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 (63 page)

BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
9.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Laura Woolford and Dana Rocco were killed by the trauma of the arrows themselves. Ziggy, Mouse, Denny, Greer, Jeff, Miguel, and the cafeteria worker all bled to death, trickle by drop.
 
(April 6, 2001—Continued)
When I wheeled out of the car, the lot was already jammed with ambulances and police cars. A bunting of yellow tape marked its perimeter. It was just getting dark, and careworn paramedics were lit in ghoulish admixtures of red and blue. Stretcher after stretcher paraded into the lot—I was aghast; there seemed no end to them. Yet even amid pandemonium, a familiar face will flash brighter than emergency vehicles, and my eyes seized on Kevin in a matter of seconds. It was a classic double take. Although I may have had my problems with our son, I was still relieved that he was alive. But I was denied the luxury of wallowing in my healthy maternal instincts. At a glance, it was obvious that he was not marching but
being marched
down the path from the gym by a brace of policemen, and the only reason he could possibly be holding his hands behind his back rather than swinging them in his conventionally insolent saunter is that he hadn’t any choice.
I felt dizzy. For a moment, the lights of the parking lot scattered into meaningless splotches, like the patterns behind the lids when you rub your eyes.
“Ma’am, I’m afraid you’ll have to clear the area—.” It was one of the officers who appeared at our door after the overpass incident, the heavier, more cynical of the pair. They must meet a plethora of wide-eyed parents whose darling little reprobates issued “from a good family,” because he didn’t seem to recognize my face.
“You don’t understand,” I said, adding the most difficult claim of fealty I’d ever made, “
That’s my son
.”
His face hardened. This was an expression I would get used to; that, and the melting you-poor-dear-I-don’t-know-what-to-say one, which was worse. But I was not inured to it yet, and when I asked him what had happened, I could already tell from the flinty look in his eye that whatever I was now indirectly responsible for, it was bad.
“We’ve had some casualties, ma’am,” was all he was inclined to explain. “Best you came down to the station. Just take 59 to 303, and exit at Orangeberg Road. Entrance on Town Hall Road. That’s
assuming
you’ve never been there before.”
“Can I—talk to him?”
“You’ll have to see that officer there, ma’am. With the cap?” He hastened away.
Making my way toward the police car into whose back seat I’d seen a policeman shove our son with a hand on the top of his head, I was forced to run a gamut, explaining with increasing fatigue who I was to a sequence of officers. I finally understood the New Testament story about St. Peter, and why he might have been driven to thrice deny association with some social pariah who’d been set upon by a lynch mob. Repudiation may have been even more tempting for me than for Peter, since, whatever he might have styled himself, that boy was no messiah.
I finally battled to the Orangetown black-and-white, whose enveloping inscription on the side, “In partnership with the community,” no longer seemed to include me. Staring at the back window, I couldn’t see through the glass for the blinking reflections. So I cupped my hand over the window. He wasn’t crying or hanging his head. He turned to the window. He had no trouble looking me in the eye.
I had thought to scream,
What have you done?
But the hackneyed exclamation would have been self-servingly rhetorical, a flouting of parental disavowal. I would know the details soon enough. And I could not imagine a conversation that would be anything but ridiculous.
So we stared at each other in silence. Kevin’s expression was placid. It still displayed remnants of resolution, but determination was already sliding to the quiet, self-satisfied complacency of a job well done. His eyes were strangely clear—unperturbed, almost peaceful—and I recognized their pellucidity from that morning, though breakfast already seemed ten years past. This was the stranger-son, the boy who dropped his corny, shuffling disguise of
I mean
and
I guess
for the plumb carriage and lucidity of a man with a mission.
He was pleased with himself, I could see that. And that’s all I needed to know.
Yet when I picture his face through that back window now, I remember something else as well. He was searching. He was looking for something in my face. He looked for it very carefully and very hard, and then he leaned back a little in his seat. Whatever he’d been searching for, he hadn’t found it, and this, too, seemed to satisfy him in some way. He didn’t smile. But he might as well have.
