The Barter (10 page)

It took her many long, anguished minutes to find a lamp and then matches. She wanted badly to make coffee, but when she tried to start a fire in the stove, she couldn't get it to do more than smoke, which forced the humiliating realization that she'd need to wait for daylight to figure out how to work the dampers—it was a different and more modern stove than the one Frau cooked on at her father's house. Then again, she thought bitterly, John might as
well get accustomed to the kind of house she was prepared to offer him: a comfortless one, no warm stove or hot coffee or willing wife.

She sat at the kitchen table with the lamp giving out a low light. She listened to the wind outside. She stroked the wood of the table itself with fingers that felt unresponsive and stiff. As she waited, she thought of her mother. She imagined that her mother, if she had lived, could have told her, long ago, that this was how she would turn out. Her mother could have spared her and John this mistake. She would have arranged it with the Doctor; they could have sent her someplace else to live, far out of John's way, a city maybe, where there might have been other cruel and unpleasant people like herself; she could have lived in a boarding house, taught piano lessons, lived cheaply, died alone, without hurting anybody or expecting anything in particular from herself. Such an existence would have seemed like a blessed, heroic one in comparison with what she had done and what she had to face now.

One of the stories Frau had told her about Florencia concerned her stubborn refusal to acknowledge her family in any way once she had married. They had cut her off, and she'd responded in kind. Florencia and the Doctor had eloped. They'd met in New Orleans, in the lobby of a hotel, because her hat had blown off her head as the hotel doors opened in a storm, romantically enough. At that time, Dr. Mueller, who was thirteen years her senior, had spent the previous five years practicing medicine in Fredericksburg and was in New Orleans to equip himself for practice in one of the newer German-belt settlements growing along the railway that ran through New Braunfels and Austin. His description of the land, and of the pretty country ways of the old-fashioned communities that clustered there, had persuaded idealistic Florencia to marry the odd, funny
gentleman. Or so Frau reported. They boarded the train to the frontier together, as many ambitious couples were still doing in those days—as, in fact, one of Florencia's older sisters had done just the year before with a rich banker fellow who had investments in Denver. Florencia's old German medical man was a horse of a different color, however. “She wrote to her family from the train as they traveled to Texas—twenty letters, she always said. Twenty letters she wrote.” Frau would usually give Rebecca a sidelong look here, indicating that she had reason to doubt the number. But then she would continue loyally, “And never did a letter come back. Once your mother understood that her family had no use for her, she had no use for them. Her back was forever turned. Whenever your father would suggest she visit or write, she said no. Even when she knew she would become a mother—no. No letter to her mother.” Frau typically shook her head here, ignoring Rebecca's mute misery, and concluded: “And when you were born, she died with this regret. But she was proud.” The lesson, like the lessons in most of Frau's stories, was unambiguous.

You stupid girl. You know what you have to do.

When he comes back, I'll tell him I made a mistake. I'll apologize, and I'll speak to him sweetly. I'll lean into him and put my arms around him, and even if it feels as obscene and insane as seducing my own older brother, I'll bring him back to bed with me and pretend I was just a hysterical bride, losing her temper in a moment of panic. Nothing's been said that he wouldn't be glad to pretend had been unsaid. Nothing's been done that he wouldn't be glad to see undone.

Even as she counseled herself, she knew he wouldn't be fooled. He was no idiot, the man she'd married.

Still she would try. She should try.

He was a good person.

She wondered if she would ever feel like a good person.
What must that be like.

Rebecca put her head on her forearms and breathed down onto the table's surface. Her lips brushed the soft, oiled wood. She yielded to the temptation to kiss it and then realized she was very sleepy or very strange, or both.

When she next looked up, the quality of the darkness had changed around her, like she'd been under a blanket and a corner had been lifted, and John was in the kitchen, stirring the stove with his back to her. He had found the pot that she'd brought out and then done nothing with, and the fragrance of coffee filled the room. It was not yet daybreak. She had the sense that John had been gone for a long time, that he'd been wandering out in the fields in the darkness—his clothes carried the scent of earth and summer night, and the pungent greenness of growing plants.

Without in any other way acknowledging that she was now awake, John turned and put a tin mug of coffee down on the kitchen table in front of her.

“Thanks,” she tried to say, but her throat was dry and it came out a squeak. Which she reflected wasn't a bad effect, after all—it made her sound timid, more timid than she felt.

“You're welcome,” John said.

