Page 10 of The Launch

Jo and the kids are in the kitchen, and their voices travel through the open house and down the hall to the master suite, where Bill is in bed with one pillow under his head and one on top of it. Closing his eyes and taking long, deep breaths is the only way he can think of to get the sound of Arvin North’s voice out of his head.

We’d like to talk about your first wife now…Meaning she left you?…Are you in touch with Ms. Wallings?

Bill puts both hands on the pillow atop his head and squeezes it against his eyes and forehead, trying to push the memory of it all away, but he can’t. Instead of North’s voice, he sees Margaret’s face—the way it was when they’d met in high school. She’d been so lovely then, so sweet, so happy, so untouched by pain. Of course, she’d cried and yelled more easily and more often than any of the other girls Bill had dated up to that point, but he’d just thought she was high-spirited. There was a passionto Margaret that had drawn him in (as it would have drawn in any other young, red-blooded boy), and he had naively assumed that a part of her rapidly changing moods had to do with her wild, untamed love for him.

Oh, youthful ignorance.

Bill flips over onto his stomach and buries his face in the pillow, keeping the other one on top of his head to block out the sliver of sunlight that’s still visible beneath the bedroom curtains.

He imagines Margaret on the night of the senior dance: her hair swept into a sleek updo with tendrils of red falling from the sides; her eyebrows the same soft, ginger color as her hair; her dress, a shiny pink confection with a rosebud of fabric at the hip; her blue eyes looking up into his as they’d slow danced to “I Love You (For Sentimental Reasons)” by Nat King Cole. In that moment, he’d known that the only thing he needed—the only thing he wanted in life—was to have Margaret as his bride. And she’d said yes that night as they’d lain in one another’s arms in the back of Bill’s dad’s 1939 Plymouth coupe.

“But is Daddy okay?” Kate’s little voice asks now from outside the closed door of the master suite.

“Yes, shhh. Daddy is fine,” Jo hushes her. “Let’s all go on a walk to the park, shall we?”

Bill hears Jo hustling the kids through a quick after-dinner change into their play clothes. He can picture her standing right outside their door and he wonders if she might pop in, but she doesn’t. Instead, Bill hears the echo of feet down the hallway, followed by Jo’s sure-footed steps, and then the front door closes and the house is silent again.

Is going into space the right thing to do? Bill isn’t even sure; he just knows that it’s what he was born to do. The moment he’d heard about the possibility of joining the team at NASA, he’d been so sure—so absolutely convinced, right to the marrow ofhis bones—that this was the mission he needed to put his life on course, that he’d immediately filled out the paperwork, gotten the appropriate recommendations, and sent it all off without even mentioning a word of it to Jo.

Maybe he’d known in his heart that moving to Florida was going to be a tough sell for his outdoorsy, wholesome, all-American girl, but Jo is a trouper; more than anything, she knows how to shore up a mission and get things done, and that’s what he needs from her right now. Bill needs Jo to keep this house in order—in fact, to get it decorated correctly so that they fit in amongst the other families in Stardust Beach—and he needs her to be the rock that holds this family together. She’d been unconvinced before the move that they’d need to change things like their furniture and their hobbies, but now that they’re here, he can see she’s become more amenable to getting floor-to-ceiling bookshelves installed, and to maybe trading in their old dining table for a chrome one with leatherette chairs. She’s even talked to Jimmy and Nancy about taking surfing lessons, and while he can’t ever imagine her becoming a lady who lunches poolside at an expensive hotel, he’s heard her talk about possibly starting a weekly card game with the other wives, and even that small effort pleases him.

The children are still in the early days of their school experience in Florida, and while they’d arrived in April with less than a month of school to go before summer break, Bill still wants Jo to help smooth the way for them, to make sure they have what they need, and to facilitate their budding relationships with the children of his coworkers. He also hopes that he and Jo can develop some real friendships with their new neighbors, but that’s lower on his list of priorities. As adults, their personal happiness is less imperative to Bill than that of his children, and all of that is slightly lower on his scale ofimportance than him doing well at NASA and being chosen to lead a mission into space.

