The Barter (8 page)

The ghost is dragging her way into the downstairs hallway now. Bridget can hear her. More to the point, she can smell the ghost, the wave of scent she seems to push in front of her, for all the world like a mound of soil being cupped and pushed by a pale human hand.

Bridget slides out of her sandals. She has reached the archway that leads into the family room. Their house is an open circle downstairs: Proceeding counterclockwise from the entryway, a hallway leads back to the long kitchen that occupies half of the first floor, with entryways to both the family room and the dining room, which also opens to the living room, which in turn is visible from the entryway. When the ghost reaches the bottom of the stairs, it will be flickering in its staticky way at the point in the house where the entryway and the living room meet.

She might just have time—if she can run. If she can run silently and outflank her.

Bridget turns and noiselessly flies into the family room on bare feet. It's here, on the shelf over the television, that she finds what she is seeking and clutches it so tightly she feels her own fingers creak. It's not from Julie's room after all, but she knows its value to herself; therefore she thinks she knows its worth as an offering. Meanwhile there is no sound from the hallway, no signal from the dead woman. Bridget tiptoes as quickly as she dares through the dining room and peers into the living room.

The ghost is not here, but Bridget is momentarily overcome by the smell. It is like a grave. A grave has settled over her rugs, over the hood of the antiqued brass lamp (like a friendly alien head bending
on its stalk) by the reading chair in the bay window; a grave has fallen on the shelves of books, the deep sofa where Mark likes to sprawl to read his email, the canvas bins of toys under the west window, the strewn-about remainders of her baby daughter's morning explorations of the world: coasters tossed from the oval table onto the rug, books pulled from lower shelves, a plastic egg crate that Bridget has saved for her to play with, filled with colorful interlocking shapes that have been sorted according to an emerging sense of logic, pure logic with no obvious motive—an adult would have arranged the shapes and colors to create a palette or, even worse, a playful facsimile of randomness, but a ten-month-old is, Bridget knows, guided by instincts at once less measured and much more acute. No other combination of colored shapes slotted into the shallow cups of a clear plastic egg crate could have been more Julie—looking at it now, holding her sacrifice in her left hand, Bridget can for a moment imagine that she's looking at her daughter's DNA.

Nothing to do but what must be done.

Bridget tiptoes into the living room and leaves her offering on the floor, in the center of the broad, patterned rug that anchors the room, next to the egg crate and its shapes—the altar where she hopes the ghost will find her payment.

Bridget backs out of the room swiftly on her toes, and once she's back in the kitchen, she opens the back door communicating out onto the shady patio. The heat of June in Texas, the insect song and leaf rustle of afternoon, steals instantly into the house and warms Bridget's air-conditioned, fear-chilled skin. The scent of baking grass and warm brick erases all traces of the ghost. Bridget turns back to her girl, half expecting to see the ghost framed in the kitchen doorway.

But there is only Julie, with her back to her mother, busily
playing at her tray. Bridget watches her plump wrists, the curls at the back of her neck.

It is the work of a few clumsy, desperate moments to seize up her daughter's entire high chair—with her too-startled-to-squawk daughter still in it—by the seat and bump it shin-bruisingly outside onto the patio, next to the outdoor table, under the striped umbrella. Bridget then slams the kitchen door and rests her back against it, pressing her palms against the hot metal alloy, relief striking through her like a clock chiming the hours.
She's trapped,
Bridget tells herself.

Julie stares at her with a bewilderment that's almost like hurt.

“It's okay. Finish up your lunch, Jujubee. Then we'll play under the tree.” Bridget moves without hesitation to the outdoor storage chest and rummages inside, pulling out the picnic blanket, a ball. It's hot enough that they won't be able to stay out here long unless Bridget can keep the baby cool somehow. She has left her sandals in the kitchen, but she crosses the hot surface to the corner of the house in her bare feet and picks her way to the small cluster of shrubberies that conceal the outdoor spigot. She twists the knob and turns on the sprinkler so that it sprays a gentle arc for Julie to toddle through and scream about. Here in the side yard where Bridget stands on tiptoe, the ground is a little bit spongy because of that underground creek. Her toes are muddy. The grass feels cool and wonderful. She pauses to catch her breath.

She's actually not sure what she thinks she's doing—did she really just drag Julie's entire high chair outside? When have they ever played under the backyard tree on a picnic blanket in the middle of the summer? When have they ever, for that matter, spent much time on the patio in the summer, except in the evenings when Bridget sometimes serves their supper out here, or when she and Mark come
outside after cookout nights, once Julie is in bed, to swat mosquitoes and drink white wine and gossip quietly about their neighbors?

