Page 48 of The Space Between

Bill has gotten used to seeing it there, and even though Jo has asked a number of times about possibly relocating it or even scattering the ashes—Perhaps at the beach? Maybe during a nice sunset ceremony?—Bill has brushed off all discussions about it and insisted that he’s not ready to do anything just yet.

“Hey, Billy,” Jo’s father says, stepping inside from the pool area, where he’s been taking turns tossing the three children intothe pool—even thirteen-year-old Jimmy. “You got an extra towel or two? I’m afraid these kids have gotten me soaked.”

“Sure, Pop,” Bill says, using the name he’d adopted for Jack White when he’d first married Jo.

Bill hums as he hunts through the linen closet for towels, and as he does, he can hear Jo talking to her mom from down the hallway.

“He’s doing okay,” Jo is saying. “Honestly, it was such a shock the way it happened. We still don’t have all the details, and I think he needs to accept that maybe we never will. Margaret made a choice to end her life without warning, and that’s possibly all the information we’ll ever have.”

Mrs. White makes atsk-tsksound and Bill imagines her shaking her head in disapproval, her hair smooth and combed into a graying flip. “But will you just have to live with this woman in the middle of your marriage forever, Josephine? I mean, come on, that’s not even reasonable. First it was her and the financial and emotional toll of her existence, but now it’s her presence in your home.”

“Shhh, Mama,” Jo warns. “It’s fine.”

“Honey, I’m a practical woman,” Mary White whispers—and Bill knows this to be true. Mary has always been a kindly, grounded, pragmatic person. “But your husband needs some help to move past this. He lost a baby, and then he effectively lost his first wife when he decided to put her in a facility. And then he lost her again when she died. Sometimes people need professional help to move past all of that.”

Jo makes a sound that Bill recognizes as dismissive. “He would never. Bill? Psychotherapy?”

Mary White takes a long pause here, and all Bill can feel from where he’s kneeling on the tile floor in front of the closet is the weight of his wife’s words:Bill would never…But maybe he would? Maybe he could sit down to talk to someone about allthe dark thoughts that claw at the edges of his mind. Maybe he needs to. This is the second time someone has said as much in the past few months, and while he took Arvin North’s suggestion to heart as something that might help or work in his favor in terms of his career, now he takes his mother-in-law’s words as a suggestion from someone who knows and cares about him on a personal level.

“I think you need to talk to him, Jo,” Mary says to her daughter. “He looks like he’s not sleeping.”

Jo lets out an audible exhale. “He got pulled off a mission shortly after Margaret died, and I didn’t want to connect the two things. I’m sure he has, but I didn’t want to. Don’t you think NASA does stuff like that all the time? Rearranges missions and changes things?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mary says. “I wouldn’t know. But if you think one thing might be related to the other, then I think it’s worth sitting down and talking to him.”

“I would,” Jo says, “but sometimes he’s hard to talk to.”

Mary gives a quick, short laugh. “Just like every other man who ever walked the planet, Josephine.”

Jo is quiet for a moment. “Right. I guess so.” She sounds unconvinced. “Maybe after the holiday I will. I’ll try to find a time to just sit down with him and see how he’s feeling.”

“Yes, do that,” Mary says. “You spend so much time doing all the things you do…” She goes quiet here, and her words are laced with so much meaning that even Bill can pick up on it. “You’re at the hospital all the time volunteering, which is wonderful, or you’re writing your stories, but your first priority is to your marriage, Josephine. I don’t want you to forget that.”

Bill winces—both from crouching on the cold tile with his bare knees, and from his mother-in-law’s words—and then pushes himself up to standing. He can’t take listening in on this conversation any longer, so he closes the cabinet door loudly.

“Jo?” Bill calls out as if he hasn’t heard anything that’s gone on. “Where can I find more pool towels for your dad?”

Jo’s shoes come click-clacking down the hall, and Bill walks away, leaving her to the task of digging up more towels.

It goes on like this over the course of Thanksgiving, and Bill can feel the distance between himself and Jo as they move around one another. There are no harsh words, and there are no deep discussions, but he can feel the slight tension as he reaches past her to grab his toothbrush from the cup on the counter while she wipes off her cold cream. He can sense that she’s lost in her own thoughts when he leans over to put a kiss on her cheek in the kitchen while she rinses dishes at the sink. He can see the faraway look in her eyes as she watches her parents with the children.

But this too shall pass, Bill knows. They’ll have a chance to sit down and talk, and maybe he’ll even tell her that he thinks Jeanie Florence is the one who shared the information that got him taken off the mission. It’s high time that he starts opening up to Jo the way he used to, and it’s definitely time for him to start treating his wife as his confidante, as talking to Jeanie as if she were his close friend certainly came back to bite him.

Soon, Bill thinks.We’ll talk just as soon as we get the chance.

Early December at Cape Kennedy is a whirlwind. Planning for the Gemini orbital mission is in full swing, and everyone is so focused on that project that for Bill, it seems that nothing else is going on at NASA. He’d underestimated his own involvement in the mission after being moved off the three-man roster for the physical part of it, and while being the lead for Gemini in mission control isn’t nearly as exciting as suiting up for it, Bill isup to his eyeballs in facts and figures, last-minute crises, and all-hours discussions about every tiny detail of the mission.

Talking to Jo keeps getting pushed back as Bill barrels straight ahead towards December 13, and at this point, he imagines them sitting poolside at Christmas, Gemini behind them, and nothing but time to talk and reconnect ahead of them.

For her part, Jo seems occupied with shopping, gift-wrapping, meal-planning, the hospital, and the damned story keeps her tapping away on the typewriter well into the night. Of course, there are worse things a man’s wife could be doing, but now she’s got an event she’s cooking up with PR at NASA, and Bill can only devote so much of his energy and brainpower to staying on top of what’s going on there. As far as he knows, there’s a cocktail party of some sort planned, and Jo will be sharing some of her stories with a crowd of women while Dave Huggins takes photos and the public relations specialists orchestrate some sort of PR blitz about astronaut wives doing exciting things.

At least that’s what he’s gathered in the slivers of time that he’s at home and awake.

“North needs you to look at these right away,” Jeanie says late in the afternoon of the 11th, setting a file on Bill’s desk as he crunches numbers and makes notes on something that’s been bugging him. “Can you sign off on this as soon as possible?”

Bill, caught off guard, looks up from his notepad, pencil still in hand, and locks eyes with Jeanie. “Is this the re-figuring of the geosynchronous orbit?” He frowns, reaching for the file in her hands.

“Yep,” Jeanie says. Of late, she’s kept her smiles soft, but distant, but here she is now, letting her gaze linger on his as if she’s about to ask him a question. “Bill,” she starts.

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