Page 44 of Jackie

“Where’s Jack?”

“We haven’t been able to reach him yet.”

It’s right there, on the edge of me—the question about the baby, where it is, that tiny body, tiny self, what happened, how it happened—but the sadness in his eyes is too cutting, too awful and intimate. I need a glass of water. That’s all.

“We almost lost you,” he says again, moving the chair closer to the bed.

“A girl?”

He nods.

“Arabella,” I say. “That’s the name I wanted. I knew it was a girl.”

His eyes fill, and I look away. Outside, starlings in the trees. Clouds and sky in pieces, caught between the branches and the flourish of summer leaves. Everything so bright and violent. Just looking at the green hurts my eyes.

—

“We haven’t been able to reach the senator,” I hear Bobby tell the doctor an hour later. I know what he’s doing. Trying to establish a story before another takes root. “We’ve sent messages through his secretary, but the boat he’s on has no ship-to-shore.”

A lie.

Bobby glances up as if he hears me thinking it.

“I’m sure there’s an explanation, Jackie,” he says after the doctor has left and we’re alone. I’m sitting up in the bed, pillows propped behind my back. The wall feels hard against my skull. I need that sense of hardness, that ground. Bobby is just looking at me. Do I really have to break it down for him? The baby is gone, so in Jack’s mind, there’s no reason to cut his trip short.

“How is Ethel?” I ask.

“Fine.”

It ends there. Ethel is due within a week. And Jack’s sister Pat has just given birth to a little girl named Sydney. Bobby is still looking at me, a compassion in his face that swerves too close and makes me feel. I don’t want to feel.

“It’s just a mistake, Jackie,” he finally says.

There’s no mistake, I want to say. The affairs are not a mistake. The coolness, the jokes, the flip remarks that shut me down. Not a mistake. Nor is his fickle desire for me, proprietary at times, like a wife is an article he wants, as long as that wife is strong, put-together, sexual, witty in a passionless way, as long as she keeps herself intact and doesn’t need him—because when she’s wanting or vulnerable or weak, he has to get out, get away. He can’t be there when she’s breaking.

Bobby’s eyes search my face.

You don’t stay with someone because they hurt you, I could say. You stay for the slight and mythical promise of a dream that once meant so much you were willing to trade a different future for it. You stay for what you gave up.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Bobby.” To his credit, he doesn’t ask what “it” is—the loss of the baby, the marriage, or some other loss not yet taken into account. He sits with me while I cry. He stays that night, late. He arranges everything. The service, flowers, funeral card. Everything.

“Good night, Jackie,” he says as he is leaving. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll always be here for you,” he says, glancing away like he feels foolish for having said it.

I smile. “So now you’re the one I’d put my hand in the fire for.”

—

Years later, I will remember that moment between us, and every time I remember, I’ll see some different aspect, a look in his eyes I didn’t register at the time, something desperately earnest in the silence, a little rushed as he looked away. Years from now, I will understand how much more complex that evening was than I gave it credit for. In the moment, all we see is what we expect to see.

Jack

The sea is calm. He sits on the deck, legs outstretched. There’s a woman nearby. Lying on a blue-and-white-striped cushion, half her face in shadow under the brim of her hat. She has pulled the straps of her bathing suit off her shoulders; her skin is tan, dirty-blond hair halfway down her back. The sun is hot. The kind of heat that erases what you’d rather forget.

He can’t forget.

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