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  “Sorry, Sid. Your mom is being a total buzzkill.” She rolled her eyes, pulling Sid up and taking him back to Jason. I tried to follow, but then remembered I still couldn’t walk.

  When my mom never returned to crane-lift me out of the pool, I decided that it was time to see a doctor. Something was drastically wrong, with my leg and my mother, and I needed to get a professional opinion on both.

  “I can hang with Sid if you two wanna take the ferry over to Maui. I have a girl who could probably drive you to an urgent care, but I doubt you’re gonna be able to get in for an MRI on such short notice.” My mom ate what was left of Jason’s sushi roll. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a dollop of spicy tuna making its way toward Sid’s virgin lips, but I intercepted it, smacking it away with my hand.

  “Jason is half-asleep and doesn’t know Maui at all. You need to take me.”

  “Me?” She was shocked by the idea.

  “Yes. You are my mom,” I reminded her.

  “Then who’s gonna watch Sid?” she said, confident she’d found a loophole in the plan.

  “Sid has to come with us. I don’t have enough pumped breast milk to leave him.”

  My mom’s face dropped. She knew I had her trapped.

  The Expedition Ferry slammed up and down as it cut across white-capped waves, fighting its way to Lahaina Harbor. Water splashed violently against the window as my mom looked out like a smoker stuck in after-school detention.

  “Rocky is going to be so pissed he’s missing his afternoon walk,” she said with a groan. I could barely make out her bitching over the sound of the roaring engine under our feet. She’d complied with my wishes and come along for the ride, but like getting an overpriced lap dance, I was left feeling underwhelmed and more pathetic than before.

  When we arrived in Lahaina, we met up with my mom’s taxi-driver friend, Kiki. Kiki was an Asian woman who spoke in a super-loud high-pitched voice that sounded like a motorcycle sliding under a semi. She was nearly forty and six months pregnant with her third child. Her maroon minivan taxi was decked out in Mardi Gras beads, hula-girl dashboard bobbleheads, and nori seaweed treats. A mix tape of nineties soft rock played nonstop as we drove for an hour to the other side of the island. Before leaving Lanai, I’d made an appointment with an urgent-care clinic in Kahului that promised to give me an MRI if my leg looked bad enough.

  When we arrived at the clinic we made Kiki come in with us and hold Sid. She rocked him back and forth as he stared at her blankly, wondering if I’d given up on solo motherhood and hired another baby nurse. My mom escorted me into an exam room, where we waited for the doctor.

  “How well do you know Kiki? Are you sure Sid is okay with her?”

  “She’s the greatest. She’s been driving me to the airport for years,” she said, as if being a great chauffeur somehow disqualified Kiki from being a kidnapper. I quieted my nerves by reminding myself that Kiki already had two kids and one on the way. She had her hands and her womb full. She knew better than I did that stealing Sid would only bring more stress.

  When a sun-damaged doctor walked in wearing a shark-tooth necklace and a gold hoop earring, universal symbols of a midlife crisis, I was dubious.

  “Are you a real doctor?” I accidentally asked out loud.

  “Ha! I think so,” he said, then looked at my mom, who seemed to be asking the same question with her eyes.

  “So where is the MRI machine?” My mom squinted down the hall like a suspicious DEA agent looking for a mountain of dope.

  “Yeah, we gotta take a look at this thing,” I said, pointing at my leg.

  “How did you injure it?” he asked, ignoring us and proceeding with his examination.

  “Running.”

  He picked up my leg in almost the same way Jason did, tipping me off that he might not be a real doctor. My mom rolled her eyes and pointed at the time on her phone. I never felt closer to my mom than when we had a third person to hate.

  “You don’t have a break,” he said, still playing with my leg.

  “I know, but it’s definitely something. I can’t stand on it. Let’s do an MRI.”

  “We actually don’t have an MRI in this facility, and to be honest, it isn’t going to show anything. Your best bet is just to go easy and let it heal itself.”

  I could already hear my mom’s I told you so.

  “So you’re saying there’s nothing to do?” I asked, annoyed.

