The Barter Read online

Bridget isn’t quite sure she’s hearing correctly—didn’t she just clarify that things are fine with Mark? “Last night. He’s working a lot. This really doesn’t have anything to do with Mark.” Suddenly she is exasperated. “‘This,’ what is ‘this’? I don’t even know what I’m trying to explain. So I show up to the art camp meeting late and looking a little bedraggled. Sorry.”

  “You look fine,” Gennie assures her. “Do you want a cup of coffee or something?”

  “Oh God, yes. And Gennie, could I—could I just freshen up a bit in your bathroom?”

  “Oh, of course, of course!” Gennie is so truly delighted by her request that she takes Bridget by the shoulders again and squeezes. “Use anything you need in there! I have this fabulous tinted moisturizer stuff. It’s, like, super sheer—”

  “And Gen, I’m so sorry to ask, I know this is weird, but . . . could I—” Bridget swallows. No, I cannot ask for underpants. “Do you have, like, a long sweater I could just wrap around me? Or something like that?”

  Gennie stares at her, and then Bridget sees something incredible happen: Her friend’s eyes well up with tears. “Oh, honey. Of course. Of course. I—I’ll be right back, I have just the thing.”

  As Gennie disappears into her walk-in closet, Bridget has time to experience a whole new bottoming-out level of shame. She thinks he’s locked you out. She thinks he beats you or terrorizes you or something. Say something. Say something right now. Just make something up, before she suggests calling a domestic crisis hotline.

  “Gennie, I know I must seem like I’m acting strange—or not strange but . . . Look. Everything’s totally fine, with me. And Mark, especially with him. He’s great, he’s just working a lot. And I—I forgot my house key and my wallet . . .” Bridget follows Gennie toward her closet, talking to her friend’s back while looking at the floor. It occurs to her that she has never sounded less convincing, even to herself, and she wonders whether some terrible part of her isn’t enjoying this a little bit. Playacting, or at least not being straight. And being treated, tended to. Why does this feel so nice? Gennie turns around with a long, belted cardigan, all-season cashmere, pale heather gray, impossibly luxurious, perfect. Bridget takes it from Gennie and appreciates the loveliness of the object, and also the gesture. It’s probably one of the most expensive sweaters Gennie owns.

  “I never wear this, and it’s too bad. I got it for Christmas from Charlie’s mom in Massachusetts, and on someone short like me, I just get swallowed up in a cut like this, it’s so long. But on you!” Gennie says brightly, and Bridget ties the belt. “That’s just right for you. You have such shoulders. Everything hangs well on you.”

  “Thank you, honey,” Bridget says. “I mean it. You just saved my life, or it feels like it anyway.”

  Gennie responds by throwing her arms around her, and Bridget is a bit embarrassed. “Whenever you need to talk, I’m here,” Gennie says, and because she is finally safe, for the moment, leaning her head against Gennie’s sweet-smelling hair, Bridget rolls her eyes.

  Karen, Pilar, Sandra, Asha, Jen, and Gennie have conducted the art camp planning meeting without Bridget and are now lingering in the general warmth and welcome of Gennie’s home while watching their children, Madison, Honor, Aidan, Jashun, and Ruby, tearing apart poor Miles’s playbox. To his credit, Miles is trying to be cool about it, but it’s easy to tell that he’s not entirely happy about seeing his toys, his precious things, carted and spun and thrown about the room. Who are these people? he seems to be wondering. Who gave them my stuff? My stuff is important! Bridget sips her coffee, hot and strong and sweet, and watches Miles with sympathy while trying to get up to speed: She has missed the entire meeting, and this means she has to go along with what whatever’s been decided, okay, but it would still be helpful if someone would just tell her what, exactly, that was.

  “So, Wednesday mornings?”

  “I thought we said that, yeah.”

  “But aren’t we starting on Tuesday next week?”

  “Gennie’s got the schedule. You wrote it all down, right?”

  “Thank God for you.”

  “So nice of you to get down all the details and have us all over, G.”

  “You’re welcome, J.” This is how Gennie and Jen address each other, G and J, and it sort of makes Bridget a little bit jealous at the same time that it makes her want to flick both of them, very, very hard, on the kneecap, with a wooden spoon handle or maybe a pencil.

