Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“ Onto the cars?” you asked, “ or just empty lanes?”

“Wouldn’t be much sport in empty lanes ,” snarled the second officer.

“It was mostly water babies, Dad!” said Kevin behind the police. I know his voice was changing, but whenever he spoke to you, Franklin, it skipped up an octave.

“Wasn’t water balloons this motorist called in about,” said the second, chunkier cop, who sounded the more worked up. “It was rocks. And we checked the highway on either side of the overpass—littered with chunks of brick.”

I nudged in urgently. “Was anyone hurt?”

“Thankfully, there were no direct hits,” said the first officer. “Which makes these boys real, real lucky.”

“I don’t know about lucky,” Lenny sniveled, “when you get nabbed by the cops.”

“Gotta have luck to push it, kid,” said the policeman with the hotter head. “Ron, I still say we should—”

“Look, Mr. Plastic,” the first cop overrode. “We’ve run your son through the computer, and his record’s clean. Far as I can tell, he comes from a good family.” ( Good , of course, meaning rich.) “So we’re going to let this young man off with a warning. But we take this sort of thing real serious—”

“Hell,” the second cop interrupted, “a few years back, some creep tossed a quarter in front of a woman doing seventy-five? Shattered the windscreen and drove right into her head!”

Ron shot his partner a glance that would get them the more quickly to Dunkin’ Donuts. “Hope you give this young man a good talking to.”

“And how,” I said.

“I expect he’d no idea what kind of risk he was taking,” you said.

“Yeah,” said Cop No. 2 sourly. “That’s the whole attraction of throwing bricks from an overpass. It seems so harmless.”

“I appreciate your leniency, sir,” Kevin recited to the primary. “I’ve sure learned my lesson, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”

Policemen must get this sir stuff a lot; they didn’t look bowled over. “The leniency won’t happen again, friend,” said the second cop, “that is for damned sure.”

Kevin turned to the hothead, meeting the man’s eyes with a glitter in his own; they seemed to share an understanding. Though picked up by the police for (as far as I knew) the first time in his life, he was unruffled. “And I appreciate the lift home. I’ve always wanted to ride in a police car— sir .”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” the cop replied jauntily, as if smacking gum. “But my money says that’s not your last spin in a black-and-white— friend .”

After a bit more fawning gratitude from both of us, they were on their way, and as they left the porch, I heard Lenny whining, “We almost outran you guys you know, ’cause you guys are like, totally out of shape… !”

You had seemed so sedate and courteous through this exchange that when you wheeled from the door I was surprised to observe that your face was livid and lit with rage. You grabbed our son by the upper arm and shouted, “You could have caused a pileup, a fucking catastrophe!”

Flushed with a morbid satisfaction, I stepped back to leave you to it. Cursing , no less! Granted, had one of those bricks indeed smashed someone’s windshield I’d readily have forgone this petty jubilation for the full-blown anguish at which I would later get so much practice. But spared calamity, I was free to muse with the singsong of the playground, You’re gonna get in trou-ble . Because I’d been so exasperated! The unending string of misadventures that trailed in Kevin’s wake never seemed, as far as you were concerned, to have anything to do with him. Finally, a tattletale besides me—the police, whom Mr. Reagan Republican had no choice but to trust—had caught our persecuted innocent red-handed, and I was going to enjoy this. Moreover, I was glad for you too to experience the bizarre helplessness of being this supposedly omnipotent parent and being completely flummoxed by how to impose a punishment that has the slightest deterrent effect. I wanted you to apprehend for yourself the lameness of sending a fourteen-year-old for a “time-out,” the hackneyed predictability of “grounding” when, besides, there was never anywhere that he wanted to go, and the horror of realizing that, if he did launch out to his archery range in defiance of your prohibition on practicing the sole activity that he seemed to enjoy, you would have to decide whether to physically tackle him to the lawn. Welcome to my life, Franklin, I thought. Have fun .

Celia wasn’t used to seeing you manhandle her brother, and she’d started to wail. I hustled her from the foyer back to her homework at the dining table, soothing that the policemen were our friends and just wanted to make sure we were safe, while you rustled our stoic son down the hall to his room.

In such an excitable state, I had difficulty concentrating as I coaxed Celia back to her primer about farm animals. The yelling subsided surprisingly soon; you sure didn’t burn out that fast when you were mad at me. Presumably you’d switched to the somber disappointment that for many children is more devastating than a lost temper, though I’d tried stern gravity ad nauseum with our firstborn, and this was one more impotence I was glad for you to sample. Why, it was all I could do to stop myself from creeping down the hall and listening at the crack of the door.

When you emerged at last, you closed Kevin’s door behind you with ministerial solemnity, and your expression as you entered the dining area was curiously at peace. I reasoned that getting all that shame and disgust out of your system must have been cleansing, and when you motioned me over to the kitchen, I assumed that you were going to explain what kind of punishment you’d levied so that we could exact it as a team. I hoped that you’d come up with some novel, readily enforceable penalty that would get to our son in a place—I’d never found it—where it hurt. I doubted he was now remorseful about the brick-throwing itself, but maybe you had convinced him that outright juvenile delinquency was a tactical error.

“Listen,” you whispered. “The whole caper was Lenny’s idea, and Kevin went along because Lenny was only proposing water babies at first. He thought the balloons would just make a splash—and you know how kids think that kind of thing is funny. I told him even a little balloon exploding might have startled a driver and been dangerous, and he says he realizes that now.”

“What,” I said. “What—about—the bricks.”

“Well—they ran out of water babies. So Kevin says that before he knew it, Lenny had pitched a stone—maybe it was a piece of brick—when a car was coming. Kevin says he immediately told Lenny not to do that, since somebody could get hurt.”

“Yeah,” I said thickly. “That sure sounds like Kevin.”

“I guess Lenny managed to get a few more bits of brick over the side before Kevin leaned on him hard enough that he cut it out. That must have been when somebody with a mobile called the cops. Apparently they were still up there, you know, just hanging out, when the police pulled up on the shoulder. It was spectacularly dumb—he admits that, too—but for a kid who’s never had trouble with the law before those blinking blue lights must be pretty scary, and without thinking—”

“Kevin’s a very bright boy, you always say.” Everything that came out of my mouth was heavy and slurred. “I sense he’s done plenty of thinking .”

“Mommy—?”

“Sweetheart,” I said, “go back and do your homework, okay? Daddy’s telling Mommy a really good story, and Mommy can hardly wait to hear how it ends.”