Page 30 of Play Nice

I pulled up the drain, blew out the candles, and told myself that I’d call a plumber first thing.

Needing fresh air, I sat on the back deck with a glass of wine, looking out into the woods, listening to the crickets and to the wind rustling the trees.

I had thought moving into the house marked the end of my nightmare, but it was only the beginning.

—

There’s a smell. Peanut butter and Coca-Cola. An anxiety hot and sharp, and it cuts straight through my chest without resistance, like I have no substance, like I’m nothing at all.

There was an incident in the kitchen. Something spilled. A mess made. Mom angry. Daffy attempting to defuse the tension. A sound. That sound. Hitting is so oddly distinct. Daffy holding her cheek. Mom yelling, Clean it up, and then go to bed!

That’s the cruelty she alluded to in her footnote, what she wouldn’t commit to paper for the masses, only to me. Because she had to. Because I was there. Because I remember.

But I have no memory of blaming a vague, formless, closet-dwelling entity for the mess.

I close my eyes, and I think back, and I try to summon that night, that moment. My fingers sticky from the sandwich. My teeth gritty, coated with sugar from the soda. The chitter of cartoons on the TV in the living room. My mother in front of me, hair wild, eyes wide, mouth purple, breath sour. My sisters beside me. A shadow in the corner with no eyes, no face, looking right at me—not there, not real. Memories are so easily manipulated.

There was a malevolent energy in the kitchen with us, but I’m pretty sure it’s the kind that exists in every house, in every family, in all of us on our worst nights. Mom surrendered to it, to her worst, and couldn’t take responsibility.

I imagine her tiptoeing into my room as I slept and kissing me on the forehead, an apology. I imagine my eyelids fluttering at her touch. I imagine a shape in the dark. I see it.

Not her.

My heart drops as it stares back at me, this shape, this shadow, this faceless thing.

I open my eyes.

11

Of course the house is haunted,” Veronica says, eating the olive out of her martini. “Like, come on.”

“You should get it checked for carbon monoxide,” Hannah says, discreetly gluing and reapplying a press-on. “A lot of times people think their house is haunted, and it’s actually carbon monoxide.”

We’re at the launch of a new skincare line from a big makeup brand, hosted at some swanky bar on the Lower East Side. Veronica is dressed in all gold, still promoting her Shine Inc. partnership. She’s in sparkly stark contrast to Hannah, who is goth. She’s in a fishnet dress, matte black lipstick, and thick kohl eyeliner. Hannah is a vlogger and special effects makeup artist who’s married to an indie film director. They share a one-year-old son named Morpheus. She and I used to drop Molly together and go to Bushwick raves. She’s still fun, but it’s not the same.

“I have an exterminator coming,” I say. “I’m going back next weekend. I don’t know. The idea of it excites me, but it might be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Are you kidding me? Everyone loves a home makeover. Document the whole process. People will eat it up!” Veronica says, reaching over and petting my neck, the snake charm. Before, I suspected that she was either jealous of me or had a little angsty, confused hetero girl crush on me, or both. But my genuine love for her charm has brought us closer, I think, our friendship now grounded in mutual gratitude.

“Haunted home makeover. I’d watch that shit,” Hannah says.

“As much as I love a gimmick, I’m ultimately trying to sell this house. I’m not exactly looking to advertise its supernatural associations. So shh. Let’s keep the ghosts quiet.”

“A good general rule,” Hannah says. She lives across from Green-Wood Cemetery. We go there for walks occasionally.

“I had mice in my old apartment,” Veronica says. “The worst. Oh my God. You can hear them in the walls…”

She shudders.

“New subject,” I say. I fish the lemon twist out of my glass and down my cocktail. “Did anyone actually like these products?”

The consensus is no.

An hour goes by, spent enjoying complimentary drinks and gossiping and taking the obligatory photos—the price of admission. Hannah taps out and calls a car back to her apartment, where she has a husband and a baby and probably a sink full of dishes waiting for her. Veronica and I stand on the sidewalk blowing her kisses as she climbs into her Uber, and I wonder if she misses her old self the way that I do. If part of her wants to stay out late, come traipse around the city with us, but feels like she can’t because she’s a mother now.

Motherhood irrevocably changed me. Years in, and I was still getting to know this new self, the ways my daughters had reconfigured me from the inside out. But motherhood had also irrevocably changed how others saw me, how they spoke to me, and it was consistently unmooring.

“Everything looks fine to me, ma’am,” the plumber said, after the water from every single faucet in the house ran clean.