April 8, 2001
Dearest Franklin,
I don’t know if you keep up with these things, but about a week ago a Chinese fighter plane ran into an American surveillance craft over the South China Sea. The Chinese pilot was probably drowned, and the crippled American spy plane landed on the Chinese island of Hainan. There seems to be some question as to whose craft hit whose. Anyway, it’s become quite a diplomatic showdown, and now China is holding the twenty-four American crew members hostage—for an apology, of all things. I haven’t had the energy to follow who is and is not at fault, but I have been intrigued that world peace (or so they say) hangs in the balance over the sole matter of remorse. Previous to my education in such things, I might have found the situation exasperating. Just say you’re sorry then, if that will get them back! But nowadays the matter of remorse looms great to me, and it neither surprises nor frustrates me that momentous events might be decided in accordance with it. Besides, so far this Hainan conundrum is relatively simple. It is so much more often the case that an apology brings no one back. Lately, too, politics seems to have dissolved for me into a swarm of tiny, personal stories. I don’t seem to believe in it anymore. There are only people and what happens to them. Even that fracas in Florida—to me it was about a man who wanted to be president since he was a little boy. Who got so close that he could taste it. About a person and his sadness and his desperation to turn back the clock, to count again and again until the news is good at last—about his poignant denial. Similarly, I think less about trade restrictions and future arms sales to Taiwan than I do about those twenty-four young people, in a strange building with strange smells, fed meals that don’t resemble the take-out Chinese they grew up with, sleeping badly, imagining the worst—being charged as a spy and rotting in a Chinese prison while diplomats trade acid communiqués that no one lets them read. Young people who thought they were hungry for adventure until they got one. I am sometimes awed by the same naïveté of my own younger self—disheartened that Spain has trees, despairing that every unexplored frontier turns out to have food and weather. I wanted to go somewhere else, I thought. Witlessly, I conceived of myself as harboring an insatiable appetite for the exotic. Well, Kevin has introduced me to a real foreign country. I can be sure of that, since the definition of the truly foreign locale is one that fosters a piercing and perpetual yearning to go home.
A couple of these small, truly foreign experiences I have held back. Which isn’t like me. You remember how I once loved to return from a trip abroad and present you my cultural bric-a-brac, the kind of mundane how-they-do-things-elsewhere discoveries that you only make if you actually go there, like the queer little fact that in Thailand commercial loaves of bread aren’t twist-tied at the heel of the loaf, but on the top. As for the first tidbit I’ve withheld, I may be guilty of plain condescension. I should give you more credit, since Kevin’s escapade screamed premeditation; in another life he might have grown up to do well at, say, staging large professional conferences—anything that’s advertised as requiring “strong organizational abilities and problem-solving skills.” Hence even you realize that Thursday being staged three days before he turned the age of full legal accountability was no coincidence. He may have been virtually sixteen on Thursday, but in a statutory sense he was still fifteen, meaning that in New York state a more lenient raft of sentencing guidelines would apply, even if they threw the book at him and tried him as an adult. Kevin is sure to have researched the fact that the law does not, like his father, round up. Still, his lawyer did locate a range of convincing expert witnesses who told alarming medical anecdotes. Typically, downhearted but mildmannered fifty-something goes on Prozac, experiences an acute personality flip into paranoia and dementia, shoots his whole family and then himself. I wonder, have you ever clutched at the pharmaceutical straw? Our good son was just one of those unfortunate few whose reaction to antidepressants was adverse, so that instead of lightening his burdens the drug plunged him into darkness? Because I really tried to believe that myself for a while, especially during Kevin’s trial. Though that defense neither got him off completely nor released him into psychiatric care as intended, Kevin’s sentence may have been slightly more lenient for the doubt his lawyer raised over his chemical stability. After the sentencing hearing at which Kevin got seven years, I thanked his lawyer, John Goddard, outside the courthouse. I didn’t, in fact, feel very grateful at the time—seven years had never seemed so short—but I did appreciate that John had done his best at a disagreeable job. Scrambling for something of substance to admire, I commended his inventive approach to the case. I said I’d never heard of Prozac’s alleged psychotic effect on some patients or I’d never have allowed Kevin to take it. “Oh, don’t thank me, thank Kevin,” said John easily. “I’d never heard of the psychosis thing, either. That whole approach was his idea.” “But—he wouldn’t have had access to a library, would he?” “No, not in pretrial detention.” He looked at me with real sympathy for a moment. “I hardly needed to lift a finger, frankly. He knew all the citations. Even the names and locations of expert witnesses. That’s a bright boy you’ve got, Eva.” But he didn’t sound upbeat. He sounded depressed.
