It all sounded so fucking cold.

Sometimes the Jane or John Does had no facial reconstruction to mark them—just a photo, perhaps, of personal effects remained—a tarnished nickel chain, a pair of turquoise earrings, boots with worn out soles, a belt with a Harley Davidson buckle. T-shirts with pictures and slogans that had meant something to them once—Hawaii, New York, a movie queen, a rock god: a dream of where they had been or wanted to go, an image of the person they lusted after or wanted to be. Izzy almost heard the objects keening.

Larry had told her that the term John Doe had come from an 1834 song about “Two Giants…who always travel hand in hand/John Doe and Richard Roe/Their fee-faw-fum’s an ancient plan/To smell the purse of an Englishman.”

Fee-fi-fo-fum. Jack and the Beanstalk. Yes, fairy tales were brutal. Eyes pecked out. Heads chopped off. Bodies burned. Cannibalism. Blood-sniffing giants. Clever girls. Leanne sometimes called Izzy “Clever Gretel.”

“Gretel wore shoes with red soles.” (Like the ones worn by the witch in the mermaid story, Izzy had thought). “She told her master’s guest that master was planning to cut off guest’s ears, so he ran away. Clever Gretel blamed him for the wine and chickens she’d eaten herself.”

“Clever and cruel,” Izzy told the Johns and the Janes. She didn’t like this type of story.

Valentine Does had been found on February fourteenth; Lavender Does wore purple sweaters; there were some Baby Does. Princess, Precious. Izzy wondered who named them. Had the public or the investigators tried to show some compassion this way? There was one child who particularly haunted her. He was called “Box Boy,” and it was believed that he had been kidnapped, sexually assaulted, murdered, and left in a cardboard box. His hair had been recently cut, and his ears had been pierced.

The Janes, the Johns, the Baby Does. They cleaved your heart in half. Cyrus was not among them.

She buried her face in the woven blanket on their bed, closed her eyes, and inhaled—almonds and smoke. The scent of her love for him.

With Cyrus gone, she might as well have been breathing cyanide.

It made no sense. People like Cyrus didn’t just disappear from their homes in the night. Crazy people or elderly people with dementia or runaways; not strong, sane young men who were planning to move to LA with their lovers someday. Unless Cyrus didn’t love her. Was he unhappy? After all this time? How could he have been with her all this time and then decided, with no warning, that it was over? Had she pushed him too hard about a baby? She hadn’t pushed him, had she? He couldn’t have stopped loving her that easily. But the alternative was worse, and she was afraid.

Bluebeard

The next morning, Izzy woke wet-eyed. She dragged the back of her hand across her face, feeling the cold metal of the silver ring against her hot skin. She would not let herself cry for him. She would not cry. It would mean he was really gone.