Page 116 of Jackie

He was always saying words like that to keep her calm, to put her off.

—

Later

Soon

—

It passes through him now like some strange and awful bolt to light the life he will not live.

…

Now it is later.

Time is gone.

—

Parkland ER. Clint has pulled out a chair. Always with her, and now in the hall he pulls out a metal folding chair for her, then a second chair, empty, beside it. Someone hands her a towel. She starts to wipe her face, then puts it down. She says something to another man, who takes a pack of cigarettes from his trousers pocket and lights one for her.

“Thank you,” she says, but does not smile. She sits and smokes and stares at the wall.

—

There are things he will miss. Tiny nothing things:

His feet following his own shadow across the lawn

The scent of the Rose Garden

A bracing wind on the water, that cold salt soak, the mainsheet in his grip

His daughter’s hands

In Caroline’s eyes he could see the future, a searing infinite blue. He could feel that future as she hurled herself across the room toward him, flew fast and hard like she’d fly straight through his open arms through the window behind him into the great tall world.

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His wife’s mind—sly, brilliant, not always kind—that meditative way she’d run her finger absently along the edge of a page she was reading in bed.

—

These throwaway details of a life.

—

“Look how beautiful, Jack,” she’d whispered to him once, her hand on his wrist, eyes fixed on a lit branch through a window, her face with no play in it then, just open and gentle and soft, and he fell in.

—

Once

Later

Soon

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