***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***
Copyright © 2014 Siobhan Adcock
CHAPTER ONE
She’s been waiting for something to happen, and now it has.
Bridget is sitting in the glider in Julie’s room. It’s past four in the morning and her thoughts are wandering, trailing through familiar places, picking up slight objects and then putting them down again. Julie is sick with a summer cold and cutting two teeth, waking every three hours to cry so piteously that even Bridget, a steadfast cry-it-outer, can’t leave her baby girl to wail in the dark. So here she is, sitting with a warm, buttery bundle of mostly sleeping girl in her lap.
And, as has become more or less customary for her, Bridget is thinking about death, plucking at it in her mind like fingers plucking at the curled edge of a bandage. Later, when she is at her most terrified, she’ll wonder whether she brought the ghost into her house somehow just by thinking about death so habitually, so unwisely. When I should have been thinking about educational toys, I was thinking about death. When I should have been thinking about weaning or baby swim classes, I was thinking about death. And that’s why she’s here. That’s how she found me.
Bridget wouldn’t call herself morbid by nature. If anyone were to ask, Bridget would say she is fixated on death for two perfectly good reasons: One, because she is a new mother, and motherhood—as everyone tried to tell her, and as has turned out to be completely true—means imagining the worst that can happen, every day, all day long. And two, because she’s married to an interactive game developer. All the ways a body can change shape, change definition, die, and avoid or cheat death—these are the things, Bridget thinks, half asleep and rocking gently, that preoccupy mothers and technologists alike.
Now that Bridget is home full time and thinking more about Mark’s job than she feels safe thinking about her own (the job she left behind, that is, her job as an attorney at a midsize firm up in Austin), she finds herself with more time to think about this stuff.
Gently, she touches baby Julie’s hair, the feathery spot right at the sleeping girl’s temple. The fact is, everything that other women tried to tell Bridget about motherhood has turned out to be true, and yet it still surprises her to realize that no one was lying. It is different when it’s yours; you do like other people’s babies more after you have one of your own; the weight does take nine months to come off, if it ever does; and then the worst, the most ludicrous and pat saying about motherhood there is: You don’t know what love is until you have a kid. All of it, all just as unilluminating and condescending as it was before Bridget gave birth, and all of it true. The weird, dreamy fixation on death, though. No one told her about that. But everybody must feel that, too; everybody must think about it.
No. Probably that’s just me.
Probably that’s my problem.
But if everybody isn’t thinking about it (because she’s thinking about it, here in the glider with her daughter snoozing in her lap), how else to explain all the movies and shows and books about it? Every time she looks at the news or the TV, she sees something that reinforces how vulnerable children are, to neglectful parents, to glib and hilarious sitcom parents, to breakfast cereal advertisers. And to worse, of course, far, far worse. Aren’t we all, she thinks, drowsing and gliding with her ten-month-old daughter in her lap, deviled and tormented by thoughts of our little dear ones coming to harm, and isn’t it true, after a while, that those feelings of torment come to be sensations we long for—manufacture, even—in order to prove that we’re capable of feeling tormented, in the same way that conservatives and liberals long to hear each other say something infuriating? A seductive self-justification, sure—the former attorney in Bridget can recall constructing stronger arguments to prop up flimsier claims.
And not just death in general, but death in particular, death as a particular inevitability for all the people she loves. Case in point: Lately it hits Bridget with increasing frequency that her own mother, Kathleen, currently alive and well and living three towns away with her second husband, might die—will die, is bound to die eventually— and the howling loneliness she feels at the thought is (she muses, half asleep) probably not unlike how Julie feels upon waking up in her crib, with her imperfect sense of time and object permanence. For Julie, the universe begins anew after every nap, with terror and curiosity and the aching search for the familiar: Mother. Mother.