  “Nope. Not really. I think it’s probably just tendinitis,” he said, rushing us out, clearly eager to return to his life of surf, sun, and suing his ex-wife.

  “So what does that mean? What do I need to do?”

  “Walk on it, for starters.”

  “What?” I said, thinking I’d misheard him.

  “Yeah, staying off it is only making it worse. The best thing you can do is start applying pressure and walking.”

  I looked at my mom. She looked back at me. I felt like a kid at the school nurse’s office who just found out her temperature was just slightly below normal. What little concern my mom had faded as she walked out of the room behind me, pushing my empty wheelchair.

  As we made our way back to Lahaina, Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” blasted through Kiki’s low-fi speakers. The Moc had already moved on, buried in her phone and flashing me pictures of potential Murphy beds for her home office at each stoplight. I glanced at each picture with detached emotion, like an in-flight movie I didn’t have the strength to turn off.

  “I’ve always felt like John would be better suited to living in a man cave than sharing a room with me and Rocky,” she mused aloud.

  “Totally.” I nodded, tuning out my mom and agreeing with Cher. I was too strong to tell her I was sorry (for dragging her to Maui), too proud to tell her I was wrong (about my leg), I knew that I was blind (at least more blind than paraplegic). And I started to realize that if I could turn back time, it wouldn’t actually change a thing.

  Days later, I boarded a flight bound for Los Angeles and real life. As we took off over Honolulu, I looked down at the serried sandy beaches and streets lined with rented Mustang convertibles. I mourned my injury and the self-awareness it forced on me. My leg wasn’t broken, but a part of me was. More than fixing my leg, I guess I hoped that in Hawaii I could fix a relationship that had never functioned normally to begin with. I wanted my mom to want to take care of me. I wanted her to put me first. Before Rocky, before men, before herself. But looking to her for a corrective experience was futile and ill-timed. I needed to put Sid first. Before my own deprivation, before my beef with Rocky, before my morbid curiosity about Allen the Bartender and whether or not he’d qualify for gastric. As the lights in the cabin dimmed and we were high above the clouds, I reclined my seat and quietly wept.

  “Are you all right?” Jason panicked, sensing the irregularity in my breathing.

  “I’m going to be.” I smiled gently, reaching into Sid’s diaper bag.

  “Can I get you a tissue?”

  “No, this is fine,” I said, pulling out Rocky’s Baby Shoe and nuzzling back into Jason’s chest.

  4

  SLEEPING IN THE DOGHOUSE

  When I was nine months pregnant, Jason decided it was the perfect time to buy a new house and uproot our life completely. He wasn’t completely wrong—our home was in no way suitable for children. Our old place, though comfortable for a young couple or a drug dealer from the 1980s, dangled off the side of a cliff and was strictly filled with sharp objects and mirrored tables. He felt it made sense to move to a house that was more kid-friendly and less fun to do cocaine in.

  It was July and Sid was five months old when we finally moved into our new place. He still wasn’t sleeping through the night and his new favorite game was to wait until 2 a.m., then start screaming like he was being recircumcised. I’d made the mistake several weeks earlier of hanging over the side of his crib and dropping my boob into his mouth, feeding him like a hamster. Now he was under the impression that his milk was on
tap and that Happy Hour was every hour.

  So, one night, half-conscious, I got up and made my way down the long narrow hallway to his nursery. When I entered, the room was pitch black. He continued screaming, my boobs inflating like airbags, getting bigger with each shriek. I picked him up and sat down in my rocking chair to feed him. The bathroom door was ajar, and for whatever reason I wanted it closed.

  Well—not for whatever reason. Open doors are unsettling. They promote tomfoolery among spirits and encourage home intruders to masturbate into your underwear drawers. I don’t know how I know this. It’s just information I was born with.

  Jason stormed in, in one of his mother-hen frenzies, and fumbled around for no reason other than because he wanted me to know that he was awake, too. We were past the first stage of parenthood, in which we were generous with our time and happy to help each other out, and had now graduated to the second stage of parenthood, in which all we did was compete. If I got up at night, I shamed Jason if he didn’t get up with me. If he changed a diaper, he was quick to let me know that it was by far the grossest diaper he’d ever seen.