  “So, Tuesday of next week but Wednesdays thereafter,” Bridget clarifies. Not for nothing has Bridget done a few depositions in her day.

  “Thereafter, yes.” Sandra says this, and it’s not exactly nice to hear the word echoed. I was an attorney, you know, and it’s not uppity to use a word your kids will learn in third grade.

  “Okay. And Sandra, you’re first?”

  “Yep, first at my house. On Tuesday.”

  “And what time.”

  “What time did we say? Eleven?” It occurs to Bridget that by skipping the meeting because she appears to be hungover—or still drunk—she might finally have demonstrated her outsiderness irrevocably to this group of women, and that this distracted vagueness in response to her questions might be masking a real unwillingness to answer. Maybe she’s not invited to the party anymore.

  Then Karen turns to her and asks, “But will that time work for you, Bridget? Is Julie napping at eleven now?”

  “She’ll be fine. And when is it my turn? Or, I guess, how do we know whose turn is next?” Suddenly Bridget’s mind leaps to the impossible: all of these children, these darling babies that she really, truly loves a little bit, playing in her living room under the watching black eyes of the ghost, her whiteness shifting and twitching in the corners of the room, her eyes following them. The babies. Oh God, what can I do? She hates me, hates me, hates me.

  “We did a lineup, right? A totally casual calendar. A TCC.” Asha yawns. She’s co-sleeping with Jashun and is always exhausted. “I’m totally trademarking that, BTW.”

  “You actually talk in text message,” Gennie teases.

  “I know! Or wait, I should say ‘LOL’!”

  Bridget waits for the two of them to stop laughing at this and then says, with a little more intensity than quite matches the mood of the room at the moment, “Okay, but, so when is it my turn?”

  She sees Sandra shoot her a look. “Do you need Gennie to give you a firm date on the TCC, Bridget?”

  “You know what, I might need to ask for one, too. As nice as it sounds to play it by ear every week, I’m so busy it’d just be nice to know when I need to plan,” Pilar puts in.

  “Is this too much work? Are we being too ambitious?” Asha asks. “Maybe we should just—”

  “No! No, y’all!” Gennie bursts. She is pleading and laughing. “Come on, we can handle this, can’t we? A weekly semiorganized playdate? I mean, for God’s sake, haven’t we each of us been responsible for harder things than a little once-a-week summer camp? You know? I mean!”

  “You really want to do this,” Jen observes, smiling. “Okay, G. Whatever makes you happy, I’ll do.”

  She has this effect on people, Gennie. Bridget can’t help but see it, but she is trembling at the thought of having guests, having the babies, actually in her house. Her house, where the dead woman is.

  Her lips feel as if they’ve been clamped shut. Bridget is aware that she is breathing funny, heavily, and then she hears Julie crying in Gennie’s room and leaps to her feet, bolting down the hallway, leaving a brief, puzzled silence in her wake.

  She doesn’t care. She’s with her girl again. Seeing Julie awake and reaching up for her from beneath the buckles of her car seat, her little face squinched in its adorable distress as she cries, Bridget’s heart does a familiar stutter. Ever since Julie was a newborn, Bridget has been trying to explain to Mark the peculiar, physical effect the sound of Julie’s c
ry produces. “It feels a little bit like an electric pulse,” she told him once. “Like a power wave that pushes through you and disables your neurological system for a second, then reboots it.”

  “Sounds like a neutron bomb,” Mark observed at the time, half kidding and half frightened.

  Bridget’s fingers are as quick as Rachmaninoff’s, and her upper-body strength is, by now, formidable. She lifts Julie into her arms and squeezes her, kisses her plump, soft cheek, takes in the unmistakable barnyard odor, and heads for Miles’s room and his changing table. “Hello, Jujubee. Did you sleep well? Did you have a good nap?” Julie’s hair is a fluffy halo, whorling out from a point at the back of her head that has been pressed into her car seat for hours. “My sweet Jujubee. Mmm, mmm, mmm.” And so on. Oh, it is sweet to hold and comfort a sleepy baby. She indulges in several more kisses as she gently lays Julie down on Miles’s changing pad. Julie is cheerful now, alert and quiet and still as she usually is after her wake-up squall. She says, “Mmmma,” and pretends to kiss her mother.

