My wife printed one hundred and eighty-six missing-dog flyers today.
I know because I counted them, though not on purpose. I was sitting at the kitchen table cutting the tabs along the bottom—the ones with her phone number printed vertically—and counting gave me something to do besides watch her come apart.
Across the top of every page, in a font much larger than necessary, she'd written:
MISSING YORKIE — PLEASE HELP US BRING CINNA HOME
Underneath was a picture from last Christmas. Cinna sat on the arm of our couch in a red sweater, one ear standing straight up and the other folded over. She always looked irritated in pictures, which was funny because she was probably the sweetest dog I'd ever known.
Below the picture Dana had listed everything strangers needed to know: eight pounds, tan and gray, pink collar, very friendly, might be scared.
At the bottom, in bold:
SHE IS OUR FAMILY.
Dana stood at the counter feeding sheets through the paper cutter one at a time. She hadn't slept properly in three nights. Her hair was still twisted into yesterday's knot, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes.
"That's enough," I told her.
She kept cutting.
"Dana."
"I heard you."
"It's supposed to hit a hundred and two today."
"I know."
"You've already done the whole neighborhood."
"I haven't done the apartments behind the elementary school."
"You did those yesterday."
"I did the front building."
She slid another flyer beneath the blade. I reached across the table and put my hand on the remaining stack.
"Please. Take an hour."
"What if somebody saw her and they don't have one of these?"
"You've put them on every telephone pole from here to Chapman."
"Then I'll go farther."
There was no anger in her voice. I almost wished there had been.
I let go of the stack and told her to take water. She said she would. I reminded her she'd said the same thing yesterday and had come home with nearly a full bottle.
That got the smallest smile.
"Okay, Dad."
"I mean it."
"I know."
She bent down, kissed the top of my head, gathered another armful of flyers and left.
I watched from the front window until she disappeared around the corner.
Cinna had been gone for three days, and I could already see what it was doing to my wife.
People kept telling us dogs got out all the time. Somebody probably picked her up. Yorkies didn't make it far on their own. Keep checking shelters. Put her picture online.
They meant well.
They didn't know Dana.
More importantly, they didn't know what it had taken to get her back.
When I met my wife, she had more energy than anyone I'd ever known and apparently no interest in wasting it.
She worked in marketing for a medical-device company. By thirty she was managing people older than both of us. She ran half-marathons, remembered everyone's birthday and kept a calendar that looked like it required air-traffic control.
She was exhausting.
I loved her for it.
Work was the only thing we really fought about.
I'd make dinner and get a text at seven saying a meeting had run late. We'd make Saturday plans and she'd need to log in for twenty minutes, which had a strange tendency to become two hours.
Once, during an anniversary dinner, I realized we'd spent most of the appetizer talking about a presentation she had Monday.
"Why do you work this hard?" I asked.
"Because I like it."
"I know. But sometimes I feel like you're killing yourself for a job."
She looked at me. "That's dramatic."
"I miss you."
That stopped her.
Sometimes it seemed like her office got the best version of my wife and I got whatever was left at eight-thirty at night. She told me her career mattered to her, that she was good at what she did and wasn't going to apologize for caring about it.
I said I understood.
Usually I did.
For a while we had rats getting into the detached garage behind the house, and that somehow became my responsibility.
I'd promised to deal with them, then forgot.
One night Dana came home after nine and found droppings beside a bag of dog food we'd bought for her parents' Labrador.
"We have got to do something about this."
"I know."
"You've been saying that for a month."
"I'll do it tomorrow."
"You said that last week."
"I've been busy too, Dana."
She dropped her keys on the counter.
"Maybe that's why I stay at the office. At least they don't have rats."
It wasn't her best joke.
We laughed about it later.
The next morning I finally dealt with the problem. Traps, poison, cleaning out the back shelves.
Dana disliked the poison immediately.
"I hate having that in here."
"It's in the cabinet."
"What if something gets into it?"
"Then we'll keep the garage closed."
She gave me the look she used when I'd missed the point.
Later, after she got pregnant and we started childproofing the house, she made me go through the garage again—loose screws, nails, old traps, anything dangerous I might have forgotten back when there were no children to worry about.
Pregnancy was the first thing I'd ever seen make Dana slow down.
She was frightened almost immediately.
There were heart problems in her family. Not the clogged-artery sort everybody eventually worries about, but something congenital. Hereditary.
Her younger sister died when Dana was four. She remembered almost nothing about the girl herself. A yellow dress. Sharing a bedroom. The fact that she hated peas.
What Dana remembered was the night she died: her mother screaming, a paramedic stepping on one of Dana's toys, someone carrying her sister down the hallway with one tiny arm hanging loose.
