“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.”