We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

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  released. Besides, what is the difference, really, b e t w e e n bearing a son w h o murders only nine people instead of thirteen? A n d I f o u n d their questions obscenely immaterial: h o w Kevin did in school, w h a t had he been hke that m o r n i n g .

  " H e was a little testy with my husband! Otherwise, nothing special! W h a t was I supposed to do, my son was rude to his father, so I call the pohce?"

  "Now, calm down Mrs. Kachourian—"

  "Khatchadourian!" I insisted. " C a n you please get my name right?"

  O h , they would.

  "Mrs. Khadourian, then. W h e r e might your son have gotten that crossbow?"

  "It was a Christmas present! O h , I told Franklin it was a mistake, I told him. Can I please call my husband again?"

  T h e y allowed the call, and after another fruitless redial, I wilted. " I ' m so sorry," I whispered. " I ' m so sorry, I ' m so sorry. I didn't mean to be unkind to you, I don't care about my name, I hate my name. I never want to hear my name again. I ' m so sorry—"

  "Mrs. Khadarian—" O n e officer patted my shoulder gingerly.

  "Maybe we should take a full statement another time."

  "It's just, I have a daughter, a little girl, Celia, at home, could y o u — "

  "I understand. Now, I ' m afraid Kevin's going to have to stay in custody. Would you like to speak to your son?"

  Picturing that smarmy, implacable expression of serenity I met through the pohce car window, I shuddered, covering my face with my hands. " N o . Please, no," I begged, feeling an awful coward. I must have sounded like Celia, imploring weakly not to be forced to bathe w h e n there was still all that dark, sticky horror lurking in the bathtub trap. "Please don't make me. Please don't.

  I couldn't face him."

  " T h e n maybe it would be best for n o w if you just went on home."

  I stared at h i m stupidly. I was so ashamed, I honestly believed they were going to keep me in jail.

  If only to fill the awkward silence as I just looked at him, he added gently, " O n c e we get a warrant, we will have to search your house. That'll probably be tomorrow, but don't you worry. O u r officers are very respectful. We won't turn the place upside down."

  "You can b u r n that house for all I care," I said. "I hate it. I've always hated i t — "

  T h e two looked at each other: hysterical. A n d they ushered me out the door.

  Freed—I couldn't believe it—out in the parking lot, I wandered desolately past my car, fading to recognize it the first time d o w n the row; everything in what was already my old life had grown alien. A n d I was dumbfounded. H o w could they just let me go?

  Even at this early juncture I must have begun to feel a deep need to be brought to book, to be called to account. I had to stop myself from pounding on the station door and importuning reception to please let me spend the night in a cell. Surely I belonged there. I was convinced that the only pallet on which I would be able to he peacefully that night would be a cheap, lumpy mattress with a scratchy institutional sheet, and the only lullaby that could possibly sing me to sleep would be the grit of cordovans on concrete and the distant clink of keys.

  Yet once I found the car I became strangely calm. Sedate.

  Methodical. Like Kevin. Keys. Lights. Seat belt.Windshield wipers on interval, for there was a thin mist. My mind went blank. I ceased talking to myself. I drove h o m e very slowly, braking on yellow, coming to a legally complete halt at the four-way stop, though there was no other traffic. A n d w h e n I curved up our long drive and noticed that n o n e of the lights were on, I thought nothing of it. I preferred not to.

  I parked. Your truck was in the garage. I moved very slowly.

  I turned off the wipers, and the lights. I locked the car. I put the keys in my Egyptian bag. I paused to think of some other small

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  everyday thing I needed to take care of before walking in the house; I picked a leaf off the windscreen, scooped your j u m p rope off the garage floor and h u n g it on its hook.

