The Barter (12 page)

Gennie goes on, “I'm so glad you could make it after all. I thought you might not be coming or something, but then I thought, Julie's probably napping at some off-hour and she can't get away. Here. Let's—let me draw the blind real fast so it's not so bright. Just put her on the floor? Between the bed and the door? And that way you'll hear her for sure when she wakes up.”

“Thanks, Gennie,” Bridget manages.
I am not going to cry. Kindness is not what makes you cry. Cruelty deserves tears, but not empathy, not tenderness of spirit. Keep your shit together.

But then. “You look tired, hon,” Gennie says feelingly, and that does it. Waterworks. Heart-deep misery. Slim, tanned arms around her shoulders. “What is it, Bridge? Is—is it Mark?” Gennie asks, hesitant. “Are things okay with you guys?”

Bridget snuffles a little bit, and instead of answering, she requests a tissue. It's perverse, not correcting her friend's assumptions immediately. It is unfair to Mark. But what can she say, really? “I've just had a tough morning.”

Gennie is silent and fetches her a box of tissues from the master bathroom. She watches Bridget wiping her face and blowing her nose. Bridget is afraid to look at her. She knows that her nipples have hardened again in the frosty air-conditioning of the house, clearly visible beneath her tank top, again. She has a feeling that she's also displaying a shadowy delta of her pubic hair through her thin, stained pants. Her feet are dirty. Worse, her child is dirty. Julie is all crust and crumb, and she smells as if she might actually be sleeping in a pooped-up diaper—allowing this to happen is probably the true cardinal sin of motherhood. Bridget thinks,
I look like a woman who has fled her home. I
am
a woman who has fled her home.

Finally, Bridget's conscience demands a say in this whole embarrassing tableau. “Mark's fine—we're fine, I mean. He had nothing to do with it. I'm just . . . freaking out.”

Gennie is quiet a moment longer, then says, “You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, Bridge.”

“I would tell you if there was anything to tell, I swear.”

“Don't feel like you have to. It's okay. I just want to make sure you're safe and taken care of. As your friend—” Gennie pauses delicately. “When was the last time you saw him?”

Bridget isn't quite sure she's hearing correctly—didn't she just clarify that things are fine with Mark? “Last night. He's working a lot. This really doesn't have anything to do with Mark.” Suddenly she is exasperated. “‘This,' what is ‘this'? I don't even know what I'm trying
to explain. So I show up to the art camp meeting late and looking a little bedraggled. Sorry.”

“You look fine,” Gennie assures her. “Do you want a cup of coffee or something?”

“Oh God, yes. And Gennie, could I—could I just freshen up a bit in your bathroom?”

“Oh, of course, of course!” Gennie is so truly delighted by her request that she takes Bridget by the shoulders again and squeezes. “Use anything you need in there! I have this fabulous tinted moisturizer stuff. It's, like, super sheer—”

“And Gen, I'm so sorry to ask, I know this is weird, but . . . could I—” Bridget swallows.
No, I cannot ask for underpants.
“Do you have, like, a long sweater I could just wrap around me? Or something like that?”

Gennie stares at her, and then Bridget sees something incredible happen: Her friend's eyes well up with tears. “Oh, honey. Of course. Of course. I—I'll be right back, I have just the thing.”

As Gennie disappears into her walk-in closet, Bridget has time to experience a whole new bottoming-out level of shame.
She thinks he's locked you out. She thinks he beats you or terrorizes you or something. Say something. Say something right now. Just make something up, before she suggests calling a domestic crisis hotline.

“Gennie, I know I must seem like I'm acting strange—or not strange but . . . Look. Everything's totally fine, with me. And Mark, especially with him. He's great, he's just working a lot. And I—I forgot my house key and my wallet . . .” Bridget follows Gennie toward her closet, talking to her friend's back while looking at the floor. It occurs to her that she has never sounded less convincing,
even to herself, and she wonders whether some terrible part of her isn't enjoying this a little bit. Playacting, or at least not being straight. And being treated, tended to. Why does this feel so nice? Gennie turns around with a long, belted cardigan, all-season cashmere, pale heather gray, impossibly luxurious, perfect. Bridget takes it from Gennie and appreciates the loveliness of the object, and also the gesture. It's probably one of the most expensive sweaters Gennie owns.

