We Need to Talk About Kevin (43 page)

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)

BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
5.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
But me, I’m superficial. Even once the shine was off travel, I could probably have sampled those same old foreign foods and that same old foreign weather for the rest of my life, just so long as I flew into your arms at Kennedy when I came home. I didn’t want much else. It is Kevin who has posed my Big Question. Before he came along, I’d been much too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvelous marriage to bother about what it all amounted to. Only once I was stuck with a bored child in an ugly house for days on end did I ask myself what was the point.
And since
Thursday
? He took away my easy answer, my cheating, slipshod shorthand for what life is for.
 
We last left Kevin at the age of fourteen, and I’m getting anxious. I may have dwelt so on his early years to stave off rehashing the more recent incidents that set you and me so agonizingly against one another. Doubtless we both dread wading back through events whose only redeeming feature is that they are over. But they are not over. Not for me.
During the first semester of Kevin’s ninth-grade year in 1997, there were two more School Shootings: in Pearl, Mississippi, and Paducah, Kentucky, both small towns I had never heard of, both now permanently marked in the American vocabulary as synonyms for adolescent rampage. The fact that Luke Woodham in Pearl not only shot ten kids, three fatally, but killed his mother—stabbing her seven times and crushing her jaw with an aluminum baseball bat—may have given me an extra private pause. (Indeed, I remarked when the reports first started pouring in, “Look, all they do is go on and on about how he shot those kids. And then, oh, by the way, he also murdered his mom.
By the way?
It’s obvious that the whole thing had to do with his mother.” This, in due course, was an observation that would qualify in legal terms as
admission against interest
.) Still, I’m not so pretentious as to impute to myself during that period a sense of deep personal foreboding, as if I perceived these repeated tragedies on the news as an inexorable countdown to our own family’s misfortune. Not at all. Like all news, I regarded it as having nothing to do with me. Yet like it or not, I had morphed from maverick globetrotter to one more white, well-off suburban mother, and I couldn’t help but be unnerved by deadly flights of lunacy from fledglings of my own kind. Gangland killings in Detroit or L.A. happened on another planet; Pearl and Paducah happened on mine.
I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn’t submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-singleparent distraction—who couldn’t serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did—without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys’ marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father’s deer rifle: “Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?” And I thought,
Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat!
Michael Carneal in Paducah was a similar type—overweight, teased, wallowing in his tiny suffering like trying to take a bath in a puddle. But he’d never been a discipline problem in the past; the worst he’d ever been caught at theretofore was watching the Playboy video channel. Carneal distinguished himself by opening fire on, of all things, a prayer group. He managed to kill three students and wound five, but judging from the cheek-turning memorial services and merciful banners in classroom windows—one of which embraced photos not only of his victims but of Carneal himself with a heart—the born-again got theirs back by forgiving him to death.
The October night that news of Pearl came in, I exploded as you and I watched the
Jim Lehrer Newshour.
“Jesus, some kid calls him a
fag
or pushes him in the hallway, and suddenly it’s
ooh, ooh, I’m gonna shoot up the school, I’m gonna crack from all this terrible pressure!
Since when did they make American kids so soft?”
“Yeah, you gotta ask yourself,” you agreed, “whatever happened to heading out to the playground to duke it out?”
“Might get their hands dirty.” I appealed to our son as he glided through on the way to the kitchen; he’d been eavesdropping, which as a rule he preferred to participating in family conversations. “Kevin, don’t boys at your school ever settle their differences with an old-fashioned fistfight?”
Kevin stopped to regard me; he always had to weigh up whether anything I asked him was worthy of reply. “Choice of weapons,” he said at last, “is half the fight.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Woodham’s weak, flabby, unpopular. Fistfight’s low percentage. A doughboy’s got way better odds with a 30 millimeter. Smart call.”
“Not that smart,” I said hotly. “He’s sixteen. That’s the cutoff in most states for being tried as an adult. They’ll throw away the key.” (Indeed, Luke Woodham would be given three life sentences, and 140 extra years for good measure.)
“So?” said Kevin with a distant smile. “Guy’s life is already over. Had more fun while it lasted than most of us ever will. Good for him.”
“Cool it, Eva,” you intervened as I sputtered. “Your son’s pulling your leg.”
 
