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 (65 page)

BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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Though that defense neither got him off completely nor released him into psychiatric care as intended, Kevin’s sentence may have been slightly more lenient for the doubt his lawyer raised over his chemical stability. After the sentencing hearing at which Kevin got seven years, I thanked his lawyer, John Goddard, outside the courthouse. I didn’t, in fact, feel very grateful at the time—seven years had never seemed so short—but I did appreciate that John had done his best at a disagreeable job. Scrambling for something of substance to admire, I commended his inventive approach to the case. I said I’d never heard of Prozac’s alleged psychotic effect on some patients or I’d never have allowed Kevin to take it.
“Oh, don’t thank me, thank Kevin,” said John easily. “I’d never heard of the psychosis thing, either. That whole approach was his idea.”
“But—he wouldn’t have had access to a library, would he?”
“No, not in pretrial detention.” He looked at me with real sympathy for a moment. “I hardly needed to lift a finger, frankly. He knew all the citations. Even the names and locations of expert witnesses. That’s a bright boy you’ve got, Eva.” But he didn’t sound upbeat. He sounded depressed.
 
As for the second tidbit—regarding how they do things in that faraway land where fifteen-year-olds murder their classmates—I haven’t held it back because I thought you couldn’t take it. I just didn’t want to think about it myself or subject you to it, though until this very afternoon I was living in eternal fear that the episode would repeat itself.
It was perhaps three months after
Thursday
. Kevin had already been tried and sentenced, and I had recently installed those robotic Saturday visits to Chatham in my routine. We had still not learned to talk to one another, and the time dragged. In those days the conceit on his part ran that my visits were an imposition, that he dreaded my arrival and applauded my departure, and that his real family was inside, among his worshipful juvenile boosters. When I informed him that Mary Woolford had just filed suit, I was surprised that he didn’t seem gratified but only the more disgruntled; as Kevin would later object,
why should I get all the credit?
So I said, that’s a fine how do you do, isn’t it, after I lose my husband and daughter? To get sued? He grunted something about my feeling sorry for myself.
“Don’t
you
?” I said. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?”
He shrugged. “Got out of this safe and sound, didn’t you? Not a scratch.”
“Did I?” I added, “And why was that, anyway?”
“When you’re putting on a show, you don’t shoot the audience,” he said smoothly, rolling something in his right hand.
“You mean leaving me alive was the best revenge.” We were already way beyond revenge-for-what.
I couldn’t talk about anything more to do with
Thursday
at that point, and I was about to resort to the old are-they-feeding-you-all-right, when my eye was drawn again by the object he kept palming from hand to hand, palpating it rhythmically with his fingers like a string of worry beads. Honestly, I just wanted to change the subject, I didn’t care at all about his toy—though if I took his fidgeting as a sign of moral discomfort in the presence of a woman whose family he had slaughtered, I was sadly mistaken.
“What is that?” I asked. “What have you got there?”
With a small, crafty smile, he opened his palm, displaying his talisman with the shy pride of a boy with his prize shooting marble. I stood up so quickly that my chair clattered backward onto the floor. It isn’t often that when you look at an object, it looks back.
“Don’t you ever pull that out again,” I said hoarsely. “If you do, I will never come back here. Not ever. Do you hear me?”
I think he knew that I meant it. Which gave him a powerful amulet to ward off these ostensibly pestilential visits from
Mumsey.
The fact that Celia’s glass eye has remained out of my sight since can only mean, I suppose, that, on balance, he’s glad I come.
 
You probably think that I’m just telling more tales, the meaner the better. What a hideous boy we have, I must be saying, to torment his mother with so ghastly a souvenir. No, not this time. It’s just that I had to tell you that story in order that you better understand the next one, from this very afternoon.
You surely noticed the date. It’s the two-year anniversary. Which also means that in three days, Kevin will be eighteen. For the purposes of voting (which as a convicted felon he will be banned from doing in all but two states) and enlisting in the armed services, that’s when he officially becomes a grown-up. But on this one I’m more inclined to side with the judicial system, which tried him as an adult two years ago. To me the day on which we all formally came of age will always be April 8th, 1999.
