Page 173 of Jackie

“You’re not going ashore,” he says. He turns to the others. “Lunch—who will join me?”

My clothes are noiseless as they strike the deck—the linen shirt, tank top, shorts, and hat. They fall in a pile, and I am over the side, swimming away toward land.

…

In the fall of 1974, I buy a two-story converted barn on ten acres in New Jersey. Ari comes to see me in New York. A few days later, he falls ill with the flu. His vision doubles. His speech begins to slur. He is hospitalized, diagnosed with progressive myasthenia gravis and a compromised heart.

Stress, alcohol, fatigue, the doctors explain. I sit beside him and listen. The cortisol they’ve injected makes his face swell. His eyelids droop. They prop them up with plaster.

He leans on me heavily as we leave the hospital, his eyes shielded by dark glasses.

“I’ve lost my touch,” he says sadly that night as I fix him a plate of bland food.

“You need to rest,” I say, “take better care of yourself. You’ll come back from this.”

“There are some voyages, Mummy, a man does not return from.”

My hand pauses, pouring a glass of water for him. “Don’t call me that again.”

—

I don’t return with him when he flies back to Athens. He falls ill again. I go to him then. I help Artemis and his daughter move him to Paris, where his doctors are. He refuses to go to the hospital, insisting he is fine, he will be fine. He’ll stay in his apartment, he says. His doctors will come to him. He’ll take whatever pills or infusion they force his way. He’ll rally.

—

I’m in New York, getting ready for a party to celebrate the premiere of an NBC documentary Caroline helped produce. She’s only seventeen. It’s late morning when the phone rings.

“Just Christina was there,” Artemis tells me. When Christina knew her father’s fever was rising, she never left his side. She told his doctors not to call anyone else. She wanted his last hours to be solely hers. An hour after he was gone, she tried to slash her wrists.

I set the phone back into the cradle and walk into the guest room, where my friend Karen has spent the night.

“Ari’s dead,” I say. “Please stay here and stand in for me as hostess. For Caroline. This is her night.”

As I pack, I try to close my mind against the unvoiced disappointment that my daughter—with her astute grace—will try to hide. She’ll understand my leaving. She will say it’s okay. This is what she’s learned to do. I consider staying the few extra hours, through the day, the party, the evening. But the world will watch. I know that. The world will be quick to judge the fact that hasn’t broken in the news yet, the one I can’t undo—that I wasn’t there when he died.

I close the suitcase, shift the lock.

—

Teddy flies with me through time zones. The Atlantic streams underneath as we gain on the night. I wear a black trench coat, a black leather skirt.

“They’re going to crucify me because I wasn’t there,” I say.

“They would’ve either way.”

He tilts his glass. Dark wine swirls. We fly in silence.

“I have to make a statement when we land,” I say.

“No, you don’t.”

“What will the press say if I say nothing?”

“We’ll explain you’re grieving.”

“I’m not.”

He looks at me sharply. He never particularly liked Ari. None of them did. But they want me to play my part.

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