Jackie

Chapter 48

November 22, 1963, 12:47 p.m. CST

They tell me they found no heartbeat, no breathing, no pulse.

In the hallway where I sit, a glacial coolness—white tiles along the wall, black linoleum floor. Clint is near me. Others cluster, voices anxious, hushed, someone walks away, someone else comes back. A nurse pushes through.

Three and a half seconds—that’s all it was—between the first shot, which missed, and the second, which did not.

If I’d been looking to the right.

If I’d recognized the sound for what it was.

If I had not been complaining in my head about the heat, or how close their hands and blurred faces came as the car took a turn, if I hadn’t been so focused on all that or wondering how I could slip off, with you, away from that grueling, unbearable sunlight to the cool dark of the tunnel ahead.

Take off your glasses so they can see you, Jackie. Let them see you.

A hypnotic burst of light off my bracelet as I waved.

And the roses were there, on the seat between us, spilling toward the floor, petals soaked, his blood, stems broken, the dark, wet iridescence of those roses crushed in the white-hot glare as I leapt to grasp a piece of his skull flying away.

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

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.”

The doctor gets small in his white coat when I say this. Down the hall, Dave Powers is raising his voice to someone—the medical examiner, who is saying the autopsy must be held here according to Texas law. Their voices bounce off the linoleum, Dave yelling now, saying the vice president is waiting at Love Field for Mrs. Kennedy, and Mrs. Kennedy is waiting for the president, and the autopsy can be held in Washington no matter what the stupid Texas law says about homicide and jurisdiction. None of it matters. They argue, then figure it out. It is almost time to go.Jack is leaving soon, and I will leave with him. At a certain point,the casket with the large handles glides out of Trauma Room1, and I know he is in it. I stand, and the casket is cool to the touch, and we walk outside to the white hearse. When Clint asks me to ride in the car behind, I have to explain, “No, Mr. Hill, I’m going to ride with the president.” I climb into the back of the hearse with Jack. Clint climbs in too, and we ride with our knees scrunched up to our chests.

Crusts of blood on my stockings. My left glove is missing. For a moment I wonder where I left it.

I should not have allowed you to come here.

I should have listened, seen it, known ahead of time or in the instant.

I should have pulled you down.

The casket won’t fit through the door of the plane. They try to wedge it in on an angle. I watch from the bottom of the steps; heat rising off the tarmac prickles my skin. I could tell them this won’t work. It will never fit. The men at the top with the casket exchange a few words, but from the base of the steps I can’t hear. Clint is with them. He glances back at me—a warning look, I realize, a moment before they break the handles off, that awful sound of metal ripped from wood. They jam the coffin through the door of the plane. I walk slowly up the stairs and follow it inside.

In the Presidential Cabin, someone has laid out a dress for me, a new jacket.

A light knock on the door. Lady Bird comes in.

“What if I hadn’t been there?” I say.

“Let’s get you changed,” Lady Bird says gently.

“No. I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”

She doesn’t seem to quite know how to answer that.

“Could you please send in Mr. Hill,” I say. “I need to give him a message for my mother and Miss Shaw. About the children.”

On the flight, I sit with Jack and the Irish in the rear of the plane. The crew has taken out the seats to make room for us. I do not take my hand off the coffin. Someone somewhere is eating soup. The smell makes me feel sick. They grumble about Johnson. Did he really need to take the oath of office in Dallas? Couldn’t he have waited? Johnson told them he talked to Bobby and that’s what Bobby told him to do, which Bobby never would have said. At one point, they break off, realizing I am watching them. There is blood on Dave Powers’s suit. For a moment I stare at it. I tell them about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral and the book in the White House library. I ask if one of them could please make sure Pam remembered to message J. B. West to find that book so we can use it to plan.

“We are going to have a funeral like Lincoln’s,” I say. “A riderless horse. I need to read again exactly what they did with that horse—the tack, how it was led. We will do that.”

The flight continues. They tell stories about Jack. They drink whiskey. They’ve insisted on pouring me a glass like I’m one of them now. They go on talking. I remember a late afternoon last summer. I was with the children, driving, just the three of us alone in the car. Up ahead was a bend in the road, and as the car took that turn, a slant of evening light shot through the green, the light like a portal; my heart kicked over, and I felt a sense of hurtling wind and speed, the future rushing through.

Moments after we touch down at Andrews Air Force Base and come to a stop, there’s a commotion at the front of the plane. Bobby. Pushing down the aisle, he blows right past Lyndon, Lady Bird, everyone, until he reaches me.

“Hey, Jackie. I’m here.”

His face is strange. Bright. Like someone who’s come through a desert. I just look at him, trying to catch up with that weird, ravaged distance in his face. He puts his arms around me, and I feel something deep inside dissolve.

There’s a helicopter, he says, waiting to take me to the children.

“Oh no,” I have to explain. “I am staying with Jack.”

Someone somewhere starts to cry.

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?”

