WHY DID YOU MOVE TO NEW YORK

(An excerpt from Live Fast, Die Hot)

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 2am, then start screaming like he was being re-circumcised. 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, 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. 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 panics, 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, where we were generous with our time and happy to help each other out, and had now graduated to the second stage of parenthood where 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 worst 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 tip-toed 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 thirty pounds of oak, so it couldn’t have opened from a stray draft. The alarm hadn’t gone off, 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 up 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 them 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. My poodle, 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.