Page 51 of The Launch
On his drive home, Bill had been thinking about how remarkable his life is and has always been. He marveled at the very fact that hegetsto work for NASA after a long and successful career in the Air Force. This career he’s chosen has afforded his family the chance to move to sunny Florida (fraught though it’s been with homesickness and growing pains), and it also allowed him to take a trip to Washington D.C. with his son to meet the president. Does any man have as much as he has? Is it right for any one person to be as fortunate as Bill Booker is? It feels impossible.
Bill gives Jo a quick kiss on the cheek and lets her go so that she can finish putting dinner on the table. “It was a really good day.”
“We have your parents coming in just over a week.” Jo changes the subject as she puts dishes on the table. “Do you think they’ll want to go to the beach or maybe take a drive and go south? We could take them to Miami.”
Bill pours himself a glass of water and stands over the sink, drinking it slowly as he looks out at the pool. “Sure,” he says mildly, “they might.”
Bill’s dad had stopped drinking more than a decade ago, and since then, he’s been the affable, energetic father that Billhad always wanted him to be. Giving up alcohol had had the secondary effect of saving Arnold and Stella Booker’s marriage, so naturally Bill is happy to have them come to visit for Thanksgiving.
“The kids will be thrilled to have them here,” Jo says as she sets silverware on the table.
“I think this is going to be a really good holiday, Jojo.”
Bill’s parents will come down and see their new home, and he’ll continue working with Desert Sage to make sure everything is good with Margaret. His kids will keep thriving, Jo will keep finding her way, and everything will be good. It has to be good. Life isso good.
On the Friday morning before Thanksgiving week, Bill’s stomach is in knots. The sensation that something monumental is about to happen is palpable, though he isn’t sure whether it has anything to do with him, his family, his job, or something else entirely. It’s just an imbalance; a sense that Earth has tilted ever so slightly on its axis. Bill hasn’t admitted to anyone that he woke up with an urgent need to run to the bathroom, and he’s gone easy on food and coffee all morning in an effort to avoid a repeat performance of that morning’s stomach catastrophe.
“You okay, bud?” Vance Majors claps Bill’s shoulder heartily. The jolt actually makes Bill momentarily seasick. He recovers quickly.
“Right as rain,” Bill says, glancing at his watch. Eleven o’clock. He’s nearly made it to lunch without anything bad happening. Maybe he’d had a bad dream earlier in the week and not realized that it had wormed its way into his psyche. There has to be something—some kind of negative energy—that’stacked itself onto Bill, but for the life of him, he can’t figure out what it might be.
At lunch, Bill stands at the counter of the cafeteria, eating his triangle of white bread and bologna with Miracle Whip. He’s got a shiny red apple in the other hand, and Ed Maxwell is standing with him and Jeanie Florence. They’re laughing about an off-color joke that Ed heard from a guy in a different department, and Bill is relieved that the punchline is still tame enough that Jeanie appears unbothered. You never know with a group of men whether things will quickly venture off into territory that isn’t particularly welcoming for the fairer sex, and Bill takes a big bite of his sandwich, relieved and smiling as Jeanie laughs at the dumb joke.
At one-thirty, the astronauts sit down in a board room, ready to receive a briefing from Arvin North on Gemini 3. But as the clock ticks away the minutes, he doesn’t show. North is never late, and Bill glances at his watch, noting that they’ve been waiting for over twenty minutes now.
Finally, Arvin North walks into the room, eyes downcast, face as serious as Bill has ever seen it. The casual conversation halts instantly, and the men sit at attention.
They are former military men, all of them, and they can discern without warning when something has shifted in the atmosphere around them. Their senses have been honed to sense, assess, and avert danger. When a superior appears to be rattled, that information immediately gets fed into the machine, and everything goes into high alert mode as they try to figure out what moves need to be made.
Arvin North clears his throat as he stands before them. He is still looking at the ground with his hands on his hips.
