The Barter Read online

  Thinking of how her mother had died tended to make Rebecca pull her little boy in closer, close enough to feel his baby breath on her lips, and wonder what would become of him, what could possibly become of him, if anything happened to her. If she didn’t get well after all, for instance. Because if the story of her birth were true (which of course it wasn’t, it couldn’t be—it was just another of Frau’s stories and it only seemed true now because she’d been in bed so long and was losing her sense of what was a dream and what wasn’t), Rebecca was missing an hour of her life. She’d bartered it without knowing it, in order to have an infant hour with her mother before her death. It was an hour gladly given, an hour she’d never thought, even as a lonely, angry child, of wanting back—if anything, she always imagined she would have given more hours, days even, if it would have meant prolonging her mother’s life or her happiness. Rebecca didn’t consider herself unusual or heroic in this regard—what child wouldn’t give as much for her mother? As a child, the only thing that troubled her about the barter her mother had made for her was not knowing which one it was—which hour she had lost. Back when she believed the story, as a girl, she had imagined a few possibilities (it was the hour she would have met her great love, or the hour she would have had some extraordinary bit of luck) but resigned herself to the understanding that she might never know. The hour she’d lost might, in the end, simply pass without her even knowing it. And if that were the case, then how wonderful, how simple, to exchange something so small for something so valuable.

  Now, though, the story Frau had told her made a different kind of sense, and hurt her in a different way. Holding her boy, watching him sleep. Would you barter an hour of your life to save me, if you could? I would for you. Isn’t this the secret contract between us? Everyone knows I’d die for you. But does anyone—anyone but we two—know what you’d give up for me? If I would dare to ask you?

  Rebecca dreamed of her mother often now, too. Usually in the dreams, Florencia was standing over her bed, looking down at her and Matthew, holding a child she didn’t recognize—her first, Rebecca supposed, the one who had died and turned into an oak tree. Within the dream, Rebecca would be consumed by a terrible sense that something had just happened to John—that he was in danger and needed her help while she was lying here in bed. And there would be her mother standing at her bedside, holding a stillborn child, eyes black and hot with anger, and gesturing angrily for her to get up, get up.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After some length of time she can only measure in units of Julie’s slowly diminishing sobs, Bridget stands, still holding her girl, and makes her way to the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator and gets Julie some sliced fruit to eat, and she puts the girl gently into the high chair and snaps on the tray. Julie smiles up at her mother hugely. All is forgiven, forgotten. You don’t know how lucky you are, my love.

  One ear still trained on detecting sounds from upstairs, Bridget calls her husband at work. He’s not at his desk. Or not picking up.

  She knows she must, must take a step backward into the realm of the real, the rational. The morning has spun out of control like a quarter over a tabletop, and only she has the power to rein in her own rampaging thoughts. Mark—her hardworking, affectionate husband and Julie’s besotted, if distracted, father—has not blown town with their every penny and left them without any means of supporting themselves. He’d sooner leap out a window than bring Julie to harm. Bridget must be fair. She must be reasonable. She must remember that he works like a desk-bound mule. For them. Everything he does is for them. Partly because she’s left him no other choice.

  She leaves a message.

  “Mark. Call me as soon as you get this. I need to talk to you.”

  Julie says, “Dooooooo.”

  “That’s right. Need to talk to doooo.”

  “Mama.”

  “I also need to talk to my mama, yes.” Bridget takes a breath. “It is time, I believe, to call in some reinforcements. Thank you. My baby angel.”

  She is moving back into the kitchen to get Julie’s cup when she sees the photo again, on the floor near the cupboard under the sink, where she’d left it this morning just prior to their flight from the house. The photo of Bridget and her mother and her sister, taken by Bridget’s father when the girls were very small.

  She stoops to pick it up and puts it thoughtfully on the counter.

