We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [164]
Instead, the flesh color of those stick-on 3M Opticlude patches turned the left-hand side of her face blank. Swelling on the left side obliterated any defining structures like her cheekbone. It was as if her face wasn’t quite three-dimensional anymore, but rather like a postcard, with a picture on one side and clean white paper on the other. I could catch a glimpse of her right-hand profile, and for a moment my cheerful moppet was unchanged; with a glimpse of the left, she was erased.
This now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t quality to her countenance gave expression to my painful new awareness that children were a perishable consumer good. Though I don’t think I had ever taken her for granted, once she came home I pretty much gave up on whatever effort I had ever made to disguise my preference for one child over the other. She could never bring herself to leave my side any longer, and I allowed her to shadow me softly around the house and join me on errands. I’m sure you were right that we shouldn’t have let her slip any further behind in school and that the sooner she got used to her disability in public the better, but I still took some time off from AWAP and kept her home for two more weeks. Meanwhile, she lost some of the skills she had mastered, for instance, tying her tennis shoes, and I’d have to go back to tying them for her and start the lesson from scratch.
I watched her around Kevin like a hawk. I admit that she did not act afraid of him. And he went right back to issuing her a plenitude of bored orders; ever since she’d gotten old enough to run and fetch, he’d treated her like a pet with a limited range of tricks. But even in response to some small, harmless request like to grab him a cracker or toss him the TV remote, I thought I now detected in his sister a momentary hesitation, a little freeze, like a hard swallow. And though she had once begged to carry his quiver and felt honored to help him prize his arrows from the target out back, the first time he casually suggested that she resume these duties, I put my foot down: I knew he was careful, but Celia had only one eye left and she was not to go near that archery range. I had expected Celia to whimper. She was always desperate to prove of use to him and had loved to watch her brother stand Hiawatha-tall and release those arrows unerringly into the bull’s-eye. Instead she shot me a glance that looked grateful, and her hairline glistened from a light sweat.
I was surprised when he invited her out to play Frisbee—play with his sister, now that was a first—and even a little impressed. So I told her it was all right so long as she wore her safety glasses; my relationship to her good eye now was hysterical. But when a few minutes later I looked out the window, he was playing with his sister only in the sense that one plays with the Frisbee itself. Celia’s depth perception was still very poor, and she kept grabbing for the Frisbee before it had reached her, missing, and then it would hit her in the chest. Very funny.
Of course, the hardest part at first was addressing that hole in Celia’s head, which had to be swabbed frequently with baby shampoo and a moistened Q-Tip. While Dr. Sahatjian assured us that the secretions would subside once the prosthesis was fitted and the healing complete, at first the cavity oozed that yellowish discharge continually, and sometimes in