We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [209]
When I turned on the light in the kitchen, I thought how unlike you it was to have left all those greasy breakfast dishes. The skillet for your sausage was upright in the drainer, but not the one for the French toast, and most of the plates and juice glasses were still on the counter. Sections of the Times splayed on the table, though taking the paper out to the stack in the garage every morning was one of your neatnik obsessions. Flicking the next light switch, I could see at a glance that no one was in the dining room, living room, or den; that was the advantage of a house with no doors. Still I walked through every room. Slowly.
“Franklin?” I called. “Celia?” The sound of my own voice unnerved me. It was so small and tinny, and nothing came back.
As I advanced down the hall, I paused at Celia’s bedroom and had to force myself to walk in. It was dark. Her bed was empty. The same, in the master bedroom, the bathrooms, out on the deck. Nothing. Nobody. Where were you? Had you gone looking for me? I had a mobile. You knew the number. And why wouldn’t you have taken the truck? Was this a game? You were hiding, giggling in a closet with Celia. This of all nights you chose to play a game?
The house was empty. I felt a surging, regressive urge to call my mother.
I walked through it twice. Though I had checked the rooms before, the second time through I felt only deeper trepidation. It was as if there were someone in the house, a stranger, a burglar, and he was just out of view, stalking behind me, ducking under cabinets, clutching a cleaver. Finally, shaking, I returned to the kitchen.
The previous owners must have installed those floodlights in the back in expectation of lavish garden parties. We didn’t incline toward garden parties and rarely used the floods, but I was familiar with the switch: just to the left of the pantry, beside the sliding glass doors that opened to our banked backyard. This was where I used to stand and watch you throw a baseball with Kevin, feeling wistful, left out. I felt a little that way at that moment—left out. As if you’d held some family celebration of great sentimental significance, and of all people I hadn’t been invited. I must have kept my hand on that switch a good thirty seconds before I flipped it. If I had it to do over again, I’d have waited a few moments more. I would pay good money for every instant in my life without that image in it.
On the crest of the hill, the archery range lit up. Soon I would understand the drollery behind Kevin’s lunchtime phone call to Lamont, when he’d apparently told Robert not to bother to pick up Celia from school, since she was “unwell.” Backed against the target was Celia—standing at attention, still and trusting, as if eager to play “William Tell.”
As I wrenched the door open and flailed up the rise, my haste was irrational. Celia would wait. Her body was affixed to the target by five arrows, which held her torso like stick-pins tacking one of her crimped self-portraits to a class bulletin board. As I stumbled nearer calling her name, she winked at me, grotesquely, with her head knocked back. Though I remembered putting in her prosthesis that morning, it was missing now.
There are things we know with our whole being without ever having to actively think them, at least with that verbal self-conscious prattle that chatters on the surface of our minds. It was like that; I knew what else I would find without having to specify it to myself outright. So when, scrambling up to the archery range, I tripped over something sticking from bushes, I may have sickened, but I wasn’t surprised. I recognized the obstacle in an instant. I had bought pairs of chocolate-brown Stove brogans from Banana Republic often enough.
Oh, my beloved. I may need too badly