We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [6]
It may have been disingenuous of me to imply at the start of my last letter that when we conferred at the end of a day, I told all. To the contrary, one of the things that impels me to write is that my mind is huge with all the little stories I never told you.
Don’t imagine that I’ve enjoyed my secrets. They’ve trapped me, crowded me in, and long ago I’d have liked nothing more than to pour out my heart. But Franklin, you didn’t want to hear. I’m sure you still don’t. And maybe I should have tried harder at the time to force you to listen, but early on we got on opposite sides of something. For many couples who quarrel, just what they are on opposite sides of may be unformed, a line of some sort, an abstraction that divides them—a history or floating grudge, an insensible power struggle with a life of its own: gossamer. Perhaps in times of reconciliation for such couples the unreality of that line assists its dissolve. Look, I can jealously see them noting, there is nothing in the room; we can reach across the sheer air between us. But in our case, what separated us was all too tangible, and if it wasn’t in the room it could walk in of its own accord.
Our son. Who is not a smattering of small tales but one long one. And though the natural impulse of yarn spinners is to begin at the beginning, I will resist it. I have to go further back. So many stories are determined before they start.
What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t. But a Pandoran perversity draws me to prize open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself. I knew this about myself in advance, too: that I was just the sort of woman who had the capacity, however ghastly, to rue even so unretractable a matter as another person. But then, Kevin didn’t regard other people’s existence as unretractable—did he?
I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to avoid it. I may not know what to call it, that Thursday. The atrocity sounds torn from a newspaper, the incident is minimizing to the point of obscenity, and the day our own son committed mass murder is too long, isn’t it? For every mention? But I am going to mention it. I wake up with what he did every morning and I go to bed with it every night. It is my shabby substitute for a husband.
So I have racked my brain, trying to reconstruct those few months in 1982 when we were officially “deciding.” We were still living in my cavernous loft in Tribeca, where we were surrounded by arch homosexuals, unattached artists you deplored as “self-indulgent,” and unencumbered professional couples who dined out at Tex-Mex nightly and flopped about at the Limelight until 3 A.M. Children in that neighborhood were pretty much on a par with the spotted owl and other endangered species, so it’s little wonder that our deliberations were stilted and abstract. We even set ourselves a deadline, for pity’s sake—my thirty-seventh birthday that August—since we didn’t want a child who could still be living at home in our sixties.
Our sixties! In those days, an age as bafflingly theoretical as a baby. Yet I expect to embark to that foreign land five years from now with no more ceremony than boarding a city bus. It was in 1999 that I made a temporal leap, although I didn’t notice the aging so much in the mirror as through the aegis of other people. When I renewed my driver’s license this last January, for example, the functionary at the desk didn’t act surprised I was all of fifty-four, and you remember I was once rather spoiled on this front, accustomed to regular coos over how I looked at least ten years younger. The coos came to a complete halt overnight. Indeed, I had one embarrassing