The Barter (30 page)

Frau burrowed into her shawl and shivered. “I have no opinion.”

*   *   *

L
ate and starry and dark. Only a quarter-moon lights the road. It is difficult to see, but she thinks the animal may have traveled this route a few times. The horse seems to be able to pick her way through the darkness as if picking berries with her dainty hooves. Only the wind courses through the grasses and the distant live oaks. She is out here on the country lane alone, the
lantern is insufficient, and the farm feels farther distant than it ever has before. Still she knows she must get there.

It is now several hours since she began to feel peculiar, dizzy, uncertain. The world clouds over, then clears, clouds over, then clears. Like a white sheet flung across a bed and yanked away, or like a nightgown floating over her head and coming to rest around her ankles before being pulled up again.

She feels as if she is dissolving.

She is trying to understand what is happening to her. Perhaps the magician has cursed her and she is dying. Or the magician's stolen kiss was laced with a slow-acting poison that is only now taking effect. Or perhaps she is mad with the magician's madness, because she, too, is seeing things, as if she is projecting them on a mirror from which she cannot turn away. She keeps closing her eyes and willing the visions to leave her be, but there they are, right in front of her on the road she travels: A cold house in a burning place, filled with magical objects, unimaginable luxuries. A woman curled up around a little girl, filled with fear, and with love, love, oh, desperate love. The beloved face of a mother suspended on a rope swing, wheeling far overhead, moonlike and as far out of reach as the moon. A window overlooking a dark street like a river, a pool of shockingly blue water, other houses, too close, with ugly eyes glaring in like a giant's face at the panes. A staircase she must climb and climb and then descend and descend, tirelessly, even though the scissor of every step is like a blade slashing through her limbs. A beautiful little girl, clever and special like her own Matthew, worth everything.

She is gasping for breath, the night air thin and cruel. Perhaps simply by making his prediction about her, the magician also made it
come true. She won't reach home in time, but she also won't die. She'll always be on this road.

She feels as she felt standing at the foot of the staircase: There is something she wants badly just ahead of her, if only she can get there.

She opens her eyes and looks up at the stars and realizes that she has slumped backward in the cart's seat and she must sit up again. It is hard, so hard. But she does it, and she is relieved to see that the horse is still moving ahead, good old girl, dear old girl. Whose horse it is, she scarcely knows. She came out of Gruber's livery stable down the street, and Rebecca hasn't given her a name yet. Mercy, Prudence, Patience, Courage, Fortitude.

What is inside me? What am I looking for?
The visions descend from the sky overhead like a screen swinging into place, and begin to flicker and fade on the road ahead of her, just past the horse's ears. The good thing about closing her eyes is that the images cannot follow her here into the dark. The bad thing about closing her eyes is that it becomes difficult to breathe.

When she can no longer stand it, she opens her eyes again, and the stars and the road and the horse and the window and the house and the mother and the girl are all still there, seething and growing and shrinking on the other side of some unthinkable membrane.

John. Be there waiting for me. Be there, love.

She thinks of what will happen to them if she doesn't make it home, if she's trapped on this road. She thinks about John, his beautiful face and his sad, hard eyes, and she sees his face become a little boy's face, her Matthew's. These thoughts are intolerable.

The hour is unimaginably late. At some point that evening Frau went up to bed, but Rebecca stayed out on the back porch alone,
thinking and then not thinking. The wind picked up, lifting leaves and grasses across the darkened yard and flying up the steps to where she sat draped in her shawl. And there on the back porch, something overcame her. Something: her own soul, a tribe of witches, her mother's spirit. Something. It lifted her. She went into the house, moving toward the stairs, and, climbing them, felt herself dropping through them again and into this horrible place, not here, not there, knowing neither. Pulling with all her might, she finally gained the house's upper story and hovered like a mist over her darling boy asleep in his cot, cheeks flushed scarlet, breathing too rapidly. She knew it then, didn't she?
He's ill, he's dying, but I can still save him.
She called for Frau, called and called from Matthew's bedside, and the old woman never came.
My boy is ill, we're dying, but I can do what my mother did. I can give up an hour of my life and an hour of my darling's, and in that way we can save each other.
But some thing, some crucial part of the exchange, was still absent: She was still missing something, looking for something. Something she loved and needed.

And then she was out in the night, at the stable, taking a neighbor's light horse cart for the journey home, with these images flashing before her eyes.