 
Driving to the Orangetown police station, I’m afraid I got enraged with you, Franklin. It wasn’t fair, but your mobile was still switched off, and you know how one fixates on these small, logistical matters as a distraction. I wasn’t able, yet, to get angry at Kevin, and it seemed safer to vent my frustrations on you, since you hadn’t done anything wrong. Hitting that redial button over and over, I railed aloud at the wheel. “Where
are
you? It’s almost 7:30! Turn on the fucking phone! For God’s sake, of all the nights, why did you have to work late
tonight
? And haven’t you listened to the
news
?” But you didn’t play the radio, in your truck; you preferred CDs of Springsteen, or Charlie Parker.
“Franklin, you son of a bitch!”
I shouted, my tears still the hot, leaking, stingy ones of fury. “How could make me go through this all by myself?”
I drove past Town Hall Road at first, since that slick, rather garish green-and-white building looks like a chain steakhouse or subscription fitness center from the outside. Aside from its clumsily wrought bronze frieze memorializing four Orangetown officers fallen in the line of duty, the foyer, too, was an expanse of white walls and characterless linoleum where you would expect to find directions to the pool. But the reception room itself was horrifyingly intimate, even more claustrophobically tiny than the emergency room at Nyack Hospital.
I was accorded anything but priority status, though the receptionist did inform me coldly through the window that I could accompany my “minor”—a word that seemed inappropriately reductive—while he was booked. Panicked, I pleaded, “Do I have to?” and she said, “Suit yourself.” She directed me to the single black vinyl sofa, to which I was abandoned untended as police officers raced back and forth. I felt both implicated and irrelevant. I didn’t want to be there. In case that sounds like a grievous understatement, I mean that I had the novel experience of not wanting to be anywhere else, either. Flat out, I wished I were dead.
For a short time, on the opposite side of my sticky black vinyl couch sat a boy whom I now know to be Joshua Lukronsky. Even had I been familiar with this student, I doubt I’d have recognized him at that moment. A small boy, he no longer resembled an adolescent, but a child closer to Celia’s age, for he lacked any of the wisecracking swagger for which he was apparently known at school. His shoulders were drawn in, his cropped black hair disheveled. Hands shoved inward in his lap, he kept his wrists bent at the unnaturally severe angle of children in the advanced stages of muscular dystrophy. He sat perfectly still. He never seemed to blink. Awarded a police minder that my own role didn’t merit—I already had that feeling of being infected, contagious, quarantined—he didn’t respond as the uniformed man standing next to him tried to interest him in a glassed-in case of model police vehicles. It was quite a charming collection, all metal, some very old—vans, horse trailers, motorcycles, ’49 Fords from Florida, Philadelphia, L.A. With fatherly tenderness, the officer explained that one car was very rare, from the days that New York City police cars were green-and-white—before NYPD blue. Joshua stared blankly straight ahead. If he knew I was there at all, he did not appear to know who I was, and I was hardly going to introduce myself. I wondered why this boy had not been taken to the hospital like the others. There was no way of telling that none of the blood drenching his clothes belonged to him.
After a few minutes, a large, plump woman flew through the reception room door, swooping down on Joshua and lifting him in a single motion into her arms. “Joshua!” she cried. At first limp in her clasp, gradually those muscular-dystrophy wrists curled around her shoulders. His shirtsleeves left red smears on her ivory raincoat. The small face buried in her ample neck. I was simultaneously moved, and jealous. This was the reunion that I’d been denied.
I love you so much! I’m so, so relieved you’re all right!
Me, I was no longer entirely relieved that our own son was
all right
. From my glance in that car window, it was his very seeming
all right
ness that had begun to torment me.
