Chapter 1

Likes Long Nails

Leena grabbed the Flamétte bobblehead with the long black hair and smashed it against the wall. “I'm sorry, Michael. I broke your…toy.”

“You don't mean it. It's the pills.”

“Percocet does not evoke this type of contraindication. Let me demonstrate.” She pulverized the plaster face with her tennis shoe. “This is not about a pill. This is about us.”

Michael looked to Leena and then down to broken bobblehead. When he bent to retrieve its remains from the floor of the baby's room, she slapped his back with an open palm.

“Leave her.”

The blow shattered his picture of their marriage— sitting with her toes in the sand and flashing him…a long night of role-play, climaxing with a plate of blueberry pancakes and a half-empty bottle of mercurochrome…a jagged hysterectomy scar —and pieces of memories scattered as the dull thud reverberated down his spine.

She pulled a strand of blonde hair away from her eyes. “Please don't let me walk away.”

With a turn of her lip, a droplet of sweat pooled in a dimple, and she pressed a hand to her sweatshirt that covered the girdle beneath. A slight layer of makeup gave her face the waxy luster of a sun-bleached mannequin in a department store window.

“You trimmed your fingernails,” she added, rabbit-slapping him with a bony palm.

He rocked away and bumped his shoulder on the shelf, riling the remaining bobbleheads into a flurry of nods: I disagree; I agree .

“Yellow, caution. You don't need to hit me.”

“Red. Stop cutting your nails. You know I like them long.”

Nine years of marriage came down to a frosty October morning at nine minutes to nine.

            “Michael, understand this: I'm leaving you. I'm going to Lottie's. For the weekend. Probably longer.” Her voice cracked. “Do you want me to leave?”  

“No.”

“Prove it.”

            “Leena, I've made the,” he looked down to the bobblehead's long black hair, “the biggest mistake of my life, and if I could, I'd erase it.”

            “No more talk.” She cocked her arm and swung.

            He caught her fist. “Don't ever do that again.”

             She started to shudder like the heads of the plaster toys. “Or…?” Her voice wavered.

            A prickling sensation surfaced in Michael's pores like the sputtering of bubbles before water boils. With his large hand engulfing hers, it would be easy to twist her arm behind her back and give in. The Velcro straps. The antiseptic scent of isopropyl on stainless steel. Ole Rusty, his fountain pen, with one edge of its nib as sharp as a razor. If he told her to retrieve it from her pink goodie bag, she would forgive all past and future sins.  

“What you wanted to give to her,” Leena said, pressing him further, “give to me.”

She lifted her hand from his and caressed the welt on his chin.

“You can do it,” she added, her pupils growing wide. “Please?”

            She ran her hand beneath her sweatshirt. Small undulations led to the unveiling of her stomach and the top of a surgical girdle. Beneath her right breast, four burgundy trails ran like fingernails across a chalkboard of ribs. “Scratch me,” she said.

            “I can't. I won't.”

            “Then I'll help you.”

            She took his hand and kissed it then sucked on his middle finger. He felt her tongue delicately probe him before she bit down and split the edge of his fingernail. With their gaze locked, she extracted his finger, pressed the serrated nail to her ribs, and connected the burgundy trails.   

            “Stop it,” Michael said, without pulling away.

            She steadied herself. “Your turn.”

            “No.”

            “I need you to.”

            He tugged and broke her grip. Leena's fist recoiled into her chin.

            “Not what I had in mind.” She rubbed her jaw. “But it's a start.”

With no escape from the bedroom, he jammed his hand into his pants pocket and felt the silver dollar-sized piece of polished glass he always carried, pressing it into his palm like a suggestion. He ran his thumb along the edge, found the single rough lip, and fingered the defect like an incessant hangnail. If it works for Leena . He forced the sliver beneath his nail.

A pain he understood entered him: a bloody scratch, a fractured pinkie finger, a glass sliver beneath his nail—all wounds which would heal. Yet inside, a deeper pain burrowed through him, one he could not understand. Penance: something Leena regarded as the secret door to salvation. As only he could heal Leena, after nine years of marriage, only she could save him.   

