" B u t — h e wouldn't have had access to a library, would he?"
" N o , not in pretrial detention." He looked at me with real sympathy for a m o m e n t . "I hardly needed to lift a finger, frankly.
He k n e w all the citations. Even the names and locations of expert witnesses. That's a bright boy you've got, Eva." But he didn't sound upbeat. He sounded depressed.
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As for the second tidbit—regarding h o w they do things in that faraway land where fifteen-year-olds murder their classmates—I haven't held it back because I thought you couldn't take it. I just didn't want to think about it myself or subject you to it, though until this very afternoon I was living in eternal fear that the episode would repeat itself.
It was perhaps three months after Thursday. Kevin had already been tried and sentenced, and I had recently installed those robotic Saturday visits to Chatham in my routine. We had still not learned to talk to one another, and the time dragged. In those days the conceit on his part ran that my visits were an imposition, that he dreaded my arrival and applauded my departure, and that his real family was inside, among his worshipful juvenile boosters.
W h e n I informed him that Mary Woolford had just filed suit, I was surprised that he didn't seem gratified but only the more disgruntled; as Kevin would later object, why should I get all the credit? So I said, that's a fine h o w do you do, isn't it, after I lose my husband and daughter? To get sued? He grunted something about my feeling sorry for myself.
" D o n ' t you?" I said. " D o n ' t you feel sorry for me?"
He shrugged. " G o t out of this safe and sound, didn't you? N o t a scratch."
" D i d I?" I added, "And why was that, anyway?"
" W h e n you're putting on a show, you don't shoot the audience," he said smoothly, rolling something in his right hand.
"You mean leaving me alive was the best revenge." We were already way beyond revenge-for-what.
I couldn't talk about anything m o r e to do w i t h Thursday at that point, and I was about to resort to the old are-they-feeding-you-all-right, w h e n my eye was drawn again by the object he kept palming f r o m hand to hand, palpating it rhythmically w i t h his fingers hke a string of w o r r y beads. Honestly, I just wanted to change the subject, I didn't care at all about his toy— t h o u g h if I t o o k his fidgeting as a sign of moral discomfort in the presence of a w o m a n whose family he had slaughtered, I was sadly mistaken.
" W h a t is that?" I asked. " W h a t have you got there?"
W i t h 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 w h e n you look at an object, it looks back.
" D o n ' t you ever pull that out again," I said hoarsely. "If you do, I will never come back here. N o t ever. Do you hear me?"
I think he k n e w that I meant it. W h i c h gave him a powerful amulet to ward off these ostensibly pestilential visits from Mumsey.
T h e 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. W h a t a hideous boy we have, I must be saying, to torment his mother with so ghasdy a souvenir. N o , 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.
W h i c h 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 w h e n 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. T h o u g h they routinely turn d o w n appeals to meet with inmates on birthdays, my request was granted. Maybe this is the kind of sentimentality that prison warders appreciate.
W h e n 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 h o w fatiguing it must be for Kevin to generate this world-weary who-gives-a-fuck the hvelong 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 w h i c h he looked dwarfed.
Three days from adulthood, Kevin is finally starting to act hke a litde 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.
T h e more extraordinary, he answered me. " I ' m almost eighteen, aren't I?" He rubbed his face."Outta here. I heard they don't waste m u c h time."
"A real prison," I said.
"I don't know.This place is sure real e n o u g h for me."
" . . . D o e s the move to Sing Sing make you nervous?"
"Nervous?" he asked incredulously. "Nervous] Do you k n o w 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. T h e effect doesn't make him look tougher, but disarranged. T h e scars have smudged the once sharp, Armenian cut of his features into a doughier blur. He could have been drawn by an uncertain portraitist w h o 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, u h — A n d y Williams?" Kevin remembered vaguely. " W h a t a sucker. Wanna k n o w the truth, I felt sorry for the chump. He's been had."
"I warned you this fad would grow passe," 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 biding in the NewYork Times. A n d the second shooting, on its heels—with one fatality, in San Diego, too? That got almost no coverage at ad."
" H e d , that guy was eighteen." Kevin shook his head. "I mean, really. D o n ' t you think he was a litde old for it?"
"You know, I saw you on TV."
