We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [127]
My mother goes somewhere else. My mother sleeps in a different bed. My mother eats different food. My mother comes home. My mother sleeps at home. My mother eats at home.
My mother tells other people to go somewhere else. Other people sleep in a different bed. Other people eat different food. Other people come home. Other people sleep at home. Other people eat at home. My mother is rich.
I know what you’re thinking, or I know what you thought then. That it was Kevin’s surly, remote pose with me that was fake, while with you he could relax and be his sprightly, chipper self. That the pervasive stiltedness of his written work revealed a commonplace gap between his thoughts and his powers of expression. I’m willing to grant that his closed condescension toward me was an artifice, even if its biding-time quality, tracing back to my appropriation of his squirt gun, felt true. But neither the Beaver Cleaver nor the windup schoolboy straight man was any less bogus. Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
I just glanced over what I’ve written so far and realized that I was being awfully summary about a solid seven years of our lives together; moreover, that the abundance of that summary concerned Celia. I’m ashamed of this, I really am, but while I can remember how we spent every one of Celia’s birthdays during those years, my memories of Kevin from the age of eight to about fourteen tend to blur.
Oh, a few bits and pieces stick out, especially my disastrous attempt to impart the enthusiasms of my professional life by taking you and thirteen-year old Kevin (you’ll recall that Celia, too young, stayed with my mother) to Vietnam. I deliberately chose that country because it’s a place that to any American, at least of our generation, inescapably means something, saving it from the dissociated Just Somewhere Else and Who Cares feeling that foreign countries so easily induce when you visit them for the first time, and to which Kevin would naturally fall prey. Too, Vietnam had only recently opened up to tourism, so I couldn’t resist the opportunity on my own account. But I grant that this sense of connectedness, of guilty intimacy with rice paddies and wizened old women in conical straw hats, would pertain mostly to you and me. I’d marched on Washington in my twenties, while you had actually begged the Draft Board, if to no avail, not to reject you because of flat feet; with Saigon already fallen three years before, we had some bracing knockdown drag-outs over the war when we met. Kevin had no such associations, so maybe despite my intentions to the contrary, I had indeed dragged him to Just Somewhere Else and Who Cares. Nonetheless, I’ll never forget my stinging humiliation when our son—if nothing else, ever a quick study—sauntered through the sea of scooters in Hanoi telling the “gooks” to get out of the way.
However, one other memory rises eidetically above the blur, and it is not, Franklin, one more mean, slanderous example of how our son was heartless from birth.
I refer to that two weeks when he got so sick. He was ten. For a while, Dr. Goldblatt worried that it was meningitis, though an excruciating spinal tap only proved that it wasn’t. Despite his poor appetite, Kevin was generally a healthy boy, and this was my only experience of our son laid so low for so long.
When he first started coming down with it, I noticed that the spirit in which he turned up his nose at my meals was no longer sneering; he’d look at his plate and slump, as if in defeat. In fact, since he was accustomed—like his mother—to battling his own impulses as much as outside forces, he struggled to stuff down one of my lamb sarma before giving up. He didn’t lurk in shadows