Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

I owed him one. He knew I owed him one. And I would owe him one for a very long time.

Driving back home, I chattered ( What Mommer did was very, very wrong, and she is so, so sorry —though this distancing device of the third person must have cast my regrets in a dubious light, as if I were already blaming the incident on my imaginary friend). Kevin said nothing. His expression aloof, almost haughty, the fingers of his plastered right arm tucked Napoleonically in his shirt, he sat upright in the front seat and surveyed the flashes of the Tappan Zee Bridge through the side window, for all the world like a triumphant general, wounded nobly in battle, now basking in the cheers of the crowd.

I enjoyed no such equipoise. I might have escaped the police and social services, but I was condemned to run one more gauntlet. Whether up against the wall I might have contrived some cock-and-bull about bumping into Kevin for Dr. Goldblatt, I could not imagine locking eyes and flinging patent nonsense at you.

“Hi! Where were you guys?” you shouted when we walked into the kitchen. Your back was turned as you finished slathering peanut butter on a Ritz cracker.

My heart was thumping, and I still had no idea what I was going to say. So far, I had never wittingly done anything that would imperil our marriage—or our family —but I was sure that if anything would push us to the brink, this was it.

“—Jesus, Kev!” you exclaimed with a mouth covered in crumbs, swallowing hard without having chewed. “What the heck happened to you ?”

You brushed your hands hastily and plunged to your knees before Kevin. My skin prickled all over, as if someone had just switched on the voltage and I were an electric fence. I had that distinctive presentiment of I-have-one-more-second-or-two-after-which-nothing-will-ever-be-thesame-again, the same limp apprehension of spotting an oncoming car in your lane when it’s too late to turn the wheel.

But headlong collision was averted at the last minute. Already accustomed to trusting your son’s version of events over your wife’s, you had gone straight to Kevin. This once you were mistaken. Had you asked me, I promise—or at least I like to think—that, with bowed head, I’d have told you the truth.

“I broke my arm.”

“I can see that. How’d that happen?”

“I fell.”

“Where’d you fall?”

“I had poopy pants. Mommer went to get more wipes. I fell off the changing table. On—onto my Tonka dump truck. Mommer took me to Doctor Goldbutt.”

He was good. He was very, very good; you may not appreciate how good. He was smooth—the story was ready. None of the details were inconsistent or gratuitous; he had spurned the extravagant fantasies with which most children his age would camouflage a spilled drink or broken mirror. He had learned what all skilled liars register if they’re ever to make a career of it: Always appropriate as much of the truth as possible. A wellconstructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact, which will as easily make a pyramid as a platform. He did have poopy pants. He remembered, correctly, that the second time I changed him that afternoon I had finished the open box of Wet Wipes. He had, more or less, fallen off the changing table. His Tonka dump truck was indeed—I checked later that night—on the nursery floor at the time. Furthermore, I marveled at his having intuited that simply falling three feet onto the floor would probably not be enough to break his arm; he would need to land haplessly on some hard metal object. And however short, his tale was laced with elegant touches: Using Mommer when he had eschewed the cutesy sobriquet for months lent his story a cuddly, affectionate cast that fantastically belied the real story; Doctor Goldbutt was playfully scatological, setting you at ease—your happy, healthy boy was already back to normal. Perhaps most impressive of all, he did not, as he had at the emergency room, allow himself the one collusive glance in my direction that might have given the game away.

“Gosh,” you exclaimed. “That must have hurt!”

“The orthopedist says that for an open fracture,” I said, “—it broke the skin—it was pretty clean, and should mend well.” Now Kevin and I did look at each other, just long enough to seal the pact. I had ransomed my soul to a six-year-old.

“Are you going to let me sign your cast?” you asked. “That’s a tradition, you know. Your friends and family all sign their names and wish you to get well soon.”

“Sure, Dad! But first I got to go to the bathroom.” He sauntered off, his free hand swinging.

“Did I hear that right?” you asked quietly.

“Guess so.” Rigid for hours—fear is an isometric exercise—I was exhausted, and for once the last thing on my mind was our son’s toilet training.

You put an arm around my shoulders. “Man, that must have given you a scare.”

“It was all my fault,” I said, squirming.

“No mother can watch a kid every second.”

I wished you wouldn’t be so understanding. “Yes, but I should have—”

“Sh-sh!” You raised a forefinger, and a delicate trickling emitted from the hall bathroom: music to the parental ear. “What do you think did the trick, just the shock?” you whispered. “Or maybe he’s scared of landing back on that changing table.”

I shrugged. Despite appearances, I did not believe that by flying into a rage at yet another soiled diaper I had terrorized our boy into using the toilet. Oh, it had everything to do with our set-to in the nursery, all right. I was being rewarded .

“This calls for celebration. I’m going to go in and congratulate that guy—”

I put a hand on your arm. “Don’t push your luck. Let him do it quietly, don’t make a big deal out of it. Kevin prefers his reversals off-camera.”

That said, I knew better than to read pee-pee in the potty as admission of defeat. He had won the larger battle; acceding to the toilet was the kind of trifling concession that a magnanimous if condescending victor can afford to toss a vanquished adversary. Our six-year-old had successfully tempted me into violating my own rules of engagement. I had committed a war crime—for which, barring my son’s clement silence, my very husband would extradite me to The Hague.

When Kevin returned from the bathroom tugging up his pants with one hand, I proposed that we have big bowl of popcorn for dinner, adding obsequiously, with lots and lots of salt! Drinking in the music of the normal life that I had minutes before kissed good-bye—your clamorous banging of pots, the clarion clang of our stainless steel bowl, the merry rattle of kernels—I’d a foreboding that this crawling-on-my-belly-like-a-reptile mode could endure almost indefinitely so long as Kevin kept his mouth shut.

Why didn’t he blab? By all appearances, he was protecting his mother. All right. I’ll allow for that. Nevertheless, a balance-sheet calculation may have entered in. Before a distant expiry date, a secret accrues interest by dint of having been kept; compounded by lying, Know how I really broke my arm, Dad? might have even more explosive impact in a month’s time. Too, so long as he retained the principle of his windfall in his account, he could continue to take out loans against it, whereas blowing his wad all at once would plunge his assets back to a six-year-old’s allowance of $5 a week.

Further, after all my sanctimonious singsong lectures (How would you feel… ?), I had provided him with a rare opportunity to annex the moral high ground—whose elevation would afford a few novel views, even if this was not, at length, a territory destined to suit his preferences in real estate. Mr. Divide-and-Conquer may also have intuited that secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who’s in on them. My chatter to you about Kevin’s needing to opt for baths over showers to keep the cast dry was artificially bright and stilted; when I asked Kevin whether he wanted parmesan on the popcorn, the question was rich with appeal, terror, and slavish gratitude.