We Need to Talk About Kevin (31 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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Anyway, when Miss Fabricant gasped, I joined her in the doorway. Kevin’s back was to us, and he was whispering. When I pushed the door open a little more, he stopped and stepped back. Facing us before the washbasins was Violetta. Her face was lifted in what I can only describe as an expression of bliss. Her eyes were closed, her arms crossed sepulchrally with each hand at the opposite shoulder, her body listing in a kind of swoon. I’m sure we’d have neither begrudged this benighted little girl the ecstasy she so deserved, except for the fact that she was covered with blood.
I don’t mean to be melodramatic. It soon became clear after Miss Fabricant shrieked and pushed Kevin aside for paper towels that Violetta’s abrasions weren’t as bad as they looked. I restrained her hands from raking her upper arms while her teacher dabbed moistened towels on her limbs and face, desperately trying to clean her up a bit before her mother arrived. I attempted to dust the dandruff of white flecks from her navy jumper, but the flakes of skin stuck to the flannel like Velcro. There clearly wasn’t time to scrub the splotches of blood from the lacy rim of her anklets and the gathers of her white puffed sleeves. Most of the lacerations were shallow, but they were all over her body, and Miss Fabricant would no sooner daub a patch of eczema—flamed from sullen mauve to incandescent magenta—than it would bead again, and trickle.
Listen: I don’t want to have this argument again. I fully accept that Kevin may never have touched her. As far as I could tell she had clawed herself open without any help. It itched and she’d given in, and I dare say that finally scraping her fingernails into that hideous red crust must have felt delicious. I even sensed a trace of vengefulness in the extent of the damage, or perhaps a misguided medical conviction that with sufficiently surgical application she might exfoliate the scaly bane of her existence once and for all.
Still, I’ve never forgotten my glimpse of her face when we found her, for it bespoke not only plain enjoyment but a release that was wilder, more primitive, almost pagan. She
knew
it would hurt later and she
knew
she was only making her skin condition worse and she
knew
her mother would be beside herself, and it was this very apprehension with which her expression was suffused, and which gave it, even in a girl of five, a hint of obscenity. She would sacrifice herself to this one glorious gorging, consequences be damned. Why, it was the very grotesquerie of the consequences—the bleeding, the stinging, the hair-tear back home, the unsightly black scabs in the weeks to come—that seemed to lie at the heart of her pleasure.
 
That night you were furious.
“
So
a little girl scratched herself. What has that to do with my son?”
“He was there! This poor girl, flaying herself alive, and he did
nothing
.”
“He’s not her minder, Eva, he’s one of the kids!”
“He could have called someone, couldn’t he? Before it went so far?”
“
Maybe
, but he’s not even six until next month. You can’t expect him to be that resourceful or even to recognize what’s ‘too far’ when all she’s doing is scratching. None of which remotely explains why you let Kevin squish around the house, all afternoon from the looks of him, plastered in shit!” A rare slip. You forgot to say
poop
.
“It’s thanks to
Kevin
that Kevin’s diapers stink because it’s thanks to
Kevin
that he wears diapers at all.” Bathed by his outraged father, Kevin was in his room, but I was aware of the fact that my voice carried. “Franklin, I’m at my wit’s end! I bought all those there’s-nothing-dirtyabout-poo how-to books and now he thinks they’re stupid because they’re written for two-year-olds. We’re supposed to wait until he’s
interested
, but he’s not, Franklin! Why should he be when Mother will always clean it up? How long are we going to let this go on, until he’s in college?”
“Okay, I accept we’re in a positive reinforcement loop. It gets him attention—”
“We’re not in a loop but a
war
, Franklin. And our troops are decimated. We’re short on ammunition. Our borders are overrun.”
“Can we get something straight? Is this your new potty-training theory, let him slum around in his own crap and get it all over our white sofa? This is instructional? Or is it punishment? Because somehow this latest therapy of yours seems all mixed up with your lunatic indignation that some other kid got an itch.”
“
He enticed her
.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
“She’d been very, very good about leaving that eczema alone. Suddenly we find her in the bathroom with her new little friend, and he’s hovering over her and urging her on.... My God, Franklin, you should have seen her! She reminded me of that old scare story that circulated in the sixties about how some guy on acid clawed all the skin off his arms because he thought he was infested with bugs.”
“Does it occur to you that if the scene was all that terrible then maybe Kevin’s a little traumatized himself? That maybe he needs some comfort and reassurance and someone to talk to about it, and not to be banished to his own personal sewer? Jesus, they take kids into foster care for less.”
“I should be so lucky,” I muttered.
“Eva!”
“I was joking!”
“What is
wrong
with you?” you despaired.
“He wasn’t ‘traumatized,’ he was smug. Riding home, his eyes were sparkling. I haven’t seen him that pleased with himself since he eviscerated his birthday cake.”
You plopped onto an end of our impractical white couch, head in hands; I couldn’t join you, because the other end was still smeared brown. “I’m pretty much at the end of my rope, too, Eva.” You massaged your temples. “But not because of Kevin.”
“Is that a threat?—”
“It’s not a threat—”
“What are you talking about!—”
“Eva, please calm down. I’m never going to break up our family.” There was a time you’d have said instead,
I’ll never leave you
. Your more rectitudinous declaration had a solidity about it, where pledges of everlasting devotion to a lover are notoriously frail. So I wondered why your bedrock commitment to
our family
made me sad.
“I dress him,” I said. “I feed him when he lets me, I ferry him everywhere. I bake his kindergarten snacks. I’m at his beck from morning to night. I change his diapers six times a day, and all I hear about is the one afternoon that he so disturbed me, even frightened me, that I couldn’t bear to come near him. I wasn’t exactly trying to punish him. But in that bathroom, he seemed so, ah—” I discarded three or four adjectives as too inflammatory, then finally gave up. “Changing him was too intimate.”
“Listen to yourself. Because I have no idea what kid you’re talking about. We have a happy, healthy boy. And I’m beginning to think he’s unusually bright.” (I stopped myself from interjecting,
That’s what I’m afraid of
.) “If he sometimes keeps to himself, that’s because he’s thoughtful, reflective. Otherwise, he plays with me, he hugs me good night, I read him stories. When it’s just me and him, he tells me everything—”
“Meaning, he tells you what?”
You raised your palms. “What he’s been drawing, what they had for snack—”
“And you think that’s
telling you everything
.”
“Are you out of your mind? He’s five years old, Eva, what else is there to tell?”
“For starters? What happened last year, in that after-preschool play group. One after another, every mother took her kids out. Oh, there was always some excuse—Jordan keeps catching colds, Tiffany is uncomfortable being the youngest. Until it’s down to just me and Lorna’s kids, and she mumbles something about it not being much of a group anymore and calls it quits. A few weeks later I stop by Lorna’s unannounced to drop off a Christmas present? All the old play group is reassembled in her living room. She was embarrassed and we didn’t address it, but since Kevin
tells you everything
why not get him to explain what might drive all those mothers to sneak off and reconvene in secret, all to exclude our ‘happy, healthy’ son.”
“I wouldn’t ask him because that’s an ugly story that would hurt his feelings. And I don’t see the mystery—gossip and cliquishness and smalltown fallings out. Typical of stay-at-home mothers with time on their hands.”
“I’m one of those s
tay-at-home
mothers, at considerable sacrifice I’d remind you, and the last thing we have is time on our hands.”
“So he was blackballed! Why doesn’t that make you angry at them? Why assume it was something our son did, and not some neurotic hen with a bug up her ass?”
“Because I’m all too well aware that Kevin doesn’t
tell me everything
. Oh, and you could also ask him why not one baby-sitter will come back a second night.”
“I don’t need to. Most teenagers around here get an allowance of $100 a week.
Only
12 bucks an hour isn’t very tempting.”
“Then at least you could get your sweet, confiding little boy to tell you
just exactly what he said to Violetta.
”
 
