The Barter (31 page)

Mark comes over to them. He kneels down and puts his arm around Bridget's shoulder, and his head against Julie's soft little head. He is quiet for a minute, and the three of them just hang on to each other, their family, the three of them, their own little boat.

Then he says, “I'll drive us to your mom's if you really want to go. Let's just get out of here, like you want, and we'll figure it all out tomorrow.” Bridget sobs with relief, with gladness. “I'll go get the car.”

He rises, goes to the door, and opens it, and then she hears his footfalls descending the stairs.

And then nothing else.

As if he's stepped into snow.

The two of them are alone, Bridget and Julie, in the girl's room.

Julie is so tired. Bridget can feel it in her little body, in the stillness and the warmth of her velvety limbs. She gathers her girl up against her and waits for what she knows is coming next.

She has known for some time now that the ghost wants something, something dear and unnameable, and it comes to her now, as clear as a pang of remorse, as charged as an afternoon sunray, who can tell her what that is. The woman inside the whiteness. She's the only one who knows. Bridget will have to face her. Ask her. Help her, maybe.

“Not much longer now, Jujubee,” Bridget whispers. Her eyes are hot with tears. “I'm right here. Not much longer now. It'll be over soon.”

She folds herself around her girl, drinking in her sweetness. Julie rests her head against her mother's shoulder, and Bridget brushes her lips across the little girl's mouth.
Not much longer now. Be brave, little bee. We have to be brave together. Because she's here.

The door opens wider, as if pushed by the breath of a dragon.

The scent of the ghost enters the room before she does, and by now it is so familiar, so understood, that it seems borne by a current of powerful, deep associations, just the way certain smells carry back figments of Bridget's childhood to her whenever she experiences them. The high, bitter fragrance of gas stations, for instance, will always remind her of her father, of sitting in the backseat of an old car, waiting for him to come back, longing for him and dreading him at once, the beloved and frightening ghost of her own baby girlhood. The ripe, cakelike smell of the makeup aisle at the drugstore is the smell of her mother's purse, the home of all the world's great
mysteries and delights when she was a girl. And whenever Bridget pours her daughter a cup of apple juice, she is three again herself, in a warm and comfortable room, sitting drowsily on a sofa, watching leaf shadows play with each other on the ceiling like kittens with a ball of yarn, and it is early evening and she is at Mrs. Washington's apartment, waiting for her mother to come pick her up, it has been a long day and she is little and she loves Mrs. Washington, she loves her juice, she loves being comfortable and small and safe, and she loves her mother with an intensity and a force that seems to make the leaves take the shape of her mother's face on the ceiling, round and loving and beloved overhead, like the moon, the moon in the bunny's room, the moon winking in the window.

The ghost is here now. Like the moon it is white, like the moon it is cold, like the moon it is crossed by shades of darkness. And like the moon, it pulls.

It is pulling itself through the doorway.

Bridget's pulse is a thick, heavy thudding in her throat. Julie rolls forward in Bridget's lap, tucking her knees up and making herself a ball. They face the door together and watch the ghost come in.
My brave girl. God help me, please help me keep her safe.

First the arm, then the head, which seems hideously larger, almost square, like a block swiveling atop a frail body. The white static of its form seethes, grows, shrinks, approaching and retreating like a tide. As Bridget watches, trying to breathe, the ghost's limbs slice into the room, jerking and stuttering. The dead thing brings itself forward with great effort and great hunger. And inside the white, Bridget and Julie can clearly see the blackness, and the woman being endlessly eaten and eaten and eaten alive.

The thing turns its gaze on Bridget and Julie, and its maw drops open, ravenous. Bridget bites back a scream and clutches at Julie, who buries her head against her mother's chest, staring and silent.

“Don't be afraid, baby. It's going to be over soon. Don't be afraid, Jujubee,” Bridget gasps, staring at the hungry, long face that flickers and waits.
I'll find a way to keep you safe. I've got to. I've got to.

She is looking into the thing's black mouth. Bridget forces herself to look, although her heart is hammering and all of her physical instincts are pleading with her, begging her to get up and run, run, run.

