Harper picked up his hand and automatically she picked up hers, too, then stared at it for a few minutes before seeing the run she already had: nine, ten, jack of hearts. She laid it down in a fan, drew, then discarded, covering up the offending black ace with a three. She looked at Harper over the top of her cards and met his eyes, which were already on her. Deep lines punctuated his face, and she tried to read them like a sentence. Three crooked dashes above his eyebrows, parentheses around his mouth, half a dozen hyphens traveling outward from the corners of his eyes, like the rays of a sun. A thin white scar running through one sandy eyebrow and another on his chin, cutting through the stubble.
“What are you thinking right now?” Harper asked, and the question startled her with its intimacy. It was the kind of question a lover might ask. She felt suddenly exposed and blinked back an unexpected film of moisture from her eyes, tears she was unwilling to shed in another person’s presence. She waited until her throat unclenched and she could be sure the timbre of her voice wouldn’t give her away before she answered.
“I was just thinking about Goldstone,” she said. “About when I lived there as a kid. My mother worked in the signal processing center.”
Harper kept looking at her. His eyes were a pale, steely blue. “Like mother, like daughter,” he said. It was his turn, but he didn’t draw. He was waiting for her to continue.
“She taught me solitaire one summer. I already knew how to play, but I wanted the attention, so I let her teach me again.” Sully arranged, then rearranged her cards. “It’s funny, I would’ve killed for a few minutes of her attention. She was all work back then. Before she got married and had two more kids and stopped working entirely. But by then I was older and the twins were more interesting and…I don’t know. I guess I didn’t need her as much anymore, and she didn’t need me, either.”
Harper slowly took a card, glanced at it, and laid it back down.
“How old were you?” he asked.
“I was ten when she got married and my stepfather moved us back to Canada, where she was from. He was her high school sweetheart, before she left for grad school and ended up at Goldstone with me. I don’t know, I think she just gave up at a certain point, like she expected everything to get easier, as I got older, as she found firmer ground at the DSN. Instead it got harder. She couldn’t catch a break. And there was this guy, my stepdad, this perfectly nice guy waiting in the wings, still pining after all that time, calling, writing letters. Finally she just…gave up. Quit her job. Went north. Married him, finally. The twins showed up really fast after that; I was eleven when they were born, I think.”
The dashes in Harper’s forehead fluttered and drew up toward his hairline. She stared at her cards so she didn’t have to see his look of sympathy. Stop talking, she reprimanded herself. It all sounded so simple out loud—an ordinary childhood, marriage and babies—but Sully was still thinking of leaving Goldstone behind for the cold loneliness of Canada. Of losing her beloved, brilliant mother to two screaming infants. Of gaining a stepfather who was kind but distant, decent but uninterested—not cruel enough to be hated, not loving enough to be loved. She remembered the telescope she and Jean used to take out into the desert in the back of their rusty green El Camino, just the two of them. They would drive with the windows down and Jean’s long hair would fill the cab, a dark tornado whipping against the sagging upholstery on the roof, reaching for the open window, trying to touch the cool, dry night.
They would set up the telescope, spread out a blanket, and stay there for hours. Jean would show her the planets, the constellations, clusters of stars, clouds of gas. Every once in a while, the ISS would spin into view, a bright, quick light. There and then gone, spinning over some other part of the world. The next day Sully would arrive at school tired but content. Her mother was showing her the universe, and school was so easy she could sleepwalk through her classes. In Canada, when her mother was married and pregnant and then consumed by the twins, Sully hauled the telescope outside by herself, onto the icy second-floor deck crowded by pine trees, their needled boughs swinging over the wooden platform and blocking her view of the horizon. The stars didn’t seem quite as clear without her mother beside her, but still the constellations comforted her. Even in the cold loneliness of this new place, she could find the map she’d grown up learning to decipher—a different latitude, but the same points of reference. Even there she could see Polaris, burning above the feathery tips of the tall pines.
“Anyway,” Sully said, but had nothing to change the subject to. Harper put down a run and discarded. “Did you—do you have brothers and sisters?” she asked, trying to fill the silence and to even the exchange of personal information, as if they were keeping score: one point for every revelation extracted.
“Yeah,” he said, but slowly, as if he weren’t sure. For a moment it seemed he wasn’t going to say anything more. “Two brothers, one sister.” Sully waited, and after a few more rounds of drawing and discarding, Harper finally went on.
“Both of my brothers are dead, but it’s too weird not to count them—one of them overdosed a few years ago and the other drowned when we were teenagers. My sister lives in Missoula with her family. Cute kids, two girls. Her husband’s a real shithead.” He snapped a run down onto the table with a mischievous grin. “You’re in trouble now, Specialist,” he said, even though she was clearly winning. She shook her head at him.
“Keep dreaming, Harper,” she said. She considered asking Harper who was the oldest sibling, but she didn’t really need to. She knew that he was without having to be told. It was the way he guided his crew, the way he nudged them along like delinquent ducklings wandering away from the group. The older brother who’d lost two of his younger siblings already. She couldn’t imagine him at the back of a crowd, and certainly not in the middle—he would always be in front, always leading, protecting those who came behind.
Sully thought of her brief and beautiful life as an only child. The taste of desert grit on her tongue, the pinpoints of light against the velvety black night. She knew that if she closed her eyes she could be there, lost in memory, lying next to her mother, tracing Ursa Minor, the first constellation she’d learned to find, their heads propped against the back tire of the El Camino—but she didn’t. She kept them open, trained on the man across from her, anchoring herself with the texture of his face, his neck, his hands. Gray had infiltrated Harper’s sandy hair, blending into the neutral tone like silver shadows. His hair had grown unkempt since the last trim, which Tal had given him months ago, when they were passing through Mars’s orbit. It stood up from his head in lopsided tufts, as if he’d just gotten out of bed. There was one emphatic curl that bobbed when he moved. Sully remembered the way her own daughter’s hair had done something similar when she was very small. It was almost impossible not to fall backward, to lose herself thinking of what she’d probably never see again.
The hand ended, and as they counted their cards Harper eked out a narrow victory. He looked relieved. “Phew,” he said. “I thought if I lost one more time I’d have to show some modesty. Not the case.”
He swept the cards into a heap and began tapping the deck together, squaring the edges. “Another?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Maybe just one more.”