Page 38 of Jackie

I watch Jack’s face as the words hit.

—

October 1954. In the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, they prepare his body with medication for ten days. Afterward, they declare the surgery a success. But even before the fever spikes, I know something is wrong. His eyes are different, glassy. A blurred look.

“Are you all right, Jack?”

“Just woozy from the pain meds.”

I lie down beside him. Night. The lamp is off. Through the sheets, his skin burns, lips dry. I hold him gently; he seems so vulnerable, frail. He stirs. I should tell the nurse. I should tell them.

“I love you, Jack,” I say.

He opens his eyes—a weak smile. “And you’d think that would be enough to fix it.”

The nurses press into the room. They soak him in antibiotics, pack him in ice, but the heat in his body keeps rising. I call Joe and Rose. They come. Rose prays, the rosary clicking, prayers under her breath. Joe sits by the bed, talking to Jack as he floats in and out of consciousness. I kneel on the other side of him, my face on his hot open palm, tears sharp. I’m going to lose him. I don’t want to lose him.

The doctor comes, another nurse behind him explaining we have to leave.

“He needs a priest,” Rose cries. Joe draws her out into the corridor. Mrs. Kennedy. That’s the doctor. I kiss his forehead, skin like fire. Jack. Stay with me. Please, Mrs. Kennedy, you have to leave now. I suddenly realize they’re talking to me.

—

It’s days before he’s stabilized, another week before he can sit up in the bed. I bring him books, newspapers, magazines. I read aloud to him. Poetry and cartoons in The New Yorker. Movie reviews.

“That one sounds good,” he says.

“Sure, if you’re John Wayne’s grandfather.”

He laughs. I feed him apple crisp. He refuses to eat the gray slab of beef on the dinner tray. I slip ice chips into his mouth. One day when I come in, someone has taped a poster of Marilyn Monroe on the ceiling over his bed. He smiles at me wanly.

“Lem,” he says.

The first time I heard Lem Billings’s name was when Joe told the story of how Lem repeated his senior year at Choate so he could graduate with Jack. That Christmas, Lem showed up at Joe’s house with his battered suitcase and never quite left.

A few days later, I notice the poster has been turned and retaped so Marilyn’s legs are an upside-down V in the air.

“Lem again?” I say.

Jack rolls his eyes. “I’m bored as hell locked up in here.”

—

He’s been in the hospital for a month when he tells me he wants to write an essay. I listen, ask a few questions. After an hour, we decide it won’t be an essay but a book.

“Thank you,” he says that evening as I get ready to leave.

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

He shrugs. “This book will be good for me.”

I smile at him and sit back down. “Let’s start, then.”

“Tonight?”

“Why not?”

He’s less than 115 pounds. He still can’t walk, and I know that this is what he needs—brusque, practical, no sympathy—a task, all intellect and matter-of-fact.

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