Page 150 of Jackie

smoke

coffee

wonder if the newspaper is safe to open

wake the children

—

Bobby comes when I ask him to. He’ll leave early from the office or come after dinner. He’ll say good night to the children and sit with me.

“Tell me this will end, Bobby. If not this year, then someday. I’ve always loved the ritual of reading the paper with my coffee in the morning. Now I can’t even do that.”

“It’s only temporary,” he says. “Until the anniversary. The day after, they’ll start talking about other things.”

—

In a photograph of Oswald, he is holding a gun in the backyard of a house. A notch in the stock.

The ballistics matched, supposedly. Bullet fragments found in the car matched bullets from that gun. Bits of fabric caught in the rifle were the same colors as the shirt he was wearing when he was apprehended.

How did we not grasp ahead of time the shape of what would come? That you would be killed. That it would be violent. There was too much rage in the world for it to be otherwise.

How did we not understand it was inevitable—the way love or war is inevitable, the way art and truth eventually rise? How could we not have seen it? Maybe you did. Maybe that’s why you’d make those chilling morbid jokes. Maybe you understood that if not Oswald (if it even was Oswald), someone would have done it.

There were too many who hated what you stood for. Too many who didn’t want the seismic change you brought, that toppling of an order, a way of life with its implicit injustice that served some and destroyed others.

You were too easy to scapegoat. You were incandescent. That was the word.

You were the walking, breathing incarnation of the youth that would ultimately upend them.

You were adored and, because of that, you were dangerous.

Bold, brilliant, extraordinary. You burned, it was just so bright—that future you were after. The America we saw.

—

A small knock on the door. Caroline.

“You’re crying, Mommy.”

“I’m not. Just waking up.”

“You’re crying about Daddy, aren’t you?”

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