Page 101 of Jackie

That was the moment he first loved her. He sees it now. That sense of love so intense, he shut it right down. It catches up with him, that memory of her, the awareness of her strength, the loaded will of her body as she swam, the light and the wet on her skin, her head turning to breathe like she was made of that water.

He feels it, what he didn’t let himself feel in that moment all those years ago.

So odd. How life can do this. You can have every fact right, every logistic, and still miss the point.

He loved her then, the way he will love her, always.

—

She is looking at him. “Jack, you aren’t upset about the bracelet, are you?” she says, teasing. “I love that bracelet, Jack. You must have known I would. I only wondered why you’d give me all those other things too and ask me to choose.” She smiles. “Sometimes it’s funny, Jack, the things you don’t seem to know.”

She is looking directly at him now, not anywhere else.

—

The world is alive to me because of you.

—

He thinks it. It’s nothing he says. Not yet. There are years to say a thing like that.

—

Agent Foster is walking toward them on the beach, his head down like he’s watching his own shoes moving through the sand. Jack knows the news is bad even before Foster tells him that a cable arrived. A Baptist church in Birmingham was bombed. Four young Black girls killed.

“You have to go, Jack,” she says.

He waits for a moment before standing up. “Is the car ready, Mr. Foster?”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Foster turns and heads back toward the lot, dark pant cuffs rimmed with sand.

“This kind of violence,” she says, “this hatred, it never ends, does it? We make a few steps forward, then something like this.”

The sound of a jet overhead. He looks up, squinting, shielding his eyes from the sun. He follows it, the liquid mercury streak of that plane bisecting the blue.

“Are you still planning to go?” he asks.

Late September. He is leaving for a five-day trip to eleven Western states. Shortly afterward, I will fly to Athens. It’s Patrick. I’ve told Jack this. I don’t want to be away from him and the children, but I am in too many pieces.

“I’m sorry,” I say. He looks at me; it’s sharp and endless, the sadness in his eyes—soul so blunt it cuts my breath.

“Stay,” he says.

—

His eyes that day were different. I could see them long after the plane lifted off, his eyes on my face when he realized I would go, the feeling in them raw and deep and new—like he finally understood something had happened between us.

It’s not that I love you less, I could have explained. It’s not that at all. It’s just these waves of burning sorrow I’ve felt since we lost Patrick. There are whole days when all I am is grief.

“Stay,” he said. Just that one word. The memory moves around my edges as the coast beneath us falls away. I watch the night-limned clouds, and through the sadness and the missing and the doubt, wondering if I should have made a different choice, I feel a trace of something else—the quiet thrill I used to feel every time I left my life behind to go abroad, the thrill of being a woman with no country, no history, no past at all.

…

At the bay in Glyfada, our bags are loaded onto a dark mahogany speedboat. We fly across the water toward the pale mass of the Christina, moored farther out.

We come aboard. Onassis steps forward, takes my hand, and kisses me on each cheek. It’s polite, customary, but I feel Clint stiffen behind me. Other guests are already there. Sue and Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.; Onassis’s sister, Artemis; and Lee. I’m shown to my suite of rooms; in the private bathroom are solid-gold faucets on the sink, dolphin-shaped.

—

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