We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  That's all it took, my turning d o w n a glass of wine, w h i c h you interpreted as hostde. In defiance of our set roles—I was the famdy booze h o u n d — y o u grabbed yourself a beer.

  "It didn't seem advisable," you began after a vengeful swig, "to apologize to that Pagorski w o m a n after the hearing. That could help the defense if this ends up in court."

  "It won't end up in court," I said. "We won't press charges."

  "Well, I'd prefer not to put Kevin through that myself. B u t if the school board allows that perv to keep teaching—"

  "This cannot continue."

  Even I was not quite sure what I meant, though I felt it forcefully. You waited for me to elucidate.

  "It's gone too far," I said.

  "What's gone too far, Eva? C u t to the chase."

  I hcked my lips. "It used to have mostly to do with us. My wall of maps. T h e n later, it was little things—eczema. B u t it's bigger now:—Celia's eye; a teacher's career. I can't keep looking the other way. N o t even for you."

  "If that lady's career is on the hne, she has only herself to blame."

  "I think we should consider sending h i m to boarding school.

  Somewhere strict, old-fashioned. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe even a military academy."

  " W h o a ! O u r son has been sexually abused, and your answer is to banish him to b o o t camp? Jesus, if some creep were interfering with Celia you'd be d o w n at the police station right now, filling out forms! You'd be on the p h o n e to the New York Times and ten victim-support groups, and never mind a school in Annapolis—you'd never let her leave your lap!"

  "That's because if Celia said someone had messed with her, the situation would be far more grave than she let on. Celia is more likely to let some dirty old geez finger her for years because she doesn't want to get the nice man in trouble."

  "I k n o w what's behind this: typical double standard. A girl gets pawed at and it's o o h terrible put the sicko away. B u t a w o m a n paws all over a boy and it's gosh, lucky kid, gets his first taste, bet he really enjoyed it! Well, just because a boy responds—from physical reflex—doesn't mean it can't be a degrading, humiliating violation!"

  "Professionally," I said, pressing an index fmger patiently to my forehead, "I may have been fortunate, but I've never thought of myself as all that bright. Kevin came by his intelligence from somewhere. So you must have at least considered the possibility that this whole thing was a sadistic frame-job."

  "Just because Lenny Pugh's horning in on the show was b o g u s — "

  "Lenny didn't 'horn in,' he just didn't learn his lines. He's lazy,

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  and a lousy drama student, apparendy. B u t Kevin clearly p u t the other boys up to it."

  "Balls—!"

  " H e didn't have to call her 'ugly.'" I shuddered, remembering.

  " T h a t was twisting the knife."

  " S o m e nympho seduces our o w n son, and the only person you care a b o u t — "

  " H e made one mistake, did you notice? He said she locked the door. T h e n he claimed he 'ran out' after she had her way with him. Those doors don't even lock, you know, from the inside. I checked."

  "Big deal she didn't literally lock it! He obviously felt trapped.

  M o r e to the point, why in God's name would Kevin make that story up?"

  "I can't say." I shrugged. "But this certainly fits."

  " W i t h what?"

  " W i t h a wicked and dangerous httle boy."

  You looked at me clinically. " N o w , what I can't figure is whether you're trying to hurt me, or hurt him, or if this is some confused self-torture."

  "This evening's witch trial was excruciating enough. We can knock out self-torture."

  "Witches are mythical. Pedophdes are real as sin. O n e look at that loon and you could tell she was unstable."

  "She's a type," I said. "She wants t h e m to hke her. She courts their favor by breaking the rules, by choosing racy plays and saying fuck in class. She may even like the idea of their ogling her a bit, but not at this price. And there's n o t h i n g illegal about being pathetic."

  " H e didn't say she spread her legs and begged like Lenny Pugh, did he? N o , she got a little carried away and crossed a line.

  He even kept his pants on. I could see it happening. That's what convinced me. He wouldn't make that part up about through his jeans!'

  "Interesting," I said. "That's exacdy h o w I knew he was lying."

