The Barter (20 page)

“Steady, Pledge! Steady!” John said firmly.

Rebecca dropped to the ground inside the fence and pulled a sodden flannel over into the dirt, hauling it toward Martin, who was on his feet again and didn't spare her a glance. The smoke was everywhere, thick and stinking and dry. The smell of charred horseflesh and the iron tang of blood curdled in her nostrils. She saw with some admiration that the plan had worked—that while John restrained the horse, the Heinrichs had mostly succeeded in smothering the fire. Martin and Paul smacked fearsomely with the blankets, driving down the flames. Rebecca squinted through the haze at the remains of the horse's harness. One of the long wooden shafts that followed the horse's flanks all the way back to the wagon had broken off at the coupling, but the leather traces underneath had remained in one piece, unburnable and unbreakable. The check lines that ran along Pledge's back could not be seen, buried as they were beneath the
damp horse blankets on her rear quarters. Rebecca didn't like to think that they might have burned into the horse's flesh, but she supposed it was possible and likely.

Pledge was breathing heavily. John said, in a voice that was low but commanding, “Martin, come and take her. I'm going to cut her loose.” Martin obeyed immediately, stepping around Rebecca and wrapping his arms tenderly around the horse's neck. Her fight was gone. At Martin's touch she stretched her neck forward along the ground and groaned. Martin, kneeling beside her, groaned in sympathy.

“Poor girl. Poor old girl,” he murmured. “
Ach
, you poor sweet girl.”

At this Rebecca could not help but feel her heart lurch as if a powerful hand had pressed it. She wiped her sleeve across her eyes, and when she saw again, John was watching her across the ruined horse's back. The horse, the wagon, the harness itself—all these things cost money, and money was dear to them, would always be. A stupid accident like this one, preventable and painful, was like a deep bite, through skin and tissue all the way to bone, that might never really heal properly. They had hard times ahead—that much they'd already known—but the real sorrow was that for some reason they'd both long forgotten, they couldn't face anything down together. Because they weren't together. They could have been.

His knife was out. She met his gaze steadily.

“Go on,” she said. “Go ahead.”

John pulled on his gloves and knelt behind the horse, and set to work.

T
he adults are all drunk, and the kids are all wild. It's a hot Friday night, and occasional tribes of teenagers skitter past the little park in clusters, glancing nervily at the party inside the gates, the women and the men all taking turns holding beers and small children and plastic cups of wine spritzer. It's as bad an idea as it usually is. Which is not to say that everyone present, young and old, isn't enjoying themselves immensely.

For Bridget it is an opportunity to show off her friend Martha, who has come with her good-looking husband and her well-dressed kids and is truly, tonight, a force to be reckoned with. Every sideways smile she flashes is a powerful signal, something like the elusive smirks that Michael Jordan used to wield on the basketball court at the height of his powers to convince refs, opponents, and teammates alike that they were
on the inside,
within the charmed circle of some understanding with him—and
on the inside
with him and his mysterious, God-given gifts was indisputably the better place to be. Being at the Friday night neighborhood party with Martha at her side feels to Bridget like being escorted through the zoo by the lion.

Martha herself isn't especially pretty, although her children are the kind of kids you see in clothing catalogs, bathed in golden sunshine and walking through wheat fields. Martha has thick, off-blond, curly hair cut into a somewhat hit-or-miss shape, and her nose and forehead are both slightly too long. Her legs are thick and pale. She and Bridget are the two rare women at the gathering who aren't in near-perfect physical condition. Most of the mothers in Bridget's neighborhood got back to their pre-baby weight within months—months!—although she knows each one of them worked at it with a self-discipline that she herself seems to lack, declining pastries and eating quinoa and getting up early to run in a ponytailed pack in the predawn hours before their children awoke and their husbands left for work.

The husbands, meanwhile, have clustered in a group near the grill. They don't know each other especially well—certainly they see less of each other than their wives do—and their banter, while easy, tends to be lightweight and uncollected and difficult to grasp, like the loose strings descending from a roomful of balloons. They've fallen into playing their game, the same game every Friday night, where each guy in turn has to quote a line from a children's book, since bedtime stories are the most obvious thing they have in common. The rules are simple: You get five seconds to come up with something, you can't repeat a line or even a book that someone else has already quoted, and a point value is immediately assigned by everyone else playing the game, which is based on the quotation's obscurity, inanity, or, most often, its previously unrevealed vulgarity.

