The Barter Read online

  At this range, surrounded as she is by a shifting cloud of static, she is even more clearly dead—dead and moving, dead and yet alive, dead and yet standing before her, an abomination.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here? Go away!” Bridget whispers fiercely. But her lips feel numb, she’s shuddering to breathe, and she staggers with Julie’s weight and falls against the wall near the crib’s headboard. “Go away and get out of my baby’s room!” Julie is fully awake by now, jostled out of sleep and crying—wailing, really. Her face is a mouth; her eyes stream tears. Bridget clutches her daughter. “Go away!”

  The baby cranes her neck around, still screaming, looking in all directions until she locates the source of her troubles. The ghost. Bridget’s heart falls. She can see it.

  Julie points a chunky fist at the ghost—shakes it at her, in the way that she does when something angers or excites her.

  The ghost watches Julie. In her mother’s arms, Julie begins to still herself and grow serious, staring at the dead woman.

  Mark shuffles belatedly, sleepily into the room.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong? Is she okay?” Without fully opening his eyes Mark takes their little girl from Bridget and cuddles her, and as always, Julie responds by grabbing him around the neck while simultaneously craning to keep her mother in view. I can have this, but you have to stay mine, too. “What’s the matter, little Jujubee? Mmmm. Little bee. Bzz bzz.”

  Julie leans into her father and extends a balled-up fist toward her mother, who closes her own hand around it. Bridget feels knock-kneed, dumbfounded—her jaw, she’s sure, must be hanging open in stuporous shock. The ghost is real. Her daughter can see it. Her husband can’t.

  The ghost is still there, right next to Bridget at the side of Julie’s crib. But the dead woman isn’t looking at them anymore. Her gaze seems to be fixed out the window. Bridget can hardly bear to look at it, can hardly bear the thought that it is still here, still real—Jesus, no, she can’t be real, but she’s still here, she’s still here, look at the way Julie’s looking at her. She swallows, hard.

  “Do you mind if she sleeps with us tonight?” Bridget asks hoarsely.

  Mark sniffs and gives Julie’s cheek a game smooch. “I thought that was a bad idea, you always said. Crib death. All that. Is she sick or something?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I just want her close by so I can watch her.” Bridget puts a hand on Mark’s lower back and gives him a gentle push, trying to herd them all out of the room, back into their bedroom, where she can shut the door against the ghost and keep them all safe.

  “Should I be worried? Are you worried? Don’t let me roll over on her.”

  “I think she’d squawk before she’d let you do that,” Bridget says, guiding Mark and Julie out, away, but keeping her eye on the ghost, flickering in stillness near the baby’s window. As soon as Bridget’s small family is out in the hallway, she can breathe again, and she begins to really push, shoving Mark along as swiftly as he’ll let her.

  “Hey. Whoa. Hey. I’m still half asleep here, Bridge. Take it easy.”

  She shuts the door behind them and quietly locks it while Mark settles Julie in the middle of their mattress in the near dark. Bridget turns on the closet bulb and closes the closet door partway, creating a warm triangle of light across the floor that will almost reach the three of them, snug and safe in the bed.

  Julie whispers some nonsense words. She is happy, if confused. Bridget crawls into bed next to her and opens her pajama top to let Julie nurse. Mark rolls onto his side to face them and sleepily pats Julie’s hair, then Bridget’s shoulder. Nothing can reach us here. Nothing can harm us as long as we’re together.

  “Good night, dear ladies,” Mark murmurs. Julie nuzzles in. Bridget closes her burning eyes in relief, exhausted, every part of her body humming with satisfaction and tiredness. They’d gotten away. The three of them, all close, all safe, here in the dark.

  Julie and Mark are asleep, and Bridget is almost asleep herself, breathing the heat and scent of the little blanket-shrouded valley between parents where baby Julie sleeps—detergent, skin, a faint whiff of pee (she should have changed Julie first, she supposes)—when the bedroom door opens and the smell of dirt enters the room.

  * * *

  In the days that follow, the ghost invades. But slowly.

