11. Bill
CHAPTER 11
Bill
Arvin North has kept himself busy. Busy and unavailable. There are meetings to attend, documents to read, to create, to file, to pass on, and there are always people from the various press organizations who approach and want interviews, comments, or sound bites.
Bill watches all of this from the sidelines, keeping his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut. This is how it’s been for the past month and a half since the accident, and this is how it will remain until such time that things return to normal.
But will they? Will they ever really return to normal ? Bill is sitting at his desk during the lunch hour one day, enjoying the fact that the floor is nearly empty. He usually appreciates taking his break with his coworkers and spending the time talking about the news of the world, but today all he wants is peace and quiet. He’s feigned busyness during the traditional break time, and will head over to eat the meat loaf sandwich packed by Jo after everyone else has cleared out of the lunch room.
It’s his hope that, by avoiding the time when idle chatter and gossip rule the conversation, Bill can steer clear of any questions about, or discussion of, the accident. He’s suffered through enough sleepless nights since then, wondering if and what he might have done differently to get a different outcome, and in truth, he knows this is a fool’s errand. But, by the same token, so is talking about it. Even in hushed tones.
Not to mention the fact that Arvin North has asked him not to talk about it. There is still a hint of trouble on the horizon, and Bill is doing his very best to ignore it and avoid it. He comes to work, he does as much of his job as his mind will let him, and he tries to take solitary breaks in the morning and the afternoon as a way to stay focused.
“Hey,” a female voice says.
Bill nearly jumps out of his skin as he turns around. He’s been so lost in thought that he wasn’t even expecting Jeanie Florence to appear. And that’s unfortunate, as he’s looked forward to talking to her—to seeing her one-on-one—because now that she’s right here, he isn’t even sure that he can speak.
“Jeanie,” Bill says, standing. He looks around; the desks are empty. There is one solitary engineer sitting far across the giant room at a desk by the window, and he has his back to Bill and Jeanie as he holds the receiver of his desk phone to one ear and looks out the window.
“How are you?” Her eyes are soft, kind, concerned.
Bill considers lying, or doing the usual job of saying he’s fine, things are good, he’s getting by. But this is Jeanie, and there’s no reason for him to lie. “I’ve been better.” He holds her gaze. “How are you?”
Jeanie shrugs as she looks around. There is a slight nervous energy to her. “It wasn’t the best holiday season I ever had,” she says with an unconvincing smile. “But my sister is able to stand up, and she’s taken her first few steps, so my family is thrilled.”
“Hey,” Bill says, mustering what he thinks is the appropriate amount of excitement. “That’s fabulous news!”
The summer before, Jeanie had gone to Chicago for her brother and sister’s nineteenth birthday party. She’d gone out with the twins after, and her brother, Patrick, had been driving when they were in an accident on a dark country road. Jeanie had escaped with minor injuries, Patrick with none to speak of, but Angela had been badly hurt, and it was unclear for months whether she’d ever be able to stand up and walk again.
“Yeah,” Jeanie goes on, still avoiding Bill’s gaze for the most part. “Her goal was to be able to walk down the aisle at her wedding this summer, so it looks like she might be able to do that.”
“I’m really happy to hear it,” Bill says. He puts his hands into his pockets and looks at the man whose back is still to them. Finding time to talk to Jeanie since they’d kissed the night of the accident has been nearly impossible, but now that they’re alone here, he isn’t even sure what to say. “Um,” Bill tries. “Do you think we could step outside and take a break together?”
“A smoke break?” Jeanie wrinkles her nose, referring to the time that Bill had taken her outside and given her a cigarette, which had been her first.
“Nah, we don’t need to smoke.” Bill pushes his chair in and leads the way, hands still in his pockets. He looks over his shoulder uncertainly, as if Jeanie might not follow him. “We can just talk.”
Outside, the afternoon has a sharp, clear feel to it. The humidity of summer is gone, and the blue skies are breezy, not blazing. Nearly everyone who works outside during the day has parked their open-top trucks and gone to eat lunch in the shade somewhere. The doors to a hangar in the distance are open, and Jeanie and Bill can see men sitting around on the concrete, eating their lunches out of metal lunch pails.
“So you went home for Christmas?” Bill starts.
At the same time, Jeanie says, “Bill, I’ve been thinking.”
They both laugh.
“You go first,” Bills says solicitously. “Please.”
Jeanie takes a deep breath. “I did go home for Christmas, yes, and there was snow,” she says, smiling at him gently. This is obviously her way of couching whatever she’s about to say in kindness. “But Bill, we need to talk.”
“I agree.” He nods. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you since that night, but it seems like there’s never a good time.”
