Page 188 of Jackie

We spill back into the apartment, their little cheeks red, lips blue, wet clothes in puddles on the floor. “Just leave it,” I say. That careless mess feels like a handwriting that is theirs, and I want it to last.

Caroline makes the girls cinnamon toast and big mugs of hot chocolate. They stir in the marshmallows, sticky streaks down their faces. A brief squabble over a cookie. “There are more,” I say, but their fingers are grasping after the last one on the plate, which has a crooked extra band of icing, and the light is in their eyes, that sudden fight mixed with laughter and the smell of chocolate and falling bits of snow blown into the sunlight pouring down through the long windows. Sunlight strikes their cheeks, their mouths, their chocolate-smeared chins. Sunlight bright on their dark hair.

—

A funny twitch like a blade against my throat. This is the life I will miss.

—

That night in bed, I close my eyes and feel my granddaughters’ hands again as they were leaving, kissing me goodbye, their sweet small fingers through my hair.

…

I begin to work from home. Maurice sets up an office for himself in my apartment, so he’s nearby if I need him. I still try to go into the office for Wednesday editorial meetings. I wear a beret to cover the wig, and I bring edited manuscript pages to be sent off to writers, my typed memos attached, pencil scrawl along the margins.

—

There is less of me now.

Each day.

Less.

—

I write letters to friends: I shall look forward to our doing something together when all this first part is over…. I write to Louis Auchincloss: Your beautiful letter. I was touched by your writing it. All will be well, I promise…. I write to John Loring: Everything is fine. Soon we can have another festive lunch at Le Cirque. Six desserts each. Seeing you is always like champagne…. I write to one of my authors, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Isn’t it wonderful the way our friendship is growing?

Finally, because I haven’t been able to pick up the phone and call him, I write Peter Sis: Your book is magnificent. Each drawing looks into the well of an artist’s mind…. It is like nothing I have ever seen before.

I write these letters on the same blue stationery I’ve had for years, 1040 Fifth Avenue embossed in white. Blue for the sea and the sky, white for the shell and the bone and the breath that continues to rise. That which is left over.

I fold the letters, envelopes sealed and addressed. I set them with the mail to go out.

Outside, spring has begun. The trees melting into themselves, buds like tiny fists coming slightly apart, grass smudged in the warmer air, color blending into color, even the streets and the edges of buildings starting to blur.

…

The scans say they have gotten all of it from my neck and chest and abdomen—all but a tiny crumb that has run off and escaped to my brain. They can drill a hole in my skull, they tell me.

—

“If it can work, that would be fine,” I say.

—

I begin to divide my things. Boxes of papers and notes, bunches of letters bound in ribbon. Things I haven’t looked at in years. Some I’ll keep. Others not. There are many letters in the pile of Not.

Once in a while, reading through them, I’ll stop and remember who I was on a particular day. It will hit in a rush, right down to the sounds and the smells, those older layers of my life still there.

Maurice comes into the room. He glances at the fire, then at the heap of papers to be burned by the chair where I sit, the astrakhan blanket over my lap. He stops, a question in his face, as if to ask, Are you sure? I smile at him. He touches my shoulder and heads in the direction of the kitchen.

—

Novalis once wrote that fiction arises out of the shortcomings of history. But I’ve come to realize no matter what truths I leave for the world to rifle through, they’ll concoct the stories of my life they want to tell—to worship me or tear me down, their ice queen or their whore.

—

The world does not need more of me than it thinks it has.

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