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Ruby sputters at the termhalf century.“God, that makes me sound ancient.”
“You’re not,” Dexter says quickly. “Not even close.”
They sit in silence and watch more children and adults bring their pumpkins to the edge of the water and send them out to float under the October moon. Central Park at night is lit from the windows of the buildings that surround it, but also by the rows of tall lantern lights on lampposts along the paths. There’s a relaxed feeling to the evening, and the people around Ruby and Dexter are chatting amiably and sharing bottles of wine, food from coolers, and photographing or taking video of everything around them. Ruby feels like she’s been invited to a neighborhood block party.
“Can we talk about the day Jack died?” Ruby ventures, wanting to dive in. She’s not going to make the same mistake she made earlier in the afternoon at Fort Tryon Park, getting so comfortable that she forgets the real reason that she’s here with Dexter; this isn’t a date, and she needs to remember that whenever she starts to feel like they’re just chatting for the purpose of getting to know one another better.
Dexter nods, clearly trying to look casual about broaching one of the bigger topics that they need to cover. “Sure. Of course we can.” He takes out his phone, opens the voice memo app, and holds it up wordlessly for her approval before he starts recording.
Ruby nods and blows out a breath. She brings herself back to that day, the feelings of which are a sharp contrast to how she’s feeling right now, in this particular moment. She tries to recall the shock, the horror, the stabbing physical pain of knowing that Jack was really and truly gone—forever.
“I was in a meeting in the dining room at the White House, and Jack’s Chief of Staff—“
“Hellen Pullman.”
“Exactly. Helen, who is an extremely close friend of mine—she, Sunday, and I are actually a very tight trio—came and told me she needed to talk. I followed her to the sitting room in our private residence, and she dove right in and told me the news. She said we didn’t have a lot of time to waste, as there were just minutes to spare before the entire world would find out, and that she’d already arranged for my girls to be brought back to the White House by private car so that they weren’t in airports or surrounded by anyone who might break the news to them first. She’d thought of everything, and it was truly a kindness to have someone at the helm who was so well prepared.”
“Disconcerting though, right? To have a person so close to you but so well-versed in the protocol surrounding your husband’s untimely death?”
“Yes, of course. It was bizarre. Otherworldly. We’d all been prepped for a worst case scenario event. It’s almost like practicing hurricane drills or something at school, but then having an actual hurricane blow onto your campus and tear the roof off the building without warning. You sit there for a minute like, ‘What do I do? Duck? Hide? Run for cover?’ But Helen took me by the hand and walked me straight through it. I wouldn’t have survived those early days without her.”
“I know what your reaction was when you read his letter for the first time because I sat across from you and watched your face, but what were you told in those first minutes, and how did you respond?”
Ruby closes her eyes and remembers. “I was told that he was not in the U.K. as I’d been led to believe, but instead had crashed into the Bay of Biscay off the coast of France. I was really hung up on the fact that he was in a different country than I’d originally thought. I’m not sure why, but that got stuck in my brain and I almost couldn’t push that aside to process that he was dead. My next thought was that Jack was an excellent pilot. He’d had a pilot’s license for about forty-five years, and had been a pilot in the Air Force. And then beyond that, I wondered how in the hell the sitting President of the United States ends up flying a single engine plane instead of being ferried on Air Force One. My mind was doing loops and circles just trying to digest and process it all. Truly.”
“I can’t even begin to imagine. At what point did you put two and two together in terms of him being in France?”
“Well, it hadn’t been that long since our breakfast in Palm Beach where Harlow had confronted him with the results of her DNA test, and with the fact that a boy in France was a potential half-sibling for her. Which, as you recall, he denied without so much as batting an eye. We still hadn’t had the chance to sit down and properly hash that one out, so while I wanted answers, I’d been waiting for the right time to talk to him. And that right time never came before the accident.” Dexter gives her a long, searching look. “I guess it wasn’t really an accident was it? What do you call it when something that’s normally considered a tragic accident is actually done on purpose?”
“I would call it a decision that ends in tragedy.”
“Mmm,” Ruby says, nodding in agreement. “That’s truly what it was.”
They sit in peaceful silence, watching as hundreds of pumpkins bob on the water, glowing with light.
“Do you wish he’d made a different decision? Perhaps told you about his illness?”
Ruby considers this. The letter that Jack’s mistress had delivered to her a year after his death—at his request—had enlightened her to the fact that he’d been diagnosed with a rare and incurable neurological disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The only outcome for someone diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is death, and generally quite swiftly. Many people only live for six to eight months, and degeneration happens nearly overnight. Jack hadn’t wanted to see that ending, and so he’d done what he thought he needed to do to spare himself, his family, and the entire country from watching him die a fast, unpleasant death.
“I’m not sure,” Ruby says honestly.
A toddler in a pink fairy outfit complete with iridescent wings runs toward them with her arms open, but the little girl’s mother swoops in and picks her up just before she reaches Ruby. The mother smiles at Ruby benignly, but then her eyes light up with recognition. Ruby gives her a nod of understanding, but then turns back to Dexter; she doesn’t want to lose this train of thought, even to share pleasantries with a young mother who has just realized that her little girl was stumbling right into the arms of a former First Lady.
“Had Jack told me what was going on, I know I would have jumped into ‘fix it’ mode. That’s just how I am. I would have consulted the best doctors and specialists in the world, and filled his last days and months with trials, treatments, and little events and things meant to build memories for all of us—particularly for Harlow and Athena. But that might not have been what Jack wanted. I mean, obviously it wasn’t. It’s possible that he would have wanted to end his days in the south of France with his…” Ruby pauses here, looking stricken. “With his other family. Maybe he would have wanted her to attend to his needs. Or possibly he would have preferred to have his son running in and out of the room, telling him about school, or about the games he was playing with his friends. How am I to ever know now which of his lives Jack preferred more?” Ruby feels herself growing hysterical at her own question, one to which she’ll never have an answer.
“I suppose you won’t ever know,” Dexter agrees. He’s pulled his knees up and has his arms wrapped loosely around them, back rounded as he leans in to listen to Ruby. “But would you really want to?”
Ruby has no idea:wouldshe really want answers to every question that’s gone through her mind as she’s lain in bed all these nights since Jack’s death? Probably not. Like many things in life, it’s thenotknowing that allows us to suspend our disbelief enough to go on.
“I guess not,” she finally says. “And furthermore—much like the question of whether he’d been unfaithful before Etienne—it doesn’t much matter now. It ended the way it ended, and I’m still in the same position I’d be in regardless.” She stares at the ground in front of her. “Before I came down to the bar tonight, I got an email from Etienne.” It’s the first she’s mentioned of it all evening, and she wasn’t even sure she would tell Dexter about it until this very moment.
“Oh?” Dexter bristles next to her. “If you’re up for sharing, I’d love to hear more about it.”
“Of course.” Ruby takes her phone from her purse, opens the email, and hands it over to Dexter so he can read it for himself.
His face is lit by the glow of her phone screen as his eyes skim the message from top to bottom, then his gaze flicks back to the top and he reads it again.
“Shit,” Dexter says, finally handing the phone back. “This is incredibly bold of her.”