“Nothing.”

I let it sink in.

“So he died for nothing. That’s what you’re saying.”

He reaches for my hand, but I can’t feel it, I can’t feel or hear or see anything, only Jack—that puzzled look, his beautiful mind, and the life flooding out of it.

“We’re going to have to make some decisions,” Bobby says. “You don’t have to. I can take care of it.”

“It’s all in the book on Lincoln,” I say. “The lying-in-state, the rotunda, the riderless horse. I asked Pam to call Mr. West to ask him to find the book. Everything is there.” The force and clarity in my voice is surprising. Not the soft voice, but the voice I used to have.

Bobby tells me then he was eating lunch when Hoover called.

“I could have done something,” I say.

“No, Jackie. There was nothing.”

He shifts, and I push into him like he is ground that will keep me from falling.

“Please,” I say. “Cut it out of me.”

My mother and Hughdie are waiting for us on the seventeenth floor at Bethesda. The Bradlees are there, Mary Gallagher, Pam, Ethel, the McNamaras. Bob McNamara is arranging a house where I can live with the children in Georgetown. We can move in anytime. I murmur my thanks. Dave Powers is mixing drinks. One appears in my hand. A smoky liquid like amber. I take a sip, taste nothing. I put the glass down and pull Kenny O’Donnell aside to explain that, at the hospital in Dallas, I made a mistake. The ring I tried to put on Jack’s finger didn’t fit; it wasn’t meant to be there, I know this now. I’d like it back. Can he take care of this for me? He nods and heads toward the door. He seems grateful to have something to do.

I learn the children were taken to my mother’s house at Merrywood.

“No,” I say. “Their lives shouldn’t be disrupted, now of all times. Tell Miss Shaw to bring them home so they can sleep in their own beds.”

Someone will have to tell them. I should be the one to do it. I want to be with them. I want to get them from my mother’s house and bring them home. But then I’d have to leave Jack, and I can’t do that.

I start to cry. My mother holds me until I’ve pulled myself together. The grief is a brick in my throat.

They are all so careful. They handle me like I’m a bit of glass. Ethel touches my arm. Her sincere, pretty face, telling me Jack went right to heaven, no stopovers.

The little blue pill I’m given doesn’t work, so Dr. Walsh gives me a shot. Shortly after midnight, Dr. Walsh has fallen asleep in the chair, and I’m wide awake, hunting around for a cigarette.

They’ve learned things about Oswald. Bob McNamara tells me this, not because he offers it but because I ask. He seems surprised I’d want to know.

These are the things they’ve learned:

The kind of gun he used.

That he spent thirty-two months in the Soviet Union.

That he was married to a woman named Marina.

McNamara sits with me while the rest of the room buzzes on, more slowly now because everyone is tired, but Bob, like me, is awake. As he talks, I feel like he’s holding me up with his eyes. The soft rectangle of his face, the neat circle of his glasses. Everything about him is ordered, calm.

“Do you want me to tell you again what happened?” I say.

“Yes.”

I glance around the room—my mother, Hughdie, Ethel.

“When I start to tell them,” I say, “they shrink. It’s too much, I think.”

“To hell with them,” McNamara says. That makes me smile.

“Dr. Walsh says I should say it as often as I need to and try to get rid of it.”

He nods.

“You see, the whole front of his head jumped out. He went to reach for it, but it wasn’t there. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes,” he says.

So I tell him the story. I tell it again, second by second, the way it happened, and McNamara just sits there listening, until I come to the end.

“I don’t think he should be buried in Brookline,” I say, “even though Patrick is there. What do you think?”

“We can work it all out,” he says.

“You’ll help me?”

“I will.”

He is sitting on the floor near my feet. I am on a low stool. Eight times since I came into this room, someone has asked if I would like to change my clothes. But Bob is not asking me this. He is just looking up at me with those clean wire-rim glasses, that arrow-neat part in his hair, and his eyes with their strength, their understanding of violence, decisions, consequence.

“Can I tell you again what happened?” I say.

Late now, after 1:00 a.m. Already Saturday. Everything is taking so long. Mr. West and Bill Walton have sent a message from the White House. They’ve found the Lincoln book. It wasn’t in the library, but they’ve found it and they have begun. And Bunny Mellon has arrived at the White House, Pam tells me. Lovely, generous Bunny. She flew through a tremendous thunderstorm, but she is there now, and she will do the flowers.

“Pam, please tell Bunny to use the blue vases.”

“Yes, that’s what you said.”

“Those large blue urns France gave us.”

“Yes.”

“Bunny will know what to do. Nothing too melancholy. It should be like spring.”

Pam looks down at her notebook and starts to cry, like these details have gotten the best of her. I put an arm around her. “Oh, Pam,” I say. “I’m so sorry. This is such a terrible thing for you.”

They keep telling me to rest.

I keep wishing you were here to tell them to shut the hell up.