  “Thank you, Jujubee.” Bridget smiles at her little girl. “I love you, too.”

  “Are y’all okay?” Gennie whispers from the door.

  “We’re fine. Do you mind if I borrow a diaper?”

  “As long as you don’t give it back.” This is their group’s standard response to this question, which is asked by at least one person every time they get together.

  “I think I’d better go, Gennie. I’ll give back your sweater—”

  “No, no, keep it. Keep it till Friday, I’ll see you then. Or keep it till whenever, I don’t need it.” Gennie eases in, glances back over her shoulder at Miles and the others in the living room, and closes the door behind her. “Bridget. I’m sorry if I said anything off . . . about Mark.”

  Bridget pulls Julie’s pajamas up and then pulls Julie into her arms. “You didn’t,” she lies. She kisses Julie’s head and puts her on the floor, where she toddles toward the bedroom door, wanting to join the children she hears in the other room.

  When Bridget looks back up at Gennie, she is pale and clearly struggling with something. It comes out in a whisper, after a tiny pause that is somehow as adorable as a mouse squeak, despite the disgusting horribleness of her question: “Is he cheating on you, Bridge?”

  “What?” She stares. “Why would you ask me that? Of course not!”

  Her friend is miserable. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please—please just forget I said anything.”

  But hadn’t she just been thinking this herself, albeit in a sort of jokey way, just yesterday? Even thinking it for the express purpose of dismissing the possibility—doesn’t that mean it’s crossed her own mind, too?

  Suddenly she would like very much to sit down.

  The bank stuff? Could it actually be because—could he really have taken everything? Constructed some kind of story about work, and then lit out of town with or checked into some hotel with or gotten on a plane with—who? Who would it be?

  No, this is not happening. This is not possible.

  “I just saw him last night. I just spoke with him yesterday afternoon. He—he was—” Not overly happy to talk to me. Either of those times. And I haven’t really been paying attention. No. Lately my attention has been, oh, let’s call it divided.

  “It’s okay. I’m sure it’s okay,” Gennie says.

  Julie begins to pound her little hand on the door. She unleashes a wail. Gennie picks her up, but Julie isn’t having it; she strains toward the door and lets loose again.

  “God,” Bridget says. “My God.” She isn’t sure what she’s feeling, but she knows she can’t be feeling it here. She has to go home. She has to go home because (why? because suddenly you want to see her? this is all her fault and you hate her) otherwise she’ll say something to Gennie that she’ll regret.

  “Are you okay? Don’t go yet, Bridge. Please. Stay and hang out and let’s talk about this.” Gennie stands between Bridget and the door, but now both Bridget and Julie are trying to escape.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Bridget says firmly.

  She slides her hands under Julie’s armpits and lifts her away from Gennie, who lets her go. Julie gives a kick and catches Gennie in the shoulder, which Gennie ignores. She’s saying, “Okay. But call me. Call me when you get back into your house. That’s all I want.”

  “God, Gennie, mind your own business,” Bridget snaps, flinging the bedroom door open, and now of course everyone in the living room has heard her. There’s another one of those funny silences. Bridget turns back to Gennie, ignoring Julie’s shouts of impatience and distress, and kisses her friend on the cheek—soft and pear-like, just like Julie’s. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, contrite. “Don’t listen to me. I don’t make sense.” This is her fault. This is her fault.

  “It’s okay. Really. It is.” Gennie clears her throat. “Let me get Julie’s car seat for you. You just go. Everybody, Bridget’s going.”

  * * *

  Bridget hurls her car around hedged street corners at speeds that make the tires squeak and make her little girl go silent in the backseat. I hate her I hate her I hate her. She wheels into the driveway and flings open the car doors and grabs Julie from her car seat. Julie laughs at the speed of her ascent.