“‘With some on top, and some beneath, they brush and brush and brush their teeth.'”

“Twenty.” Laughter.

“Okay, twenty. That
is
pretty filthy.”

“‘If you are the wind and blow me, I'll go flying on a flying trapeze.'”

“Wait, is that how it actually goes?”

“No. It's not. Five.”

“Someone uses that one every week. Zero.”

“Damn. It's like
that
.”

“It is. You gotta start reading more books to your kid.”

“Meanwhile Dave has had, like, a half hour . . .”

“No, I got one. ‘Madeline woke up four hours later, in a room with flowers.'”

“Fifteen!”

Martha and Bridget drift away at this point, having refreshed their drinks from the seltzer bottles and the discreet cartons of white wine in the cooler near the grill, and Martha murmurs to Bridget, “They totally want to be overheard. They totally want extra man-credit.”

“For coming up with that game?”

“For knowing those lines. They're showing off.”

“You're probably right,” Bridget acknowledges. This game is one of her least favorite features of the Friday night cookouts.

Mark hasn't joined the rest of the fathers. Bridget can see him over in the playground, pushing Julie in the baby swings, with his closest guy friend from around the block, Asha's husband, Dev, who is pushing his son, Jashun, in the swing next to Julie's. Dev and Mark both manage development teams at competing mobile gaming companies, although Dev's company is the larger of the two. They usually find each other at these gatherings and peel off to talk shop,
helplessly, angrily, almost involuntarily, as if they are powerless to keep their jobs from following them everywhere, like starving stray dogs they once showed a moment's kindness to.

She and Mark have hardly spoken to each other all night. They are moving glacially through one of their marriage's ice ages. If this one is anything like the others, they'll work out all right in the end, but for now there's a lot of satisfying jaw-jutting and silence to deploy. Eventually either Bridget or Mark will get bored of it, or something will happen to force them to speak and work together, like the weekly grocery shop or a call from one of their parents.

Or they could be on the edge of permanently breaking up. All it takes, Bridget thinks, is one of them saying something really unforgivable. Sometimes she thinks he's really about to do it, say something from which there's no going back. And sometimes she imagines she'll be the one to let it out, the thing, the black evil thing that lives inside their perfectly unextraordinary love.

“It's funny the things you can get used to,” Bridget hears herself say.

“Which one is Sandra? Which one is Gennie?” Martha asks. She knows the supporting players in Bridget's life much better than Bridget knows Martha's—Bridget thinks she might know Martha's nanny's name, and she can just remember Martha's paralegal's name, and if she squints into the tight-packed filing cabinets of her mind, she can almost manufacture the name of Martha's boss, a senior partner at her firm, one of the names on the letterhead. Of Martha's working-mother friends Bridget knows very little. It could be that they don't exist.

Martha has confessed on more than one occasion to feeling envy at the casual sociability of Bridget's neighborhood, dense as it is with
children. Martha's envy is, she would be the first to admit, why she is here with Bridget tonight, and it is a relief for them both to discover that, despite Martha's envy, she is also unable to smother a certain amount of contempt for the entire scene, lovely and summery and relaxed as it really, truly is. There's something excellent about Martha's contempt, and Bridget finds herself briefly, triumphantly sharing in it, even at her own expense.

It actually feels good to share a little bit of bitchiness with a friend—it feels normalizing, somehow. It makes a nice change from being the object of the contempt of a ghost, anyway. Since the catastrophic outing yesterday, Bridget has avoided being home. She spent the day with Julie shuttling between the pool, the playground, and the stores, and at midday, while Julie napped in her car seat, Bridget drove up and down long swaths of the interstate and tried to think what to do, or tried not to think what to do.

The ghost had ignored
Pat the Bunny,
of course. No real surprise there, she'd been forced to admit.
So what is she looking for? Haven't I already given up everything I'm supposed to?

“Sandra. Hm. Well, our paths wouldn't have crossed yet because we're working on getting drunk,” Bridget explains faintly. “She has opinions about parents who drink when their kids are around. She doesn't really approve of these parties, to be honest, which is something she'll tell us right out, if we give her a chance.”

“Oooh, goody.” Martha lights up. “Let's find her. But I also want to meet the
pretty
one—Gennie, where's Gennie?”

