Tiny

First Chapter

NATE lies flat in bed, staring at the ceiling. When he was a kid, they had popcorn ceilings. He used to find shapes in them—Snoopy’s profile, a space shuttle, that kind of thing. When he and Annie bought their house, a beach cottage built in the 1950s, the first order of business was removing the popcorn ceilings. “There could be asbestos,” she said. The guy from the removal company—there are whole companies dedicated to this now—nodded in grave agreement, and they paid him to strip it away and make them feel safer.

He knows Annie is awake next to him. They’re both pretending to be asleep, trying to convince each other that such a thing is possible. It doesn’t seem like it will ever be possible again.

There were times—in college, between classes—when he’d lie down on a park bench like a homeless person and fall asleep. He could sleep anywhere, anytime. Annie used to make fun of him for doing push-ups in the living room while watching football games and then lying on his stomach for a quick nap. The first time she caught him, she gasped and shook him awake. “I thought you were dead,” she said, slapping him on the shoulder.

The grief counselor, Pete, had told them it would take time. Nate asked, “How much time?” in hopes that there was a prescribed formula, a date he could look forward to when they would just wake up and it would be all over.

Pete chuckled in a good-natured way and said, “Unfortunately, it’s different for everyone.”

Annie’s eyes welled up. “I don’t think the next sixty or whatever years I have left on earth will be enough time.” Pete put his hand over her clenched fist, like he was paper to her rock.

Annie hasn’t gone two hours without crying since it happened. There’s a subconscious timer in Nate’s brain, counting the minutes, hoping she’ll be tearless just a few moments longer than the day before. She hasn’t passed the two-hour mark though. Sometimes she’ll seem okay, going through the motions of existence, and then something small will happen and she’ll lose it. Yesterday, she cried after finding a little pink sock behind the dryer. “It’s been missing for months,” she said, holding it up to him like it was the Hope Diamond.

Nate has never been a crier. He prides himself on this fact, resents the psychology community for implying he has some kind of underlying issue.

Pete had asked him, “Where did you learn to hold in your emotions?”

Learn? Like it was an obscure skill like building ships in bottles. Nate told him it was just who he was. “Aren’t most guys like me?” he asked Pete.

Pete said, with a friendly laugh, “You say that like it’s a good thing,” and Nate thought, but didn’t say, Isn’t it?

He doesn’t mind being a stereotype, a cliché. It’s better than losing his shit and sobbing like a little girl. Annie would cry automatic tears—the kind of tears you cry when you pluck a nose hair—if he said this out loud, if he said “little girl.” She wants him to break down, to join her in misery. Pete told her, as if Nate wasn’t sitting right there, “He doesn’t want to open the floodgates.” Nate didn’t fight this conclusion, even though he doesn’t think there’s a flood, rivers of raging tears, waiting to break free. Maybe it’s shock. Maybe he’s hardened by the need to support Annie. There’s an equilibrium to relationships; both people can’t be completely devastated simultaneously. They just can’t.

Nate gets out of bed, stretches up toward the ceiling. The clock says 3:26 am. Lucy, their seven-year-old black Lab mix, stirs in her dog bed on the floor. Nate got Lucy when he was twenty-eight, after breaking up with Stephanie, his girlfriend of four years, the girl he swore he was going to marry. He resigned himself to a man-and-dog kind of life. Then he met Annie. Lucy seemed to approve of her. They got married after only a year of dating. Lucy was their ring bearer.

Lucy used to sleep on the bed with them, but Annie can’t bear looking at her since it happened. So Nate tries to keep her out of the way. He feeds the dog, walks her, picks up her poop. Lucy isn’t the same either. There is something in her eyes—apology, maybe, guilt.

“What are you doing?” Annie says, voice soft and falsely groggy.

“Going for a run,” he says.

“Now?” Her tone tells him this is a crazy notion.

“Figure I’ll make use of the awake time. I’ll take Lucy with me. She hasn’t been out in a few days.”

Annie rolls back over, away from him. “Fine,” she says. She’s used this word so many times before, as a precursor to so many arguments, when she is exactly not fine.

“I’ll have breakfast ready for you when you wake up,” he says. He’s trying to make her some version of content in this new life of theirs—a Sisyphean mission so far. “What sounds good?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“Pancakes?”