They want me to rest, because they think that when I wake up, I will be like them again. I will see the world as they do. I will be able to fathom tomorrow. They do not understand that if I lie down, the dark will devour me.

“You should go home, Jackie,” Ethel says.

“I’m not leaving until Jack does,” I say.

At least they have finally stopped asking me to change my clothes.

After two in the morning, I think of it again. I’d thought of it earlier, then pushed the thought away. It was harder than any other thought. I go to find Bobby.

“What about your father?” I say.

“Teddy and Eunice have flown to Hyannis Port.”

I nod. I feel suddenly very cold, very still, like a hinge has snapped.

“Is there anything you need, Jackie? Anything I can get you?”

I shake my head. There’s a chair nearby. I suddenly have to sit down.

Blank, I want to say. What I need is to be empty, unbroken, blank.

Like the ceiling or the sky.

Four a.m. The motorcade winds through the wet city night. A light rain has begun. Bobby and I are with Jack again in the back of the ambulance. We should take a different turn, I almost say. The three of us. Take a turn and drive off.

“How much do you think they’ve done so far on the East Room?” I say instead.

“I’m sure they’re taking care of it,” Bobby says.

A pressure in my chest. I’m on the verge of starting to tell him again what happened, but I don’t. And I don’t explain that when I am not thinking about what happened, I am thinking about how an asymptote is a line that continually approaches an axis but never meets it.

The word asymptote comes from the Greek, not falling together.

In the back of the ambulance, Bobby pulls me to him. It is sudden and clumsy, his grief. My mouth faces into his jacket, my cheek near his chest; I can feel the thud of his heart, the rise and fall of his breath.

“I’m planning to walk,” I say.

“That might not work,” he says. “But we can talk about it later.” He is trying to calm me. His voice is kind and soft, and I wish I could let go and lie down in it.

In my head, I’ve begun to make a list of readings. No dull sermon. No Twenty-third Psalm. Jack never liked that. I want to find words he would love. I remember a coda he once made up to the chapter in Ecclesiastes: “There’s a time to fish and a time to cut bait.” We’d all laughed. “And now it’s time for a swim,” he’d said, standing up, strolling out the door.

In the car now, I want to keep driving. I don’t want the car to turn into the northwest gate.

The honor guard is there to meet us, young Marines in formation, their faces rinsed with rain. Beyond them, the drive is lit with flaming pots.

“We’d just begun to figure everything out,” I say to Bobby.

Inside, the staff is lined up. I cannot look at them as I walk by. I start to, then it’s too much.

Mr. West steps forward.

“Where are the children?” I say.

“Safe in their rooms, Mrs. Kennedy.”

What an odd word to use. Safe.

They carry Jack into the East Room. Swags of black crepe. The catafalque identical to the one used for Lincoln. Just as I asked.

It is only a few steps from the doorway to where they’ve set him down. I kneel, my forehead pressed against the wood. I kiss the edge of the flag and pray to a god that has ceased to exist, and when I stand up again, I am like light rising; I’ve left everything behind—hope, faith, rage, sorrow, even fear. My body is smoke. Beyond the doorway is the hall that leads upstairs to the bedroom where I will not sleep and the desk in the West Sitting Hall where I will sit and write thousands of words over the next few days. Lists of names to be invited. Lists of readings and music and hymns. There will be cross-outs and carets, the tip of my pen working into the page.

There is only one way this can be done, and that is how it will be done. I will walk next to Jack. It will not be Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, where Patrick is buried. It will be Arlington.

Later someone will write: She bore the grief of a nation.

I didn’t do it for them. I was never that good or that generous. I did it so the children would have something noble to hold on to. I did it for you.

In the doorway of the East Room, I pause. Jack is on the catafalque behind us. Bobby is beside me. What will happen to you?I start to ask him. That same thing I’ve been asking each of them in turn. It bursts then, the wall in my heart giving way. I don’t realize I’m falling until he steps in to catch me. He pulls me against him, an arm around my waist, his face filled with a pain I don’t want to see. Somewhere in the room, someone is crying again, then someone else starts. Together, Bobby and I walk past the crying and out of the room.

Provi is waiting upstairs. I take off my clothes and lay the suit on the bed.

“Fold it, please, Provi,” I say. “Put it in a bag, the shoes and hat as well, even the stockings. Find the box Chez Ninon sent with it. Don’t let anything be cleaned. Just put it in the bag and put the bag in the box. Make sure my mother gets it.”

Provi takes a white towel and lays the stockings carefully into it. Bits of dark stuff flake out onto the white.

I run a bath. When the tub is full, I step into it.

I lie down on Jack’s side of the bed, that awful mattress like concrete. I do not sleep. It grows light outside. Raining. The wet shines on the windowpane.

I get up and write out a list of names to be invited.