She cleared her throat and took a welcome sip of coffee, into which he'd dumped a hearty spoonful of sugar so that it was strong and dark and sweet, just as she'd preferred it when she drank with her father and Frau in the afternoons. The Doctor's house already seemed as if it had never existed. With her throat warmed and moistened once more she said, experimentally, “I love you.”

“Stop.” John turned where he stood. His eyes were terrible, dry
and cold. But of course. He wouldn't have been weeping out his love for her in the fields. Not him. “Just stop it right now.”

“I do. I love you as much as I—as I seem to be able to. I love you like my own brother. I would never want to make you as unhappy as I've made you. It's killing me to think that I'm doing this to you.”

“If you keep . . . talking . . . ,” John said through clenched teeth, “I'm going to do something I will regret. Just be quiet. Please. Just don't say anything else. For a minute. Please.”

Rebecca pressed her lips together hard.
You see, I can be obedient.

He shook his head, watching her. After a moment he said, “It never even occurred to you that you might drive me away, did it?”

She didn't dare to lie. “No,” she replied.

“You can have the bedroom. I'll take the east gable room. I have an old bed in there.” John rubbed his eyes. “The hired girl comes in the mornings and will help you—she does most things, but you should give her directions. Otherwise you can do whatever you want with your days, just don't come out to the fields. We should be all right for a while, if only we don't see each other too much. But you know and I know that this can't last. This can't be what it's like forever.”

This last seemed to be a direct appeal to her intelligence. But she didn't want to say the first thing she thought, which sounded meager and sniveling even to herself:
Why don't we try it and see?

“Whatever your ideas of marriage are, Beck, you have to know I don't want you for a sister.”

She knew she'd insulted him, but not until now had she understood just how deeply offended he was.

“Wouldn't it be better that way? Wouldn't it be better after all to know that we were still friends than to feel as if you were forcing me?”

John's lips parted. He stared at her.

“Beck, what could I have done to you that was so terrible that you'd . . . I don't . . .”

It was a terrible thing, but now that she had hurt him as much as she would ever hurt anyone, she wanted badly to touch him again. She wanted—she wanted mad things; she almost followed an instinct to throw herself against him, thrust her hands into his trousers, back him up against the burning stove and take him in her mouth.

Instead she rose unsteadily and said, “You didn't do anything.” She met his gaze frankly. She made her voice clear. “I made a mistake. I'm sorry. Come here.”

She raised her arm and extended her hand to him over the table.

B
ridget makes her way downstairs in her pajamas, holding Julie, who swings one leg cheerfully, swatting her mother with her chubby foot.

As she descends, Bridget's eyes are fixed on the photograph in its frame, lying on the floor at the bottom of the staircase: the picture of her mother, her sister, and herself. She half expects it to look different—some kind of horror-movie special effect, all the eyes blacked out or all the faces dripping blood. But when she picks it up and examines it, it's clear that it's the same as it ever was. The three bright, girlish faces shining out of the frame are merry, knowing, as if the photographer, Bridget's father, has just told a family joke, which perhaps he had. The photo, which Bridget was given in high school and which has been with her ever since—the first thing she packed when she went off to college, the first thing she unpacked when she moved into this house—is unchanged. Nothing has happened to it. No harm has come; no malice has been acted upon. She's not sure why she doesn't feel more relieved.

“Let's go get breakfast started, Jujubee.”

It is in turning that she sees it. The ghost is standing near the
living room window with a look of contempt and fury in her eyes. But here, now, in the morning brightness, the ghost is less recognizably a woman; she seems to be enveloped by that crackling whiteness, seething. Staring out at Bridget from a dark place.

There's a dead thing—a deadening thing—in my house.

It feels suddenly as if the ghost's hatred has swept down into Bridget's throat and blocked her windpipe.

The ghost has full rein of the house now. Yesterday, after making its way downstairs and collecting its offering, it roamed through the lower story of the house all afternoon and night in its slow and staggering way. Looking for something else, Bridget supposed. Looking for its payment. She and Julie, meanwhile, slipped upstairs and hid in the little girl's bedroom—for once, the only place in the house the ghost showed no interest in. Bridget pushed the little bookcase in front of the door, and they read stories; they napped curled up together on the glider; they woke and played with Julie's toys. After dark, Bridget gave her daughter a bath and put her to bed, then crept into her own bedroom next door to hide until Mark came home. The ghost did not disturb them.

