01:001948-The Apodaca house, the back gardenSanta Fe, New MexicoThe 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.
1958-The Apodaca house, the drivewaySanta Fe, New Mexico"I
measured you," I grunted, shoving my shoulder against one last suitcase. "I know exactly how much room is in there; you didn't
grow overnight, so tell me why you won't fit now, you
son of a-"
"Annie?"
One final heave slid the clothing trunk home into its slot in the yellow Nash Rambler so endearingly ugly Mother all but jumped at the chance to get rid of it. I dusted my hands off on my hips and turned as I smeared a lock of hair off my forehead with the back of my hand. I pushed my glasses up my nose. "Yes?"
My mother was making her steady way down the front walk-the world paused for Helen Fisk, and it would wait as long as she bid it with her quiet, careful way.
"Here." Mother stopped beside me, eyeing the looming stack of luggage I had finally wrangled, and extended one hand without preamble. "It was your father's."
My eyebrows went up of their own volition. The red-varnished fingers of my mother's loose fist waited for me. I wordlessly opened my palm. A small weight, metallic but warmed by Mother's skin, dropped into my hand with surprising density.
"He always meant for this to be yours." Mother, face blank, plucked an invisible mote of dust from the edge of one sleeve. "It's small, but I think it suits you."
It was an upside-down teardrop-shaped lapel pin of shiny royal blue. At its center, an abstract jot of white lightning coming down from an eyeball shape cracked a yellow circle into pieces. The iris of the eye was a blue star ringed with red.
"This was Daddy's?" I looked up at Mother, frowning. Her expression was trained, but I saw a flash of sympathy pass through it.
"It's from Project Y."
I stared at her, my heart tightening in my chest. "Did-did he ever wear it?"
I turned it over to see its tiny clasp, a serial number on the back, all of it so painstakingly exact. I shouldn't have been surprised that atomic physicists could make delicate things. Their science was micro- and pico-, elements that needed to be handled with such careful attention that to split them was to transform them entirely.
Mother regarded the pin in my flat palm. "On occasion." She brushed a glossy pin curl from her temple with one graceful finger-the barest hint of gray played at her roots, well-hidden. "Mostly just when the others were wearing them, too. You know how he felt about bringing his work home with him."
Her even expression tolled familiarly deep in me. Did I? Did I truly know anything about my father?
What did you see, Annie?Mother had looked me straight in the eye the night Daddy died and posed the question. That day was like a hole punched through reality, a sucking black vacuum that dragged the rest of my childhood into obscurity along with it. The only thing I could remember was swooning on my feet.
I don't know.Tell me what you saw. Mother had gripped me hard by both shoulders. My eyes had welled up.
Red, I stammered,
everything was red.She covered her face briefly with one hand and looked dangerously close to crying-but she schooled herself and drew her hands down my arms until she had both my hands gripped hard in hers.
It was a heart attack, she whispered.
What?It was a heart attack, Annie.Reality's teeth, ugly and long, caught up to me in that moment and snapped shut clean through my middle. Heavy tears broke from my lashes.
Daddy's dead?She held me then, kneeling and rocking and lulling me as I bawled into her shoulder in the kitchen. I remembered the oven timer ringing. Neither of us rose to turn it off for a long while.
She hadn't held me since.
Beside the hatchback, I glanced up at Mother as my throat grew tight. "Thank you." I glanced away and pinched at the inner corners of my eyes to keep the sudden, spiny tears from coming. "I-I'll wear it. It will make me think of him."
Mother nodded, her expression unreadable. "Do."
A breeze blew over from the northwest and rustled the cottonwood trees overhead. The distance between my mother and me felt infinite in that moment-she wanted me to stay here, take a typing job somewhere nearby, but we both knew the only place I would have fit in was Los Alamos. Mother would throw herself naked into the Rio Grande before she let me follow directly in Daddy's footsteps.
I didn't have any concrete plan besides getting the hell out of Dodge and seizing my education in both hands-first, a stopover in the heart of Texas to get my degree at St. Christopher the Martyr, then probably onward to Georgia after graduating. Two distant cousins of mine lived outside of Atlanta and had done rather well for themselves with a pair of handsome husbands and a brood each of apple-cheeked babies.
The very thought of marriage made my gut turn over on itself. Mother always told me I'd feel differently when I met
the right one, as though men were an equation to be solved and would seem more appealing in my preferred vocabulary.
I liked men just fine. They were nice to look at. I just couldn't for the life of me imagine myself as a wife, with a child, with a husband who might disappear at any given moment just like Daddy had.
"You'll drive safely, won't you?" Mother nodded and said with an air of finality. I swallowed and pocketed Daddy's pin, glancing at the full-up car and the trunk tied to the luggage rack on the roof.
