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to detect. I did ask about the purpose of the five chain-and-padlock Kryptonites when they were delivered to our door by FedEx, since Kevin had a bike lock, along with a bike he never rode. Yet his explanation seemed credible: He’d come across a terrific deal on the Internet, and he planned to sell these Kryptonites, which went for about $100 apiece retail, at school for a profit. If he’d never before displayed such entrepreneurial spunk, the aberration only seems glaring now that we know what the locks were for. How he got hold of school stationery I’ve no idea, and I never ran across it. And while he laid in a generous supply of arrows for his crossbow over a period of months, he never ordered more than half a dozen at a time. He was always ordering arrows, and the stockpile, which he kept outside in the shed, didn’t attract my attention.

The one thing that I did notice through the rest of December and the early months of 1999 was that Kevin’s Gee, Dad routine now extended to Gee, Mumsey. I don’t know how you put up with it. Gosh, are we having some of that great Armenian food tonight? Terriff! I sure want to learn more about my ethnic heritage! Lots of guys at school are plain old white-bread, and they’re superjealous that I’m a member of a real-live persecuted minority! Insofar as he had any tastes in food at all, he hated Armenian cuisine, and this disingenuous boppiness hurt my feelings. With me, Kevin’s behavior had been hitherto as unadorned as his bedroom—stark, lifeless, sometimes hard and abrasive, but (or so I imagined) uncamouflaged. I preferred that. It was a surprise to discover that my son could come to seem even farther away.

I interpreted his transformation as induced by that conversation in the kitchen that he’d overheard—to which neither you nor I had alluded again, even in private. Our prospective separation loomed as a great smelly elephant in the living room, trumpeting occasionally or leaving behind massive piles of manure for us to trip over.

Yet astonishingly, our marriage blossomed into a second honeymoon, remember? We pulled off that Christmas with unequaled warmth. You secured me a signed copy of Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate, as well as Michael J. Arlen’s Passage to Ararat, Armenian classics. In turn, I gave you a copy of Alistair Cooke’s America and a biography of Ronald Reagan. If we were poking fun at one another, the teasing was tender. We indulged Kevin with some sports clothes that were grotesquely too small, while Celia, typically, was every bit as entranced with the bubble wrap it came in as with her glass-eyed antique doll. We made love more often than we had in years under the implicit guise of for-old-time’s-sake.

I was unsure whether you were reconsidering a summer split or were merely impelled by guilt and grief to make the most of what was irrevocably terminal. In any event, there is something relaxing about hitting bottom. If we were about to get a divorce, nothing worse could possibly happen.

Or so we thought.

Eva

April 5, 2001

Dear Franklin,

I know it’s bound to be a touchy subject for you. But I promise, if you hadn’t given him that crossbow for Christmas, it would have been the longbow or poison darts. For that matter, Kevin was sufficiently resourceful to have capitalized on the Second Amendment and would have laid hands on the more conventional arsenal of pistols and deer rifles that his more modern-minded colleagues prefer. Frankly, traditional School Shooting instruments would not only have improved his margin of error but would have heightened the likelihood that he could best the competition in fatalities—clearly one of his driving ambitions, since before those Columbine upstarts came along twelve days later, he topped the charts. And you can be sure that he considered this issue at great length. He said himself at fourteen, “Choice of weapons is half the fight.” So on the face of it, the archaic selection is peculiar. It handicapped him, or so it would seem.

He may have liked that. Maybe I passed on my own inclination to rise to a challenge,