  Bridget learns to avoid places where the scent of wet earth is strong. The second morning, climbing the stairs to put Julie down for a nap, smelling grass and mud more distinctly with each step, feeling a bit short of breath but attributing it to the climb (and to her own denial that this could be happening, that this could really still be happening, to them, in their neat little house), Bridget almost walks right into the ghost standing in the upstairs hallway at the top of the steps near the door to Julie’s room, still and alert.

  She’s looking for something.

  It’s the first thing that comes into Bridget’s mind—and once she has the idea, she can’t help but think and rethink it, over and over, because for now it’s a question she can’t begin to imagine how to answer: What is she after? What is she after? Julie makes a small, low sound in her throat, and Bridget kisses her head, in her favorite spot, right at the little girl’s feathery temple. It can’t be her. If the ghost wanted the baby, she would have just taken her, or tried to. She’s after something else. Got to be. Got to be. What does she want? The ghost turns toward them, and Bridget backs away down the stairs, keeping the ghost in sight—promising herself she would not make the mistake, ever again, of shutting her eyes. Better to see the unimaginable than try to imagine what it could be doing while you’re refusing to look. The ghost doesn’t pursue them, and Bridget brings Julie downstairs to sleep on the couch, which the little girl does almost right away, with her mother leaning over her in protective terror, her breath coming fast and shallow.

  It’s not lost on Bridget that Julie seems less afraid of the ghost than she is herself. The ghost is, for all Julie knows, just another grown-up in the house. Just another strange person watching over her. For all Julie knows, they could come in all sizes and shapes, every variety of solidity and transparency. Sure. Why not? If the ghost is just another watchful presence in Julie’s life, that would explain why it seems to spend so much time flickering back and forth between the hallway, her mother’s bed, and Julie’s bedroom, a field of static restlessly shifting channels on itself in an endless loop between the window, the bed, and the stairs, the window, the bed, and the stairs. She probably seems more real to Julie than her own father does. She’s certainly around the house more.

  She’s looking for something up there. But what?

  Bridget can sense the dead woman nearby at all times, even in the broad light of afternoon, but the ghost never seems to want to come downstairs—at least not when Bridget has been around to notice—which makes her easier to avoid. Like a lot of other things in Bridget’s life at home with a baby, maneuvering around a ghost in the house soon becomes a sort of challenging-but-doable routine. The ghost stays upstairs all day, doing God knows what, and Bridget contrives ways for herself and Julie to stay away from her. Sometimes, when she and Julie are in the living room, Bridget senses the ghost looking down over the banister at them, flickering and watching, but when she looks up, nothing is there.

  It is only during the dark hours that the ghost seems to come looking for them. Night after night, Bridget surfaces from a miserable half-sleep to feel her breath coming shorter and shorter, the scent of damp earth approaching, even before the door to her bedroom opens and the flickering presence in the hallway makes herself known.

  Sometimes it’s possible for Bridget to believe that she isn’t frightened. When she’s out of the house with Julie, mostly—at the neighborhood pool, or aimlessly wandering the aisles of the grocery store, or driving the long way home. During the hours that Bridget is not in the house, which naturally have begun to spr
ead and lengthen with the ghost’s arrival, she can almost decide it’s funny, almost hear the jokes she would tell if anyone, anyone at all, were prepared to believe her. The thing I don’t get is why she doesn’t do some fucking laundry if she’s just going to be hanging around the house all day.

  She’s looking for something. But what?

  In her deepening exhaustion, Bridget can only guess that the ghost, in the fashion of most ghosts she’s read stories about, wants something specific—an offering of some sort—and what, exactly, she should do about it finally comes to her days later, on a sparkling Wednesday morning that she spends, like every Wednesday, at the coffee shop with the redoubtable Gennie, Gennie of the beautiful thick hair and the well-behaved, artistic toddler. The ghost wants something from Bridget’s house—something from Julie’s room, perhaps?—and Bridget will have to give it to her. An offering. A sacrifice.