The trio shuffled through the inside door. The officer behind the reception window ignored me. If at wit’s end, I was probably grateful for my little task with the mobile, which I worried like a rosary; dialing gave me something to do. If only for variety, I switched to trying our home phone for a while, but I kept getting the machine, and I’d hang up in the middle of that stilted recording, hating the sound of my own voice. I’d already left three, four messages, the first controlled, the last weeping—what a tape to come home to. Realizing that we were both running late, Robert had obviously taken Celia to McDonald’s; she loved their hot apple pies. Why didn’t
he
call me? He had my mobile number! Hadn’t
Robert
listened to the news? Oh, I know, McDonald’s broadcasts Muzak, and he wouldn’t necessarily switch on his car radio for such a short trip. But wouldn’t someone mention it while standing on line? How could anyone in Rockland County be talking about anything else?
By the time two officers fetched me into that plain little room to take my statement, I was so distraught that I was less than polite. I probably sounded thick, too; I couldn’t see the purpose of contacting our family’s lawyer when there didn’t appear to be any question that Kevin did it. And this was the first time that anyone had seen fit to give his mother even the sketchiest lowdown on did
what
. The casualty estimates that one officer rattled off matter-of-factly would later prove exaggerated, but back then I’d had no reason to have researched the fact that atrocity figures are almost always inflated when first released. Besides, what is the difference, really, between bearing a son who murders
only
nine people instead of thirteen? And I found their questions obscenely immaterial: how Kevin did in school, what had he been like that morning.
“He was a little testy with my husband! Otherwise, nothing special! What was I supposed to do, my son was rude to his father, so I call the police?”
“Now, calm down Mrs. Kachourian—”
“Khatchadourian!” I insisted. “Can you
please
get my name right?”
Oh, they would.
“Mrs.
Khadourian
, then. Where might your son have gotten that crossbow?”
“It was a Christmas present! Oh, I
told
Franklin it was a mistake, I
told
him. Can I please call my husband again?”
They allowed the call, and after another fruitless redial, I wilted. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be unkind to you, I don’t care about my name, I hate my name. I never want to hear my name again. I’m so sorry—”
“Mrs. Khadarian—” One officer patted my shoulder gingerly. “Maybe we should take a full statement another time.”
“It’s just, I have a daughter, a little girl, Celia, at home, could you—”
“I understand. Now, I’m afraid Kevin’s going to have to stay in custody. Would you like to speak to your son?”
Picturing that smarmy, implacable expression of serenity I met through the police car window, I shuddered, covering my face with my hands. “No. Please, no,” I begged, feeling an awful coward. I must have sounded like Celia, imploring weakly not to be forced to bathe when there was still all that dark, sticky horror lurking in the bathtub trap. “Please don’t make me. Please don’t. I couldn’t face him.”
“Then maybe it would be best for now if you just went on home.”
I stared at him stupidly. I was so ashamed, I honestly believed they were going to keep me in jail.
If only to fill the awkward silence as I just looked at him, he added gently, “Once we get a warrant, we will have to search your house. That’ll probably be tomorrow, but don’t you worry. Our officers are very respectful. We won’t turn the place upside down.”
“You can burn that house for all I care,” I said. “I hate it. I’ve always hated it—”
The two looked at each other:
hysterical
. And they ushered me out the door.
 
Freed—I couldn’t believe it—out in the parking lot, I wandered desolately past my car, failing to recognize it the first time down the row; everything in what was already my old life had grown alien. And I was dumbfounded. How could they just let me go? Even at this early juncture I must have begun to feel a deep need to be brought to book, to be called to account. I had to stop myself from pounding on the station door and importuning reception to please let me spend the night in a cell. Surely I belonged there. I was convinced that the only pallet on which I would be able to lie peacefully that night would be a cheap, lumpy mattress with a scratchy institutional sheet, and the only lullaby that could possibly sing me to sleep would be the grit of cordovans on concrete and the distant clink of keys.
BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
9.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Zola's Pride by Moira Rogers
Mia's Baker's Dozen by Coco Simon
12 Hours In Paradise by Kathryn Berla
Lusitania by Greg King