Her son was still crying. He would cry for hours each night, uninterrupted. She had tried burping him, but it did nothing. No gas came up; he wouldn’t vomit. He was totally healthy, her doctor said. It’s just colic. It happens with infants. Hold him. Rock him. It’ll pass.

And it did. He grew up; he started to speak at an appropriate time (18 months) and he was as curious, boisterous, and self-centered as any child. He grew shy in elementary school, and when he was twelve he began to have trouble falling asleep. He was afraid he would die in his sleep, so he would lie on the couch, downstairs, and watch the late shows bleed into repeats of 80s police procedurals and infomercials. He dreamed of test patterns.

In college he met a girl, a theater major, and they bonded over their shared experiences with depression. She had attempted suicide twice, she told him. Her mother had pulled her from the bathtub, and she spent a month in a psychiatric hospital. One night, while walking back to his dorm she started singing “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins, and he thought, “Life is a movie after all. Every moment is scripted.” After the break up, he would fall asleep each night thinking about following her home during break, strangling her, holding her underwater, cutting her wrists (the right way this time); her mother would find her, assume she had done it to herself.

And then he graduated, and the years of unemployment began, followed by the years of underemployment. There were resumes and interviews, every one of them an obnoxious memory, even the successful ones. He moved to a new city, alone. He rented an apartment, adopted a cat. His twenties passed. His thirties started.

One day he didn’t show up to work. The police had to call his landlord to unlock his door. They asked her to stand outside while they cut him down. He had left food and water for the cat, but no note.

It was midafternoon when his mother got the call. She dropped the telephone, and she cried.