We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [45]
Oh, please don’t. I know what you’d say. I was exhausted. I’d had a thirty-seven-hour labor and it was ridiculous to think I’d be capable of feeling anything but weary and numb. And it had been absurd to imagine fireworks; a baby is a baby. You’d goad me to remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeered. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around—well, it just didn’t seem that different. Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn’t count.
Besides, you would cajole, parenthood isn’t something that happens in an instant. The fact of a baby—when so recently there was none—is so disconcerting that I probably just hadn’t made the whole thing real to myself yet. I was dazed. That’s it, I was dazed. I wasn’t heartless or defective. Besides, sometimes when you’re watching yourself too hard, scrutinizing your own feelings, they flee, they elude capture. I was self-conscious, and I was trying too hard. I had worked myself up into a kind of emotional paralysis. Didn’t I just observe that these spontaneous outpourings of high passion are matters of faith? So my belief had flickered; I had allowed the underfear temporarily to get the best of me. I just needed to relax and let nature take its course. And for God’s sake, to get some rest. I know you’d say all these things, because I said them to myself. And they didn’t make a dent—in my sense that the whole thing was going wrong from the start, that I was not following the program, that I had dismally failed us and our newborn baby. That I was, frankly, a freak.
While they stitched up the tearing, you offered to take Kevin again, and I knew I should protest. I didn’t. At being relieved of him, my gratitude was soul-destroying. If you want to know the truth, I was angry. I was frightened, I was ashamed of myself, but I also felt cheated. I wanted my surprise party. I thought, if a woman can’t rely on herself to rise to an occasion like this, then she can’t count on anything; from this point onward the world was on its ear. Prostrate, with my legs agape, I made a vow: that while I might have learned to expose my “private” parts for all the world to see, I would never reveal to anyone on earth that childbirth had left me unmoved. You had your unspeakable—“Never, ever tell me that you regret our own kid”; now I had mine. Reminiscing in company about this moment later, I would reach for that word, indescribable. Brian was a splendid father. I would borrow my good friend’s tenderness for the day.
Eva
December 18, 2000
Dear Franklin,
Tonight was our office Christmas party, which isn’t easy to pull off with six people fresh from one another’s throats. We have little in common, but in general I am glad for their companionship—not so much for heart-to-hearts over a sandwich as for quotidian exchanges about package deals in the Bahamas. (I’m sometimes so grateful for the busywork of flights to book that I could weep.) Likewise, the simple adjacency of warm bodies supplies the deepest of animal comfort.
The manager was kind to take me into her employ. Thursday having wounded so many people in this area, Wanda did worry at first that folks might start to avoid her premises just to keep from thinking about it. Yet to be fair to our neighbors, it is often an exceptionally heartfelt-sounding season’s greetings that tips me off that a customer recognizes who I am. It’s the staff whom I’ve disappointed. They must have hoped that rubbing up against