Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

There came an afternoon in July that, per tradition, Kevin had soiled his diapers once and been cleaned up with the whole diaper cream and talcum routine, only to complete the evacuation of his bowels twenty minutes later. Or so I assumed. But this time he outdid himself. This was the same afternoon that, after I had insisted he write a sentence that was meaningful about his life and not one more tauntingly inert line about Sally, he wrote in his exercise book, “In kendergarden evrybody says my mother looks rilly old.” I’d turned beet-red, and that was when I sniffed another telltale waft. After I’d just changed him twice . He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I lifted him to a stand by the waist, pulling his Pampers open to make sure. I lost it. “How do you do it?” I shouted. “You hardly eat anything, where does it come from?”

A rush of heat rippled up through my body, and I barely noticed that Kevin was now dangling with his feet off the carpet. He seemed to weigh nothing, as if that tight, dense little body stocked with such inexhaustible quantities of shit was packed instead with Styrofoam peanuts. There’s no other way to say this. I threw him halfway across the nursery. He landed with a dull clang against the edge of the stainless steel changing table. His head at a quizzical tilt, as if he were finally interested in something, he slid, in seeming slow motion, to the floor.

Dear Franklin,

So now you know.

I had rash hopes when I first rushed over to him that he was all right—he looked unmarked—until I rolled him over to reveal the arm he fell on. His forearm must have struck the edge of the changing table when for the first time, as you once remarked in jest, our son had learned to fly. It was bleeding and a little crooked and bulging in the middle with something white poking out and I felt sick. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I whispered. Yet however weak with remorse, I was still intoxicated from a moment that may put the lie to my preening incomprehension of Thursday . On its far side, I was aghast. But the very center of the moment was bliss. Hurtling our little boy I-didn’t-care-where-besides-away, I had heedlessly given over, like Violetta, to clawing a chronic, torturous itch.

Before you condemn me utterly, I beg you to understand just how hard I’d been trying to be a good mother. But trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one. Distrusting my every impulse from the instant he was laid on my breast, I’d followed a devout regime of hugging my little boy an average of three times a day, admiring something he did or said at least twice, and reciting I love you, kiddo or You know that your Daddy and I love you very much with the predictable uniformity of liturgical professions of faith. But too strictly observed, most sacraments grow hollow. Moreover, for six solid years I’d put my every utterance on the five-second delay of call-in radio shows, just to make sure I didn’t broadcast anything obscene, slanderous, or contrary to company policy. The vigilance came at a cost. It made me remote, halting, and awkward.

When hoisting Kevin’s body in that fluid adrenal lift, for once I’d felt graceful, because at last there was an unmediated confluence between what I felt and what I did. It isn’t very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness. For two seconds I’d felt whole, and like Kevin Khatchadourian’s real mother. I felt close to him. I felt like myself—my true, unexpurgated self—and I felt we were finally communicating.

As I swept a shock of hair from his moist forehead, the muscles of Kevin’s face worked furiously; his eyes screwed up and his mouth grimaced into a near-smile. Even when I ran to fetch that morning’s New York Times and slipped it under his arm he did not cry. Holding the paper under the arm—I still remember the headline by his elbow, “More Autonomy for Baltics Stirs Discomfort in Moscow”—I helped him to his feet, asking if anything else hurt and he shook his head. I started to pick him up, another shake; he would walk. Together we shuffled to the phone. It’s possible that he wiped away the odd tear when I wasn’t looking, but Kevin would no more suffer in plain view than he would learn to count.

Our local pediatrician Dr. Goldblatt met us at Nyack Hospital’s tiny, crushingly intimate emergency room, where I felt certain that everyone could tell what I’d done. The notice for the “New York Sheriff’s Victim Hotline” beside the registration window seemed posted specially for my son. I talked too much and said too little; I babbled to the admissions nurse about what had happened but not how. Meantime Kevin’s unnatural self-control had mutated into the bearing of a martinet; he stood straight with his chin lifted, and turned at right angles. Having assumed responsibility for supporting his arm with the newspaper, he allowed Dr. Goldblatt to hold his shoulder as he marched down the hall but shook off my hand. When he entered the orthopedic surgeon’s examining room, he about-faced in the doorway to announce briskly, “I can see the doctor by myself.”

“Don’t you want me to keep you company, in case it hurts?”

“You can wait out there,” he commanded, the muscles rippling in his clenched jaw the only indication that it hurt already.

“That’s quite a little man you’ve got there, Eva,” said Dr. Goldblatt. “Sounds like you got your orders.” To my horror, he closed the door.

I did, I really did want to be there for Kevin. I was desperate to reestablish that I was a parent he could trust, not a monster who would hurl him about the room at a moment’s notice like a vengeful apparition from Poltergeist. But, yes, I was also in dread that Kevin would tell the surgeon or Benjamin Goldblatt what I’d done. They have laws about these things. I could be arrested; my case could be written up in the Rockland County Times in an appalled sidebar. I could, as I had so tastelessly joked that I would welcome, have Kevin taken away from me for real. At a minimum I might have to submit to mortifying monthly visits from some disapproving social worker sent to check my son for bruises. However much I deserved rebuke, I still preferred the slow burn of private self-excoriation to the hot lash of public reproof.

So as I stared glaze-eyed into the glassed-in case preserving gushy letters to the nursing staff from satisfied customers, I scrambled for soft-core rewrites. Oh, doctor, you know how boys exaggerate. Throw him? He was running headlong down the hall, and when I walked out of the bedroom I bumped into him, by accident… Then he, ah, of course he fell, hard, against—against the lamp stand…! I sickened myself, and every whitewash I concocted sounded preposterous. I had plenty of time to stew in my own juices on one of those hard, sea-green metal chairs in the waiting room, too; a nurse informed me that our son had to undergo surgery to have his “bone ends cleansed,” a procedure I was more than happy to have remain opaque.

But when Kevin emerged three hours later with his blindingly white cast, Dr. Goldblatt patted our son on the back and admired what a brave young man I had raised, while the orthopedic surgeon impersonally detailed the nature of the break, the dangers of infection, the importance of keeping the cast dry, and the date Kevin should return for follow-up care. Both doctors were kind enough to omit mention of the fact that the staff had been obliged to change our son’s dirty diapers; Kevin no longer smelled. My head bobbed dumbly up and down until I stole a quick glance at Kevin, who met my eyes with the clear, sparkling gaze of perfect complicity.