We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [214]
“I’ll still come to visit you,” I promised, bracing myself for sarcastic reproof.
“Thanks. I was hoping you would.”
Incredulous, I’m afraid I stared. As a test, I brought up the news from March. “You always seem to keep up with these things. So I assume you saw the stories out of San Diego last month? You have two more colleagues.”
“You mean, Andy, uh—Andy Williams?” Kevin remembered vaguely. “What a sucker. Wanna know the truth, I felt sorry for the chump. He’s been had.”
“I warned you this fad would grow passé,” I said. “Andy Williams didn’t make the headlines, did you notice? Dick Cheney’s heart problems and that huge storm-that-never-happened both got bigger billing in the New York Times. And the second shooting, on its heels—with one fatality, in San Diego, too? That got almost no coverage at all.”
“Hell, that guy was eighteen.” Kevin shook his head. “I mean, really. Don’t you think he was a little old for it?”
“You know, I saw you on TV.”
“Oh, that.” He squirmed with a tinge of embarrassment. “It was filmed a while ago, you know. I was into a—thing.”
“Yes, I didn’t have a lot of time for the thing,” I said. “But you were still—you were very articulate. You present yourself very well. Now all you have to come up with is something to say.”
He chuckled. “You mean that isn’t horseshit.”
“You do know what day it is, don’t you?” I introduced shyly. “Why they let me come see you on a Monday?”
“Oh, sure. It’s my anniversary.” He is finally turning that sardonicism on himself.
“I just wanted to ask you—,” I began, and licked my lips. You’re going to think this curious, Franklin, but I had never put this question to him before. I’m not sure why; maybe I didn’t want to be insulted with a lot of rubbish like jumping into the screen.
“It’s been two years,” I proceeded. “I miss your father, Kevin. I still talk to him. I even write to him, if you can believe it. I write him letters. And now they’re in a big messy stack on my desk, because I don’t know his address. I miss your sister, too—badly. And so many other families are still so sad. I realize that journalists, and therapists, maybe other inmates ask you all the time. But you’ve never told me. So please, look me in the eye. You killed eleven people. My husband. My daughter. Look me in the eye, and tell me why.”
Unlike the day he turned to me through the police car window, pupils glinting, Kevin met my gaze this afternoon with supreme difficulty. His eyes kept shuttering away, making contact in sorties, then flickering back toward the gaily painted cinder-block wall. And at last gave up, staring a little to the side of my face.
“I used to think I knew,” he said glumly. “Now I’m not so sure.”
Without thinking, I extended my hand across the table and clasped his. He didn’t pull away. “Thank you,” I said.
Does my gratitude seem odd? In fact, I’d harbored no preconception of what answer I wanted. I certainly had no interest in an explanation that reduced the ineffable enormity of what he had done to a pat sociological aphorism about “alienation” out of Time magazine or a cheap psychological construct like “attachment disorder” that his counselors were always retailing at Claverack. So I was astonished to discover that his answer was word-perfect. For Kevin, progress was deconstruction. He would only begin to plumb his own depths by first finding himself unfathomable.
When he did pull his hand back at last, it was to reach into his coverall pocket. “Listen,” he said. “I made you something. A—well—sort of a present.”
As he withdrew a dark rectangular wooden box about five inches long, I apologized. “I know it’s your birthday coming up. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll bring your present next time.”
“Don’t bother,” he said, polishing the oiled wood with a wad of toilet paper. “It’d just get ripped off in here anyway.”
Carefully, he slid the box across the table, keeping two fingers on the top. It wasn’t quite rectangular after all, but coffin-shaped, with hinges