The Bartletts

The Bradlees

Bill Walton

Aristotle Socrates Onassis

The Ormsby-Gores

On a separate sheet of paper, another list:

- Caparisoned horse

- Cadets from Ireland

- Black Watch Highlander regiment

Because you loved it when they came to play, you sat with me and the children on the South Portico to listen. There is a photograph of the four of us there, our backs to the camera, four heads, two light, two dark—Caroline’s small white gloved hand resting on your shoulder.

Take off your glasses, Jackie.

Yesterday, in the rooms on the seventeenth floor of Bethesda, Arthur Schlesinger told me I was your “full and inseparable partner in the most brilliant and gay and passionate adventure” he has ever known.

You would have smiled. You might have made a joke, rolled your eyes. You hated sentiment like that.

On a new sheet of paper, a list of things to put in the coffin:

- Inlaid cuff links

- Scrimshaw with the presidential seal

There’s a terrible noise from down the hall. Someone is sobbing. Shouting. Bobby, I realize. From the Lincoln Bedroom.

The first night we spent in this house, you slept in that bedroom where your brother is crying now. You threw yourself on Lincoln’s bed and yelled with joy that you had won and this was ours. You cried out at the ceiling like the joy would explode from inside you, like you were shrieking across time to the ghosts of all the men before you who had lived and led and died and worked and aged in this terrible house.

To think I almost didn’t go with you to Dallas.

What if I had been here or out riding in Virginia, or somewhere else. Not with you.

Raining now. Miss Shaw brought the children to me this morning after their breakfast. John climbed into the bed, cried for a bit, then asked about his birthday and when the party would be. Caroline came in pushing that huge toy giraffe you gave her. Jack, she was so quiet, like a clock gone still. Her face is not the same. I can feel it. A distance in her eyes, the incandescent wreckage of her face, like she knows something now about the wordforever. In less than a week, our daughter will be six. This morning she wrapped her arms around me, pressing close, like she could dig all the way in. Miss Shaw told her last night before bed, and Caroline asked Miss Shaw if God would give you a job, since you always had so much to do here. Miss Shaw told her God had already made you an angel to watch over us and that you would look after Patrick, who is lonely up there in heaven.

Do you remember what I told you, Jack, when we lost Patrick? Do you remember how I said losing you would be the one thing I could not bear—

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Caroline whispers. At the private Mass in the East Room, she kneels with me on the pew by the coffin. When I bow my head, Caroline bows hers. When my lips move, she half-follows, trying to keep up with the words. I stand, and my daughter takes my hand. She looks up at me. I see Jack’s face in her face. Someone is sobbing. Pam. Bill Walton puts an arm around her. The others try to manage their grief. If they can’t, they recuse themselves to the Green Room. I look for Clint.

“Mr. Hill, would you arrange for the children to be taken out this afternoon? To lunch with my mother, then for a drive.”

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Oh, and, Mr. Hill?”

“Yes?”

“Please tell Mr. West I want to go to the president’s office.”

I wait while Clint speaks to the other agents. Then he walks with me in silence to the Oval Office, where Mr. West is waiting. The new carpet I’d ordered was installed while we were in Dallas. Jack’s things are being packed up. I make a mental inventory: photographs, a small clock, scrimshaw.

“Do you remember how much he loved this desk, Mr. Hill? How excited he was when the children played hide-and-seek with the little trapdoor?”

I rest my hand on the rocking chair, and I’m startled when it moves.

Out the window, I can see the trampoline, the sandbox, the treehouse.

“Mr. West.”

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“I need you to be honest with me.”

“Of course.”

“My children—they are good children, aren’t they?”

“Certainly.”

“They’re not spoiled.”

“No, indeed.”

“The president loved the Green Room most. It was his favorite room. I want to do something in that room for him that he would love.”

Mr. West’s eyes fall. That he would have loved, I realize. That’s how I should have put it.

“Also, I’d like to give small gifts, things of Jack’s, to members of the staff. They’ve been so good to us. Will you help me?”

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Oh, Mr. West—” My voice starts to break then, and I can’t let it. So I thank him and leave, Clint beside me; we walk along the colonnade. I look out to the saucer magnolias planted in the four corners of the Rose Garden. They came from a tidal basin, their branches silvered pale. In the rain, they glow. I remember a day in August 1961, when Jack and I came ashore from the boat to Bunny Mellon’s house on Cape Cod. We’d come for a picnic and, as we walked toward the low dune, Jack said to me, “I’m going to ask Bunny to design a garden like the ones we saw in France.”

“You should do that, Jack,” I said.

“I’ll tell her I’ve read Jefferson’s gardening notes and I want the same flowers he would have had in his time.”

“And you’ll tell her you won’t take no for an answer.”

“That’s the easy part,” he said. “I never do.’’ He reached for me then and pulled me close, his arm around me, as the house came into view. Then his arm dropped, he drew slightly away, and it was there again, that thin layer of remove that only really broke down in those last few months, after Patrick.

Had we really begun to figure everything out?

I turn away from the Rose Garden. Clint and I continue walking.