  Bridget’s older sister died in a car accident at age three. The little girl had been named Carrie-Ann, after that old song—Hey, Carrie Anne, what’s your game now, can anybody play? Kathleen had raised Bridget alone because the accident and everything after had caused Bridget’s father to surrender and retreat. He had been the one driving the car that day, although the accident wasn’t his fault. Bridget hasn’t seen her father in many years. After spending most of her childhood shuttling between towns out in the Panhandle, he moved to the desert in New Mexico and more or less disappeared there.

  It’s been a long time since Bridget has thought of her father with anything more than a sort of unembittered curiosity—where did he get to, anyway—which, Bridget reflects, is certainly a credit to Kathleen. If Mark were ever to really leave her and Julie, she doubts she would have the emotional wherewithal to somehow prevent her own daughter from resenting her father for his flaws, however human they might be. After Julie was born, Bridget sent a birth announcement to her father’s last known address and got a wonderfully weird card from him, with a gift certificate for a baby store in a denomination that seemed fearsomely large for an unemployed desert drifter.

  Time to call in reinforcements. Kathleen had made it, somehow, through that terrible time, which had gone a long way toward convincing Bridget (and Kathleen herself, for that matter) of her invincibility. As Kathleen often says, “If you’ve gone this far, you might as well go on”: She not only survived the loss of her baby and her husband, not only raised a little girl on her own, but also, in the meantime, built herself a career as a personal finance advisor at the bank where she started as a teller—a career that, while not glamorous, subsidized some travel and a tasteful, selective shopping habit. Kathleen has outfitted Julie’s nursery with beautiful things. Hers is the kind of true-grit, steel-magnolia story one hears told about a particular kind of Southern woman. She intends to work until she dies. Indeed she almost always phrases the things that she feels most strongly about in terms of them killing her: I just love Julie to death. I would sooner die than sell my house. I’m dying for a cigarette, but I worked so damn hard to quit I’d rather kill myself than smoke again. This man is going to be the death of me, but I love him, I do. You and Julie are my life, Bridget. You and Julie are my heart, just walking around outside my chest—that must be why I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven whenever I’m with that little thing.

  Bridget brings Julie a cup of milk, then sits at the kitchen table and watches Julie eat her snack while waiting for the telephone to ring at her mother’s office. There is still no noise from upstairs, and Julie herself is quiet and cheerfully focused, faced with a tray of bright delicacies. She’s a good eater, thank God. She’s a good little ladybug in general. Bridget watches her, her long lashes and round soft cheeks, her sweet mouth and dark curls, and she begins to feel calmed.

  Her mother’s voice in her cell phone says, “Bridget? Hi! How’s my baby?”

  “She’s good, she’s eating a little something. We’ve had quite a morning.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve been in meetings all day, and I’m dying for a coffee. I think, actually, while I have you on the phone, that I’ll walk out and get a cup while I’m talking to you. Hey, so, have y’all decided whether you’re going to Mark’s family for Thanksgiving?”

  Bridget has called her mother for a reason, but her mother has her own reasons to chatter. This is not exactly unusual. “Um, no, we haven’t discussed it yet. But it’s their turn—Christmas with you, Thanksgiving with them. This yea
r. Look, Mom, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, honey. Oh, Christ, will you look at that—” There is the sound of a fumbling tussle. “I just missed the elevator. The guy in it looked right at me and didn’t press the hold button. Or the door-open button. He basically did nothing. And here I am juggling this phone and my bag and my sweater and not moving fast enough to catch him. What a jerk.”

  “I hate that,” Bridget says, distracted at what might have been a sliding, heavy step overhead. “Mom, I have to ask you something. Can you— Are you in a place where you can hear me?”

  “Oh, yeah, hon. Just in the lobby here. You go on.”

  For a moment Bridget is unsure what she means to ask, exactly. Are you ever mad at me for that thing I said? Do you think Mark might be cheating on me? Can telling yourself a story about something too many times make it real, whether you want it to be or not? Do you think about Carrie-Ann dying? Or me, or Julie?

