“Look at you!” I exclaimed when Kevin emerged. I was carefully frying Celia’s French toast completely dry, lest a little undercooked egg seem like
slime.
“What happened, were all your size-one clothes in the wash?”
“Some days you just wake up,” he said, tucking his billowing white fencing shirt into the same rippling black rayon slacks he had worn to Hudson House, “with a sense of occasion.”
In plain view, he packed the five Kryptonite locks and chains into his backpack. I assumed he’d found takers at school.
“Kevin looks really handsome,” said Celia shyly.
“Yup, your brother’s a heartbreaker,” I said. And wouldn’t he be.
I sifted a generous dusting of confectioner’s sugar over the toast, stooping by Celia’s soft blond hair to mumble, “Now don’t dawdle, you don’t want to be late for school again. You’re supposed to eat it, not make friends with it.”
I tucked her hair behind her ears and kissed the top of her head, and as I did so Kevin cut a glance toward me as he loaded the backpack with another chain. Though he’d entered the kitchen with a rare energy, now his eyes had gone dead.
“Hey, Kev!” you cried. “I ever show you how this camera works? Good knowledge of photography never hurt anybody; it’s sure paid off for me. Get over here, there’s time. I don’t know what’s got into you, but you have forty-five minutes to spare.” You pushed your greasy plate out of the way and opened the camera bag at your feet.
Unwillingly, Kevin floated over. He didn’t seem in the mood for
Gee-Dadding
this morning. As you went through the lighting and f-stop positions, I felt a pang of recognition. Your own father’s awkward version of intimacy was always to explain in far greater detail than anyone cared to hear exactly how some device worked. You didn’t share Herbert’s conviction that to take apart the clockwork of the universe was to unlock the extent of its mysteries, but you had inherited a resort to mechanics as an emotional crutch.
“This reminds me,” you said mid-instruction. “I want to shoot a roll of you at archery practice sometime soon. Capture that steely gaze and steady arm for posterity, how about it? We could do a whole photomontage for the foyer: Braveheart of the Palisades!”
Slapping his shoulder was probably a mistake; he flinched. And for the briefest of moments I appreciated what little access we ever had to what really went on in Kevin’s head, since for a second the mask fell, and his face curdled with—well, with revulsion, I’m afraid. To allow even so brief a glimpse of its workings, he must have had other things on his mind.
“Yeah.
Dad
,” he said effortfully. “That would be . . .
great
.”
Yet I chose this of all mornings to gaze upon our domestic tableau in soft focus. All teenagers hate their parents, I thought, and there was something priceless about the antipathy if you could take it. As the sun caught the fine gold of Celia’s hair while she cut her French toast into ridiculously tiny pieces and you embarked on a riff about the dangers of backlighting while Kevin twitched with impatience, I was so heartened by this Norman Rockwell moment that I considered sticking around until the kids had to leave for school, maybe giving Celia a lift myself instead of leaving the run to you. Would that I had given in to the temptation! But children need routine, I decided, and if I didn’t get a jump on the morning rush hour, there would be hell to pay on the bridge.
“Shut up!” Kevin barked suddenly at your side. “That’s
enough
. Shut
up
!”
Warily, we all three peered at this unprompted impertinence.
“I don’t
care
how your camera works,” he continued levelly. “I don’t
want
to be a location scout for a bunch of crappy products. I’m
not interested
. I’m not interested in
baseball
or the
founding fathers
or
decisive battles
of the
Civil War
. I hate
museums
and
national monuments
and
picnics
. I don’t want to memorize the
Declaration of Independence
in my spare time, or read
de Tocqueville
. I can’t stand reruns of
Tora, Tora, Tora!
or documentaries about
Dwight Eisenhower.
I don’t want to play
Frisbee
in the backyard or one more game of
Monopoly
with a sniveling, candy-ass, one-eyed midget. I don’t give a
fuck
about
stamp collecting
or
rare coins
or pressing
colorful autumn leaves
in encyclopedias. And I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with
heart-to-heart father-son talks
about aspects of my life that are
none of your business
.”
You looked stunned. I met your eyes, then just perceptibly shook my head. It was unusual for me to counsel restraint. But the pressure cooker was very popular among my mother’s generation. After an incident now mythic in my family involving
madagh
scraped off the ceiling with a broom, I’d learned at an early age that when that chittering round whistle is blowing off steam, the worst thing you can do is open the pot.
“Okay,” you said tightly, fitting your lenses back in the case. “You’re on the record.”