“We’ll have to keep certain things,” I tell my mother. “I’ve drafted a list. Documents, letters, everything on his desk—notes, doodles, even things that seem like trash.”

My mother nods. “Yes.”

“And the suit,” I say. I see her face shift. “Have it stored just as it is.”

Because when these four days are over, the world will churn on. The world will forget, and I can’t let that happen.

I go to my room and lie down in that place on the bed where he will not be. I lie there and do not sleep. My mind is fire.

Saturday afternoon.

“I am going to walk with the caisson,” I tell Clint. “I’m letting you know now because you are the one Bobby will send to talk me out of it.”

“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.”

He looks at me, like he’s about to say something else.

“I need to see Jack again, Bobby, before they take him away. Will you go with me?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll come in time so we can do that?”

“Yes.”

There is the sound of someone walking down the hall outside. We wait until the sound is gone. Then he gets up and leaves.

From the doorway of the East Room, I watch as they shift the flag partway down and raise the lid.

I take Bobby’s hand. We walk up and look in.

“Mr. Hill?” I say without turning to look. I know he’s there.

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Will you bring me scissors?”

I put the cuff links into the casket, and the scrimshaw. Bobby puts in his PT 109 tiepin and a silver rosary. I tuck in the letter I wrote, Caroline’s letter, and John’s (Caroline had guided John’s hand). Clint gives me the scissors, then steps back and quietly signals the guards to turn away as I bring the blade against Jack’s cheekbone, above his brow, and cut a lock of hair.

In less than an hour, the children and I will walk down the steps of the North Portico. The guards will bring you out to a caisson drawn by gray horses. We will get into a car with Bobby, Lyndon, and Lady Bird, to follow you to the Capitol, down a gauntlet of people along the cold avenue. The crowd will be silent. No cries, no calls, no ringing of your name, just the rhythmic strike of hooves against pavement, sticks against drums. I will whisper to Caroline, “We’re going to say goodbye now, tell Daddy how much we love him and how much we will miss him, always….” She’ll kneel with me, her little face glancing toward mine. “You just kiss like this,” I will whisper as we lean to kiss the flag that covers you, my eyes half-closed more for her sake than anyone else’s, my lips moving in a prayer that feels weightless.Always. How that word lingers. I can just see her small hand reaching like she wants to lift the flag to peek underneath, to touch you one last time.

Riding back from the Capitol, Bobby tells me Oswald was shot that morning, coming out of the police station basement garage.

“They were moving him to a jail,” Bobby says. “Some man, a nightclub owner, stepped out of the crowd and fired. Point-blank range.”

“He’ll survive?”

Bobby shakes his head.

I feel a chill then, deep, settle in me. I don’t speak for the rest of the ride.

I am aware Jack is gone as soon as I get back to the Residence. His body nowhere near me now.

That afternoon, I step out of the elevator. Onassis is there, waiting, as if materialized out of thin air.

“Thank you for coming,” I say.

“Of course.”

“When did you arrive?”

“An hour ago.”

“You spoke with Lee?”

He nods. “I was in Hamburg when she called. She told me to come, but I waited until I received your note. You were kind to think of me.”

I take his arm, and we walk through the Center Hall.

“I want you to let me know if you need anything,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“Anything.”

“They say it was a silly little communist who did it,” I say. “But I don’t believe that.”

“They will say many things.”

“And now Oswald’s been shot, so we’ll never know for sure.”

“There’s very little we know for sure.”

“That’s true, I suppose.”

“You are a strong woman. Noble and wise and brave. You’ll survive this, as awful as it is.”

I tell him then that I am determined to build something transcendent to outdo this awful thing they did to Jack. I am aware that I use the word they. I don’t correct it. Someone has lied. I’m not quite sure who. Talking to Onassis, I feel more grounded than I’ve felt since it happened. Maybe because he’s a stranger. Not of our world. He knows what it is to be outside.

“How has Johnson been?” he asks. I’m grateful he does not say President Johnson. Onassis will do this, I’ve noticed. Intuit these tiny things that matter.

“He’s been good to me. Though Bobby doesn’t agree.”

“Why?”

“He says Lyndon shouldn’t have forced me to take part in the swearing in. I don’t see it that way. I wasn’t forced. These last few days, Lyndon’s been only generous. ‘Little Lady,’ he said to me yesterday, ‘anything you want in these rooms is yours.’?”

Onassis laughs. “Always the wonderful mimic.”

“I’ve told Johnson all I want is his promise that the work Jack started will be finished. The civil-rights bill passed and, at least for now, no turnover. Everyone who wants to stay in their jobs should be able to stay.”

“And what about you?” Onassis says. An open-ended question. I am careful as I answer.

“The children and I will live in Georgetown for now, in a loaned house, until I find my own. It is disconcerting watching our life being boxed up, trying to keep track of what will go where.”

He nods. He’s about to ask something else, then his eye is caught, a slight hardness. I turn. Bobby’s walking toward us from the stairs.