She has been on this road a long time.

Something has overcome her—her self, that hot and hungry thing, latent in her but growing all along—and caused everything inside her to rise to the surface and evaporate. That must be it. She has finally turned her insides out. And the fear and loneliness and doubt in which she has encased herself are causing her to dissolve. Her self, her real self, that thing she felt rising to the surface from within its cold container that night in the wagon with John, the night her father died and the magician's calculations failed: It is here, now,
outside in the world, but it is disintegrating inside of an acidic mist, a sheet of white, a cloud. She knows well this kind of evil whiteness that envelops and imprisons: the nightgown, the smoke, the snow. The bedsheets.

She is trapped inside, looking out. Watching these scenes.

Can she touch them?

She can try.

The night is black.

She wants to be home. She wants to see her fields again and see John's dear, good face.

She left her little boy behind.

She is a monster.

But not forever, she wouldn't leave him forever.

Just for an hour. An hour of his life, sleeping and unaware, and an hour of hers, out here alone on the road. The hours are given freely in exchange for their release from the tower and her release from the white, and in exchange for their return home, to each other, to safety together. What mother wouldn't exchange an hour of her life for her child? What child, if he understood what it meant, wouldn't exchange an hour of his life to save his mother?

Make the barter that I made. I am what you are.

She's ready to do it now.

In exchange for love, I give this hour. In exchange for happiness, for purpose, for worth, I give this hour.
It's that easy—it's such a small thing, to give and to take. On the road in front of her she can see the burning house in its tiny matchbox of a field, and the terrified mother curled around her little girl, and she wants to tell her:
It's not so hard as you think. Make the barter that I made, and you can both be free.

The farm is over the next rise, she's sure of it, and in the
farmhouse she will find her happiness, her purpose, and her power. It's not just John, although he's part of it, and it's not just the work and the farm and the things she learned how to do there, but that's all part of it, too. It's not only Matthew, either, although he is always there with her, a part of herself that she's always known and yet has a whole lovely lifetime to learn. Joy rises in her throat, and she urges the horse onward, hurrying toward the woman in the road.

Don't you know who you are? Don't you know by now what you can do?

You are the only one who can give so monstrously. You are the only one.

The horse missteps in the dark, and her foreleg is suddenly off the road. She is a light animal, and the cart is not heavy, but there is a bank by the roadside here, protecting a ditch through which a shallow springtime creek runs. The angle is not steep, but it is enough to render the horse off-balance, unable to correct her stride, and the front wheel of the cart follows the animal off the road and catches her on her back hoof. All at once the cart is on its side, and then the horse is beneath it, bucking with her heavy hooves against the muddy earth until she is upright again. The cart rears up with her weight and then crashes back down again, still attached to the horse and still on its side, dragging behind her on a broken harness. The horse takes a few lurching steps, and the cart's rear wheel catches on a rock emerging from the creek's gravelly bank. The horse pulls mightily, making a frustrated sound of effort, and the cart's cheap wheel breaks off. Up onto the road the animal pulls herself, the wrecked cart trailing. With a triumphant little shake of her head the horse continues on her way, slowly, dragging the ruined cart on its side and favoring her back left leg.

There is a woman by the side of the road.

She is still moving.

She followed the little cart's cartwheel into the ditch and shattered her right shoulder on the rocky outcrop that just a minute later would catch the cart on its way back out of the ditch. Striking her head on the ground at the creek's edge and then tumbling into the water, the woman saw the cart following her flight into the creek, and then the cart's weight landed on her body and rolled, breaking two ribs. She was aware of a forceful, splashing lunge, a whicker of air overhead, and then the horse's flailing hoof struck her skull.

This woman is able, after some time, to fight her way out from the creek water to lie on her side, and then on her back, lying in her blood- and mud-soaked black dress in the grass on the edge of the road, smelling the wet earth all around her and gasping up at the stars.

