Page 6 of The Launch

“And how does Josephine feel about you entering the space program?” Arvin North takes a long, slow drag on his cigarette and exhales the smoke towards the ceiling, where a visible layer of gray-blue cigarette smoke already hovers like fog hanging over the land below.

“She is one hundred percent supportive, sir,” Bill says, straightening his shoulders. “Always has been.”

Arvin North nods as though he’s satisfied with the topic of Jo—at least for the moment. “Do any of your children have any special needs?”

“Sir?” Bill’s forehead creases.

North clears his throat. “Do any of them have…special needs, like behavior, or mental issues?”

“Oh,” Bill says, relaxing. “No. Fit as fiddles, my three. Smart, polite, and obedient.” He can say that with all honesty, though he’ll leave out the fact that Nancy loves to read books so intensely that she sometimes refuses to go to sleep at night. On more than one occasion, either Bill or Jo have done a bedtime sweep of the kids’ rooms, only to find little Nancy sitting in a closet with a book and a flashlight, looking up at them guiltily as she sits beneath the hanging skirts and dresses, giving them a gap-toothed smile.

Arvin North feigns at picking a piece of tobacco from the end of his tongue while his cigarette burns between his first and middle fingers. He looks directly at Bill. “Glad to hear the wife and kids are good.” He waits a beat. “We’d like to hear about your first wife now.”

Bill’s heart hammers in his chest, and his pulse thumps like a heartbeat that’s audible to the entire room. With a few momentsof soothing, even breaths, Bill pulls himself together and wills the pulsing of his neck veins to stop.

“My first wife,” he says slowly, buying himself the tiniest sliver of time by repeating these words.God, I wish there was a window to look out of, he thinks.But this is probably why there aren’t any windows: they want to keep us under the microscope and see how we react. Stay cool.“Margaret Wallings-Booker,” he says after a brief pause. “Margaret was my first wife.”

“Could you please tell us about your courtship, marriage, and how things ended?”

Bill has the distinct impression that Arvin North and every other man at the table already knows exactly what course his marriage with Margaret took, but rather than assuming that’s the case, he starts at the beginning: “Margaret and I were high school sweethearts. She was my date to the senior dance, and we were engaged right after graduation.” Bill keeps his eyes on North, who begins to pace the room again. There is a clock high up on the wall over North’s head, and Bill tears his gaze from it. Time does not matter now that he’s in the hot seat. His answers are all that matter.

“We got married right after my nineteenth birthday, and Margaret was pregnant with our daughter by the time we were twenty.”

“I see,” North says flatly to show that he’s listening to every word.

“Margaret was always difficult. She was prone to fits of…I don’t know. Just fits. She would be silent, then angry, then nearly catatonic. I thought I knew how to handle her moods, but there were times I really wasn’t sure what to do. Then, about halfway through her pregnancy, something went wrong.” Bill’s heart is no longer racing, but instead squeezing itself like a tight fist inside his chest. He swallows gently, knowing that his wordswill hitch in his throat and cause his voice to break if he goes too quickly. “We went to the hospital, and the baby was born before she could live outside the womb. Her eyes never opened.” The ticking of the clock is again audible alongside the reel-to-reel’s mechanical spinning sound. “She was so tiny,” Bill says softly. He clears his throat and holds his eyes open to stave off tears. “Margaret could not take it. Under the best of circumstances, she couldn’t take it, but in her state of mind, she just snapped.”

“Meaning she left you?” North prods, though not unkindly.

“No,” Bill says. “She did not leave me. She cried incessantly, which is understandable, but something about holding that little baby in her hands…I don’t know. Her eyes changed. She turned completely inward. It was like she could no longer hear my voice,” he says, looking at the men seated around the table. One or two of them are watching him intently, but the others have their eyes trained solemnly on the tabletop. “I would talk, but it didn’t get through. No matter what I said or did, Margaret was locked in a world of her own. Even her parents couldn’t get her to speak. She just rocked back and forth and banged her head against things.”

“That must have been incredibly difficult.” North is watching Bill with his sharp eyes. “What did you do?”

Bill shrugs. “Her parents and I agreed that she needed to get help. We moved her into a treatment facility—a home,” he clarifies. “And she stayed there. At first I went every day, then every few days, but eventually just once a week. I kept hoping she’d get better, that she’d see me and remember who I was to her. I thought that maybe the hormones from the baby, or, just…you know?” He looks around the table helplessly, hoping for one of the men to nod his reassurance, but they all stay the course: eyes on table; eyes on the smoke curling from their cigarettes; eyes anywhere but on Bill. “But she never came to. Never spoke to me again. After a year of that, I was ready to have the marriagedissolved, and I’d even spoken to her parents about it. No one was happy about that decision, and my parents begged me not to do it, but I was only twenty-two at that point. I couldn’t stay married to a ghost for the rest of my life, and she’d given me no indication that she was still in there.”

Arvin North has stopped pacing and is standing behind his own chair, leaning over the back of it to stub his cigarette out in an ashtray. He reaches for the cup of coffee that’s resting near his forgotten manila folder and a cup of pencils with clean, pink erasers and sharp points. His eyes lift and land on Bill. “That’s understandable,” he says, sipping his coffee. “A man that young has his whole life ahead of him.”

“I requested a relocation to the Air Force base in Minneapolis in the midst of all of it. I needed a change. And then I went to the dentist one day to get a cleaning, and there was Jo,” Bill says, imagining her there again, lips shiny and pink, eyes dancing. “She was offering me a lollipop and a future, and I took both. We were married eight months after we met, and then a year later, James was born.”

“And Ms. Wallings?” North prompts him, bringing them back to Margaret.

“She’s still in the same facility in Arizona.”

“That’s a tough decision,” North says mildly. There is no judgment in his tone.

“It was. And I’m good at tough decisions,” Bill says, lifting his chin an inch. “I can weigh the pros and cons of any situation, and do the things that need to be done.”

“Are you in touch with Ms. Wallings?” North has a glint in his eye. He already knows the answer to this question.

The clock on the wall ticks again loudly as Bill weighs the question. “I am. I have, on occasion, made the trip to Arizona to visit her in the facility.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Duty,” Bill says simply. “I can do the tough things—in any situation—but I am also a man of duty and honor. I may not have been the right husband for her, but I am still a person who cares about her. Her parents have passed, and a part of the expense of her care falls on me.” Bill pauses and then goes on. “I didn’t divorce her because I stopped loving her…I left because there was no future for us. So I visit when I can, whether it means anything to her or not. It’s the right thing to do,” he concludes, holding his gaze steady on North’s. “And I put a lot of merit in doing the right thing.”

“Thank you for your candor, Lieutenant Colonel,” Arvin North says, giving him a single nod. “Now we have a few questions for you about your time in Korea.”

Bill steels himself and finally allows a single glance at the clock on the wall; the questions are not about to get any easier—they’ll just be hard in a different way.

---