As for the second tidbit—regarding how they do things in that faraway land where fifteen-year-olds murder their classmates—I haven’t held it back because I thought you couldn’t take it. I just didn’t want to think about it myself or subject you to it, though until this very afternoon I was living in eternal fear that the episode would repeat itself. It was perhaps three months after Thursday. Kevin had already been tried and sentenced, and I had recently installed those robotic Saturday visits to Chatham in my routine. We had still not learned to talk to one another, and the time dragged. In those days the conceit on his part ran that my visits were an imposition, that he dreaded my arrival and applauded my departure, and that his real family was inside, among his worshipful juvenile boosters. When I informed him that Mary Woolford had just filed suit, I was surprised that he didn’t seem gratified but only the more disgruntled; as Kevin would later object, why should I get all the credit? So I said, that’s a fine how do you do, isn’t it, after I lose my husband and daughter? To get sued? He grunted something about my feeling sorry for myself. “Don’t you?” I said. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?” He shrugged. “Got out of this safe and sound, didn’t you? Not a scratch.” “Did I?” I added, “And why was that, anyway?” “When you’re putting on a show, you don’t shoot the audience,” he said smoothly, rolling something in his right hand. “You mean leaving me alive was the best revenge.” We were already way beyond revenge-for-what. I couldn’t talk about anything more to do with Thursday at that point, and I was about to resort to the old are-they-feeding-you-all-right, when my eye was drawn again by the object he kept palming from hand to hand, palpating it rhythmically with his fingers like a string of worry beads. Honestly, I just wanted to change the subject, I didn’t care at all about his toy—though if I took his fidgeting as a sign of moral discomfort in the presence of a woman whose family he had slaughtered, I was sadly mistaken. “What is that?” I asked. “What have you got there?” With a small, crafty smile, he opened his palm, displaying his talisman with the shy pride of a boy with his prize shooting marble. I stood up so quickly that my chair clattered backward onto the floor. It isn’t often that when you look at an object, it looks back. “Don’t you ever pull that out again,” I said hoarsely. “If you do, I will never come back here. Not ever. Do you hear me?” I think he knew that I meant it. Which gave him a powerful amulet to ward off these ostensibly pestilential visits from Mumsey. The fact that Celia’s glass eye has remained out of my sight since can only mean, I suppose, that, on balance, he’s glad I come.
You probably think that I’m just telling more tales, the meaner the better. What a hideous boy we have, I must be saying, to torment his mother with so ghastly a souvenir. No, not this time. It’s just that I had to tell you that story in order that you better understand the next one, from this very afternoon. You surely noticed the date. It’s the two-year anniversary. Which also means that in three days, Kevin will be eighteen. For the purposes of voting (which as a convicted felon he will be banned from doing in all but two states) and enlisting in the armed services, that’s when he officially becomes a grown-up. But on this one I’m more inclined to side with the judicial system, which tried him as an adult two years ago. To me the day on which we all formally came of age will always be April 8th, 1999. So I put in a special request to meet with our son this afternoon. Though they routinely turn down appeals to meet with inmates on birthdays, my request was granted. Maybe this is the kind of sentimentality that prison warders appreciate. When Kevin was issued in, I noticed a change in his demeanor before he said a word. All that snide condescension had fallen away, and I finally appreciated how fatiguing it must be for Kevin to generate this worldweary who-gives-a-fuck the livelong day. Given the epidemic thieving of small-sized sweats and T-shirts, Claverack has given up on its experiment in street clothes, so he was wearing an orange jumpsuit—for once one that wasn’t only normal-sized but too big for him, in which he looked dwarfed. Three days from adulthood, Kevin is finally starting to act like a little boy—confused, bereft. His eyes had shed their glaze and tunneled to the back of his head. “You don’t look too happy,” I ventured. “Have I ever?” His tone was wan. Curious, I asked, “Is something bothering you?” though the rules of our engagement proscribe such a direct and motherly solicitation. The more extraordinary, he answered me. “I’m almost eighteen, aren’t I?” He rubbed his face. “Outta here. I heard they don’t waste much time.” “A real prison,” I said. “I don’t know. This place is sure real enough for me.” “... Does the move to Sing Sing make you nervous?” “Nervous?” he asked incredulously. “ Nervous! Do you know anything about those places?” He shook his head in dismay. I looked at him in wonder. He was shaking. Over the course of the last two years, he has acquired a maze of tiny battle scars across his face, and his nose is no longer quite straight. The effect doesn’t make him look tougher, but disarranged. The scars have smudged the once sharp, Armenian cut of his features into a doughier blur. He could have been drawn by an uncertain portraitist who constantly resorts to an eraser. “I’ll still come to visit you,” I promised, bracing myself for sarcastic reproof. “Thanks. I was hoping you would.” Incredulous, I’m afraid I stared. As a test, I brought up the news from March. “You always seem to keep up with these things. So I assume you saw the