Prologue
1966—THE MANNED SPACECRAFT CENTER, DR. ALLEN GIBBS’S EMPTY OFFICEHouston, Texas
I blew a piston of smoke through the open window and took another draw on its heels, my eyes fixed on the waxing moon hanging high above. The sill dug softly into my elbows as I drank the fresh air.
I was lucky the door had been unlocked, and luckier still the random room I’d chosen had a window. Beyond the door I’d shut tight behind me, the office-wide Christmas party carried on with a crush of seasonal noise and bluster I hadn’t been doused in since I was a kid. My parents were the only ones of their friends who had gone and had a child amid the heaving groundswell of the 1940s. Having a daughter bouncing around like a free agent didn’t deter Mother from throwing her Christmas party in excess every year. With the other lab men and their wives on leave from Los Alamos for only a precious handful of days, for one night a year our house was a tiny nucleus of normalcy warmed to bursting by laughter, spiced wine, and the popping of paper crackers I had helped make at the kitchen table the week prior.
I couldn’t remember much from my childhood, but I could remember those parties.
I had one vivid memory left of my father. I turned it over in my head as I stared up at the moon, out at the sky, along the endless stars like batter flung against the scooped-out bowl of the night. As the only kid at the Christmas parties, I’d gotten good at entertaining myself. After enough stolen sips of amaretto made my lips pucker, tasting nothing like I had hoped, I sought curiosities beyond the bar cart or record cabinet.
I got great at eavesdropping.
I remembered standing just outside the kitchen archway while Daddy and four friends chipped ice from the freezer into their glasses and talked about a rare vacation one of them had managed to take to a dude ranch farther north.
When I peeked around the corner, I saw Daddy was smiling. His smiles were rare and precious to me, like the annual appearance of Mother’s spiced rum cake. He was leaning languidly on a friend’s shoulder, all of them dotted with little blue pins on their lapels, as though they’d been marked with bingo blotters, and he pointed at one of the other men. He swayed a little where he stood.
If they’re going to drop another, he had announced, I’d better be far away from here. That’s all I’ll say about that. You know what I mean.
The others had chuckled and patted his shoulders and cheeks as they continued making their drinks. For the rest of that night, until I got tired and Daddy carried me carefully to my bedroom, the smell of his aftershave strong on his collar, an incessant itch of apprehension had buzzed under my skin.
The single moment was as clear to me in Dr. Gibbs’s window as it had been when I was seven years old. I leaned forward onto the windowsill again, sticking my head out to breathe the light December air of our solitary stretch of Houston. The respite from humidity at this time of year dug me even deeper into those childhood thoughts of parties long past, the shapes and colors of them in the desert like vibrant movement through frosted glass.
New Mexico was nothing but a dream from here.
The door swung open behind me. A brief shout of the chatter outside underscored by Connie Francis wailing about “Baby’s First Christmas” tugged me around and quieted again as whoever came in after me pulled the door shut.
“Occupied,” I blurted.
The intruder looked far from offended. His tipsy smile beamed, and a thick pair of Buddy Holly glasses framed eyes that could have been sharp in their viridian shimmer if not for whatever battalion of cocktails swirled in his belly. His tie was loosened at his neck, his sport coat sleeves rucked up messily to his elbows, and he sauntered over to lean on the windowsill beside me as though I had invited him.
He waved an easy hand. “This isn’t the restroom.”
His hair was a sandy blond, still smoothly combed and parted despite his dishevelment. From so near, I could smell the faint touch of a woodsy cologne overpowered by sweet vermouth. The man snickered as his face brightened with mischief—he glanced over his shoulder and shot me a conspiratorial look as if we were already friends. “Although this is Gibbs’s office, might as well be a shithouse.”
The long taffy-pull of his voice was native to these parts of Texas, all honey-sticky vowels and back-of-the-tongue purl. My interloper fixed me a smile just sideways enough to be charming.
“I’m bothering you,” he said plainly, like it was some sort of achievement.
I gave a tight shrug. “Not really.”
My cigarette had one last draw in it before I stubbed it out on the sill. I dropped it into the full ashtray to my right. Mine was the only one with a rind of lipstick on its filter.