"Yep." I patted the side of the car like the withers of an old nag. "I filled the tank last night, and I have the route marked onto the map."
"Don't let any strangers pay for your food."
"I won't."
"And be sure you deadbolt your motel room in El Paso."
"I
will."
Mother fixed me with a look, the same one I got just a couple years back when she'd come home early from her shift at the dry goods shop and found me and Peggy Lipton giggling on the floor in the den with a half-gone bottle of wine between us. "You're sure you have enough money?"
"I'm sure," I insisted. "When you told me to start saving, believe it or not, I listened."
Sighing lightly, Mother seemed assuaged. She mulled something over for a moment, there beside the front gate and the open trunk. "I hope you know I love you very much, Annie," she said.
She was half-frowning, and so it took a moment to register that Mother had just shown me the most affection I'd had in years. My heart stuttered, as did I: "I-love you, too."
Both of us hesitated when we stepped forward, but she folded me into a hug after a moment. I had a good three inches on her; the last time we'd hugged, she'd been taller than me. She gathered my head down into her shoulder and squeezed lightly. "I'm proud of you," she said into my hair. I couldn't help but tear up against her blouse.
I could think of nothing worth saying when she released me, so I turned quickly and hefted the trunk shut. Clearing my throat and sniffling sharply, I swiped at my lower eyelids beneath my glasses and nodded once. "I'll call. I'm sure the motel will have a phone I can use."
Mother gave me a nod and the palest touch of a smile. I would never get any sweeping acknowledgment of the heavy weight we both carried, the both of us stumbling through life after Daddy. But a smile like that might be enough. "That would be lovely," she said.
Before Mother could turn back to the house, I reached forward and hugged her again. I buried my face in her hair, the geranium scent of her powder makeup, and reveled in the memories that didn't slip through my grasp like sand: Mother teaching me how to drive, showing me how to mix a proper drink on my eighteenth birthday, instructing me how to change a tire on the Cadillac here in the front yard with her hair done up in pin curls; filling in the blank spaces of Daddy's absence in the small ways she could.
I pressed a brief kiss to the crown of her head. In the tree beside the gate, a crow muttered gayly to itself. Daylight was burning. "Drive safely," Mother replied, her voice thick, and patted my cheek once before gliding away through the gate. It latched softly behind her. The front door fell shut. A breeze swept past and gently rattled the branches above me. I settled into the driver's seat and started the engine with its tumbling growl. It was eleven hours to San Antonio, and I was determined to do it in two days. I slipped my left hand into my pocket and stroked Daddy's pin with my thumb before shifting the car into gear.
1958 - The College & Academy of the Incarnate Word, a lecture hall
San Antonio, Texas
"Reviewing the basic properties of ellipses. Firstly, they’re defined by two points, two foci—"
Professor Laitz drew a wide arc that soared across the whole of the board. An ellipse came to life, stark in white, and he denoted two axes with tidy dotted lines. From the back of the lecture hall, I copied the shape judiciously onto my page of notes.
Laitz dashed two marks onto the shape,
chak chak, quick with his chalk. "The sum of the distances between two foci, at any point on the ellipse, is constant. Secondly, the eccentricity. The flatter the ellipse, the more eccentric. For example, a circle has an eccentricity of zero, and a parabola has an eccentricity of one."
A lofty sigh floated up from beside me. I spared a glance to my right and caught sight of someone vaguely familiar—one of the
two,
maybe three other women in all my other classes. I had noticed her in this lecture before. She never sat in the same seat twice, and never beside me until today. She caught my look with her heavy-lashed brown eyes and leaned over to me.
"Are you catching any of this?" she whispered.
I let my gaze flit to her notebook propped on the little boomerang curve of our writing desks. Where my page was riddled with detailed notes, bullet points, copies of Laitz’s illustrations, hers was bursting with rambling sketches. Beneath the casual curve of her hand holding her pencil, I noticed the edge of what looked like my profile, my father’s roman nose and the edge of my round glasses visible through her fingers curled around her pencil.
I angled my head toward her ever so slightly without taking my attention away from the head of the hall. "What part are you stuck on?"
We had enough space between us and the majority of the class, the backs of their heads in slick pompadour and ducktail haircuts, that nobody would turn around and glare at our chatter—they expected it from us anyways.
Her face twitched into a wry smile. She had a mane of wavy blonde hair down to her shoulders, teased and folded in a similar style as several other girls from our dormitory hall. I had seen her in our hall, with fluffy slippers on her feet and a blue bathrobe down to her knees, her calves bared as she went to and fro between her room and the showers.
Evelyn, that was her name. I remembered seeing it on her door. Evelyn Moore.
Copyright © 2023 by Isa Arsén. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
