We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [207]
I was accorded anything but priority status, though the receptionist did inform me coldly through the window that I could accompany my “minor”—a word that seemed inappropriately reductive—while he was booked. Panicked, I pleaded, “Do I have to?” and she said, “Suit yourself.” She directed me to the single black vinyl sofa, to which I was abandoned untended as police officers raced back and forth. I felt both implicated and irrelevant. I didn’t want to be there. In case that sounds like a grievous understatement, I mean that I had the novel experience of not wanting to be anywhere else, either. Flat out, I wished I were dead.
For a short time, on the opposite side of my sticky black vinyl couch sat a boy whom I now know to be Joshua Lukronsky. Even had I been familiar with this student, I doubt I’d have recognized him at that moment. A small boy, he no longer resembled an adolescent, but a child closer to Celia’s age, for he lacked any of the wisecracking swagger for which he was apparently known at school. His shoulders were drawn in, his cropped black hair disheveled. Hands shoved inward in his lap, he kept his wrists bent at the unnaturally severe angle of children in the advanced stages of muscular dystrophy. He sat perfectly still. He never seemed to blink. Awarded a police minder that my own role didn’t merit—I already had that feeling of being infected, contagious, quarantined—he didn’t respond as the uniformed man standing next to him tried to interest him in a glassed-in case of model police vehicles. It was quite a charming collection, all metal, some very old—vans, horse trailers, motorcycles, ’49 Fords from Florida, Philadelphia, L.A. With fatherly tenderness, the officer explained that one car was very rare, from the days that New York City police cars were green-and-white—before NYPD blue. Joshua stared blankly straight ahead. If he knew I was there at all, he did not appear to know who I was, and I was hardly going to introduce myself. I wondered why this boy had not been taken to the hospital like the others. There was no way of telling that none of the blood drenching his clothes belonged to him.
After a few minutes, a large, plump woman flew through the reception room door, swooping down on Joshua and lifting him in a single motion into her arms. “Joshua!” she cried. At first limp in her clasp, gradually those muscular-dystrophy wrists curled around her shoulders. His shirtsleeves left red smears on her ivory raincoat. The small face buried in her ample neck. I was simultaneously moved, and jealous. This was the reunion that I’d been denied. I love you so much! I’m so, so relieved you’re all right! Me, I was no longer entirely relieved that our own son was all right. From my glance in that car window, it was his very seeming all rightness that had begun to torment me.
The trio shuffled through the inside door. The officer behind the reception window ignored me. If at wit’s end, I was probably grateful for my little task with the mobile, which I worried like a rosary; dialing gave me something to do. If only for variety, I switched to trying our home phone for a while, but I kept getting the machine, and I’d hang up in the middle of that stilted recording, hating the sound of my own voice. I’d already left three, four messages, the first controlled, the last weeping—what a tape to come home to. Realizing that we were both running late, Robert had obviously taken Celia to McDonald’s; she loved their hot apple pies. Why didn’t he call me? He had my mobile number! Hadn’t Robert listened to the news? Oh, I know, McDonald’s broadcasts Muzak, and he wouldn’t necessarily switch on his car radio for such a short trip. But wouldn’t someone mention it while standing on line? How could anyone in Rockland County be talking about anything else?
By the time two officers fetched me into that plain little room to take my statement, I was so distraught that I was less than