" O h , that." He squirmed with a tinge of embarrassment. "It was f d m e d a w h d e 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. N o w all you have to come up with is something to say."
He chuckled. "You mean that isn't horseshit."
"You do k n o w what day it is, don't you?" I introduced shyly.
" W h y they let me come see you on a Monday?"
" O h , sure. It's my anniversary." He is fmady 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 lik e 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 h i m letters. And n o w th
ey're in a big messy stack on my desk, because I don't k n o w 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 t u r n e d to me through the police car window, pupils glinting, Kevin met my gaze this afternoon w i t h supreme difficulty. His eyes kept shuttering away, making contact in sorties, then flickering back toward the gaily painted cinder-block wall. A n d at last gave up, staring a little to the side of my face.
"I used to think I knew," he said glumly. " N o w I'm not so sure."
W i t h o u t thinking, I extended my hand across the table and clasped his. He didn't pull away. " T h a n k 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 w h a t he had d o n e to a pat sociological aphorism about
"alienation" out of Time magazine or a cheap psychological construct hke "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 w o u l d only begin to p l u m b his o w n depths by first finding himself unfathomable.
W h e n 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 w o o d e n box about five inches long, I apologized."I k n o w it's your birthday coming up. I haven't forgotten. I'll bring your present next time."
" D o n ' t bother," he said, polishing the oiled w o o d with a wad of toilet paper. "It'd just get ripped off in here anyway."
Carefully, he slid the box across the table, keeping two fingers on the top. It wasn't quite rectangular after all, but coffin-shaped, 464
w i t h hinges on one side and tiny brass hooks on the other. He must have made it in shop. T h e m o r b i d shape seemed typical, of course. T h e gesture, however, moved me, and the workmanship was surprisingly fine. He'd given me a f e w Christmas presents in the olden days, but I always k n e w you'd b o u g h t 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.
D o n ' 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 u n h o o k e d 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.'T 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 g o o n was going to swipe it, and it'd get used for some cheap gag—you know, it'd t u r n 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 t h o u g h t you might take this and, well, maybe you could, you k n o w — "
"Bury it," I finished for him. I felt heavy. It was an e n o r m o u s request, for along with his dark-stained h o m e m a d e coffin I was to bury a great deal else.
Gravely, I agreed. W h e n I hugged him good-bye, he clung to me childishly, as he never had in childhood proper. I ' m n o t quite sure, since he muttered it into the u p t u r n e d codar of my coat, but I like to think that he choked, "I'm sorry." Taking the
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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 reheved. B u t 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 h o m e now, and I w o u l d feel redeemed. To the contrary, I k n e w I'd go h o m e and feel hideous, as usual, and desolate, as usual, and dirty, as usual. I'd wanted to be cleansed, but my experience on that b e n c h was m u c h like a typically sweaty, gritty a f t e r n o o n in a Ghana hotel r o o m : t u r n i n g on the shower to find that the water main was t u r n e d off. This disdainful rusty drip was the only baptism the law w o u l d afford me.
T h e sole aspect of the verdict that gave me the slightest satisfaction was being stuck with my o w n court costs. Although the judge may not have thought m u c h of Mary Woolford's case, she had clearly taken a personal dislike to me, and plain animosity from key parties (ask D e n n y Corbitt) can cost you. T h r o u g h o u t 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 o w n husband and daughter tended to get lost in the shuffle. T h o u g h I k n o w 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 w h o "don't hke" their own sons.
I don't m u c h hke 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
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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 o w n flesh and blood were submitted n o - c o m m e n t , to hang me out to dry. W i t h such an ice queen for a mother, litde 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 w h o 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 k n e w immediately that I would have to sell AWAP, and I would have to sell our awful, empty house. N o w that was cleansing.
But since then—and throughout writing these letters to y o u —
I have c o m e full circle, making a j o u r n e y m u c h like Kevin's own.
In asking petulandy 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. T h e 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. O n c e 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 m o m e n t we have f
ought one another with an unrelenting ferocity that I can almost admire. But it must be
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possible to earn a devotion by testing an antagonism to its very limit, to bring people closer through the very act of pushing t h e m 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. T h e bedspread is plain. A copy of Robin Hood lies on the bookshelf. A n d the sheets are clean.
Forever your loving wife,
Eva
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 49