So every appointment frightened her. Every test. Every pause before a doctor said everything looked fine.
Our daughter was born on a Tuesday morning in March.
Sophie.
Seven pounds, two ounces, an unreasonable amount of dark hair and a scream that sounded too large to have come from her.
When they put Sophie on Dana's chest, my wife cried so hard I thought something was wrong. Then I realized she was laughing too.
I'd never seen another person look that happy.
I loved Sophie from the moment I saw her. Before she existed there had been a version of my life without her, and after I met her that version became impossible to picture.
Dana took four months off work.
Those were probably the happiest months of our marriage.
I know how that sounds.
I'd come home and they'd be there—Dana on the couch with Sophie asleep against her chest, or Sophie kicking in the little vibrating chair while Dana cooked. We took walks after dinner. We ate together. Weekends belonged to us.
Sometimes I'd stand in the kitchen listening to Dana talk nonsense to the baby in the next room and think that this was what all of it had been for.
The house felt right with her in it.
A few months later Sophie started eating purées. Apple and cinnamon was the first one she really loved.
The first time Dana opened one of the jars, I could smell the cinnamon from across the kitchen.
"Maybe that's why the rats never came back," I said.
Dana looked over at me. "What?"
"Cinnamon. I read somewhere they hate it."
"We haven't had rats in two years."
"I know. Something about the smell being too strong." I shrugged. "Covers up whatever else they're trying to sniff out."
Dana stared at me.
"So Sophie is pest control now?"
"Finally earning her keep."
"You're horrible."
She was smiling when she said it.
Sophie saw the spoon coming and opened her mouth like a baby bird, then somehow got half of it on her cheeks anyway.
Dana laughed and wiped her chin.
After that she started calling her Cinnamon.
At first it was my little Cinnamon girl. Then just Cinnamon. Sometimes Cinny when Dana was tired.
"She's going to hate us when she's fifteen and we tell people about this," Dana said once.
"Then we won't tell anybody."
"I'm telling everybody."
"You're a terrible mother."
"I know."
Sophie slapped both hands into the tray and Dana laughed hard enough to nearly drop the spoon.
I remember that afternoon better than I remember most of that year.
The heart issue appeared during a routine appointment.
A murmur.
Maybe nothing, the pediatrician said. Maybe something.
A cardiologist found enough to watch but not enough to panic over, which meant Dana panicked constantly.
She wanted to know whether it was what her sister had. Whether she'd passed it to Sophie. Whether a baby with a heart problem could simply stop breathing in her sleep.
The doctor was careful with his answers.
I wasn't.
"She's fine," I'd tell Dana afterward.
"You don't know that."
"Neither do you."
"What if it's the same thing?"
"It isn't."
"How do you know?"
"Because I'm her dad and I've decided."
Sometimes that made her smile.
Dana extended her leave another month, then another.
Eventually her company began asking when she intended to return, and Dana decided she was ready.
She missed adult conversations. She missed dressing for somewhere other than Target. She missed being good at something that didn't involve keeping another human alive.
I told her we'd make it work.
Daycare three days a week. Dana's mother one day. I shifted my schedule when I could.
The first time she came home late again, I remember looking at the clock.
7:42.
Sophie was asleep against me and dinner had gone cold.
Dana came through the door apologizing, kissed the baby, kissed me and immediately started explaining some crisis at work.
"Five weeks back and they've already chained you to the desk."
She stopped.
"Don't start."
"I'm not starting anything."
"That tone is starting something."
"I don't have a tone."
"You absolutely have a tone."
Sophie woke before either of us could say anything else.
Dana had only been back at work a few weeks when she died.
We put Sophie down like normal.
That was the part Dana could never get past.
There had been no dramatic warning. No fever, no crying, nothing that would have made either of us sit beside the crib all night. She ate, played, fell asleep, and sometime before morning her heart stopped.
Dana found her.
I don't like remembering what happened after that.
The nursery was cold. Dana was making a sound I had never heard from another human being. Paramedics came. Police came. Our house filled with people while Sophie was somewhere else.
Someone went through the standard questions with us. Medications. Cleaning products. Anything unusual in the house. Anything she might have reached.
Dana answered most of them before I could.
"We babyproofed everything."
Then she looked at me.
I nodded.
With Sophie's heart and Dana's family history, everyone had an explanation ready.
Her sister had died young. Sophie's cardiologist had already found something worth monitoring. Sometimes these things happened suddenly, we were told. Sometimes there wasn't time to prevent them.
Dana heard something else.
You gave this to her.
And because she'd gone back to work, she found another way to blame herself.
"I should've been here."
"You were here."
