Dandelion Summer (2 page)

Read Dandelion Summer Online

Authors: Lisa Wingate

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, July 2011

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Wingate, Lisa.

Dandelion summer/Lisa Wingate.

p. cm.—(Blue sky hills bk. 3)

ISBN : 978-1-101-51644-7

1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Dallas (Tex.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3573.I53165D36 2011

813’.54—dc22 2011004014

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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To Samuel, Halley, Jarrett, and Shane,

May you find the paths

To your own Camelots

And recognize them when you get there.

To my dad, the guy with the punch cards and printouts—

Thanks for not panicking

When I quit computer school to study writing.

And to my grandfather, Norman,

Thanks for letting me borrow your name

And for that great line about old age and treachery.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is, in some ways, similar to engineering those early missions to the moon. You find yourself making plans to travel into the unknown—to go to a place no one has ever been. Success in such an endeavor depends upon the generous contributions and expertise of many people.
Dandelion Summer
would never have safely soft-landed in the bookstores without the help of some wonderful, amazing, and thoroughly inspiring contributors. As the head of mission control for this project, I’d like to take a moment to give credit where credit is due.

To begin with, fathomless gratitude goes to former Hughes Aircraft engineer and treasured friend Ed Stevens for invaluable help, advice, encouragement, and the many, many shared stories over the past several years that inspired the creation of Norman. Thank you for answering countless questions, for sharing photos and documents, and for bringing the early years of America’s space program to life. Thank you for your help with technical projects over the years, and for the wisdom you’ve shared. I love hearing your stories, and I treasure your friendship.

I would also like to pay homage to the men and women of Cape Canaveral’s early years, who worked tirelessly in many capacities with NASA, JPL, and Hughes Aircraft, and whose innovation and hard work led to an era of shining moments for America. We have always been the sort of country that does what has never been done. It’s worth noting that the names of those who said Surveyor’s mission to the moon was impossible have long since passed into history, but those who believed it was possible
made
history. As my friend and adviser on this mission, Ed, once told me, “No one ever erected a statue to a critic.”

My gratitude goes out to my family for being wonderful, supportive, and amazing in general. Thank you to my mother, Sharon, for editing, hashing over plotlines, proofreading, and helping with all things book related. Thank you to my mother-in-law, Janice, for helping with address lists and for being such a sweet grandmother to my boys. Thanks also to relatives and friends far and near for encouraging, supporting, hosting us on book trips, sharing stories, and always asking at family gatherings, “So, what are you writing now?” Everyone should have such a loving, encouraging, and fun family. I’m incredibly grateful to Teresa Loman (yes, I now know there is no “H” in either of your names) for heading up the Facebook readers’ group and often making me laugh like a crazy woman. I’m grateful also to my friends and fellow Southern gal bloggers at
www.SouthernBelleView.com
. What a hoot to be sharing a cyber-porch with you and blogging about books, good food, and life in general.

On the print-and-paper side of things, I’m grateful to the dedicated professionals at New American Library and Penguin Group. Thank you, Kara Welsh and Claire Zion, for your support of this book, and my appreciation also goes to the hardworking folks in marketing, sales, and publicity, who bring the books to the stores. A measure of deep gratitude goes to my editor, Ellen Edwards, for believing in this book from the first time we talked about it on the phone. Thank you for your encouragement and guidance in this project and in so many others. It’s hard to believe it has been ten years since we started this journey with the publication of
Tending Roses
! To my agent, Claudia Cross at Sterling Lord Literistic, thanks again for all that you do.

Last, but not least, gratitude beyond measure once again goes out to reader friends far and near. Without you, Epiphany and Norman’s little dandelion parachutes would have no place to land. Thank you for sharing this story circle with me and for sharing the books with friends, recommending them to book clubs, and taking time to send little notes of encouragement my way via e-mail and Facebook. I cannot imagine that any storyteller, anywhere, has ever been blessed with a more wonderful, enthusiastic, and supportive group of listeners. I hope this latest journey into the unknown brings some pleasant reading hours and that this little batch of dandelion seeds leaves behind even a fraction of the happiness you’ve given me.

