Page 142 of Jackie

Every evening before dinner, I swim from the edge of the cliff to the forked palm tree and back. Bobby doesn’t like it. Too close to dusk, he says.

I smile. “What are you afraid of? Sharks?”

He waits for me on the beach. When I turn my head to breathe, I can see his small dark figure, knees tucked up to his chest as he waits for the sun to go down and for me to come out. He meets me in the shallows with a towel.

“Thank you,” I say. He takes a step back. There are new faint splits in the bond between us, moments when his hand brushes mine. Or he’ll reach for my face without thinking. Then his fingers will pause, retract.

We don’t talk about it. It means nothing.

A few nights before we leave for Washington, he and I sit out on the porch after the others have drifted off to bed.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” he says. I keep smoking. He won’t say it again. Then it is just the silence and the two of us alone, awkward again, under the weight of the hot night and the terrible stars.

I’d kissed him earlier that evening. After my swim. I’d gone past the palm tree. He followed along the shore, carrying the towel. I got out at the end of the beach. We were far down, out of sight of the house. As he put the towel over my shoulders, I turned and kissed him. It startled him at first. Then not. I moved closer. No one else was there. His hands touched me, and it felt almost familiar—the touch—not awkward at all. No shock in it. Only his hands on my body, my neck, my face. I felt like I was no one. Like we were two people who had ceased to exist. In the dusk, his eyes were empty, pale as glass, apart from that cool hunger. Then his hand dropped, and I pulled the towel around me. We walked in silence back to the house.

“I used to love the night,” I say to him now on the porch.

“What did you love?”

“Walking around in it. In the summers, in Newport, I’d go down to the edge of the lawn and watch the boats and lightships on the bay. It felt magical, that glow of night water and lights in the distance. Sometimes I would just lie out there in my nightgown in the grass and watch the stars in their massive Van Gogh pinwheels.”

The porch ceiling fan spins, a low creaking sound through the heat.

“That’s a nice memory,” he says.

“It’s only memory,” I say. “You can’t expect too much of it.”

…

A week after I come home, a letter arrives from William Manchester, requesting a meeting to talk about the book he’s been contracted to write. About the death of the president. The few days before it happened, the few days after, the map of decisions and events.

“I need more time, Bobby. There must be others he can talk to.”

“He’s already started.”

“Writing? How can he have started?”

“The agreement—”

“I don’t want a book about that day.”

“There will be books,” Bobby says, his voice calm, pragmatic, like he’s talking to a child. “You need to meet with Manchester, then the Warren Commission. Then the record will be there.”

“And I can stop?”

“Yes.”

“And it will be over?’’

“Yes.”

Yesterday, at Hickory Hill, I played tennis with Father McSorley, Ethel’s priest. As we played, I asked Father McSorley if God would separate me from Jack if I killed myself.

“What about John and Caroline?” the priest asked.

I explained I feel like I’m no good to my children as I am right now.

“They’d be better off with Bobby and Ethel. They could have a normal life.”

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