So I put in a special request to meet with our son this afternoon. Though they routinely turn down appeals to meet with inmates on birthdays, my request was granted. Maybe this is the kind of sentimentality that prison warders appreciate.
When Kevin was issued in, I noticed a change in his demeanor before he said a word. All that snide condescension had fallen away, and I finally appreciated how fatiguing it must be for Kevin to generate this worldweary who-gives-a-fuck the livelong day. Given the epidemic thieving of small-sized sweats and T-shirts, Claverack has given up on its experiment in street clothes, so he was wearing an orange jumpsuit—for once one that wasn’t only normal-sized but too big for him, in which he looked dwarfed. Three days from adulthood, Kevin is finally starting to act like a little boy—confused, bereft. His eyes had shed their glaze and tunneled to the back of his head.
“You don’t look too happy,” I ventured.
“Have I ever?” His tone was wan.
Curious, I asked, “Is something bothering you?” though the rules of our engagement proscribe such a direct and motherly solicitation.
The more extraordinary, he answered me. “I’m almost eighteen, aren’t I?” He rubbed his face. “Outta here. I heard they don’t waste much time.”
“A real prison,” I said.
“I don’t know. This place is sure real enough for me.”
“... Does the move to Sing Sing make you nervous?”
“Nervous?”
he asked incredulously. “
Nervous
! Do you know
anything
about those places?” He shook his head in dismay.
I looked at him in wonder. He was shaking. Over the course of the last two years, he has acquired a maze of tiny battle scars across his face, and his nose is no longer quite straight. The effect doesn’t make him look tougher, but disarranged. The scars have smudged the once sharp, Armenian cut of his features into a doughier blur. He could have been drawn by an uncertain portraitist who constantly resorts to an eraser.
“I’ll still come to visit you,” I promised, bracing myself for sarcastic reproof.
“Thanks. I was hoping you would.”
Incredulous, I’m afraid I stared. As a test, I brought up the news from March. “You always seem to keep up with these things. So I assume you saw the stories out of San Diego last month? You have two more
colleagues
.”
“You mean, Andy, uh—Andy Williams?” Kevin remembered vaguely. “What a sucker. Wanna know the truth, I felt sorry for the chump. He’s been had.”
“I warned you this fad would grow passé,” I said. “Andy Williams didn’t make the headlines, did you notice? Dick Cheney’s heart problems and that huge storm-that-never-happened both got bigger billing in the
New York Times
. And the second shooting, on its heels—with one fatality, in San Diego, too? That got almost no coverage at all.”
“Hell, that guy was
eighteen.
” Kevin shook his head. “I mean, really. Don’t you think he was a little old for it?”
“You know, I saw you on TV.”
“Oh, that.” He squirmed with a tinge of embarrassment. “It was filmed a while ago, you know. I was into a—thing.”
“Yes, I didn’t have a lot of time for the
thing,
” I said. “But you were still—you were very articulate. You present yourself very well. Now all you have to come up with is something to say.”
He chuckled. “You mean that isn’t horseshit.”
“You do know what day it is, don’t you?” I introduced shyly. “Why they let me come see you on a Monday?”
“Oh, sure. It’s my
anniversary.
” He is finally turning that sardonicism on himself.
“I just wanted to ask you—,” I began, and licked my lips. You’re going to think this curious, Franklin, but I had never put this question to him before. I’m not sure why; maybe I didn’t want to be insulted with a lot of rubbish like
jumping into the screen.
“It’s been two years,” I proceeded. “I miss your father, Kevin. I still talk to him. I even write to him, if you can believe it. I write him letters. And now they’re in a big messy stack on my desk, because I don’t know his address. I miss your sister, too—badly. And so many other families are still so sad. I realize that journalists, and therapists, maybe other inmates ask you all the time. But you’ve never told me. So please, look me in the eye. You killed eleven people. My husband. My daughter. Look me in the eye, and tell me why.”
