Live Fast Die Hot (12 page)

“Does anyone else have any concerns they want to discuss before we sing our goodbye song?” Abby, our instructor, asked.

Apparently, class started at ten-fifteen, not eleven-fifteen as I'd thought. Abby looked over at me and faintly smiled, as if my sister had already warned her I was a total flake. “Let's go to Starbucks and have our own class,” I whispered to Sid, who was getting his imaginary taxes done by one of the accountants.

Before the singing could commence, Mirial, the annoying blonde, started desperately rambling, as if once class was over she was going to be thrown back into solitary confinement until her husband came home from work and beat her over the head with his dick. “Hi, guys, Mirial again.” She signed her name twice, as if she was waiting for us to mirror it back to her. “Anyway, my ‘area' has just been so sore since having little Jagger. I'm so tight, my husband can barely fit inside me.” The only thing I found more annoying than a mom who unnecessarily uses sign language was a mom who pretended to still care about sex.

Abby explained that her estrogen levels were low because of breast-feeding. She recommended a cream.

“Does anybody in here have a ghost problem?” I said. I looked at Sid, worried he might start shrieking like a vampire at the mere mention of the word.

“You mean like a phantom pain?” Abby replied.

“No, more like a literal phantom. Not
of the Opera,
more
of the underworld.
”

The room went silent. Mirial's signing fingers twisted into horns on her head. The accountants started crying.

Class was dismissed on that note. As I tried to strap Sid's flailing body back into his stroller, Abby walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. She was an extremely petite woman with pale skin and a neck full of birthstone charms.

“I didn't want to say this in front of the group, but I do believe in ghosts and I have a great psychic who specializes in this kind of thing, if you'd like to speak with her.” She told me she'd text me her clairvoyant's number and not to worry.

Before I exited the building, I rolled past a small marble fountain and sprinkled what I assumed was holy water on Sid's face. He didn't burst into flames, but he also didn't look happy. I tried to lighten things up on the drive home by playing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” on the stereo on repeat. Every stoplight, I'd look in the rearview mirror to check if he was awake. He was always awake. Part of me wondered if he might be one of those people who slept with their eyes open. The other part suspected he was an incubus.

It's a strange feeling to both love and fear something in equal parts. I didn't know if I made him happy. He couldn't tell me. I didn't know if he wanted to kill me. He was strapped in a car seat. All I knew was that I loved him violently—to the point of madness. But the intimate serenity of pregnancy, that weightlessness that can be replicated only by a muscle relaxer and a tall glass of wine, had vanished and in its place grew a thundering, inexorable terror.

Just as I pulled up to our well-appointed albeit demonic home, Sid fell asleep. I scanned the upstairs windows of the house, sure I'd see the kid from
The Omen
peering out through one of the curtains, but everything looked calm. Lita's car was gone. She usually worked later, but knowing there was a greater chance of her being deported than apported, I tried not to read into it. I parked and waited for Jason rather than disturb Sid.

I looked around at the lush greenery cascading off the hillside. I watched the sunlight cut through the fanning palms above. I scanned for unmarked Indian burials. I told myself that I should be happy, that everything was good. But not even the half-eaten Quest Bar in my glove box could suppress my pangs of discomfort.

I looked at my phone and found a text from Abby. Her psychic's name was Elenor. I called right away.

“Hi, my name is Jenny Mollen, er…Biggs, and—” Before I could finish leaving a message, my other line beeped.

I clicked over and it was Elenor.

Her voice was soft and sympathetic and slightly less “Come to the light, Carol Anne” than I'd anticipated. Part of me wanted to hang up before she told me anything that might make me check into a hotel; the other part waited with bated breath for the gory details.

Torn between what I wanted and what I needed, I blurted out, “Do you think my house is haunted because I totally think it's haunted oh my God I'm scared.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, followed by what sounded like a cockatiel being shoved into a microwave. Finally, Elenor spoke.

“It's a little haunted.”

“A little haunted? What does that mean? How can something be a little haunted? Is it haunted by a little person?” I looked at Sid in the backseat and flashed to the little boy who kills his mother in
Pet Sematary.

“I think the spirit is actually a large dog.”

“A dog?” I exhaled for the first time in two minutes. I knew that dogs, unlike people, were inherently good.

“Yes.”

Now that I thought about it, a dog ghost made a lot of sense. Ever since we moved in, Harry and Teets had been marking the walls incessantly. What I thought was just a simple game of dueling penises was probably a concerted effort to establish dominance over the former tenant. Having a ghost dog seemed kind of fun. Jason always wanted to adopt a bullmastiff or a standard poodle, but we traveled too much and didn't have the space in the old house. Maybe a large ghost dog was exactly what we needed. Husky, low maintenance, omnipresent.

“Like a Clifford the Big Red Dog? That's how I'm picturing him. Because I have three small dogs and none of them are strong enough to open bathroom doors.”

“He's more the size of a cocker spaniel.”

“Teets hates cocker spaniels,” I said, hoping to at least steer her toward a bichon frise.

“Oh, and he has an old-man partner.” Elenor's microwave beeped. No sound from the cockatiel. “Somebody who lived near the property. He's going to teach your son historical facts.” I envisioned a man in a tricornered hat floating over Sid's crib, quizzing him about the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. Now I wasn't just scared of the ghost, I was a little bit offended. Had the universe assigned me this apparition because it assumed I'd be a shitty history teacher? Would Sid also be visited by ghosts tutoring him on other topics I was deficient in, such as industrial arts and arithmetic?