“There never will be a good time,” Jeanie says quietly. “But there’s no way to ignore what happened between us.”
“And I don’t want to,” Bill says. “I’ve thought of it so many times.”
Jeanie flushes bright red as his words land on her. “I’ve thought of it too, Bill,” she says, stammering. Jeanie drags the toe of her sandal across the dusty pavement as they stand near the building. “And I wasn’t lying: I do feel something for you. But it’s something I shouldn’t feel. It’s something that I shouldn’t want or even think about. You’re a married man with children, and everything about it is wrong, Bill.”
He wants to argue with her on this point, but of course he can’t. It is wrong. All of it.
“I just…I like you so much as a person, Jeanie. Talking to you is like having this great conversation with someone whose voice just, you know.” He pauses. “Makes my heart leap a little.”
At this, Jeanie laughs and she looks incredibly young. Girlish. When he looks away, she grows serious. “I’m sorry, Bill. That was just such a sweet thing to say.” She swallows hard. “It was nice. And I understand what you mean, because mine does, too. Talking to you about books or space or anything, really, is just so damn fun for me. Seeing you and catching your eye across a room makes me feel weightless. But we’re not. There’s a definite gravity to both of us, and to our lives, and we can’t ignore that. This isn’t some passionate love affair set on a planet where no one gets hurt.”
Bill makes no attempt to dispute this. “Of course,” he says.
“And I’m not the kind of girl who does those things anyway.”
A storm cloud passes over Jeanie’s face and Bill wants to grab her and pull her close. He wants to kiss her again, but this time not in a stairwell; this time right here, on the tarmac, within shouting distance of fifty men eating tuna fish sandwiches and sliced pears and thermoses of water. Only he doesn’t do it. Instead, he leans the back of his head against the wall behind him, closes his eyes, and turns his face up to the sky.
“I don’t go around kissing other women’s husbands,” Jeanie says, her words as forceful as bullets. “And I certainly don’t fall in love with men who aren’t free to love me back.”
Bill opens his eyes and turns his head to look right at her. “Then why not go back to dating Peter Abernathy?”
“Oh, that’s rich, Bill. You know I don’t have feelings for Peter,” Jeanie says sharply. She’d casually dated Peter Abernathy back in the fall and early winter, but it had been a bid for companionship more than it had been a real play for love and romance. If anything, what it had truly been was a way for Jeanie to stop thinking about Bill. And it had failed miserably, by her own admission.
“He’s single at least. He has no kids. No ex-wife who just killed herself. No past at all, it would seem.” This is Bill’s way not of pushing Jeanie towards Peter, but of pointing out just how boring and dull Abernathy truly is. The man is a dolt , Bill thinks, picturing Peter standing dumbly beneath a single streamer at his thirtieth birthday office party one afternoon just a couple of months before. “He’s a blank slate, and you can make him into anything you want him to be.”
Jeanie looks angry now, and she turns her full body towards Bill, nearly touching his arm with her breasts as she steps closer to his ear. “I don’t want a blank slate, William Booker,” she whispers, her eyes searching his as she stands up to him. “I want a man who brings something to the table. I want a man with a past. I want someone who challenges me.” She stops talking and stares at him for a beat before taking a step back. “But what I don’t want is someone else’s husband.”
Bill is aroused by her nearness, and this alone floods him with guilt. He needs to walk away from her, but he can’t. He can’t physically make himself move.
As they stand there, eyes in a deadlock, the men from the hangar end their lunch break and start to stream out into the afternoon sun, swinging lunch pails lazily as they walk off their midday meals.
Bill breaks his stare with Jeanie and watches them in silence. A few men smoke cigarettes, and some get into their open-top Jeep/truck vehicles, putting them in gear as they take off for different corners of the NASA property to do all sorts of things. They scatter like ants as Bill watches them. When he looks back at Jeanie, she is still staring at him with a look in her eyes that he can’t quite name.
“I won’t call that night a mistake,” Bill says. He leans against the wall again, but this time he doesn’t put his head back, he just folds his arms across his chest and turns his body slightly towards Jeanie. “I won’t apologize. But I will say that I understand what you’re saying, and I don’t want to make you the kind of woman who does something she deems inappropriate.”
Jeanie suddenly looks irked. “You’re not making me do anything, Bill. I’m not a puppet—or a little girl. I’m a grown woman. I wanted to kiss you.” Her voice is rising as she gets more emphatic. Jeanie stops herself and glances around; there is no one nearby, but still she lowers her volume. “I wanted to, and I’m not sorry either,” she says in a near whisper. “But it can’t happen again. I can’t be coming to work every day, hoping to see you. I can’t get dressed in the morning and think ‘Will Bill like me in this dress? Will he sit by me at lunch?’ We’re not in high school.” Her dark eyebrows are knit together as she glares at a spot on the ground. “I need to grow up and move on.”
