We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [37]
Harvey thought from the start that I should settle. You remember Harvey Landsdown; you thought he was self-important. He is, but he told such marvelous stories. Now he goes to other people’s dinner parties and tells stories about me.
Harvey did rattle me a bit, since he’s a get-to-the-point type. In his office, I stumbled and digressed; he messed with papers, implying that I was wasting his time or my money—same thing. We were at odds on our understanding of what constitutes truth. He wanted gist. Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile. Maybe that’s what I’m attempting here, Franklin, because though I tried to answer his questions directly, whenever I made simple, exculpatory statements like, “Of course I love my son,” I felt that I was lying and that any judge or jury would be able to tell.
Harvey didn’t care. He’s one of those attorneys who think of the law as a game, not as a morality play. I’m told that’s the kind you want. Harvey is fond of declaiming that being in the right never won anyone’s case, and he even left me with the unfocused sense that having justice on your side is a faint disadvantage.
Of course, I was not at all sure that justice was on my side, and Harvey found my hand-wringing tedious. He commanded me to stop dithering about how it looked, accepting a reputation as a Bad Mother, and he clearly couldn’t have cared less about whether I really was a bad mother. (And Franklin, I was. I was terrible at it. I wonder if you can ever forgive me.) His reasoning was straightforward economics, and I gather this is how many suits are decided. He advised that we could probably pay off the parents out of court for a great deal less than a sentimental jury might award. Crucially, there was no guarantee that we’d be compensated for court costs even if we won. So that means, I sorted out slowly, that in this country where you’re “innocent until proven guilty” someone can accuse me of whatever he wants and I could be out hundreds of thousands even if I prove the accusation groundless? Welcome to the U.S. of A., he said gaily. I miss you to rail to. Harvey wasn’t interested in my exasperation. He found these legal ironies amusing, because it was not his company started from a single discount plane ticket that was on the line.
Looking back, Harvey was absolutely right—about the money, that is. And I have reflected since on what drove me to make Mary take her case against me to trial in defiance of sound legal counsel. I must have been angry. If I had done anything wrong, it seemed to me that I had already been punished roundly. No court could have sentenced me to anything worse than this arid life in my poky duplex, with my chicken breast and cabbage, my tremulous halogen bulbs, my robotic biweekly visits to Chatham—or perhaps even worse, to nearly sixteen years of living with a son who, as he asserted, did not want me as a mother and who gave me almost daily good reason to not want him as a son. All the same, I really ought to have worked out for myself that if a jury’s damning verdict would never assuage Mary’s grief, a more kindly judgment would never temper my own sense of complicity, either. I’m sad to say that I must have been motivated in some not inconsiderable part by a desperation to be publicly exonerated.
Alas, it was not public exoneration that I truly craved, which may be why I sit here night after night and try to record every incriminating detail.