“Gentlemen,” he says, as the room is entirely populated by men for this afternoon meeting. “I regret to inform you that at approximately twelve-thirty Central Standard Time, ourCommander in Chief was gunned down in Dallas. John F. Kennedy is dead.”
Silence. Stunned silence.
“The President was riding in a motor cavalcade with the First Lady when gunfire rang out, and he was struck in the head. The country is in shock, and will undoubtedly remain so for some time to come.” North stops speaking and clears his throat, holding his fist in front of his mouth and taking a moment to compose himself. “There’s a lot we don’t know right now, but what I do know is that we need to be with our families. Please go home now, and hold your wives and children tight.”
Arvin North turns and walks out of the room, leaving a table full of men in shock in his wake. No one speaks for what feels like ten minutes, and then finally, Bill stands.
“North has instructed us to go home,” he says in the firmest voice he can conjure, though nothing about this moment feels firm to him at all. Rather, he feels as though his voice, his heart, his very being, is suspended in Jello and that the world won’t stop shaking. “Let’s go.”
Port Canaveral is as eerily silent as it must be in the middle of the night when everyone has gone home. Bill walks through the halls, barely making eye contact with people as he passes. They are all walking ghosts, their shock so tangible that it almost hurts. Little do they know, but the rest of the country is stumbling around in the same nearly catatonic state, eyes glazed as they watch and listen to the news, trying to understand what evil force has infiltrated their lives, changing everything forever.
When he pulls into his driveway, Bill turns off the engine and sits there, staring at the sun reflecting off the windows of the house. Jo and the kids must be inside. Perhaps no one has called her yet to tell her the news. Maybe the children are unaware that a gunman has taken the life of their president, inadvertently snatching away a sense of innocence that the country will neverget back. Bill hopes they’re in the pool, or perhaps playing cards under the palm tree in the grass in the backyard. He hopes Nancy is sprawled out on the ground, holding her book in the air as she flips the pages. He prays that Jimmy is thinking about the Yankees and not about an unseen gunman with his crosshairs trained on the President. Bill wants to walk in and see Kate dressing her Barbies as she chatters to herself in high-pitched doll voices, unaware that the world has changed in an instant.
Bill grips his steering wheel and closes his eyes. He can picture Jackie Kennedy in the hallway of the White House, smiling at him and thanking him for serving their country. He remembers standing behind Jimmy at the desk in the Oval Office, with JFK standing behind his son on the other side. It feels surreal that their president had been alive and well—a breathing, walking, joking man full of hope and ideas—and now he’s gone. And for what reason? To what end?
Bill wants to turn back the hands of time and save the president who has promised the United States that they’d put a man on the moon before the decade is out. A president with a vision for the future of their planet, and a vision of how they’ll explore space.
Lieutenant Colonel William Booker gets out of his car and stands in the driveway, facing his house.
His family is in there.
A cloud passes over the sun, and the glare on the front window of his house disappears, revealing Jo’s stony face and unseeing eyes. She’s standing in the front room, arms folded across her chest, staring back at him in a way that makes Bill feel as though she can’t see him, though he knows in his heart that she can.
Bill and Jo hold steady for one more moment this way, looking at one another from opposite sides of the glass. It’s almost like they’re holding onto this one brief slice of silencebefore they exchange words about what’s happened—before they say it out loud and make it real.
The moment passes and Jo bolts from her spot in the window. She throws the front door open and runs to him, a sob escaping her as Bill folds his collapsing wife into his arms. He covers her, wrapping his body around hers, as if he’s protecting her from radioactive fallout.
But it’s too late—the damage has been done. History has been made, the future changed. All Bill can do now is hold her while she cries.
And if Bill can’t turn back time and undo this tragedy, then he wants tobeone of the men who sets foot on the moon before 1970. He wants to honor their fallen president’s wishes.
If he can’t do anything else, he can at least do that.
As he rocks his wife back and forth in his arms, he knows that he can atleastdo that.