The ghost of a woman is in there.
Inside, inside of it, I'm so sorry, so sorry, how did this happen to you?
Bridget is sure of it—she can see her more clearly now than ever before. She's so close, and yet, as Bridget watches, she seems to be melting away, or perhaps consumed, as if the whiteness all around her is the whiteness of a smoldering coal. She is in terrible pain.

Bridget pulls Julie tighter into her chest and leans forward into her knees, putting one hand on the floor in front of her. Julie clings to her neck, her fingers a fist in Bridget's hair.

Staring into the white hungry static with its stink of the grave, Bridget sees that the woman inside is not what she'd thought. Either something has changed in the ghost, or Bridget never really saw this woman for what she was. But she is beautiful. Her hair is black; her eyes are piercing and intelligent and gray. She is wearing a black dress, not a white one. Her lips are full but pale, and the skin of her throat above the high black collar of her dress is also a nacreous white, except where it has been darkened by the blood flowing from her mouth and over her chin in a dreadful caul. Her hair is in disarrayed braids.

Part of her skull is horribly misshapen.

The ghost within the whiteness has one arm wrapped around her own side protectively, and with the other hand she is reaching out to Bridget and Julie.

What happened to you, what can help you?
Bridget's lips are dry with terror, and her throat is choked with pity.

She is suddenly aware that as she leans toward it, the white stinking hateful fire is also leaning toward her and Julie:
Yes. Yes. Let me. I'll eat you, too, you stupid woman. I'll eat you all.

It lunges at them, releasing a ghastly sigh like the air escaping a tomb. Bridget screams and scrabbles backward to her feet, holding to Julie with one arm. Julie's legs dangle hazardously close to the open mouth, but her arms are painfully tight around her mother's neck and Bridget manages to yank them both upward, backward, away. She staggers under Julie's weight in the direction of the window.

“Mama,” Julie says pleadingly, and her small high voice reminds Bridget that they have to get out of this. She has to find a way. She can't be backed into a corner and out the window. They are alone with this thing, she and her daughter, and she has to see them through to the other side.

Bridget hisses at the thing. “I won't be swallowed! Shut your mouth!”

It cocks its head, for all the world a disgusting parody of a human.
Surely you've always known this would happen.

It advances.

Bridget clutches Julie and calls out to the woman again through the fearsome seething that surrounds her. “
What do I do? Please, please, what can I do?
”

The dead woman's arm is extended, and her hand is outstretched. But not to ask for something, not to beg for help. Incredibly, in her agony she seems to be reaching out to offer something, an invisible
thing, the only thing that can save them, small and insignificant but worth everything, and cupped in her outstretched hand.

You. You are the only one. The only one who can give so much.

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

As if she is reading it on a page in the ghost's outstretched hand, Bridget sees the answer unspooling like the hours she's lost and looked for, the hours she hoped to gain but kept watching helplessly evaporate, the hours she would give her life to retrieve and make meaningful, the hours she'll never get to live again. That is all that it wants, all that it requires. An hour of her life. An hour of Julie's. To save the ghost, to save Bridget's marriage, to save them all. She's holding it in her hand. All Bridget has to do is walk toward her and take it—and give her what she needs in return.

The woman beckons to them.
Come to me.

The whiteness rears back to attack, its limbs eager and curled inward like a spider's. The blank, numbing reality of it strikes Bridget as she watches it prepare: This is really happening, there is a poisonous and hateful presence in her daughter's room, and it will consume her and her little girl and leave Mark with nothing. Unless she can find the courage to move, to act. To give and to take—the thing that means so little and yet means everything.

Bridget looks at the little girl in her arms, panicked and heartsick.
How can I ask it of you, my own love?

Julie gazes back at her, in just the way she always looks at her mother. The way that the lucky and loved children of this world all look at their mothers, reflecting back the promise that brought them into the world to begin with:
You are the beginning of everything in my world, and I would do anything for you.

