The Barter (23 page)

Gennie blinks, then smiles uncertainly at Bridget. She leans down to kiss Julie's head. Gennie smells delicious, like a field in blossom. Although in the moment that she is bending near, Bridget is almost certain that she can smell Mark's soap on her friend as well.

“Good night, hon,” Gennie says quietly. “Have a good weekend.” Without another word she vanishes into the park.

Bridget nestles Julie into the curve of her lap and waits while the
night unravels around them. Throughout the park, groups of people are breaking apart, spinning off into the streets with strollers and coolers. Locusts shrill and laughter bounces off the blacktop. Streetlights and park lights are on, and the moon is a round dumb show.

She doesn't want to think about Gennie and Mark but finds that it's impossible not to. They could be together right now, kissing secretly somewhere among the hydrangeas. Helplessly she finds she can recall a hundred moments when
she
was that person in Mark's arms, when they'd stolen kisses from each other as if they didn't already belong to each other. They'd played out some bold sexual challenges when they were first together, like they wanted to test each other. On their early dates and nights out, they'd done now-unimaginable things to each other in the posh, darkened lobbies of smart downtown hotels, in restaurant parking lots, in little tacky wine bars. The rules were simple enough: Whatever the one proposed, no matter how outrageous, the other one had to accept the dare, no questions. She'd even surprised him at his office, exactly once, and that is the memory that comes to her now: The two of them in a tree-shaded picnic-and-smoking area between the rear door and parking lot of his office building a few jobs before he'd started at PlusSign, her back against the wall of the building, her skirt shifted up, her thigh on Mark's shoulder, and the vibration of his mouth shocking her all the way through her body as he groaned at the first taste of her. His thumb sliding into her and her knees buckling.

That could be him and Gennie, right now. She sickens herself, deliberately, seeing if she can make herself imagine it. If it could be Gennie, here in the park somewhere, surrounded by rustling leaves in the secret dark, cupped in Mark's palm, her hair wild and pretty around her flushed face.

You don't really believe it of him, do you? You can't really mean this craziness?
Stop it,
for God's sake
.

“Are you sleepy, baby?” Bridget asks Julie. Julie doesn't respond. Bridget pulls her little girl up onto her shoulder, and they rest their heads against each other. “My bee. My Jujubee,” Bridget whispers.

That is how Mark finds them some minutes later. He reaches down and puts his hand across Bridget's head and Julie's. “Come on, dear ladies,” he says gently. Bridget sees that they are the last to leave. Even the fireflies seem to be gone.
Where were you all this time?
she wants to ask, but does not.

Mark has loaded Julie's stroller with all the things Bridget packed to bring to the cookout, Julie's diaper bag and their cooler and a mesh bag with long handles that she uses for picnics. It's all a mess, everything rumpled and half tumbling out, but it's all there. So Bridget carries Julie on her shoulder and the three of them venture out into the street, walking down the block toward where the sidewalk picks up again, across the intersection from the park. They are quiet, and the night holds only the sounds of their sandals flicking and of the crickets and locusts and far-off teenagers crying to each other, even though Bridget can clearly sense the inevitable prickling of questions and statements and challenges between herself and Mark, whole schools of those poisonous, darting little nightfish. They're going to have a fight tonight. They won't be able to help themselves. And maybe that will be the end of it. Maybe the ghost will have what she wants, then.

“I was talking to Dev tonight for a while. I . . . I might be laid off next week,” Mark says suddenly. “In fact I'm pretty sure it's happening. I didn't want to tell you earlier. But I'm pretty sure it's happening.”

Bridget looks at him in astonishment over Julie's small round back.

At that moment a car materializes from around the corner where the park meets the turnoff to the neighborhood's southernmost exit road, and it's coming way too fast. Teenagers. Music is everywhere all of a sudden. There's a swerve and a shout. Bridget screams and holds out one hand as if to stop the car with it, her other arm tight around Julie's back, but now the baby's legs are dangling and she begins to slip from Bridget's arms. Mark lunges in some direction—she can't tell where or why. The headlights are wild.