  "Lost me."

  " T h r o u g h his jeans. It was calculated authenticity. T h e believability was crafted."

  "Lets get this straight.You don't believe his story because it's too believable."

  "That's right," I agreed evenly. " H e may be scheming and mahcious, but his English teacher is right. He's sharp as a tack."

  " D i d he seem as if he wanted to testify?"

  " O f course not. He's a genius."

  T h e n it happened.When you collapsed into the chair opposite, you did not come to a dead halt only because I had made up my m i n d and you could no more dislodge my conviction that Kevin was a Machiavellian miscreant than I could dislodge yours that he was a misunderstood choirboy. It was worse than that. Bigger.

  Your face sagged much as a short time later I would see your father's droop as he emerged from his basement stairwell—as if all your features had been artificially held up by tacks that had suddenly fallen out. Why, at that m o m e n t you and your father would have appeared nearly the same age.

  Franklin, I'd never appreciated h o w m u c h energy you expended to maintain the fiction that we were a broadly happy family whose trifling, transient problems just made life m o r e interesting. Maybe every family has one m e m b e r whose appointed j o b is to fabricate this attractive packaging. In any event, you had abruptly resigned. In one f o r m or another, we had visited this conversation countless times, with the habitual loyalty that sends other couples to the same holiday h o m e every summer. But at some point such couples must look about their painfully familiar cottage and admit to each other, Next year we'll have to try somewhere else.

  You pressed your fingers into your eye sockets."I thought we could make it until the kids were out of the house." Your voice was gray. "I even thought that if we made it that far, maybe.. .But that's ten years from now, and it's too many days. I can take the years, Eva. But not the days."

  I had never so fully and consciously wished that I had never borne our son. In that instant I might even have forgone Ceha, whose absence a childless woman in her fifties would not have known well enough to rue. From a young age there was only one thing I had always wanted, along with getting out of Racine, Wisconsin. And that was a good man w h o loved me and would stay true. Anything else was ancillary, a bonus, like frequent-flier miles. I could have lived without children. I couldn't live without you.

  But I would have to. I had created my own Other Woman w h o happened to be a boy. I'd seen this in-house cuckolding in other families, and it's odd that I'd failed to spot it in ours. Brian and Louise had spht ten years before (all that wholesomeness had been a httle meat-and-potatoes for him, too; at a party for his fifteenth wedding anniversary, a jar of pickled walnuts smashed on the floor, and he got caught fucking his mistress in the walkin pantry), and of course Brian was far more upset about separation from those two blond moppets than about leaving Louise.

  There shouldn't be any problem loving both, but for some reason certain men choose; hke good mutual-fund managers minimizing risk while maximizing portfolio yield, they take everything they once invested in their wives and sink it into children instead.

  What is it? Do they seem safer, because they need you? Because you can never become their ex-father, as I might become your ex-wife? You never quite trusted me, Franklin. I took too many airplanes in the formative years, and it never entirely registered that I always bought a round-trip.

  "What do you want to do?" I asked. I felt light-headed.

  "Last o
ut the school year, if we can. Make arrangements over the summer.

  "At least custody is a no-brainer, isn't it?" you added sourly.

  "And doesn't that say it all."

  At the time, of course, we had no way of knowing that you would keep Ceha, too.

  "Is it—?" I didn't want to sound pitiful. "You've decided."

  "There's nothing left to decide, Eva," you said limply "It's already happened."

  Had I imagined this scene—and I had not, for to picture such things is to invite them—I'd have expected to stay up until dawn draining a bottle, agonizing over what went wrong. But I sensed that if anything we would turn in early. Like toasters and sub-compacts, one only tinkers with the mechanics of a marriage in the interests of getting it up and running again; there's not much point in poking around to see where the wires have disconnected prior to throwing the contraption away. What's more, though I'd have expected to cry, I found myself all dried up; with the house overheated, my nostrils were tight and smarting, my lips cracked.