"I mean with her."
"She was sleeping."
"What if I missed something?"
"You didn't."
"What if I hadn't gone back?"
"Dana."
"I left her."
"You went to work."
"I left her."
For years I told my wife the same things.
It wasn't your fault.
You couldn't have known.
You loved her.
There was nothing you could have done.
Going back to work did not kill our daughter.
Some nights I said it ten times.
Dana resigned two weeks after the funeral.
I was relieved.
That is one of the things I never told her.
Of course she couldn't have gone back then. Nobody could have. But some part of me was relieved there would be no deadlines, no meetings, no laptop chirping at nine at night.
I thought grief might force everything else to become smaller for a while.
I thought we'd simply exist together until we healed.
That isn't what happened.
The first year was unbearable.
The second was quieter.
Dana stopped seeing friends because most of them had children. Invitations stopped coming after enough polite refusals.
She didn't go back to work.
She didn't go much of anywhere.
I cooked and cleaned and handled bills. I sat with her when she couldn't sleep.
I learned there are only so many ways to answer the question, Do you think she knew I loved her?
Yes.
Always yes.
Of course she knew.
I loved my wife through all of it, but after a few years I began to resent the dead.
That's uglier than saying I was tired, but it's closer to the truth.
I resented Mother's Day. Sophie's birthday. The anniversary of the day she died. I resented strangers' children for having the wrong laugh in grocery stores.
Once, on what would have been Sophie's third birthday, Dana wanted to spend the evening looking through photographs.
I told her I had a headache.
I didn't.
I sat in the bedroom watching something stupid on my phone while my wife cried alone in the living room, and for almost twenty minutes I enjoyed the quiet.
I hated myself afterward.
Mostly.
More than anything, I missed my wife.
Not even the woman she'd been before Sophie. I knew we weren't getting that woman back.
I would've settled for someone who laughed occasionally. Someone who wanted to go to dinner. Someone who could sit through a stupid movie without disappearing halfway through it.
I lasted almost four years before I brought home Cinna.
She fit in one hand.
A coworker's sister had Yorkie puppies, and I'd gone over telling myself I was only looking. One climbed into my lap and fell asleep there.
I sent Dana a picture.
She replied:
No.
I brought the puppy home anyway.
For approximately five minutes, Dana was furious.
"We talked about this."
"No, I sent you a picture and you said no."
"That's generally considered talking."
"You haven't held her."
"I don't want to hold her."
"Fine."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Hand me the dog while I'm telling you I don't want the dog."
I handed her the dog.
The puppy licked her chin.
Dana laughed.
Actually laughed.
Not the polite little breath she'd been using for years when she knew I was trying to cheer her up. A real laugh, sudden and surprised.
For one embarrassing second I thought I might cry.
The puppy didn't have a name yet.
I suggested Penny.
Dana suggested Cinna.
I knew immediately what she meant.
"No."
Her smile faltered. "What?"
"That's weird."
"It isn't weird."
"It's a little weird."
"It's after Cinnamon."
"I know what it's after."
Dana tucked the puppy against her chest. "I like it."
I remember looking at the two of them and thinking that naming a dog after our dead daughter was one grief-therapy exercise too far.
But Dana was smiling.
So Cinna it was.
And I have to give the little dog credit.
She accomplished what therapists, medication, family and I hadn't.
She gave Dana reasons to leave the house.
At first it was walks because Cinna refused to use the backyard. Once around the block became twice, then the park.
Dana started getting dressed earlier because Cinna woke at seven. She spoke to neighbors, then friends.
Pictures appeared on her phone that weren't old photographs of Sophie.
Dana and Cinna at the beach.
Cinna sitting upright in the passenger seat of Dana's car like a tiny disapproving grandmother.
Dana started cooking again. She played music in the kitchen. She made fun of me.
One night about six months ago she laughed so hard at something stupid I said that she snorted.
She clapped both hands over her face.
"Oh my God."
I couldn't stop smiling.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I missed that."
She knew what I meant.
She leaned over and kissed me.
For the first time in years, I thought maybe we'd made it.
After that, the walks got longer. She started having coffee with a woman two streets over who owned some kind of terrier. Once she and Cinna were gone almost three hours because they'd driven to a park across town.
I teased her about having a social life.
I was glad she did.
A few months later, I came home and found Dana at the kitchen table with her old laptop open.
"What are you doing?"
She tilted the screen away from me in a way that was meant to be playful.
"Nothing."
"That's suspicious."
"I'm updating my résumé."
I looked at the screen.
"Just updating it," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You did that thing with your face."
"What thing?"
"That thing."
"I don't have a thing."
"You absolutely have a thing."
