We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [154]
Accordingly, while “Andy” Williams is now nearly as famous as his crooner counterpart, I doubt there’s a news consumer in the country who could tell you the name of either of the two students he shot dead—teenagers who never did anything wrong outside of heading to the bathroom on a morning that their more fortunate classmates resolved to hold their bladders through Geometry: Brian Zuckor and Randy Gordon. Exercising what I can only regard as a civic duty, I have committed their names to heart.
I’ve heard parents throughout my life allude to horrifying incidents in which something happened to their children: a full-immersion baptism by a boiling pot of turkey stew or the retrieval of a wayward cat via an open third-story window. Prior to 1998, I had casually assumed that I knew what they were talking about—or what they avoided talking about, since there’s often a private fence around such stories, full access to which, like intensive care units, only immediate family is allowed. I’d always respected those fences. Other people’s personal disasters of any sort are exclusionary, and I’d be grateful for that Don’t Enter sign, behind which I might shelter a secret offensive relief that my own loved ones were safe. Still I imagined that I knew roughly what lay on the other side. Be it a daughter or a grandfather, anguish is anguish. Well, I apologize for my presumption. I had no idea.
When you’re the parent, no matter what the accident, no matter how far away you were at the time and how seemingly powerless to avert it, a child’s misfortune feels like your fault. You’re all your kids have, and their own conviction that you will protect them is contagious. So in case you expect, Franklin, that I’m simply setting about one more time to deny culpability, to the contrary. Broadly, it still feels like my fault, and broadly, it felt like my fault at the time.
At the very least, I wish I’d stuck to my guns on our child-care arrangements. We’d hired Robert, that seismology student from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, to pick up Celia from school and stick around the house until one of us got home, and that’s the way the rules should have stayed. Against all odds, we managed to keep Robert, too—though he threatened to quit—once we assured him that Kevin was now old enough to look after himself and he need only look after Celia. But you were on this responsibility kick. Kevin was fourteen, as old as many sitters in our neighborhood. If Kevin was to become trustworthy, he had first to be trusted; sure, it sounded good. So you told our child-minder that as long as Kevin had returned from ninth grade and had been apprised that he was now to keep an eye on Celia, Robert could go. That solved the problem that kept cropping up, that you would get stuck in traffic and I would work a bit late, and (however well-compensated for his time) Robert would get stranded, chafing, on Palisades Parade when he had research at Lamont to which he needed to return.
When I try to remember that Monday, my mind shies, like ducking a hurtling tether ball. Then the memory curves centrifugally back around again, so that when I stand back up it hits me in the head.
I was once more working a little late. The new arrangement with Robert made me feel less guilty for putting in an extra hour, and AWAP’s preeminence in the budget-travel niche had started to slide. We had so much more competition than when I started out—The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide had sprung up; meanwhile, with the whole country aslosh in cash from a buoyant stock market, demand for the really dirt-cheap travel in which we specialized had dropped. So against my better judgment, I was working up a proposal for a whole new series, Wing and a Prayer for Boomers—whose target audience would be flush with Internet start-up stock, probably overweight, nostalgic about their first seat-of-the-pants trip to Europe with a beat-up copy of W&P in the sixties, convinced they were still college students if not in fact then in spirit, accustomed