We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [110]
As for my incontinent outpouring of tenderness, it was tainted with apology, and Kevin was having none of it. When I kissed his forehead, he wiped it off. When I combed his hair, he batted me away and rumpled his locks. When I hugged him, he objected coldly that I was hurting his arm. And when I averred, “I love you, kiddo”—no longer recited with the solemnity of the Apostle’s Creed but rather with the feverish, mindless supplication of a Hail Mary—he’d assume a caustic expression from which that permanent left-hand cock of his mouth was enduringly to emerge. One day when I avowed yet again I love you, kiddo, Kevin shot back, Nyeh NYEE nyeh, nyeh-nyeeeeh! and I gave it a rest.
He clearly believed that he had found me out. He had glimpsed behind the curtain, and no amount of cooing and snack food would erase a vision at least as indelible as a first encounter with parental sex. Yet what surprised me was how much this revelation of his mother’s true colors—her viciousness, her violence—seemed to please him. If he had my number, it was one that intrigued him far more than the twos and threes of our dreary arithmetic drills before his “accident,” and he side-eyed his mother with a brand new—I wouldn’t call it quite respect—interest. Yes.
As for you and me, until that summer I’d become accustomed to concealing things from you, but mostly thought crimes—my atrocious blankness at Kevin’s birth, my aversion to our house. While to some extent we all shelter one another from the cacophony of horrors in our heads, even these intangible unsaids made me mournful. But it was one thing to keep my own counsel about the dread that had descended on me whenever it was time to fetch our son from kindergarten, quite another to neglect to tell you that, oh, by the way, I broke his arm. However wicked, thoughts didn’t seem to take up space in my body, while keeping a three-dimensional secret was like having swallowed a cannonball.
You seemed so far away. I’d gaze at you as you undressed at night with a spectral nostalgia, half expecting that when I crossed to brush my teeth you’d step through my body as easily as through moonlight. Watching you in the backyard teaching Kevin to cup a baseball in a catcher’s mitt with his good right hand—though in truth he seemed more gifted with pizza—I’d press my palm against a sun-warmed windowpane as if against a spiritual barrier, stabbed by the same vertiginous well-wishing and aching sense of exclusion that would have tortured me had I been dead. Even when I put my hand on your chest, I couldn’t seem to quite touch you, as if every time you shed your clothes there were, like Bartholomew’s hats, another L. L. Bean work shirt underneath.
Meantime, you and I never went out just the two of us anymore—to catch Crimes and Misdemeanors, grab a bite at the River Club in Nyack, much less to indulge ourselves at the Union Square Café in the city. It’s true that we had trouble with sitters, but you acquiesced to our housebound nights readily enough, prizing the light summer evenings for coaching Kevin on fourth downs, three-pointer field goals, and the infield-fly rule. Your blindness to the fact that Kevin displayed neither interest nor aptitude in any of these sports nagged me a bit, but I was mostly disappointed that you didn’t ever covet the same quality time with your wife.
There’s no purpose to talking around it. I was jealous. And I was lonely.
It was toward the end of August when our next-door neighbor leaned on our doorbell with censorious insistence. I heard you answer it from the kitchen.
“You tell your kid it’s not funny!” Roger Corley exclaimed.
“Whoa, slow down, Rog!” said you. “Criticize anybody’s sense of humor, gotta tell the joke first.” Despite your jocular cadence, you did not invite him in, and when I peered