We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [151]
I paid the bill. We wouldn’t conduct another mother-son outing until Claverack.
Discouraged from getting her the scooter, I went to considerable trouble to locate a “small-eared elephant shrew” as a Christmas present for Celia. When we’d visited the Small Mammals exhibit in the Bronx Zoo, she’d been enchanted by this incongruous little fellow, who looked as if an elephant crossed with a kangaroo had interbred with several generations of mice. The importation was probably illegal—if not outright endangered, this tiny creature from southern Africa was identified at the zoo as “threatened, due to habitat loss”—which didn’t help my case when you grew impatient with the time it took to find one. At length we struck a deal. You’d look the other way as I located a pet shop that specialized in “unusual” animals on the Internet, I the other way as you bought Kevin that crossbow.
I never told you what Celia’s present cost, and I don’t think I’ll tell you now, either. Suffice it to say that once in a while it was nice to be wealthy. The short-eared elephant shrew—inaptly named; neither elephant nor shrew, it has flanged, cupped ears that are proportionately enormous—was, bar none, the most successful present I’ve ever given. Celia would have been bowled over by a roll of Lifesavers, but even our agreeable daughter expressed degrees of exhilaration, and when she unwrapped the big glass cage her eyes bulged. Then she flew into my arms with a torrent of thanks. She kept getting up from Christmas dinner to check that the cage was warm enough or to feed him a raw cranberry. I was already worried. Animals don’t always flourish in alien climates, and giving such a perishable present to a sensitive child was probably rash.
Then, I may have purchased “Snuffles,” as Celia christened him, as much for myself as for her, if only because his delicate, wide-eyed vulnerability reminded me so of Celia herself. With long, downy fur reminiscent of our daughter’s fine hair, this five-ounce fluff ball looked as if, with one good puff, he would scatter to the winds like a dandelion. Balanced on haunches that narrowed to slender stilts, Snuffles looked precarious when upright. His signature snout, trumpet-shaped and prehensile, routed about the dirt-lined cage, both touching and comic. The animal didn’t run so much as hop, and his bounding within the confines of his hemmed-in world exuded the cheerful make-the-best-of-it optimism with which Celia would soon face her own limitations. Although elephant shrews are not strictly vegetarian—they eat worms and insects—massive brown eyes gave Snuffles an awed, frightened appearance, anything but predatory. Constitutionally, Snuffles, like Celia, was quarry.
Appreciating that her pet mustn’t be overhandled, she would poke a nervous finger through the cage door to stroke the tips of his tawny fur. When she had friends over to play, she kept her bedroom door shut while she decoyed playmates to more durable toys. Maybe that means she’s learning, I prayed, about other people. (Celia was popular partly for being indiscriminate,