24. Bill
CHAPTER 24
Bill
There is no part of Bill’s brain that is nagging him about Jo’s reading event. None whatsoever. He’s completely forgotten it. In fact, every fiber of his being is completely focused on the task at hand, so much so that if someone interrupted his thought process, he most likely wouldn’t even be able to name his children in order, or answer basic questions about who he is and where he comes from.
“Booker, this is urgent,” one of the engineers says, rushing in with a memo that he hands off to Bill. Bill skims it quickly and then balls up the memo and tosses it halfheartedly.
He’s behind the controls at mission headquarters, monitoring a half-dozen screens that are spread out on the console in front of him. Bill stands up and puts his hands on his hips as he frowns at the television screen overhead that shows the three-man orbital spacecraft as it sits on a launch pad. He has a stopwatch on a string looped around his neck and tucked into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, and a sharpened pencil tucked behind one ear.
“You think this is a go, or do we scrap it?” Bill turns to Arvin North, who is sitting in a chair nearby, one ankle crossed over his knee, arms folded over his chest. He’s also monitoring the screens and data, and he’s acting as Bill’s second-in-command, though they both know that North has the final say on everything.
Bill does not want to scrap this. He absolutely does not. This is his mission to lead from the ground (even though the spacecraft won’t be launching into the atmosphere on this particular mission, the astronauts are still fully suited up and prepared the same way they would be for a launch). He wants to show everyone that he’s done his work and that he’s fully prepared for this mission to be a success, but he doesn’t want to make stupid mistakes because of his own bravado. A line of sweat beads on his forehead and Bill resists the urge to brush it away.
“We’ve already been pushed back an hour,” Arvin North says gruffly, turning to look at Bill. “And we’re losing daylight here.”
Bill pauses as he considers his next words carefully. “There’s been some talk about this particular spacecraft. It’s clunky. It’s kind of barebones, and there are some things about it that I think we could see as flaws. It might be in our best interest to?—“
“Clunky?” Arvin North repeats with a sharp laugh. “You want me to call off a mission because you think the technology is inelegant, Booker?”
Bill’s eyes shift to the side for a moment and then he drags them back to North and holds them there. “Yes,” he finally says with a nod. “I think that’s exactly what we should do. Running a mission of any sort—even one that doesn’t involve actual space travel—when you’re unconvinced about the technology is a bad idea. It just is.”
The screens around them beep and chirp. There are voices from other parts of the floor as various engineers carry on conversations and take turns pointing at the windows, the monitors, and at Bill. He looks around at everyone; they’re clearly waiting for him to make a call, but something is really bothering him, and he knows he should have spoken up to Arvin North sooner—much sooner than the day of the mission.
With a conviction that he pulls together from everything he knows and feels about this particular mission, Bill stares at Arvin North. “I don’t feel comfortable with this,” he says in a low, firm voice. “I think we should postpone.”
Arvin North holds Bill’s gaze for what feels like an eternity, then he stands up slowly, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. Conversation slows to a trickle and then stops. “I’ve considered all the elements here, including the delay we’ve already encountered, and I’ve decided that this mission is a go,” North says.
The faces around the room remain mostly placid, save for a few men who show the slightest flickers of disapproval. Still, no one speaks up.
“We’ve got our men suited, and ready to board Gemini. I’ve heard all the issues and I’ve considered the factors, and we’re going to run this mission tonight. Right here, right now. I want everyone in their places. We’ll begin countdown in—“ North glances up at the giant clock on the wall of mission control, watching its sweeping hands for a moment, “—twenty minutes. If we don’t, we lose our window for today, and for the foreseeable future due to projected weather conditions. Am I clear?”
No one says a word.
“Fabulous,” North says. “We have twenty minutes.” He strides over to the side of the room and pours himself a paper cup of black coffee from a silver urn, sipping it calmly.
When he returns, he stands next to Bill, facing the same direction and looking at the same monitors. “Bill,” he says. “I’m relieving you of your duties on this mission. There’s no room for second-guessing here, and I’m going to ask you to step away without making an issue of this. Do you hear me?”
