We Need to Talk About Kevin (49 page)

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Authors: Lionel Shriver

Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Teenage Boys, #Epistolary Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Massacres, #School Shootings, #High Schools, #New York (State)

BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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It was only a couple of days after the
accident
when you convened our roundtable of three. We’d just had dinner, loosely speaking; Kevin had shoveled his food directly from the stove. Humoring you, he assumed his rueful, sideways slouch at the dining table. Having been unwillingly summoned to this convocation as well, I felt like a kid myself, once more forced at age nine to formally apologize to Mr. Wintergreen for pilfering drops from the walnut tree in his front yard. Sneaking a glance at Kevin, I wanted to say,
Wipe that smirk off your face
,
this isn’t a joke; your sister’s in the hospital.
I wanted to say,
Go put on a T-shirt that isn’t five sizes too small for you, just being in the same room with that getup makes me itch
. But I couldn’t. In the culture of our family, such commonplace parental admonitions, from me anyway, were impermissible.
“In case you’re nervous, Kev,” you began (though he didn’t look nervous to me), “this isn’t an inquisition. We mostly want to tell you how much you impressed us with your quick thinking. Who knows, if you hadn’t called those medics in right away, it could have been even worse.” (
How?
I thought. Though I suppose she could’ve taken a bath in it.) “And your mother has something she wants to tell you.”
“I wanted to thank you,” I began, avoiding Kevin’s eye, “for getting your sister to the hospital.”
“Tell him what you told me,” you prompted. “Remember, you said you were concerned, that he might feel, you know . . . ”
This part was easy. I looked at him straight on. “I thought you probably felt responsible.”
Unflinching, he squinted back, and I confronted my own widebridged nose, my narrow jaw, my shelved brow and dusky complexion. I was looking in the mirror, yet I had no idea what my own reflection was thinking. “Why’s that?”
“Because you were
supposed
to be taking care of her!”
“But you wanted to remind him,” you said, “that we’d never expected him to watch her every single minute, and accidents happen, and so it
wasn’t
his fault. What you told me. You know. In the truck.”
It was exactly like apologizing to Mr. Wintergreen. When I was nine, I’d wanted to blurt,
Most of those stupid walnuts were wormy or rotten, you old coot
, but instead I’d promised to harvest a full peck of his crummy nuts and return them fully shelled.
“We don’t want you to blame yourself.” My tone duplicated Kevin’s own, when he’d spoken to the police—
sir
this,
sir
that. “I’m the one at fault. I should never have left the Liquid-Plumr out of the cabinet.”
Kevin shrugged. “Never said I blamed myself.” He stood up. “I be excused?”
“One more thing,” you said. “Your sister’s going to need your help.”
“Why?” he said, ranging into the kitchen. “Only one eye, wasn’t it. Not like she needs a guide dog or a white stick.”
“Yes,” I said. “
Lucky her
.”
“She’ll need your support,” you said. “She’s going to have to wear a patch—”
“Cool,” he said. He came back with the bag of lychees from the refrigerator. It was February; they were in season.
“She’ll be fitted with a glass eye down the line,” you said, “but we’d appreciate your sticking up for her if neighborhood kids tease her—”
“Like how?” he said, carefully pulling the rough salmon-colored husk off the fruit, exposing the pinkish-white flesh.
“Celia does not look like a geek?”
When the pale translucent orb was peeled, he popped it in his mouth, sucked, and pulled it back out.
“Well, however you—”
“I mean,
Dad
.” Methodically, he splayed the lychee open, parting the slippery flesh from the smooth brown seed. “Not sure you remember too good, being a kid.” He angled the mangle into his mouth. “Ceil’s just gonna have to suck it up.”
I could feel you internally beaming. Here was your teenager trotting out his archetypal teenagery toughness, behind which he hid his confused, conflicted feelings about his sister’s tragic accident. It was an act, Franklin, a candy-coated savagery for your consumption. He was plenty confused and conflicted, but if you looked into his pupils they were thick and sticky as a tar pit. This teenage angst of his, it wasn’t
cute
.
“Hey, Mister Plastic,” Kevin offered. “Want one?” You demurred.
“I didn’t know you liked lychees,” I said tightly once he’d started on a second one.
“Yeah, well,” he said, stripping the fruit bare and rolling the pulpy globe around the table with one forefinger. It was the ghostly, milky color of a cataract.
“It’s just, they’re very delicate,” I said, fretting.
He tore into the lychee with his front teeth. “Yeah, whadda you call it.” He slurped. “An
acquired taste
.”
He was clearly planning to go through the whole bag. I rushed from the room, and he laughed.
 
