Free We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver Page B

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. The hours that had elongated into lifetimes suddenly collapse like a fan. So even though the salty terror in my gums tasted familiar, I couldn’t recall a specific instance when I had paced our loft before, head swimming with cataclysms: an aneurysm, an aggrieved postal worker with an automatic in Burger King.
    By 11:00, I was making vows.
    I gulped a glass of sauvignon blanc; it tasted like pickle juice. This was wine without you. The moussaka, its dry, dead hulk: This was food without you. Our loft, rich with the international booty of baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import outlet: This was our home without you. Objects had never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory. Your remnants mocked me: the jump rope limp on its hook; the dirty socks, stiff, caricatured deflations of your size eleven feet.
    Oh, Franklin, of course I knew that a child can’t substitute for a husband, because I had seen my brother stooped from the pressure to be the “little man of the house”; I had seen the way it tortured him that Mother was always searching his face for resemblances to that ageless photo on the mantle. It wasn’t fair. Giles couldn’t even remember our father, who died when he was three and who had long since transformed from a flesh-andblood Dad who dribbled soup on his tie into a tall, dark icon looming over the fireplace in his spotless army air corps uniform, an immaculate emblem of all that the boy was not. To this day Giles carries himself with a diffidence. When in the spring of 1999 he forced himself to visit me and there was nothing to say or do, he flushed with speechless resentment, because I was reviving in him the same sense of inadequacy that had permeated his childhood. Even more has he resented the public attention refracted off our son. Kevin and Thursday have routed him from his rabbit hole, and he’s furious with me for the exposure. His sole ambition is obscurity, because Giles associates any scrutiny with being found wanting.
    Still I kicked myself that you and I had made love the night before and one more evening I had absently slipped that rubber hat around my cervix. What could I do with your jump rope, your dirty socks? Wasn’t there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi ? No offspring could replace you. But if I ever had to miss you, miss you forever, I wanted to have someone to miss you alongside, who would know you if only as a chasm in his life, as you were a chasm in mine.
    When the phone rang again at nearly midnight, I hung back. It was late enough to be a reluctant emissary of a hospital, the police. I let it ring a second time, my hand on the receiver, warming the plastic like a magic lantern that might grant one last wish. My mother claims that in 1945 she left the envelope on the table for hours, brewing herself cup after cup of black, acid tea and letting them grow cold. Already pregnant with me from his last home leave, she took frequent trips to the toilet, closing the bathroom door and keeping the light off, as if hiding out. Haltingly, she had described to me an almost gladiatorial afternoon: facing down an adversary bigger and more ferocious than she, and knowing that she would lose.
    You sounded exhausted, your voice so insubstantial that for one ugly moment I mistook it for my mother’s. You apologized for the worry. The pickup had broken down in the middle of nowhere. You’d walked twelve miles to find a phone.
    There was no point in talking at length, but it was agony to end the call. When we said good-bye, my eyes welled in shame that I had ever declared, “I love you!” in that peck-at-the-door spirit that makes such a travesty of passion.
    I was spared. In the hour it took a taxi to drive