We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [81]
I snatched the gun.
“Aw!” you cried. “Eva, moving’s such a pain in the behind!” (Behind, that was the way we talked now.) “Can’t we have a little fun?”
I had the squirt gun now, so one easy exit was to turn a tonal corner: to squirt you gleefully on the nose, and we could have this rambunctious family riot whereby you wrest the gun away and toss the squirt gun to Kevin . . . . And we’d laugh and fall all over each other and we might even remember it years later, that mythic squirt-gun fight the day we moved to Gladstone. And then one of us would return the toy to Kevin and he’d go back to soaking the movers and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on to get him to quit because I’d been squirting people too. Alternatively, I could do the killjoy thing, which I did, and put the gun in my purse, which I did.
“The movers peed their pants,” you told Kevin, “but Mommer pooped the party.”
Of course I’d heard other parents talk about the unfair goodcop /bad-cop divide, how the good cop was always the kid’s favorite while the bad cop did all the heavy lifting and I thought, what a fucking cliché, how did this happen to me? I’m not even interested in this stuff.
Kevin’s voodoo alter ego marked the gun’s location in my purse. Most boys would have started to cry. Instead he turned his bird-bone grimace mutely to his mother. From preschool, Kevin was a plotter. He knew how to bide his time.
Since a child’s feelings are bruisable, his privileges few, his chattel paltry even when his parents are well-to-do, I’d been given to understand that punishing one’s own child was terribly painful. Yet in truth, when I commandeered Kevin’s squirt gun, I felt a gush of savage joy. As we followed the moving van to Gladstone in the pickup, the continuing possession of Kevin’s beloved toy engorged me with such pleasure that I withdrew it from my purse, forefinger on the trigger, riding shotgun. Strapped between us in the front seat, Kevin lifted his gaze from my lap to the dashboard with theatrical unconcern. Kevin’s bearing was taciturn, his body slack, but the mask gave him away: Inside he was raging. He hated me with all his being, and I was happy as a clam.
I think he sensed my pleasure and resolved to deprive me of it in the future. He was already intuiting that attachment—if only to a squirt gun—made him vulnerable. Since whatever he wanted was also something I might deny him, the least desire was a liability. As if in tribute to this epiphany, he pitched the mask on the pickup floor, kicked it absently with his tennis shoe, and broke a few teeth. I don’t imagine he was such a precocious boy—such a monster—that he had conquered his every earthly appetite by the age of four and a half. He still wanted his squirt gun back. But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
When we drove up, the house looked even more hideous than I’d remembered, and I wondered how I would make it through the night without starting to cry. I hopped out of the cab. Kevin could now unstrap himself, and he scorned assistance. He stood on the running board so that I couldn’t shut the door.
“Give me my gun back now.” This was no wear-Mom-down whine, but an ultimatum. I wouldn’t be given a second chance.
“You were a jerk, Kevin,” I said breezily, lifting him to the ground by his underarms. “No toys for jerks.” I thought, hey, I could come to enjoy being a parent. This is fun.
The squirt gun leaked, so I didn’t want to stash it back in my purse. As the movers began to unload, Kevin followed me to the kitchen. I hoisted myself onto the counter and slid his squirt gun with my fingertips on top of the cupboards.
I was busy directing what went where and may not have returned to the kitchen for twenty minutes.
“Hold it right there, mister,” I said. “Freeze.”
Kevin had shoved one box next to a pile of two to create a stairway to the counter, onto which one