As abruptly as he had exploded, Kevin folded right back up, once again the complacent, unimaginative tenth-grader preparing for another humdrum day of school. I could see him shutting out your hurt feelings, one more thing in which, I suppose, he was
not interested
. For about five minutes no one said anything, and then we gradually resumed the pretense of an ordinary morning, making no mention of Kevin’s outburst the way polite people are meant to pretend they didn’t notice the release of a very loud fart. Still the smell lingered, if less of gas than of cordite.
Although by now in a hurry, I had to say good-bye to Celia twice. I stooped and brushed her hair, picked a last bit of crust from her lower lash, reminded her which books she had to take today, and then gave her a big long hug, but after I’d turned to collect my things, I noticed her still standing there where I’d left her looking stricken, hands held stiffly out from her side as if contaminated with
drydirt
. So I hoisted her by the armpits into my arms, though she was nearly eight now and supporting her full weight was hard on my back. She wrapped her legs around my waist, buried her head in my neck, and said, “I’ll miss you!” I said I would miss her, too, though I had no idea how much.
Perhaps unnerved by Kevin’s unwarranted harangue and in need of safe harbor, your own kiss good-bye was for once not an absent peck on the cheek, but feverish, open-mouthed. (Thank you, Franklin. I have relived that moment so many times now that the memory cells must be pale and broken down, like the denim of much-loved jeans.) As for my earlier uncertainty over whether children enjoy watching their parents kiss, one look at Kevin’s face settled the matter. They didn’t.
“Kevin, you have that independent study archery for gym today, don’t you?” I reminded him, keen to consolidate our normality while bustling into my spring coat. “Don’t forget to bring your kit.”
“You can count on it.”
“Also, you should make up your mind what you want to do for your birthday,” I said. “It’s only three days away, and sixteen is something of a milestone, don’t you think?”
“In some ways,” he said noncommittally. “Ever notice how
milestone
turns into
millstone
by changing only one letter?”
“What about Sunday!”
“I might be tied up.”
I was frustrated that he always made it so difficult to be nice to him, but I had to go. I didn’t kiss Kevin lately—teenagers didn’t like it—so I brushed the back of my hand lightly against his forehead, which I was surprised to find damp and cold. “You’re a little clammy. Do you feel all right?”
“Never better,” said Kevin. I was on my way out the door when he called, “Sure you don’t want to say good-bye to Celie
one more time
?”
“Very funny,” I said behind me, and closed the door. I thought he was just riding me. In retrospect, he was giving me very sound advice that I really ought to have taken.
I have no idea what it must be like to wake up with such a terrible resolve. Whenever I picture it, I see myself roll over on the pillow muttering,
On second thought, I can’t be bothered
, or at the very least,
Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow
. And tomorrow and tomorrow. Granted, the horrors we like to term “unthinkable” are altogether thinkable, and countless kids must fantasize about revenge for the thousand natural shocks that tenth-graders are heir to. It’s not the visions or even half-baked plans that set our son apart. It’s the staggering capacity to travel from plan to action.
Having racked my brains, the only analogy I’ve located in my own life is an awful stretch: all those trips to foreign countries that, up against it, I really didn’t want to take. I would ease myself through by breaking a seemingly monumental excursion into its smallest constituent parts. Rather than dare myself to spend two months in thief-riddled Morocco, I would dare myself to pick up the phone. That’s not so hard. And with a minion on its other end, I would have to say something, so I would order a ticket, taking refuge in the mercifully theoretical nature of airline schedules on dates at such marvelous remove that they could never possibly come to pass. Behold, a ticket arrives in the mail: Plan becomes action. I would dare myself to purchase histories of North Africa, and I would later dare myself to pack. The challenges, broken down, were surmountable. Until, after daring myself into a taxi and down a jetway, it would be too late to turn back. Big deeds are a lot of little deeds one after the other, and that’s what Kevin must have cottoned onto—ordering his Kryptonites, stealing his stationery, loading those chains into his backpack one by one. Take care of the components, and the sum of their parts unfolds as if by magic.
For my own part that Thursday—still plain old Thursday—I was busy; we were rushing to meet a due date at the printers. But in the odd unoccupied moment, I did reflect on Kevin’s peculiar outburst that morning. The diatribe had been signally absent the
like
s,
I mean
s,
sort of
s, and
I guess
es that commonly peppered his passable imitation of a regulation teenager. Rather than slump at an angle, he had stood upright, speaking from the center of his mouth rather than out one corner. I was certainly distressed that he would hurt his father’s feelings with such abandon, but the young man who made these stark, unmediated declarations seemed a very different boy than the one I lived with every day. I found myself hoping we would meet again, especially at such a time that this stranger-son’s state of mind was more agreeable—an unlikely prospect that to this day I continue to look forward to.