So (pushing with one foot so that the glider’s rocking motion lengthens), what if her mother were to die. What kind of world could Bridget inhabit if it turned out to be possible for Kathleen to leave it. Or, okay, what if Mark were to die. What would she and Julie have to do, how would they have to live then—when she, Bridget, has just taken this strange huge step of exchanging her old life for this new one and is, for the first time in a decade or so, without any means of supporting herself, or any other creature for that matter, without help from someone else? Or, what would Mark do, for that matter, if Bridget were to die—who would care for Julie?
From there, Bridget’s next irresistible thought is the really unthinkable one: What if Julie were to die. How would Bridget live in a world where Julie was not. Bright, plump, fearless Julie, with her throaty, truck driver’s chortle and her endearingly spazzy baby ways.
She can’t know it until later, but it is at this moment, just as she is finishing this peculiar logical circle in her mind, the one that has led her so naturally to thoughts of her own daughter’s death, that she first senses the ghost nearby. There is a scent in the air, a smell that someone half-asleep could mistake, at first, for the smell of summer-time, for mown lawns and flourishing shrub beds, and it moves into the room like a secret and brushes across her face like a veil, sweet and sorrowful.
In the days to come this scent will become synonymous with panic, and hiding, and heart-stopping fear, but in this moment it is almost comforting, familiar. In the yard alongside their house, there’s a strip of ground that’s always a little bit muddy and damp, even in the heat of summertime, thanks to a creek that used to run through the neighborhood and now resurfaces between the houses only during the wetter spring and winter months, the merest temporary glimmer, like a bracelet emerging from a velvet pouch. Bridget likes to see the little creek surfacing and receding, likes the way its muddy scent floating through the window screens means the start of the green season, although both she and Mark have wondered whether it might be undermining their foundation. Their neighborhood is all new construction, quickly planned—the houses here aren’t bulletproof. She knows from her neighbors that some of them have poor insulation, bad drainage. She thinks tiredly, We should get that side of the house looked at for cracks, I guess. I’ll have to talk to Mark about it.
When Bridget hears the noise out in the hallway—a thump, something heavy and soft meeting the wall—she assumes it’s Mark, even though he never gets up with the baby, or hardly ever. Mark works, she doesn’t; ergo, she gets up with the baby. The logic seems straightforward enough, even when the execution of that logic leaves her stumbling and glassy-eyed and foulmouthed, and when Mark complains constantly that he’s tired, which Bridget is always too tired to challenge. Still, she sometimes loves being with her little girl when the world is dark and it’s just the two of them. The turtle night-light in Julie’s room glows warm orange, as if the world is shining through a piece of amber. To pick up a reaching, sweet-smelling baby girl in the orange turtle light, to tuck her head under your chin, to shuffle sleepily to the glider chair and settle in for some long, edgeless minutes while the trees shush outside in the heat and the air-conditioning blows a soft, cool breeze—it is lovely to be clung to by a curled-up baby in the middle of the night. Bridget still nurses Julie sometimes, when Julie’s half-asleep anyway and won’t be made impatient by the scantiness of Bridget’s milk, which was never plentiful to begin with and which began to dry up when Julie started solids. Bridget is nursing Julie when she looks up and sees, for the first time, what has just moved through the doorway into her daughter’s room.
At first her mind supplies a nonsensical explanation, and she thinks she’s seeing a piece of furniture—a white couch—that has somehow reared up, massive and shambling and improbable, and is trying to bump into the room. But immediately, by the horribleness of its continuing movements, that first comical impression is erased. Because it is clearly human, and yet not. Even before Bridget sees what it is, what it is doing, her breath stops.
It moves as if struggling for every inch; each step has to be swung for, lunged into. Every movement costs it something.
Then Bridget sees a hand.
It hits the doorframe with a slight, soft thud that makes Julie twitch in Bridget’s lap. The baby’s weight feels like all that is keeping Bridget attached to the bottom of the world, all that’s keeping her from following her insanely accelerated heart in a flight backward out the bedroom window and into the black-and-green night. It takes several long moments for Bridget to realize she is not breathing, and she swallows a gasp of air.