For most of his life, Kevin’s troubles, too, remained on a minor scale. He was bright but hated school; he had few friends, and the one we knew was smarmy; there were all those ambiguous incidents, from Violetta to let-uscall-her-Alice, that set off alarm bells at a volume only I seemed able to hear. Yet character expresses itself with remarkable uniformity, be it on a battlefield or in the supermarket. To me, everything about Kevin was of a piece. Lest my theories about his existential disposition seem too highfalutin, let’s reduce the unifying glue to one word:
spite
. Consequently, when two Orangetown policemen showed up at our door on that night in December 1997 with Kevin and the unsavory Leonard Pugh in tow, you were shocked, while I regarded this constabulary visit as overdue.
“What can I do for you, officers?” I overheard.
“Mr. Khadourian?”
“Plaskett,” you corrected, not for the first time. “But I am Kevin’s father.”
Having been helping Celia with her homework, I crept up to hover behind you in the foyer, buzzing from voyeuristic excitement.
“We had a motorist phone in a complaint, and I’m afraid we found your son and his friend here, on that pedestrian overpass over 9W? We had to run these two down, but it seemed pretty obvious that they were the kids throwing detritus onto the roadway.”
“ Onto the cars?” you asked, “ or just empty lanes?”
“Wouldn’t be much sport in
empty lanes
,” snarled the second officer.
“It was mostly water babies, Dad!” said Kevin behind the police. I know his voice was changing, but whenever he spoke to you, Franklin, it skipped up an octave.
“Wasn’t water balloons this motorist called in about,” said the second, chunkier cop, who sounded the more worked up. “It was
rocks.
And we checked the highway on either side of the overpass—littered with chunks of brick.”
I nudged in urgently. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Thankfully, there were no direct hits,” said the first officer. “Which makes these boys real, real lucky.”
“I don’t know about lucky,” Lenny sniveled, “when you get nabbed by the cops.”
“Gotta have luck to push it, kid,” said the policeman with the hotter head. “Ron, I still say we should—”
“Look, Mr. Plastic,” the first cop overrode. “We’ve run your son through the computer, and his record’s clean. Far as I can tell, he comes from a good family.” (
Good
, of course, meaning rich.) “So we’re going to let this young man off with a warning. But we take this sort of thing real serious—”
“Hell,” the second cop interrupted, “a few years back, some creep tossed a quarter in front of a woman doing seventy-five? Shattered the windscreen and drove right into her head!”
Ron shot his partner a glance that would get them the more quickly to Dunkin’ Donuts. “Hope you give this young man a good talking to.”
“And how,” I said.
“I expect he’d no idea what kind of risk he was taking,” you said.
“Yeah,” said Cop No. 2 sourly. “That’s the whole attraction of throwing bricks from an overpass. It seems so harmless.”
“I appreciate your leniency, sir,” Kevin recited to the primary. “I’ve sure learned my lesson, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”
Policemen must get this
sir
stuff a lot; they didn’t look bowled over. “The
leniency
won’t happen again, friend,” said the second cop, “that is for damned sure.”
Kevin turned to the hothead, meeting the man’s eyes with a glitter in his own; they seemed to share an understanding. Though picked up by the police for (as far as I knew) the first time in his life, he was unruffled. “And I appreciate the lift home. I’ve always wanted to ride in a police car—
sir
.”
“Pleasure’s all mine,” the cop replied jauntily, as if smacking gum. “But my money says that’s not your last spin in a black-and-white—
friend
.”
After a bit more fawning gratitude from both of us, they were on their way, and as they left the porch, I heard Lenny whining, “We almost outran you guys you know, ’cause you guys are like, totally out of shape . . . !”
You had seemed so sedate and courteous through this exchange that when you wheeled from the door I was surprised to observe that your face was livid and lit with rage. You grabbed our son by the upper arm and shouted, “You could have caused a pileup, a fucking catastrophe!”
Flushed with a morbid satisfaction, I stepped back to leave you to it.
Cursing
, no less! Granted, had one of those bricks indeed smashed someone’s windshield I’d readily have forgone this petty jubilation for the full-blown anguish at which I would later get so much practice. But spared calamity, I was free to muse with the singsong of the playground,
You’re gonna get in trou-ble
. Because I’d been so exasperated! The unending string of misadventures that trailed in Kevin’s wake never seemed, as far as you were concerned, to have anything to do with him. Finally, a tattletale besides me—the police, whom Mr. Reagan Republican had no choice but to trust—had caught our persecuted innocent red-handed, and I was going to enjoy this. Moreover, I was glad for you too to experience the bizarre helplessness of being this supposedly omnipotent parent and being completely flummoxed by how to impose a punishment that has the slightest deterrent effect. I wanted you to apprehend for yourself the lameness of sending a fourteen-year-old for a “time-out,” the hackneyed predictability of “grounding” when, besides, there was never anywhere that he wanted to go, and the horror of realizing that, if he did launch out to his archery range in defiance of your prohibition on practicing the sole activity that he seemed to enjoy, you would have to decide whether to physically tackle him to the lawn. Welcome to my life, Franklin, I thought.
Have fun
.
Celia wasn’t used to seeing you manhandle her brother, and she’d started to wail. I hustled her from the foyer back to her homework at the dining table, soothing that the policemen were our friends and just wanted to make sure we were safe, while you rustled our stoic son down the hall to his room.
In such an excitable state, I had difficulty concentrating as I coaxed Celia back to her primer about farm animals. The yelling subsided surprisingly soon; you sure didn’t burn out that fast when you were mad at me. Presumably you’d switched to the somber disappointment that for many children is more devastating than a lost temper, though I’d tried stern gravity ad nauseum with our firstborn, and this was one more impotence I was glad for you to sample. Why, it was all I could do to stop myself from creeping down the hall and listening at the crack of the door.
When you emerged at last, you closed Kevin’s door behind you with ministerial solemnity, and your expression as you entered the dining area was curiously at peace. I reasoned that getting all that shame and disgust out of your system must have been cleansing, and when you motioned me over to the kitchen, I assumed that you were going to explain what kind of punishment you’d levied so that we could exact it as a team. I hoped that you’d come up with some novel, readily enforceable penalty that would get to our son in a place—I’d never found it—where it hurt. I doubted he was now remorseful about the brick-throwing itself, but maybe you had convinced him that outright juvenile delinquency was a tactical error.
“Listen,” you whispered. “The whole caper was Lenny’s idea, and Kevin went along because Lenny was only proposing water babies at first. He thought the balloons would just make a splash—and you know how kids think that kind of thing is funny. I told him even a little balloon exploding might have startled a driver and been dangerous, and he says he realizes that now.”
“What,” I said. “What—about—the bricks.”
“Well—they ran out of water babies. So Kevin says that before he knew it, Lenny had pitched a stone—maybe it was a piece of brick—when a car was coming. Kevin says he immediately told Lenny not to do that, since somebody could get hurt.”

Other books

Lost Melody by Lori Copeland
Pistols at Dawn by Andrea Pickens
Trouble by Fay Weldon
Blood Spirits by Sherwood Smith
Paid Servant by E. R. Braithwaite
Bound by Decency by Claire Ashgrove
An Accidental Hero by Loree Lough