The grass will be prickly; the shade will be unconvincing; the heat will overpower. Why is she cast out here in the heat with her child? Why did she give her house over to a ghost?

My offering needs time to do its work.

Bridget squints across the glare of the afternoon toward her daughter in her high chair in the shade. Julie has thrown her juice cup over and is kicking her feet, sure signs that the postlunchtime squall is about to begin. The grass here at the side of the house is soft and feathery, more signs of the little creek that used to run through her side yard. Bridget lets her gaze sweep the street in front of the house. It is empty. It is always empty. Texas schoolchildren play inside during summer vacations. There will never be a gang of kids riding bikes in the street or playing catch in the cul-de-sac in the afternoon.

Mad dogs and Englishmen.

But I can't go back in there.

Bridget tells herself that she will bring Julie to the shade of the tree with the blanket and the ball, and they'll play for just long enough for her to catch her breath, and then she'll take Julie through the sprinklers for a laugh, and then they'll go back inside and change. By then everything will be fine. Her heart rate will have slowed down enough to get her through the long, quiet afternoon and Julie's nap, which is always the worst and best part of the day (before the ghost, Bridget relished having those hours to nap and clean and zone out—now, however, the afternoons are spent convincing herself not to be afraid).

She focuses on her daughter, who is beginning to cry. She has to get back to Julie and pick her up and clean her off.

She begins her wincing steps across the hot artificial planking toward Julie's patch of shade near the back door, passing, as she must, the glass sliding doors that also communicate onto the patio from the family room.

The sun's glare against the glass obscures her for a moment, reflects Bridget back to herself; nevertheless, Bridget cannot help but see her.

I won't turn and look. I won't turn and look at her.

The ghost, just inside the sliding glass door, her terrible face inches from the glass. Staring furiously at Bridget from inside and holding the framed photograph Bridget has left for her, the one treasure of hers whose value she imagined a dead woman might understand. It is the only photograph Bridget has of herself (in the photo she is a baby, not quite a year old) with her older sister, who died when Bridget was two, and their mother, Kathleen, the guiding star of Bridget's life. The ghost has picked this photograph up somehow and is holding it in her flickering claw. Holding it like something she would crush.

W
ith her penchant for telling tales (not all of them happy), Frau had, naturally, told Rebecca the story of her own birth and her mother's death many times, and it was this story that Rebecca found herself thinking of the night of her marriage to John Hirschfelder, in the middle of the night, sitting alone at the kitchen table, after everything had happened.

This was how Frau usually told it:

Florencia's labor had come on suddenly while the Doctor was on a call a day's drive away, and the birth soon became nightmarish (Frau invariably used the word “
furchtbar
”). Florencia had endured a troublesome pregnancy, and no one had expected the baby so soon. Both mother and child were in mortal danger when the midwife called for her sister. The midwife's sister lived alone and was rarely seen out in town, but when the midwife called for her, she never failed to come. She arrived at midnight.

Rebecca's mother was roused from semiconsciousness. The midwife stood by in a corner, while her sister, Ilsa, crouched over Florencia and touched her forehead, not ungently.

Frau, telling the story, would intone in the mysterious Ilsa's stern voice, “Do you want to see your child live?”

Florencia's weak reply: “Of course.”

“Then listen carefully to me. What would you be willing to barter for your wish?”

“Oh—everything, anything! My own life!” (Frau always gave Florencia a higher-pitched voice than any grown woman ever possessed—it was an effect Frau applied in all her Florencia stories to make Rebecca's mother sound young, charming, steerable.)

To this Ilsa said, “That won't be necessary. But perhaps an hour?”

Here Frau, in guileless imitation, typically strained her head forward with difficulty, as a struggling woman would attempt to lift her head from a pillow. “Only an hour? For all her life?”

“An hour.”

“What mother wouldn't sacrifice an hour of her life for her daughter? Of course I will do it!” Florencia was stirred to indignation. The midwife rushed forward to calm her, but Florencia swatted her away—this imperious gesture, too, Frau loved to reenact.

“An hour may seem very precious to you,” the midwife's sister judged, “once you realize you will never have it.”

“I would give the most important hour of my life for her!” Florencia declared.

“I must be clear. I don't mean an hour of your life only. I mean an hour of your life, and also an hour of hers.” Standing at the bedside, Ilsa then put her hand on Florencia's belly.