“We need you for a few decisions, Jackie,” Bobby says. “We’re in the West Sitting Hall.” He doesn’t say who the we are, but the implication is that Onassis is not.

“Thank you for being here, Ari,” I say.

Onassis holds my hand for a moment, then lets go.

That night, Bobby brings me the Mass card with Jack’s picture. At the rotunda, he says, hundreds of thousands are in line to pay their respects. At a certain point they’ll have to turn people away.

When I wake up, he is gone, the sun rising, curtains rinsed in flame. Today is John’s birthday. He’s turning three.

Getting dressed, I tell Provi, “I can’t let John’s birthday get entirely lost in this day.”

As Kenneth is setting the veil to my hair, Pam comes in to remind me I need to be ready by 9:45. The car will be waiting.

I look at my face in the mirror—swollen eyes, swollen cheeks, like I’ve spent the night underwater. I draw the veil down.

“I’d like you to come, Jackie.” That’s what you said a few weeks before Dallas. Then you added, “You’d be a great help.”

“That’s why you want me to come?” I teased you. “So I can be useful?”

“I want you with me.” It was strangely direct, the way you said it. Then you did that little awkward thing with your hair you used to do when we first met, pushing it back from your face, and I suddenly realized you were nervous. Even after ten years of marriage, it made you nervous to admit you needed me.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I tell Miss Shaw. “The children should stay here this morning. They don’t need to go to the Capitol. They can meet us at St. Matthew’s.”

I take the elevator down with Bobby and Teddy. The car comes around to the North Portico. We drive down Pennsylvania Avenue. I’m between Jack’s brothers as we enter the rotunda. We walk to the casket, kneel, rise, and walk back out the same door. A blaze of daylight. I reach for Bobby’s hand. At the base of the steps, we wait as Jack is carried down to us. We wait until he’s lifted onto the gun carriage. Then we climb back into the car.

“Unroll the window, please,” I say. Strains of the Marine Corps band drift as we flow down the road to the White House and a milling sea of world leaders. My mind starts to work through them, cataloging, like I used to do at a state dinner or event. De Gaulle, Prince Philip, the king of Belgium, the mayor of Berlin, Eamon de Valera, Queen Frederica, Haile Selassie.

All morning, Bobby says, there’ve been assassination threats. Dean Rusk has tried to talk Lyndon out of walking. They’ve tried to persuade De Gaulle to take a car, citing the nine attempts on his life so far. Just before we get out of the car, Bobby asks again if I really think it’s wise to walk.

“What does wise mean at this point?”

I take my place with Bobby and Teddy as the procession assembles. The cadets; the Marines; the Scottish Black Watch in their white spats, plumed headdresses, tartan kilts. The bagpipes begin; notes rend the air. I reach for Bobby, but after several steps I drop his hand and walk alone. Rows of people everywhere, along the sidewalk and gathered on the balconies above, children standing with solemn faces on the curb. I keep my eyes fixed on the riderless horse, the sheathed sword, empty saddle, boots reversed in the stirrups. It’s a huge gelding and the young soldier leading him is tall, but he can’t manage that horse. He can’t make it behave. Everything else is in such perfect order, not a beat off—all but that mad, lovely horse and the dissonant tattoo of its hooves on the street, the bright defiant glint of tack.

For you, history was never something bitter old men wrote. History, you told me once, makes us what we are. As we walk, I watch that horse and think of you as a boy in that small bedroom, reading stories of kings and warriors, the Knights of the Round Table, your Buchan and your Marlborough. For you, history was full of heroes. Human, flawed, dazzling.

At St. Matthew’s, I wait for the children. The car pulls up, and they scramble out in their pale-blue coats. I take them by the hand, and together we walk up the steps. I feel stronger when they’re with me. As I bend to kiss Cardinal Cushing’s ring, John starts to cry.

“Where is Daddy?”

“Shhh, darling,” I say, and he bites down gently on his lip, trying to be good, and for a moment I regret it.

During the service, I lose my composure only once, when Luigi Vena sings Ave Maria. Clint Hill leans forward to hand me a handkerchief, and I realize I’m crying. Caroline has edged her small body right up against mine, like she could hold me there, in place. John squirms on his seat, and I feel a stab of panic. I just need to get out, sweep them up in my arms, away from all this.

Mr. Foster picks up John and carries him away as Cardinal Cushing says, “May the angels, dear Jack…” His voice breaks. Caroline is still pressed right against me, and I can feel the riderless horse outside, waiting, the buck of that horse, its dark mad revolt, the weight of absence on its back.

Afterward, on the steps, Mr. Foster brings John to me.

They secure the casket to the caisson. The men salute. I lean down to John and whisper. He raises his hand to his brow.

I tell Clint I’ve changed my mind again. The children will not go to Arlington. He and Agent Foster work to find a car for the children. They’re taking someone’s car, asking the man and his wife to get out of it. They bundle the children in, and I am suddenly alone.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” Clint says. “It’s time to go.”