And then, because she's strong, and because if she's gone this far she might as well go on, she might wait here, and in an hour, after the sound of the broken, riderless cart clattering past the farmhouse over the next rise awakens the farmhouse's occupant, she might be discovered and, after a long night of anguish and uncertainty, ultimately saved by the doctor who replaced old Dr. Mueller. She might in time recover and build a successful farm with her husband. Because of her, Matthew might survive the night, too, and grow up to distinguish himself at school and marry a smart girl of a good family. He'll be too young for the Great War and too old for the one that follows it. He'll be one of the lucky ones. And after enough time passes she might not think of the barter she made—like the meaningless, random accident that followed, it simply won't seem to have taken place. She could almost have imagined the white flickering images, the road, and the magician's cursed kiss. She might still go
on to have a happy life, with few regrets. She might die an old woman, loved and accomplished.

She might survive this. Or she might barter her hour and still die, just as her own mother did.

But she still wants to tell the woman ahead of her on the road something—
I have something for you. Something important.
Even here by the side of the road, she feels so alive with power that her body seems to be singing with it: She's outside of the white now, and she knows what she passed through it to do. She wants to tell this woman, wants to tell her—what? To do exactly as she herself has done. Risk the safety of an hour for what it might yield in exchange: power.
You are the only one who can do this.
The power to define the meaning and shape of your own life, and not have it shaped for you by an acid shroud of fear, self-doubt, misperception, powerlessness.
You
are
what you are looking for.
The power to walk right through that white, shapeless barrier of fear and self-loathing and render it meaningless, a bedsheet flapping on a clothesline in the breeze.

Even now, even here poised on the crumbling edge of this road, she is filled with compassion for the woman ahead of her—the other one, the one she'd been racing toward through the white of her fear and the black of the night. If only she can be brave enough to make the same barter.
Let me show you. Let me help you. My mother did it, and now I will do it, and you must do it, too. An hour, it is such a small thing, and it could save all of us. All of us.

She can taste blood in her mouth. Every breath brings with it a shocking pain, and then an awareness that the pain is fading. She's sorry to feel it leaving her, but she feels ready to reach out for whatever might be coming next.

S
he makes it to the top of the stairs, chest heaving—there's some air up here, now that she's put some distance between herself and the thing downstairs. But her legs are still shaking so badly that somehow on the last riser she trips and falls to the floor. The ghost is coming. She keeps her eyes on the rectangle of air above the stairway. She knows what she will see there, soon, very soon. Behind her, on the other side of the yellow-outlined rectangle that is the bathroom door, Julie is gamely splashing with her father, her rarely glimpsed great love. And in front of her, just over the horizon line where the upstairs hallway meets the staircase, something is coming for her, something so hungry and insistent that even though it can move only by shambling, shuffling grasps at the air, it won't stop until it reaches her again.

Without pausing, Bridget pulls herself down the runner carpet of the darkened hallway, reaching into her skirt pocket for her phone.
Time to call in reinforcements. If she were here, I really think she could see it.
Bridget taps her mother's name on her phone and forces herself to wait, inching backward down the hall on her elbows, listening for sounds on the stairs.

“Bridget? Hey, how are you, how's my baby?”

“Mama. We have to come stay with you for a while. Please.” Speaking is almost impossible. She can't get enough breath in.
It's closer now.
“Can we stay with you? Can you come and get us? Tonight?”

Kathleen's voice is suddenly octaves deeper. “What happened, honeygirl?”

“Nothing. We just— We need to get out of this house, Mama, tonight. Okay?” Bridget can hear the panic rising in her voice and struggles to get enough air in to talk, to get the words out. “Or we'll come to you. We'll drive there. We're on our way. We're on our way,” she repeats, to reassure herself more than anything.

“Listen to me, honey,” Kathleen Goodspeed intones sternly. “Okay? You and Mark have a good thing. A good thing. It's worth something, what you have, and I know it's hard, but if any woman ever balanced it all, her self and her marriage and her work and her babies, it was through love, hard work and hard love. What I'm saying, and I want you to listen to me, is that you have it in you to make this work, but you're the only one who can do it.”

Bridget closes her eyes. “Mama, I have to tell you something.”

“Go ahead, honeygirl.”

I am crazy. After this, there's no going back.
Bridget gulps for air and can smell nothing but the grave coming after her, up the stairs in her own dear house.
After this I don't know what.
“There is a ghost in my house. It's a woman. Or—there's a woman inside it, but I—I think it ate her. It ate her. And it wants something from me. I don't know what it is. I can't tell Mark. He can't see her. But Julie can.” She is panting. The ghost is below her on the stairs, scrabbling and thumping. “I tried, I—I gave her my favorite picture of you and me and Carrie, I gave her Julie's favorite book. She wants something else
and I don't know what it is. She wants it now. The ghost is right here, Mom. She's
right here
.”

