right now is Luis. I desperately want him to hold me, to help me make it right even though I know nothing can ever be right again. The police will come for me soon. Hey, maybe they’re at the house already. I have so little time and all I want is to curl up on the sofa and maybe watch him work, just to pretend for a little while that none of this is happening.
I let myself into the building and up the goods lift. I knock on the heavy door but he doesn’t hear me. I rest my forehead against the cold metal. I can faintly hear music inside. I pry the key loose from its trusted place and let myself in.
“Luis?”
His large sculpture, The Nest, is back. It’s bigger than I remembered. More somber, too, somehow. I walk around it and to the other end of the studio, and turn off the sound system.
“Luis?”
I check my cell but there’s no message.
I stare at the sculpture. The Nest. His apogee. I think how much I wanted him to succeed, how much I supported him, loved him, trusted him, admired him. And that work? His grand masterpiece? It should have been about us. The Nest. It should have been for me. And I can’t stop crying as I think back to that night at the opening: Isabelle might have a shot at selling The Nest to the contemporary art museum for their permanent collection. I think of him crossing his fingers, his eyes closed, his face turned to the ceiling, and I remember the words that floated in my mind then, like a whisper.
He’s in love.
I don’t know what happens after that. I just feel all the pent-up pain and fury roar through me and before I can stop myself my hands have gripped the long metal rod that seconds ago was leaning by the window and I’m screaming as I raise the rod over my head and strike the sculpture as hard as I can. But the hook gets caught on something and I pull the rod up and blindly thrash into it again, and again and again until the cables snap and the whole structure falls with a loud crash and the creatures in their eggs roll out and I smash them too, I smash their faces and their eyes and the delicate shell around them and I’m screaming because they should have represented our children, shouldn’t they? This should have been our nest, shouldn’t it, Luis? Didn’t we deserve this homage to your genius, Luis? Weren’t we enough for you that you had to fall in love her?
And I can’t see anything anymore and it’s all his fault and everything I did, I did for us, and all there is now is noise and dust and splinters flying and bouncing against the walls and I’m still screaming and I can’t breathe but I don’t want to stop until it’s gone, until that thing that sits there like a monument to all that went wrong is gone.
I am on my knees. I drop the rod with a clank. I can’t breathe. I don’t know how long I sit like that, in the middle of the wreckage, my arms wrapped tightly around my sides. I open my eyes and see the creatures at my feet, broken, eyes smashed, no longer pleading, like they were real and now they’re dead, and suddenly I have this overwhelming urge to put them back together. I scramble around the floor to find the right pieces and grab a chunk of the shell, then another, and I want to put them back together but they don’t fit. I stare at them in my hands, sobbing. Something catches my eye: Letters. Words. The shells were made of paper, glued together and shaped. I pull it apart gently and smooth the creases out as much I can, and I see now, what caught my eye. It’s my name, on an official document, or what’s left of it. It’s stained with dark spots, like it was kept somewhere damp for a long time.
It’s a residential purchase agreement for the house I grew up in, in Youngstown. What I think of as my mother’s house, after my father died, before she moved to California. I know that my mother sold that house and moved years ago, but I don’t understand why Luis would have a copy of this purchase agreement. I look closer, and I know then that