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.
The sole aspect of the verdict that gave me the slightest satisfaction was being stuck with my own court costs. Although the judge may not have thought much of Mary Woolford’s case, she had clearly taken a personal dislike to me, and plain animosity from key parties (ask Denny Corbitt) can cost you. Throughout the trial I had been aware that I cut an unsympathetic figure. I had disciplined myself never to cry. I’d been loath to use you and Celia for so venal a purpose as ducking liability, and so the fact that my son had not only killed his classmates but my own husband and daughter tended to get lost in the shuffle. Though I know they didn’t mean to undermine my defense, that testimony from your parents about my fatally forthcoming visit to Gloucester was disastrous; we don’t like mothers who “don’t like” their own sons. I don’t much like such mothers, either.
I had broken the most primitive of rules, profaned the most sacred of ties. Had I instead protested Kevin’s innocence in the face of mountains of hard evidence to the contrary, had I railed against his “tormentors” for having driven him to it, had I insisted that after he started taking Prozac “he was a completely different boy”—well, I guarantee you that Mary Woolford and that defense fund she raised through the Internet would have been forced to pay my court costs to the final dime. Instead, my demeanor was repeatedly described in the papers as “defiant,” while my disagreeable characterizations of my own flesh and blood were submitted no-comment, to hang me out to dry. With such an ice queen for a mother, little wonder, observed our local Journal News, that KK turned bad boy.
Harvey was outraged, of course, and immediately whispered that we should appeal. Paying costs was punitive, he said. He should know; he was the one who would write the bill. But me, I was cheered up. I wanted a verdict that was punitive. I had already depleted all our liquid assets for Kevin’s pricey defense and had taken out a second mortgage on Palisades Parade. So I knew immediately that I would have to sell AWAP, and I would have to sell our awful, empty house. Now that was cleansing.
But since then—and throughout writing these letters to you—I have come full circle, making a journey much like Kevin’s own. In asking petulantly whether Thursday was my fault, I have had to go backward, to deconstruct. It is possible that I am asking the wrong question. In any event, by thrashing between exoneration and excoriation, I have only tired myself out. I don’t know. At the end of the day, I have no idea, and that pure, serene ignorance has become, itself, a funny kind of solace. The truth is, if I decided I was innocent, or I decided I was guilty, what difference would it make? If I arrived at the right answer, would you come home?
This is all I know. That on the 11th of April, 1983, unto me a son was born, and I felt nothing. Once again, the truth is always larger than what we make of it. As that infant squirmed on my breast, from which he shrank in such distaste, I spurned him in return—he may have been a fifteenth my size, but it seemed fair at the time. Since that moment we have fought one another with an unrelenting ferocity that I can almost admire. But it must be possible to earn a devotion by testing an antagonism to its very limit, to bring people closer through the very act of pushing them away. Because after three days short of eighteen years, I can finally announce that I am too exhausted and too confused and too lonely to keep fighting, and if only out of desperation or even laziness I love my son. He has five grim years left to serve in an adult penitentiary, and I cannot vouch for what will walk out the other side. But in the meantime, there is a second bedroom in my serviceable apartment. The bedspread is plain. A copy of Robin Hood lies on the bookshelf. And the sheets are clean.
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by Lionel Shriver
Published by Counterpoint,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Counterpoint, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shriver, Lionel.
We need to talk about Kevin / Lionel Shriver.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43887-0
1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. New York (State)—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Massacres—Fiction. I. Title.