Page 1 of The Launch

prologue

MARCH 1956

The room was bright;there was a glare on the linoleum floor that stared up at Bill Booker as he tried to blink his dry eyes. The lights overhead gave off a faint buzzing sound, cut only by the screams of Bill’s wife as she gripped his hand tightly. The pressure of her hand was his only anchor in that moment.

“Billllll,” Josephine wailed, sweat beading on her smooth forehead. She squeezed her eyes shut as she held onto him with all her might. “I can’t do this. The pain,” she panted, finally opening her blue eyes and looking up into his with an animalistic ferocity that he’d never seen from her. Even the birth of their first two children had not elicited this level of fear or pain, and it terrified him.

Bill stared back at Jo, willing himself not to look away. This was his responsibility, to be here with her, to push aside any of his own fears, to not conflate this day—March 17, 1956—with any other day in his past. He owed Jo this, at least: to bear witness as she went through the physical trauma of giving life to another human being. He would not falter, he would not let her down. He had to stay strong—for Jo.

“I can’t…I need…” Jo continued to pant. She looked increasingly panicked as her skin morphed into a shade of clammy white right before Bill’s eyes. Bill reached out and touched her, afraid for a moment that she was turning into melting wax.

This is not before. This is not that. This is not war. There are no casualties. This is not danger.No one will be hurt here.Bill repeated these sentences to himself in his head as he held Jo’s hand in his, letting her squeeze so tightly that her nails dug into his skin. He needed these mantras in his head to keep him present, to force him not to slip into other moments in his life that were laced with fear.

“I’m going to need the father to leave the room,” a very round, very old nurse said brusquely as she pushed her way past Bill and yanked the edge of the curtain that wrapped around Jo’s bed. “OUT,” she said harshly, pointing at the door. It was obvious that this nurse had seen battle herself—perhaps of a different kind than Bill had seen, but battle nonetheless—and that she was firmly and inexorably in charge of the hospital room.

“No!” Jo cried out desperately as she reached for Bill with her other hand. Before the nurse could stop her, Jo had the collar of his shirt balled in both of her fists. She clung to him like a drowning woman hanging onto the side of a boat. “I need Bill here.”

The nurse shook her head patiently, trying to disentangle Jo’s hands from Bill’s shirt. “No, ma’am,” the nurse said. “This will go faster and easier with him waiting outside.”

Bill was torn. He wanted nothing more than to be there for his wife. To support her. To ensure her safety and that of his unborn child. He couldn’t stand the idea of her calling out for him as he sat on a chair in another room, head in his hands, waiting. But being in there was proving immensely difficult forhim as well. The buzzing sound from the lights seemed to have infiltrated his brain, and everything was becoming so bright that his peripheral vision was fading to a blinding white. He had the overwhelming urge to sink to the floor, to sit on the cold tile, to rest.

“Goddammit,” the nurse swore, her tone turning angry. “Pearl!” she shouted, still trying to free Bill from Jo’s grasp. “Can you get in here with the smelling salts, please? Husband is on his way down.”

The words filtered into Bill’s ear as if they were coming through a tunnel: “Husband is on his way down…”

Was this him? Was she talking about Bill? Because he was fine. He felt steady, he felt?—

As he slipped from Jo’s fingers, Bill’s consciousness left the hospital room there in Minneapolis, and suddenly he was somewhere else entirely. First, he was in Phoenix: It was November 1949, in a hospital room so nondescript that it could have been this very same one, save for the fact that he was in a different state and with a different woman. In fact, he was with a different wife—his first. His young love, his emotionally volatile, beautiful, redheaded Margaret. In his mind’s eye, Margaret was in the bed before him, curled around her own white-hot pain in a way that was at once the same and entirely different than Jo’s present agony. This memory gripped Bill and he stood there, watching an image of Margaret, wishing he could help her somehow. All he’d wanted to do was to take away the thing—whatever it was—that had made her go into labor far too soon. He wanted to unwrap the cord around the baby’s neck, to breathe life into that tiny baby girl, and to make everything better. He wanted to put a baby in Margaret’s arms so that she’d be whole.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t fix it then, and he certainly couldn’t fix what happened in 1949 now.

