The Barter (2 page)

*   *   *

T
he house has a strange smell the next day. A tang.

Ignoring the smell, Bridget and Julie go ahead with their normal Bridget-and-Julie routine. Playtime, morning nap, out in the car for errands, back for lunch, afternoon nap during which Bridget dozes off herself on the couch, then some distracted housework, then some more playtime while Bridget returns a couple of emails on her phone, then yet more playtime (bored by now, so heart-failingly bored, and counting the hours until Julie will be asleep) and dinner and bathtime and bedtime and waiting for Mark to come home, which he won't do until much later, after Bridget herself has fallen asleep. It's as if nothing has happened at all. Bridget hasn't exactly forgotten the ghost so much as decided it is unlikely she will
see her again—the ghost was some product of a dream, not even a dream itself. And so, the night after seeing the ghost for the first time, Bridget puts Julie to bed as usual and goes to sleep waiting for Mark as usual, albeit later than she'd expected to, given her uncomfortable, long hours in Julie's glider, folded in half around her baby with tears of relief and terror drying on her face.

Julie awakes crying at three
A
.
M
.
, and Bridget opens her eyes and sees the ghost standing close at the side of the bed, filling the room with her watery indistinctness, her coldness, her smell like a fresh-turned grave.

The ghost is waiting for her, black eyes neutral and expressionless.

With her heart stuttering and her eyes already tear-filled with horror, Bridget scrabbles for Mark's hand under the covers.

He murmurs, “Not you.”

The ghost turns and effortfully begins slicing her way out of the room.

“Marshland,” Mark says, still in a dream he doesn't know is a dream.
He smells her, too.

Bridget lies stiff with fear until she realizes the ghost must be going to Julie's room. Then she throws back the covers and flies out into the dark hallway, heedless and terrified. “Mark!” she cries. “Julie!”

The ghost is entering Julie's room as Bridget hits the upstairs banister and rebounds, hip singing with pain. She's never moved so fast, and yet suddenly she doesn't seem able to catch the ghost in her slow, struggling deliberateness. Her breath is short again, and she can't seem to get enough air into her lungs—it's like being on top of a mountain, where everything is cruel and thin.

Mark is awake now, calling worriedly from bed. “Bridget? What happened? Is she all right?”

Get up and help us, damn it!
But Bridget can't speak: Horror and airlessness have stopped her voice. The ghost is standing next to Julie's crib, turning to face Bridget as she halts in the doorway to the baby's room.

The ghost lifts her arm, as if pointing in Bridget's direction. For the first time, but not the last, Bridget understands that it is a command.

To do what?

Bridget can't keep herself from snatching her sleeping baby up and away, out of reach. Her movements are the jerky, panicked whirs of a clock reversing its wheels. And then Bridget has Julie in her arms and finds herself standing two feet from the ghost, the closest she's come, close enough to feel the radiant coolness coming from the dead woman's form, almost like a soft wind that her ceaseless shape-shifting seems to create, the kind of wind that would stir light curtains at a window in the half hour before a rainstorm.

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.

*   *   *

I
n 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 spread 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?