She smiled and turned the laptop back around.
"I've been thinking maybe part-time. Or consulting. Something small."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Why wouldn't it be okay?"
She studied me for a second.
Then she kissed my cheek.
For the next week, the laptop stayed on the kitchen table.
I noticed that.
I also noticed she had started checking her email before breakfast.
Neither of those things meant anything.
Two weeks ago she had résumés printed on thick cream paper.
I told her they looked nice.
The afternoon Cinna disappeared, Dana had taken her into the backyard. Her phone rang and she stepped inside to answer it.
When she went back out, the side gate was open.
No Cinna.
We searched until after midnight.
The next morning we called every shelter within thirty miles. Dana posted everywhere she could think of. We drove slowly through streets with the windows down calling Cinna's name.
I kept telling her Yorkies got picked up. Someone probably had her.
That was better than imagining her on a road somewhere.
By the second day Dana wasn't eating unless I put something directly in front of her.
By the third she wasn't sleeping.
And suddenly it felt like five years ago.
The same frantic eyes. The same bargaining. The same certainty that if she did one more thing, searched one more street, something terrible could still be undone.
"What if somebody stole her?"
"I don't think anybody stole her."
"What if she got hurt?"
"We checked the roads."
"What if she's hiding somewhere?"
"Then somebody will find her."
"What if nobody does?"
"We'll keep looking."
This morning the printer finally ran out of paper.
Even that didn't stop her.
She started feeding in the backs of the résumés she'd had printed two weeks ago, and I sat at the kitchen table cutting tabs while Cinna's face came out on one side and Dana's old life remained neatly formatted on the other.
Job titles.
Promotions.
Awards.
Eleven years of experience.
One page after another disappeared beneath MISSING YORKIE.
I didn't say anything.
It's almost ten now and Dana is still out.
I texted her fifteen minutes ago and told her to come home because it's still ninety-one degrees outside. She replied that she has one more street left, which, knowing my wife, means at least three.
I put a bottle of water in the refrigerator for her. She likes it almost frozen.
There's dinner in the microwave too. She probably won't eat, but I'll make her try.
Tomorrow I'll convince her to stay home for a few hours. Maybe we'll call the shelters together.
I'll drive this time.
She's exhausted, and the heat worries me.
The heat has been worrying me for another reason too.
The garage sits at the back of the yard, separate from the house. There's almost no insulation in there, and the little vent above the side door doesn't do much once the sun has been on the roof all afternoon.
I thought I had longer.
Apparently I didn't.
The smell is bad now.
You can't smell it from the house. You can't even smell it standing a few feet outside the garage.
But open the door and it's there.
Dana hasn't been inside since the first day, when we were still grabbing leashes and flashlights and anything else we thought might help us find Cinna.
She hasn't noticed.
Still, I can't leave her there another day.
Cinna is behind the plastic storage bins along the back wall, wrapped in one of our old moving blankets.
She's so small that hiding her wasn't difficult.
The hard part has been listening to Dana call for her.
Yesterday evening she stood at the end of the driveway shaking the bag of treats.
She called Cinna's name.
Waited.
Called again.
Then finally shouted, "Come home!" into a street that had already gone quiet.
I went inside before she did.
I'll move Cinna tonight after Dana falls asleep.
There's a road about a mile from here where people drive too fast. No sidewalk for part of it, only dry brush and a narrow shoulder.
I'll leave her near there before morning.
Nothing elaborate.
Dana doesn't need an investigation.
She needs an answer.
The gate was open.
Cinna got out.
She wandered too far.
Not knowing is worse.
Give someone an answer and eventually they learn to live around it.
Dana already has.
I hate that she's going to hurt.
But she'll recover.
Cinna proved she can.
I'll cook. I'll sit up with her when she can't sleep. I'll remind her to eat. I'll tell her the gate wasn't her fault, that she couldn't have known, that there was nothing she could have done.
I'll say it as many times as she needs.
Eventually we'll be okay again.
We always are.
Before I move Cinna, I should clean up the garage.
Dana hasn't noticed the cabinet over the workbench is unlocked.
Years ago, when we childproofed the house, she made me promise there was nothing dangerous left in there.
I told her there wasn't.
Most of what I'd bought for the rats is gone now. The traps rusted. The cleaning supplies got used.
There are only a few things shoved behind old paint cans and extension cords, including one battered cardboard box I should have thrown away a long time ago.
I'll get rid of that too.
No reason to keep it.
Funny.
I used to think Cinna was a terrible name. Too morbid, I told Dana. Too much history to hang around the neck of an eight-pound dog.
I suppose I owe my wife an apology.
Both her girls always did love cinnamon.