Parenthood and care

Parenthood and care in the novel are tested against one another: biological connection does not guarantee responsibility, while repeated acts of attention can create a family where no formal claim exists. Augustine Lofthouse once rejected fatherhood and left Jean, yet later learns to care for Iris through the ordinary work of keeping her safe and teaching her what she needs. Sully, meanwhile, inherits a model of family shaped by Jean’s work and an idealized story about an absent father, then confronts her own distance from Lucy. Across both plotlines, care is not an abstract virtue but a practice that may be refused, imperfectly learned, or shared among people bound by loss.

Refusal and the Inheritance of Parenthood

Augustine’s history establishes the sharpest divide between biological paternity and parental responsibility. When Jean told him she was pregnant, he was thirty-seven and she was twenty-six. He said he would never be a father, and soon left New Mexico for a position in Chile. His decision was not undone by later regret: for years, he stayed outside his daughter’s life, despite repeatedly thinking about the child who would grow up without him.

Eventually Augustine learned that Jean had given birth to a girl in November, somewhere in the southern California desert. He obtained Jean’s work address and sent the child an expensive amateur telescope for her birthday, then occasional gifts and checks. These gestures acknowledged a biological connection but did not amount to an active relationship. He sent no note or return address, leaving Jean to decide what to tell their daughter. When a photograph of the girl reached him, he kept it; when a later gift came back marked with an invalid address, he did not find them again. His partial support therefore remained at a distance, reflecting his continuing inability to take up the role he had refused.

That history becomes especially consequential beside Sully’s childhood account of her father. Jean told her that he was brilliant and devoted to his work, and explained his absence as evidence that the world needed him more than his family did. She called Sully her little bear and framed the two of them as a family perfectly sized for each other. The affectionate reassurance and the idealized account of the absent father gave Sully a language for interpreting abandonment as a kind of calling. The reader, however, knows that Augustine’s departure began in his refusal to become a father. Sully’s inherited story dignifies the very absence that Augustine’s own memories reveal as a choice.

Jean’s example also shaped Sully’s sense of care. As a child, Sully spent time alone in Jean’s office, hearing the air-conditioning and the muffled activity of the control room while her mother worked. She admired Jean’s research and took pride in her promotion, understanding their shared sacrifice as meaningful because Jean was doing important work. Sully consequently wanted to follow her mother’s path. But when Jean remarried, moved to Canada, stopped working, and devoted herself to newborn twins, Sully felt the family’s attention shift away from her. She left for boarding school, and her absence was accepted without the argument or pleading she had hoped would acknowledge her anger. Jean’s life thus gives Sully both an inspiring model of purposeful work and an experience of care that seems to have narrowed when a new family formed.

Learning Care Through Daily Responsibility

Augustine’s first response to Iris after the evacuation is explicitly uncertain and emotionally distant. He feeds her when he feeds himself, talks when he feels like talking, and offers objects to occupy her, including a walkie-talkie, a constellation map, potpourri, and an Arctic field guide. He recognizes that his efforts are inadequate, but tells himself that Iris does not belong to him and that he is not someone who adopts strays. His initial care is a set of improvised provisions, not yet an acknowledged parental bond.

The change becomes visible when Iris is missing from her usual hiding places. Augustine is not initially alarmed because she sometimes hides and normally reappears; he has allowed her secrets and hiding places while insisting to himself that he does not care. Later, when he finds her outside in inadequate clothing, he gives her his parka, checks that she is warm, and questions her in rising alarm about her missing outerwear and boots. Iris responds not by dwelling on his worry but by pointing out that the musk oxen have returned to the valley. Augustine follows her attention to the animals, then holds her close. The scene joins practical protection to a new recognition: Iris notices changes in the landscape that he has missed, and his fear for her makes his responsibility personal.

Preparing to travel with Iris to Lake Hazen makes that responsibility more concrete. When she runs down the stairs asking whether they are going for a ride, Augustine sees a child’s delight where he had often perceived strangeness and wildness. Tenderness comes with fear about whether the journey is safe and whether he has thought it through carefully enough. Together they sort necessities from luxuries: tent, subzero sleeping bags, food, water, fuel, warm clothing, helmets, goggles, stove, map, compass, and flashlights take priority. Iris’s books and spare items might come only if there is room. Care here involves planning under uncertainty, deciding what two people need to survive rather than simply taking what is desirable.

