The Barter Read online

  “Someone, please, think of the children,” Mark agrees, deadpan.

  “They’re our only hope for the future.”

  “Do it for the children. Save the children!”

  “Somebody save my baby!” Bridget cries.

  “I left my baby in that burning building! Save it!” Mark rejoins, a little dorky, just the way she likes him. Then says, “How is my baby, anyway?”

  “She’s good. I think she’s starting to get hot. I should go inside.” Bridget feels better. It is comforting to know that someone else out there is as unspecific and strange-feeling as you are, and that is why, she thinks with satisfaction, human beings get married to each other.

  “Okay. Do you still need me to call you back in twenty minutes?”

  “I don’t need you to call,” Bridget says, with a lightness she does not quite feel, not quite. “Would I like for you to call? Maybe. Yes. Probably.” And if I don’t pick up, it’s because the ghost got us; send help. Send Bill Murray.

  “I have a meeting but I’ll call you after that. If you probably maybe would like me to.”

  “A meeting. How intensely professional. I didn’t think PlusSign even had conference rooms.” Here she goes again—she can’t seem to help herself. Cheer him up, tear him down. Praise his effort, belittle his work. Where, where, where does it come from, this compulsion to make him hate what he’s doing? She used to make him feel proud of what he did. And now, now that they’re all dependent on him, now that all three of them need him more than he’s probably ever been needed in his life, she makes these remarks, where do they come from, like the tiny moths in the closet that you never see but that you know must be living there because they’ve contrived to ruin your favorite sweater.

  “Where else are they going to keep the Ping-Pong table?” Mark sighs. It is of course a relief that he hasn’t allowed himself to be baited, but in another way it’s a measure of her diminished influence. Which she shouldn’t be measuring at all, much less in units of passive-aggressive snark. Where, where, where does it come from. “I have to go. You got my text? I’ll be home late tonight.”

  “That’s okay,” she promises, even though it isn’t, exactly. She has to make up for herself. “You got the picture I sent?”

  “Yes. My little muncher. Give her a kiss from her daddy. I miss Jujubee today,” Mark says longingly, and she doesn’t doubt it. She would, too.

  “I’ll kiss her enough for you and for everybody else in the world besides. What time will you be home, do you think?”

  Mark sighs again, musically this time. “Ohhh, God, I don’t know. I sort of don’t want to think about it, you know?”

  This again.

  “Okay. Love you.”

  “Love you, too, Bridge.”

  And here she is, in her car again, with her baby, running out of ways to avoid going into her own house.

  As usual, the instant she’s off the phone with her husband she wants to call him right back and do it all over. Whatever else she and Mark may lack as a pair, they’ve always enjoyed a little telephone banter—indeed, phone conversations, as Bridget has pointed out to Mark on more than one occasion, probably make up well more than three-quarters of their marriage.

  Mark is a hard worker—he’s always excelled. Mark also happens to be a good-looking geek, so his was not the typical story of the nerdy, scrawny guy with the small coterie of similarly nerdy guy friends, one skinnier, one fat, one acne scarred. He and Bridget met online, like about forty percent of the couples they know, when they were in their late twenties, but they also went to the same college at the same time about ten years ago, where their paths never crossed. Mark didn’t leave the computer lab much in college, except to smoke up with his friends and listen to jam bands. Bridget, too, was a grindstoner, so determined to get into a good law school and get internships and then an associate position at a good firm that she hardly looked up for about four years, and then for about another seven years after that.

  They bought a house together—this house—right before they were married, at about the same time that work began to pick them both up and propel them windward. Bridget has always loved their house, but never more than when they first bought it. She loved how smoothly all the new fixtures operated. Sometimes she walked from room to room and just squeezed things, the overstuffed arm of a chair or a smart, shiny banister. This was before they really knew any of the other young married couples in the neighborhood—although she and Mark both saw their next-door neighbors sometimes, in their cars, in their driveways.

  And then, once they were finally married, they fell into lonesome habits almost right away. She would bring home casework and nod off at her desk at home, waiting for him to be released from his office, where product delivery dates kept his entire team on a maddening schedule and a debilitating diet. She drank what seemed to be oceans of tea, but she never managed to stay up long enough to see Mark come in. She slept next to him every night, both hands closed into loose balls. He slept heavily; he slept through her alarm every morning. She reset it an hour later for him. She left before he rose. That was her whole week.

  Saturdays she usually spent in the office, especially after she started getting assigned to larger cases. At the time, they’d been married less than a year, and she’d been swept into a kind of helpless acceleration of briefings and research and memos that had made her, she knew, short-tempered and prickly. Then Mark had been assigned to direct two important projects at his software company, and suddenly Sunday to Friday would pass without their having seen each other—awake—more than two or three times. At her corporate Christmas party they’d snuck up to the roof of her office building and stopped just short of rangy, difficult sex in view of downtown, warming their hands inside each other’s clothes, grinning incredulously at each other like strangers pleased to find they had so much in common. Because they were still excited about what they were doing, who they were—the two of them so delighted by their own success that it seemed natural to have sex every time they saw each other, and more natural still for Bridget to go off the pill, and ultimately (here is where Bridget acknowledges there had been some magical thinking going on) to be pregnant and still working until nine or ten at night seemed like the final symbol of their badassery, their martial marital bonhomie. We are so damn good at this we hardly need to even see each other to make it work.