But the air itself has changed, and she suddenly feels as if she can’t get enough oxygen into her lungs. The smell of earth, of soil and moisture and things growing out of the dark, has gathered close around her even as the quality of the air in the room seems to have thinned, as if all the nourishment has been sucked out of it. This is what it’s like inside a coffin, Bridget hears herself thinking over the terrified hammering of her heart. This is what the air tastes like inside a coffin when you wake up and find you’ve been buried alive. Bridget lunges forward in the glider and gasps for breath again, the lungs in her chest feeling flattened and strained.
The ghost, pulling herself painfully through the doorway, pauses and shifts at the sound, with a sharp, quick snap in Bridget’s direction, and unwillingly Bridget finds herself looking directly into her. Her eyes are like glittering wells, like stone-rimmed quarries, deep and cold. Bridget feels her own hand clap over her mouth, feels her other arm scoop around Julie’s back, creating a barrier between the ghost and the girl on her side on her nursing pillow, still mostly asleep.
The ghost is a dead woman. Her hair, like her eyes, is black, and she seems to be wearing white, or to be made of something white, but it is nearly impossible to tell anything else about her because the edges of her body, her head, her limbs, seem constantly to be shifting, growing enormous and grotesque and then shrinking, angling away, diminishing to an equally grotesque size, out of proportion to what her body seems to want to be. It is like watching a maddened Picasso try to struggle out of its frame. Impossible to tell whether the ghost really has two eyes or just the combined force of two eyes, impossible to see whether she is slender or full figured or weak or strong. She seems to be dissolving and resolving through a field of static.
Now she moves toward Bridget, bringing with her that smell of damp earth. Watching her move is horrible, each step a reminder that the body can die. But watching her eyes is worse.
Bridget doesn’t think of herself as a brave person—it doesn’t occur to her to confront the ghost or to fight, for example, although later she will wonder what might have happened if she had. Her first instinct is only to lean forward to cover Julie’s small sleeping body. “Don’t,” Bridget pants. Her lungs are white fire. “Please don’t, please don’t.”
The ghost stops in the middle of the room and with difficulty lifts her arm, or the haze of impressions that seems to be her arm. Is the ghost pointing at her? Gesturing for her to rise? Beckoning for her to come? Begging? Bridget’s eyes are now blurred by hot tears. No no no no no.
The baby sleeps on, peaceful and unaware. Bridget can’t bear to look away but can’t bear to keep looking, either. Finally she buries her face in her baby’s side, eyes burning, chest aching, breathing Julie’s smell of sun-warmed skin and pee and laundry detergent. Now she’ll strike. Bridget realizes her mistake too late: She should never have looked away from the ghost, even for a second, even to blink, because now, when she looks up, the ghost’s face will be there, inches away, glaring and staticky and furious, before it becomes a huge black mouth and swallows them both whole.
Panicking, Bridget weeps into the crook of her daughter’s small arm. The baby sighs. Oh God, please save us. Save her.
When Bridget looks up again—it could have been moments later, or it could have been hours—the ghost is no longer standing in the middle of the room. The smell of wet mud is gone. Bridget kisses Julie all over: her fat thighs, her cheeks, her sweet starfish hands. Julie latches on again and nurses for a few moments, then falls back asleep. Mark finds them both there in the morning light.
The house has a strange smell the next day. A tang.
Ignoring the smell, Bridget and Julie go ahead with their normal Bridget-and-Julie routine. Playtime, morning nap, out in the car for errands, back for lunch, afternoon nap during which Bridget dozes off herself on the couch, then some distracted housework, then some more playtime while Bridget returns a couple of emails on her phone, then yet more playtime (bored by now, so heart-failingly bored, and counting the hours until Julie will be asleep) and dinner and bath time and bedtime and waiting for Mark to come home, which he won’t do until much later, after Bridget herself has fallen asleep. It’s as if nothing has happened at all. Bridget hasn’t exactly forgotten the ghost so much as decided it is unlikely she will see her again—the ghost was some product of a dream, not even a dream itself. And so, the night after seeing the ghost for the first time, Bridget puts Julie to bed as usual and goes to sleep waiting for Mark as usual, albeit later than she’d expected to, given her uncomfortable, long hours in Julie’s glider, folded in half around her baby with tears of relief and terror drying on her face.
