Page 127 of Jackie

“It might not be safe, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Well, we can’t all be rushed around in fat black Cadillacs.”

I look for the smile, some lightness again between us.

“If you walk, there will be concern for others as well,” he says.

“Oh, Mr. Hill. They can do what they want. I am going to walk with the president.” A sudden tightness in my throat. It takes me a moment to register it as anger. “I’m going to walk with the president to the church. I’ve told Bobby once already, but he either thinks I don’t mean it or that I’ll forget. I’ll tell him again later today, and he will send you to talk me out of it.”

He almost smiles then. How kind he has been. His cigarettes, my hair loose as we talked and smoked and laughed and drove with the windows unrolled out toward Wexford and the horses waiting in the fields, the chilled air in sheets of mist across the ridge.

—

They’ve begun to tell me things I do not remember:

That I climbed out of the seat and onto the back of the moving car.

That Clint ran forward, leapt, and pushed me back like some dark angel.

That when we reached Parkland Hospital, I wouldn’t let go of Jack, even as they kept pleading with me, until Clint read my face and understood. He took off his coat and wrapped Jack’s head and torso carefully, and only then was I willing to let go.

I don’t remember any of this.

I remember the roses, the hospital corridor, the folding metal chair.

…

Sunday, November 24

—

I wake with a start and call out. His name in the echo. My eyes adjust. The room feels tight and empty. A room like a fist. I turn on the lamp so the light can push the dark out of my mind.

—

A soft knock. Bobby. He comes in and closes the door. He sits on the edge of the bed, holding my hand. He is drunk. It’s after midnight. He starts to tell me about dinner—the jokes they made, how they were all laughing, then crying, how Ethel’s wig got tossed like a Frisbee and landed on Pierre Salinger’s head. I tell him about the conversation I had with Bunny earlier that evening, when Mr. West couldn’t find the veil I wanted. Bunny found him frantic in the basement, almost in tears. She told him not to worry, she’d have one of the girls make a new veil for the morning.

“We call them girls,” I say. “Why do we do that? They’re women.” Bobby nods, and I realize how drunk he is. He looks at me blankly and the blankness feels like someone stepping on my heart.

I fall asleep in his arms. When I open my eyes again, he’s still awake. Hours have passed. Raw light has begun to sneak in. I wonder if he slept at all or if he’s just been waiting that way, staring at the wall, that set in his jaw that makes him look old.

“You slept,” he says.

—

I can’t not see it. The crowd and the sun and the dark of the tunnel. That piece of your skull snapping away.

—

I’ve looked for scars on Clint’s hands. I keep thinking that if it happened as they say it did, that he leapt up and pushed me back into the car, there would be scars from when he held me down and torched bits of me flew like embers through the air.

I don’t tell Bobby this. He’d worry. I don’t tell him how that day is a fractured collage on a screen in my mind.

“I’m going to walk,” I say.

“You can’t do that, Jackie. They’ll all feel they have to walk with you.”

“I don’t care what they do.”

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