Bill isn’t at all sure that he’s doing the right thing, but he’s doing what he thinks is right, and sometimes that’s the very best you can do. He wants to prove himself, and to show that he’s able to consider both his own findings and determinations, as well as to weigh the possible dangers and successes of the mission itself. He’s in a tough spot, and he knows it. His entire career could be in jeopardy if he says or does the wrong thing.
Bill can feel the eyes of nearly every man in mission control watching him furtively as he stands shoulder to shoulder with Arvin North, and so he nods, casting his gaze to the floor. “I hear you, sir,” he finally says, confirming it with another nod. “I do.”
Arvin clears his throat next to Bill and then claps Bill on the back once. “Next time,” he says in a voice that’s laced with regret and understanding. “We’ll give it another go next time.”
Bill walks off the floor of mission control then, not making eye contact with anyone as he does, and when he pushes the latched door handle with both hands, it swings open wildly and nearly knocks Jeanie off her feet.
“Bill!” she says with surprise. She’s been asked to stay and watch the mission from the viewing deck, and while he knows that he should follow her directly up there and watch and learn right alongside her and the other engineers and astronauts who are non-essentials on this particular mission, he knows that he can’t do it. He just can’t.
Without a word, Bill pushes past Jeanie and makes a beeline for the stairwell, where he yanks open another door and starts taking the steps two and then three at a time.
“Bill!” Jeanie calls after him, standing in the doorway as she looks up at him ascending. Her voice echoes in the concrete stairwell, and there’s a plaintive note in her cry that forces him to stop in his tracks. He stands there, one hand on the railing, his back to the bottom floor where Jeanie waits. “What happened?” she asks.
Her voice reverberates off of everything and fills his ears. Bill can feel the hum of her words in his chest. He stands there, still saying nothing, but not running away.
“Can you come down? Can we talk?” she pleads. “Or can I come up?”
Bill knows that everyone will either be watching or taking part in the mission, and the chance of anyone happening onto their conversation is low, so he turns around and sits—slowly. He rests both elbows on his knees and then puts his head into his hands, letting it rest there.
Carefully, as if approaching a wounded animal, Jeanie climbs the stairs. She walks on the balls of her feet, which keeps her heels from clicking on the concrete, and soon she is standing just beneath Bill—two steps down—and looking right at him.
“Bill,” she whispers imploringly, putting her hands on his shoulders but not shaking him. “Hey.”
Bill stays inside of himself. He can’t unfurl physically or emotionally right away, and so it’s better for him to stay curled up and to keep to his thoughts tucked away until it feels safe to speak.
“I don’t know what happened in there,” Jeanie says, keeping her hands on his shoulders. Bill can feel her moving closer until her upper thighs are touching his knees. If he lifts his head, he knows they will be face to face. “I’m here to listen, Bill. Or I can just sit next to you and we can be quiet.”
As if to prove this point, Jeanie lets go of his shoulders and shifts so that she’s sitting next to him on the hard step. “Ooh,” she says to herself as she settles her body, tucking her thin skirt beneath her. “Cold.”
Bill can feel the faintest hint of a smile as listens to her, but he’s still too far inside himself to be able to interact, so he doesn’t. They sit quietly for a long while.
“I’ve missed talking to you,” Jeanie says softly. “I’ve missed your friendship, and I don’t know what happened between us to make things weird, but I’m still here, Bill.”
Finally, Bill lifts his head and looks at her raggedly. “You don’t know what happened?” he rasps. “You really don’t?” Rather than launching into his real feelings and his deepest accusations, Bill reaches for the surface answer, the lightest punch. “You and Abernathy are always together,” he says, feeling like an idiot and a child as the words come out. “You seem pretty preoccupied there.”
“Bill,” Jeanie says, but then doesn’t go on.
“No, seriously. Everywhere I look, you and Peter are together, and I don’t want to interrupt.”
“Oh, come on,” Jeanie says, but now her voice sounds exasperated, and Bill’s head whips in her direction. He hadn’t expected exasperation. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Bill waits a beat, and as he watches her face, he can feel a vein pulsing in his forehead.
“Why did you tell Peter I had a boyfriend?”
There is no good answer for this, or rather, there is no good answer that won’t make her upset. Bill shrugs. “I’m not sure.”
Hot, angry tears appear in Jeanie’s eyes and he looks away. “That was wrong, Bill.”