Around 6:15 P.M., there was a commotion outside my office, a conspiratorial huddling by my staff, which I interpreted as a sociable gossip as they knocked off for the day. Just as I was resigning myself to working into the evening on my own, Rose, their elected representative I suppose, knocked tentatively on my door. “Eva,” she said gravely. “Your son’s at Gladstone High School, isn’t he?”
It was already on the Internet.
The details were incomplete: “Fatalities Feared in Gladstone High Shooting.” Who and how many students had been shot was unclear. The culprit was unknown. In fact, the news flash was exasperatingly brief. “Security staff” had come upon “a scene of carnage” in the school gym, to which police were now “trying to gain access.” I know I was flustered, but it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me.
I immediately called your mobile, cursing when it was turned off; you did that all too often, treasuring the uninterrupted solitude of your 4x4 as you tooled around New Jersey searching for the right-colored cows. I appreciated that you didn’t want to hear from a rep from Kraft or your Madison Avenue minders, but you might have thought to turn it on for me. What’s the point of
having
the damned thing? I fretted. I called home but got our machine; it was a lovely spring evening, and doubtless Robert had taken Celia out in the backyard to play. The fact that Kevin didn’t pick up made my stomach churn, but I reasoned feverishly that of course he could have slunk off with Lenny Pugh, with whom he had inexplicably patched things up since the Pagorski hearing. Perhaps the trade in slavish disciples was not so brisk that a self-abasing sidekick could be easily replaced.
So I grabbed my coat and resolved to go straight to the school. As I left, my staff was already regarding me with the awe that attends those who have even the most tangential association with the cameo news flash on the America On-Line home page.
As we follow me running down to the garage to my VW, gunning out of midtown only to get stuck on the West Side Highway, let’s get one thing straight. I did think Kevin screamed in his crib out of free-floating rage, and not because he needed feeding. I fiercely believed that when he poked fun at our waitress’s “poopy face” he knew he would hurt her feelings, and that he defaced the maps on my study walls out of calculated malice, not misguided creativity. I was still convinced that he systematically seduced Violetta into clawing a layer of skin from the better part of her body and that he continued to require diapers until he was six years old not because he was traumatized or confused or slow to develop, but because he was on a full-time war-footing with his mother. I thought he destroyed the toys and storybooks I painstakingly fashioned because they were worth more to him as emblems of his own up-yours ingratitude than as sentimental playthings, and I was sure that he learned to count and read in secret deliberately to deprive me of any sense of usefulness as a parent. My certainty that he was the one who flipped the quick-release on the front wheel of Trent Corley’s bicycle was unwavering. I was under no illusion that a nest of bagworms had dropped into Celia’s backpack by itself or that she had climbed twenty feet up our white oak only to get stranded on an upper branch all by her lonesome; I believed it was no more her idea to stir together a lunch of petroleum jelly and Thai curry paste than it was to play “kidnapping” and “William Tell.” I was pretty damned sure that whatever Kevin whispered in the ear of let-us-call-her-Alice at that eighth-grade school dance, it wasn’t admiration of her dress; and however Liquid-Plumr got in Celia’s left eye, I was dead positive that her brother had something to do with it beyond his role as her noble savior. I regarded his jerking off at home with the door wide open as wanton sexual abuse—of his mother—and not the normal uncontrolled bubbling of adolescent hormones. Although I may have told Mary that Laura should
suck it up
, I found it entirely credible that our son had told her frail, underfed daughter that she was fat. It was no mystery to
me
how a hit list turned up in Miguel Espinoza’s locker, and though I took full responsibility for spreading one to my own company, I couldn’t see the hobby of collecting computer viruses as anything but disturbed and degenerate. I remained firmly of the view that Vicki Pagorski had been persecuted in a show trial of Kevin Khatchadourian’s personal contrivance. Granted, I’d been mistaken about our son’s responsibility for chucking chunks of bricks at oncoming cars on 9W, and until ten days ago I had chalked up the disappearance of a treasured photograph from Amsterdam as yet another victim of my son’s unparalleled spite. So I have, as I said, always believed the worst. But even my unnatural maternal cynicism had its limits. When Rose told me there’d been a vicious assault at Kevin’s high school and some students were feared dead, I worried for his well-being. Not for an instant did I imagine that our son was the perpetrator.