At camp, the relationship grows through small exchanges rather than declarations. When Augustine is unwell after skating, Iris waits beside him and lays a hand on his forehead as though playing doctor. Later, she makes coffee and reproduces a meal he had prepared the previous night. Augustine feels pride that she paid attention and learned something useful. When he finds her asleep on his cot with a paperback novel, he lies beside her and finally identifies the feeling behind his long-standing fear as love. The practical tasks of cooking, watching, learning, and staying close have altered what he understands himself to be doing: Iris is no longer merely someone he has been left to manage.

Care, Loss, and the Limits of Parental Roles

Sully’s memories of Lucy complicate any simple account of her as a mother. After Devi’s death, Sully’s mind returns to the occasions when she left Lucy and Jack: first for Houston, hoping the separation might work, and later before her first spaceflight, after Jack had served her with divorce papers. She remembers promising to return before Lucy knew it, but also remembers Lucy growing older and less trusting. When Sully later visited, she saw Lucy fold herself into Kristen’s lap and felt that her family had become secure without her. The memories show a painful gap between Sully’s love for her daughter and her repeated absence from family life; grief for Devi brings that earlier history back rather than resolving it.

Jean’s death deepened Sully’s sense of having lost her place in a family. Jean died after surgery following the stillbirth of an unexpected fourth child, before Sully had completed her degree. Sully did not get back in time. At the funeral, seated beside the twins, she understood herself as an orphan and felt that what remained of the family had never belonged to her. This history helps explain why Devi’s distress reaches Sully through the memory of caring for Lucy: she wants to comfort her friend, but cannot summon the words she once might have used. Instead, she lies close enough for their feet to touch, and later moves nearer and weeps with her. The care is limited and wordless, but it answers vulnerability with presence rather than a promise Sully cannot make.

Ivanov’s withdrawal offers a contrasting instance of care that is offered but not received. Sully notices that he has been working more, sleeping less, and apparently going days without eating. She brings him aeroponic cherry tomatoes, their red, yellow, and orange fruit gathered in her hands, and suggests he save them for later. Ivanov refuses the food and sharply tells her not to interrupt his work. The exchange does not establish reconciliation; it shows that noticing another person’s need does not give Sully control over the response. Care may be sincere and practical yet meet grief and anger that the caregiver cannot repair.

Shared Care and Chosen Kinship

After Devi dies, Sully’s grief alternates between traumatic replay and the work still required of her. She wakes screaming and repeatedly imagines different versions of the spacewalk, but none changes the fact that Devi is gone. Her crewmates visit her compartment; Harper and Thebes look in with concern, while Sully can offer only the prospect of tomorrow. Eventually she returns to the task of configuring the communications system. Tal tells her that what happened was awful and not her fault. Sully keeps eating despite feeling sick and resolves to do the work because she owes Devi that much. The exchange does not erase the loss; it helps her re-enter action without treating action as proof that she has stopped grieving.

The crew’s shared meal gives that care a collective form. Thebes, Harper, Tal, Ivanov, and Sully sit together over the last tinfoil dish of shepherd’s pie, saved for a special occasion. Ivanov takes the others’ hands, and they bow their heads. He asks protection for Aether, described as having lost its youngest daughter; Thebes adds that Devi was loved. The ritual makes explicit what their conduct has already shown: they have witnessed the same loss and are responsible to one another in its aftermath. Sully recognizes the crew as her family, not because grief has made their histories identical, but because they have shared the work, presence, and mourning through which family becomes real.

When the communications system is calibrated, Sully remains to listen. She does not claim that this makes her connected to anyone beyond the ship; there is still no one answering. But she feels less alone because she has done her part and the crew has done theirs. The novel’s account of parenthood and care ends in this widened sense of responsibility. Biological ties explain Augustine’s connection to Sully and Sully’s to Lucy, but they do not by themselves ensure closeness. Conversely, the bond between Augustine and Iris, and the crew’s care for one another after Devi’s death, take shape through attention, protection, shared labor, and the decision to remain present.