We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [55]
Clearly, God’s children are meant to savor His glorious gifts without petulance, for Siobhan’s uncanny forbearance could only have issued from catechism. No amount of wheedling would elicit whatever was driving her abed every Friday. So if only to give her permission, I complained myself.
“I have no regrets about my travels,” I began one early evening as she prepared to go, “but it’s a shame I met Franklin so late. Four years just the two of us wasn’t nearly enough time to get tired of him! I think it must be nice if you meet your partner in your twenties, with long enough as a childless couple to, I don’t know, get a little bored even. Then in your thirties you’re ready for a change, and a baby is welcome.”
Siobhan looked at me sharply, and though I expected censure in her gaze I caught only a sudden alertness. “Of course, you don’t mean Kevin isn’t welcome.”
I knew the moment mandated hurried reassurances, but I couldn’t furnish them. This would happen to me sporadically in the coming years: I would do and say what I was supposed to week upon week without fail until abruptly I hit a wall. I would open my mouth and That’s a really pretty drawing, Kevin or If we tear the flowers out of the ground they’ll die, and you don’t want them to die, do you? or Yes, we’re so awfully proud of our son, Mr. Cartland would simply not come out.
“Siobhan,” I said reluctantly. “I’ve been a little disappointed.”
“I know I’ve been poorly, Eva—”
“Not in you.” I considered that she may have understood me perfectly well and had misinterpreted me on purpose. I shouldn’t have burdened this young girl with my secrets, but I felt strangely impelled. “All the bawling and the nasty plastic toys . . . I’m not sure quite what I had in mind, but it wasn’t this.”
“Sure you might have a touch of postpartum—”
“Whatever you call it, I don’t feel joyful. And Kevin doesn’t seem joyful either.”
“He’s a baby!”
“He’s over a year and a half. You know how people are always cooing, He’s such a happy child! Well, in that instance there are unhappy children. And nothing I do makes the slightest bit of difference.”
She kept fiddling with her daypack, nestling the last of her few possessions into its cavity with undue concentration. She always brought a book to read for Kevin’s naps, and I finally noticed that she’d been stuffing the exact same volume in that daypack for months. I’d have understood if it was a Bible, but it was only an inspirational text—slim, the cover now badly stained—and she had once described herself as an avid reader.
“Siobhan, I’m useless with babies. I’ve never had much rapport with small children, but I’d hoped ... Well, that motherhood would reveal another side of myself.” I met one of her darting glances. “It hasn’t.”
She squirmed. “Ever talk to Franklin, about how you’re feeling?”
I laughed with one ha. “Then we’d have to do something about it. Like what?”
“Don’t you figure the first couple of years is the tough bit? That it gets easier?”
I licked my lips. “I realize this doesn’t sound very nice. But I keep waiting for the emotional payoff.”
“But only by giving do you get anything back.”
She shamed me, but then I thought about it. “I give him my every weekend, my every evening. I’ve even given him my husband, who has no interest in talking about anything but our son, or in doing anything together besides wheeling a stroller up and down the Battery Park promenade. In return, Kevin smites me with the evil eye, and can’t bear for me to hold him. Can’t bear much of anything, as far as I can tell.”
This kind of talk was making Siobhan edgy; it was domestic heresy. But something seemed to cave in her, and she couldn’t keep up the cheerleading. So instead of forecasting what delights were in store for me once Kevin became a little person in his own right, she said gloomily, “Aye, I know what you mean.”
“Tell me, does Kevin—respond to you?”
“Respond?” The