“I know,” he says instantly. He feels guilty, and he has ever since he’d lied to Peter in the elevator, though clearly it hadn’t stopped the guy from making his move. “But he asked you out anyway, so all’s well that ends well, right?”
“Not exactly,” Jeanie says, sniffing and tossing her head back as she fights off the tears that had threatened to fall. “We got to talking one day in the lunch room and he mentioned that he was having a party and wanted to know if my boyfriend and I might want to come.”
“Oh,” Bill says.
“Right,” Jeanie agrees. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry. That put you in an awkward position.”
“It sure as hell did,” she says emphatically. “I sounded like a moron—and a liar—as I told him I had no boyfriend. He said you’d been so sure I did when he asked, so he’d just assumed.”
“And then he asked you out?”
“Well, he invited me to the party, and I went, and then we found out we both like golfing and swimming, and we’ve become somewhat…friendly.”
A dark cloud passes over Bill’s heart and he tries to ignore the way this makes him feel. The idea of Jeanie being “friendly” with a jackwad like Peter Abernathy is almost more than he can take. “I’m really sorry,” he says, trying to actually be sorry.
“Well, what’s done is done,” Jeanie says. She sounds tired. “It’s not a relationship or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she admits as she smooths her skirt over her thighs. “But it’s nice to have someone to go out with occasionally other than Vicki.”
This actually makes Bill smile—at least partially. “How is old Vicki?”
Jeanie laughs softly. “First of all, don’t let her hear you calling her ‘old’ anything,” she says with a wry smile. “But she’s fine. She’s dating a guy or two?—“
“Of course she is.”
“And she seems happy. She’s good company, and I’ll be honest, I’ve been glad to not be alone here while my brother and sister recuperate up in Chicago.”
“Oh, jeez,” Bill says, feeling ashamed of himself. “I haven’t even asked you how they are.”
“Yeah, well…you’ve been busy ignoring me.” Jeanie bumps him with her shoulder in a slightly more aggressive manner than is strictly necessary. “My brother is doing alright. He still hasn’t forgiven himself for the accident. And Angela still isn’t walking, but she can feel some sensation in one of her feet, and she’s the most optimistic person I know. She really is.”
“That’s great,” Bill says, feeling actual relief. The idea that two eighteen-year-old kids nearly lost their life—not to mention the fact that Jeanie could have lost hers—had troubled him immensely. “I’m so happy to hear that.”
Jeanie lifts one shoulder and tilts her head towards it shyly. “I’ve really struggled with all of it. My mom and stepdad have done the lion’s share of the work when it comes to Angela’s recovery, obviously, but I had some really dark moments.” She bites her lip and drops her shoulder. “I needed to confront the fact that my life is working out differently than anyone else I know, and that a part of me likes it this way.”
“What does that mean?” Bill frowns as he watches her profile.
Jeanie looks ahead at the scarred, vanilla-colored paint of the stairwell in the dim wattage of the lightbulbs that illuminate the space. “It means that, as a woman, I should be settling down by now. I’m twenty-seven, Bill. I have no romantic prospects on the horizon.”
“You have Peter.”
She turns to look at him pointedly. “I have no romantic prospects on the horizon,” Jeanie reiterates, “and I’m nowhere near getting married and having children. I mean, what if it never happens for me? What if the bulk of my life is spent working as an engineer and not as a mother?”
Bill has never had direct insight into a woman’s thought processes as they pertain to such things, and he isn’t sure what to say. For him—as he would imagine it is for most men—it was just another stepping stone on the long path of his life: get married. Have kids. Go back to work as the wife raises the kids. Carry on. But for Jeanie, as for all women, it’s a real “either/or” question, and the notion of whether they will or won’t find love and marriage and family carries a very real and very heavy weight. Bill has never had a conversation with another man that’s laced with longing for these things. No man in his orbit has ever expressed worry that he might regret not having these things.
“I’m not sure, Jean,” he finally says. He feels for her, and as he watches the way her eyebrows knit together, he wants to put an arm around her shoulders and take some of the burden from her, to at least let her rest against him for a bit. But he doesn’t. “I really don’t know.”
“Yeah, there are no answers,” she says, standing again and brushing her skirt flat against her front. “But anyway.”