I fussed with the lay of my collar and smoothed my skirt, wishing I was still alone so I could tug at the band of my left nylon, which had worked itself askew. I held in a tight sigh. “Are you escaping, too?” I asked the man, looking at him in my periphery.
He glanced back at the door and shrugged. “Needed some air, and Gibbs won’t ever shut the hell up about winning the straw-draw for the office with the window. So. Figured I knew where to try first.”
I peered at the dark sky again. I glanced back at the stranger to find he had followed my gaze with a dreamy look on his face. The lines of his cheeks had softened. He had a proud mouth, a handsome set to his jaw . . . I forced myself to quit watching him and fixed my eyes back up at the moon, that heavy gaze of one pearly eye.
“Ain’t she something?” the man murmured. I swallowed a bundle of nerves and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. It curled in on itself, tickling the heel of my jaw. I ignored the shiver along my back.
“Must be some reason everyone wants to be first to land.”
The man turned to me with a sideways grin. “Gimme some of yours.”
I couldn’t help the spasmodic little smile that chased its way onto my face as an answer to his. “What do you mean?”
“Some of your reasons—why would you want to go up there?”
I found my eyes searching habitually down to his breast pocket where a name tag might be, but of course, it was a party so we had all shed our skins for the evening. “You’re on Apollo,” I guessed, and correctly: he puffed up with pride.
“Norman,” he said as he stuck out a hand, “call me Norm. Navigator.”
I took his hand in mine and shook it with a firm grip. “Anne, call me Annie. Secretary.”
The man, Norm, gave me another grin that wasn’t so giddy this time. A fizzing sensation prickled my mind like a brief and dazzling searchlight.
“So, Annie secretary,” Norm said, “why do you want to go to the moon?”
I leaned through the window again and thought for a moment. “I suppose from up there, everything down here would feel so . . . manageable. As though I could reach out”—I stretched my hand up, pretending to pinch the moon between my thumb and middle finger—“and pluck the Earth out of the sky to keep it safe in my pocket.”
Norm turned to look at me, his expression open and wondrous. He was even more handsome than I had thought at first glance. “And what makes you think Earth needs keeping safe?”
His voice was soft, as though we were sharing secrets. The fact it’s so fragile, I wanted to say, the fact we could crack in half at any moment—do you know anything about the bomb?
But of course Norm knew about the bomb. He was a rocket man, only just the other side of that work’s coin. I gave him a wry smile instead. “What makes you think it doesn’t?”
Norm leaned forward and kissed me square on the mouth.
I hadn’t kissed a boy since I was sixteen: poor Mickey Fields in his father’s Thunderbird, whacking his knee on the gearshift when he tried to lean forward and feel me up after I told him it was okay.
This was different. This felt . . . right.
Norm held us there for a moment, our lips still. “Sorry,” he breathed when he pulled back. I was left with the pleasant cloy of cherries from his drinks.
I stared at him. “It’s okay.”
Norm peered at me so closely, honesty eddying in those green, green eyes. “Do we know each other?” he murmured. A swooping sensation flew through my body. I ignored it.
“I don’t know.” My lips brushed his as he leaned into me again, as though testing whether I was just a mirage from the bottom of several Manhattans.
“I’m pretty sure I’m drunk,” he said. I snorted as I tried to swallow a laugh, which made his shoulders jump against mine with his own laughter.
He came forward and kissed me again with a pitch almost like another apology. I gripped his elbow, warm solidity through his rumpled sleeves, and tried to speak back without saying anything, either: This is good. You know what I mean.
01:00
1948—THE APODACA HOUSE, THE BACK GARDENSanta Fe, New Mexico
The far corner of the garden was filling up again. Annie didn’t know where the strange objects came from. She never knew where they came from, but even though they were a miscellany of staplers and paperweights and all sorts of scribbled notes, it was always exciting to find them.
The garden sat at the back of the house. The house on Apodaca was a cozy stack of adobe where the front yard spilled tidily through its creaky gate. Through the front door, the foyer opened up into three paths—left hall, center hall, right hall: a choice to be made every time Annie came home with her little hand held tightly in Mother’s.
