Jackie

Chapter 1

November 22, 1963

They will tell her they found no heartbeat, no breathing, no pulse.

In the hallway where she sits, a glacial coolness—white tiles along the wall, the black linoleum floor. Clint stands near her, that precise distance an understanding between them. Others cluster in uncertain knots, voices anxious, hushed, bowed heads, someone walks away, someone else comes back. A nurse pushes through.

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

If she had been looking to the right.

If she had recognized the first sound for what it was.

If she had not been complaining in her head about the heat, how it seared her eyes, how close their hands and blurred faces came as the car took a turn, how they pressed in.

If she had not been thinking of how she wanted to put her sunglasses back on and why did he always insist? So they can see you, Jackie. Let them see you. She had been too focused on all that and wondering how she could slip away from the grueling heat into the cool promise of the tunnel ahead—

A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.

And the roses were there, on the seat between them, roses spilling toward the floor, she kept pushing them back so they wouldn’t fall.

Later, she won’t be able to get the roses from her mind—the petals soaked, his blood, stems broken under her knees. Three times that day someone pushed roses into her arms—yellow roses each time, until they reached Dallas. There, the roses were red.

She will say this again and again, later. Each time she is asked to tell the story of those hours, and even when she is not asked, she will tell it. She has not yet begun, but when she does, she will describe the dark, wet iridescence of those roses crushed in the white-hot glare of hate as she leapt up to grasp a piece of his skull flying away.

Sometimes—also later—she will wonder aloud to Bobby how in those few seconds her mind could have witnessed so much and at the same time remembered so little.

They killed him over that bill.

She knew it.

The civil-rights bill he wanted to get passed.

That’s why they killed him.

The morning they had left the White House—Thursday, only the day before—Jack was relaxed. He told her his back felt better than it had in years. “So what will we do stuck at Lyndon’s ranch?” she asked him. Kenneth was doing her hair. Jack had come into her room and was standing behind her, off to the side. He caught her eyes in the mirror and shrugged.

“We should ride,” he said.

Before Jack left the room, he gave her a document. “If you want to know what my life is like, read this.”

“For Texas?”

“No,” he said. “I asked Neustadt to study the missile crisis and draft a report, map where things went awry.”

She glanced at it. SKYBOLT AND NASSAU—American Policy-Making and Anglo-American Relations.Top Secret typed in the top and bottom left corners.

He stood in the room, like he was waiting for something.

“I’ll read it,” she said.

He touched his jacket pocket, his fingers tapping against the dark-blue fabric.

“I’m also going to give Macmillan a copy,” he said. “I’m thinking about it, anyway. Why don’t you bring it along, take a look, and let me know if that’s a good idea.”

“Sure,” she said.

As if satisfied, he left the room.

Her mind was on the speech she had to give in Spanish to the Latino group in Houston. She put the Skybolt report in the pile of last-minute things to be packed.

Once, years ago, at a party, you left with another woman. She was blond, in a silver dress, her body like a fingernail of moon. We were married by then. This was the first time it happened. I felt myself move outside of myself, watching you leave with that woman, aware of others in the room turning toward me, as I tried to empty my face into the face of a wife who knew and did not care.

In the Parkland Hospital corridor, she sits in the metal folding chair and smokes. She is cool and still as they scuttle around—feet, voices, that awful hospital smell.

She wonders where her coat is, then realizes she’s wearing it. She looks down at her lap, her skirt—then wishes she hadn’t.

She looks back up through the moving stream of them. She looks at the opposite wall.

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

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

They keep saying things like that.

When the doors to Trauma Room 1 open, the corridor goes still. She turns to the doctor stepping out, his face telling her what she already knows—it couldn’t be otherwise, no matter how much wanting. She gets up as if this is how it was always meant to happen. This is the script and Jack knew it and now she has to play her part.

She goes to walk past the doctor, even as others fold in to block her way. She pushes through. She is stripped to nothing now—just a woman in the shape of a blade slipping through a line of men past the doctor through the operating-theater doors to the body laid out that is hers, naked under a sheet, her lips to his feet, her face to his beautiful face. It is no less beautiful now. She takes the ring from her finger and twists it onto his littlest finger. It stops at the first knuckle, which upsets her, but she leaves it, his lovely shattered head. They’ve turned the shattered part away, his eyes open still. Not blank yet.