  What she says is “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  Kathleen Goodspeed laughs heartily. “What a question. I most certainly do.”

  Bridget is momentarily floored. “What? Really?”

  “Oh, it’s the Irish in me, I guess. Your grandfather used to tell me stories that’d scare me so bad I’d be dreaming of sleep. I’m in the elevator, honey, I might lose you. Hang on.”

  “Don’t go—Mom—” Bridget says urgently. It was definitely a step that she heard. The door to Julie’s room has opened upstairs. “Mom. Mom.”

  The line is bright and empty. Bridget stares at her phone. He has not left me. She is not real. Nothing has happened that can’t be undone.

  She is thinking this thought over and over—nothing has happened that can’t be undone—when Kathleen calls her back. The background noise on her mother’s end is louder now; she’s outside, evidently on her way to the Starbucks across the parking lot from her office. Bridget remembers when she used to make early-afternoon coffee runs herself, to the coffee-and-sandwich chain across the parking lot from her office, the one where her mother waited for her the day Bridget left the firm. Bridget and her paralegal, Juana, a smart cookie from down around Corpus Christi, would make a dash together around two thirty, do a little catching up, half business, half personal, and on the way back Juana would excuse herself to go smoke a cigarette in the shade by the mercilessly pruned landscaping in front of the building, and Bridget would head back in and ride the elevator up by herself. Bridget remembers those times being weirdly satisfying, the humming of work in her brain, the scorched, earthy scent of a cup of strong coffee, the sunshine slanting through the building lobby on her heels, how good it felt to stand up and stretch her legs, how good it felt to know exactly what she was going to do when she sat back down at her desk. There’s something to all that, I guess, Bridget thinks now. There’s something stupidly satisfying in a day’s work, whatever it happens to be—that and the rituals of working life, the coffees, the meetings, the conference calls, the harmless conversations over the sinks in the women’s room, the smell of the supply closet like the first day of school trapped in resin forever.

  Kathleen is not yet aware that they are connected, that the warm, warbling throb that in the cellular age has come to stand in for the sound of a telephone ringing has stopped. Bridget can hear the firm click of her mother’s shoes on the pavement—they would be pumps, probably a closed-toe d’Orsay, a style that Kathleen favors because her ankles and feet, at sixty-two, are still slim and strong.

  “Mom?”

  “Oh, you scared me!” Kathleen laughs again. She has a laugh like a late Judy Garland, loud and chomping but nevertheless endearing. “Guess I was thinking about ghosts since you asked. And then there you are talking to me, from beyooooond the phooooone . . .” Kathleen is clearly in a good mood. Bridget allows herself a small smile. “So what’s up, buttercup? Is there a ghost in your pretty little house?”

  “Yes,” Bridget says baldly. It doesn’t make her feel better to say it; there’s no release. Rather, she feels as if she’s taking a step forward into a swirl of mummy wrappings that will bind her up tight.

  “Oh, come on now,” Kathleen says. “Your house is five years old, tops. You were the first owners!”

  “Do you really think that matters? Don’t you think ghosts can just show up wherever they feel like it?”

  “Well, no, as a matter of fact I don’t,” Kathleen says, indignant but still amused. “I think there are, you know, special rules. But you’re serious, I guess? You really think your house is haunted? Yes, I’d like a medium skim latte, please,” she adds, and Bridget is forced to feel ridiculous again.

  Do I press it or let it go? What help am I looking for here, anyway? The screaming of milk being steamed in the background on her mother’s end of the line is making this whole exchange seem ludicrous. And then Bridget hears the footfalls upstairs. The sounds are not on the stairs, not yet anyway (maybe I frightened her a little bit after all), but the ghost is on the move up there. Looking out the windows with her blackly blazing stare. Dragging her deadness down the hallway. Looking for something—some piece of Julie, or Bridget, or Mark to fixate on, to stand over and hate.

  “Bridget? You there? Is everything okay? Where’s Julie right now, what’s she doing?”

