Page 32 of Play Nice

The magazine dropped into my lap. I leaned forward, wondering if that had just happened, if I’d truly just seen what I thought I’d seen.

Maybe it was the wind? Only no windows were open. It was April. The heat wasn’t on either. No air was moving through the vents, circulating through the house. I called out my girls’ names, keeping my voice low. At least, at first.

“This isn’t funny,” I said, hoping one of them would wriggle out of the fort laughing. Cici was a practical joker, my little jester. She loved to hide in strange places, then pop out to scare me and her sisters. “Cici?”

There was no answer.

The blanket moved, undulating as if in a breeze. As if there were a giant mouth behind it, breathing in and pulling the fabric back, breathing out and releasing it. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

I stood up and took a step closer. I could see it. A vague shape. The outline of something there.

In that moment, I remembered what Cici had said after the incident in the kitchen.

It doesn’t have a body yet.

“Cici,” I said again, more sternly. “Cici, come out right now!”

The blanket stopped moving.

“Cici?”

“Yeah, Mommy?”

I turned around to see my daughter at the top of the stairs, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

Seeing her there disturbed my center of gravity. I was unbalanced, untethered from reality. I ran forward and ripped the blanket off the fort. There was nothing behind it, not that I could see, but that did nothing to reassure me. They say that seeing is believing, but I believed that something lurked there in the shadowy emptiness. I believed with my gut. My intuition. I believed with a protective maternal response that is ordained by nature.

The destruction of the fort was quick but took some effort, some force. I stomped the cardboard flat. Tore through the old blankets. Then it was a pile on the floor, and I was panting so loudly that it took a minute for me to hear the girls.

Elle and Dee had come out of their room, joining Cici. They held each other, looks of sheer horror on their faces. They were terrified. Terrified of me.

I couldn’t stand it.

“Go back to bed!” I screamed. I’d never screamed at them like that before. “Now! In your rooms!”

Elle and Dee turned and ran down the hall to their room. I heard the door slam. I heard them crying.

But Cici didn’t move. She stood there with her little hands balled into fists.

“Go!”

“I’m thirsty,” she said, and marched into the kitchen.

I heard her climb up onto the counter, a cabinet open, and then the fridge whirring.

I backed away from the ruined fort. I didn’t want to be near it, to be reminded of what I’d done, of how my daughters had looked at me. What had made me do it in the first place.

So I followed Cici into the kitchen.

She had her favorite cup—the pineapple cup. I’d gotten a set of three plastic cups at a garage sale years earlier that were all shaped like fruit. Dee liked the strawberry, Elle the apple. Cici filled her pineapple cup with the water from the Brita filter, which I’d purchased right after the plumber left.

“Cici.”

She didn’t look up. She wouldn’t make eye contact. She was seven years old but acted seventeen. Or seventy, depending on the day. So much personality. So self-assured.

“Cici…”

“Why would you do that?” she asked.