On the days that I took the early afternoon visiting hours, I worked from home; Kevin’s school bus would often drop him off at the same time as I returned from the hospital. The first time I passed him as he sauntered languidly across Palisades Parade, I pulled over in my Luna and offered him a ride up our steep drive. You’d think that just being alone with your own son in a car was a pretty ordinary affair, especially for two minutes. But Kevin and I rarely put ourselves in such stifling proximity, and I remember babbling associatively all the way up. The street was lined with several other vehicles waiting to rescue children from having to walk as much as ten feet on their own steam, and I remarked on the fact that every single car was an
SRO
. It was out of my mouth before I remembered that Kevin hated my teasing malapropism for SUV—one more pretend-gaffe to service the myth that I didn’t really live here.
“You know, those things are a metaphor for this whole country,” I went on. I had been put on notice that this sort of talk drove my son insane, but maybe that’s why I pursued it, much as I would later bring up Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris in Claverack just to goad him. “They sit up on the road higher and mightier than anyone else, and they have more power than anyone knows what to do with. Even the profile they cut—they always remind me of fat shoppers, waddling down the mall in squarecut Bermuda shorts and giant padded sneakers, stuffing their faces with cinnamon buns.”
“Yeah, well, ever ride in one?” (I admitted I hadn’t.) “So what do you know?”
“I know they piggy up too much of the road, guzzle gas, sometimes roll over—”
“Why do you care if they roll over? You hate these people anyway.”
“I don’t hate—”
“Single-room occupancy!”
Shaking his head, he slammed the VW door behind him. The next time I offered him a lift up the hill, he waved me off.
There was even something strangely unbearable about those couple of hours he and I sometimes shared the house before your 4x4 plowed into the garage. You’d think it would be easy enough, in that vast splay of teak, but no matter where each of us settled I never lost an awareness of his presence, nor he, I suspect, of mine. Lacking you and Celia as a buffer, just the two of us in the same residence felt—the word
naked
comes to mind. We barely spoke. If he headed for his room, I didn’t ask about his homework; if Lenny stopped by, I didn’t ask what they were doing; and if Kevin left the house, I didn’t ask where he was headed. I told myself that a parent should respect an adolescent’s privacy, but I also knew that I was a coward.
This sensation of nakedness was assisted by the real thing. I know that fourteen-year-old boys are brimming with hormones, all that. I know that masturbation is a normal, vital relief, a harmless and enjoyable pastime that shouldn’t be slandered as a vice. But I also thought that for teenagers—let’s be serious, for everyone—this entertainment is covert. We all do it (or I used to—yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn’t customary to say, “Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I’m going to go masturbate.”
It had to happen more than once for me to finally mention it, because after our set-to in the hospital parking lot I had blown my tattling allowance for several months.
“He leaves the bathroom door open,” I reported reluctantly in our bedroom late one night, at which point you began to brush the hairs from your electric shaver intently. “And you can see the toilet from the hallway.”
“So he forgets to close the door.” You were clipped.
“He doesn’t forget. He waits until I go to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee, so I’ll see him on my way back to my study. It’s very deliberate. And he’s, ah—loud.”
“At his age, I probably jerked off three times a day.”
“In front of your mother?”
“Around the corner, behind the door. I thought I kept it secret, but I’m sure she knew.”
“Behind the door,” I noted. “The door. It’s important.” My, that shaver was really clogged with stubble tonight. “Knowing I can see—I think it excites him.”
“Well, no matter how
healthy
you try to be about it, everybody’s a little weird in this department.”
“You’re not, um—getting it. I know he’s going to do it, I don’t have a problem with his doing it, but I’d rather not be included. It’s inappropriate.” That word took heavy duty during this era. The Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken the month before, and President Clinton would later put a napkin over the specifics by deeming their relations
inappropriate.