Silence on the other end of the line, but scraping, shuffling, a revolting flopping sound from the stairs. And then it is there, its head, rising up before her, its mouth, its black and starving mouth, and its eyes full of hate.
Found you. I'm so hungry. Let me.

Bridget's mother says, “Help her, honey.”

A shattered white arm slaps against the hallway floor. Bridget screams and drops the phone.

Warm yellow light sweeps over her as Mark and Julie emerge from the bathroom. “Bridget? What— Who are you talking to?”

Julie begins screaming again.

“Oh God—Mark, get her into her room—” Panic and terror shoot a sudden strength through her limbs like voltage, and Bridget scrabbles to her feet and grabs her husband and her little girl bodily, throwing her arms around the two of them and pulling them with a cry of effort into Julie's dark little room, then slamming the door. In the blackness her fingers fumble for the lock.
Not that it will work—against that—what is she now, where is she now? What do we do? How do we get out? Does it even matter, now that I'm crazy? I'm officially crazy. Even my mother would say so, and she would know, wouldn't she? Jesus, Jesus Christ.

“Okay. I'm getting Julie into her pajamas. And you can nurse her down. And then we are going to have a goddamn
conversation,
Bridget.” Mark's tone is that of a man who has reached the end of the proverbial rope.

“Just—get her changed—and then we have to hurry—we'll run down the stairs as fast as we can and get in the car right now and go to my mom's.” Bridget has found the lock, she's found the light switch,
and as she swipes the light on in the room and flattens her back against the door, determined to protect them even if she is insane, even if it is impossible, she turns to face her husband and her daughter.

Who stare back at her, both of them as hurt and scared and confused and sorry as she has ever seen either of them. They have never looked more alike. If it weren't so heart-wrenching, and if she weren't so terrified, she would laugh, she really would.

“What?” Mark grates out. His eyes are bright. “Bridget, are you—are you trying to say you're leaving me? Is that what this craziness is all about?”

Julie lets out a sobbing wail and begins to squirm out of her ducky towel. Mark wheels about suddenly, not waiting for Bridget's answer, and brings his little girl to the changing table, where he lays her down and begins diapering her with stiff, unpracticed movements.

“Because if you are, Bridge, I can tell you, it's one of the shittiest things you've ever done. Not just because of the timing, although, my God, like, you would
think
after what I just told you, you could at least wait until the morning. Or until we got Julie down so we could actually
talk
about—”

Here Bridget interrupts him with a muffled shriek. “Mark!” The ghost is in the hallway, thudding against the door—
I can hear it thumping out there I can
feel
it God help us—

“Well? What? For Christ's sake
what
?” Mark bursts out, picking Julie up and looking at Bridget over the girl's head.

She is not so insensible with fear that she doesn't feel her heart lurch at the expression in her husband's eyes as they meet hers. Because he is her friend, her one real ally—not Gennie, not Martha, but Mark.
He
is the one she chose, and she chose him knowing him well: He is smart and good-hearted and true. He works hard; he tries hard.
He doesn't always know what to do, and if he's the type of man who often makes that into a problem for her to solve, then at least it means he values her instincts and her abilities. Even if he doesn't always understand her, he loves her; she sees clearly enough that he does love her. She's hurting him terribly without meaning to.

She can't bear to stand across the room from Mark with him looking at her like that.

Bridget releases her panicky grip on the doorknob. If it means the ghost can enter the room, so be it. Let them face it together.

The door shakes in its jamb. Bridget flinches. Her daughter's mouth is slightly open, and her eyes are dark with anxiety.
I'm going to keep us safe
,
Bridget thinks at her, but her heart is screaming,
She can hear it out there, she can hear everything it's doing, God help us.

She extends her arms to Mark and Julie and seems to cross the few feet from the door to the changing table just by leaning closer to them. “I'm sorry. I know you must think I'm crazy,” she says to Mark. “Please, please, please believe me, I'm not, I'm not.”

Now Mark has Bridget in his arms, has them both in his arms. He kisses her mouth, and she feels his shudder as he pulls her shoulders close, holding both Julie and Bridget against him. Julie is cupped in the crook of his elbow, wedged between the two of them and holding her little self still. “Don't scare me like this,” he mutters into Bridget's neck. “Don't leave me. Bridget. I'm begging you. I know I've been out of it. I know I've been gone a lot. Things are going to change. I want them to. You and Julie—I want things to be different for us.”

