Read We Need to Talk About Kevin Online

Authors: Lionel Shriver

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

We Need to Talk About Kevin (17 page)

BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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You teased me that I took such a shine to Siobhan just because she was a
Wing and a Prayer
fan, for she’d used AWAP when traveling the Continent. Unsure what God would “call” her to do, she said she couldn’t imagine a more delightful occupation than professional globetrotting, stirring my nostalgia for a life already growing distant. She ignited the same pride that I hoped Kevin would some day kindle, when he got old enough to appreciate his parents’ accomplishments. I’d already indulged the odd fantasy whereby Kevin would pore over my old photographs, asking breathlessly,
Where’s this? What’s that? You’ve been to AFRICA? Wow!
But Siobhan’s admiration proved cruelly misleading. Kevin did
pour over
a box of my photographs once—with kerosene.
After a second round of antibiotics, the mastitis cleared up. Resigned that Kevin was on formula for keeps, I allowed my breasts to engorge and dry up, and with Siobhan holding down the fort was at length able to return to AWAP that fall. What a relief, to dress well, to move briskly, to speak in low, adult tones, to tell someone what to do and to have them do it. While I took fresh relish in what had previously grown workaday, I also chided myself for having imputed to a tiny bundle of confusion such malign motives as an intent to drive a wedge between you and me. I’d been unwell. It had been harder to adapt to our new life than I’d expected. Recuperating some of my old energy and discovering with pleasure that I had agitated myself back down to my former figure, I assumed that the worst was over and made a mental note that the next time one of my friends bore a first child I would fall all over myself to sympathize.
Often I’d invite Siobhan to linger with me for a cup of coffee when I came home, and the enjoyment I took in conversing with a woman roughly half my age may have been less the delight of leaping generations than the more standard one of talking to anybody. I was confiding in Siobhan because I was not confiding in my husband.
“You must have wanted Kevin something fierce,” said Siobhan on one such occasion. “Seeing the sights, meeting amazing people—and paid for the pleasure, if you can credit it! I can’t imagine giving that up.”
“I haven’t given it up,” I said. “After a year or so, I’ll resume business as usual.”
Siobhan stirred her coffee. “Is that what Franklin expects?”
“It’s what he ought to expect.”
“But he mentioned, like,” she was not comfortable with tattling, “that your running off for months at a go, like—that it was over.”
“For a while there, I was a little burned out. Always running out of fresh underwear; all those French train strikes. It’s possible I gave the wrong impression.”
“Oh, aye,” she said sorrowfully. I doubt that she was trying to make trouble, though she saw it coming. “He must have been lonely, when you’d go away. And now if you take your trips again, he’d be the only one to mind wee Kevin when I’m not here. Of course, in America, don’t some da’s stay home, and the ma’s go to work?”
“There are Americans and Americans. Franklin’s not the type.”
“But you run a whole company. Sure you could afford ...”
“Only in the financial sense. It’s hard enough when a man’s wife is profiled in
Fortune
magazine and he’s only location-scouted the advertisement on the facing page.”
“Franklin said you used to be on the road five months a year.”
“Obviously,” I said heavily, “I’ll have to cut back.”
“You know, you may find that Kevin’s a wee bit tricky, like. He’s a—an uneasy baby. Sometimes they grow out of it.” She hazarded starkly, “Sometimes they don’t.”
 
