The Barter

by Siobhan Adcock

  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 i
t 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.

  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 effo
rt 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.