You looked stunned. I met your eyes, then just perceptibly shook my head. It was unusual for me to counsel restraint. But the pressure cooker was very popular among my mother’s generation. After an incident now mythic in my family involving madagh scraped off the ceiling with a broom, I’d learned at an early age that when that chittering round whistle is blowing off steam, the worst thing you can do is open the pot.
“Okay,” you said tightly, fitting your lenses back in the case. “You’re on the record.”
As abruptly as he had exploded, Kevin folded right back up, once again the complacent, unimaginative tenth-grader preparing for another humdrum day of school. I could see him shutting out your hurt feelings, one more thing in which, I suppose, he was not interested. For about five minutes no one said anything, and then we gradually resumed the pretense of an ordinary morning, making no mention of Kevin’s outburst the way polite people are meant to pretend they didn’t notice the release of a very loud fart. Still the smell lingered, if less of gas than of cordite.
Although by now in a hurry, I had to say good-bye to Celia twice. I stooped and brushed her hair, picked a last bit of crust from her lower lash, reminded her which books she had to take today, and then gave her a big long hug, but after I’d turned to collect my things, I noticed her still standing there where I’d left her looking stricken, hands held stiffly out from her side as if contaminated with drydirt. So I hoisted her by the armpits into my arms, though she was nearly eight now and supporting her full weight was hard on my back. She wrapped her legs around my waist, buried her head in my neck, and said, “I’ll miss you!” I said I would miss her, too, though I had no idea how much.
Perhaps unnerved by Kevin’s unwarranted harangue and in need of safe harbor, your own kiss good-bye was for once not an absent peck on the cheek, but feverish, open-mouthed. (Thank you, Franklin. I have relived that moment so many times now that the memory cells must be pale and broken down, like the denim of much-loved jeans.) As for my earlier uncertainty over whether children enjoy watching their parents kiss, one look at Kevin’s face settled the matter. They didn’t.
“Kevin, you have that independent study archery for gym today, don’t you?” I reminded him, keen to consolidate our normality while bustling into my spring coat. “Don’t forget to bring your kit.”
“You can count on it.”
“Also, you should make up your mind what you want to do for your birthday,” I said. “It’s only three days away, and sixteen is something of a milestone, don’t you think?”
“In some ways,” he said noncommittally. “Ever notice how milestone turns into millstone by changing only one letter?”
“What about Sunday!”
“I might be tied up.”
I was frustrated that he always made it so difficult to be nice to him, but I had to go. I didn’t kiss Kevin lately—teenagers didn’t like it—so I brushed the back of my hand lightly against his forehead, which I was surprised to find damp and cold. “You’re a little clammy. Do you feel all right?”
“Never better,” said Kevin. I was on my way out the door when he called, “Sure you don’t want to say good-bye to Celie one more time?”
“Very funny,” I said behind me, and closed the door. I thought he was just riding me. In retrospect, he was giving me very sound advice that I really ought to have taken.
I have no idea what it must be like to wake up with such a terrible resolve. Whenever I picture it, I see myself roll over on the pillow muttering, On second thought, I can’t be bothered, or at the very least, Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow. Granted, the horrors we like to term “unthinkable” are altogether thinkable, and countless kids must fantasize about revenge for the thousand natural shocks that tenth-graders are heir to. It’s not the visions or even half-baked plans that set our son apart. It’s the staggering capacity to travel from plan to action.
Having racked my brains, the only analogy I’ve located in my own life is an awful stretch: all those trips to foreign countries that, up against it, I really didn’t want to take. I would ease myself through by breaking a seemingly monumental excursion into its smallest constituent parts. Rather than dare myself to spend two months in thief-riddled Morocco, I would dare myself to pick up the phone. That’s not so hard. And with a minion on its other end, I would have to say something, so I would order a ticket, taking refuge in the mercifully theoretical nature of airline schedules on dates at such marvelous remove that they could never possibly come to pass. Behold, a ticket arrives in the maiclass="underline" Plan becomes action. I would dare myself to purchase histories of North Africa, and I would later dare myself to pack. The challenges, broken down, were surmountable. Until, after daring myself into a taxi and down a jetway, it would be too late to turn back. Big deeds are a lot of little deeds one after the other, and that’s what Kevin must have cottoned onto—ordering his Kryptonites, stealing his stationery, loading those chains into his backpack one by one. Take care of the components, and the sum of their parts unfolds as if by magic.
For my own part that Thursday—still plain old Thursday—I was busy; we were rushing to meet a due date at the printers. But in the odd unoccupied moment, I did reflect on Kevin’s peculiar outburst that morning. The diatribe had been signally absent the likes, I means, sort ofs, and I guesses that commonly peppered his passable imitation of a regulation teenager. Rather than slump at an angle, he had stood upright, speaking from the center of his mouth rather than out one corner. I was certainly distressed that he would hurt his father’s feelings with such abandon, but the young man who made these stark, unmediated declarations seemed a very different boy than the one I lived with every day. I found myself hoping we would meet again, especially at such a time that this stranger-son’s state of mind was more agreeable—an unlikely prospect that to this day I continue to look forward to.
Around 6:15 P.M., there was a commotion outside my office, a conspiratorial huddling by my staff, which I interpreted as a sociable gossip as they knocked off for the day. Just as I was resigning myself to working into the evening on my own, Rose, their elected representative I suppose, knocked tentatively on my door. “Eva,” she said gravely. “Your son’s at Gladstone High School, isn’t he?”
It was already on the Internet.
The details were incomplete: “Fatalities Feared in Gladstone High Shooting.” Who and how many students had been shot was unclear. The culprit was unknown. In fact, the news flash was exasperatingly brief. “Security staff” had come upon “a scene of carnage” in the school gym, to which police were now “trying to gain access.” I know I was flustered, but it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me.