At the close of the ceremony at Arlington, following the gun salute, “Taps” is played. I take Bobby’s hand. The hill is awash in flowers.

Before heading upstairs to the children, I meet with De Gaulle, Selassie, and others at a reception in the Yellow Oval Room. I spend a few moments with De Gaulle. I show him the chest he’d sent as a gift after our visit to Paris. Daisies in a vase on top of it. I take one and give it to him.

“Souvenez-vous,” I say. Remember.

He puts the flower carefully in his jacket pocket. When he raises his eyes, the expression is not what I expect. Depth, a true sorrow.

He inclines toward me, a slight bow. “You have taught us how to grieve,” he says.

“Jack wanted very much to be a friend of France,” I say, “but it didn’t quite work, did it?” I’m on the verge of adding, You didn’t let him, but Jack would not have wanted me to be bitter, and now it’s too late. De Gaulle knows what he did, and he knows what I wanted to say even without my saying it.

“I am sorry,” he says, and in his eyes, there is shame.

“I have to leave now. You see, it’s my son’s birthday. We are going to try to have a little party upstairs. This is what I have left to do.”

Upstairs is chaos. Children hopping around, paper hats and streamers, balloons and noisemaker horns. I watch little John go from kneeling to standing, then balance on one foot like a pelican on a chair. I take my mother aside.

“Will you do something for me?” I say.

“Of course.”

“Find Pam and have her send a message. I want the tack of the riderless horse. Have it saved for me—saddle, bridle, blanket, boots, sword. Instruct them not to clean it.”

My mother nods, and the party continues. The adults look tired, but the children plunder on. John, with bits of cake and frosting ground into his shirt, is tearing through his gifts. My heart quickens, watching him.

They will say I was calculating, dispassionate, an actress. They will say I kept that tack for show. They will say that day was theater, as if my grief were some kind of charade. They will not know how much I craved it—that sweet stink of horse mixed in with oiled leather, that trace of the dance and the fight. How much I wanted to sink my face into that smell and remember.

Midnight again. Everyone is gone, asleep, or they’ve left, flown off. The day is done. Bobby and I are alone in Jack’s office. The lights are off. The curtains open. I asked for them to be left open. I wanted to look out at the night, the stars in bloom.

Bobby stands with me by the long windows. Neither of us can sit for any length of time. The sky so clear. Moonlight rakes the floor.

“Well,” he finally says. “Shall we go?”

I pick up the phone. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Hill, please.”

The flame is visible as we cross the bridge, the rows of stones bright against the hill. At the grave, Bobby stands beside me, his hand woven through mine.

“What are you thinking?” he asks when we’re in the car again, driving back.

A day, years ago. Jack and I were out sailing. I’d caught sight of a bird—some kind of hawk. The light was in my eyes and the bird was a distant shape. I tried to identify the lines of its wings and flight. I shielded the light from my eyes and tracked the bird as it shifted course, heading toward the coast behind us. The boat tacked, and a sea rushed under the hull. The bow rose, then dipped. “Hang on, Jackie,” Jack said. I turned. He was just sitting there, open water behind him, managing the lines, one hand on the mainsheet, one on the tiller, his face bright, that casual beauty of him so brisk and alive, like he was cut right out of the wind, the salt air, and the light.

“What are you thinking?” Bobby asks again as the car turns onto the avenue. I don’t answer. The memory fades. His asking dimmed it. I lean my forehead against the window glass to close my mind.

I can’t sleep. I can’t even lie down without seeing his head destroyed in my lap. I wander around, sit in a chair, smoke. The room has a terrible wrongness. I take one of the little blue pills. I still can’t sleep. The stars drift.

Later that night, I hear Bobby cry out again from a bedroom down the hall.

I should go to him,I think.

At the desk in the West Sitting Hall, I write to Lyndon.

Thank you for walking yesterday—behind Jack. You did not have to do that—I am sure many people forbid you to take such a risk—but you did it anyway.

Thank you for your letters to my children….

I pause. Bobby still doesn’t trust him. Just yesterday he called Johnson “the usurper.”

“You’ve never liked him,” I said. “But we weren’t always fair. We ridiculed him.”

“He never knew.”

“It was still awful.”

Bobby looked at me, his eyes level. “I won’t let him take credit for what Jack did.”

“He and Lady Bird have been kind to me, and I am grateful. They’re going to let the White House school stay open so Caroline and her friends can finish the year.”

“He wants your support. Ask him to rename Cape Canaveral after Jack. Jack would’ve wanted that.”

“Jack wouldn’t want me to ask.”

“He dreamed of putting an American on the moon. Renaming Canaveral is a way to say that.”

Then, because it is Bobby, I agree.

I learn that the caparisoned horse is called Black Jack. The night after Caroline’s birthday, I write to the secretary of the Army to inform him I’d like to buy that horse when it is retired.

Thanksgiving Day. We go to visit Jack at Arlington, then fly to Hyannis Port.

