Then, just as they’d gotten focused, the bomb hit: in a single day, President Kennedy was assassinated and Aldous Huxley, their animating spirit, died. Huxley’s death wasn’t unexpected—he’d been ill with cancer for some time and Tim had recently flown out to Los Angeles to pay his last respects—but it was a blow nonetheless. With Kennedy, it was different. Nobody had expected that, least of all her—and she must have been one of the last people in the country to hear about it. She’d been out for a long ramble through the woods that afternoon and when she got back—late, the sky already beginning to close up—she was puzzled to find no one in the sitting room or the library, not even the dog or one of the cats. Puzzled, she sank into the couch in front of the fire, which had burned down to coals, something that was unusual in itself—there was always somebody around to throw a log on. One of the satisfactions of a house with a fireplace, as opposed to the chintzy apartments they’d been stuck in the past two years, was to build a fire and plant yourself in front of it to absorb the heat and watch the play of the flames that were a whole trip in themselves, whether you were high or not. She always liked to picture the primeval men and women—cavemen, Neanderthals—staring into their bonfires and leaving their bodies for hours at a time while the stars rained down on them and the wind howled and the mammoths and musk oxen and all the rest of the ice-bound creatures curled up in their fur.

When she got up to fetch wood from the porch, still wondering where everybody was, she thought she heard a noise from the kitchen and stopped a moment, listening. There was a crackle, a whine, then a mechanical voice—the radio—and went to investigate. Pushing through the double doors, she was stunned to see everybody there, the entire household, right down to the Nestlings and little Bobby Eggers, crowded round the kitchen radio and sitting on every available surface, the counters, the table, the kitchen chairs, the chopping block. No one said a word, no one even glanced up at her. For one wild moment she thought she was in a Twilight Zone episode and everyone had been transformed into automatons, but then, her heart fluttering, she asked, “What is it? What’s happened?”—and Fitz looked up at her and said, “Kennedy’s dead.”

“What do you mean dead?”

Corey shot her a look. He had tears in his eyes.