We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

I wake up with what he did every morning and I go to bed with it every night. It is my shabby substitute for a husband.

like someone who gives you a gift of a single carved ebony elephant, and suddenly you get this idea that it might be fun to start a collection.

“I knew exactly what I was doing.” He leaned onto his elbows. “And I’d do it again.” “I can see why,” I said primly, gesturing to the windowless room whose walls were paneled in vermilion and chartreuse; I have no idea why they decorate prisons like Romper Room. “It’s worked out so well for you.” “Just swapped one shithole for another.” He waved his right hand with two extended fingers in a manner that betrayed he’s taken up smoking. “Worked out swell.”

“I’ll see you in two weeks,” when I realized Kevin had been staring straight at me, whereas his every other glance had been sidelong. That stopped me, unnerved me, and made me wonder why I had ever wanted him to look me in the eye.

“You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga mother with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you’re not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don’t be dragging your ass back here on my account.” Then he added, “Because I hate you.”

“I often hate you, too, Kevin,” and turned heel.

Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me.

I have been exiled to this rarefied class, the mother of one of those “Columbine boys,”

Kevin has turned me into a foreigner again, in my own country.

For the most part, these brushes against a parallel universe in which they never do come home—for which there is an explanation, but one that will divide your whole life into before and after—vanish without a trace.

deep down inside I was a brat. While you came up with names (for boys), I wracked my brain for what in all this—the diapers, the sleepless nights, the rides to soccer practice—I was meant to be looking forward to.

But any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks without picking up the pace, without avoiding the eye contact that might connote challenge or invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is a dangerous animal.

Maybe Talking Heads isn’t in The Book. Maybe by playing ‘Psycho Killer’ we’re feeding him Bad Thoughts. Better look it up.”

You were the one powering through all those parental how-tos, about breathing and teething and weaning, while I read a history of Portugal.

Kevin was two weeks late. Looking back, I am superstitiously convinced that he was foot-dragging even in the womb—that he was hiding. Perhaps I was not the only party to this experiment who had reservations.

In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations—with not only suffering, but defeat.

Thus even tragedy can be accompanied by a trace of relief.

But if I extracted one lesson from my tenth birthday party, it was that expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.

you fall in love with your own children. You don’t just love them. You fall in love. And that moment, when you lay eyes on them for the first time—it’s indescribable.

I’d never found solace in being just like everybody else.

It curled up falsely; it evaporated with revelatory rapidity when I turned from his crib. Is that where Kevin got it? In prison, that marionette smile, as if pulled up by strings.

I was eating badly and sleeping badly and showering at most every three days; I saw no one and rarely got out because Kevin’s rages, in public, were not socially acceptable; and daily, I faced a purple churn of insatiable fury while rehearsing to myself with dull incomprehension, I’m supposed to love this.

hip. “And there are two of us, and one of you.” It was a ratio I was destined to confront repeatedly.

If she lived in mortal dread of a trip to Walgreens, how would she confront the vastly more appreciable terror of a murderous grandson?

I’d never conceived of myself as someone who dwelled upon what other people thought, but hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

Had we never discussed what I envisioned? You must have had some idea. My fantasy house would be old, Victorian. If it had to be big it would be high, three stories and an attic, full of nooks and crannies whose original purpose had grown obsolete—slave quarters and tackle rooms, root cellars and smokehouses, dumbwaiters and widow’s walks. A house that was falling to bits, that dripped history as it dropped slates, that cried out for fiddly Saturday repairs to its rickety balustrade, while the fragrant waft of pies cooling on counters drifted upstairs. I’d furnish it with secondhand sofas whose floral upholstery was faded and frayed, garage-sale drapes with tasseled tiebacks, ornate mahogany sideboards with speckled-looking glass. Beside the porch swing, struggling geraniums would spindle out of an old tin milking

Yet what strikes me now is not your foreboding, but your capacity to ignore it.

I allowed to Thelma that it might help me to express my own sorrow for her son’s passing, and for once I realized that I wasn’t simply going through the motions, saying what I was supposed to.

I almost stopped her from going on because it seemed easier for me to know as little as possible about her boy, but she clearly believed that we would both be better off if I knew just who my son had murdered.

I said that I’d seen him in Streetcar the year before and that (stretching the truth) he’d been terrific. She seemed so pleased, if only that her boy wasn’t just a statistic to me, a name in the newspaper,

Then she said she wondered whether I didn’t have it harder than any of them. I backed off. I said, that couldn’t be fair; after all, at least I still had my son, and the next thing she said impressed me. She said, “Do you? Do you really?” I didn’t answer that, but thanked her for her kindness,

You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”

“I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don’t always like you.’ But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, ‘I’m not oblivious to you—that is, you can still hurt my feelings—but I can’t stand having you around.’ Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, ‘I like you.’ I wonder if just enjoying your kid’s company isn’t more important.”