Julie awakes crying at three a.m., and Bridget opens her eyes and sees the ghost standing close at the side of the bed, filling the room with her watery indistinctness, her coldness, her smell like a fresh-turned grave.
The ghost is waiting for her, black eyes neutral and expressionless.
With her heart stuttering and her eyes already tear-filled with horror, Bridget scrabbles for Mark’s hand under the covers.
He murmurs, “Not you.”
The ghost turns and effortfully begins slicing her way out of the room.
“Marshland,” Mark says, still in a dream he doesn’t know is a dream. He smells her, too.
Bridget lies stiff with fear until she realizes the ghost must be going to Julie’s room. Then she throws back the covers and flies out into the dark hallway, heedless and terrified. “Mark!” she cries. “Julie!”
The ghost is entering Julie’s room as Bridget hits the upstairs banister and rebounds, hip singing with pain. She’s never moved so fast, and yet suddenly she doesn’t seem able to catch the ghost in her slow, struggling deliberateness. Her breath is short again, and she can’t seem to get enough air into her lungs—it’s like being on top of a mountain, where everything is cruel and thin.
Mark is awake now, calling worriedly from bed. “Bridget? What happened? Is she all right?”
Get up and help us, damn it! But Bridget can’t speak: Horror and airlessness have stopped her voice. The ghost is standing next to Julie’s crib, turning to face Bridget as she halts in the doorway to the baby’s room.
The ghost lifts her arm, as if pointing in Bridget’s direction. For the first time, but not the last, Bridget understands that it is a command.
To do what?
Bridget can’t keep herself from snatching her sleeping baby up and away, out of reach. Her movements are the jerky, panicked whirs of a clock reversing its wheels. And then Bridget has Julie in her arms and finds herself standing two feet from the ghost, the closest she’s come, close enough to feel the radiant coolness coming from the dead woman’s form, almost like a soft wind that her ceaseless shape-shifting seems to create, the kind of wind that would stir light curtains at a window in the half hour before a rainstorm.
At this range, surrounded as she is by a shifting cloud of static, she is even more clearly dead—dead and moving, dead and yet alive, dead and yet standing before her, an abomination.
“Who are you? What are you doing here? Go away!” Bridget whispers fiercely. But her lips feel numb, she’s shuddering to breathe, and she staggers with Julie’s weight and falls against the wall near the crib’s headboard. “Go away and get out of my baby’s room!” Julie is fully awake by now, jostled out of sleep and crying—wailing, really. Her face is a mouth; her eyes stream tears. Bridget clutches her daughter. “Go away!”
The baby cranes her neck around, still screaming, looking in all directions until she locates the source of her troubles. The ghost. Bridget’s heart falls. She can see it.
Julie points a chunky fist at the ghost—shakes it at her, in the way that she does when something angers or excites her.
The ghost watches Julie. In her mother’s arms, Julie begins to still herself and grow serious, staring at the dead woman.
Mark shuffles belatedly, sleepily into the room.
“What’s going on? What’s wrong? Is she okay?” Without fully opening his eyes Mark takes their little girl from Bridget and cuddles her, and as always, Julie responds by grabbing him around the neck while simultaneously craning to keep her mother in view. I can have this, but you have to stay mine, too. “What’s the matter, little Jujubee? Mmmm. Little bee. Bzz bzz.”
Julie leans into her father and extends a balled-up fist toward her mother, who closes her own hand around it. Bridget feels knock-kneed, dumbfounded—her jaw, she’s sure, must be hanging open in stuporous shock. The ghost is real. Her daughter can see it. Her husband can’t.
The ghost is still there, right next to Bridget at the side of Julie’s crib. But the dead woman isn’t looking at them anymore. Her gaze seems to be fixed out the window. Bridget can hardly bear to look at it, can hardly bear the thought that it is still here, still real—Jesus, no, she can’t be real, but she’s still here, she’s still here, look at the way Julie’s looking at her. She swallows, hard.
