We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [212]
As for the first tidbit I’ve withheld, I may be guilty of plain condescension. I should give you more credit, since Kevin’s escapade screamed premeditation; in another life he might have grown up to do well at, say, staging large professional conferences—anything that’s advertised as requiring “strong organizational abilities and problem-solving skills.” Hence even you realize that Thursday being staged three days before he turned the age of full legal accountability was no coincidence. He may have been virtually sixteen on Thursday, but in a statutory sense he was still fifteen, meaning that in New York state a more lenient raft of sentencing guidelines would apply, even if they threw the book at him and tried him as an adult. Kevin is sure to have researched the fact that the law does not, like his father, round up.
Still, his lawyer did locate a range of convincing expert witnesses who told alarming medical anecdotes. Typically, downhearted but mildmannered fifty-something goes on Prozac, experiences an acute personality flip into paranoia and dementia, shoots his whole family and then himself. I wonder, have you ever clutched at the pharmaceutical straw? Our good son was just one of those unfortunate few whose reaction to antidepressants was adverse, so that instead of lightening his burdens the drug plunged him into darkness? Because I really tried to believe that myself for a while, especially during Kevin’s trial.
Though that defense neither got him off completely nor released him into psychiatric care as intended, Kevin’s sentence may have been slightly more lenient for the doubt his lawyer raised over his chemical stability. After the sentencing hearing at which Kevin got seven years, I thanked his lawyer, John Goddard, outside the courthouse. I didn’t, in fact, feel very grateful at the time—seven years had never seemed so short—but I did appreciate that John had done his best at a disagreeable job. Scrambling for something of substance to admire, I commended his inventive approach to the case. I said I’d never heard of Prozac’s alleged psychotic effect on some patients or I’d never have allowed Kevin to take it.
“Oh, don’t thank me, thank Kevin,” said John easily. “I’d never heard of the psychosis thing, either. That whole approach was his idea.”
“But—he wouldn’t have had access to a library, would he?”
“No, not in pretrial detention.” He looked at me with real sympathy for a moment. “I hardly needed to lift a finger, frankly. He knew all the citations. Even the names and locations of expert witnesses. That’s a bright boy you’ve got, Eva.” But he didn’t sound upbeat. He sounded depressed.
As for the second tidbit—regarding how they do things in that faraway land where fifteen-year-olds murder their classmates—I haven’t held it back because I thought you couldn’t take it. I just didn’t want to think about it myself or subject you to it, though until this very afternoon I was living in eternal fear that the episode would repeat itself.
It was perhaps three months after Thursday. Kevin had already been tried and sentenced, and I had recently installed those robotic Saturday visits to Chatham in my routine. We had still not learned to talk to one another, and the time dragged. In those days the conceit on his part ran that my visits were an imposition, that he dreaded my arrival and applauded my departure, and that his real family was inside, among his worshipful juvenile boosters. When I informed him that Mary Woolford had just filed suit, I was surprised that he didn’t seem gratified but only the more disgruntled; as Kevin would later object, why should I get all the credit? So I said, that’s a fine how do you do, isn’t it, after I lose my husband and daughter? To get sued? He grunted something about my feeling sorry for myself.
“Don’t you?” I said. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?”
He shrugged. “Got out of this safe and sound, didn’t you? Not a scratch.”
“Did I?” I added, “And why