Then there's a shriek of laughter from a young girl in the car, and the headlights yank away, leaving Bridget and Julie standing in the purple dark again. She scoops her arm back under Julie's rump and catches her before she slumps any further. The car's wheels ride up onto the grass and then whump back down harmlessly onto the blacktop beyond them. “Shit!” Bridget hears a boy say, maybe the driver, maybe not, and the car swings off again down the street and curls around the next corner with its music and bass and shouting inside, but leaking out behind it in echoes all over the street as well, like the liquid leavings of a cracked radiator.

“Fucking kids!” Mark spits. He's all the way at the curb, visibly shaken, his hands in fists and his shoulders bunched up tensely beneath his shirt.

Bridget looks at him coldly. “Did you just jump out of the way over there?”

“What?”

“Did you just jump out of the way and leave us here in the street?”

He stares at her blankly. “Bridget, I jumped
toward
the car. I just missed punching that fucking driver in the face.”

Bridget stares back, keeps her face still.

The problem with being married, of course, is that you always know when the other one is telling the truth, but also when they are lying.

Julie flops one cheek on Bridget's shoulder and starts crying weakly, exhausted. Bridget pats Julie on the back and resumes walking in the direction of their house.

“Bridget? You're kidding me, right? You really think I'd save my own skin before yours and Julie's?” Mark is still standing on the curb where she left him.

Bridget doesn't answer, and then she hears him behind her, his flip-flops scuffing to catch up. She feels his hand on her un-Julied shoulder.

“Bridget. Stop. Look at me. You've got to be kidding me with this.”

“Let's just go home. Let's just get home. I can't have this conversation without air-conditioning,” Bridget says wearily. In her head she's rehearsing a future-of-the-next-few-minutes in which the ghost meets them at the door to their house and rises up before her husband, vengeful and horrifying, and scares him Scrooge straight.

“There's no
conversation
to have! You're judging me for something I didn't even do—you didn't even
see
me!”

“What I can or cannot see, and what you can or cannot see, is a very big deal. A very big deal,” Bridget allows, and she nuzzles her head against Julie's in the vain hope that it will make her cry less, or at least more quietly, but of course it doesn't, and they're followed down the street by the echoes of Julie's crying and their own quiet, stony fortifications. The quiet of the suburbs is rarely true quiet, especially at night.

“Bridget, I don't even want to dignify this bullshit with a defense.
But I jumped toward the car to make them turn—I guess I thought something crazy like I could make them dodge us, I don't know—I was just acting on instinct. But my instinct was to
protect
you. You really aren't paying attention if you don't believe that.”

Bridget's eyes are prickling, and she kisses her baby's hot shoulder.

“Fine. Don't talk to me. Don't believe me. Don't answer me. But we do need to talk at some point about what the hell we're going to do when I lose my job next week.”

“How do you know you're going to lose your job,” Bridget demands in a sullen, thick voice. She knows how she sounds—she won't react to anything but the problem of how he's going to continue to support them—but right now she doesn't care.

Mark is briefly silent as they turn onto their street. Then he says, “Brian and Mike let me know tonight that they've got to cut from both the marketing and development teams. They said they just wanted a clean cut, one cell. They said it was hard but they picked my group. And they decided to go all the way up.”

“Did they say why?” Bridget is still avoiding looking at anything but the street passing beneath her feet, and Julie's little bare feet, swinging and bouncing against her thighs.

“Budget. What else. They don't want to go after another round of investor money until after they get this release out. And the shittiest thing is they're not even
letting
me tell the guys they're going to be let go. Not until after the release date.
That's
how they do things, those two.”

“Why your team, though?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Mark says, almost moans, his voice enlarging as if he wants to yawn even though he's anything but bored by the question. Her heart aches for him for a moment. “I guess I just don't
put in the hours that the other team leads do. Those guys live there. They really live there. I can't do that right now.”