Rose meets us downstairs. “I have to keep busy,” she says. “I can’t stop praying.”

I go to find Joe. He is in his room, waiting for me. This man who cannot move or walk, can barely speak. The ambassador. The king. The maker of legends. We were all so certain then. His face brightens when I come in. I sit in a chair by his bed, hold his hand, and I tell him the story of his son’s death. I talk around the gap of time where my mind is still scrubbed out.

I tell him that Bobby and I will make good decisions about Jack’s library. I tell him they want me to tell the story, not just of Jack’s death but his life, because if we don’t tell it, others will, and those others might tear him apart and try to dismantle his legacy. So they’re asking me to do this. We’ve chosen a writer named William Manchester to create an official account. I ask Joe if he remembers Manchester and that other book he wrote, Portrait of a President, the one Jack liked.

I stare at the bureau as I tell Joe these things, tracing the knobs and inlay, whorls of wood through the lacquered finish.

Joe makes a little sound. Tears flood his face.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’ve said too much, haven’t I? You see, there is just so much in me right now, and I feel you should know everything. I want to make sure this all makes sense to you.”

His eyes search mine and, in his eyes, I can see that for him, as for me, everything is meaningless now.

The morning after Thanksgiving, I call Theodore White and arrange an interview.

“I will do this,” I tell Bobby. “I’ll do all these things you’re asking me to do, because that’s what Jack would want. But when it’s over, I need to disappear.”

Theodore White arrives that night in a heavy rain. I sit on the low sofa. He sits across from me.

“How can I help you?” I say.

He reminds me we spoke in the morning on the phone. I called and asked him to come.

“I will tell you the story,” I say.

The biggest motorcade from the airport.

It was hot. Wild. Like Mexico or Vienna.

The sun was so strong on our faces….

I tell him about the gap of seconds between seconds.

I do not cry. I keep my hands folded, everything in me very still except the words. They are bright and molten, flowing out of my mouth. I see it like it’s still happening. A perfectly clean piece of skull detaching itself from his head, rising away as I reached.

It was not repulsive to me for one moment. Nothing was. Your head was so beautiful. I was just trying to keep it in. That wonderful expression on your face you’d get when you were asked a question, just before you answered.

“I would have done things differently,” I explain to White. “Turned sooner—after the first shot—and pulled him down, but I was so taken by that expression on his face, that abstracted, puzzled look I’ve always loved. What is it, Jack? I went to say, and then the next shot came.”

I go on talking. White goes on writing. There are others in the room. They listen like trees, and the rain strikes the window, and bits of my words and his questions float, parsed smaller, splintered to powerless dust, rings of smoke shot through with sickening yellow lamplight.

“Jack was magic.” I use that word, then stop.

We never pay attention, do we? To what we should.

In the downstairs room that night with Theodore White, his notepad, pages wrapped thick around the top edge, pencil flying fast across, and the darker shadows of Bobby and the others, silent at the hem of things, faces half lit, ghostly, obscure, a quiet word exchanged, they watch and wait, the occasional bright orange glow of a cigarette.

The children are asleep upstairs.

We imagine time will clarify our intention. Who we were, how we lived, what we achieved. We want to believe we will be treated with integrity, with fairness and compassion. But history is not so forgiving, is it?

“When did farewell really come?” White is asking me now.

Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie—

Take off your glasses, Jackie, so they can see you.

These moments, I could explain, these little things Jack used to say when he was asking me to be more visible, to play my part—these are the lean, sharp cliffs of my mind where I walk.

“When did farewell really come?” White asks again.

How dark in the room it’s grown.

“It’s become almost an obsession with me,” I say. “This one small thing I want to tell you. At night, before going to sleep, Jack loved to listen to music. He loved the record from the musical Camelot. I’d play it for him on the old Victrola. His favorite lines, near the end: Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” I pause. “You imagine I’m making things up.”

I inhale, and the cigarette brings back a little of my mind.

White has stopped writing. “I think I have enough.”

“There’s more,” I say. I suddenly find I don’t want this to be done.

“Let me start with what I have.” He smiles then. A strange sad smile.

I show him to a small room, a typewriter on the desk.

When he returns with typewritten pages, I’ve sharpened two pencils. I read on the sofa. He’s written eloquently. Beautifully. Nothing graphic. No blood, brains, gore. On the one hand, I’m grateful. At the same time, there’s a great deal missing. I work over each line, the pencil marking up the text.

At two in the morning, White stands by the wall phone in the kitchen and dictates his story to the Life offices in New York.

“The Camelot bit?” he says into the receiver but glancing at me. “You’re saying you want to strike that? Or tone it down?” He catches my eye. I shake my head.

“No,” he says into the phone. “That stays.”

Then he is gone. They are all gone, and the house is empty again. Just me and the children. A glass of water on the nightstand. I lie on the bed and sleep without sleeping.

It is almost tomorrow,I think.