Bill looks up at her, noting the faux toughness in her voice. It’s definitely for show, and it pains him even more than her vulnerability. In order to give her something in return, he tells her the truth. “You caught me coming out of mission control after North took me off the mission.”
Jeanie sucks in air loudly. “What? Just now?”
Bill nods once and looks at his hands; he’s still sitting on the step and now Jeanie is looking down at him. “I disagreed with doing it today. I don’t think the spacecraft is right yet, and I had this feeling that we needed to push it out, but North felt otherwise.” Bill glances at his watch. “Countdown starts in about seven minutes. We should probably go and watch from the observation deck.”
“But Bill…” Jeanie shakes her head as she stares at him. “I’m so sorry. I think you did what was right in this case though, because you had some misgivings and you spoke up. Ultimately we’re reaching for the stars here, but we’re still accountable for our own instincts and gut feelings, and we’re still accountable to each other. I think you were right to say something.”
Bill laughs drily. “Well. We’ll see, I guess. In the end it might have been exactly the wrong thing, but I’m willing to stand by it.”
“Then I’m willing to stand by you,” Jeanie says with conviction.
All the emotions Bill has felt for the past several months come rushing back in one tidal wave that hits him now on the stairs and nearly knocks him down, metaphorically speaking.
“Now you’re willing to stand by me?” he asks, trying to squelch the angry tone in his voice. “Why now?”
Jeanie takes a step away from him, blinking in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Remember that time we talked at The Black Hole? Down by the water?”
Jeanie’s eyes are darting around like a scared rabbit’s. “Yes,” she says hesitantly. “I remember.”
“And how I told you that I have these…episodes? Where I need to shut myself away from the world and just cope?”
“Okay,” Jeanie says carefully. “Yes. I remember.”
“So? You had to have taken that directly to North. Why did you do that?”
“What are you talking about?” Now Jeanie looks mad. He’s accused her, and her face is flushed bright red with frustration. “Why would I ever do that? I wouldn’t ever do that, Bill.”
“You’re the only person who I’ve ever told about those episodes,” he says hotly. “It had to be you.”
“Well, it wasn’t!” Jeanie says with venom. “It most definitely wasn’t.” The color drains from her face as realization dawns. “Oh, Bill,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper. She puts her fingers to her lips. “I’m so sorry. I should have come to you with this, but I thought it wasn’t my place. Oh, no.”
Bill’s heart nearly stops. Whatever she’s going to say, he needs to hear it now, without delay, but he also doesn’t want her to tell him at all. “What? What happened?”
Jeanie closes her eyes and holds them that way for a long breath and then opens them. “It was Vance Majors.”
“What was Vance Majors?”
Jeanie blows out a fast, hard breath that makes her cheeks puff. “Vance came to me a while back and said we should talk to North about the way you kind of lost it on the Fourth of July. I’m so sorry, Bill. I didn’t do it, and he never brought it up again. I assumed he just dropped it.”
“But…why?” Bill is asking the question, but not really asking it of Jeanie. “Why would he do that?”
Jeanie’s eyes are wide. “Jealousy, maybe? I’m not sure.”
Bill runs a hand through his hair and then looks at Jeanie’s worried face. It’s clear that she feels terrible about this situation, but it’s obviously not her fault. He isn’t even sure what he might have done in her position, so he can’t fault her for the way she handled it.
“Bill, you don’t know how sorry I am. If something I did or didn’t do got you pulled off this mission, then?—“
“No,” Bill says, reaching out with both hands and cupping her shoulders gently. “This is not your fault. Not at all.”
Jeanie’s eyes fill with tears. “I would never want you to get removed from a mission, and I didn’t think you handled things badly on the Fourth. That was terrible, shocking news,” she says, not meeting Bill’s eye as he continues to hold on to her with both hands. “I’m on your side, Bill,” she says, finally lifting her gaze so that it meets his. “I’m on your side because I think you’re smart, and good at what you do. I think you’re dedicated, and amazing, and…” Her voice trails off as Bill’s eyes land on her soft, pink lips. He watches them move as if in slow motion. “And I care about you.”
There it is: the truth. It’s been the truth in Bill’s heart all along, and now he knows it’s been the truth in Jeanie’s, as well.
He cares about her.
And she cares about him.