Now Bridget picks up Julie and moves into the kitchen with her, clutching the photograph, and sits very, very carefully on the cool, comforting kitchen tiles with her daughter. Blindly she reaches out to pull a few measuring cups from a drawer for Julie to play with, and then Bridget puts her own forehead on the floor, just so, just so, until she can catch her breath and be sure she won't cry.
Why is it here, what have I done, what have I not done.
The stench of the wet ground.

She is alone with Julie in the house; Mark left for work at sunup. He'd been at the office until late the night before, and she could dimly recall his explaining something to her while he undressed for
bed, talking fast and loud like someone who's been on urgent phone calls for hours, and seeming to be only half aware that she herself was already in their bed, trying to sleep or, more accurately, waiting in a glazed, exhausted stupor for the ghost to make her nightly appearance at their bedside. Mark had said something about a product delivery deadline moved up by a new marketing opportunity. It had sounded convincing. Or had it?

She didn't know whether to believe her husband; she's long since stopped being able to judge whether his workplace war stories are plausible or not—the digital gaming business is a strange place. All she knows is that she and Julie are alone in the house with the ghost, and they can't be. They can't be.

She stands, grabs a handful of their earthly goods from the kitchen counter—car keys, wallet, juice cup—and takes Julie and herself out of the house via the back door, walking in her sandals and pajamas around to the driveway. She puts the baby in the car seat and starts driving.

*   *   *

A
nd here they are, Bridget and Julie in the car, on the run. Driving the roads that used to be—and Bridget can remember this from her own girlhood—surrounded by sleepy country on both sides; the former farm-to-market roads around Austin all have transformed into tucked-in plazas and subdivision entry points. This road was still half wild when she was a girl, golden hills sloping away in all directions and flattening into green lines. Now it is different.

It's Julie's morning naptime, and the little girl has begun to nod off, although even from the driver's seat, Bridget can see Julie fighting
it. The eyes drift closed. But then the eyebrows go up high:
No! No sleep!
The eyelids raise, the little head bops to one side, then the other, and the eyes widen, try to focus out the window.
Whoa, stop sign. Whoa, tree. Car. House. Sleep.
The eyes drift closed. But then, oh, the eyebrows go up high:
No! No sleep!
And again the head moves, the eyes widen.
Whoa. Parking lot. Sign. House. Sleep.

Bridget estimates that they left the house around seven thirty in the morning. At some point she'd picked up breakfast from a drive-through and pulled over to eat it at a picnic table near a forlorn-looking playground on the banks of a small, scummy pond, the centerpiece of an unimpressive little park, in which the two of them were alone with the sound of traffic on the nearby road. After breakfast, Julie cruised around the table and crawled a bit in the grass, until Bridget discovered the grass was riddled with goose poop. So she picked up her baby and put her through her paces at the playground, and when Julie began to look tired, Bridget unearthed a snack from the bottomless reserves of left-behind-but-still-useful packages of gently processed edibles in the backseat of the car, and then let Julie play a little with the water coming out of the drinking fountain in the playground, and then loaded her back into the car seat, both of them still in their pajamas past ten in the morning, and started driving again.

Nothing to do but what must be done.

Julie is asleep.

I will stay with my mother for a few days.

Oh God, what a fucking fabulous idea—she is going to put it into practice this very instant. The relief attending this thought is almost as gratifying as the coffee and the shower she also desperately wants. She can't leave Mark a message because she left her phone at
the house, but it doesn't matter—he's so busy at work he'll probably be glad that they're out of his hair. She won't go home to pack. She'll get on I-35 in twenty minutes and be at her mother's office by the time Julie awakens, hungry for lunch.

Something stops her, though.

No, even if your house is haunted, you can't show up unannounced to your impeccable, beloved Texan mother's workplace, wearing your pajamas at noon, without so much as your diaper bag, bearing a hungry baby with an unchanged diaper who is also in pajamas and has been in a car seat for most of the day. The shame of it would give almost any woman pause, even a formerly hardworking, IRA-contributing career woman who really—let's be honest—
is
, now, what her stay-at-home mom friends are, even though in her heart she's not.

What would those mothers think of her if they could see her now? Even Gennie, friendly and tolerant Gennie, would find it hard not to judge.
You gave your daughter breakfast from a drive-through window. You haven't changed her diaper since this morning. You are not wearing underwear—like, any underwear of any kind—and you are out in public in your pajamas, and so is your kid, and by the way, you just gave her a snack from a container of oat puffs you found in the backseat of your mobile landfill of a car. That's it, then. You've taken the final step out of line, and there is no community of decent women on earth that will consent to have you.
And besides, she needs to fill up the gas tank.

