wind whipping his black pants about his legs. And in this moment he seems to Duncan old but as immutable as the Iron Range beyond, with its hills of hardwoods, conifers, and spruces. Duncan slides down in his seat, wishing to be invisible, and Billy begins to cry softly, now that they are back, so Duncan takes his hand and squeezes it tenderly and tries to smile to comfort him. But when