Page 13 of Play Nice

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.

“I don’t understand. The water was black, like tar.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “If you’re worried about it, don’t let your daughters drink from the tap.”

“Clio?”

“That’s me!” I say, snapping out of my head, which is stuck in Mom’s book, which is back at my apartment, hidden under my pillow, because it feels wrong to have it, to read it. Because I said I never would.

Veronica puts her arm around my waist and pulls me into her. “Let’s go dancing.”

“I know just the place,” I say, taking her hand and leading her to Second Avenue.

“By the way, what happened with you and Ethan? I saw you leaving my launch together.”

“Nothing. I’m keeping him on ice.”

“Laurie always said he was good in bed.”

“I don’t trust Laurie’s standards. Think of the lipsticks.”

Veronica laughs, stumbling into me.

I take her to SMOKE—a dive bar with a not-so-secret basement club.

The dance floor is sticky, as are the velvet couches pressed up against the concrete walls, and the lighting sucks, but the DJ is great.

It’s packed like a Saturday night on a Thursday night, and everyone here is hot and smells like Santal 33.

The music is so loud I can’t think, and it’s a blessing. A most welcome escape.

We drink vodka tonics and run up a tab that Veronica pays for. We dance together, and she keeps stroking my collar bones, my chest, where the charm rests. The snake with shining eyes.

“I love it on you!” she shouts over the thumping bass.

“I love it on me, too!” I shout back.

“Everything looks good on you,” she says, her arms around my neck. “I hate you.”

“Yeah, but you’re on me,” I say.

“Then I must look good.”

Later, when I kiss her on the street, she suddenly turns shy.

“I can’t,” she says, pulling away. “Johnny.”

Her boyfriend.

Normally, I wouldn’t care. I’ve historically kept a pretty laissez-faire attitude about cheating.

Monogamy is for suckers. And yet, after resurfacing my mother’s claim that my father stepped out on her with Amy, a claim I’d never previously given any real consideration because it’s one he so adamantly denied, infidelity has suddenly become a more sensitive subject.

One I’d rather avoid. Because now, as a world-wise adult, I’m confronting the legitimate possibility that my dad and Amy are committed, perpetual liars.

Of course they would deny it. They have nothing to gain by admitting guilt and everything to gain by stripping my mother of all credibility.

Veronica giggles, touching her lips. Then she turns around and pukes all over the sidewalk.

I get us an Uber and drop her off first in Boerum Hill. When I get back to my apartment, I change into sweatpants and a tank top, eat cold lo mein on my couch, and wait for the world to stop spinning.

I consider calling Ethan, since he’s been oh-so eager, or any one of my reliable hookups to come over and distract me. To stop me from doing what I’ve been doing, from crawling into bed with a version of the past—my past—that doesn’t belong to me.

But I’ve never been any good at controlling my impulses. It’s not in my nature. Apparently, it’s genetic.

Weeks passed without incident, and we began to settle in, establish a new routine.

The girls and I built forts out of old blankets and duct tape and cardboard boxes left over from the move.

Our most impressive fort was surprisingly sturdy and comfortably fit all four of us, so I allowed them to leave it up indefinitely.

Then one night, after I’d put my daughters to bed, I was alone on the couch reading a magazine, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the blanket draped over the entrance to the fort pull back. A second later, the fabric released, sweeping down, concealing the interior of the fort.

It was Us Weekly . It had Britney Spears on the cover. This was shortly after she shaved her head. The world will drive a woman insane, then point at them and laugh.

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.

I poured myself some water and sat on the floor. She sat down across from me, and I wanted to pull her to me, hug her, squeeze her, never let her go. But I was afraid to touch her. She was too precious, and I was falling apart.

I didn’t have water, I had wine. Wouldn’t you want a drink after seeing what I’d seen?

“I thought I saw something inside the fort. It scared me,” I told her. I’d always been honest with my daughters. I respected them too much to lie or sugarcoat.

“Oh,” Cici said, nodding. Her demeanor changed. She wasn’t angry with me anymore. I was forgiven.

“You said…” I hesitated. I worried about bringing her into my fear of the house. It was important to me that my daughters wanted to be there. To be with me. If they didn’t, if they decided they would rather be at their father’s, I could lose them.

“You said there was something in your closet.”

“Yeah,” she said, sighing and rolling her eyes. Annoyed.

“Why did you say that?”

“Because there is,” she said. “I don’t know what it is.”

“How do you know it’s there?”

“I hear it.”

“What does it sound like?”

You asked for a dollar before you told me. I was impressed by your savviness, that you knew how to barter. That you knew your own value. I gave you one.

She shrugged, and it occurred to me that maybe she was hearing normal house sounds, nothing out of the ordinary.

The pipes. Her sisters moving upstairs, the floorboards creaking.

Maybe there was nothing wrong with the house, I just wanted to believe there was, instead of accepting that something might be wrong with me.

Cici finished her water, put her cup in the dishwasher, yawned, and gave me a hug.

“Good night,” she said, and went downstairs.

I stayed in the kitchen. I finished my water and made the girls their lunches for school the next day. I stuffed the cardboard from the ruined fort into the recycling bin in the garage, tossed the sheets and blankets into the washing machine.

After, on the way to my bedroom, I passed by Cici’s, and I heard her. Awake. Whispering.

I pressed my ear to the door, but I couldn’t distinguish any words. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I assumed—I hoped—she was just talking in her sleep.

The next morning, I drove the girls to school. I dropped Elle and Dee off first. When it was only me and Cici in the car, I asked her.

“I heard you talking last night,” I said, turning down the radio. “Who were you talking to?”

“Hey!” she said, kicking the back of my seat. “I like this song!”

“Cici.”

She huffed and crossed her arms. “I wasn’t talking.”

“I heard you,” I said.

She stayed quiet.

“Okay,” I said. “Never mind.”

A moment passed, and I turned the radio up again.

Then she said softly, so softly I almost didn’t hear, “It thinks you’re funny and wants to be my friend.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I pressed her, but she wouldn’t repeat it. She claimed she never said anything.

—

The pineapple cup. The fort. I drank out of that cup. I played in that fort.

But the fort’s supposedly traumatic destruction? Bartering for a dollar over demon info? It thinks you’re funny and wants to be my friend ? No recollection. Mom must have made all that up for the book. I almost text Daffy but think better of it.

Which leaves me to sit with myself. Which leaves me alone with a bad question.

If we don’t remember something, how can we be sure it never happened?