  W h e n I turned on the light in the kitchen, I thought h o w unlike you it was to have left all those greasy breakfast dishes.The skillet for your sausage was upright in the drainer, but not the one for the French toast, and most of the plates and juice glasses were still on the counter. Sections of the Times splayed on the table, though taking the paper out to the stack in the garage every m o r n i n g was one of your neatnik obsessions. Flicking the next light switch, I could see at a glance that no one was in the dining room, living room, or den; that was the advantage of a house with no doors. Still I walked through every room. Slowly.

  "Franklin?" I called. "Celia?" T h e sound of my own voice unnerved me. It was so small and tinny, and nothing came back.

  As I advanced d o w n the hall, I paused at Ceha's b e d r o o m and had to force myself to walk in. It was dark. H e r bed was empty. T h e same, in the master bedroom, the bathrooms, out on the deck. Nothing. Nobody. W h e r e were you? H a d you gone looking for me? I had a mobile.You k n e w the number. And w h y wouldn't you have taken the truck? Was this a game? You were hiding, giggling in a closet with Celia.This of all nights you chose to play a game?

  T h e house was empty. I felt a surging, regressive urge to call my mother.

  I walked through it twice. T h o u g h I had checked the rooms before, the second time through I felt only deeper trepidation. It was as if there were someone in the house, a stranger, a burglar, and he was just out of view, stalking behind me, ducking under cabinets, clutching a cleaver. Finally, shaking, I returned to the kitchen.

  T h e previous owners must have installed those floodlights in the back in expectation of lavish garden parties. We didn't inchne toward garden parties and rarely used the floods, but I was familiar with the switch: just to the left of the pantry, beside the sliding glass doors that opened to our banked backyard. This was

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  where I used to stand and watch you throw a baseball with Kevin, feeling wistful, left out. I felt a little that way at that m o m e n t —left out. As if you'd held some family celebration of great sentimental significance, and of all people I hadn't been invited. I must have kept my hand on that switch a good thirty seconds before I flipped it. If I had it to do over again, I'd have waited a few moments more. I would pay good money for every instant in my life without that image in it.

  On the crest of the hill, the archery range lit up. Soon I would understand the drollery behind Kevin's lunchtime phone call to Lamont, when he'd apparently told R o b e r t not to bother to pick up Celia from school, since she was "unwell." Backed against the target was Celia-—standing at attention, still and trusting, as if eager to play "William Tell."

  As I wrenched the door open and flailed up the rise, my haste was irrational. Celia would wait. Her body was affixed to the target by five arrows, which held her torso like stick-pins tacking one of her crimped self-portraits to a class bulletin board. As I stumbled nearer calling her name, she winked at me, grotesquely, with her head knocked back. Though I remembered putting in her prosthesis that morning, it was missing now.

  There are things we know with our whole being without ever having to actively think them, at least with that verbal self-conscious prattle that chatters on the surface of our minds. It was hke that; I knew what else I would find without having to specify it to myself outright. So when, scrambling up to the archery range, I tripped over something sticking from bushes, I may have sickened, but I wasn't surprised. I recognized the obstacle in an instant. I had bought pairs of chocolate-brown Stove brogans from Banana Repubhc often enough.

  O h , my beloved. I may need too badly to tell myself a story, but I've felt compelled to weave some thread of connection between the otherwise meaningless dishevelment of that backyard and the finest in the man I married.

  With a good twenty minutes remaining before they had

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  to leave for school, you'd let the kids go out
to play. In fact, it would have encouraged you that for once the two of t h e m were horsing around together— bonding. You dawdled through the Times, though it was the Home C-section on a Thursday, w h i c h wouldn't entice you. So you started on the breakfast dishes. You heard a scream. I don't doubt that you were out the sliding doors in a flash. From the b o t t o m of the hill, you went for him. You were a robust man, even in your fifties, still skipping rope forty-five minutes a day. It would have taken a lot to stop a man like you in his tracks. And you almost made it, t o o — a few yards from the crest, with the arrows raining.