We are made of stars and I loved you from the first moment I saw you. I loved you even knowing it would break something in me.

In the suite at the hotel the night before, someone had filled the walls with a collection of borrowed art. Sixteen exquisite pieces—a Monet, a Van Gogh, a Prendergast.

He had made a little doodle on a pad of paper near the phone, the drawing of a sailboat, sail filled with wind; you could tell it was moving. Up in one corner was a shape.

“Is this a bird?” she asked. “A kite, or a boxy cloud?”

“It’s the sun,” he said.

“No, it’s not the sun,” she said. “What is it?”

“I couldn’t quite decide. Something in flight.” He was lying on the bed. “Hey,” he said then. “Come here.”

The world is shadowless, time bent. No before or after, just that hard brutal sound when everything slowed and your head jerked back, your hands toward your throat, that puzzled look on your face. I remember that. I remember thinking you looked as if you had a headache.

“Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Johnson is going back to Washington, and he would like you to go with him.”

Clint, her Secret Service detail, is saying this to her. She is in the hospital corridor. Outside the closed door of Trauma Room 1. The team of doctors is doing something else in there. They told her but she can’t remember now, so she is waiting, seated again in the metal folding chair. She looks up, and Clint’s eyes are as young and raw and dark as she has ever seen them.

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

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

Leaving their house in Virginia earlier that week, she had gone back through, checking rooms for last-minute things. She found the Book Review with Jack’s markups, the books he wanted circled. It was folded and had fallen under the sofa, just an edge of it poking out. She found John’s toy helicopter, a spilled set of crayons. A rogue sock.

Once, years ago, in Hyannis Port, before we were married, there was a flood of light through the window and children tumbling over one another in their little white shorts, grass-stained. I was looking for you. I crossed through the living room. You and your father and Bobby were talking in another room down the hall, you didn’t know I was there; I heard your father say my name and I stopped, listening as the three of you discussed the assets I brought to the table—the illusion of wealth, the pedigree, the beauty (enough but not too much)—and then the liabilities—a little too highbrow, too French. I felt a wave of nausea, listening, as the three of you talked about me like I was a piece of territory to be inspected, parsed, acquired for gain. I glanced across the room toward the door that led out to the front yard, the driveway, my car.

But there was you.

And then your father was there, coming into the room, with you and Bobby behind him. Your father stopped when he saw me sitting there. He knew I had overheard.

They wheel an empty casket in from outside. Bronze. Up on a metal dolly with small rubber tires. O’Donnell and Powers step in front of her. What are you doing? she almost asks, then realizes they’re trying to shield her, to block her view as it goes by. A doctor urges her to leave.

“Do you think seeing a coffin could possibly upset me?” she says. “I’ve seen my husband die, shot in my arms. His blood is all over me. How can I see anything worse than what I’ve seen?”

The doctor seems to shrink into his white coat. Baffled, embarrassed, something like that. She doesn’t have space in her brain to wonder or care. Dave Powers is in an argument with the medical examiner, who’s saying they have to hold the autopsy here in Texas, according to state law. Their voices rise, bouncing off the linoleum, they start to yell in the hallway. Powers explains that the vice president and Lady Bird Johnson are waiting at Love Field for Mrs. Kennedy, and Mrs. Kennedy is waiting for the president, and the medical examination can be held at the Capitol, no matter what the stupid Texas law has to say about homicide and jurisdiction.

She stops paying attention. At a certain point, the casket with the large handles glides out of Trauma Room 1. She knows he is in it, and it is time to go; he is leaving and she will leave with him. The casket is cool to the touch, and she walks out with it to the hearse. When Clint asks her to come ride in a car behind, she has to explain, “No, Mr. Hill. I’m going to ride with the president.” She climbs into the back of the hearse with Jack, and Clint climbs in with her. They ride with their knees scrunched up to their chests. She knows there is more room inside where Jack is.

I should not have allowed you to come here.

The casket will not fit through the door of the plane; they tilt and try to wedge it in on an angle. She watches from the bottom of the steps. She can feel the heat rising off the tarmac. The crust of his blood on her stockings. She could tell them this won’t work at all, it will never fit. The men at the top holding the casket exchange words, but from the base of the steps she can’t make them out. Clint glances back at her. A warning look she recognizes a moment before they break the handles off, that awful sound of metal ripped from wood. Then they jam the coffin through the door. She walks up the stairs and follows it into the plane.