  “We’re going to go kick that thing’s sorry fucking ass out of our house, Juju. What do you think? What do you think about that?” Bridget says brightly. “And then we’re going to call your dada and have him explain a few fucking things. Awesome! Fun! Let’s do it! Let’s go!” In Bridget’s arms, Julie is bounced and is thereby delighted. Right now there is no room left in Bridget’s heart for fear; her heart is full; it is bursting with a righteous sureness. I should have done this days ago. Gotten angry. Demanded my rights. Claimed my house. Protected my girl.

  The front door swings open hard and fast enough that it boings against the little spring mounted in the baseboard to prevent the doorknob from going through the drywall, then swings back into Bridget’s face—she catches it with one palm. She puts her little girl down on the floor in the living room on the rug, among her toys. “You play there for a minute. Don’t go off anywhere. Mama’s got to take care of something. I’ll be right back.” I am ninety percent sure.

  Bridget’s chin is high, her eyes wide, her shoulders back. She strides into the kitchen. She is smelling for the ghost, sniffing for her like a cat.

  “Where are you?” she says in a low voice. Then, louder, “Where are you? Come out. Come out here right now.” Through the kitchen into the rear part of the house. “I’m coming to find you.” Julie says something encouraging from the living room, something like “Bidissus!” And Bridget actually laughs, although her eyes are filling inexplicably with tears again. “I don’t know what you thought, but I’m stronger than you are! I’m coming to get you!”

  Nothing. Nothing is here.

  She spins back toward the front of the house. Upstairs. The dead woman is upstairs, probably in her baby’s room. “You can’t live here anymore,” Bridget declares—mutters, really. She is feeling less bold by inches as she climbs the stairs. The smell is here; the damp grave has settled on everything over their heads. By the time she reaches the top landing and glances back down into the living room at her daughter, she is aware of her heart again. My heart, my heart, my heart. Julie is absorbed in a shape sorter, her plump starfish hands working inexpertly, her little head bowed in concentration, her breathing collected and heavy.

  Bridget wipes tears from her cheeks and advances down the dim upstairs hallway.

  The doors all open to the left from the landing, except for the bathroom at the end of the hall. The first door is Julie’s room, and it is ajar. The wet earth, the bank of a creek, the bare yard after a rain. Bridget’s arm is shaking, but she pushes the door open, and the sunlight in the room floods across the floor, warm across her feet.

  She is there, by
the window.

  The sun flickers through her as if she were made of leaves.

  “Get out,” Bridget tells her. The ghost’s attention snaps toward the sound of Bridget’s voice, and then its hideous indistinctness shifts in her direction. Its black eyes rest upon her now. She is more transparent than Bridget remembers, more diffuse and staticky. Has she changed, or is it just the daylight? It doesn’t matter. Bridget sobs, “Get out! Get out! You can’t live here!”

  And now it is moving toward her. Has it become stronger? It seems to move more quickly than it used to—still as if pulling its own deadness behind its intention, but with the awful segmented coordination of a spider.

  “No!” Bridget points at it, shaking but insistent. “No, you! You can’t!”

  Can’t she? What can’t she do? Just because the ghost hasn’t touched her yet doesn’t necessarily mean she can’t, or doesn’t want to.

  “Get out of here!”

  The ghost’s hands rise, her arms, her body still just channels of static that limit her realness and yet seem to make her limitless. With the sunlight behind her, the ghost is a series of shifting and flickering layers: a woman’s face, a screen of smoke, a woman’s shoulders, a wall of static, a woman’s body, a white membrane. As the ghost shifts within herself, her form releases cool waves of air, like a wind off the surface of a pond, brushing Bridget’s bangs back gently.

  The ghost raises her hands, begging.

  Bridget is crying hard now. “I won’t help you! I hate you!”

  The ghost’s stare is fixed and bottomless. She makes sure Bridget is looking into her eyes; she waits. Then with effort the ghost shakes her head, once, a slow no. No, you don’t.

  The ghost’s hands are raised toward Bridget, out and up, not to grasp but to plead. Give me something.

  “You can’t have them,” Bridget gasps. “They’re mine.”

  Anger flashes through the ghost’s body like a shaft of light skimming across a river. Her eyes grow—the black holes in her face actually grow larger, deeper.