Spotlight: Landing by Olivia Hawker
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Alan is able to imagine every way critical equipment might break during the launch and landing of Apollo 11. But his experience in preventing cosmic disasters does nothing to prepare him for the pressures of a hasty marriage to a woman he barely knows—or the strain of keeping up appearances amid the shifting social attitudes of the late ’60s. When a crisis at home forces Alan back to earth, he’s faced with a choice he doesn’t know how to make: whether to let go or move forward.
Olivia Hawker’s Landing is part of A Point in Time, a transporting collection of stories about the pivotal moments, past and present, that change lives. Read or listen to each immersive story in a single sitting.
Excerpt
Alan wasn’t sure what exactly love was, how to quantify and measure it, but he knew how he’d felt on that day when he’d first met Carol. He’d been standing in the crowd on Playalinda Beach, with his school buddies gathered around him, all of them waiting in breathless anticipation for Saturn V to billow out its red skirt of fire and rise majestically into the sky. They were jostling and laughing, making crude jokes, and Alan had slipped a little farther down the beach as he’d sensed ignition coming, this moment he’d been dreaming of for months now. He wanted to be alone with his wonder, his sense of accomplishment—as much as a guy could be alone in a pack of excited gawkers.
A girl with dark hair had come skipping backward across the sand, holding up her camera, trying to keep her friends in the frame while they posed with Cape Canaveral behind them. Look out, one of them had called, and a second later Carol had collided with Alan.
He’d said, Pardon me, my mistake, even though it had been hers, but she hadn’t left it at that. She forgot all about taking that picture and asked him if he wanted a beer because she had one in her bag, though it was probably warm by now. And then his friends were flocking around, urging him toward the beautiful, slender girl with the camera, and one of them said, He’s an engineer at NASA, you know. He helped build the rocket.
“Well,” Carol had said, giving Alan a more considering look. Then she’d cracked open a beer can herself and pushed it decisively into his hand while his friends hooted and pounded him on his back.
“What do you do over at NASA?” she’d asked.
“Small-equipment engineering.” The beer had gone warm, but Alan gulped it down just so he wouldn’t have to meet her eye. She was watching him with an expectant grin, and he didn’t know what was expected of him.
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“I break things,” Alan had said, chuckling. “I’m supposed to think of all the ways a thing might break, and then make that thing unbreakable.”
“Oh, yeah?” Carol had stepped very close to him before he’d realized what she was doing, before he could slide away. She tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow, and he was afraid to drink any more of the beer in case the movement might dislodge her and deprive him of her touch. “What about hearts?” she’d said. “Can you make hearts unbreakable?”
A moment later there’d been a burst of red light on the cape, twenty tons of fuel per second burning in a cloud of heat, and Saturn V had begun its flight into an endless new frontier.
And now here they were, holding hands as if it were a thing they’d always done, a thing they’d be doing for the rest of their lives, motoring toward the country club, and staring, both of them, out over the perfect blue of the water to the cape and the far horizon beyond. It was easier to keep their eyes on the world out there than on the small, uncertain reality they’d just made between them.
About the Author
Olivia Hawker is the Washington Post bestselling author of The Fire and the Ore, The Rise of Light, The Ragged Edge of Night, and One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction. For more information, visit www.hawkerbooks.com.
