Page 96 of Jackie

“Not exactly. They’re going to take the baby to Children’s Hospital in Boston.”

“You’ll go with him?”

“Yes.” He is looking at me. I can’t quite bear the way he is looking at me. “He’s beautiful, Jackie.”

“I want to hold him.”

“You can’t yet. They’re helping him breathe.”

“John’s lungs were undeveloped, and he’s fine now. Baby Patrick will be fine.”

Jack nods but doesn’t answer, and I feel the ground underneath me sink away, like the world has lost its edge.

“What is it, Jack? Tell me.”

“Patrick has something called hyaline membrane disease. A film around the air sacs in his lungs.”

“And what will they do?”

“We have to wait and hope his own body dissolves the film.”

“I want to see him, Jack, our baby, before they take him away. Can I see him? Jack, please.”

They wheel him into my room. He is so small and so still. He lies on his back in an Isolette, a little clear box Jack tells me is a pressurized incubator. He has a name band around his tiny wrist. His eyes are closed. He has light-brown hair.

Jack flies with him to Boston. It’s Dr. Walsh who tells me the baby is gone. He passed away at four in the morning. They removed him from the oxygen chamber and the web of tubes. They laid him in Jack’s arms. He was thirty-nine hours, twelve minutes old.

Clint is in the room when Dr. Walsh comes in to tell me these things. Clint’s eyes meet mine, and I feel the grief rip throughme.

By the time Jack arrives an hour later, I’ve tried to pull myself together. But he cries telling me what happened, and I cry again with him.

—

He comes to see me twice a day, often with Caroline, who brings flowers in small lopsided bouquets. Summer flowers—the kind I love—larkspur, trumpet flowers, black-eyed Susans. My daughter’s face is solemn as she holds them out to me, her hair neatly parted, held in place with a barrette. It feels almost too neat, too careful. I don’t want this for her.

The following Saturday, Cardinal Cushing holds a Mass in Boston. I’m still not strong enough to go. It’s Lee who tells me afterward that Jack put his arm around the small white casket, sobbing, like he would not be pulled away from it, like he just couldn’t let it go underground.

“Patrick fought,” Jack keeps telling me. Again and again, he tells me this—how tiny Patrick was, how brave. At Children’s, he’d started to improve, his breathing had stabilized, but then he went into a sudden downward spiral, and they put his tiny body in a hyperbaric chamber and tried to flood oxygen into his lungs. Jack could do nothing. He could only sit there in the corridor on a wooden chair and wait. There was a round window in the chamber, a porthole window, through which he could see our baby. How he fought. How clear it was that he wanted to live, to breathe. And when he began to die, they brought Patrick out to him, and Jack sat on that wooden chair and held him as he fought right to the end.

Jack tells me this over and over; he goes back to those hours, that moment, when he held our baby in his arms and his heart broke. He looks down at his hands as he reaches the end, like he still can’t believe how his hands could have let that slight life go.

—

Night again. He’s gone. They need him in Washington, and he’s flown back. He has meetings with the Senate about the test-ban treaty vote. Within a few days, he’s promised, he’ll return. I can’t sleep. The air in the room unsettled. Nurses come and go. I ask them to leave me alone.

I want to stanch it, that grief, a hard, fast, raging thing forcing a channel through in its own most terrible way.

—

Down there in the ground, alone. He is too small to be down there alone, too small to have slipped, so easily, through some slight crack from our world into that dark other.

—

Jack flies back to Hyannis on Wednesday to bring me to our house on Squaw Island. As we walk out of the hospital and down the front steps, he grips my hand. He opens the door of the car and helps me in.

We spend hours together, lying on the bed, without exchanging a word. His arms wrap around me, my face against his chest. My tears soak his shirt and his soak my hair, that wet leaking in to soften the leftover ice between us. I feel it happen. Through those long silent hours of August, it hollows us, changing the ways we fit into each other—hands, bodies, eyes—even as the rest of the world starts up again.

When he is in Hyannis Port, he is with me almost constantly. When he has to fly down to Washington, he returns within days. So much is the same as it’s always been. The children still come running at the sound of the helicopter in its descent. When it lands and he climbs out, he sweeps John and Caroline up in a hug. Then he comes to find me. That is the difference. Not sometimes anymore, but always. And if I’m not right there with the others, he won’t get into the golf cart and drive into town with the children; he’ll come to find me first. He’ll take me in his arms and hold me, the holding so tight, his mouth in my hair, and I will say to him, “Bring them into town now, Jack, they’ve been waiting all day. Take them for an ice cream. Go now, before the store closes.”

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