I moved the baby monitor to Jason's new side of the bed (my old side) to ensure I wouldn't see any floating old-man hands swipe through the frame when I least expected it. The monitor was always wherever Jason was, because even before I had confirmation of a ghost, baby monitors scared the shit out of me. Like all surveillance cameras, if you watch them long enough, something usually levitates. The room felt colder than normal, a sure sign that we weren't alone.

“Who do we know with a midsize dog that was recently murdered?” I asked, crawling into bed next to Jason. I'd read online earlier that the number one reason a ghost haunts a place is because it doesn't know it's dead. “What was the name of Jerry and Mike's Lhasa apso?”

A guy at Jason's gym had accidentally killed his six-year-old dog two months earlier. The dog had sneaked into the backseat of his car one morning before work and was found “sleeping” on the dashboard later that afternoon.

“Jenny!
NEVER MENTION THAT EVER
. I'm serious. That was the most devastating thing that ever happened to Jerry. And the dog was a Pekingese. Seymour, I think.” Jason paused, contemplating the name.

“Seeeeymour?” I called out, dangling my head off the end of the bed and looking under it.

Jason looked at me, incredulous. “Jenny, you are an adult. I need you to act like an adult. Ghosts aren't real. This is our home. You need to stop being afraid of it.”

The notion sounded so simple. And I wished deeply that I could. I didn't want to be afraid of my new house. I didn't want to be afraid of my new life. But I was. Desperately and utterly afraid.

Everywhere I went for the next month I found myself talking about the ghost. Business meetings, television pitches, the dog groomer. I bought a three-pack of sage smudge sticks from Whole Foods and walked through each room making smoke triangles. I opened all the windows and doors and chanted the words “If you are not of this realm, you need to leave.” I even made Lita spend the night in Sid's room to see if anything would happen to her. I was sleeping less as Sid was sleeping more. I knew something had to change.

My therapist, Chandra, whom I'd recently sent Joan Arthur to for a full psych eval, suggested that I might be projecting other woes onto the house. I agreed that it was possible. But what was equally possible was that the ghost was reaching out to me because it had unfinished business in this lifetime.

One afternoon, Jason took Sid to the park and I sat in the front yard doing a phone session with Chandra. I preferred phone sessions because Chandra's office was on the other side of town and because if I got bored of whatever she was talking about I could look at Twitter. Teets sat on my lap, tuning out, as Gina and Harry scavenged around for pieces of petrified deer poop.

“Maybe I'm like Whoopi Goldberg—” I started to say, just as the other line beeped and I took it. It was Elenor the Psychic. I told her I'd call her back for counsel just as soon as I hung up with my therapist. I didn't tell her when that would be; I assumed she knew.

Twenty-five minutes later I called. “Okay,” I said, “Chandra thinks this entire situation is a case of classic projection.” I waited for Elenor to weigh in.

“Fear manifests in different ways, Jenny,” she said after a moment. “Maybe it isn't about a house or a ghost or anything other than your real fear of being a parent.”

I looked at my phone to make sure I'd actually hung up with Chandra. She and Elenor were starting to sound a lot alike. Both were trying to steer me toward rational explanations for my totally irrational fears. It was infuriating.

I grabbed the conversational wheel and turned us back into the weeds, where it was safe. “The truth is I'm fine with the dog. I'm just sort of taking issue with this old-man partner. Is there a way to split them up?” I started fantasizing about a three-way call with Elenor and Chandra. One three-way phone call with my therapist and my psychic might literally solve my entire life.

“You can't escape your own psychological demons, Jenny. You need to ask yourself what you're really afraid of before you just up and move.”

“You think they might be
demons
?” I wanted to probe further, but Joan Arthur and my realtor, Eric Kessleman, were ringing at the front gate. I hung up.

I could see only the bottom half of Joan's body as I approached. The rest of her was obscured by the avocado tree straddling our property line as she attempted to scale the fence.

“I think you guys changed the code!” Eric shouted as one of Joan's Marni boots kicked him in the head.

I punched a code in my phone and the gate opened, pulling Joan's body out of the tree. Joan wrapped her heels around the gate and rode in like a rodeo cowboy. I walked down the driveway to meet them and Eric held his hands out to help Joan down.

“Yeah, honey, that was fairly easy to climb and I'm fifty-four-ty.” She glanced at Eric. “Imagine if I was a strapping young black guy with an erection! Good thing you're selling.” Joan pulled up her slim-fitting cargo pants, then wiped her hands on my back while pretending to give me a hug. “Does anybody have hand sanitizer?”

I'd explained to Eric that I might want to relist the house, but I didn't get into details over the phone. I thought it'd be best to wait until we were face-to-face to mention supernatural activity.

Eric was a handsome gay man in his midforties. He always wore a jacket with an open-collar shirt and small, studious spectacles. He drove a sensible car, said sensible things—I trusted Eric. He seemed like the kind of person who had his life figured out—the kind of guy who read Eckhart Tolle and did Self-Compassion workshops at Esalen. I'd never been to Eric's house, but I pictured it smelling like sandalwood and spa water. Eric wasn't the type of guy who'd ever be called on to do the bidding of a ghost dog and his old-man partner.