“So why don’t you say something?” You got tired of intercession, I suppose.
“What if Celia were masturbating in front of you? Would you talk to her about it or prefer that I did?”
“So what do you want me to say?” you asked wearily.
“That he’s making me uncomfortable.”
“That’s a new one.”
I flounced onto the bed and grabbed a book I’d be unable to read. “Just tell him to keep the goddamned door shut.”
I shouldn’t have bothered. Yes, you reported that you’d done as you were told. I pictured you poking your head into his room and saying something jovial and collusive about “growing a little hair on the palm,” a dated expression he probably didn’t get, and then I bet you tossed off, supercasual, “Just remember it’s private, okay sport?” and said good-night. But even if you instead had a long, earnest, stern discussion, you’d have tipped him off that he’d gotten to me, and with Kevin that’s always a mistake.
So the very next afternoon after your “talk,” I’m heading to the study with my cup of coffee and I can hear a telltale grunting down the hall. I’m praying that he’s gotten the message and there will at least be a thin but blessed wooden barrier between me and my son’s budding manhood. I think: Aside from closets, there are only about four, five doors in the whole bloody house, and we should really be getting our money’s worth out of them. But as I advance another step or two the noise level belies this most minimal attempt at propriety.
I press my warm coffee cup between my eyes to soothe a nascent headache. I’ve been married for nineteen years and I know how men work and there’s no reason to be afraid of a glorified spigot. But subjected to the urgent little moans down the hall, I’m ten years old again, sent on errands across town for my shut-in mother, having to cut through the park, eyes trained straight ahead while older boys snicker in the bushes with their flies down. I feel stalked, in my own house, nervous, hounded, and mocked, and I don’t mind telling you I’m pretty pissed off about it.
So I dare myself, the way I always got home in the old days, when I would discipline myself not to run and so give chase. I march rather than tiptoe down the hall, heels hitting the floorboards, clop-clop. I get to the kids’ bathroom, door agape, and there is our firstborn in all his pubescent splendor, down to a rash of fiery pimples on his backside. Feet planted wide and back arched, he has pivoted his stance at an angle to the toilet so that I can see his handiwork—purple and gleaming with what I first assume is K-Y jelly, but which the silver wrapper on the floor suggests is my Land O’Lakes unsalted butter—and this is my introduction to the fact that my son has now grown fine, uncommonly straight pubic hair. Though most males conduct this exercise with their eyes closed, Kevin has cracked his open, the better to shoot his mother a sly, sleepy glance over the shoulder. In return, I glare squarely at his cock—doubtless what I should have done in the park instead of averting my gaze, since the appendage is so unimpressive when confronted head-on that it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. I reach in and pull the door shut, hard.
The hallway rings with a dry chuckle. I clip back to the kitchen. I’ve spilled coffee on my skirt.
 
So. I know you must have wondered. Why didn’t I simply walk out? Nothing stopped me from grabbing Celia while she still had one eye left and hightailing it back to Tribeca. I could have left you with your son and that horrible house, a matched set. After all. I had all the money.
I’m not sure you’ll believe me, but it never occurred to me to leave. I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you’re related to. I hated the prospect of defeat; if in bearing Kevin to begin with I picked up my own gauntlet, bearing Kevin on a daily basis involved rising to a greater challenge still. And there may have been a practical side to my tenacity as well. He was about to turn fifteen. He had never spoken of college—had never spoken of his adult future at all; never having expressed the slightest interest in a trade or profession, for all I knew he was sticking to his five-year-old vow to go on welfare. But theoretically our son was out of the house in about three years. Thereafter, it would just be you, me, and Celia, and then we would see about that happy family of yours. Those three years are almost over now, and if they have proved the longest of my life, I had no way of anticipating that at the time. Lastly, and this may strike you as simplistic, I loved you. I loved you, Franklin. I still do.

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