We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [210]
With a good twenty minutes remaining before they had to leave for school, you’d let the kids go out to play. In fact, it would have encouraged you that for once the two of them were horsing around together—bonding. You dawdled through the Times, though it was the Home C-section on a Thursday, which wouldn’t entice you. So you started on the breakfast dishes. You heard a scream. I don’t doubt that you were out the sliding doors in a flash. From the bottom of the hill, you went for him. You were a robust man, even in your fifties, still skipping rope forty-five minutes a day. It would have taken a lot to stop a man like you in his tracks. And you almost made it, too—a few yards from the crest, with the arrows raining.
So here is my theory: I believe you paused. Outside on the deck, with our daughter pinioned to an archery target with an arrow through her chest, while our firstborn pivoted on his mound and sighted his own father down the shaft of his Christmas crossbow, you simply didn’t believe it. There was such a thing as a good life. It was possible to be a good dad, to put in the weekends and the picnics and the bedtime stories, and so to raise a decent, stalwart son. This was America. And you had done everything right. Ergo, this could not be happening.
So for a single, deadly moment this overweening conviction—what you wanted to see—fatally interposed itself. It is possible that your cerebrum even managed to reconfigure the image, to remix the sound track: Celia, pretty make-the-best-of-it Celia, darling look-on-the-bright-side Celia, is once more inured to her disability and tossing her fine gold hair cheerfully into the spring breeze. She isn’t screaming, she’s laughing. She’s shrieking with laughter. The only reason Kevin’s helpful girl Friday could conceivably be standing right in front of the target is to faithfully collect her brother’s spent arrows—ah, Franklin, and wouldn’t she. As for your handsome young son, he has been practicing archery for six years. He has been scrupulously instructed by well-compensated professionals, and he is nothing if not safety conscious. He would never point a loaded crossbow at another person’s head, least of all at his own father’s.
Clearly, the sunlight had played some visual trick. He is merely waving an upraised arm. He must be hoping, without saying as much—he is a teenager, after all—to apologize for lashing out at breakfast with those harsh, ugly repudiations of everything his father has tried to do for him. He is interested in how the Canon works, and he hopes you’ll explain what “f-stop” means another time. In truth he deeply admires his father’s enterprise in having seized upon such a quirky profession, one that allows such creative latitude and independence. It’s just awkward for an adolescent boy. They get competitive at this age. They want to take you on. Still the boy feels awful now, for having let fly. The fit of pique was all a lie. He treasures all those trips to Civil War battlefields, if only because war is something that only men can understand with other men, and he’s learned one heck of a lot from museums. Back in his room some nights, he takes out those autumn leaves you two collected on the grounds of Theodore Roosevelt’s ancestral home and pressed inside the Encyclopedia Britannica last year. Seeing that the colors are beginning to fade reminds him of the mortality of all things, but especially of his own father, and he cries. Cries. You will never see it; he will never tell you. But he doesn’t have to. See? The waving? He’s waving for you to bring the camera. He’s changed his mind, and with another five minutes left before he has to catch the bus, he wants you to take some photographs after all—to start the montage, Braveheart of the Palisades, for the foyer.
This masterful remake may not have lasted more than a second or two before it corrupted, as a frozen frame will