  You were right, it had already happened, and I may have been in mourning for our marriage for a decade. N o w I understood how the mates of long senile spouses felt when, after dogged, debilitating visits to a nursing home, what is functionally dead succumbs to death in fact. A culminatory shudder of grief; a thrill of guilty relief. For the first time since I could remember, I relaxed. My shoulders dropped a good two inches. I sat into my chair. I sat. I may have never sat so completely. All I was doing was sitting.

  Thus it took a supreme effort to hft my eyes and turn my head w h e n a flicker of motion in the mouth of the hallway distracted from the perfect stasis of our still life. Kevin took a deliberate step into the light. O n e glance confirmed that he'd been eavesdropping. He looked different.Those sordid afternoons with the bathroom door open notwithstanding, this was the first time in years I had seen him naked. Oh, he was still wearing the normal-sized clothes from the hearing. But he'd lost the sideways skew; he stood up straight. The sarcastic wrench of his mouth dropped; his features were at rest. I thought, he really is "striking,"

  as his drama teacher purportedly remarked. He looked older.

  But what most amazed me were his eyes. Ordinarily, they glazed with the glaucous film of unwashed apples—flat and unfocused, bored and belligerent, they shut me out. Sure, they glittered with

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  occasional mischief, like the closed metal doors of a smelting furnace around which a little red rim would sometimes smolder, from which stray flames would lick. But as he stepped into the kitchen, the furnace doors swung wide to bare the jets.

  "I need a drink of water," he announced, somehow managing to hiss without pronouncing any S s, and strode to the sink.

  "Kev," you said. "Don't take anything you might have overheard to heart. It's easy to misunderstand w h e n you hear something out of context."

  " W h y would I not know the context?" He took a single swallow from his glass. "I am the context." He put the glass on the counter, and left.

  I'm certain of it: That moment, that hard swallow, is w h e n he decided.

  A week later, we received another letter from the school board.

  Already relieved of her classes w h e n the accusations were first made, Vicki Pagorski would be permanently removed to administrative duties and never allowed direct supervision of students again. Yet in the absence of any evidence beyond the boys' word against hers, she was not to be discharged. We both found the decision cowardly, though for different reasons. It seemed to me that she was either guilty or she was not, and there was no justification for taking an innocent from an occupation that she clearly adored. You were outraged that she was not to be fired and that none of the other parents planned to sue.

  After slumping around the house as pointedly as one can go about an exercise that is essentially rounded, Kevin confided in you that he had grown depressed. You said you could see why.

  Stunned by the injustice of the school board's slap on the wrist, Kevin felt humiliated, so of course he was depressed. Equally you fretted that he had intuited an impending divorce that we both wanted to put off making official until we had to.

  He wanted to go on Prozac. From my random sampling, a good half of his student body was on one antidepressant or another, though he did request Prozac in particular. I've always been leery of legal restoratives, and I did w o r r y about the drug's reputation for flattening; the vision of our son even more dulled to the world boggled the mind. But so rarely out of the States those days, I, too, had acculturated myself to the notion that in a country with more money, greater freedom, bigger houses, better schools, finer health care, and more unfettered opportunity than anywhere else on earth, of course an abundance of its population would be out of their minds with sorrow. So I went along with it, and the psychiatrist we sought seemed as happy to hand out fistfuls of pharmaceuticals as our dentist to issue free lollipops.

  Most children are mortified by the prospect of their parents'

  divorce, and I don't deny that the conversation he overheard from the hallway sent Kevin into a tailspin. Nevertheless, I was disconcerted. That boy had been trying to split us up for fifteen years. W h y wasn't he satisfied? A n d if I really was such a horror, w h y wouldn't he gladly jettison his awful mother? In retrospect, I can only assume that it was bad enough living with a w o m a n w h o was cold, suspicious, resentful, accusatory, and aloof. Only one eventuality must have seemed worse, and that was living with you, Franklin. Getting stuck with Dad.

  Getting stuck with Dad the Dupe.