Daddy was gone most days then, gone so often that Annie was missing him more regularly than seeing him. But the day after they dropped that great big something onto a great big somewhere far across the sea, Daddy had come home and knelt down in that foyer of choices and held Annie so hard she could have sworn she felt him crying.
But Daddy didn’t cry. Daddy was a grown-up. Grown-ups kept secrets, and drank drinks that tasted like matchsticks, and made sure to shut the door behind them and speak very, very softly when they argued.
Annie was very good at keeping secrets, too. She never did tell anyone else about the corner of the garden and its staplers, its paperweights, its impossible pieces of paper.
The little girl from nowhere appeared one evening when the sun was getting low and hot-heavy. Mother was in the den inside, and Annie had just picked up a typewriter eraser with the nub worn low from under the rosebushes, where she liked to hunt for treasures.
“Hello,” the girl said. Annie looked up and forgot about the eraser.
She was a little shorter than Annie. She had a pair of glasses and a pretty face that looked sort of like a young version of Fran Allison from the television. Her hair was strawberry-fair, blonder than the auburn red of Annie’s own, and instead of wearing it short at the chin like Annie did, the girl had hers long in two pretty braids. She wore a striped shirt and tan corduroy pants. Annie fiddled with the hem of her skirt and scuffed the toe of her saddle shoes on the white gravel.
“Good evening,” she said, as mother had taught her to be polite to everyone, even strangers. “My name is Annie Fisk. I’m eight years old. What’s your name?”
“I’m Diana,” the girl said with a wide, toothy grin—one of the front ones was missing in a tiny gap, and Annie burned briefly with envy. “I’m eight years old, too.”
With the camaraderie only a child could muster, Annie decided immediately that they must be the best of friends simply by virtue of being the same age. “Do you also live on Apodaca Street?” she asked, hopeful for a neighborhood kid who wasn’t practically grown up. Diana shook her head.
“No,” she said simply, and she seemed to stop herself. “I’m from far away,” she said with a touch of hesitation, as if her mother had also taught her all the right ways to say things. “Just visiting.”
Well, if she was just visiting, Annie would have to make her visit worthwhile. She stooped briefly to hunt around in the soil bed before holding up another trinket more interesting than the forgotten eraser: a tiny model rocket, patterned in black and white, which fit perfectly in the palm of her hand.
“Do you want to play spacemen?” Annie asked, and this time Diana nodded.
But when it felt they had only just begun, Diana stopped to look at a slim silver band on her wrist. A tiny clockface was worked into it. Annie thought of her mother’s cocktail bracelet, which she saved for special occasions like her Christmas parties. This must have been a special occasion for Diana.
“I have to go,” she said, and stuck out her hand; handshakes, those were also something grown-ups did. “I’ll see you again soon, okay?”
Annie took Diana’s hand and gave a firm shake, just the way Daddy taught her the first time she met his friends from the big lab. “You’ll come back?”
“Of course I’ll come back!”
Annie beamed and believed her.
An idea came in a flash—a souvenir!
Annie glanced over her shoulder to make sure Mother couldn’t see them through the sliding back door into the den. She hunted into the back of the rosebush, where the biggest blossoms were safe from the breezes and birds and still had all their petals, and snipped a billowing pink rose from its stem with her fingernails.
“Here.” Annie held it out to Diana in one flat hand while she wiped the green residue off on the side of her skirt. “So you remember where you found me.”
Diana stepped carefully over to the end of the soil plot, where the wall turned, hiding the far side of the garden from the house. She turned once in place and gave another big grin as she gently took the rose. “See you, Annie.”
Something itched at Annie’s periphery. She looked away to glance at it and blinked, finding nothing.
When she turned to ask Diana if next time she might bring the playing cards she had mentioned, Diana was gone.
“Annie, dinner!”
The patio door rolled open before Annie could scramble up the garden wall and see if Diana had somehow vaulted over it and begun tearing across the neighbors’ lawns already. How fast was she? Was everyone so fast where she came from?
“Annie?”
She managed to tear her attention away from the horizon and abandon the idea. “Coming, Mother!”
Annie straightened her skirt and made for the patio door with one last glance at the bushes, the hidden trinkets, the tall impasse of the garden wall.
Diana had said she would come again. Annie had a new friend, just for her, and she would be back soon.
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