She can't wait. She can't wait to hate them.
Bridget can't help but laugh aloud.
God, me neither. I'm not what they are. Even though I am, and I'm also what they're not. Wait, how does that go again?
Bridget scans the party in search of her friend Gennie, to whom she hasn't
quite gotten around to apologizing. She meant to—she really did mean to call Gennie to explain her rudeness and weirdness and to arrange to return the beautiful sweater, no doubt over Gennie's own protests. Gennie is her ally, the person on earth who is most consistently nice to her. There's nothing special about her niceness to Bridget, of course; it's just part of how Gennie carries herself in the world. But when you get down to it, what's the point in even apologizing to a person like Gennie? She's just going to insist there's nothing to apologize for. Bridget could keep Gennie's three-hundred-dollar sweater forever, without mentioning it once, and Gennie would probably act exactly the same toward her, as if the sweater had never existed.
That's what happens when you're always, always, always the bigger person. Your sweaters get stolen.

All the same, Bridget isn't proud of her lapse in manners. It feels strange to be here, at one of these parties, without having so much as texted with Gennie beforehand. Yet here she is, enjoying the spectacle of Martha's condescension at the party Gennie plans for her and her friends every week. Martha's every droll aside ups the ante on the sweet perfection of the night, the neighborhood, the neighbors, their children, what everybody's wearing and drinking and how they're holding their liquor. She's already made two John Cheever jokes. If you could call them jokes.

“Even the fireflies look like they're CGI,” she remarks now.

The night splashes a sweet, mown-grass breeze in their faces, and light cotton skirts across the park all lift as one. Bridget is still scanning the horizon line of the party for Gennie when she takes in the fact that her husband seems to have removed Julie from the swings and disappeared from the inky, tree-shrouded dark pooling around the swing set, where Jashun and Dev are being joined by
Asha, elegant and lovely in a sundress, and carrying two plastic cups of beer.

Martha herds her, in the way that only mothers of small children can, toward her husband, Graham. And with a sinking heart, Bridget sees that Graham is talking to Sandra.

“Graham! Where are our infernal hellbeasts?” Martha asks merrily as they approach.

“They're off eating squirrels. We never gave them dinner. You didn't bring me a drink?” Graham shows them a hurt, surprised expression. He wears expensive, stylish glasses and has been shaving his head since the turn of the century. He always looks effortlessly great, for a tall bald man, although Martha confides to Bridget that Graham is relentlessly particular about his products.

“Oh God, I
suck.
I'm sorry. The cooler's right there, though. Don't you think the kids can grab something on their own? There's so much food—go make them a hot dog.”

For the moment they're all ignoring Sandra, all except Bridget, who cannot help but notice the arched eyebrow that Sandra has manufactured for Martha's benefit.

“Hot dogs are a choking hazard,” Sandra informs them, just as Bridget knew that she would. For a moment Bridget feels sorry for her. The inevitable moment has arrived. Martha won't be able to help herself. Sandra is so prickly, so easily offended. She's like a wall of elevator buttons, and Martha's going to make sure she stops at every floor.

Martha, undeterred, introduces herself with a cowgirl grin. “I'm a friend of Bridget's from her lawyerin' days.”

“I hear those were great,” Sandra says remotely.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Martha laughs.

Sandra goes on, “If you don't want to give your children hot dogs,
there's lots of kid-friendly food here. I'll be happy to make a plate. Where are they?” Sandra smiles, pauses. “Do you know?”

Martha's eyes narrow. “You
must
be Sandra.” She turns to Bridget. “Do I get the stuffed pony?”

“You do,” Bridget replies.

Sandra looks to Bridget. But it's too late to explain; the show has already begun.

“I am
so drunk
!” Martha announces, throwing an arm around Graham's shoulders. “There is
no way
I'm going to be able to find my children now.
If they're even still alive.
You're going to have to go look for them, honey. But get me another drink first. Wait, first, give me a big sloppy kiss. In fact, let's make out.”

Graham obliges with a slightly openmouthed peck. “Sandra was pre-law in college, too,” he offers blandly, eyes scanning the party over their heads for his children. The beautiful warmth of the violet night drifts among them like a magical cloak, sequined with the fireflies that have begun to dart. Children are chasing them, shrieking. A dog someone has brought—one of the good kinds, a long, loping wolflike beast—has joined the hunt, although he is already panting desperately. “Someone needs to give that dog a drink of water,” Graham observes.