            “And another thing,” she added in a little girl's voice. She walked her fingers along the shelf until stopping at Michael's second favorite bobblehead, an oversized-monster of a defensive lineman. “ Get wid of deese stupid toys .” She bumped it from the edge. 

            Michael stiffened as the lineman doll joined the cheerleader doll in a pile of plaster rubble.

            “You need more incentive?” She grabbed the first thing within reach: a small Lego carousel, complete with miniature horses and a red- and white-striped center pole flying a stiff white flag. Michael had given her the unassembled gift on their second anniversary, and for six nights, they sat at the kitchen table together, assembling the model and painting the small creatures with brushes losing their lashes.

            “The carousel,” Leena said, surprised. “Do you remember how much trouble we had painting the little horses?” She reached for his hand, lacing his fingers with hers, and guided him to the carousel. “How the paintbrush was down to its last few bristles?” Leena retuned the carousel to the shelf. “How have we gone so wrong?”  

“I want to be more for you.”

“I don't want more,” she said. “I want us to be the way we were.”

The wetness of her kiss faded from his hand, and he took a final look at his wife: blue eyes the color of faded denim; her full lips, chapping; her waxy-luster, cracking. 

Leena backed away and waved “bye-bye” with a bent little finger, a scar in the shape of a ladybug perched upon her knuckle. She added in a voice little more than a whisper, “Who maintains a shrine for a child who never lived?” and closed the door behind her.

            “Not a shrine,” he said to the door. “The shrine.”

The baby's room: a private place where tens of thousands of colored Legos adorned the empty spaces, covering every sign of paint, plaster, and plywood. No natural construction, not in the last nine years, not even the floor. No Lincoln Logs here. Michael stood on the yellow brick Lego path in a room lacking sugar-and-spice pink and snips-and-snails blue. Lego construction everywhere. Even the few pieces of furniture were made of briquettes: a blue- and green-colored dresser and matching not-so-easy chair; a crib trimmed in a white brick façade, its mattress wrapped in cellophane like a Christmas cheese basket. And the room's centerpiece: a monstrosity of a Lego pirate ship enveloping a child's bed. At the head, a stubby red mast extended to the ceiling sporting a sissified Jolly Roger , and at the foot, a black-and-brown bricked hull doubled as a toy chest.

Within a five-year-old's reach, a low-hanging shelf held classic cartoon figurines of Bugs, Daffy, and Elmer Fudd that menaced Thomas the Train, Dora the Explorer, and Bob the Builder with a sledgehammer, a case of dynamite, and a conspicuous crate labeled ACME. On an upper shelf, a place for objects coveted and untouched by small hands, once sat Michael's collection of Chicago Flames bobblehead dolls, all twenty football players and a half-dozen of the team's cheerleaders, the Flaméttes, waving red and black pom-poms. Now, an incomplete set. 

At one time, Leena commended him on his attention to detail and dedication to their unborn child. Now the room anchored him to a damaged past.

“Who maintains a shrine for a child who was never born? Not me.”  

He hooked the hull of the pirate ship and launched it into the wall. A thousand shiny pieces of plastic rained down like spent fireworks, one sharp edge catching him above the eye. Incensed, he reached to knock the remaining bobbleheads from their shelf and grabbed a blond Flamétte shaking her head no, no, no . He aimed for the crib.

No, no, no , she repeated.

            “What have I done?” He looked to the mess, to the disabled pirate ship, and to the blond bobbling cheerleader in his hand. “No one will bust up a set to sell me a single.”

            He returned the toy to its place.

If he started immediately, he knew the room would take months to repair. The red plastic wall suffered a large breech and the hull of the bed needed an overhaul. He checked his watch. If he hurried, he could squeeze in five, maybe six, hours of repair work before he had to leave.  

“Black bricks first,” he said. Black then blue then brown then green . “Then grey then red then white then yellow.”

He got down on his knees and began to separate the black bricks from the pile, locking them into precise rows along the yellow path.

“Maybe Charlie was right. Adults should keep secrets.”

Click .

 “We need each other.”

Snap .

“I have faith in us.”

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