Page 2 of The Launch

“No,” he said, this time out loud, as he thought of the worst possible outcome for Jo and the baby. The idea that anything could be wrong with his wife or their child was unfathomable, and absolutely unacceptable.

In the end, Bill spent nearly an hour there, locked inside his own mental battle against these dark thoughts. This only happened to him on occasion, and when it did, he tried to remove himself from whatever situation he was in and find a place to recover. He’d finally calmed himself down and found a peaceful plane on which to exist when he heard his name.

“Mr. Booker?”

Bill opened his eyes immediately, swung his feet around so that they touched the ground, and sat up on the couch. He was ready for whatever was coming his way. A tall, graying doctor in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling around his neck was standing in the doorway. He looked tired and serious.

“Yes,” Bill said gruffly, standing. On the table next to the vinyl couch was a full ashtray, and the smell of stale cigarettes filled the small room. He wiped his hands down the front of his pants, drying his damp palms. “Is it my wife? Is she okay?”

The doctor lowered his gaze to the floor for what felt like an eternity, then lifted his eyes and looked right at Bill. “Josephine is going to be fine,” he said. “She’s lost a lot of blood, and she went into labor nearly a month early. She was suffering from what’s called placenta previa. It’s a condition where the placenta covers the cervix—this almost always requires a c-section, which is what we did.”

Bill couldn’t take it anymore. He felt wild with both relief and terror—terror at what the doctor had not yet said. “And the baby?” he choked out, barely keeping the emotions he’d so carefully held back from finally breaching the surface and overtaking him.

At last, the doctor smiled. “She’s fine,” he said, giving Bill the same look he must have given to thousands of other fathers over the course of his career. “Ten fingers, ten toes, and a strong set of lungs. She is a month early, so she’s on the small side, but she appears to be quite healthy, Mr. Booker.”

“Can I see them?” Bill coughed into his hand to mask the relief that had already cascaded into tears. “Can I hold the baby?”

“They were cleaning things up when I left,” the doctor said, motioning for Bill to follow him. “Let me take you to Mrs. Booker’s recovery room, and you can see her as soon as they bring her back.”

Bill was standing there, pacing the room, when Jo was wheeled back in. He rushed to her side as soon as the orderlies had her bed in place. They locked the wheels so that she wouldn’t roll, and then left the room in a hushed, reverent manner.

“Hi,” Jo said groggily, holding up a hand for Bill to take. She was pale, her veins blue against her translucent skin. Her eyes were at half-mast. “She’s so beautiful,” Jo said. Her voice sounded like she’d been walking around in the desert for days without water. “So tiny. So mighty.”

“A girl,” Bill said, bursting with pride. “Another girl.” At home, four-year-old Jimmy was with his three-year-old sister, Nancy, and both kids were being watched by Bill’s parents.

“Katherine,” Jo said. Her fingers tried to squeeze Bill’s, but she was far too weak to do much but twitch lightly. “Kate.”

A smile cracked Bill’s face as he leaned over the side of the bed and put his lips to his wife’s smooth forehead. He ran a hand over her sweat-dampened hair. “How about Katherine Rose?” he offered. “Kate the Great.”

Jo nodded, a smile on her tired face.

They’d made it. Bill’s wife and daughter were safe. He’d chased away the darkness, avoided disaster, and brought himself back to the present, as he always managed to do.

Now everything would be fine—more than fine. Everything would come up roses.

ONE

may 1963

JO

The house is intimidatingto Jo: it’s brand new, entirely modern, and situated in a housing development so freshly hatched that the sidewalks still sparkle with chips of mica, and the palm trees aren’t much taller than a grown man. Windows are new and so clean that at least four children have run right into the plate glass on their way outside to play, and the driveways are all peppered with shining Buick Rivieras, wood-paneled Ramblers, and the sleek Corvettes that the newly-chosen astronauts are allowed to lease for one dollar per year upon arriving at Port Canaveral in Florida (this is a cute and clever way of getting around the rule that astronauts can’t receive free gifts, in Jo’s mind).

Everything feels like it’s just come out of shrink-wrap, and it lacks the cozy, homey, lived-in comfort that the Bookers are accustomed to. In fact, Jo’s first reaction to seeing Stardust Beach as they’d driven into the town, was to look out the window of their car, stone-faced, and wonder how anyone lived in a flat state without tall sugar maples, white oaks, and black walnut trees.All these palm trees, she’d thought.All this bright sunshine.The whole state feels like living inside of a lemon.But with beaches.

She wasn’t in Minnesota anymore.

In the hallway of the Booker home, which sits on a cul-de-sac of angular new homes, hangs a photo of Josephine and William Booker with their three children, James, Nancy, and Katherine. The photo was taken shortly after Bill Booker was chosen to join the ranks of would-be astronauts at NASA, and was meant to capture the happy family as they embarked upon a journey that would change their lives—and possibly history as well.

Jo passes by the photo with a stack of pool towels in her arms now, pausing as she cocks her head and contemplates it. Her kids are adorable, of course. Bill looks handsome and dignified, and she looks…Jo isn’t sure how she looks. Hesitant? Content? Fearful? Lost? Maybe a little bit of everything. The woman in the photograph seems to know that she’s the nucleus of the people around her, but also that she’ll need to hold everyone together in the face of whatever is coming next. And that right there is the rub, isn’t it? Because she has no clue what is coming next. All she knows for certain is that her husband, a decorated Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, has been chosen to possibly go to outer space. The very idea of it completely terrifies her.

Jo reaches out to straighten the frame and catches a glimpse of her own reflection in the glass. Her hair is styled, her eyes lightly penciled and coated with mascara. She is not a stranger to herself exactly, but to her own eyes she is an unfamiliar vision. She has done herself up in a way that she thinks is presentable to the other astronauts and their wives, and she’s welcomed them and all of their children into her new home so that everyone can get better acquainted. Jo blinks, willing the woman in the glass to come into focus. To be familiar. To beher.

In the front room, someone switches the vinyl that’s spinning on the blonde wood Zenith console stereo and puts on Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” Jo tries on a smile as she tucks her straight brown hair behind one ear, admiring the way it flipsup at the ends. She rubs her lips together, making sure her frosted gloss is in place, then—giving the hair at her crown one more quick pat—she turns to take the towels out to the gaggle of children in her backyard who are currently squealing and splashing pool water everywhere while the barbecue sends up smoke and the smell of charbroiled meat.

“Josephine!” a woman says, startling Jo right there in the hallway. “Your home is so lovely.”

For a moment, Jo feels as though she’s been caught wandering through the private rooms of someone else’s house, but no—this is her home; she lives here, tucked into a sunny yellow stucco house with a turquoise kidney bean of a pool right off the kitchen. As a young girl, Jo had always figured she’d live and die in Minnesota, spending her summers at the lake, and her winters laughing and playing in the snow. Never in a million years would she have imagined herself living in a community of NASA people just a stone’s throw from Port Canaveral. This was never in the plans. And yet here she is, walking through the hallway of her very own midcentury modern home, holding a pile of freshly laundered pool towels, and listening to her son and her two daughters yelp and holler outside with their new neighborhood friends.

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