“I have to go through it,” Bridget tells Julie in a whisper. “We have to go through it together. Don't be afraid. I'm right here. I won't ever really leave you.” She kisses Julie's cheek, again and again. “We're giving a little something away, but we'll get so much more back if we can just be brave together. You'll see. We'll be okay. We'll be okay.” Her heart is pounding. She is terrified, so terrified. She closes her eyes. She takes a step forward, and the smell of the room, the grave and the stink of death, shifts like a lock clicking into place and becomes the smell of a wet dirt road, earth after a rain, green and struggle and reward.

I give it freely, this hour. In exchange for love, I give this hour. In exchange for strength, for meaning. Your heart makes me brave enough.

“It's okay, Julie. It's going to be okay,” Bridget murmurs. She doesn't dare open her eyes, but she senses herself on the cusp of something larger than herself, and she can feel hands reaching for her, strong hands that can set her free.

It doesn't hurt. I thought it would hurt.

She feels the warmth of a hand on her face, on her cheek, on her lips. It is Julie's small hand, placed there as if to comfort her. But it's actually to bring her back to life.

T
he warm November afternoon has given itself over to a golden evening. Something is burning in one of the valleys—he can see the smoke rising over the trees as he drives. Leaves, probably, or an autumn brushfire. He takes in the scent and urges the minutes to move slower and the wheels to move faster.

He's hungry, thinking of dinner. He's restless because the drive is so familiar. And he's tired, thinking about all the things he still has to do that evening and tomorrow. As he drives, his thoughts take the indistinct shapes of a thousand things, big and small, orderly and disordered, practical and unwise. It's the movement of the trees and the landscape all around him that makes his thoughts scatter and fly like this, he thinks. As hard as he tries to bring his attention back where it belongs, his consciousness wants to wander away to the side of the road. He has a hangnail on his left index finger, and it's been throbbing all afternoon because he never found the time or the right tool to cut it. He didn't eat enough at lunch today and he feels a little light-headed, although a hot cup of coffee might set him straight. And the right rear wheel is making that whirring noise again; he'll need to look at it soon,
try to figure out what the problem is, but to be honest he likes mechanical problems, he always has, so he's not entirely sorry that the wheel is speaking to him now. It sounds like a voice in his head, spinning out the same phrase over and over.
You miss her, you miss her, you miss her,
it says. And also,
Here I come, here I come, here I come.

The little creek skirting the road has receded into the earth now, but he knows that during the spring it will resurface, during those months when the whole world smells like the beginning of the earth must have smelled: pungent, promising, wet, and black. He drives this road infrequently then.

Back at the house he knows what he'll find—or at least, he loves to imagine it. He urges the wheels toward it with a great swelling of anticipation in his chest: the gold fields, the busy yard, the good straight house, and in them the familiar heads young and old bent over familiar chores. But for all its familiarity, and for how much it is loved, it's not a peaceful place, and it never has been. With a child growing up in the house, you can expect something wild and inconsistent every day. Even when you think you've finally understood them. You never know what you'll come across, rounding a corner or coming up the stairs.

Sometimes, even now, coming up the stairs in his own house, he expects to see something waiting for him at the top, just waiting and looking for him. Something he recognizes and honors from the deepest mirror in his heart, something he longs for, loves still.

*   *   *

H
ere I come, here I come, here I come.

Mark yawns with a bone-cracking stretch of the jaw and tries to keep his eyes on the road and not the golden,
outrageously gorgeous hills tempting his attention just past the car windows. He's got eight minutes by the dashboard clock. He should make it in time.

Their days are driven by clocks. Sometimes he feels the urge to step outside of the little machine they've made, just stop the relentlessly moving gears and try something easier, but he knows better than to believe that
easier
necessarily exists. Bridget likes to tell him her ideas for magical, amazing tools for a better world—she comes up with them by the hour, it seems like. She says mothers and geeks have that in common: the creative compulsion to
make it better
. Clocks that let you swap wasted hours for better ones, mirrors that reconfigure the symbols in your dreams so you can see their meanings more clearly, books where you can write down things you want to come true—but only within the next two days. Sort of like enchanted objects from fairy tales but addressing the particulate vexations of modern life. He's always thought it was funny that he was in the business of game development when she had the better imagination. Once, when he asked her if he could use an idea of hers in a game they were developing back when he was at PlusSign—was it the eye camera? or the thought clock?—she'd made a face, screwing her pretty mouth over to one side, saying, “What would you want to do with
that
? Sure, take it. Although, wait. Is it going to be, like, a weapon thing or a status thing? You should earn it. It shouldn't be just sitting in a . . . a yeoman's abandoned cloak at ye old mill town tavern, you know.”