  With Julie’s birth, though, that kind of spontaneous goodwill vanished. Once her mother went back home and Bridget found herself alone with a newborn and doing everything on her own, she was surprised (surprised! as if she couldn’t have expected it!) at how tired and resentful she felt. She’d begun, unconsciously at first, to establish a refined sexual algebra of permission, refusal, and frequency. She wasn’t sure yet whom she was trying to punish, or what she was trying to prove. Sitting in her stuffy car in her driveway, she’s sure that’s another reason why Mark finds it easy to forget her.

  But if she feels like she’s been disappearing—from her husband’s mind, from the world outside her neighborhood—well, it’s her own fault, and she can admit it. Sure. Yes. It was me. Because she’d been the one to suggest that she quit her job after the twelve weeks of her maternity leave elapsed. The understanding between Mark and herself seemed to be that in exchange for her increasing competence at home with Julie, Mark was prepared to take on sole financial responsibility for the three of them.

  Bridget remembers the night they talked about it. They’d been lying in bed in the dark after a long and difficult day, the baby asleep but about to wake up in an hour, he frustrated and she near tears, both of them whispering fiercely at each other as if they weren’t alone in their own house, as if some other grown-up might overhear and shout from the living room that they should stop talking and go to sleep.

  “I need sleep,” she whispered helplessly.

  “I don’t see how this is going to work if one of us doesn’
t slow down. We’re already running on fumes and you’re not even back to work yet.”

  “I feel like I should stay home.”

  “You should, if you want to.” He paused. “We should run the numbers.”

  And they had, and even though the numbers hadn’t even come close to working, she’d felt so wildly incompetent and powerless as a new mother, and so wildly in love with her little girl, that she voluntarily relinquished everything other than trying to be better at motherhood—even and including all the other things she used to be good at, like the law, or being well and truly married, or having friends outside the neighborhood. So now here they are, ten months after Julie’s birth, and for Mark, other than the sex, it is almost as if nothing has changed—he still works long hours; she still cleans the rim behind the toilet seat. Whereas for Bridget, every day feels like time is spinning itself out, a spool of thread knocked across the floor. Mark knows nothing about the way the hours inflate, substanceless but not quite weightless, like plastic bags filling with cotton balls. Bridget loves her baby girl with a clear intensity that reminds her why she’s alive, but even for her, love isn’t enough for all these strange, expanding, swelling hours and days. I’m the ghost around here, lady. This particular job is filled.

  She’s been feeling herself dissolving, losing substance, as if she were disintegrating inside the cotton balls herself; joking grimly to herself that she’d been rendered a mommy mummy, a formerly powerful personage crumbling to spicy pieces inside of the carefully applied shroud that was intended to hold her together—there it was again, she was thinking about death—and now this, this ghost.

  What is she after? What does she want?

  Haven’t I already given up everything I was supposed to?

  * * *

  Bridget finally opens the door to the driver’s side, letting in a swath of concrete-baked summer air, and Julie begins to scream in earnest.

  “Okay, my darling. Okay. Hang in there.” Bridget hurriedly snatches her tote bag from the passenger seat and decides to leave the yoga mat where it is, wedged against the door. Impossible to carry it and also get the baby out of the car seat. These small unpremeditated driveway compromises are why the inside of her car looks nothing like the inside of her house—ten months of deciding to come back for it later have added up in the predictable way, and it makes Bridget uncomfortable to look at the inside of her car from the outside, the way a person parking next to her might. She put a car seat—a baby—in the middle of all that mess? Who could do such a thing?

  Julie’s face is an unhappy mouth now. Wailing, she locks onto her mother through the rear window, and her mother opens the door and swings down toward her with a gentle series of sounds and assurances. “Okay, okay, okay, okay . . . Jujubee, Jujubee, Jujujujujubeeeeee . . .”

  It doesn’t really help. Julie is still unhappy when Bridget heaves them through the front door, holding the baby under the armpits and dangling two bags from her shoulder and almost losing the keys. Still bleating, outraged, Julie nevertheless holds herself stiff and still against Bridget’s side. The baby always seems to sense when she runs the risk of actually being dropped.

  The door swings closed behind them although Bridget doesn’t feel herself kicking it shut—she knows she must have done it, one of those movements so routine it becomes unconscious, the way you’ll lock your front door on the way out, thinking about something else, and then spend the entire drive to work wondering whether you locked the front door. She must have kicked the door closed. It doesn’t close on its own.

  Bridget and Julie both smell it immediately, the earth, the wet, cold dirt, the banks of a creek on a spring day, the newly broken sod. They’re on the threshold, both of them pausing before the next breath, looking into the bright living room, the staircase, and the hallway to the cool kitchen. Julie wails. Despite the fact that she’s never seen the ghost downstairs, Bridget is suddenly seized by the conviction that if she were to turn her head just a hair to the right, there the dead woman would be, her impossible face inches away, staring blackly, waiting for her sacrifice.