Whether we were the victims of bad luck or bad genes or bad culture was a matter for shamans or biologists or anthropologists to divine, but not the courts.

“Kevin, I told you to stop it. Don’t squirt these nice men who are only trying to help us one more time, and I mean it.” Naturally I only managed to imply that the first time I hadn’t meant it. An intelligent child takes the calculus of this-time-I’m-serious-so-last-time-I-wasn’t to its limit and concludes that all his mother’s warnings are horseshit.

Franklin, what good were those parenting books of yours? Next thing I know you’re stooping beside our son and borrowing his dratted toy. I hear muffled giggling and something about Mommer and then you are squirting me. “Franklin, that’s not cute. I told him to quit. You’re not helping.”

“The movers peed their pants,” you told Kevin, “but Mommer pooped the party.”

“Hold it right there, mister,” I said. “Freeze.” Kevin had shoved one box next to a pile of two to create a stairway to the counter, onto which one of the movers had slid a box of dishes, making another step. But he had waited for the sound of my footsteps before climbing the cabinet shelves themselves. (In Kevin’s book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.)

“Kevin’s been very, very bad!” I sputtered. “Now we’re going to have to take that gun away for a very, very, very long time!” “Aw, he’s earned it, haven’t you, kiddo? Man, that climb took guts. Real little monkey, aren’t you?”

For our new home’s christening dinner the next night we bought steaks, and I wore my favorite caftan, a white-on-white brocade from Tel Aviv. That same evening Kevin learned to fill his squirt gun with concord grape juice. You thought it was funny.

In all, I may have been borderline rich, but I’d never owned much, and aside from the silk hangings from Southeast Asia, a few carvings from West Africa, and the Armenian rugs from my uncle, we dispensed with most of the detritus of my old Tribeca life in frighteningly short order.

Since our aesthetic reinvention coincided with my sabbatical from AWAP, I felt as if I were evaporating.

I’ve long taken pride in my powers of navigation, for I’m better than the average bear at translating from two dimensions to three, and I’ve learned to use rivers, railroads, and the sun to find my bearings. (I’m sorry, but what else can I boast about now? I’m getting old, and I look it. I work for a travel agency, and my son is a killer.)

Three-year-olds aren’t interested in the chemistry of digestion; they’ve simply hit on the magic word that always provokes a response. But Kevin had a real why phase. He thought my wallpaper an incomprehensible waste of time, as just about everything adults did also struck him as absurd. It didn’t simply perplex him but enraged him, and so far Kevin’s why phase has proved not a passing developmental stage but a permanent condition.

The study’s was shut. “Hey, kid,” I called, turning the knob, “when you’re this quiet you make me nervous—” My wallpaper was spidery with red and black ink. The more absorbent papers had started to blotch. The ceiling, too, since I’d papered that as well; craning on the ladder had been murder on my back. Drips from overhead were staining one of my uncle’s most valuable Armenian carpets, our wedding present. The room was so whipped and wet that it looked as if a fire alarm had gone off and triggered a sprinkling system,

He was standing on my study chair, bent in concentration; he did not even look up. The filling hole was small, and though he was pouring intently, my burnished oak desk was awash in spatter. His hands were drenched. “Now,” he announced quietly, “it’s special.”

I contend with strangers so infrequently now—I still prefer booking flights in the back room at Travel R Us—that during small transactions I panic. Maybe I was desperate to have a positive effect on someone else’s life, if only by providing the means to a Mars Bar. At

“But Kevin’s never been interested in food. When he was little I was afraid he would starve, until I figured out that he would eat as long as I wasn’t watching. He didn’t like to be seen needing it—as if hunger were a sign of weakness. So I’d leave a sandwich where he was sure to find it, and walk away. It was like feeding a dog. From around the corner I’d see him cram it in his mouth in two or three bites, looking around, making sure nobody saw. He caught me peeking once, and spat it out. He took the half-chewed bread and cheddar and mashed it onto the plate glass door. It stuck. I left it there for the longest time. I’m not sure why.”

his day is agreeably regimented from breakfast to lights-out. And now he lives in a world where being pissed off all day long is totally normal. I think he even feels a sense of community,” I allowed. “Maybe not with the other inmates themselves. But their prevailing humors—disgust, hostility, derision—are like old friends.”