We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [35]
Baby what did you expect—Baby what did you expect—
The track had started to skip.
Eva
December 12, 2000
Dear Franklin,
Well, I had no desire to linger at the agency today. The staff has gone from good-hearted jousting to all-out war. Observing the showdowns in our small office without taking sides has lent these scenes the slightly comic, unaffecting quality of television with the sound off.
I’m a little at a loss as to how “Florida” has become a race issue, except in the way that sooner or later everything becomes a race issue in this country—sooner, as a rule. So the three other Democrats here have been throwing terms like “Jim Crow” at the two beleaguered Republicans, who huddle together in the back room and speak in low tones that the rest construe as the conspiratorial mutter of shared bigotry. Funny; before the election none of these people displayed the least interest in what was generally agreed to be a dreary contest.
Anyway, today some Supreme Court decision was due, and the radio was on all day. The staff’s recriminations flew so fast and furious that more than one customer, abandoned at the counter, simply walked out. At length I did the same. Whereas the two conservatives tend to argue nakedly for their side, the liberals are always weighing in on behalf of truth, justice, or humanity. Though once a staunch Democrat, I long ago gave up on defending humanity. It’s beyond me on most days to defend myself.
Then, while I do hope this correspondence hasn’t degenerated into shrill self-justification, I worry equally that I may seem to be laying the groundwork for claiming that Kevin is all my fault. I do indulge that sometimes, too, gulping down blame with a powerful thirst. But I did say indulge. There’s a self-aggrandizement in these wallowing mea culpas, a vanity. Blame confers an awesome power. And it’s simplifying, not only to onlookers and victims but to culprits most of all. It imposes order on slag. Blame conveys clear lessons in which others may take comfort: if only she hadn’t—, and by implication makes tragedy avoidable. There may even be a fragile peace to be found in the assumption of total responsibility, and I see that calm in Kevin on occasion. It is an aspect that his keepers confuse with remorselessness.
But for me this greedy gorging on fault never works. I am never able to get the full story inside me. It’s larger than I am. It has damaged too many people, aunts and cousins and best friends whom I will never know and would not recognize if we met. I cannot at once contain the suffering of so many family dinners with one empty chair. I haven’t anguished that the photo on the piano is forever tainted because that was the snapshot given to the newspapers or because sibling portraits on either side continue to mark occasions of greater maturity—college graduations, weddings—while the static high school yearbook photo loses color in the sun. I haven’t been privy to the month-by-month deterioration of marriages once robust; I haven’t sniffed the sickly sweet waft of gin off the breath of a formerly industrious realtor at advancingly earlier hours of the afternoon. I haven’t felt the weight of all those cartons dragged into a van after a neighborhood lush with oaks, bubbling with smooth-rocked creeks, and alive with the laughter of other people’s healthy children has suddenly become intolerable overnight. It seems as if for me to feel guilty in any meaningful way, I should have to suspend all these losses in my head. Yet like those car games in which you recite, I’m going on a trip, and I’m going to take an ambling aardvark, a babbling baby, a capering caterpillar . . . , I always blank on an element or two before the end of the alphabet. I start to juggle Mary’s