  Bridget drops her bags on the floor in the entryway and gathers Julie close. Julie is whispering Julie words now, breathing through her mouth, looking around with gleaming eyes. Bridget’s own heart is hammering. She’s here. She’s always here.

  As impossible as it seems to move, to take even one step, Bridget realizes she must. She cannot stand with her baby in her arms just inside her doorway all afternoon. She must move.

  Julie whimpers. She’s hungry, Bridget thinks, and then shudders.

  “Nothing to do but what must be done,” Bridget murmurs, then decides to sing it. “Nothing to do but what must be done, Jujubee, Jujubee, Jujubee. . . . Nothing to do but what must be done, oh deedee, oh deedee, oh deedee . . .” The song, breathless though it is, helps get her stiff limbs moving. Move. Don’t breathe too deeply. Don’t look around you. Just go, just go. “Oh deedee, oh deedee, oh deedee . . .”

  Bridget is in the kitchen now, where she sets Julie down on the floor to crawl around on the slick surface the little girl loves, while she opens the refrigerator in search of something to feed her. The smell of mud is stronger in here. Bridget looks determinedly into the bright, harmless interior of the fridge and tries to keep singing. “Nothing to do but feed you lunch, Jujubee, Jujubee, Jujubee. . . . Nothing to do but give you much, oh deedee . . .” She clears her throat, and as she does, she thinks she sees something white slide past her field of vision, something moving past the breakfast table on the other side of the kitchen counter.

  Why am I so convinced it’s down here with us?

  Without turning—unable, for the moment, to force herself to do it—she says, “Julie?” Her voice is shaking.

  Julie doesn’t answer immediately, and Bridget whips around so quickly that the bottles in the fridge door shelves clink.

  Her darling baby, sitting in the middle of the floor with a measuring cup in her hands, looks up at her. “Ha,” she says in her small voice.

  Nothing. She didn’t really see anything. There was nothing there after all.

  “Ha,” Bridget echoes, smiling at her daughter. The smile is unforced. Even in the presence of death, Bridget can’t help smiling at this creature, all chubby legs and velvety skin.

  “Ha,” Julie responds, warming to her theme. “Ha. Ha.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Then they both hear it. Something slides across the floor over their heads and lands with a thud in the upstairs hallway.

  Julie’s face reflects the change in Bridget’s expression in the instant before Bridget is aware that her own mouth has stretched wide, her own eyes have become glassy with fear. Julie begins to cry, and Bridget corrects herself and snatches the girl up off the floor. “Oh, don’t cry, Jujubee. Don’t cry, sweet pea.” Julie stops midsob. Like all babies, Julie mostly just wants to be held, and she settles into the curve of her mother’s left arm comfortably and begins to look on the counter for her lunch.

  With one arm, Bridget pulls out plastic containers of finger food from the fridge and puts them on the counter. As she does so, she is conscious of sliding footsteps in the hallway upstairs, moving toward the landing.

  “Jujubee, Jujubee . . .”

  It is difficult, but Bridget has done it before: opening plastic containers with the scrabbling fingers of one hand, tipping the contents out onto the tray of Julie’s high chair, which Bridget always leaves on the kitchen counter once she’s washed it after breakfast.

  “Dah. Dah,” says Julie, unremarkably.

  “Dah,” Bridget answers, impersonating conversation for the girl, the theory being that someday, when she learns to talk, she’ll understand the give-and-take, the rules of talking to others. Bridget is also performing in this moment the real way conversation works, which is to say that even as the words are being spoken at least one of the parties to the conver
sation will invariably be thinking about, concentrating on, listening for, something else entirely.

  The footsteps are now creaking slowly somewhere near the top of the stairs.

  Bridget lifts her chin and swallows. We’re fine, oh deedee. She takes the baby and the high chair tray to the breakfast table, buckles Julie into her high chair, snaps the tray on. Scoots back into the kitchen for a cup of juice diluted with water for Julie’s lunch.

  As she’s pouring the juice, there’s a sliding, heavy sound midway down the stairs. A dead step.

  It’s coming down.

  Bridget begins her song again. “Jujubee, Jujubee, oh deedee, oh deedee.”

  “Dah!” Julie shouts, but as Bridget returns from the kitchen she sees that Julie’s face is quite serious. She’s staring down at the scattered chunks of cold steamed vegetable on her tray, deciding where to start.

  It’s coming down. For whatever it’s looking for.

  The shuffling, sliding sound on the stairs is growing closer now. Bridget can almost believe that the ghost is trying to hurry.

  Nothing to do but what must be done.

  Bridget puts the juice cup onto Julie’s tray and leans down so that they are eye to eye.

  She whispers, “Listen to me, my baby girl. I’m going to go take care of something real quick. You just sit here and eat your lunch. And be quiet. Please, please, please be quiet. Don’t let her know you’re in here. Okay?”

  She knows this is an impossible thing to ask of a ten-month-old who likes nothing more than to greet each morning with a triumphant yawp. But her heart is pumping so hard and so fast she can hardly think above the blood rushing through her veins. She feels electric, singing with tension, afraid to touch Julie lest she somehow transmit a current through her fingers.