“I never wear this, and it's too bad. I got it for Christmas from Charlie's mom in Massachusetts, and on someone short like me, I just get swallowed up in a cut like this, it's so long. But on you!” Gennie says brightly, and Bridget ties the belt. “That's just right for you. You have such shoulders. Everything hangs well on you.”

“Thank you, honey,” Bridget says. “I mean it. You just saved my life, or it feels like it anyway.”

Gennie responds by throwing her arms around her, and Bridget is a bit embarrassed. “Whenever you need to talk, I'm here,” Gennie says, and because she is finally safe, for the moment, leaning her head against Gennie's sweet-smelling hair, Bridget rolls her eyes.

Karen, Pilar, Sandra, Asha, Jen, and Gennie have conducted the art camp planning meeting without Bridget and are now lingering in the general warmth and welcome of Gennie's home while watching their children, Madison, Honor, Aidan, Jashun, and Ruby, tearing apart poor Miles's playbox. To his credit, Miles is trying to be cool about it, but it's easy to tell that he's not entirely happy about seeing his toys, his precious things, carted and spun and thrown about the room.
Who are these people?
he seems to be wondering.
Who gave them my stuff? My stuff is important!
Bridget sips her coffee, hot and
strong and sweet, and watches Miles with sympathy while trying to get up to speed: She has missed the entire meeting, and this means she has to go along with what whatever's been decided, okay, but it would still be helpful if someone would just tell her what, exactly, that was.

“So, Wednesday mornings?”

“I thought we said that, yeah.”

“But aren't we starting on Tuesday next week?”

“Gennie's got the schedule. You wrote it all down, right?”

“Thank
God
for you.”

“So nice of you to get down all the details and have us all over, G.”

“You're welcome, J.” This is how Gennie and Jen address each other, G and J, and it sort of makes Bridget a little bit jealous at the same time that it makes her want to flick both of them, very, very hard, on the kneecap, with a wooden spoon handle or maybe a pencil.

“So, Tuesday of next week but Wednesdays thereafter,” Bridget clarifies. Not for nothing has Bridget done a few depositions in her day.

“Thereafter, yes.” Sandra says this, and it's not exactly nice to hear the word echoed.
I
was
an attorney, you know, and it's not uppity to use a word your kids will learn in third grade.

“Okay. And Sandra, you're first?”

“Yep, first at my house. On Tuesday.”

“And what time.”

“What time did we say? Eleven?” It occurs to Bridget that by skipping the meeting because she appears to be hungover—or still drunk—she might finally have demonstrated her outsiderness irrevocably to this group of women, and that this distracted vagueness in response to her questions might be masking a real unwillingness to answer. Maybe she's not invited to the party anymore.

Then Karen turns to her and asks, “But will that time work for you, Bridget? Is Julie napping at eleven now?”

“She'll be fine. And when is it my turn? Or, I guess, how do we know whose turn is next?” Suddenly Bridget's mind leaps to the impossible: all of these children, these darling babies that she really, truly loves a little bit, playing in her living room under the watching black eyes of the ghost, her whiteness shifting and twitching in the corners of the room, her eyes following them.
The babies. Oh God, what can I do? She hates me, hates me, hates me.

“We did a lineup, right? A totally casual calendar. A TCC.” Asha yawns. She's co-sleeping with Jashun and is always exhausted. “I'm totally trademarking that, BTW.”

“You actually talk in text message,” Gennie teases.

“I know! Or wait, I should say ‘LOL'!”

Bridget waits for the two of them to stop laughing at this and then says, with a little more intensity than quite matches the mood of the room at the moment, “Okay, but, so when is it my turn?”

She sees Sandra shoot her a look. “Do you need Gennie to give you a firm date on the TCC, Bridget?”

“You know what, I might need to ask for one, too. As nice as it sounds to play it by ear every week, I'm so busy it'd just be nice to know when I need to plan,” Pilar puts in.