According to Frau, in this moment, Florencia showed some pride, and no little courage: “‘I accept,' the girl said. Never would she try to bargain or ask for mercy. These were the terms, you see.”

Ilsa said, “I will need a tear.” Florencia tried to comply, but she
could not simply cry on demand (“no
Mimöschen
, she,” Frau observed), so Ilsa blew into her eye until it watered, then caught the drops in a tiny glass jar. “Now I must have a kiss.” So Ilsa bent low over Florencia, and the little mother kissed the soft corner of her mouth. Ilsa went out into the night, toward the woods.

The midwife waited with Florencia, whose pains were unbearable (“
unerträglich
,” Frau always said, fixing Rebecca with a gleaming eye). Shortly before dawn, however, Rebecca came through safely.

With the sunrise, the inscrutable Ilsa returned from the forest. “The girls are fine, fine!” the midwife exclaimed happily. Florencia lay with Rebecca in the bed, exhausted and feeble. Ilsa went to Florencia and touched her forehead again.

“You may sleep well with your daughter today and tonight. But the hour you bartered is the hour you would have seen your second daybreak with her. I did what I could.” Ilsa went away.

According to Frau, Florencia had not expected to live. “She would have almost a full day with her little miss—what was a sunrise? She lay with you in her arms and thought no more about the midwife's crazy old sister.”

But as the sun set, Florencia did begin to think—and she began to harass the midwife. What if the crazy woman had really accomplished this exchange? Had she been cursed? Almost a day—one hour short of a day. Surely Ilsa could have spared them the last hour of one day—was it so much? Florencia's temper rose. She ordered the midwife to fetch her sister again.

Ilsa came and stood over the bed.

“Why can't we have a day?” Florencia demanded weakly.

“You gave up your hour—that was the hour needed to make a day. But your daughter will live. You gave that to her.”

“But you didn't tell me which hour!” Florencia cried. “You tricked me!”

“There is no trick. You pledged an hour. One hour from both of you, in exchange for her whole life. If it consoles you, the barter you made has given
her
a chance at everything.” Ilsa nodded to the little pale girl with the head full of thick black hair, nestled against Florencia's side.

At this Florencia seemed to resign herself to her fate, to the extent that she ever resigned herself to anything.

“She slept curled around you, and before daybreak, she died.”

*   *   *

A
s they rode down the country lane toward John's farmhouse on their wedding night, Rebecca and John talked in a lively way about the wedding and the party. They'd always enjoyed a bit of gossip together, even when they were school chums. This much about married life, at least, felt comfortingly the same to Rebecca. Their talk didn't slow until the wagon reached the gate in the early evening, and John said, “Would you like to see the place, sweetheart?”

She accompanied him on a tour of the land that had become his entire universe, and was now hers, too. John drove the horse as slowly as the animal would allow at the end of a long day with hay waiting in the barnyard. He was quiet as the wagon skirted the north end of the property, bordered by a copse of oak trees that swayed and whistled in a low wind. But Rebecca sensed him watching her in the gathering darkness, and her hand found his again on the wagon's board and clasped it as they surveyed what seemed to be the blessed end of the earth. In the dusk, the green merging with the violet and
black, the long rows of young oats bent back into wind-traveled channels, the soft, pliable shadow of the fields. It was as if the farm itself were showing off for her. Texas was vain; it had a vast, dark heart.

“Do you know where you are, John?” Rebecca demanded quietly, somewhat short of breath.

“Let me show you the house,” John said, and his voice was warm with joy.

It wasn't until the next morning, after things had gone so terribly wrong, that Rebecca saw for herself the simple, well-planned prettiness of the house where she would live. It had the straightness of a house where every nail and board had been put in place by a family who knew only how to do things the right way. The dining room cupboards were built into the wall on either side of a broad window facing west. The kitchen faced east and was cool in the evenings and warm in the mornings, with a trim new stove and a pantry clean and fresh. The wall above the stairs had been papered in a climbing vine pattern with a background of pale-green stripes, and the wood floors and banisters had been well planed and polished. Another little stove stood in the sitting room, this one potbellied and just for warmth, looking judicious and expensive in the bright candid light of the first morning of her married life, the first morning she'd awakened and known herself to be a cruel woman, a horror to herself.

