Sully and Jean Sullivan

Sully and Jean Sullivan are mother and daughter whose relationship is defined first by proximity and shared attention, then by a change in family life that Sully experiences as a gradual loss of closeness. At Goldstone, Jean’s demanding work and their life together in the desert coexist with small, intensely valued moments: a card game in an office, evenings spent studying the sky, and the sense that being near her mother is enough. Later, marriage and the arrival of twins rearrange the household. Sully’s memories preserve both the intimacy of the earlier years and the loneliness she associates with what followed.

A childhood organized around closeness

When Sully was about eight, Jean worked long hours at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone facility. The two lived in the Mojave Desert, and Jean sometimes had no one to look after Sully or take her home. On one especially hot afternoon, she borrowed a deck of cards from an intern and brought Sully into her small office between meetings. She showed her how to play solitaire, explaining how to alternate red and black cards and build the suits onto the aces. Sully handled Jean’s plastic nameplate, which identified her as Jean Sullivan, PhD, and pretended to concentrate.

Sully already knew the game from a babysitter. She accepted the lesson anyway because it gave her more time with Jean. That choice captures the relationship as Sully remembers it: ordinary activity becomes a way to extend a scarce interval of attention. She was accustomed to accompanying her mother to work, and recalls that the two of them had always been a family of two. She did not question the absence of a father, having no other household arrangement to compare with her own. Her attachment to Jean was not an abstract idea of motherhood; it was built from daily nearness and the wish to remain included in her mother’s world.

Goldstone, cards, and the shared sky

Years later, during a game of rummy with Harper aboard Little Earth, Sully sees an ace of spades and is carried back to that office at Goldstone. The recollection begins in the present: she has been playing cards, but a familiar card prompts a childhood memory of Jean’s hands laying out solitaire. When Harper asks what she is thinking about, Sully tells him she remembers Goldstone and her mother’s work in signal processing. The game thus becomes the occasion for a disclosure about how she understood her childhood, rather than merely a pastime between crew members.

Sully explains that she had allowed Jean to teach her a game she already knew because she wanted her mother’s attention. In her account, Jean was absorbed in work before marrying and having two more children; by then, Sully felt older, less in need of her mother, and less needed in return. This is Sully’s interpretation of the change, not evidence that Jean stopped caring for her. The distinction matters: her recollection holds affection and disappointment together, and the hurt comes from the altered shape of their closeness rather than from a claim of cruelty.

The telescope gives their earlier bond a larger shared practice. In the desert, Sully and Jean drove out in an old green El Camino, set up the telescope, and spent hours looking at planets, constellations, star clusters, and clouds of gas. The International Space Station sometimes crossed their view as a brief point of light. Sully remembers arriving at school tired but content after those nights, with the universe made familiar by her mother’s presence and explanations. Astronomy was not only Jean’s profession: in Sully’s memory, it was also a way the two of them spent time together and built a common map of the world beyond their immediate lives.

Marriage, relocation, and a changed household

When Sully was ten, Jean married her high-school sweetheart, who had remained in contact while Jean pursued graduate study and worked at Goldstone. The family moved back to Canada, Jean’s home country, and she left her job. The twins arrived soon afterward; Sully believes she was about eleven when they were born. For her, these changes belong together: the move away from Goldstone, the end of her mother’s working life there, and the arrival of younger siblings who required Jean’s attention.

Sully describes her stepfather as kind and decent but emotionally distant from her. She does not cast him as a villain; the difficulty is that he was neither cruel enough to hate nor close enough to love. Likewise, her account of Jean is not a simple accusation. She imagines her mother reaching a point of exhaustion and choosing the apparently firmer ground of marriage and family life after years in which work had been difficult. Sully’s memories nevertheless register the cost to her: she had to share the mother whose attention she had once sought during office hours, and she felt that by the time Jean’s life changed, she herself had become less central.

In Canada, Sully continued to use the telescope, but now carried it outside alone to an icy second-floor deck partly screened by pine branches. The constellations remained recognizable even at a different latitude, and Polaris was still visible above the trees. The stars therefore offer continuity without restoring the earlier companionship. Sully retains the map Jean taught her to read, but the practice has become solitary; what once joined mother and daughter now helps Sully find steadiness in a place where she feels lonely.

An unspoken family history

The novel also places the mother-daughter relationship within a fact Sully does not appear to know. Before Jean married and moved north, Augustine Lofthouse had been involved with her; when Jean told him she was pregnant, he refused fatherhood and left for a position in Chile. Years later, he learned through former colleagues that Jean had had a girl, born in November in the southern Californian desert. He obtained Jean’s work address and sent Sully an expensive amateur telescope for her birthday, without a note or return address, and later sent other gifts and occasional checks.

Jean cashed the checks and once sent Augustine a photograph of their daughter. The picture, recalled by Augustine much later, shows a child in a pale yellow dress, barefoot, with dark hair and a defiant expression. These details establish a hidden biological connection around Sully’s family without changing the relationship she herself remembers: in her account, Jean is the parent who raised her, took her to Goldstone, and shared the telescope and the night sky. The contrast between an absent biological father and the remembered daily bond with Jean gives the relationship its particular weight. Sully’s childhood sense that it had always been the two of them is emotionally true to her experience, even as the reader learns that the family’s history contains an unacknowledged third presence.