  They are at a Starbucks, of course. In their mid-Texas suburb there is no other kind of coffeehouse. The four of them, Bridget and Julie and Gennie and Gennie’s nineteen-month-old son, Miles, arrive after the morning rush and before the afternoon loiterers and poem writers, just post morning nap, and immediately squat in the plushest, most remote corner and proceed to cover it with rice puffs and little bits of half-eaten tofu cubes and cooked apple. A guy at the other end of the room is trying to read the paper and keeps sighing loudly and glancing at them as he turns the pages. They all ignore him.

  “I can’t believe Julie’s cruising already! She’s going to be an early walker,” Gennie is saying. “Yes, you!” This last is addressed to Julie, who has been wriggling ardently in Bridget’s lap, trying to reach for Gennie, just get at her, with no thought of what she’ll do once the object of her searing baby desires is achieved. Bridget knows she should try to listen to Gennie but can’t seem to stop herself from staring into space, thought after thought drifting out into blackness like a series of hapless astronauts stepping out of the capsule. She is dead tired. It’s been days.

  What can she offer the ghost. What should it be. Some little thing from Julie’s room, some token of appeasement? Bridget finds herself cataloging Julie’s less-favored toys in her mind as Gennie talks. Floppy Bunny—too crusty. Laughy Giraffey—too crusty. Plus, Julie still sucks on his legs when her gums hurt. That horrible monkey thing Mark’s mom gave her—inappropriate? Would the ghost somehow guess it didn’t matter, that she’d been given something valueless? But how could anything from the world of the living—particularly from the world of a plump-wristed, rosy ten-month-old girl, with bright eyes and a beating heart and a pulse just discovering what it could do—be of no value to the dead?

  It is a sign of something that I’m even considering this. It is a sign that some corner has been turned, Bridget thinks, as if being stern with herself somehow excuses it. But this can’t go on. This is worse than sleep training. I’m being chased out of my own house by a ghost, like Ms. Pac-Man. So she will offer the ghost . . . something. A talisman. Or maybe it’s more like a payment. I’ll pay up. Julie is so little and easily pleased, she’ll never miss whatever it is Bridget takes away to give to the ghost—who will . . . what? Pick it up in her hands? Flow through it like a sunray? Or shove it hungrily into her mouth?

  But Bridget is trying not to go into that dark place—she’s trying to be reasonable and practical about it, which seems possible at least while she’s here, in the coffee shop with Gennie.

  Gennie takes one of Julie’s hands and swings her arm gently in space. “I thought maybe we could come up with a budget cap for the craft projects so nobody gets too crazy—you know some of the mommies will make this into a bigger deal than it needs to be. Yes, hello, sweet pea,” Gennie says to Julie, who, judging by her grasping and reaching and grunts of effort, seems to want to change mothers. Gennie’s son, Miles, meanwhile, is playing quietly on the floor with some kind of nontoxic wooden puzzle. “I do hate to sound judgey about other moms. I do.”

  If only I could talk to Mark. If only. But even if Mark could see the ghost, which he can’t, he’s never around, and at any rate the two of them aren’t exactly in the practice of solving problems together. Not now. Maybe they were once, but not anymore.

  The very first person Bridget realized she couldn’t talk to about the ghost was, of course, Mark. The ghost is invisible to him, even though she stands over his bed every night. Even though she’s there waiting when he comes home close to midnight and crawls into bed with his wife, and she’s there in the hallway when he rises early to beat the traffic in. Throughout the dark hours, Bridget is a sentry for Mark and Julie both, overtired nerves sensing and scenting, seeking the ghost, imagining where she might be. She’s never far. And every night, while Bridget lies in bed, fluctuating between stiff terror (she’s here, she’s right here with us) and helpless half-wakefulness (the hallway, the top of the stairs), punctuated by periodic visits to Julie’s room to stand guard over the baby while the ghost flickers near Julie’s window, Mark is asleep.

