Page 120 of Jackie

God, I wish they wouldn’t.

I say this quietly, so only Bobby hears it. He takes my hand and we walk to the door and step off the plane into a deafening silence. At first I think the airstrip is empty, but as my eyes adjust, I can make out a dark mass where crowds of people stand. As I move forward, they appear. Bobby keeps hold of my hand; we walk together down the stairs, and something pure and irrevocable moves between us, and, from that moment on, there is no one else.

—

It is evening. But that sense of evening is no longer anchored in time.

—

He rides with me and Jack in the back of the ambulance to the Navy hospital at Bethesda.

“Do you want to hear what happened?” I ask.

“Yes.”

I tell him.

Afterward there is silence. He draws the curtain back and looks out the window.

“This is a long ride,” I say.

“We’re almost there.”

He is still looking out the window.

“What are you looking at?”

“Just outside.” He drops the curtain.

“I didn’t read the Skybolt report,” I say. “Before we left for Dallas, Jack asked me to read it and I didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter, Jackie.”

“Do you know what he said when he gave it to me? He said, ‘If you want to know what my life is like, read this.’ ”

Again, Bobby looks out the window, like he can’t look at me for any length of time. He keeps reaching for the curtain and drawing it back.

“I could have stopped it,” I say, “if I’d understood sooner what was happening.”

“There’s nothing you could have done.”

You weren’t there, I want to say, then I realize he already knows this and it’s killing him.

“I held his brains in my hand,” I say. My fingers rest on the lid of the casket. Bobby is still looking out the window.

“What is out there, Bobby?”

He looks at me then. “It wasn’t about the civil-rights bill.”

“What?”

“They found the man who did it. Oswald. That’s his name. We think he acted alone.”

“No. It was that bill. That’s what they hated Jack for.”

“Oswald is a communist.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

---