Shoot the Moon - Hardcover

Arsén, Isa

 
9780593543887: Shoot the Moon
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593543882 ISBN 13: 9780593543887
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

How far would you travel for love?

Intelligent but isolated recent physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. Her childhood memories dimmed by loss, she has left behind her home, her family, and her first love in pursuit of intellectual fulfillment. When she finally lands a job as a NASA secretary during the Apollo 11 mission, the work is everything she dreamed, and while she feels a budding attraction to one of the engineers, she can’t get distracted. Not now.

When her inability to ignore mistaken calculations propels her into a new position, Annie finds herself torn between her ambition, her heart, and a mysterious discovery that upends everything she knows to be scientifically true. Can she overcome her doubts and reach beyond the limits of time and space?

Affecting, immersive, and kaleidoscopic, Shoot the Moon tells the story of one singular life at multiple points in time, one woman's quest to honor both her head and her heart amid the human toll of scientific progress.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Isa Arsén is a certified bleeding heart and audio engineer based in South Texas, where she lives with her spouse and a comically small dog. She’s published several shorts and pieces of experimental interactive media. Inspired by her own childhood summers in New Mexico, Shoot the Moon is her debut novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

01:00

1948-The Apodaca house, the back garden

Santa Fe, New Mexico

The 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 driveway

Santa 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...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593543882
ISBN 13 
9780593543887
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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