We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [106]
As I swept a shock of hair from his moist forehead, the muscles of Kevin’s face worked furiously; his eyes screwed up and his mouth grimaced into a near-smile. Even when I ran to fetch that morning’s New York Times and slipped it under his arm he did not cry. Holding the paper under the arm—I still remember the headline by his elbow, “More Autonomy for Baltics Stirs Discomfort in Moscow”—I helped him to his feet, asking if anything else hurt and he shook his head. I started to pick him up, another shake; he would walk. Together we shuffled to the phone. It’s possible that he wiped away the odd tear when I wasn’t looking, but Kevin would no more suffer in plain view than he would learn to count.
Our local pediatrician Dr. Goldblatt met us at Nyack Hospital’s tiny, crushingly intimate emergency room, where I felt certain that everyone could tell what I’d done. The notice for the “New York Sheriff’s Victim Hotline” beside the registration window seemed posted specially for my son. I talked too much and said too little; I babbled to the admissions nurse about what had happened but not how. Meantime Kevin’s unnatural self-control had mutated into the bearing of a martinet; he stood straight with his chin lifted, and turned at right angles. Having assumed responsibility for supporting his arm with the newspaper, he allowed Dr. Goldblatt to hold his shoulder as he marched down the hall but shook off my hand. When he entered the orthopedic surgeon’s examining room, he about-faced in the doorway to announce briskly, “I can see the doctor by myself.”
“Don’t you want me to keep you company, in case it hurts?”
“You can wait out there,” he commanded, the muscles rippling in his clenched jaw the only indication that it hurt already.
“That’s quite a little man you’ve got there, Eva,” said Dr. Goldblatt. “Sounds like you got your orders.” To my horror, he closed the door.
I did, I really did want to be there for Kevin. I was desperate to reestablish that I was a parent he could trust, not a monster who would hurl him about the room at a moment’s notice like a vengeful apparition from Poltergeist. But, yes, I was also in dread that Kevin would tell the surgeon or Benjamin Goldblatt what I’d done. They have laws about these things. I could be arrested; my case could be written up in the Rockland County Times in an appalled sidebar. I could, as I had so tastelessly joked that I would welcome, have Kevin taken away from me for real. At a minimum I might have to submit to mortifying monthly visits from some disapproving social worker sent to check my son for bruises. However much I deserved rebuke, I still preferred the slow burn of private self-excoriation to the hot lash of public reproof.
So as I stared glaze-eyed into the glassed-in case preserving gushy letters to the nursing staff from satisfied customers, I scrambled for soft-core rewrites. Oh, doctor, you know how boys exaggerate. Throw him? He was running headlong down the hall, and when I walked out of the bedroom I bumped into him, by accident . . . Then he, ah, of course he fell, hard, against—against the lamp stand ...! I sickened myself, and every whitewash I concocted sounded preposterous. I had plenty of time to stew in my own juices on one of those hard, sea-green metal chairs in the waiting room, too; a nurse informed me that our son had to undergo surgery to have his “bone ends cleansed,” a procedure I was more than happy to have remain opaque.
But when Kevin emerged three hours later with his blindingly white cast, Dr. Goldblatt patted our son on the back and admired what a brave young man I had raised, while the orthopedic surgeon impersonally detailed the nature of the break, the dangers of infection, the importance of keeping the cast dry, and the date Kevin should return