  I whispered to him to close the bathroom door. He did, then wandered around for a few seconds before returning to bed. Sid drank up like my mom at a bottomless-mimosa buffet, and an hour later, he was unconscious.

  Slowly, I got up and tiptoed back to his crib, where I lowered him down on his side. Just then, something caught my eye. My reflection in the mirror. My reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  The motherfucking bathroom door was open.

  The air conditioner was off and the door was fifty pounds of oak, so it couldn’t have opened from a stray draft. The alarm hadn’t made a sound, so it couldn’t be a break-in. As I saw it, there was only one reasonable explanation: ghost.

  I tried to calm myself as I bolted out of the room and shut the door behind me. “Baby, can you come here for a second?” I called out down the hall.

  Jason appeared a few minutes later, clearly having just been awakened but pretending he’d been up the whole time. I was standing with my back pressed against Sid’s door, like a throng of hungry zombies were trying to break through from the other side.

  “Yeah? Everything all good?”

  His eyes were open and his mouth was moving, but he was still asleep. I amped up my volume to make sure I had his attention.

  “Can you go in there and see if the bathroom door is open or closed?” I didn’t want to hint at what the right response was, because husbands are trained to tell you whatever answer is most likely to shut you up. I also didn’t warn him about the potential ghost, figuring that if I let it feast on his spirit for a while, it would give me and Sid more time to escape.

  He opened the door, stumbled back into the room, flipped on a light, then walked back out. “It’s open.”

  “What do you mean it’s open?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s closed.”

  “No, it’s not, Jason. It’s open. You just checked. You gotta get Sid out of there. Can you please bring him to me?”

  It dawned on me. I had enclosed my only child in a room with an evil spirit for five full minutes. This was what it was like to be a horrible parent. I was disgusted with myself and also, strangely, felt closer to my own parents.

  “Bring him to you? He’s asleep.”

  Jason started walking away, but I blocked him and pushed his body through Sid’s door, the way I planned on doing if the house was ever on fire. “BRING ME THE CHILD,” I said.

  Once my son was safe in my arms, I raced Jason back to the bedroom. Sid’s mouth latched back onto my tit, and he hung off me like a giant clip-on earring, as my braless udders flapped. I checked around the room to make sure it was secure, then crawled under my duvet and switched my pillow to the opposite side of the bed.

  “What are you doing?” Jason looked at me, confused, like someone who’d just lost a race across the house he didn’t even know he was competing in. Mr. Teets trampled over my other two dogs, Gina and Harry, and curled up between my legs like a chastity belt (clearly dedicated to preventing me from being raped by Satan while I slept).

  “I need to sleep on your side of the bed now. I’m scared of my side. It’s too close to the door.” I set Sid down on a pillow, which upon further reflection may have been Gina, and I burrowed in for the night.

  Jason didn’t have the strength to protest, or else he was unfamiliar with the fact that ghosts always eat the person closest to the door. Either way, he came to bed, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

  The next morning everything in the house looked different. I’d seen something I couldn’t un-see. As a kid I used to always say aloud that I’d never want a ghost to reveal himself to me because I wouldn’t be able to handle it and probably end up having a psychotic break. I figured announcing it to various rooms I found dubious was a great way to get my message across to the afterlife, without coming straight out and accusing any place in particular of harboring spirits.

  “No need to reveal yourself, ghosts. My mom is fucking me up just fine on her own,” I’d say casually while doing my homework.

  Ironically, the only person I knew who’d ever actually seen a ghost was my mom.

  “Well, Choppy, can’t you just light some candles and make the place totally Jenny?”

  “Totally Jenny? I don’t even know what that means,” I said into the phone. I paced back and forth on the patio as Jason stared at me passive-aggressively from the kitchen.

  “I mean, get some sage and clear out the bad vibes.”

  “Mom, this is more than just bad vibes. I saw a ghost. Remember when you saw a ghost?”

