Jean

Jean is Sully’s mother and Augustine’s former partner, a researcher whose life links the novel’s account of work, parenthood, and abandonment. She raises Sully to admire her scientific vocation, but later withdraws from that work and builds a different family life in Canada. The novel’s retrospective account also reveals that Augustine, the absent father Sully was taught to understand as devoted to a greater calling, is her biological father; Jean’s account of him and his own belated gestures leave that connection divided between inheritance and care.

Research, work, and Sully’s childhood

Sully remembers Jean most vividly through the routines surrounding her work at Goldstone. In Jean’s office, Sully played alone with a deck of cards, while the air-conditioning and muffled voices from the control room formed the setting of her childhood. Jean taught her to occupy herself there. The memory is not simply one of a child left waiting: Sully understood her mother’s work as important, admired her for it, and took pride when Jean received a promotion. She saw that achievement as the result of their shared effort and sacrifice, and resolved to follow Jean’s example.

Jean gave Sully a story about the father who was absent from their household. She described him as brilliant and so committed to his work that he had no room left in his heart for a family. In that account, his absence was framed as the cost of serving something larger than a household, and Jean reassured Sully that the two of them were enough for each other. The explanation gave Sully a way to be proud of a father she did not know, while reinforcing her closeness to Jean. It also made the truth of her parentage especially consequential when the narrative later identifies Augustine as that father.

A changed family life

When Sully was ten, Jean married and moved with her husband to Canada. She became pregnant within the year and gave birth to twins a few months after Sully turned eleven. Jean stopped working and left her research, becoming deeply occupied with raising the younger children. Sully experienced the change as a rupture in the closeness she had understood as exclusive: Jean taught the twins to call her Mommy, a name Sully had never used, and Sully felt there was no place for her in the new household as an angry adolescent.

Sully applied to boarding school and returned home only when the dormitories closed. She had hoped Jean would protest her absence through calls or letters, but her departure met no disagreement. After graduating, Sully skipped the ceremony and went south for college, back to the place where she had been happiest. Jean’s shift from working mother to full-time caregiver for the twins stands in sharp contrast to the earlier childhood Sully remembered, when her mother’s work had seemed to bind them together. The story establishes Sully’s sense of loss without suggesting that Jean understood or answered it in the way Sully hoped.

Jean and Augustine

Jean met Augustine while they were both connected to a research facility in Socorro. She was twenty-six and he was thirty-seven when she told him she was pregnant. Augustine reacted by refusing the prospect of fatherhood and urging her to end the pregnancy; he later remembered telling her that he would never be a father. Jean did not respond with the distress he had expected. Her judgment of him as emotionally damaged, and her wish that he were not, remains part of his memory of their separation.

Augustine left New Mexico for a position in Chile, trying to put Jean behind him. Years later, he called Socorro to learn what had happened and discovered that she had had a daughter. He found a work address for Jean and, when the child’s birthday came, sent an expensive amateur telescope without a note or return address. For several years he sent occasional gifts and checks, unable to claim them as active fatherhood. Jean cashed the checks, and once sent him a photograph of Sully; it went to an old address. These distant exchanges show that Jean retained some channel of contact with Augustine, but the evidence does not show her telling Sully who he was.

A memory from shortly after the pregnancy reveals another side of their relationship. Augustine arrived uninvited at Jean’s small adobe guesthouse, drunk, while her dissertation work occupied the table. After he accidentally spilled her tea across the pages, Jean quietly dealt with the mess and asked him what he was doing there. The scene presents her as more than the absent partner in Augustine’s later regrets: she is working on her own research, and in this encounter she offers him room to speak without resolving his refusal of responsibility.

Death and narrative significance

Jean died before Sully completed her degree. Her fourth child was stillborn, and Jean did not wake after the surgery. Sully could not get back in time. At the funeral, Jean’s appearance had been altered so that Sully felt she was looking at someone she did not recognize. Sitting beside the twins, Sully understood herself as an orphan and felt that what remained of the family had never belonged to her. Her grief therefore arrives entangled with the earlier estrangement: the mother she had admired and lost was also the person whose changed family life had left Sully feeling excluded.

Jean’s story is disclosed through memories held by both Sully and Augustine, and those recollections do not offer a single, complete account of her. Sully remembers an admired mother whose work once gave their shared sacrifices meaning, then a mother whose attention shifted to a new family. Augustine remembers a woman he loved but left, and whose daughter he tried to acknowledge without taking up the responsibilities of fatherhood. Together, these views make Jean central to the novel’s distinction between biological kinship and lived care: she raises Sully, while the father whose vocation explains his absence remains, for much of Sully’s life, an idea shaped by Jean’s words rather than a presence in her home.