stories out of San Diego last month? You have two more colleagues. ” “You mean, Andy, uh—Andy Williams?” Kevin remembered vaguely. “What a sucker. Wanna know the truth, I felt sorry for the chump. He’s been had.” “I warned you this fad would grow passé,” I said. “Andy Williams didn’t make the headlines, did you notice? Dick Cheney’s heart problems and that huge storm-that-never-happened both got bigger billing in the New York Times. And the second shooting, on its heels—with one fatality, in San Diego, too? That got almost no coverage at all.” “Hell, that guy was eighteen. ” Kevin shook his head. “I mean, really. Don’t you think he was a little old for it?” “You know, I saw you on TV.” “Oh, that.” He squirmed with a tinge of embarrassment. “It was filmed a while ago, you know. I was into a—thing.” “Yes, I didn’t have a lot of time for the thing,” I said. “But you were still—you were very articulate. You present yourself very well. Now all you have to come up with is something to say.” He chuckled. “You mean that isn’t horseshit.” “You do know what day it is, don’t you?” I introduced shyly. “Why they let me come see you on a Monday?” “Oh, sure. It’s my anniversary. ” He is finally turning that sardonicism on himself. “I just wanted to ask you—,” I began, and licked my lips. You’re going to think this curious, Franklin, but I had never put this question to him before. I’m not sure why; maybe I didn’t want to be insulted with a lot of rubbish like jumping into the screen. “It’s been two years,” I proceeded. “I miss your father, Kevin. I still talk to him. I even write to him, if you can believe it. I write him letters. And now they’re in a big messy stack on my desk, because I don’t know his address. I miss your sister, too—badly. And so many other families are still so sad. I realize that journalists, and therapists, maybe other inmates ask you all the time. But you’ve never told me. So please, look me in the eye. You killed eleven people. My husband. My daughter. Look me in the eye, and tell me why.” Unlike the day he turned to me through the police car window, pupils glinting, Kevin met my gaze this afternoon with supreme difficulty. His eyes kept shuttering away, making contact in sorties, then flickering back toward the gaily painted cinder-block wall. And at last gave up, staring a little to the side of my face. “I used to think I knew,” he said glumly. “Now I’m not so sure.” Without thinking, I extended my hand across the table and clasped his. He didn’t pull away. “Thank you,” I said. Does my gratitude seem odd? In fact, I’d harbored no preconception of what answer I wanted. I certainly had no interest in an explanation that reduced the ineffable enormity of what he had done to a pat sociological aphorism about “alienation” out of Time magazine or a cheap psychological construct like “attachment disorder” that his counselors were always retailing at Claverack. So I was astonished to discover that his answer was word-perfect. For Kevin, progress was deconstruction. He would only begin to plumb his own depths by first finding himself unfathomable. When he did pull his hand back at last, it was to reach into his coverall pocket. “Listen,” he said. “I made you something. A—well—sort of a present.” As he withdrew a dark rectangular wooden box about five inches long, I apologized. “I know it’s your birthday coming up. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll bring your present next time.” “Don’t bother,” he said, polishing the oiled wood with a wad of toilet paper. “It’d just get ripped off in here anyway.” Carefully, he slid the box across the table, keeping two fingers on the top. It wasn’t quite rectangular after all, but coffin-shaped, with hinges on one side and tiny brass hooks on the other. He must have made it in shop. The morbid shape seemed typical, of course. The gesture, however, moved me, and the workmanship was surprisingly fine. He’d given me a few Christmas presents in the olden days, but I always knew you’d bought them, and he’d never given me anything while inside. “It’s very nicely made,” I said sincerely. “Is it for jewelry?” I reached for the box, but he kept his fingers on it fast. “Don’t!” he said sharply. “I mean, please. Whatever you do. Don’t open it.” Ah. Instinctively, I shrank back. In an earlier incarnation, Kevin might have crafted this very same “present,” lined mockingly with pink satin. But he’d have relinquished it blithely—suppressing a grisly little smile as in innocent expectation I unhooked the clasps. Today it was his warning— don’t open it— that may have constituted the greatest measure of my gift. “I see,” I said. “I thought this was one of your most precious possessions. Why ever would you give it up?” I was flushed, a little shocked, a little horrified really, and my tone was stinging. “Well, sooner or later some goon was going to swipe it, and it’d get used for some cheap gag—you know, it’d turn up in somebody’s soup. Besides. It was like she was, sort of, looking at me all the time. It started to get spooky.” “She is looking at you, Kevin. So is your father. Every day.” Staring at the table, he shoved the box a little farther toward me, then removed his hand. “Anyway, I thought you might take this and, well, maybe you could, you know—” “Bury it,” I finished for him. I felt heavy. It was an enormous request, for along with his dark-stained homemade coffin I was to bury a great deal else. Gravely, I agreed. When I hugged him good-bye, he clung to me childishly, as he never had in childhood proper. I’m not quite sure, since he muttered it into the upturned collar of my coat, but I like to think that he choked, “I’m sorry.” Taking the risk that I’d heard correctly, I said distinctly myself, “ I’m sorry, too, Kevin. I’m sorry, too.”
