We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [108]
“Gosh,” you exclaimed. “That must have hurt!”
“The orthopedist says that for an open fracture,” I said, “—it broke the skin—it was pretty clean, and should mend well.” Now Kevin and I did look at each other, just long enough to seal the pact. I had ransomed my soul to a six-year-old.
“Are you going to let me sign your cast?” you asked. “That’s a tradition, you know. Your friends and family all sign their names and wish you to get well soon.”
“Sure, Dad! But first I got to go to the bathroom.” He sauntered off, his free hand swinging.
“Did I hear that right?” you asked quietly.
“Guess so.” Rigid for hours—fear is an isometric exercise—I was exhausted, and for once the last thing on my mind was our son’s toilet training.
You put an arm around my shoulders. “Man, that must have given you a scare.”
“It was all my fault,” I said, squirming.
“No mother can watch a kid every second.”
I wished you wouldn’t be so understanding. “Yes, but I should have—”
“Sh-sh!” You raised a forefinger, and a delicate trickling emitted from the hall bathroom: music to the parental ear. “What do you think did the trick, just the shock?” you whispered. “Or maybe he’s scared of landing back on that changing table.”
I shrugged. Despite appearances, I did not believe that by flying into a rage at yet another soiled diaper I had terrorized our boy into using the toilet. Oh, it had everything to do with our set-to in the nursery, all right. I was being rewarded.
“This calls for celebration. I’m going to go in and congratulate that guy—”
I put a hand on your arm. “Don’t push your luck. Let him do it quietly, don’t make a big deal out of it. Kevin prefers his reversals off-camera.”
That said, I knew better than to read pee-pee in the potty as admission of defeat. He had won the larger battle; acceding to the toilet was the kind of trifling concession that a magnanimous if condescending victor can afford to toss a vanquished adversary. Our six-year-old had successfully tempted me into violating my own rules of engagement. I had committed a war crime—for which, barring my son’s clement silence, my very husband would extradite me to The Hague.
When Kevin returned from the bathroom tugging up his pants with one hand, I proposed that we have big bowl of popcorn for dinner, adding obsequiously, with lots and lots of salt! Drinking in the music of the normal life that I had minutes before kissed good-bye—your clamorous banging of pots, the clarion clang of our stainless steel bowl, the merry rattle of kernels—I’d a foreboding that this crawling-on-my-belly-like-a-reptile mode could endure almost indefinitely so long as Kevin kept his mouth shut.
Why didn’t he blab? By all appearances, he was protecting his mother. All right. I’ll allow for that. Nevertheless, a balance-sheet calculation may have entered in. Before a distant expiry date, a secret accrues interest by dint of having been kept; compounded by lying, Know how I really broke my arm, Dad? might have even more explosive impact in a month’s time. Too, so long as he retained the principle of his windfall in his account, he could continue to take out loans against it, whereas blowing his wad all at once would plunge his assets back to a six-year-old’s allowance of $5 a week.
Further, after all my sanctimonious singsong lectures (How would you feel . . . ?), I had provided him with a rare opportunity to annex the moral high ground—whose elevation would afford a few novel views, even if this was not, at length, a territory destined to suit his preferences in real estate. Mr. Divide-and-Conquer may also have intuited that secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who’s in on them. My chatter to you about Kevin’s needing to opt for baths over showers to keep the cast dry was artificially bright and stilted; when I asked Kevin whether he wanted parmesan on the popcorn,