  So here is my theory: I believe you paused. Outside on the deck, with our daughter pinioned to an archery target with an arrow through her chest, while our firstborn pivoted on his m o u n d and sighted his o w n father down the shaft of his Christmas crossbow, you simply didn't believe it.There was such a thing as a good life.

  It was possible to be a good dad, to put in the weekends and the picnics and the bedtime stories, and so to raise a decent, stalwart son. This was America. And you had done everything right. Ergo, this could n o t be happening.

  So for a single, deadly m o m e n t this overweening conviction—what you wanted to see—fatally interposed itself. It is possible that your cerebrum even managed to reconfigure the image, to remix the sound track: Celia, pretty make-the-best-of-it Celia, darling look-on-the-bright-side Celia, is once more inured to her disability and tossing her fine gold hair cheerfully into the spring breeze. She isn't screaming, she's laughing. She's shrieking with laughter. T h e only reason Kevin's helpful girl Friday could conceivably be standing right in front of the target is to faithfully collect her brother's spent arrows—ah, Franklin, and wouldn't she. As for your handsome young son, he has been practicing archery for six years. He has been scrupulously instructed by well-compensated professionals, and he is nothing if not safety conscious. He would never point a loaded crossbow at another person's head, least of all at his o w n father's.

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  Clearly, the sunlight had played some visual trick. He is merely waving an upraised arm. He must be hoping, w i t h o u t saying as m u c h — h e is a teenager, after all—to apologize for lashing out at breakfast w i t h those harsh, ugly repudiations of everything his father has tried to do for him. He is interested in h o w the C a n o n works, and he hopes you'll explain w h a t " f -

  stop" means another time. In truth he deeply admires his father's enterprise in having seized u p o n such a quirky profession, one that allows such creative latitude and independence. It's just awkward for an adolescent boy. T h e y get competitive at this age. T h e y want to take you on. Still the boy feels awful now, for having let fly. T h e fit of pique was all a lie. He treasures all those trips to Civil War battlefields, if only because war is something that only m e n can understand with other m e n , and he's learned o n e heck of a lot f r o m museums. Back in his r o o m some nights, he takes out those a u t u m n leaves you two collected on the grounds of T h e o d o r e Roosevelt's ancestral h o m e and pressed inside the Encyclopedia Britannica last year. Seeing that the colors are beginning to fade reminds him of the mortality of all things, but especially of his o w n father, and he cries. Cries. You will never see it; he will never tell you. But he doesn't have to. See?

  T h e waving? He's waving for you to bring the camera. He's changed his mind, and w i t h another five minutes left before he has to catch the bus, he wants you to take some photographs after ad—to start the montage, Braveheart of the Palisades, for the foyer.

  This masterful remake may not have lasted more than a second or two before it corrupted, as a frozen frame will bhster and crenellate before a hot projection lamp. B u t it would have lasted just long enough for Kevin to sink his first crippling shaft—perhaps the one I found angled through your throat and protruding from the back of your neck. It must have severed an artery; around your head, under the flood lamps, the grass was black. T h e three other arrows—stuck in the hollow between your pectorals where I loved to rest my head, fixed fast into the

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  fibrous muscle of your broad rope-skipping calf, and extending from the groin whose pleasures we had so recently rediscovered together—were just-to-be-on-the-safe-side touches, hke a few extra stakes around the edges of a well-pitched tent.

  All the same, I do wonder just how hard you struggled up that hill, really—wheezing, beginning to choke on your own blood.

  It wasn't that you didn't care for her, but you may have grasped with a glance that it was too late to save Ceha. T h e fact she was no longer screaming was a bad sign. As for saving yourself, maybe it just wasn't in you. Stark in the glare of the floods, sharpened by the shadow cast by the shaft in your neck, the expression on your face—it was so disappointed.