I will never forget sitting in that civil courtroom and hearing the judge with tiny pupils announce primly that the court finds for the defendant. I’d have expected to feel so relieved. But I didn’t. Public vindication of my motherhood, I discovered, meant nothing to me. If anything, I was irate. Supposedly we were all to go home now, and I would feel redeemed. To the contrary, I knew I’d go home and feel hideous, as usual, and desolate, as usual, and dirty, as usual. I’d wanted to be cleansed, but my experience on that bench was much like a typically sweaty, gritty afternoon in a Ghana hotel room: turning on the shower to find that the water main was turned off. This disdainful rusty drip was the only baptism the law would afford me. The sole aspect of the verdict that gave me the slightest satisfaction was being stuck with my own court costs. Although the judge may not have thought much of Mary Woolford’s case, she had clearly taken a personal dislike to me, and plain animosity from key parties (ask Denny Corbitt) can cost you. Throughout the trial I had been aware that I cut an unsympathetic figure. I had disciplined myself never to cry. I’d been loath to use you and Celia for so venal a purpose as ducking liability, and so the fact that my son had not only killed his classmates but my own husband and daughter tended to get lost in the shuffle. Though I know they didn’t mean to undermine my defense, that testimony from your parents about my fatally forthcoming visit to Gloucester was disastrous; we don’t like mothers who “don’t like” their own sons. I don’t much like such mothers, either. I had broken the most primitive of rules, profaned the most sacred of ties. Had I instead protested Kevin’s innocence in the face of mountains of hard evidence to the contrary, had I railed against his “tormentors” for having driven him to it, had I insisted that after he started taking Prozac “he was a completely different boy”—well, I guarantee you that Mary Woolford and that defense fund she raised through the Internet would have been forced to pay my court costs to the final dime. Instead, my demeanor was repeatedly described in the papers as “defiant,” while my disagreeable characterizations of my own flesh and blood were submitted no-comment, to hang me out to dry. With such an ice queen for a mother, little wonder, observed our local Journal News, that KK turned bad boy. Harvey was outraged, of course, and immediately whispered that we should appeal. Paying costs was punitive, he said. He should know; he was the one who would write the bill. But me, I was cheered up. I wanted a verdict that was punitive. I had already depleted all our liquid assets for Kevin’s pricey defense and had taken out a second mortgage on Palisades Parade. So I knew immediately that I would have to sell AWAP, and I would have to sell our awful, empty house. Now that was cleansing. But since then—and throughout writing these letters to you—I have come full circle, making a journey much like Kevin’s own. In asking petulantly whether Thursday was my fault, I have had to go backward, to deconstruct. It is possible that I am asking the wrong question. In any event, by thrashing between exoneration and excoriation, I have only tired myself out. I don’t know. At the end of the day, I have no idea, and that pure, serene ignorance has become, itself, a funny kind of solace. The truth is, if I decided I was innocent, or I decided I was guilty, what difference would it make? If I arrived at the right answer, would you come home? This is all I know. That on the 11th of April, 1983, unto me a son was born, and I felt nothing. Once again, the truth is always larger than what we make of it. As that infant squirmed on my breast, from which he shrank in such distaste, I spurned him in return—he may have been a fifteenth my size, but it seemed fair at the time. Since that moment we have fought one another with an unrelenting ferocity that I can almost admire. But it must be possible to earn a devotion by testing an antagonism to its very limit, to bring people closer through the very act of pushing them away. Because after three days short of eighteen years, I can finally announce that I am too exhausted and too confused and too lonely to keep fighting, and if only out of desperation or even laziness I love my son. He has five grim years left to serve in an adult penitentiary, and I cannot vouch for what will walk out the other side. But in the meantime, there is a second bedroom in my serviceable apartment. The bedspread is plain. A copy of Robin Hood lies on the bookshelf. And the sheets are clean.
Forever your loving wife,
Eva
Copyright © 2003 by Lionel Shriver
Published by Counterpoint,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Counterpoint, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shriver, Lionel.
We need to talk about Kevin / Lionel Shriver.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-582-43887-0
1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. New York (State)—Fiction. 3. High
schools—Fiction. 4. Massacres—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H742 W4 2003
813’.54—dc21 2002152753
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