Page 185 of Jackie

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Early that morning, when I arrive at the stables at Rokeby, a crust of frost on the grass snaps under my boots. My breath is white in the cold clean air. I look for the horse I usually ride, Frank, the horse I won the trials with three years before.

Afterward, I’ll try to remember what I was thinking when I chose the other horse instead—a dark bay thoroughbred gelding with a neatly braided mane and tail, the one the groom told me used to fly over fences but now might be too settled, too content to follow the hunt.

I lead the horse over to join the others. The hounds pick up the scent of the fox. The horse’s girth and stride feel unfamiliar. Then I adjust, and we’re swept into the speed and rhythm, the cry of the hounds, the peal of the horn echoing back through the valley while a mist fills in among the hills. We come to the wall, gaps where the rise is low. I move away to find a good place to cross, back the horse up, then urge him forward to jump.

—

I feel it happen, the jerk as his hoof clips an edge of the wall, and my body flows over his head toward the ground.

—

I open my eyes. You’re somewhere nearby, on the beach. You’re with me and we’re lying in the sun. No one is there. I know this somehow. No one’s looking for us. No one knows we are gone. You’re lying beside me, eyes closed, and the sun has shaped your face. You’re a man in relief—alien, divine—pulled out of sand, dune grass, light. Your eyes open then, your face turning just enough so you’re looking at me, and it is only you again. Young. The way I remember. Your eyes with a kind of forever in them I’d only glimpse from time to time.

“Swim?” you say.

The image snaps. Like the vanishing zip on a television screen before it goes dark.

—

Bunny’s face. No, not Bunny. Another woman. Bunny’s friend Barbara, leaning over, and a man as well, concerned faces. They tell me I’ve been out for over fifteen minutes. They have phoned Bunny and she is on her way. Their voices waver like static. I remember the last bad fall I took. That one, too, was this time of year. November.

—

At Loudoun Hospital Center, Bunny’s doctor finds a lump at the top of my thigh.

“You haven’t been feeling well?” he says.

“Always cold. Tired. I was unwell earlier this year, in France. I haven’t seemed to shake it since.”

“Fever?”

“Sometimes at night. Not every night, but some nights.”

He nods. “You’ve been fighting an infection,” he explains. He prescribes a heavy antibiotic. After he leaves the room and I’m slipping off the examining table, finding my clothes, I feel a wave of relief. I’d been afraid it was something worse.

—

So my spirits are light over the holidays. I spend Thanksgiving with the children, celebrating their birthdays, each in turn as always. Colder weather begins to descend—days of biting wind, a dusting of snow. Holiday lights swathe the avenues, carolers gather in the park, Christmas displays in store windows, the smell of roasted chestnuts, pine. I take my granddaughters to The Nutcracker. I put up a tree in the apartment, draped with old-fashioned ornaments. Their mirrored surfaces catch splintered fragments off the fire.

—

Marta helps me load the little BMW with presents, my weekend bag, and extra rolls of wrapping paper, ribbon, bows. As I drive out to New Jersey, where I’ll spend Christmas with Caroline’s family, John, and Maurice, I listen to the cassette of Carly’s duet with Sinatra. Then I pop that tape out and pop in another. It’s Carly’s voice I want to fill the car—that big, bold poet voice, carving hunger out of nothing. I hum along, tapping the steering wheel, even as I hit the tunnel and the line of cars ahead slows. A few years ago, I was passing through this same tunnel in my car. I’d let my friend William drive. We got caught behind a tractor trailer. William was so tentative, stuck behind that truck. He’d edge out, then edge back in, refusing to cross the solid double line to pass, although there was no oncoming traffic. “You’re not going to let us spend the next half hour like this, are you?” I asked as he edged out again. “Oh, for God’s sake, William. Just gun it.”

…

In the Caribbean after Christmas, I’m with Maurice when I’m struck by an agonizing pain in my back and groin, a swelling in my neck that doesn’t abate.

We come home to New York early.

—

The diseased cells are anaplastic—what the doctors call “primitive,” which sounds like it might be early and a good thing but which I learn is neither. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t know this until now. I didn’t have that word—cancer—with me over Christmas. I didn’t have that word traveling with Carly’s voice and all those gifts piled into the car as I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel toward my children.

It strikes me as extraordinary—the way I am floating up there in a corner of the ceiling in the doctor’s office, the way one word can change the shape of everything.

“So all those push-ups I did were sort of a waste of time,” I say.

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