“I don't know,” she mumbles. “It looks to me like you live there.”

“You'd be surprised at how much is happening during the hours when you're asleep,” Mark says bitterly. He's pulling his house keys from his pocket, and they're turning up the walk. “I don't know why I even bother coming home at night. You're both asleep and I miss you anyway. But there's a lot happening in the office during the overnight hours, believe it or not. I haven't been there enough, but I haven't been here enough, either.

“You know what, though, I cannot
wait
to get out of there. Seeing how they're burning up my team,
after
they get as much out of them as they possibly fucking can. It's the last fucking straw. It's all been a waste,” he concludes. His voice is tight and hollow. Bridget blinks, her eyes burning.

“I'm so sorry, Mark,” she says. “You work really hard. It's not fair.”

“Fair isn't what life is about,” Mark responds. “Not for anybody.” He opens the door to their house, and the air-conditioning inside swims out to touch their faces and bathe their sticky bodies. He leans across the threshold to turn on the light in the foyer and then holds the door open for Bridget and Julie to pass through ahead of him.

But Bridget cannot move. She can't enter the house.

Her way is blocked by the ghost, waiting in the doorway just as she had imagined a few minutes ago that it might, although its gaze is fixed not on Mark but on Bridget. The stench of wet earth is overpowering, carried toward them much more forcefully than the gentle press of the cooled air inside the house, and Bridget's throat lurches.

“Oh God,” she hears herself say.

Its mouth hangs open hungrily, a black maw. Bridget sees to her horror that the ghost no longer really resembles a woman—in fact, whatever was human in its formless shape-shifting is actually disappearing within an indistinct mass of white limbs and black gulfs, its eyes, its mouth, the hollows of its cheeks and throat. But the woman is still there, inside the mass of flickering movement, thin and hungry, a melting ghost inside of a ghost.
What will happen when she is gone inside of it?
Bridget's heart is hammering.
What will happen to us when she's swallowed up? What will it come for next?

Is this what was happening to her while I refused to see?

“Oh God, I'm so sorry!” she cries out.

The form, or possibly the woman inside of it, lurches toward her but cannot cross the threshold. It is penned inside the house, and she is trapped outside of it. To go back home she needs to—to what? A membrane she cannot bring herself to violate hangs just inside the door.

“Bridge, it's okay,” Mark says. He is looking back at her, leaning halfway into the house, his arm holding the door open. He has one foot in the house and one foot on the front step. Around his body, all over his outstretched arm and his shoulder, against his cheek, against his chest, the whiteness and blackness flicker and curl together, vicious like smoke. “Let's talk about it inside.”

Then Mark's expression changes. He has seen not the ghost but Bridget, her obvious terror. And also Julie, who has turned in Bridget's arms and is staring at the ghost, her glassy, exhausted eyes blank and wide, her little mouth open and exhaling. Bridget can feel herself beginning to gasp for air, can hear her breath coming harshly.
There she is, she's inside of it, she's allowing herself to be
eaten
, she's allowing
herself to be consumed by it, what is it, what is it, why didn't I see before that she's
inside
of it, inside of it and fighting her way out toward us—Jesus, God, look at the way Julie's looking at it, she can see it, too—

“Bridge?” Mark reaches for her. His warm arm is around her shoulders, embracing her and moving her.

“Don't pull me in, oh God, don't move us!” Bridget screams, but it's too late. He has gently, gently, so gently pulled them right into the whiteness and the blackness, so close to it that the smell of the grave is closing over Bridget's face, shutting out the air, and she thinks for a second that she might pass out from the stench and the cold, but she remembers Julie in her arms and yanks desperately out of the way, stumbling over the doorjamb, falling against Mark's body and then down onto the floor, where her head and Julie's little head both smack smartly against the wood. Julie is screaming now, and Bridget scrabbles to cup Julie's head with her hand, curling up around her girl on the floor, trying to protect her from what she knows will now come, having tasted them both and needing to bite deeper.