No, the drive to her mother's cannot be undertaken, not just yet. What can be done, and it gives Bridget some comfort to think it: She can drive to the Starbucks over in the next town that has the take-out window, and she can get a coffee and a something, some kind of fatty,
awful something, and then she can suck it up, yes, she can, and she can go to a gas station
that's nowhere near her house
and be one of those sloppy, horrible people who gets out of her car and pumps gas braless, underpantsless, wearing slept-in, crusty yoga pants and falling out of a tank top.

This much she can do. Because she is bold. She is brave. She is in a neighboring town that is not as nice as hers. And she is a mother who does what she needs to do, when she needs to do it, no matter who's watching. Right.

But first she has to get some money out from a bank with a drive-through ATM, so she drives around looking for one of those, and it doesn't matter if it's her bank—she's decided she'll eat the cheating-on-you fee this once. The first machine she finds, however, won't accept her card. Or something. The second bank she drives to, which is right across the street but requires about a hundred right turns to reach because of all the meticulously landscaped median strips in the mini-mall maze she's wandered into, also won't let her withdraw cash.
“Transaction cannot be completed.” What the hell is this.

She finds a branch of her own bank after another ten minutes of driving. No drive-through teller; it's showtime. Bridget parks as close to the vestibule as possible, draws up her chin, puts on a pair of sunglasses she finds on the floor below the passenger seat, and rolls down the windows of the car for Julie. She will walk as stiffly as possible so as not to let her breasts swing beneath her tank top or let her thin yoga pants ride into the crack of her ass. But she will be quick, too, so that nobody can see that she's left her sleeping child to broil or be kidnapped in an unattended, open car in the sun.

Nothing to do but what must be done.

She waits until no one is in line, then scoots. Go, go, go.
Watching her car through the plate glass front of the building. Insert card and then pull out, but not too quickly—
shit. Okay, do it again. What would I like to do? I'd like to find some kind of a drive-through where I can buy a fucking bra and a package of diapers, that's what I'd like to do.
She cannot stop to wonder why she feels so exposed, so horribly outflanked. Julie is alone out there in the car, and it's starting to get hot.

After the second failed attempt, it dawns on Bridget to check their account balance.

There's nothing. No money in their shared checking account. Bridget tries to think how this could possibly be. She'd taken money out last Friday, before the weekend, and there'd been several hundred dollars left.

Bridget hears someone clearing his throat behind her and steps aside for the man who's been waiting to use the bank machine. In the frosty air-conditioning of the vestibule her nipples have become noticeable, and of course the guy looks at them as he passes her, of course he does. She swipes her sunglasses back down onto her nose furiously.

You're not going to cry, are you? Seriously?

No, she is not going to cry. She's going to try to think this through. Bridget marches back out into the harsh sunshine and starts up her car, rolling up the windows and blasting the air-conditioning—in the few minutes she's been inside, the car has already become uncomfortable. She and Mark pay all their bills from a separate checking account they designated for that purpose. Well, Mark pays all their bills, yes, but she makes sure the electronic transfers happen on time. When Bridget stopped working, they did some financial housekeeping and agreed that it was better to have one untouchable account for bills and necessities and then one special, sort of
discretionary
account, which was to be separate—that way no payments would ever bounce, and they could see exactly how much they had to spend at any moment. Yes. A good idea. It should have worked. Except that money from the
discretionary
fund got used for necessities all the time, and then sometimes money from the bills-only account would need to be moved over to the
spend-me-like-I'm-on-fire account, to keep them liquid between Mark's paydays. Had they decided to consolidate everything after all? They must have.
Think, Bridget.
She could almost manufacture a grayscale memory of that conversation:
Let's just move everything into one place since the shifting back and forth is getting annoying. Okay, I'll do it. Will you remember? I will, I promise. I'll remember. I'll do it the next time I have a minute and I'm online.
Except which of them had promised? Which of them had come to the conclusion about what to do? Why hadn't anybody clarified that they should move everything into the fucking account for which they actually had fucking
debit cards,
for Christ's sweet fucking sake?

And now she does cry a little bit, but out of fury and frustration and not humiliation. Although, yes, there's some humiliation in it, too.