Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“This city has the best private schools in the country.”

“New York private schools are snobbish and cutthroat. Kids in this town start worrying about getting into Harvard at the age of six.”

“What about the tiny matter that your wife doesn’t want to leave this city?”

“You had twenty years to do whatever you wanted. I did, too. Besides, you said you yearned to spend our money on something worthwhile. Now’s your chance. We should buy a house. With land and a tire swing.”

“My mother never made a single major decision based on what was good for me .”

“Your mother has locked herself in a closet for forty years. Your mother is insane. Your mother is hardly the parent to look to as a role model.”

“I mean that when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I’m a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can’t believe this.” I flounced onto the couch. “I want to go to Africa, and you want to go to New Jersey .”

“What’s this about Africa? Why do you keep bringing it up?”

“We’re going ahead with AFRIWAP. The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide are starting to squeeze us badly in Europe.”

“What does this edition have to do with you?”

“The continent is huge. Someone has to do a preliminary canvass of countries.”

“Someone other than you . You still don’t get it, do you? Maybe it was a mistake for you to think of motherhood as ‘another country.’ This is no overseas holiday. It’s serious—”

“ We’re talking about human lives, Jim! ”

You didn’t even smile. “How would you feel if he lost a hand reaching through that elevator gate? If he got asthma from all this crap in the air? If some loser kidnapped him from your grocery cart?”

“The truth is, you want a house,” I charged. “ You want a yard. You have this dorky Norman Rockwell vision of Daddydom, and you want to coach Little League.”

“Got that right.” You straightened victoriously at the changing table, Kevin in his blazing fresh Pampers on your hip. “And there are two of us, and one of you.”

It was a ratio I was destined to confront repeatedly.

Dear Franklin,

I agreed to visit my mother for Christmas, so I’m writing from Racine. At the last minute—when he found out I was coming—Giles decided that his family would spend the holiday with his in-laws instead. I could choose to feel injured, and I do miss my brother if only as someone with whom to mock my mother, but she’s getting so frail now at seventy-eight that our patronizing despair on her behalf seems unfair. Besides, I understand. Around Giles and his kids, I never mention Kevin, Mary’s lawsuit; a little traitorously, I never even mention you. But through benign discussion of the snow, whether to put pine nuts in the sarma, I still personify a horror that, in defiance of my mother’s locked doors and sealed windows, has gotten inside.

Giles resents my having co-opted the role of family tragic figure. He only moved as far as Milwaukee, and the child at closer hand is always chopped liver, while for decades I made a living from being as far away from Racine as I could get. Like De Beers restricting the supply of diamonds, I made myself scarce, a cheap gambit in Giles’s view for artificially manufacturing the precious. Now I have stooped even lower, using my son to corner the market on pity. Having kept his head below the parapet working for Budweiser, he’s in grudging awe of anyone who’s been in the newspaper. I keep trying to find some way of telling him that this is the kind of dime-store fame that the most unremarkable parent could win in the sixty seconds it takes an automatic assault rifle to fire a hundred bullets. I don’t feel special.

You know, there’s a peculiar smell in this house that I used to find rank. Remember how I used to insist that the air was thin? My mother rarely opens a door, much less airs the place out, and I was convinced that the distinctive headache that always hit me on arrival was the beginnings of carbon dioxide poisoning. But now the close, clinging admixture of stale lamb grease, dust, and mildew sharpened with the medicinal reek of her colored inks comforts me somehow.

For years I wrote off my mother as having no grasp of my life, but after Thursday I came to terms with the fact that I’d made no effort to understand hers. She and I had been distant for decades not because she was agoraphobic but because I’d been remote and unsparing. Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. During my traveling days, I must have seemed uppity and superior, and my new desperation for safety has restored my status as a proper child. For my part, I have come to recognize—since any world is by definition self-enclosed and, to its inhabitants, all there is—that geography is relative. To my intrepid mother, the living room could be Eastern Europe, my old bedroom Cameroon.

Of course, the Internet is the best and worst thing that ever happened to her, and she is now able to order anything from support hose to grape leaves over the Web. Consequently, the multitude of errands I used to run for her whenever I was home is already dispatched, and I feel a little useless. I suppose it’s good that technology has granted her independence—if that’s what it’s called.

My mother, by the way, doesn’t avoid talking about Kevin at all. This morning as we opened our few presents beside her spindly tree (ordered on-line), she noted that Kevin rarely misbehaved in the traditional sense, which always made her suspicious. All children misbehave, she said. You were better off when they did so in plain view. And she recalled our visit when Kevin was about ten—old enough to know better, she said. She’d just finished a stack of twenty-five one-of-a-kind Christmas cards commissioned by some wealthy Johnson Wax exec. While we were preparing khurabia with powdered sugar in the kitchen, he systematically snipped the cards into ragged paper snowflakes. (You said—a mantra—he was “just trying to help.”) That boy had something missing , she pronounced, in the past tense, as if he were dead. She was trying to make me feel better, though I worried that what Kevin was missing was a mother like mine.

In fact, I trace the flowering of my present filial grace to a gasping phone call the night of Thursday itself. To whom else was I to turn but my mother? The primitiveness of the tie was sobering. For the life of me, I can’t remember a single time that Kevin—distraught over a scraped knee, a falling-out with a playmate—has called me.

I could tell from her collected, formal greeting, Hello, Sonya Khatchadourian speaking , that she hadn’t seen the evening news.

Mother ? was all I could manage—plaintive, grade-school. The ensuing heavy breathing must have sounded like a crank call. I felt suddenly protective. If she lived in mortal dread of a trip to Walgreens, how would she confront the vastly more appreciable terror of a murderous grandson? For pity’s sake, I thought, she’s seventy-six, and she already lives through a mail slot. After this, she’ll never pull the covers off her head.

But Armenians have a talent for sorrow. You know, she wasn’t even surprised ? She was somber but remained composed, and for once, even at her advanced age, she acted and sounded like a real parent. I could depend on her, she assured me, an assertion that hitherto would have made me scoff. It was almost as if all that dread of hers finally redeemed itself; as if on some level she was relieved that her whole batten-down-the-hatches gestalt hadn’t proved baseless. After all, she’d been here before, where the rest of the world’s tragedy lapped at her shore. She may have hardly left the house, but of everyone in our family, she most profoundly appreciated how the careless way adjacent people live their lives can threaten all you hold dear. Most of her extended family had been slaughtered, her very husband picked off by Japanese like skeet; Kevin’s rampage fit right in. Indeed, the occasion seemed to liberate something in her, not only love but bravery, if they are not in many respects the same thing. Mindful that the police were bound to expect me to remain on hand, I declined her invitation to Racine. Gravely, my shut-in mother offered to fly to me .