  “No. When?” My mom had this uncanny ability to block out all milestones in her life that others might deem notable: her college graduation, her first marriage, and now, apparently, all interactions with poltergeists.

  I walked back inside, holding the phone to my ear with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing a ghost is going to kill you before brain cancer has a chance. “Mom, remember you told me you had a spirit attack you when we were house-sitting for your sister in Coronado?”

  “I did?”

  “What do you mean? How do you not remember that? You said it sat on your chest and held you down in bed and whispered that you had perfect, dime-sized nipples.”

  “It mentioned my dime-sized nipples? Maybe that sounds familiar. I don’t know, I’ve blocked out a lot of my childhood.”

  “This was five years ago!”

  While I was busy trying to explain to my mom that she was past middle age, Sid was busy head-butting Jason. I told my mom I’d call her back, even though I had zero plans to call her ever again, and hung up.

  I took Sid from Jason so he could get ready for a meeting, then nonchalantly followed him around the house. Whatever room he walked into, I’d walk into. If he had to get something out of the dryer, I suddenly needed to start a load of laundry. If he had to make a second cup of coffee, I coincidentally needed to toast a piece of bread. He finally called me out when Sid and I appeared naked behind him in the shower and I suggested the three of us rinse off together as a family.

  “Jenny, there is nothing wrong with the house. You are creating shit in your head. You need to get back on Zoloft.”

  One part of me believed him. The other part suspected that he’d promised Sid to another realm as a sacrifice in exchange for success in his acting career.

  Get back on Zoloft? I thought to myself. Was that what the neighbors drugged Mia Farrow with in Rosemary’s Baby? I was pretty sure it was.

  Since my mom was a total dud in the ghost-busting department and Jason had officially adopted the role of “guy in the horror movie who doesn’t believe in ghosts until one impales him with a harpoon in his sleep,” I turned to my new replacement mom for advice.

  Joan Arthur was a friend I’d made via Instagram a year and a half earlier. I knew who she was because we had all the same frenemies. She was a successful screenwriter with a reputation for telli
ng networks that their notes made absolutely no sense. I remembered meeting her briefly years earlier when I auditioned for a pilot she wrote for ABC. I didn’t get the job and didn’t think of her again (except when hoping her pilot didn’t get picked up) until I stumbled upon her Instagram. Unlike most of the accounts I followed, Joan’s page told a story. Her voice was unmistakable and unique. She was narcissistic, unapologetic, hilarious, chaotic, and brutally honest. She was the kind of storyteller I aspired to be. Naturally, I found myself craving her friendship and approval. For a few weeks I followed her, hoping she’d follow back, but when she didn’t, I grew offended, staged a screaming, dramatic breakup with her in my head, and deleted her ass. Then one day, a few months before I became pregnant with Sid, she texted me out of nowhere and said she’d heard I was funny. I didn’t know how she got my number and I didn’t care. She asked if I wanted to have dinner. Eager to win her over, I accepted.

  That night I made my way up the long, treacherous staircase at the private, members-only Soho House in West Hollywood. After fighting my way through the line at the valet, I was confronted by the cunty sphinxes guarding the elevator.

  “I’m meeting Ms. Arthur. She’s expecting me,” I said, hoping it might be that simple.

  “There’s no reservation under that name. Do you have another?” A tall brunette with two nostrils where her pre-Bat-Mitzvahed nose used to be smiled down at me from a mahogany lectern.

  I tried Joan’s first name, my last name, then a random series of numbers, exclamation points, and ampersands until finally the sphinx beamed proudly.

  “Found it,” she said. “It was under Joan Arthur.”

  “I said that.”

  “You did?” She leaned back and feigned ignorance, overly confident in her kitten heels.

  When I finally reached the rooftop garden, I was escorted to a table where a chic lesbian with an expensive, choppy blond haircut and mirrored Ray-Bans sat on a sofa, checking her phone.

  “Honnnneeeeey,” she said, as if reuniting with a long-lost lover. As she brushed her bangs to the side, I could see she was older than me, but her body looked roughly fourteen. She threw her phone at her Balenciaga motorcycle bag and started talking.