  “She’s finishing up her snack and she’s starting to look bored. I should go. We need to clean up and get dressed,” Bridget says decisively. There are clean clothes in her dryer; she’ll fashion some kind of laundry-day look for the two of them out of whatever she can find.

  “Get dressed? Why, it’s almost one o’clock, Bridget,” her mother says, genuinely startled, and Bridget is glad after all that she didn’t get on the highway this morning.

  “I know, I know. I told you it’s been a rough day.”

  “What’s going on? Are you all right? Are you safe?”

  “We’re fine. I’m sorry if I scared you. I’m going to get Julie out of her high chair and get us cleaned up.”

  “Okay, but—Bridget, let me call you when I’m back at my desk. I can barely hear you in here.”

  “Fine.”

  The shuffling sounds continue upstairs as Bridget, gritting her teeth, cleans up her little girl and puts her on the kitchen floor to toddle about while she washes up in the sink. Then it’s off into the utility room near the kitchen, Julie yelping with delight at the sight of the dryer. Bridget puts clothes into the washing machine and starts it up so that at least there’s a comforting, harmless sound in the house to compete with the dead woman’s stealthy footsteps—this is a trick she has used many times since the ghost arrived. The other day she ran the dishwasher a full cycle for five plates, three cups, and a couple of spoons. Oh, the polar bears. The familiar pang of remorse striking like a clock chiming the hour.

  Bridget finds tiny, fresh-smelling leggings for Julie and clean shirts for both of them. Underwear and a support camisole for her, and a cotton skirt. She dresses them both right there in the utility room and tosses their pajamas into the hamper. She hasn’t shaved her legs, and in her short skirt she’s conscious of the stubble, but the simple fact of wearing a pair of underwear feels so surprisingly wonderful that she almost doesn’t care whether her calves are a little bristly. Almost. She’s a Southern woman herself, like her mother and her friends. But when did I become so tightly wound up that going commando for a half day makes me feel like I’m living in the Lord of the Flies?

  Her cell phone is ringing in the kitchen. Bridget picks up Julie, who wails at being removed from the scene of so much large, exciting machinery, and carries her into the living room, where most of her toys are. Then she jogs back to the kitchen and snatches at the phone just before its final ring.

  “Hi, Mom,” she says immediately, coming around the corner again back into the living room. “Sorry again if I worried you.”

  “It’s Mark.”

  “Oh.” Bridget is caught up short, both by
her surprise at the sound of his voice, and by the fact that the ghost is visible at the top of the stairs and the black eyes are looking down at her steadily. She’s been standing there watching Julie. Waiting for her to come back into view from the landing.

  “What is your mom worried about?” Mark asks suspiciously, and suddenly all of Bridget’s annoyance is back, triggered by anxiety and fear, but also ready and waiting to leap from its shelf like a canned snake. Bridget shuts her eyes tight to block out the ghost and hears terrible things begin to tumble out of her own mouth.

  “Well, I haven’t really told her anything to worry about, but if I felt like it, I could. I could tell her my husband moved all of our money into an account I can’t access, so I’m totally and completely broke unless he elects to get some cash out for me on the way home.” She hears Mark groan at this—too little, too late, buddy—and then continues mercilessly. “I could tell her I’m not sure I’ll even see said husband anytime soon because he’s home so late these days I could almost believe he’s having an affair, if he ever smelled like perfume or booze instead of, I don’t know, conference-room takeout and whiteboard markers.”

  “Funny,” Mark says.

  “Oh, am I? I’ve sure felt fucking funny all day long. I guess that explains it.”

  “I’m sorry about the money. I knew as I was doing it that I should have checked with you first. I knew I was doing something wrong.”

  “Well, it’s all your money, I guess,” Bridget says bitterly. “I suppose you can do what you want with it.”

  Mark coughs. “That’s a hell of a thing to say, Bridge. I said I was sorry. Don’t be shitty.”