“Do you mind if she sleeps with us tonight?” Bridget asks hoarsely.
Mark sniffs and gives Julie’s cheek a game smooch. “I thought that was a bad idea, you always said. Crib death. All that. Is she sick or something?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just want her close by so I can watch her.” Bridget puts a hand on Mark’s lower back and gives him a gentle push, trying to herd them all out of the room, back into their bedroom, where she can shut the door against the ghost and keep them all safe.
“Should I be worried? Are you worried? Don’t let me roll over on her.”
“I think she’d squawk before she’d let you do that,” Bridget says, guiding Mark and Julie out, away, but keeping her eye on the ghost, flickering in stillness near the baby’s window. As soon as Bridget’s small family is out in the hallway, she can breathe again, and she begins to really push, shoving Mark along as swiftly as he’ll let her.
“Hey. Whoa. Hey. I’m still half asleep here, Bridge. Take it easy.”
She shuts the door behind them and quietly locks it while Mark settles Julie in the middle of their mattress in the near dark. Bridget turns on the closet bulb and closes the closet door partway, creating a warm triangle of light across the floor that will almost reach the three of them, snug and safe in the bed.
Julie whispers some nonsense words. She is happy, if confused. Bridget crawls into bed next to her and opens her pajama top to let Julie nurse. Mark rolls onto his side to face them and sleepily pats Julie’s hair, then Bridget’s shoulder. Nothing can reach us here. Nothing can harm us as long as we’re together.
“Good night, dear ladies,” Mark murmurs. Julie nuzzles in. Bridget closes her burning eyes in relief, exhausted, every part of her body humming with satisfaction and tiredness. They’d gotten away. The three of them, all close, all safe, here in the dark.
Julie and Mark are asleep, and Bridget is almost asleep herself, breathing the heat and scent of the little blanket-shrouded valley between parents where baby Julie sleeps—detergent, skin, a faint whiff of pee (she should have changed Julie first, she supposes)—when the bedroom door opens and the smell of dirt enters the room.
In the days that follow, the ghost invades. But slowly.
Bridget learns to avoid places where the scent of wet earth is strong. The second morning, climbing the stairs to put Julie down for a nap, smelling grass and mud more distinctly with each step, feeling a bit short of breath but attributing it to the climb (and to her own denial that this could be happening, that this could really still be happening, to them, in their neat little house), Bridget almost walks right into the ghost standing in the upstairs hallway at the top
of the steps near the door to Julie’s room, still and alert.
She’s looking for something.
It’s the first thing that comes into Bridget’s mind—and once she has the idea, she can’t help but think and rethink it, over and over, because for now it’s a question she can’t begin to imagine how to answer: What is she after? What is she after? Julie makes a small, low sound in her throat, and Bridget kisses her head, in her favorite spot, right at the little girl’s feathery temple. It can’t be her. If the ghost wanted the baby, she would have just taken her, or tried to. She’s after something else. Got to be. Got to be. What does she want? The ghost turns toward them, and Bridget backs away down the stairs, keeping the ghost in sight—promising herself she would not make the mistake, ever again, of shutting her eyes. Better to see the unimaginable than try to imagine what it could be doing while you’re refusing to look. The ghost doesn’t pursue them, and Bridget brings Julie downstairs to sleep on the couch, which the little girl does almost right away, with her mother leaning over her in protective terror, her breath coming fast and shallow.
It’s not lost on Bridget that Julie seems less afraid of the ghost than she is herself. The ghost is, for all Julie knows, just another grown-up in the house. Just another strange person watching over her. For all Julie knows, they could come in all sizes and shapes, every variety of solidity and transparency. Sure. Why not? If the ghost is just another watchful presence in Julie’s life, that would explain why it seems to spend so much time flickering back and forth between the hallway, her mother’s bed, and Julie’s bedroom, a field of static restlessly shifting channels on itself in an endless loop between the window, the bed, and the stairs, the window, the bed, and the stairs. She probably seems more real to Julie than her own father does. She’s certainly around the house more.
