Page 118 of Jackie

I do not quite remember that last part. What happened after.

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They killed you over that bill.

I know it.

The civil-rights bill.

That’s what they killed you for.

…

In the Parkland Hospital corridor, I sit in the folding metal chair and smoke, very still. They scuttle around—feet, voices, that awful hospital smell.

—

I look down at my lap, my skirt—then wish I hadn’t. I look back up, through the moving stream of them to the opposite wall.

—

“Mrs. Kennedy, shall we go into the restroom and get cleaned up?”

—

“We’ve brought you a new set of clothes.”

—

They keep saying things like that.

—

When the doors to Trauma Room 1 open, the corridor goes silent, and a doctor steps out, his face telling me what I already know. I stand up, stripped to nothing now, just a woman in the shape of a blade. I walk past them through the operating-theater doors to the body laid out that is mine, my lips to his feet, my face to his beautiful face, his lovely shattered head, no less beautiful, eyes open still. Not blank yet.

—

The world is shadowless. Time bent. No before or after. Just that hard brutal sound when everything slowed and your head jerked back, hands to your throat, that puzzled look. I remember thinking you looked like you had a slight headache.

—

We are made of stars, and I loved you from the first moment I saw you.

—

“Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Johnson is going back to Washington and he would like you to go with him.” Clint is saying this. They have sent him to tell me. I look at him, then can’t.

We are back in the hospital corridor. Outside the closed doors of Trauma Room 1. The doctors are doing something else in there—I can’t remember what. We are waiting again, and Clint’s eyes are as young and raw and dark as I have ever seen them.

“Mr. Hill, please explain to Vice President Johnson that I am not going anywhere without the president.”

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy,” he says, and steps away.

—

They wheel an empty casket in from outside. Bronze. Up on a metal dolly with small rubber wheels. O’Donnell and Powers step in front of me. What are you doing? I almost ask, then realize they’re trying to shield me, to block my view as it goes by. Another doctor comes and urges me to leave.

“Do you think seeing a coffin could possibly upset me?” I say. “My husband was shot in my arms.”

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