Page 29 of Play Nice

I also, apparently, wasn’t good enough for him. He began an affair with our daughters’ dance instructor, spent a year denying it, accusing me of being crazy and insecure, and then one day I woke up to him packing a bag, telling me he was leaving me and taking the girls. He promised I could still see them. He told me it’d be better for everyone if I didn’t fight.

He’ll continue to deny this till the day he dies. He’ll tell you that I never recovered from my postpartum with you. That I became reliant on alcohol. That I was paranoid and mentally unstable. And that accusing him of cheating was my way of tarnishing his reputation while redeeming my own. I know you love your father. He’s a great dad. But he was horrible to me. This is the truth. I know you’re smart enough to see it, if you look back, and look closely.

But I fought. Of course I fought. Eleven months later, I was in the new house with my daughters, but as far as he was concerned, custody still was not settled.

There were stakes to feeding them peanut butter and jelly for dinner and allowing them to watch TV. It didn’t matter that I was exhausted from the move, physically and financially. There was no room for me to fail, to open myself up to ridicule.

The pressure put me on edge. It made me vulnerable.

So when I went into the kitchen to find all the cabinets open and peanut butter smeared on the walls, even though I knew in my right mind, in my heart of hearts, that it wasn’t my daughters, I called them into the kitchen.

“Who did this?” I asked.

They looked confused.

“Is this supposed to be funny?”

“What happened?” Elle asked, anxiously shifting her weight, shuffling back and forth.

“You tell me,” I said.

“We were in the other room,” Dee said. “It wasn’t us. But I can clean it up. I’ll clean.”

“Cici?” I asked. “Was this you?”

She wasn’t tall enough to reach the cabinets. Not unless she climbed up…

“No,” she said. Then, very matter-of-fact, added, “It was probably the thing that lives in my closet.”

We all looked at her.

“What?” I asked, kneeling so we could be eye to eye.

She repeated herself in her sweet little voice. “The thing that lives in my closet.”

There was no trace of her typical impishness, no wink in her eye. I knew my daughters, I understood them. I saw them. And I knew Cici was being serious.

“What thing?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I dunno. It doesn’t have a body yet.”

“Cici,” I said, standing. “This is our new house. Why would you make a mess in our new house? Do you not like it here?”

“I didn’t do it,” she said, her cheeks going red, eyes welling with tears. “I didn’t do it.”

“She didn’t,” Dee said. “She was with us the whole time.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then you can all clean. Clean it up, and then go to bed!”

I stormed out of the kitchen, down the stairs, and into my room, slamming the door behind me. I regretted my behavior instantly and wanted to run back upstairs to apologize, but I couldn’t bear to face them. I was too ashamed.

An hour later, I emerged from my room to find the kitchen wiped clean, cabinets closed, and the girls asleep in their beds. I kissed them all on the forehead and prepared to make it up to them in the morning with French toast.

I know I was crueler in the moment than I recounted here. I will be sorry about this until the day I die, and probably even after.

Too upset to sleep, I decided to light some candles and run a bath. The downstairs bathroom had a sunken tub, which was novel to the girls. They liked it, so I liked it.

I set out the few candles I had, switched off the lights, and leaned down to turn on the faucet. At first, I couldn’t tell, since the room was dark. But by the soft flicker of candlelight, the water looked wrong, only I couldn’t determine why. Or perhaps I just struggled to wrap my mind around it, to accept that the water was black as ash. And that it smelled. That it stank of sulfur.