She’s looking for something up there. But what?
Bridget can sense the dead woman nearby at all times, even in the broad light of afternoon, but the ghost never seems to want to come downstairs—at least not when Bridget has been around to notice—which makes her easier to avoid. Like a lot of other things in Bridget’s life at home with a baby, maneuvering around a ghost in the house soon becomes a sort of challenging-but-doable routine. The ghost stays upstairs all day, doing God knows what, and Bridget contrives ways for herself and Julie to stay away from her. Sometimes, when she and Julie are in the living room, Bridget senses the ghost looking down over the banister at them, flickering and watching, but when she looks up, nothing is there.
It is only during the dark hours that the ghost seems to come looking for them. Night after night, Bridget surfaces from a miserable half-sleep to feel her breath coming shorter and shorter, the scent of damp earth approaching, even before the door to her bedroom opens and the flickering presence in the hallway makes herself known.
Sometimes it’s possible for Bridget to believe that she isn’t frightened. When she’s out of the house with Julie, mostly—at the neighborhood pool, or aimlessly wandering the aisles of the grocery store, or driving the long way home. During the hours that Bridget is not in the house, which naturally have begun to spread and lengthen with the ghost’s arrival, she can almost decide it’s funny, almost hear the jokes she would tell if anyone, anyone at all, were prepared to believe her. The thing I don’t get is why she doesn’t do some fucking laundry if she’s just going to be hanging around the house all day.
She’s looking for something. But what?
In her deepening exhaustion, Bridget can only guess that the ghost, in the fashion of most ghosts she’s read stories about, wants something specific—an offering of some sort—and what, exactly, she should do about it finally comes to her days later, on a sparkling Wednesday morning that she spends, like every Wednesday, at the coffee shop with the redoubtable Gennie, Gennie of the beautiful thick hair and the well-behaved, artistic toddler. The ghost wants something from Bridget’s house—something from Julie’s room, perhaps?—and Bridget will have to give it to her. An offering. A sacrifice.
They are at a Starbucks, of course. In their mid-Texas suburb there is no other kind of coffeehouse. The four of them, Bridget and Julie and Gennie and Gennie’s nineteen-month-old son, Miles, arrive after the morning rush and before the afternoon loiterers and poem writers, just post morning nap, and immediately squat in the plushest, most remote corner and proceed to cover it with rice puffs and little bits of half-eaten tofu cubes and cooked apple. A guy at the other end of the room is trying to read the paper and keeps sighing loudly and glancing at them as he turns the pages. They all ignore him.
“I can’t believe Julie’s cruising already! She’s going to be an early walker,” Gennie is saying. “Yes, you!” This last is addressed to Julie, who has been wriggling ardently in Bridget’s lap, trying to reach for Gennie, just get at her, with no thought of what she’ll do once the object of her searing baby desires is achieved. Bridget knows she should try to listen to Gennie but can’t seem to stop herself from staring into space, thought after thought drifting out into blackness like a series of hapless astronauts stepping out of the capsule. She is dead tired. It’s been days.
What can she offer the ghost. What should it be. Some little thing from Julie’s room, some token of appeasement? Bridget finds herself cataloging Julie’s less-favored toys in her mind as Gennie talks. Floppy Bunny—too crusty. Laughy Giraffey—too crusty. Plus, Julie still sucks on his legs when her gums hurt. That horrible monkey thing Mark’s mom gave her—inappropriate? Would the ghost somehow guess it didn’t matter, that she’d been given something valueless? But how could anything from the world of the living— particularly from the world of a plump-wristed, rosy ten-month-old girl, with bright eyes and a beating heart and a pulse just discovering what it could do—be of no value to the dead?
It is a sign of something that I’m even considering this. It is a sign that some corner has been turned, Bridget thinks, as if being stern with herself somehow excuses it. But this can’t go on. This is worse than sleep
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