“Is this too much work? Are we being too ambitious?” Asha asks. “Maybe we should just—”

“No!
No,
y'all!” Gennie bursts. She is pleading and laughing. “Come on, we can handle this, can't we? A weekly semiorganized playdate? I mean, for God's sake, haven't we each of us been responsible for harder things than a little once-a-week summer camp? You know? I mean!”

“You really want to do this,” Jen observes, smiling. “Okay, G. Whatever makes you happy, I'll do.”

She has this effect on people, Gennie. Bridget can't help but see it, but she is trembling at the thought of having guests, having the babies, actually in her house. Her house, where the dead woman is.

Her lips feel as if they've been clamped shut. Bridget is aware that she is breathing funny, heavily, and then she hears Julie crying in Gennie's room and leaps to her feet, bolting down the hallway, leaving a brief, puzzled silence in her wake.

She doesn't care. She's with her girl again. Seeing Julie awake and reaching up for her from beneath the buckles of her car seat, her little face squinched in its adorable distress as she cries, Bridget's heart does a familiar stutter. Ever since Julie was a newborn, Bridget has been trying to explain to Mark the peculiar, physical effect the sound of Julie's cry produces. “It feels a little bit like an electric pulse,” she told him once. “Like a power wave that pushes through you and disables your neurological system for a second, then reboots it.”

“Sounds like a neutron bomb,” Mark observed at the time, half kidding and half frightened.

Bridget's fingers are as quick as Rachmaninoff's, and her upper-body strength is, by now, formidable. She lifts Julie into her arms and squeezes her, kisses her plump, soft cheek, takes in the unmistakable barnyard odor, and heads for Miles's room and his changing table. “Hello, Jujubee. Did you sleep well? Did you have a good nap?” Julie's hair is a fluffy halo, whorling out from a point at the back of her head that has been pressed into her car seat for hours. “My sweet Jujubee. Mmm, mmm, mmm.” And so on. Oh, it is sweet to hold and comfort a sleepy baby. She indulges in several more kisses as she gently lays
Julie down on Miles's changing pad. Julie is cheerful now, alert and quiet and still as she usually is after her wake-up squall. She says, “Mmmma,” and pretends to kiss her mother.

“Thank you, Jujubee.” Bridget smiles at her little girl. “I love you, too.”

“Are y'all okay?” Gennie whispers from the door.

“We're fine. Do you mind if I borrow a diaper?”

“As long as you don't give it back.” This is their group's standard response to this question, which is asked by at least one person every time they get together.

“I think I'd better go, Gennie. I'll give back your sweater—”

“No, no, keep it. Keep it till Friday, I'll see you then. Or keep it till whenever, I don't need it.” Gennie eases in, glances back over her shoulder at Miles and the others in the living room, and closes the door behind her. “Bridget. I'm sorry if I said anything off . . . about Mark.”

Bridget pulls Julie's pajamas up and then pulls Julie into her arms. “You didn't,” she lies. She kisses Julie's head and puts her on the floor, where she toddles toward the bedroom door, wanting to join the children she hears in the other room.

When Bridget looks back up at Gennie, she is pale and clearly struggling with something. It comes out in a whisper, after a tiny pause that is somehow as adorable as a mouse squeak, despite the disgusting horribleness of her question: “Is he cheating on you, Bridge?”

“What?” She stares. “Why would you ask me that? Of course not!”

Her friend is miserable. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please—
please
just forget I said anything.”

But hadn't she just been thinking this herself, albeit in a sort of
jokey way, just yesterday? Even thinking it for the express purpose of dismissing the possibility—doesn't that mean it's crossed her own mind, too?

Suddenly she would like very much to sit down.

The bank stuff? Could it actually be because—could he really have taken everything? Constructed some kind of story about work, and then lit out of town with or checked into some hotel with or gotten on a plane with—who? Who would it be?

No, this is not happening. This is not possible.

“I just saw him last night. I just spoke with him yesterday afternoon. He—he was—”
Not overly happy to talk to me. Either of those times. And I haven't really been paying attention. No. Lately my attention has been, oh, let's call it divided.

“It's okay. I'm sure it's okay,” Gennie says.

Julie begins to pound her little hand on the door. She unleashes a wail. Gennie picks her up, but Julie isn't having it; she strains toward the door and lets loose again.