We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [189]
Most children are mortified by the prospect of their parents’ divorce, and I don’t deny that the conversation he overheard from the hallway sent Kevin into a tailspin. Nevertheless, I was disconcerted. That boy had been trying to split us up for fifteen years. Why wasn’t he satisfied? And if I really was such a horror, why wouldn’t he gladly jettison his awful mother? In retrospect, I can only assume that it was bad enough living with a woman who was cold, suspicious, resentful, accusatory, and aloof. Only one eventuality must have seemed worse, and that was living with you, Franklin. Getting stuck with Dad.
Getting stuck with Dad the Dupe.
Eva
MARCH 25, 2001
Dear Franklin,
I have a confession to make. For all my ragging on you in these days, I’ve become shamefully dependent on television. In fact, as long as I’m baring all: One evening last month in the middle of Frasier, the tube winked out cold, and I’m afraid that I rather fell apart—banging the set, plugging and unplugging, wiggling knobs. I’m long past weeping over Thursday on a daily basis, but I go into a frenzy when I can’t find out how Niles takes the news that Daphne’s going to marry Donnie.
Anyway, tonight after the usual chicken breast (a bit overcooked), I was flicking through the channels when the screen suddenly filled with our son’s face. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’m not. And this wasn’t the ninth-grade school photo all the papers ran—out of date, black-and-white, with its acid grin—but Kevin’s more robust visage at seventeen. I recognized the interviewer’s voice. It was Jack Marlin’s documentary.
Marlin had ditched the dry thriller title “Extracurricular Activities” for the punchier “Bad Boy,” reminding me of you; I’ll finish off that bad boy in a couple of hours, you’d say, about an easy scouting job. You applied the expression to just about everything save our son.
To whom Jack Marlin applied it readily enough. Kevin, you see, was the star. Marlin must have gotten Claverack’s consent, for interspersed with shots of the tearful aftermath—the piles of flowers outside the gym, the memorial service, Never Again town meetings—was an exclusive interview with KK himself. Rattled, I almost switched it off. But after a minute or two, I was riveted. In fact, Kevin’s manner was so arresting that at first I could barely attend to what he said. He was interviewed in his dormitory cubicle—like his room, kept in rigid order and unadorned with posters or knickknacks. Tipping his chair on two legs, hooking an elbow around its back, he looked thoroughly in his element. If anything, he seemed larger, full of himself, bursting from his tiny sweats, and I had never seen him so animated and at his ease. He basked under the camera’s eye as if under a sunlamp.
Marlin was off-screen, and his questions were deferential, almost tender, as if he didn’t want to scare Kevin away. When I tuned in, Marlin was asking delicately whether Kevin still maintained that he was one of the tiny percentage of Prozac patients who had a radical and antipathetic reaction to the drug.
Kevin had learned the importance of sticking by your story by the time he was six. “Well, I definitely started feeling a little weird.”
“But according to both the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, a causal linkage between Prozac and homicidal psychosis is purely speculative. Do you think more research—?”
“Hey,” Kevin raised a palm, “I’m no doctor. That defense was my lawyer’s idea, and he was doing his job. I said I felt a little weird. But I’m not looking for an excuse here. I don’t blame some satanic cult or pissy girlfriend or big bad bully who called me a fag. One of the things I can’t stand about this country is lack of accountability. Everything Americans do that doesn’t work out too great has to be somebody else’s fault. Me, I stand by what I done. It wasn’t anybody’s idea but mine.”
“What about that sexual abuse case? Might that have left you feeling bruised?”
“Sure I was interfered with. But hell,” Kevin added