Liz thought, at first, that it was just another childhood fear. Aspen, a sensitive four-year-old, had asked for help hanging blankets around her bed because she thought the dresser across the room watched her. It did look a bit like a face and a creepy one at that, the two knobs on the top drawer the eyes and the single wide, curved handle on the drawers beneath like a column of smiles.

Liz assured Aspen that it was all in her imagination, but also indulged her, helping arrange the blankets every night. At that age, Liz had been afraid there were pirates under her bed, and she lived in Colorado.

Liz’s older daughter, Sylvie, who slept in the top bunk, had always had a sense of humor about her sister’s fears. Hanging blankets around the bed had been Sylvie’s idea.

 “You won’t see the dark  that way,” she said.

Aspen considered the idea, her brow furrowed over serious brown eyes, thumb in her mouth. Sylvie gave Liz a sly smile.

After a few weeks of Aspen’s anxiety, Sylvie suggested that actually, there was a person behind the dresser, breaking the spell of childhood fear. The girls laughed at the thought of someone very flat back there. Liz found bowls of Goldfish and Fruit Loops on the bedroom floor and when she got mad at the girls they’d insisted they were feeding the person behind the dresser.

When Liz kissed the girls goodnight and turned out the light, Sylvie would say, “Goodnight, person behind the dresser.” It seemed benevolent now rather than sinister.

Liz left the room one night, laughing at the ritual and told her husband about it.

He stood in front of the liquor cabinet, surveying his options and, without looking up, said, “Don’t encourage it.”

Deflated, Liz went to her bedroom and lost herself in Instagram for a few hours, scrolling through pictures of girls’ nights with boutique cocktails. There was Lindsey in the middle of a group of moms, their dresses revealing enough cleavage and thigh to be sexy without stepping over into tacky. When Liz had nearly run down her phone battery, she plugged it into the charger and went to bed.

She thought the person behind the dresser would fade, but night after night, the girls said goodnight to it. One afternoon, with the girls at school and the toddler napping, Liz walked through the girls’ room, stuffing plush animals and old toys that wouldn’t be missed into a garbage bag. She felt the dresser’s eyes on her and turned to face it.

“Don’t judge me,” she said. “I told them to pick things to get rid of and they didn’t do it. Look at this room.” She waved a hand over the layer of discarded Barbie paraphernalia on the floor and the stuffed animals tumbling from the beds. “They have so much junk they never play with.” She turned back to her task, feeling, somehow, that she had the dresser’s blessing.

Weeks later, Liz had a particularly harried morning. The girls had fought getting dressed, screamed when she brushed their hair and they were late to school. Liz had to drag them past Lindsey WHO was volunteering in the library, her eyes following Liz and her sobbing girls down the hall. She took her son to their Mommy and Me class, only to carry him out, mid-tantrum, under her arm like a surf board.

“It happens,” one of the moms had said, but somehow it only seemed to happen to her, and with some regularity.

Finally, with the toddler down for a nap, she headed to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. As she passed the girls’ room, she caught the dresser looking at her and she thought about what it had witnessed. Her complete lack of control, the way she’d yelled, “What is wrong with you?” when Sylvie had hit Aspen with a plastic Batman.

Liz went back into the girls’ room, shoved a heap of dolls to the side and sat on the floor, leaning against the bed, coffee mug radiating its heat into both hands.

She took a sip and looked at the dresser. “I guess it was pretty bad.” She looked into her mug. “I hate being the mom who yells. Every other parent has it together. They get their kids to school on time.” She took a long slow drink and sat in the silence a moment.

 “Sylvie tells me she hates me and wishes I was dead at least once a day.”

She brushed a tear away. The dresser absorbed her confession and she could feel the muscles in her neck and shoulders begin to release. She got up, put the stray clothes in the hamper and left to clean up the breakfast dishes.

She’d come back to the dresser during naptime to unload, or sometimes just to laugh about craziness with the kids. It was better than the athleisure-wearing mom group that met twice a week to push Bob strollers along the Cherry Creek trails. Liz always showed up without makeup, hair in a pony tail. The other moms had a no-makeup look that required more cosmetics than Liz used when she wore makeup in earnest, and they kept their ponytails in place with just a hint of teasing and a volumizing hair spray.

When Liz vented any frustration, their apparent commiseration only reminded Liz how everyone else was momming better than she was.

I find things are smoother when I keep a regular bedtime, cut down on sugar, limit screen time.

Lindsey had said, “My kids respond really well to empathy.”

It struck Liz one day, holding her coffee mug, that she shouldn’t show up empty handed, and the next time she went in to talk to the dresser, she brought a second cup.

“I didn’t know how you take your coffee,” she said. “I just like cream, but I thought maybe you’d like sugar too.”

The dresser seemed pleased, so she kept it up.

Her mom-friends maximized naptime, doing Pilates, taking online accounting classes, organizing closets, and here she was, talking to furniture. But who was she kidding. Whatever personal development plans she made, after getting her son down, she’d wind up on Instagram, scrolling through documentation of workouts crushed, clean-eating salads, or kids crafting in immaculate, tastefully decorated living rooms.

Liz never put her own pictures up. She clearly wasn’t working out and you don’t take pictures of boxed mac and cheese. Whenever her kids did something photo-worthy, she couldn’t get a shot without the mess in the background. At least, if she spent her son’s naptime talking to the dresser, she didn’t feel worse about herself when he woke up.

Liz had always been a bit woo-woo, dabbling in healing crystals and chakras. She’d gone to a clairvoyant for a while. Her husband thought it was stupid, but kept it to himself.

