Page 145 of Jackie

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Once upon a time, there was a woman in the backseat and a man beside her she was trying to pull down.

If she had been stronger. If only she’d been able to.

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“What else do you want, Mr. Manchester?”

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I could tell him that, recently, I’ve begun to wonder if those are in fact the details that matter or if what really matters is how the dog, for example, is still waiting for Jack to come home. Circling the rug by the door, the dog has paced one edge of that rug bare. What matters is the smell of the tack of that riderless horse, the buck and the fight. What matters is how Jack looked at me once, on a street corner in Georgetown, a year before we were married. He looked at me and I felt my soul wash open.

If I trusted this man, I’d explain the danger in the hours of night silence—not only the grief but what might have happened differently and who might have killed Jack. Was it really Oswald? Only Oswald? Killed now too, so we can’t ask him. What about the rumblings I catch sometimes, about Johnson, the CIA, more than one shooter? Sometimes I wonder what Bobby really knows. Does he tell me everything? Why would he keep things from me? What is he afraid I would do?

This all pushes up in me at once. I look from Bobby to the writer, then back again. My mind unspools. Like a film cut and spliced. I look again at the creep of sweat on the writer’s shirt. I should stop this now, stand up, ask him to leave.

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“What else do you want, Mr. Manchester?”

“The truth,” he says—that smile not awkward now but hard, predatory, in this theater of a living room where we’ve been thrown together.

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I give him everything then, the underside of those days in November, every limbic and intimate detail. The story I’ve told a hundred times since it happened, but never this way. I have never given away so much, to anyone.

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That day it was the coolness of the tunnel I wanted—I wanted to whisper to you—in the blinding white heat of Dallas, I wanted totell you how much I craved the dark of that tunnel ahead. I wanted those shadows to wrap my face, my hands, to wrap you in with me.

I wanted to tell you that this is where forever lives—in the wanting. This is where life turns godlike.

I wanted to whisper to you that day in the open sweltering car that the dark ahead was what I was waiting for. Your hands and your mouth in that dark. I would steal across the seat and surprise you with a kiss.

Then the sky cracked. How fast it can happen. Like chalk off a slate. The sound again. No blood at first. Then it’s everywhere. The roses on the seat are the wrong color. And a woman in the car, his head blown apart in her lap, pieces she’s trying to keep held together, his beautiful mind all over her.

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One mind unlike any other.

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You are like no other.

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When I surface again, the living room is filled with smoke. My drink is empty, the pitcher of daiquiri nearly empty as well. We’ve been at this for hours, and the writer is looking at me, his madman eyes not darting anymore, not uncertain or restless, but fixed, exultant.

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“Who helped you into the car?” he asks. “Who was seated where? Do you have a recollection of the speed?”

He knows these things. Why does he need me to say them?

“What about Mr. Hill?” he asks.

“Clint?”

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