It’s not as if we fought all the time. To the contrary, though, it’s the fights I remember; funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade. I’m not one of those sorts, either, who thrives on turmoil—more’s the pity, as it turns out. Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere crust on her limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers. That said, I feared what lay beneath. I feared that at bottom I hated my life and hated being a mother and even in moments hated being your wife, since you had done this to me, turned my days into an unending stream of shit and piss and cookies that Kevin didn’t even like.
Meanwhile, no amount of shouting was resolving the diaper crisis. In a rare inversion of our roles, you were apt to regard the problem as all very internally complicated, and I thought it was simple: We wanted him to use the toilet, so he wouldn’t. Since we weren’t about to stop wanting him to use the toilet, I was at a loss.
You doubtless found my usage of the word
war
preposterous. But in corralling Kevin to the changing table—now small for the purpose; his legs dangled over its raised flap—I was often reminded of those scrappy guerrilla conflicts in which underequipped, ragtag rebel forces manage to inflict surprisingly serious losses on powerful armies of state. Lacking the vast if unwieldy arsenal of the establishment, the rebels fall back on cunning. Their attacks, while often slight, are frequent, and sustained aggravation can be more demoralizing over time than a few high-casualty spectaculars. At such an ordnance disadvantage, guerrillas use whatever lies at hand, sometimes finding in the material of the everyday a devastating dual purpose. I gather that you can make bombs, for example, out of methanating manure. For his part, Kevin, too, ran a seat-of-the-pants operation, and Kevin, too, had learned to form a weapon from shit.
Oh, he submitted to being changed placidly enough. He seemed to bask in the ritual and may have inferred from my growing briskness a gratifying embarrassment, for swabbing his tight little testicles when he was nearly six was beginning to feel risqué.
If Kevin enjoyed our trysts, I did not. I have never been persuaded that even an infant’s effluents smell precisely “sweet”; a kindergartner’s feces benefit from no such reputation. Kevin’s had grown firmer and stickier, and the nursery now exuded the sour fug of subway tunnels colonized by the homeless. I felt sheepish about the mounds of nonbiodegradable Pampers we contributed to the local landfill. Worst of all, some days Kevin seemed deliberately to hold his intestines in check for a second strike. If no Leonardo of the crayon world, he had a virtuoso’s command of his sphincter.
Mind, I’m setting the table here, but hardly excusing what happened that July. I don’t expect you to be anything but horrified. I’m not even asking your forgiveness; it’s late for that. But I badly need your understanding.
Kevin graduated from kindergarten in June, and we were stuck with one another all summer. (Listen, I got on Kevin’s nerves as much as he got on mine.) Despite Miss Fabricant’s modest successes with Drano illustrations, the Montessori method was not working wonders in our home. Kevin had still not learned to play. Left to entertain himself, he would sit like a lump on the floor with a moody detachment that turned the atmosphere of the whole house oppressive. So I tried to involve him in projects, assembling yarn and buttons and glue and scraps of colorful fabric in the playroom for making sock puppets. I’d join him on the carpet and have a cracking good time myself, really, except in the end I would have made a nibbling rabbit with a red felt mouth and big floppy blue ears and drinking-straw whiskers, and Kevin’s arm would sport a plain knee-high dipped in paste. I didn’t expect our child to necessarily be a crafts wunderkind, but he could at least have made an effort.
I also tried to give him a jump on first grade by tutoring him on the basics. “Let’s work on our numbers!” I’d propose.
“What for.”
“So when you get to school you’ll be better than anyone else at arithmetic.”

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