Mark glances at the phone on the passenger seat of the car, its unblinking face reflecting the car ceiling and the dim dashboard lights.

I have an idea for a new one, Bridge. I want a text message service
that reminds you to stop compulsively looking for text messages. It would be activated by elevations in certain . . . hormones. I wouldn't even have to look at the phone—it would detect that I was
about
to look and supply the reminder preemptively.

Either that, or a teleport that will get me to day care pickup on time regardless of when I leave the goddamn garage.

“Almost there,” Mark says aloud, and turns on the car radio to try to keep himself alert. Still his mind wanders, picking up familiar objects and putting them down. Work, mostly. But also: his girl, his home, his wife.

He doesn't like to indulge in it too much, but he loves thinking about his girls. He saves up thoughts of them like Halloween candy and dips into his store when he's feeling bored or off-center.

His wife is the one thought that usually brings him back to something like a center. She is the engine that turns the wheels in a lot of ways. She got them out. After those dark days when PlusSign pushed him out and there was no work for either of them and they lost the house. When he was at his lowest. Bridget kept them looking, moving. She was the boat and the water and the oars and the sails, the boards and the hammers and the nails.

It makes him turn ever so slightly inside out to think about those times, but those times are stuck in his candy store of Bridget thoughts, too. Hard times but good times, in their way. That was when they were finding each other again, a process that he can admit is still
in process,
but it's happening. He needs it to happen. That brightness between them coming back, flame point by flame point in a hard glass window. She's happier now, even when she's tired, which is often, or always. He tries not to think that he wasn't good enough, that he somehow failed to carry them all on his own and he let his
girls down. Or that he was somehow responsible for Bridget's unhappiest times, that he had penned her up inside of a bright idea. Bridget, for her part, never fails to reject that notion, to lop off its head whenever it pokes up out of the ground like a deranged gopher. “You and I are supposed to do this together. It's better for us to do this together. We need to have each other's backs,” she usually says. Sometimes she just says, “Shut the fuck up, honey. Really.”

Tonight it's Bridget's turn to leave the office later and get home in time for the bath, and it's his turn to pick up Julie and get her dinner. So. Dinner. What should it be? Fishies and peas. She loves those. Like Lola in that book about the tomatoes. Easy. Food groups. Think food groups.

As he turns the corner into the parking lot, he feels his heart quicken, and a goofy swat of joy smacks him across the face. It's always the same.

He parks the car and lets himself run, really run (okay, trot) to the door. Inside the golden-yellow main room the day's artworks are tacked up to dry, cubbies hold water bottles and jackets and small shoes like dinner rolls, and a sweet cluster of little heads is visible in the center of the room, all the kids on the rug listening to a story from Miss Henry, who catches his eye in the doorway and says, “Julie, your daddy's here.”

Her dear, shining face. Her glorious, spazzy grin. Her curls and creamy cheeks. Her bright rascal eyes. Here she comes. Mark drops to a knee and holds his arms out for her, and she begins her toddle across the room.
I can't wait, I can't wait, I can never wait to hold you.

As Julie makes her unsteady way toward him, Mark smiles a thank-you to Miss Henry, who, as she nods and turns back to her storybook, reveals a strange, elongated figure behind her, dark and
light at once, like a smudge of charcoal across a sheet of paper or like the trail a warm, swiped hand leaves across a frosted windowpane. The figure flickers like a flame and then grows stronger, straight, sure, impossibly tall—
is that a woman? who is that?
—but then Julie falls into his arms with her scent of honey and playground dust, and he isn't sure he saw anything at
all.