She had to believe in things seen and unseen, the only point of dogma she’d retained from Catechism. Otherwise it meant that life was nothing more than photo-worthy moments, social media brags and bank accounts. That couldn’t be true. Smudge sticks and cleansed auras had been a way to pretend that she could scrape away the veneer and uncover something with substance. Here, behind the dresser, she could feel the unseen, like the membrane was thin between that world and all of this artifice. She had to protect it.

When her youngest started kindergarten, Liz’s mom-friends joined the PTA or something equally productive. One friend started a graduate program in psychology; Liz took a job at a dentist’s office. She wasn’t curing cancer, or anything, but she kept things running smoothly. It was nice to have a purpose. The girls had long since stopped saying goodnight to the person behind the dresser, but she always took a moment, once the kids were off and before she had to go, for a quick coffee with it.

Eventually, Sylvie wanted a room of her own, and when she moved out, Aspen, now nine, wanted to rearrange the furniture.

“I want the dresser over there,” she said.

“I think that wall is the best space for it,” Liz said, trying to keep her voice even.

From the other room, her husband called over the TV news he had turned up loud, “Aspen should arrange her furniture however she wants it.”

Liz ignored him. “Aspen, let’s leave the dresser there and we’ll get you a desk for the other wall.” She couldn’t stand the idea of pushpins and boy-band posters on it.

“I don’t want a desk. I just want the dresser over there,” Aspen said. She wedged herself between the dresser and the wall and began to heave.

 “Don’t move the fucking dresser!”

Aspen froze.

“Everything okay in there,” her husband said.

“You could tip it over, moving it by yourself,” Liz said, her voice back under control.

She left the room, joining her husband. Standing behind his recliner while he continued to watch the news, a whiskey in his hand, she listened to the girls talking in the bedroom.

“Here, let me help you,” Sylvie said. “Why do you want to move it so bad?”

“I’ve always felt like it was watching me,” Aspen said.

“Well that’s a little crazy.” There was the heavy shuffle and scrape of moving furniture.

Later, Liz forced herself to look into the room. She’d never noticed how the sun had leached the paint color on the walls, but now, the space where the dresser had stood remained the “Hopeful Dream” blue she’d painted the room when she was pregnant with Sylvie.  Other than the mismatch of color, it was an ordinary wall. Not ordinary, vacant.

The whole house felt empty and so Liz made herself busy elsewhere, leaving for work earlier than usual, volunteering for the girls’ soccer teams.

Sylvie crashed into teenagerdom, changing her hair color from screaming purple to Twilight-Zone green seemingly weekly. Liz thought it was best to let Sylvie her express herself, but when they arrived at soccer practice, the other moms’ eyes slid first over Sylvie then settled on Liz.

The hair color, the piercings, were one thing, an experimentation Liz understood. It was when she stopped experimenting that Liz began to worry. Sylvie would barely shower, grew thinner, shrinking under oversized hoodies. She quit the soccer team, and it was a relief, for both of them, to avoid judgment, but Liz worried about the withdrawal.

She downplayed the slump as another phase, countering it with aggressive cheerfulness. She would positive-think the fuck out of it. She started leaving notes in Sylvie’s backpack, like she’d done when Silvie was younger. All hearts, smiley faces and exclamation points. She insisted on game nights and outings to museums, family activities they’d never done before.

One morning, when waking Sylvie, she saw the scabbed-over cuts raked across her arms, crosshatching she’d hid under her sweatshirts. Liz tried to stay calm, to manage the situation, but after talks with a psychologist, there was nothing left but to get Sylvie hospitalized. She’d wept sitting in the therapist’s office listening to how Sylvie had been bullied, alone, unprotected against all of high school’s cruelty while she’d maintained impeccable billing at the dentist’s office and planned soccer-practice snacks.

She returned home from the appointment, needing to put things in order, to tidy things up. Standing in Aspen’s room with an armful of clothes, she felt the familiar eyes on her. She turned to the wall, exposed now under a corkboard where Aspen tacked up pictures and random notes from friends. The presence felt weakened, vulnerable, but it had once again taken up residence.

“Hey,” she said. “I think we need something stronger than coffee.”

She went to the liquor cabinet, selecting one of her husband’s whiskeys, an expensive looking bottle, adorned with a silver deer head staring straight at you with angry eyes, a mean set of antlers rising out of each side of its head. She didn’t particularly like whiskey, more of a fruity cocktail, easy drinking kind of girl, but it just felt right. On the rare occasions she did drink whiskey, she’d have it over ice, cooling and watering it down, but today, she needed the burn. She poured two glasses, probably a little too big, but her husband wouldn’t notice.

She sat facing the wall, the scorch sliding down her throat, settling into her hollowed out stomach.

“I can’t believe I missed it all.” The whiskey churned in her stomach. “I guess I knew something was wrong. I don’t know why I thought I could fix it with inspirational quotes from cat posters.” She took another burning sip, looked at the chipped paint on the wall, a smudge of something. “You’re a mess, you know that.” She drained the rest of her glass; the heat felt like a purging.

She got up, picked up the detritus that had collected on the floor in front of the wall. She washed the grit off with a vinegar solution and it looked better. She moved a small end table in front of the wall, set a potted African violet on it.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now you can see out, but Aspen won’t throw her things at you. I’ll make sure she keeps this here.”

Liz had to go back to the hospital to check on Sylvie, but she left a lamp on.

Michelle Nicolaysen has an MA in Religious Studies from Arizona State University. She now lives with her husband and three kids on a sheep and cattle ranch in Central Wyoming. Her work has appeared in Hash Journal, Sad Girls Club and The Examined Life Journal.