Unlike the day he turned to me through the police car window, pupils glinting, Kevin met my gaze this afternoon with supreme difficulty. His eyes kept shuttering away, making contact in sorties, then flickering back toward the gaily painted cinder-block wall. And at last gave up, staring a little to the side of my face.
“I used to think I knew,” he said glumly. “Now I’m not so sure.”
Without thinking, I extended my hand across the table and clasped his. He didn’t pull away. “Thank you,” I said.
Does my gratitude seem odd? In fact, I’d harbored no preconception of what answer I wanted. I certainly had no interest in an explanation that reduced the ineffable enormity of what he had done to a pat sociological aphorism about “alienation” out of
Time
magazine or a cheap psychological construct like “attachment disorder” that his counselors were always retailing at Claverack. So I was astonished to discover that his answer was word-perfect. For Kevin, progress was deconstruction. He would only begin to plumb his own depths by first finding himself unfathomable.
When he did pull his hand back at last, it was to reach into his coverall pocket. “Listen,” he said. “I made you something. A—well—sort of a present.”
As he withdrew a dark rectangular wooden box about five inches long, I apologized. “I know it’s your birthday coming up. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll bring your present next time.”
“Don’t bother,” he said, polishing the oiled wood with a wad of toilet paper. “It’d just get ripped off in here anyway.”
Carefully, he slid the box across the table, keeping two fingers on the top. It wasn’t quite rectangular after all, but coffin-shaped, with hinges on one side and tiny brass hooks on the other. He must have made it in shop. The morbid shape seemed typical, of course. The gesture, however, moved me, and the workmanship was surprisingly fine. He’d given me a few Christmas presents in the olden days, but I always knew you’d bought them, and he’d never given me anything while inside.
“It’s very nicely made,” I said sincerely. “Is it for jewelry?” I reached for the box, but he kept his fingers on it fast.
“Don’t!” he said sharply. “I mean, please. Whatever you do. Don’t open it.”
Ah. Instinctively, I shrank back. In an earlier incarnation, Kevin might have crafted this very same “present,” lined mockingly with pink satin. But he’d have relinquished it blithely—suppressing a grisly little smile as in innocent expectation I unhooked the clasps. Today it was his warning—
don’t open it—
that may have constituted the greatest measure of my gift.
“I see,” I said. “I thought this was one of your most precious possessions. Why ever would you give it up?” I was flushed, a little shocked, a little horrified really, and my tone was stinging.
“Well, sooner or later some goon was going to swipe it, and it’d get used for some cheap gag—you know, it’d turn up in somebody’s soup. Besides. It was like she was, sort of, looking at me all the time. It started to get spooky.”
“She is looking at you, Kevin. So is your father. Every day.”
Staring at the table, he shoved the box a little farther toward me, then removed his hand. “Anyway, I thought you might take this and, well, maybe you could, you know—”
“Bury it,” I finished for him. I felt heavy. It was an enormous request, for along with his dark-stained homemade coffin I was to bury a great deal else.
Gravely, I agreed. When I hugged him good-bye, he clung to me childishly, as he never had in childhood proper. I’m not quite sure, since he muttered it into the upturned collar of my coat, but I like to think that he choked,
“I’m sorry.”
Taking the risk that I’d heard correctly, I said distinctly myself, “
I’m sorry, too, Kevin
. I’m sorry, too.”
 
I will never forget sitting in that civil courtroom and hearing the judge with tiny pupils announce primly that the court finds for the defendant. I’d have expected to feel so relieved. But I didn’t. Public vindication of my motherhood, I discovered, meant nothing to me. If anything, I was irate. Supposedly we were all to go home now, and I would feel redeemed. To the contrary, I knew I’d go home and feel hideous, as usual, and desolate, as usual, and dirty, as usual. I’d wanted to be cleansed, but my experience on that bench was much like a typically sweaty, gritty afternoon in a Ghana hotel room: turning on the shower to find that the water main was turned off. This disdainful rusty drip was the only baptism the law would afford me.
BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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