Something in Bill softens and nearly breaks as he watches her. He’s causing this girl real torment, and while he’s fine shouldering the burden of the mess he’s making, he isn’t keen on the idea that he’s making this beautiful, intelligent young woman feel the way that she obviously does.
“I do like you in that dress,” he says. His eyes linger on the way the black A-line dress grazes her torso and leaves her arms bare. Her long, brown hair is smoothed into a sleek chignon, and for some reason, she looks older today than she normally does. “And I like sitting with you at lunch, but I also know I need to stay away from you. I need to stay away from everyone and just catch my breath.”
Jeanie’s anger with herself seems to vanish as her face changes to one of concern. “What’s wrong?”
Now Bill does put his head back against the brick wall again, letting his eyes close. “I’m just having a tough time. The accident really threw me.”
“I know.”
When he opens his eyes, she’s still looking at him. “I feel partially responsible. Or completely. I don’t know.” Bill clamps his mouth shut; this is more than he’s said about the accident up until this point, and far more than he should be saying, according to his agreement with Arvin North. But there’s something so trustworthy about Jeanie Florence. It feels like—no matter what he has to say—Bill’s secrets will be safe with her. That he can unburden himself to Jeanie without fear of consequence. She is, above all, level-headed, rational, a thinker. Against his better judgment (and ignoring the fact that, a few months prior, he’d mistakenly thought she was the one who’d spoken badly about him at work), Bill exhales.
"I don't think you should," Jeanie says carefully. Two men in a Jeep drive by and wave at them. Bill nods back, but Jeanie keeps her eyes on him. "You didn't design the mission, the space craft, or have any hand in whatever caused the mishap. You weren't even officially on the mission anymore once the countdown started. The buck stops with North on this--or someone above either of our pay grades."
Bill feels relief to hear that she doesn't blame him, but then she has plenty of reason to feel guilty about her own actions that night, and her natural inclination might be to absolve them both of any wrongdoing on the evening of December thirteenth.
"But I could have been more forceful," Bill argues, though his heart isn't in it. He believes quite strongly that he could have been more adamant, but at the moment, he's just exhausted. He hasn't gotten a whole night of sleep since mid-December, and on top of that, he's got a stack of magazines in his briefcase that are filled with his wife's stories. He's halfway through the first one and while it's good storytelling, it's already feeling far too familiar.
Jeanie is nodding and digesting his concerns about what he might have done wrong with regards to the Gemini mission, and when she speaks, her words are measured.
"Bill." She puts a hand on his upper arm tentatively and leaves it there. The feeling of her skin against his short-sleeved shirt sends a thrill through him. "I think we should just keep our focus on what comes next. There are whole other departments and committees whose job it is to investigate this accident, and they'll find out that--well, maybe they'll find out that you were right and maybe they’ll find out that it was something else, but that’s out of our hands.” She’s pleading with him, but it's nice to have someone else saying words that feel good to hear. “For now, the best thing you can do is to just come to work and think about what else we have going on. There’s work to be done here, and?—“
As Jeanie is talking, Bill sees a commotion from the corner of his eye. Several of the open-topped trucks have circled the lot and come together, where the men are parking and jumping out to rush towards one of the hangars.
“Hey,” Bill says, interrupting Jeanie. “Something’s up. Something’s going on.” He’s absolutely certain from the determined and tense look on most of the men’s faces that there’s a situation brewing.
Jeanie turns her head and follows his gaze to where, in fact, a group of men are all gathering. “What do you think it is?” She glances back at Bill.
“I don’t know. Maybe we should head back to the office and find out. I’m sure protocol wouldn’t have us out here just watching from a distance. If it’s serious, we’ll hear about it.”
Rather than waiting for the elevators, Bill and Jeanie rush into the building and up the stairs, emerging on their floor out of breath. The others are just coming back from lunch, and phones are ringing at several of the desks, including Bill’s.
He picks it up. “Booker.”
“Bill,” Arvin North says into his ear. “Situation out front. We’ve got protestors.”
Bill frowns. Jeanie is standing next to him, looking at him with open and curious concern on her face, but he avoids her eyes. “Okay,” he says into the receiver.
“There’s a group of people and at least one camera crew. They’re saying we messed up with Gemini, and there’s talk of too much funding going towards NASA and not enough towards the rest of the issues in this country.”