  More frightening than the ghost is the suspicion, which Bridget briefly entertained, that she might be utterly bonkers, a complete lunatic. But as far as Bridget can tell, she is not insane, inasmuch as she knows the ghost is real. Mark may not see the ghost, but he smells it—she’s seen his face change when he enters a place the ghost has recently occupied, as if he’s smelling something off and is too polite to mention it. Since Bridget’s been at home, Mark has become cagey about anything that might be construed as a critique of Bridget’s housekeeping. He made one harmless comment too many when Julie was small and still up half the night, and Bridget laid into him with real ferocity, whisper-screeching that he could do them all a favor and sweep the kitchen himself if he was so sick of catching crumbs on his fucking socks, which, by the way, I wash for you so what exactly is your problem exactly? It’s not a sexist thing in him, not really—he’s just never been as tidy or fastidious as Bridget, and even before she quit her job to stay home, Bridget was doing most of the housework. Almost all. Mark helps with laundry and handles the trash and does ineffectual puttering things, like pruning the houseplants. Which is actually fine, really fine—she’d rather do it herself and know it’s been done right than have to nag Mark to be sure he wipes the little rim behind the toilet seat. It’s only when Bridget is exhausted that she minds.

  And she’s exhausted all the time now.

  Gennie says, “Sometimes I wish that we could all just hang out without talking about the kids, because inevitably we start comparing the kids, I don’t know how it happens but it always, always does. And then I think, well, Jesus, what the hell would we all talk about if it weren’t for the kids, you know? So that’s part of why I really want to make this work. I just want to give us something we can share and do together, as a group, without it becoming a competition.”

  At this point Bridget realizes that Gennie has actually been talking to her about something on and off for a few minutes. A summer project Gennie’s come up with for all the neighborhood families with little kids. And she ought to at least pretend that she’s listening to her, her good friend Gennie. (But oh God, this, this is a matter of life and death: There is a dead person in my house who stands over my bed at night, and sometimes over Julie’s, and I might be crazy or I might just be tired—of course I’m tired—but oh God, Gennie, I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t ever tell you in a million years what I’m really thinking right now, and it’s not just because you’re what I’m not, not really, not in my heart, not even though that’s also what I am.)

  It’s the art camp. Gennie has been talking about the art camp she’s been trying to organize for the summer, an idea she may have read about in a magazine or just come up with on her own, so creative and kind- and sweet-hearted is she: Gennie and Bridget and the other mothers they know with young children will each take turns hosting an art camp morning once a week all summer long. Week one at Gennie’s: Make your own superhero capes, design your own sidekicks! We
ek two at Pilar’s: Finger painting outside on the deck and sidewalk chalk! It sounds fun. It’s a nice idea. Please, oh God, let this be the end of it, let us escape the ghost and have art camp. Floppy Bunny will be fine. In her mouth.

  To prevent herself from thinking of the ghost—from clutching at thoughts of the ghost the way one clutches a handlebar, and for the same reasons: the instinctive physical reaction to fear, the sensation of falling—Bridget bends down to Julie and lands a series of kisses, swock after swock, all over the dear little musk-smelling head of the child in her lap. As Bridget does so, she is aware that Gennie is watching her do it, and that the look on Gennie’s face is tender and appreciative but also, and here’s the slightly menacing thing, proud. Bridget has seen this expression before, on Gennie’s face and on the faces of other mothers they know, and to her, that familiar expression says, We got you. We so got you.

  Bridget’s phone buzzes in her skirt pocket, and she plucks it out from under Julie’s plumply diapered butt and peers at its screen, entertaining half a second’s hope that it’s Mark. But in fact it’s Martha, an old friend from law school who is also a mom and also an attorney (although Bridget supposes she can no longer call herself that, strictly speaking).

  quick q? about estates. ur my only hope. call me!

  She is too tired. She puts the phone on the wobbly little table in front of them. Gennie has taken the opportunity to check her phone, too. Like all the mothers they know, they live and die by their phones. “I know that women used to do this without smartphones,” Bridget says by way of apology, “but I can’t imagine how.”

  “What, you mean motherhood?” Gennie smiles absently. She’s still reading something on her screen. “Yeah, it does seem impossible. I take a picture of Miles every day, probably.”