Chapter 1

J. Norman Alvord

A single drop of water changes the ocean. A noted colleague of mine once asserted this as we dawdled over lunch at a restaurant near Cape Canaveral. “How can it not?” he demanded. “Some amount of matter is displaced. There’s transference of energy. Nothing is as it was before.” We were young then, certain of our own importance. Convinced that our presence in the world, that our work, was destined to change it. “I discussed it with Einstein, you know,” he said, and went on to share a story of having accompanied the physicist on a fishing trip, of all things. They’d considered the drop-of-water theory while Einstein reclined on the deck of a sailboat, trails of pipe smoke drifting lazily into the air. Less than a year after their conversation, Einstein’s sudden demise sent a ripple around the world.

There are those men whose deaths displace water in the far parts of the sea, and then there are those for whom the pool seems to have dried up long ago. So much of a life can pass without a thought of where the journey might end. A young man’s days grow full and his nights become short, and his mind is crowded with all that must be done, and all that has been done, and all that waits to be done. Hours come and go, a rush of time that seems limitless as it passes.

Looking back through the haze of years, you wish to whisper in the young father’s ear, tell him to put away his books and his calculations, go out into the yard and play a game of kickball, stop worrying about engineering the best tree house on the block and just climb the tree. Sit quietly in its branches with a son or a daughter and watch the minutes drift by in glorious splendor, as aimless as the cloud ships in a summer sky.

There comes a time when the opportunity for sailing cloud ships is gone, when time is not just passing, but speeding toward something. You attempt to communicate this truth to the young people now, but to them you’re just an old man growing uncomfortably sentimental.

You remember, of course, when you stood where they are. There were mountains to be scaled, bridges to be built, bills to be paid, work to be done. A man’s work defines him when he is young. Time flows as water through an estuary, accomplishments collecting like leaves in the brackish tide pools against the shore. The water hides beneath them, moving yet invisible, placid on the surface. Accolades amass in tidy black frames and hang on a wall to be dusted and polished, straightened now and again if tipped askew by a child visiting the office, or a cleaning woman brushing by with a feather duster, or a colleague leaning casually against the paneling, stroking his chin.

“Good heavens,” the visitor might say, if the frame jarred loose. “I didn’t see that hanging there. My word, man! You were in on
Apollo 13
? That must have been some experience.”

On occasion, such a question fades into the background. A missing frame yields a gap in the covering of leaves, through which the rush of water is obvious.
How long ago was that? Twenty years? Twenty-five? Thirty? No . . . even longer. Longer than I’d care to admit.

“Tense times,” I’d say, when recalling those days, for the benefit of conversation. Deborah was just a girl then. Thirteen years old. Thirteen, the same as the mission number. An odd coincidence. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have remembered her age at the time. “A four-day nail-biter, getting the Command Module back. Could have heard a pin drop in the control center when it went through radio blackout during reentry.”

On occasion, I considered telling the rest of that story—there was so much more. Those were glorious days. Exciting hours. What words could describe the moment when the Mission Control Center became impossibly quiet, every man in the room hanging on edge, waiting as the crew of the crippled
Apollo 13
plunged through the atmosphere in a hail of fire? The void lay so heavily, I heard my heart pumping that day, each beat individual, distinct, separated by the silence that sucked the air from the room at Mission Control. Over four minutes waiting for a radio response, the difference between success and failure, between life and death. The heartbeats slowed inside my chest, my body hoarding oxygen as if I were in the
Odyssey
capsule, time stretching and bending as the pilot of an ARIA support aircraft hailed the crew of
Apollo 13
. “Odyssey, Houston standing by, over.” Already, we were one minute and twenty-seven seconds beyond the expected end of radio blackout.

We waited, the moment one of breathless hope, consuming fear.

And then came the rush of adrenaline when a voice broke through in response: “Okay, Joe.” Swigert, letting us know the crew had survived against all odds.

What words could encapsulate such a moment? How beautiful to have lived it, to have felt the suffocation of fear followed by the rush of joy. I’d often thought that the journey from this life to the next would be like that instant—fear, a struggle for breath, a grasping at what is familiar, a clinging to one’s own understanding, and then surrender, joy, freedom, air abundant, and finally peace.

But it was a hypothesis that remained unproven. I considered it as I lay on the floor of my study, my eyes opening, then falling closed, then opening again, my heart struggling in my chest, the beats erratic, weak then strong, like a peg-legged dancer doing a clumsy jig on a wooden floor. There was a searing pain, a dim awareness that my body was twisted into a strange shape, then another stab, sharper this time, radiating outward like an electrical current splitting, running into my arm. I had the sense of time passing—minutes, then longer, maybe hours.

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