“I’m listening,” Bill says, hoping that no one nearby can tell that he’s talking to North.
“They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I’d beg to differ on that.” Bill can hear Arvin North exhaling cigarette smoke before he goes on. “This, Lieutenant Colonel, is bad press.”
“So it would seem,” Bill agrees.
“I want you to steer clear of news crews, you hear me? We’re not commenting on this—no one is commenting. Gather the rest of the team. We’ll meet in the conference room in fifteen minutes.”
“Understood,” Bill says. He hangs up and turns back to Jeanie. “Looks like we missed lunch and it’s not on the horizon for either of us.”
Jeanie says nothing, but arches an eyebrow in question.
“We’ve got protestors out front, and North wants us in the conference room in fifteen minutes.”
Jeanie gives a single nod. “I’ll spread the word.”
* * *
“Protestors?’ Vance Majors stands up, pacing along the wall. Generally, when Arvin North calls a meeting, the men know better than to stand and interject. But something’s clearly bothering Vance. “Why would anyone in their right mind be opposed to what we’re trying to do here?”
“Majors,” Arvin North says sharply, “have a seat.”
Vance does as he’s told, though he sits back in his chair with a dark look in his eyes.
“Now,” North goes on. “We have people picketing the entire periphery of Cape Kennedy, and the entrance to the Cape is filled with people holding up signs and shouting at cars. From what I’ve gathered, they’re upset about Gemini, but also about the fact that government funding is going towards the space program rather than towards Civil Rights issues.”
“Like what?” Todd Roman, also not one to speak up in these meetings, raises his head and asks the question in a way that makes it seem as though he hasn’t meant to. Everyone looks in Todd’s direction, and his youthful face grows animated. “I just mean, there are ways to spend different pots of money, and people don’t seem to understand that. It’s possible that the money NASA receives wouldn’t even go towards the things they’re protesting for. The money might go towards other scientific advancements. Research. So essentially, they’re kind of wasting their own time. And ours.”
Vance is nodding as Todd speaks. “And they’re hindering our ability to do our damn jobs,” he adds, looking far less youthful and far more angry than Todd Roman. “We show up here every day and are willing to put our lives on the line—quite literally,” he adds, and everyone goes silent for a moment thinking of Bob Young and Derek Trager. “And for what? For ignorant people out on the street to stand there with signs glued to sticks, shouting about how money is being wasted?”
Bill, who is always prone to silence in meetings and other scenarios where he’s being spoken to by a superior, clears his throat. “But don’t forget,” he says, holding out a hand, “they have the right to peacefully gather and protest. So far, we haven’t heard of anything that would qualify as not peaceful. No one is breaking the law, are they?” He turns and looks at Arvin North.
“Not as of yet,” North confirms. “We had a group approach the front doors of the building, but they’ve been escorted off the property by the police. My understanding is that the authorities are more than willing to keep them in check.”
“Not much else going on in Stardust Beach, huh? Cops are all over some people who want to march in circles and chant.” Jay Reed, always jocular and a true peacemaker, tries for a bit of levity. It falls flat. “Sorry,” he says, giving a close-lipped smile in surrender.
“The space program is a very important part of this community—and our state,” North says. “Everyone takes the safety and sanctity of Cape Kennedy seriously, and people infiltrating the property in order to shout negative things at our workers will not be accepted.”
Jeanie is seated across the table from Bill, and he catches her eye. They stare at one another for a moment and then she looks away.
“I have also heard that there are news crews out there and that they’re looking for soundbites. I understand that many of you engage in after hours fraternizing at The Black Hole,” Arvin North adds, “which is fine. Your time is your time. But I want you to be on high alert, and be aware of anyone you don’t recognize. I’m sure it won’t surprise a sharp bunch of people like yourselves, but there are news organizations out there that would be willing to wait for an inebriated astronaut to stumble out of a bar and spill the beans. Don’t let that be you.” North lowers his chin and takes his time dragging his gaze across every face at the table. “If I turn on my television or open my newspaper and see your face, or read a quote from any of you, there will be consequences. Am I being clear?”
A chorus of “Yes, sirs” breaks out around the table.
Arvin North heaves a sigh of resignation. “Alright then. Back to work you go. All of you. Heads down, mouths closed. As you were.”
The astronauts and engineers file out, barely making eye contact with one another. They have work to do. Things to focus on. Issues to hammer out before their next mission, which has been postponed but not cancelled. But all it will take is a misspoken word for the program to come under the kind of scrutiny that will hurt them all. They cannot afford that.
Bill is the last to leave the room, and as he does, Arvin North catches his gaze and holds it for a beat.
Bill nods and walks out.