You thought that Siobhan was devoted to our son, but I read her loyalty as more to you and me. She rarely spoke of Kevin in other than a logistical sense. A new set of bottles had been sterilized; our disposable “nappies” were running low. For such a passionate girl this mechanical approach seemed unlike her. (Though she did observe once, “He has like, beady eyes, so he does!” She laughed nervously and qualified, “I mean—intense.” “Yes, they’re unnerving, aren’t they,” I rejoined, as neutrally as I knew how.) But she adored the two of us. She was entranced with the freedom of our dual self-employment, and, despite the evangelical romance with “family values,” was clearly disconcerted that we would willfully impair this giddy liberty with the ball and chain of an infant. And maybe we gave her hope for her future. We were middle-aged, but we listened to The Cars and Joe Jackson; if she didn’t approve of bad language, she may still have been broadly heartened that a codger nearing forty could decry a dubious baby manual as
horseshit
. In turn, we paid her well and accommodated her church obligations. I gave her the odd present, like a silk scarf from Thailand, which she gushed over so much that I was embarrassed. She thought you devastatingly handsome, admiring the sturdiness of your figure and the disarming flop of your flaxen hair. I wonder if she didn’t “fancy” you a tad.
Having every reason to assume that Siobhan was contented in our employ, I was puzzled to note as the months advanced that she began to look curiously drawn. I know the Irish don’t age well, but even for her thinskinned race she was much too young to develop those hard worry lines across her forehead. She could be testy when I returned from the office, snapping when I had simply expressed surprise that we were low again on baby food, “Och, it doesn’t all go in his mouth, you know!” She immediately apologized, and grew fleetingly tearful but wouldn’t explain. She became more difficult to entice into a debriefing cup of coffee, as if anxious to be quit of our loft, and I was nonplussed by her reaction when I proposed that she move in. You remember that I offered to wall off that illused catchall corner, and to install a separate bath. What I had in mind would have been far more capacious than the cubbyhole she shared in the East Village with a loose, boozing, godless waitress she didn’t much like. I wouldn’t have cut her salary, either, so she’d have saved buckets on rent. Yet at the prospect of becoming a live-in nanny, she recoiled. When she protested that she could never break her lease on that Avenue C hovel, it sounded like, well,
horseshit
.
And then she started calling in sick. Just once or twice a month at first, but at length she was phoning in with a sore throat or an upset stomach at least once a week. She looked wretched enough; she couldn’t have been eating well, because those doll-baby curves had given way to a stickfigure frailty, and when the Irish pale, they look exhumed. So I was hesitant to accuse her of faking. Deferentially I inquired if she had boyfriend problems, if there was trouble with her family in Carickfergus, or if she was pining for Northern Ireland. “Pining for
Northern Ireland
,” she repeated wryly. “You’re having me on.” That moment of humor served to highlight that her jokes had grown rare.
These impromptu vacations of hers put me to great inconvenience, since according to the now-established logic of your tenuous freelance employment versus my fatuous security as CEO, I was the one to stay home. Not only would I have to reschedule meetings or conduct them awkwardly in conference calls, but a whole extra day spent with our precious little ward tipped a precarious equilibrium in me; by nightfall on a day I had not been girded for Kevin’s unrelenting horror at his own existence, I was, as our nanny would say,
mental
. It was through the insufferable addition of that extra day a week that Siobhan and I came, tacitly at first, to understand each other.
Clearly, God’s children are meant to savor His glorious gifts without petulance, for Siobhan’s uncanny forbearance could only have issued from catechism. No amount of wheedling would elicit whatever was driving her abed every Friday. So if only to give her permission, I complained myself.
“I have no regrets about my travels,” I began one early evening as she prepared to go, “but it’s a shame I met Franklin so late. Four years just the two of us wasn’t nearly enough time to get tired of him! I think it must be nice if you meet your partner in your twenties, with long enough as a childless couple to, I don’t know, get a little bored even. Then in your thirties you’re ready for a change, and a baby is welcome.”
