We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [94]
“So what would you have done?” I said. “With a little boy who insisted on messing his pants until he was old enough for first grade?”
Kevin leaned further onto his elbow, his bicep flat on the table. “Know what they do with cats, don’t you. They do it in the house, and you shove their faces into their own shit. They don’t like it. They use the box.” He sat back, satisfied.
“That’s not that far from what I did, is it?” I said heavily. “Do you remember? What you drove me to? How I finally got you to use the bathroom?”
He traced a faint white scar on his forearm near the elbow with a note of tender possessiveness, as if stroking a pet worm. “Sure.” There was a different quality to this affirmation; I felt he truly remembered, whereas these other recollections were post hoc.
“I was proud of you,” he purred.
“You were proud of yourself,” I said. “As usual.”
“Hey,” he said, leaning forward. “Most honest thing you ever done.”
I stirred, collecting my bag. I may have craved his admiration once, but not for that; for anything but that.
“Hold on,” he said. “I answered your question. Got one for you.”
This was new. “ All right,” I said. “Shoot.”
“Those maps,” he said.
“What about them,” I said.
“Why’d you keep them on the walls?”
It’s only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin “remembers” the incident at all. He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young.
“I kept them up for my sanity,” I said. “I needed to see something you’d done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn’t all in my head.”
“Yeah,” he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. “Know what you mean.”
I promise to explain, Franklin, but right now I just can’t.
Eva
JANUARY 17, 2001
Dear Franklin,
I’m sorry to have left you dangling, and I’ve been dreading an explanation ever since. In fact, driving to work this morning, I had another trial flashback. Technically, I committed perjury. I just didn’t think I owed that beady-eyed judge (a congenital disorder I’d never seen before, inordinately small pupils, provided her the dazed, insensate look of a cartoon character who’s just been hit over the head with a frying pan) what for a decade I’d kept from my own husband.
“Ms. Khatchadourian, did you or your husband ever hit your son?” Mary’s attorney leaned threateningly into the witness stand.
“Violence only teaches a child that physical force is an acceptable method of getting your way,” I recited.
“The court can only agree, Ms. Khatchadourian, but it’s very important that we clarify in no uncertain terms for the record: Did you or your husband ever physically abuse Kevin while he was in your care?”
“Certainly not,” I said firmly, and then muttered again for good measure, “certainly not.” I rued the repetition. There’s something dodgy about any assertion one feels obliged to make twice.
As I left the stand, my foot caught on a floorboard nail, pulling the black rubber heel off my pump. I limped back to my chair, reflecting, better a broken shoe than a long wooden nose.
But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never used to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator’s credo that one doesn’t so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into