They do not take off. They have to wait, apparently, for a judge who will do the swearing in. On the bed in the Presidential Cabin, someone has laid out a dress for her, stockings, a jacket. Two blue Air Force One towels next to the clothes. Her face appears in the bathroom mirror, streaked with blood. She soaks a tissue and begins to wipe it off. No. A mistake. She should have left it. His blood, her face, this bathroom mirror that was theirs a few hours ago and is not now. There’s a light knock on the door. Lady Bird comes in and offers to have someone come and help her get cleaned up.

“What if I had not been there?” she says to Lady Bird.

One glove—her right glove—white this morning, now is dark, lacquered in blood. Her left glove is missing. Where did she leave her left glove?

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

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

Later, she will not remember saying it out loud.

“Lady Bird, could you please send in Mr. Hill and Mr. O’Donnell? I have to give instructions to send to my mother and Miss Shaw, about the children.”

The judge who will perform the swearing in is a peanut, tiny even in her brown-and-white polka-dot dress. The heat in the plane is stifling, bodies and hot air all crushed and caught in that overstuffed low-ceilinged space—too many, too much—and the eagle is still flying on the carpet, its wings pinched down by all their feet. Someone has realized they don’t have a Bible. “The nightstand in the bedroom,” she whispers to O’Brien, who is standing beside her. He leaves to go find it. The photographer has already climbed up onto the couch and is angling his lens down at them. Light nicks his spectacles as he pushes back against the curve where the wall of the plane meets the ceiling, hunching his shoulders, troll-like, trying to get them all in. The engines have snapped to life—a whirring, drowning sound, and someone’s hand is at her elbow. Lyndon. He wants her to stand next to him. They are all pushing back into the tight-as-sardines-in-a-can crowd. She shuffles her feet in the direction they want her to move and looks down at her hands. They look wrong, odd and new, a pale band of lighter skin at the base of her ring finger.

“You don’t have to go out there,” Kenny O’Donnell had said to her ten minutes earlier, in the bedroom. He was tense, taut with grief, furious at the unthinkable that had just shredded meaning out of his life.

“I think I owe that much to the country,” she had answered.

On the flight, she sits with Jack and the Irish in the rear of the plane—O’Brien, O’Donnell, Powers. The crew has taken out the seats to make room for them. She does not take her hand off the coffin. The smell of soup someone is eating somewhere sickens her.

How do I do it? How will I, can I, do it? Turn the mess of our lives with its brazen mistakes and disorder into some tenable history I can relate to the children, as if all along we had it in our control?

They are grumbling now about Johnson and why did he need to take the oath of office in Dallas? Couldn’t he have waited? He told them he asked Bobby and said that’s what Bobby told him to do, which Bobby would never have said. They break off, realizing she’s watching them, listening. There is blood on Dave Powers’s suit. For a moment she stares at it, then she tells them about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral and the book in the White House library and she asks if one of them could make sure Pam has remembered to message J. B. West to go and find it so they can use it to plan.

“We are going to have a funeral like Lincoln’s,” she says. “There was a riderless horse, and I need to reread exactly what they did with the horse—the tack, how it was led. We will do that.”

As the flight continues, they tell her stories about Jack. They drink whiskey, and she sips at hers to be polite because they’ve insisted on pouring her a glass as if she is one of them now. They are the widowers and she is his residual. Dave Powers tells her about Jack’s last visit to Joe in Hyannis Port. He’d driven out to the Cape after the fundraiser in Boston the night before, after the visit to Harvard and to Patrick’s grave. He had spent the day at the house with his father. Dave describes how Jack kissed his father goodbye. She can almost feel Joe’s cheek under her lips; she can almost smell a bolt of salt wind. She takes another sip of whiskey, lets it burn in her throat.

“Dave, you have known Jack all your life,” she says. “What will you do now? What will happen to you?”

His eyes are angry, almost desperate. “You want to know something, Jackie. I don’t give a damn.”

There’s a report of a storm ahead. Severe weather, she’s told. Possibly tornadoes. Through Mississippi and Arkansas. The pilot is going to try to climb over it.

“Fine,” she says. “Have you ever noticed how fast the dark comes on when you are flying west to east?”