But that night, that first night, she saw as much as the lamp would allow, which was plenty to assure her that the place was comfortable, as sweet and tidy as a newlywed girl could ask for. John pointed out the riches in the pantry and the cold storage room below the kitchen, where they also found cool, sweet milk in jugs, evidence that the cows had been tended that day by the hired boys. Since the wedding lunch had been long and rich, and since it was now dark and
hot and they didn't want to bother with starting the stove to cook, he and Rebecca sat down to a slice each of a neighbor's pie and a shared mug of milk at their kitchen table, which John had made himself last winter, before he'd gotten sick.

Once she had finished exclaiming her delight in the place, she found that both her approval and his evident pleasure in it had exhausted her. The talk between them faded again. Rebecca couldn't help herself; she yawned mightily.

“Would you like to get ready for bed, sweetheart? The bedroom is upstairs. I'll bring up your valise.” He avoided her eyes. He didn't say “our bedroom,” not yet. Rebecca wondered at him suddenly. What was to keep him from just taking her hand and leading her up there, she wondered. Kissing her again. Where had that feeling of brightness gone, that one she'd been thinking of and leaning toward all the afternoon? Where, when she needed it to remind her how she should feel and act?

“Do you get tired easier now, John? Earlier than you used to, I mean?” she asked hopefully.

“Because I was sick?” John shrugged, squinted away toward the window, where the night was blueing outside and the shishing sound of trees came from past the kitchen garden. Even in the dimness she saw him deciding to lie. “I've got some good help. The Heinrichs—Paul and Martin. We've been working out here all spring, and I've never felt better in my life.” He turned to her then, seeming to unleash the whole force of himself on her in a moment, his determination, hope, desire, fear, that brightness—it was too much for Rebecca, who almost leaped out of her kitchen chair in her instinct to escape. Yet at the same time panic kept her rooted to her seat just as if she'd grown out of it.

“And I've never been happier in my life than I am tonight, Beck,” he said to her, either tactfully ignoring or not seeing the reaction his loving, unhurried words were having on his wife. The panic sent stupid thoughts skittering like a handful of spilled dry beans across Rebecca's consciousness.
I won't be swallowed! Close your mouth!
“You know—you must know—I've always loved you.”

“Oh God,” Rebecca moaned. She put her hands over her face.

She felt, rather than heard, John's hesitation. Then he stood and moved toward her, putting his hand on her hair.

“Don't be afraid, Beck.”

Misery and embarrassment kept her still.

“I'm sorry, John,” she said through her fingers.

“It's all right,” he said gently, although she knew from his tone that he couldn't have understood her.

“I'm not . . . strange.” She kept her fingers over her eyes, breathing into her palms. She stammered—how unlike her, she thought, who is speaking, who is saying these things. “I'm not a monster.”
I'm not special. I'm not anything. I'm not a nurse or an actress or a saint or a teacher. I would still like the right to decide what makes me happy.
“I think I'm afraid of what we just did, today—getting married, I mean. I'm afraid of being unhappy. But I believe in you, I believe in you.”

John touched her hair again. “If you do, then everything will be all right.” His voice was troubled—instantly, she had to work not to hate him a little bit. Oh, he was a good person, one of the best. And she . . . What could be wrong with her, to say these things without thinking of what they meant or whether she even meant to say them? She was wild and stupid and afraid, an animal, not a reasonable adult. She felt a deep disgust in herself and an equally bottomless pity for her husband. How could she rescue them in this terrible, idiotic hour?

“I do,” she promised. She reached for bravery. “I do love you. Let me—let me show you.” She stood and took his hand, which closed tightly around hers.

The kitchen was black now and very quiet. John gently pulled her into his arms, and she could hear the raggedness of his breath in the instant before their mouths touched again, for only the third time since they'd known each other. Her lips opened under his; she felt everything that was herself opening, a slow, reaching movement like that of water that has been spilled over hard-packed earth, seeking its widest circumference before penetrating into the ground. There was that sound again, that broken sound from the battered cavern of his chest, where his sadly strained heart lived. Her John's heart. She must be careful with it. She flattened her hands against his chest. She would be brave. She moved her hands down to his belt. His body stiffened. Knowing how she affected him gave her power, and she longed to use it. The plane of her hand dropped down over the meridian of his belt buckle; she was no longer thinking now; there was no need for thought. Or was it rather that she was thinking harder, calculating faster, than she ever had in her life?

John broke away first. His breath was so uneven that Rebecca wondered briefly whether this was something he was strong enough for.
Maybe I should stop. I don't want to stop. I don't want to begin.
In the darkness his expression just registered—either startled or angry or hungry. It didn't matter. His mouth was on hers again, and he had pulled her against him.