Pancakes had been their Saturday morning ritual, before.

She sighs something like disappointment. “Definitely not pancakes.”

The air outside is crisp and cold. People say California is always seventy-something degrees, but it’s not. There are thirty-eight-degree January mornings like this one. Joggers wear sporty gloves and headbands that keep their ears warm. Nate doesn’t have either of these things. And his shoes are a decade old. He’s only just started running again. He ran track in high school and college but couldn’t manage to integrate it into his adult life. There wasn’t time before work, or he didn’t make time. And after work, he just wanted a beer and brainless TV. There were occasional years when he made resolutions on December 31 to start running again, but he’d maintain his resolve for only a month or so before petering out. It feels good to be back now. Or maybe good isn’t the right word. Maybe necessary is the right word. It feels necessary.

He lets Lucy run next to him, off leash. He hates the leash, probably more than she does. Annie always scolds him when he doesn’t use it though. She says he has to consider other people, not just himself. He has to think of the little old ladies who are petrified of dogs. He has to remember that dogs are animals and Lucy might attack an unassuming shih tzu. And besides, the ticket for having a dog off leash is expensive—four hundred bucks or something absurd like that. At four in the morning though, nobody is out. No cops, no little old ladies, no shih tzus.

On those past New Year’s resolution kicks, he had a running route, a loop that went by the park and then down to the beach path. He’d run two miles along Pacific Coast Highway, ending at a traffic light that marked the start of the big hill trek back home. He could never bring himself to run the damn hill; he always walked it.

Now, though, he can’t run by the park. After what happened, it’s like it doesn’t even exist to him as a place. So he’s found another way down to the beach path. He winds through their Capistrano Beach neighborhood, a maze of streets crammed together by city planners who never expected such an influx of humans. There are no streetlights because his hippie-dippie community has an ordinance against them, the board agreeing that streetlights would make it hard to see the stars at night. Annie loves this about where they live—the people who have been there forever, who bake pies for each other and sip wine on each other’s porches, talking about the good old days when they surfed in less crowded ocean waters. Nate would prefer streetlights.

He uses the flashlight on his phone to navigate. When he gets down to the beach, the air is cooler. He blows warmth onto his hands, but that helps for only a split second.

“Jesus, Lucy, it’s a cold one today,” he says.

This is one of the favorite parts of his run—talking to the dog. He used to talk to her a lot when she was a puppy, when he lived alone in his bachelor pad, pitying himself after the Stephanie breakup. He’d tell Lucy about his day, and she’d cock her head to one side, ears perked, like she understood, like she was genuinely interested. When Annie entered the picture, there weren’t as many Lucy chats. Sometimes when Annie was in the shower and he was still in bed, taking his time to wake up, he’d nuzzle Lucy and tell her she was a good girl and ask her what she wanted for breakfast. “I can whip up some steak-and-vegetable kibble,” he’d tell her. “The bag says it’s meatier than ever.” She’d lick his face like she was trying to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. When Penelope started talking in sentences—around the sixteen-month mark, early according to Annie—she had full conversations with Lucy and seemed disappointed that they weren’t a two-way street.

At the end of the run, instead of heading straight up the merciless hill home, he decides to take Lucy to the beach, let her run in the waves. There is something freeing about ignoring the signs that forbid such a thing. He sits on a bench and watches her, her big pink tongue flapping out of her mouth, a wide grin on her face. “It’s not a grin,” Annie said once. “It’s just the way her face is when she’s panting.” She always teases him for ascribing human emotions to Lucy. But damn it if Lucy doesn’t seem ecstatic right now. She comes back to him, her underbelly, paws, and the tips of her floppy ears wet. She jumps up next to him on the bench. He flinches at her cold fur on his skin. It’s cold, freaking cold.

“You ready to head back, girl? Maybe I’ll give you some bacon. Sound good? And don’t worry about Annie. She just needs time. It wasn’t your fault, what happened. It was mine. She’ll forgive us though, both of us. She just needs time.”

He kisses the bridge of her nose, and she licks his face in return. He crosses the street, not needing to push the button to walk for once. There are no cars. And then, overcome by a sudden burst of energy, he runs the hill home.