Bill’s eyes closed and Jo’s hospital room spun around him as he left both Phoenix and Minneapolis behind. He was no longer in a world of mothers and babies, but in a land of stalemates and unnecessary death. As he hit the cold tile with one shoulder and then with the side of his head, Bill parachuted into North Korea in his mind. It was 1951, and he had just ejected from a flight near the border. The terrain was not familiar to this American boy, and falling from a plane into enemy territory was frightening. Bill opened his eyes on that frigid, bitterly cold winter day, and found himself on the peninsula, which was covered in mountains, hills, and hollows. He shivered, grossly unprepared for both the weather and the possibility of attack. Instead of getting up, disengaging from his parachute, and running for cover, Bill rolled up into a ball and shivered in the cold air.

“Sir? Mr. Booker?” a woman’s voice was saying from a distance. He felt a hand on his shoulder and he jerked, fearing for his life. “Sir, let me help you up,” the woman said kindly, her voice still an echo that reached him from far away.

Bill opened his eyes, surprised to find himself not wedged into the cold bushes and tangled in a parachute on a hillside in Korea, but instead stretched out on the hard floor of the hospital with his teeth chattering. “What happened?” he asked, willing his body to stop its shaking. He was safe; he was not in enemy territory. He was on the floor of the hospital on March 17, 1956, staring at the white shoes of a nurse who looked down at him with professional concern.

“You passed out, darling,” she said, crouching down next to him with a cold, wet washcloth, which she used to mop his brow. “We’re going to move you to a room where you can stretch out and recover, okay?”

Bill sat bolt upright as soon as he noticed the silence in the room. “Where is my wife?” he asked, looking around. “Wheredid she go?” The nurse reached out a hand and tried to stop him, but Bill got to his feet without hesitation and turned in a circle. He felt frantic. The spot where Jo had lain in a hospital bed was now just bare linoleum. All that remained in the room was the curtain that had surrounded her bed, a clock on the wall, and a small sink and countertop. “Where is Jo?”

The nurse pushed herself up from her crouching position with a small clucking sound. “Love, we had to wheel her into surgery. It was time.”

“Surgery?” Bill felt his heart start to pump blood furiously in his chest. He put a hand to his neck, where his pulse raced. “Why? What’s wrong? What about the baby?”

The nurse, clearly weighing her words carefully, watched his face before speaking. “The baby needs to come out now,” she said gravely. She’d obviously decided that Bill could not only handle the truth, but that he needed to hear it. “We’re doing our best to deliver the baby safely, so I need you to rest and get your wits about you.”

Bill bent at the waist, putting his hands on his knees. He almost felt like passing out again, but rather than giving in to the images in his brain—Margaret in a different hospital bed; bright white lights; ejecting from his plane; landing on the cold, hard Korean ground—Bill pushed himself upright again and forced his eyes to remain open. “Can I go in there?”

“Certainly not,” the nurse said regretfully. “But the doctor will come out and update us as soon as possible.”

Bill allowed himself to be led to a room with a vinyl cushioned couch, where he stretched out and took several deep, fortifying breaths. It was in his nature to problem solve, and to make sure that he was never dodging his responsibilities, but the rational part of him knew that there was nothing he could do in that moment to help Jo or the baby. All he would do by barging into the operating room was put his wife and childin danger by distracting the doctor from performing whatever measures needed to be taken in order to save both their lives.

As he realized this, Bill rolled onto his side and pulled his knees closer to his chest. He wanted to let the hot tears flow from his eyes, to get that physical and emotional release, but he knew that this would be about as helpful as storming the operating room. “A man who gives in to tears is a man who is of no use to anyone,” Bill thinks, remembering this nugget of wisdom handed down by his father, a stoic man who’d farmed his way through the Great Depression on a wing and a prayer, coaxing corn from hard-packed dust, and feeding five children on a fistful of coins. Bill respected his father—especially now that he had kids of his own—and he knew that Arnold Booker had always been a man in every sense of the word. So instead of crying, Bill counted his own breaths, pushing each intrusive thought from his mind the way a child might push away a bully who keeps trying to engage him in a struggle on the playground.

“No,” Bill whispered to himself when he thought of Margaret in that hospital bed that seemed too big for her small frame once the baby was gone. Of the tears. The blood. The sheer loss.

“No,” he said softly to himself again as he remembered his fallen comrades in Korea, and the fear he’d felt nearly every time he’d tried to fall sleep on foreign soil. The threat of death and danger had lurked around every corner, and that same sensation filled his body again as he waited for word of his wife and child.

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