  A P R I L 8 , 2 0 0 1

  Dearest Franklin,

  I don't k n o w if you keep up with these things, but about a week ago a Chinese fighter plane ran into an American surveillance craft over the South China Sea. T h e Chinese pilot was probably drowned, and the crippled American spy plane landed on the Chinese island of Hainan. There seems to be some question as to whose craft hit whose. Anyway, it's b e c o m e quite a diplomatic showdown, and n o w China is holding the twenty-four American crew members hostage—for an apology, of all things. I haven't had the energy to follow w h o is and is not at fault, but I have been intrigued that world peace (or so they say) hangs in the balance over the sole matter of remorse. Previous to my education in such things, I might have f o u n d the situation exasperating. Just say you're sorry then, if that wdl get t h e m back! But nowadays the matter of remorse looms great to me, and it neither surprises nor frustrates me that momentous events might be decided in accordance with it. Besides, so far this Hainan c o n u n d r u m is relatively simple. It is so m u c h more often the case that an apology brings no one back.

  Lately, too, politics seems to have dissolved for me into a swarm of tiny, personal stories. I don't seem to believe in it anymore. There are only people and w h a t happens to them. Even that fracas in Florida—to me it was about a man w h o wanted to be president since he was a httle boy. W h o got so close that he could taste it. About a person and his sadness and his desperation to turn back the clock, to count again and again until the news is good at last—about his poignant denial. Similarly, I think less about trade restrictions and future arms sales to Taiwan than I do about those twenty-four young people, in a strange building with strange smells, fed meals that don't resemble the take-out Chinese they grew up with, sleeping badly, imagining the worst—being charged as a spy and rotting in a Chinese prison while diplomats trade acid communiques that no one lets them read. Young people w h o thought they were hungry for adventure until they got one.

  I am sometimes awed by the same naivete of my own younger self—disheartened that Spain has trees, despairing that every unexplored frontier turns out to have food and weather. I wanted to go somewhere else, I thought. Witlessly, I conceived of myself as harboring an insatiable appetite for the exotic.

  Well, Kevin has introduced me to a real foreign country. I can be sure of that, since the definition of the truly foreign locale is one that fosters a piercing and perpetual yearning to go home.

  A couple of these small, truly foreign experiences I have held back. W h i c h isn't hke me. You remember h o w I once loved to return from a trip abroad and present you my cultural bric-a-brac, the kind of mundane how-they-do-things-elsewhere discoveries that you only make if you actually go there, hke the queer litde fact that in Thailand commercial loaves of bread aren't twist-tied at the heel of the loaf, but on the top.

  As for the first tidbit I've withheld, I may be guilty of plain condescension. I should give you more credit, since Kevin's escapade screamed premeditation; in another life he might have grown up to do well at, say, staging large professional conferences—anything that's advertised as requiring "strong organizational abilities and problem-solving skills." H e n c e even you realize that Thursday bei
ng staged three days before he turned the age of full legal accountability was no coincidence. He may have been

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  virtually sixteen on Thursday, but in a statutory sense he was still fifteen, meaning that in N e w York state a more lenient raft of sentencing guidelines would apply, even if they threw the b o o k at him and tried h i m as an adult. Kevin is sure to have researched the fact that the law does not, like his father, round up.

  Still, his lawyer did locate a range of convincing expert witnesses w h o told alarming medical anecdotes. Typically, downhearted but mild-mannered fifty-something goes on Prozac, experiences an acute personality flip into paranoia and dementia, shoots his whole family and then himself. I wonder, have you ever clutched at the pharmaceutical straw? O u r good son was just one of those unfortunate few whose reaction to antidepressants was adverse, so that instead of lightening his burdens the drug plunged him into darkness? Because I really tried to believe that myself for a while, especially during Kevin's trial.

  T h o u g h that defense neither got him off completely nor released him into psychiatric care as intended, Kevin's sentence may have been slighdy 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, J o h n 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 J o h n 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.

  " O h , don't thank me, thank Kevin," said J o h n easily. "I'd never heard of the psychosis thing, either. T h a t w h o l e approach was his idea."