How to Be Human by Paula Cocozza

Author:Paula Cocozza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER TEN

How many cries can an adult human make? Mary’s mother believed that babies had only three. One for hunger, one for exhaustion, and one for pain. Even when Mary entered her teenage years, a time when she hoped life would admit more possibilities, any sign of sadness was diagnosed as tiredness. There was no suffering that an early night could not cure. Adulthood had taught Mary to scoff at the limits of her mother’s understanding, but she still sometimes applied the old family prescription to random sorrow. She was harking back to all this because a continuous sobbing had drawn her to the lounge wall, making her wonder whether anyone had ever studied the cries of adults the way they had studied those of babies. If there were such a thing as a lexicon of tears, she would like to own it. And she would have a second copy delivered to her mother. Mary leant into the tremors. Oh, oh, here they came again, each sob a broken gasp, regularly spaced and oddly uniform, like a stuck machine. The hardest kind to stop. Where the sob itself is a hand laid over a wound, and there’s nothing to do but keep going because you don’t want to hear the thing you know you’d hear if you … She shut her eyes. It was actually quite comforting to stand there and listen. It must be George, because the sobs were too grown to be Flora, too quiet to be Michelle. Now she thought of it, she had never heard Eric cry. “Georgie, Georgie, Georgie…” Ah, there was Eric now, so it definitely wasn’t him. His low chant kept time with the cries, and the cries, enjoying the company, kept going. Oh Jesus, now what? Mary lifted her ear from the wall in disgust. She’d recognize that wailing anywhere. Michelle! What had set her off again?

The screeching was too much for Mary. She was already in the hall, through the kitchen, out of the door. She halted in the middle of the lawn, which was where the ringing in her ears stopped.

How quiet it was. Some guy’s saw drowsing through wood in a garden down the street. An airplane silently splitting scraps of cloud overhead. She exhaled noisily. Because where the bloody hell was he? The sun lit a white butterfly, and its wings strobed briefly in the laurel, then held their peace. In the Sunday stillness, her lawn and borders and everything out here pronounced his absence. She looked in at her shed and screwed up her nose. No news. Rather than leave empty-handed, she grabbed the glove-oath he’d brought her weeks ago. She would take it indoors because the sensible course was to follow police advice for loved ones of the missing and make sure she was home when he returned.

Mary walked slowly toward the house, trying to decide whether she hoped the noise from next door had stopped or whether it might be soothing to listen to someone else doing her crying for her, and she felt rather than saw the thing under her foot.

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