At thirty-five and with seventeen years in the Air Force, Bill had reached the point where he’d needed to make a bold move. It was time to challenge himself, to elevate his family, and to make his mark on history, and so he’d applied to NASA without hesitation. His own father had died of a heart attack at 49, so Bill figures that he’s—at best—in the middle of his life right now, or that—at worst—he’s over the peak of the mountain and coasting towards eternity.

These are the kinds of thoughts that keep a man awake at night, that keep him plunging ahead towards his own destiny.

But no matter what obstacles get in his way, Bill knows how important it is to stay the course. He needs to keep his head on straight, and to not let things like a mandatory psychological evaluation dig up the past in a way that forces him to retreat into himself, as he sometimes does when the going gets tough. It takes a lot these days to send him into a dark space where all he can do is curl up in the fetal position, but it’s still possible. In the years since Kate’s traumatic birth, small things have occasionally caught him off guard, reminding him of Korea, of loss, of pain. But he does his best to always stay aware, and to remove himself from other people when he needs a moment to regroup. He doesn’t need Jo or the children to see him in a bad way, and he doesn’t like to talk to anyone until he brings himself out from whatever dark cloud is passing over him.

Under no circumstances does Bill like to lose control of his emotions, and he likes it least of all when he’s sitting in a room full of NASA employees. He’d held it together all day, and he’s pretty sure that he made it through the door of his own house and back to the bedroom without anyone knowing how truly off-kilter he’s feeling, which is precisely as he wants it.

Bill rolls over and takes a long, fortifying breath. As he lets it out, his bones rattle and his brain buzzes. He’s going to need to stay in the cool bedroom with the curtains drawn for as long as he can—all evening, if possible. He’ll wake up tomorrow on the right side of the bed, ready to take on another day.

He wants this so badly that he can taste it. Space travel is—and will be—the culmination of his childhood dreams, his years flying in the Air Force, and the legacy he wants to leave for his family. Coming to Florida was the right choice; Bill absolutely knows this in his gut. And the sooner he can convince Jo that he was right to bring them here, the better for all of them.

“Booker.” Ed Maxwell is standing in the middle of the small cafeteria on the ground floor of NASA the next morning. There are four round tables with chairs surrounding each of them, and three vending machines lining one wall. One of the vending machines spits out coffee with cream, sugar, or just black, and Ed is standing before that machine, one hand poised to push the buttons.

Bill stops in his tracks as he’s passing the open cafeteria area; there is no one else in the shiny-floored room. “What’s up?”

“You got a minute?” Ed asks, punching the buttons and then waiting while the white paper cup fills with hot coffee. He picks it up off the dispensing tray and walks across the room to where Bill is standing next to a table, briefcase in hand.

Bill glances at his watch. “Sure. I’m a few minutes early. What’s up?”

Ed scans the room quickly even though it’s obvious that they’re alone. “How’d it go yesterday during your psych eval? Were they tough on you?”

Bill swallows and then clears his throat. “Sure,” he says honestly. “They were pretty tough. But I think they have to be. They need to know what we’re made of, and what might be lurking in the background that could surface and throw us off track. We have to be cool-headed, and they need to do their due diligence to make sure that we are.”

Ed nods; his jaw is clenched and his eyes are on the floor. “You got dark stuff in your past?”

Bill almost laughs at this, because it seems so incongruous to ask a man first thing in the morning what his deepest, darkest secrets are. He wipes the shocked smile off his face. “I have stuff, Ed. Don’t you?”

Ed takes a drink of his coffee. “Yeah. Of course. And they dug around pretty hard inside that locked box in my head. I went home feeling like I’d had a long night with an insatiable woman.”

“That good, huh?” Bill chuckles.

“No, buddy. Not in a good way. I felt like I got put through the wringer: my head hurt. My back was sore. I felt like I got kicked in the balls.”

“Oof.”

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