  4

  M A R C H 2 5 , 2 0 0 1

  Dear Franklin,

  I have a confession to make. For all my ragging on you in these days, I've b e c o m e shamefully dependent on television. In fact, as long as I'm baring all: O n e evening last m o n t h in the middle of Frasier, the tube winked out cold, and I ' m afraid that I rather fell apart—banging the set, plugging and unplugging, wiggling knobs. I ' m long past weeping over Thursday on a dady basis, but I go into a frenzy w h e n I can't find out h o w Ndes takes the news that Daphne's going to marry Donnie.

  Anyway, tonight after the usual chicken breast (a bit overcooked), I was flicking through the channels w h e n the screen suddenly filled with our son's face.You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I ' m not. A n d this wasn't the ninth-grade school p h o t o all the papers ran—out of date, black-and-white, with its acid g r i n — b u t Kevin's more robust visage at seventeen. I recognized the interviewer's voice. It was Jack Marlin's documentary.

  Marlin had ditched the dry thriller tide "Extracurricular Activities" for the punchier "Bad Boy," reminding me of you; I'll finish off that bad boy in a couple of hours, you'd say, about an easy scouting job. You applied the expression to just about everything save our son.

  To w h o m Jack Marlin applied it readdy enough. Kevin, you see, was the star. Marlin must have gotten Claverack's consent, for interspersed with shots of the tearful aftermath—the piles of

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  flowers outside the gym, the memorial service, Never Again town meetings—was an exclusive interview with KK himself. Rattled, I almost switched it off. But after a minute or two, I was riveted.

  In fact, Kevin's manner was so arresting that at first I could barely attend to what he said. He was interviewed in his dormitory cubicle—hke his room, kept in rigid order and unadorned with posters or knickknacks. Tipping his chair on two legs, hooking an elbow around its back, he looked thoroughly in his element. If anything, he seemed larger, full of himself, bursting from his tiny sweats, and I had never seen him so animated and at his ease. He basked under the camera's eye as if under a sunlamp.

  Marlin was off-screen, and his questions were deferential, almost tender, as if he didn't want to scare Kevin away. W h e n I tuned in, Marlin was asking delicately whether Kevin still maintained that he was one of the tiny percentage of Prozac patients w h o had a radical and antipathetic reaction to the drug.

  Kevin had learne
d the importance of sticking by your story by the time he was six. "Well, I definitely started feeling a little weird."

  "But according to both the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, a causal linkage between Prozac and homicidal psychosis is purely speculative. Do you think m o r e research—?"

  "Hey," Kevin raised a palm, " I ' m no doctor.That defense was my lawyer's idea, and he was doing his job. I said I felt a little weird. But I'm not looking for an excuse here. I don't blame some satanic cult or pissy girlfriend or big bad bully w h o called me a fag. O n e of the things I can't stand about this country is lack of accountability. Everything Americans do that doesn't w o r k out too great has to be somebody else's fault. Me, I stand by w h a t I done. It wasn't anybody's idea but mine."

  " W h a t about that sexual abuse case? Might that have left you feeling bruised?"

  "Sure I was interfered with. But hell," Kevin added with a confidential leer, "that was nothing compared to what happens here." (They cut to an interview with Vicki Pagorski, whose

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  denials were apoplectic with me-thinks-thou-dost-protest-too-m u c h excess. Of course, too feeble an indignation would have seemed equally incriminating, so she couldn't win. A n d she really ought to do something about that hair.)

  " C a n we talk a little about your parents, Kevin?" Marlin resumed.

  Hands behind head. "Shoot."

  "Your father—did you get along, or did you fight?"

  "Mister Plastic?" Kevin snorted. "I should be so lucky we'd have a fight. N o , it was all cheery chirpy, hot dogs and Cheez Whiz. A total fraud, you know? All like, Let's go to the Natural History Museum, Kev, they have some really neat-o rocks! He was into some Litde League fantasy, stuck in the 1950s. I'd get this, /