Bridget hears the ghost in the hallway thudding against the wall, the door. Something is knocked over and drops to the runner carpet with a rumbling roll—the little bird vase? Bridget closes her burning eyes and concentrates on the bodies, the bodies: her little warm girl,
who always smells of honey and pee and soap, and Mark, lean and hot and urgent.
I love these let no harm come to these let me protect these let not a single part of these come to grief God help me help me be strong enough.

Mark is saying, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I haven't been paying attention. Gennie was telling me tonight that she's worried about us—not that it's her business. But I'm trying, I'm really trying. This news about my job is—hard. I'm scared I can't keep it all together by myself. It's making me sick—it actually feels like something's eating my guts. I don't know how we're going to live. The house—”

“You don't have to do this all yourself. I'm here. I can help. I can go back to work,” Bridget says. Her burning eyes are closed; her throat is full. “We should be facing this together.”

“If you want to, fine. It's always been your choice. You know I'm fine with whatever you want to do,” Mark replies instantly, his voice ardent and thick. “Just don't give up on us.”

From the hallway the sounds cease.

Then there's a scraping, a sly scraping, like bones trailing along the floor.

She doesn't want to ask it, but she does. It's the only thing that might still separate them, the only thing she doesn't yet know about him, for sure.

Bridget says, still in his arms, still holding on to him and their daughter with her eyes closed up tight, “You're having an affair with Gennie, aren't you.”

There is a numb pause and then Mark steps back. She forces herself to open her eyes, and right there and then she can see the truth. She's wrong. He's done nothing.

But for the moment Mark is so amazed he can't answer. Her
heart breaks a little bit—she's sorry, of course she is—and then she gently takes Julie under her hot little armpits and lifts her away.

“Please just get the car,” Bridget says quietly. “We have to leave tonight. We can't stay here.”

His face changes. He is furious. “I don't even
like
her,” he bites out.

“I know. Never mind. Forget I said it.” One-handed, Bridget opens Julie's drawer and begins to pull out clothes, pajamas, tiny little shirts, tiny little leggings. Now the house is filled with silence, so thick and terrible it's like a snow that has fallen hard enough to fill up every room and smother every thought, movement, heartbeat. Bridget can see tears, her own, dropping onto the little cotton flowers and turtles and gingham checks that make up the pile of Julie's clothes in front of her on the dresser top. Julie puts her arms around her mother's neck and burrows in, glossing her own cheeks with her mother's tears.

“I have
never
liked her,” Mark says distinctly. “
You
are the one who's, like,
fixated
on Gennie. I know what she is for you—and I know you know it, too. It's like you needed to make her into this
thing
just to remind you to feel bad about yourself for some reason. But I don't give a shit about her. You know that.”

“I know.” Bridget shakes her head. A hot salty drop flies from her nose. “Forget it. Forget I said anything. But we need to leave. Please, please believe me, Mark, we have to leave tonight. All of us.”

She can't hear anything in the hallway, but that doesn't mean nothing's there.

When she can bring herself to look at her husband, she sees that he has pulled a veil over his feelings for the moment and is gazing at the floor, eyes shuttered.

“I don't understand what you want to do, Bridget,” he says at last. “I don't understand what's happening to us.”

She gulps in a strengthening breath and pulls her little girl's body close to hers. The air all around them smells of the ground in spring, pungent and reeking and yet full of insects, living things, everything struggling and green.

“I have to
give
something,” Bridget says, her throat aching. “I don't know why, I don't understand it, but I know I have to give something up in order for us to be—safe. Saved. But I think—I think it wants something from
all
of us. Me, you. Even Julie.” She strokes Julie's back and feels the girl's fingers clutching in her hair.
But how can I ask it of her, how how how?
“Oh God, this is so hard,” Bridget gasps and feels her knees buckle.
My baby, my baby.
She sits down heavily on the pretty braided rug, pulling her girl into her lap, and she can hold herself steady for a second but then the sobs come and she is racked and racked. Julie gazes at her in astonishment and alarm. She puts her lips to Bridget's trembling ones and makes the “mmmm-ma” sound that is her notion of a kiss. She does it again and again. Her baby.