We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [76]
So, as I told your parents, I went to Denny’s funeral. I sat in the back. I wore black, though in funerals these days that is old-fashioned. And then in the receiving line to convey my condolences, I offered Thelma my hand and said, “I’m so sorry for my loss.” That’s what I said, a miscue, a gaffe, but I thought it would be worse to correct myself—“your loss, I mean.” To your parents, I was blithering. They stared.
Finally I took refuge in logistics. The legal system is itself a machine, and I could describe its workings, as your father had once explained to me, with poetic lucidity, the workings of a catalytic converter. I said that Kevin had been arraigned and was being held without bail, and I was hopeful that the terminology, so familiar from TV, would comfort; it failed to. (How vital, the hard glass interface of that screen. Viewers don’t want those shows spilling willy-nilly into their homes, any more than they want other people’s sewage to overflow from their toilets.) I said I’d hired the best lawyer I could find—meaning, of course, the most expensive. I thought your father would approve; he himself always bought top-shelf. I was mistaken.
He intruded dully, “What for?”
I had never heard him ask that question of anything in his life. I admired the leap. You and I had always pilloried them behind their backs as being spiritually arid.
“I’m not sure, though it seemed expected ... To get Kevin off as lightly as possible, I guess.” I frowned.
“Is that what you want?” asked your mother.
“No . . . What I want is to turn back the clock. What I want is to never have been born myself, if that’s what it took. I can’t have what I want.”
“But would you like to see him punished?” your father pressed. Mind, he didn’t sound wrathful; he hadn’t the energy.
I’m afraid I laughed. Just a dejected huh! Still, it wasn’t appropriate. “I’m sorry,” I explained. “But good luck to them. I tried for the better part of sixteen years to punish Kevin. Nothing I took away mattered to him in the first place. What’s the New York state juvenile justice system going to do? Send him to his room? I tried that. He didn’t have much use for anything outside his room, or in it; what’s the difference? And they’re hardly going to shame him. You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”
“He could at least be kept from hurting anyone else,” your father submitted.
A defective product is recalled, and withdrawn from the market. I said defiantly, “Well, there is a campaign on, to try him as an adult and give him the death penalty.”
“How do you feel about that?” asked your mother. Good grief, your parents had asked me if Wing and a Prayer would ever go public; they had asked if I thought those steam gadgets pressed trousers as well as ironing. They had never asked what I felt.
“Kevin is no adult. But will he be any different when he is one?” (They may be technically different specialties, but Workplace Massacre is really just School Shooting Grows Up.) “Honestly, there are some days,” I looked balefully out their bay window, “I wish they would give him the death penalty. Get it all over with. But that might be letting myself off the hook.”
“Surely you don’t blame yourself, my dear!” your mother chimed, though with a nervousness; if I did, she didn’t want to hear about it.
“I never liked him very much, Gladys.” I met her eyes squarely, mother-to-mother. “I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don