We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [89]
“Remorse?” I provided dryly. “What could he conceivably regret? Now he’s somebody, isn’t he? And he’s found himself, as they said in my day. Now he doesn’t have to worry about whether he’s a freak or a geek, a grind or a jock or a nerd. He doesn’t have to worry if he’s gay. He’s a murderer. It’s marvelously unambiguous. And best of all,” I took a breath, “he got away from me.”
“Sounds like there’s a silver lining, then.” She held herself at an inch or two greater distance than women in earnest conversation are wont, eyeing me at an angle that departed from a straight line by about thirty degrees. These subtle removals seemed almost scientific: I was a specimen. “Like, you get away from him, too.”
I gestured helplessly at the waiting room. “Not quite.”
Glancing at her Swatch, she displayed a growing awareness that in what could prove a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, she had to work in the one question she had always wanted to ask KK’s actual mother before it was too late. I knew what was coming: “You ever figure what it was drove him to—you ever figure out why?”
It’s what they all want to ask—my brother, your parents, my coworkers, the documentary makers, Kevin’s psychiatric consult, the gladstone_carnage.com web-page designers, though interestingly never my own mother. After I steeled myself to accept Thelma Corbitt’s gracious invitation for coffee the week after her son’s funeral (though she never asked aloud, and she spent most of our session reading me his poems and showing me what seemed like hundreds of snapshots of Denny in school plays), it came off her in pulses, it clutched at my dress: a craving for comprehension that verged on hysteria. Like all those parents, she’d been wracked by the apprehension that the entire gory mess whose sticky pieces we would both be picking up for the rest of our lives was unnecessary. Quite. Thursday was an elective, like printmaking, or Spanish. But this incessant badgering, this pleading refrain of why, why, why—it’s so grossly unfair. Why, after all I have borne, am I held accountable for ordering their chaos? Isn’t it enough that I suffer the brunt of the facts without shouldering this unreasonable responsibility for what they mean? That young woman at Claverack meant no harm I’m sure, but her all-toofamiliar question made me bitter.
“I expect it’s my fault,” I said defiantly. “I wasn’t a very good mother—cold, judgmental, selfish. Though you can’t say I haven’t paid the price.”
“Well, then,” she drawled, closing up that two inches and swiveling her gaze thirty degrees to look me in the eye. “You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it’s the fault of somebody who’s dead.”
Stolid in my guilt, clutching it like a girl with a stuffed bunny, I failed to follow.
“Greenleaf?” shouted the guard. My companion tucked the candy into her pocketbook, then rose. I could see her calculating that she had just enough time to slip in one more quick question-and-answer or to deliver a parting thought. With Sean Connery, that’s always the quandary, isn’t it: to siphon information, or to pour. Somehow it impressed me that she chose the latter.
“It’s always the mother’s fault, ain’t it?” she said softly, collecting her coat. “That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or a she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don’t teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. Don’t you believe that old guff. Don’t you let them saddle you with all that killing.”
“Loretta Greenleaf!”
“It hard to be a momma. Nobody ever pass a law say ’fore you get pregnant you gotta be perfect. I’m sure you try the best you could. You here, in this dump, on a nice Saturday afternoon? You still trying. Now you take care of yourself, honey. And you don’t be talking any more a that nonsense.”
Loretta Greenleaf held my hand and squeezed it. My eyes sprang hot. I squeezed her hand back, so hard and