Siobhan looked at me sharply, and though I expected censure in her gaze I caught only a sudden alertness. “Of course, you don’t mean Kevin isn’t welcome.”
I knew the moment mandated hurried reassurances, but I couldn’t furnish them. This would happen to me sporadically in the coming years: I would do and say what I was supposed to week upon week without fail until abruptly I hit a wall. I would open my mouth and
That’s a really pretty drawing, Kevin
or
If we tear the flowers out of the ground they’ll die, and you don’t want them to die, do you?
or
Yes, we’re so awfully proud of our son, Mr. Cartland
would simply not come out.
“Siobhan,” I said reluctantly. “I’ve been a little disappointed.”
“I know I’ve been poorly, Eva—”
“Not in you.” I considered that she may have understood me perfectly well and had misinterpreted me on purpose. I shouldn’t have burdened this young girl with my secrets, but I felt strangely impelled. “All the bawling and the nasty plastic toys . . . I’m not sure quite what I had in mind, but it wasn’t this.”
“Sure you might have a touch of postpartum—”
“Whatever you call it, I don’t feel joyful. And Kevin doesn’t seem joyful either.”
“He’s a baby!”
“He’s over a year and a half. You know how people are always cooing,
He’s such a happy child!
Well, in that instance there are unhappy children. And nothing I do makes the slightest bit of difference.”
She kept fiddling with her daypack, nestling the last of her few possessions into its cavity with undue concentration. She always brought a book to read for Kevin’s naps, and I finally noticed that she’d been stuffing the exact same volume in that daypack for months. I’d have understood if it was a Bible, but it was only an inspirational text—slim, the cover now badly stained—and she had once described herself as an avid reader.
“Siobhan, I’m useless with babies. I’ve never had much rapport with small children, but I’d hoped ... Well, that motherhood would reveal another side of myself.” I met one of her darting glances. “It hasn’t.”
She squirmed. “Ever talk to Franklin, about how you’re feeling?”
I laughed with one
ha
. “Then we’d have to
do
something about it. Like what?”
“Don’t you figure the first couple of years is the tough bit? That it gets easier?”
I licked my lips. “I realize this doesn’t sound very nice. But I keep waiting for the emotional payoff.”
“But only by giving do you get anything back.”
She shamed me, but then I thought about it. “I give him my every weekend, my every evening. I’ve even given him my husband, who has no interest in talking about anything but our son, or in doing anything together besides wheeling a stroller up and down the Battery Park promenade. In return, Kevin smites me with the evil eye, and can’t bear for me to hold him. Can’t bear much of anything, as far as I can tell.”
This kind of talk was making Siobhan edgy; it was domestic heresy. But something seemed to cave in her, and she couldn’t keep up the cheerleading. So instead of forecasting what delights were in store for me once Kevin became a little person in his own right, she said gloomily, “Aye, I know what you mean.”
“Tell me, does Kevin—respond to you?”
“Respond?”
The sardonicism was new. “You could say that.”
“When you’re with him during the day, does he laugh? Gurgle contentedly?
Sleep?
” I realized that I had refrained from asking her as much for all these months, and that in so doing I’d been taking advantage of her ungrudging nature.
“He pulls my hair,” she said quietly.
“But all babies—they don’t know—”
“He pulls it very hard indeed. He’s old enough now and I think he knows it hurts. And Eva, that lovely silk muffler from Bangkok. It’s in shreds.”
Ch-plang! Ch-plang!
Kevin was awake. He was banging a rattle onto that metal xylophone you came home with (alas), and was not showing musical promise.
“When he’s alone with me,” I said over the racket. “Franklin calls it
cranky
—”
“He throws all his toys out of the playpen, and then he screams, and he will not stop screaming until they are all back, and then he throws them out again.
Flings
them.”
P-p-plang-k-chang-CHANG! PLANK! P-P-P-plankpankplankplank!
There was a violent clatter, from which I construed that Kevin had kicked the instrument from between the slats of his crib.
“It’s desperate!” Siobhan despaired. “He does the same thing in his highchair, with Cheerios, porridge, cream crackers . . . With all his food on the floor like, I haven’t a baldy where he gets the energy!”
“You mean,” I touched her hand, “you don’t know where
you
get the energy.”
Mwah . . . Mmwah . . . Mmmmwhawhah . . .
He started like a lawnmower. Siobhan and I looked each other in the eye.
Mwah-eee! EEEeee! EEEEEEEE! EEahEEEEEEEE!
Neither of us arose from our chair.
BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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