Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  They lifted the body through the hatch. It was cold and stiff and bruised, the face harrowed. They reported an accident, the preacher and the eldest. And when the other children woke to find Sebastian gone, they, too, learned a lesson about language and the nature of “accidents.” And with the reportage of the accident, over the years, each family member became complicit, some immediately and some later, and each would come to shoulder its burden.

  Mary Beth was on the front walk. She might have just appeared, the way the girl had at the top of the stairs. She waved, and he said, “Hey,” to which she answered, “Hello,” like a stranger. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of running shoes. She came up the stairs and onto the porch and stood in front of him. He scooched to make room, but she stood there, hand on her hip.

  “What happened to you last night?” she asked.

  He patted the bench seat next to him, but her face was a mask of indifference, lost in thought. Her eyes refused to meet his.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said, and pushed open the front door and disappeared.

  He considered following her inside, but he’d done that too often, trailed after her in her silence. She’d left the house today. And yesterday, too. He hoped it meant something. He hoped she’d come back outside. She’d left the door open, which was promising. He heard her in the kitchen. The rattle of ice from the ice maker. Then she was in the entry, a hand on the door, and back on the porch. She pulled the door shut behind her. Was there a buoyancy about her that he remembered from before? She had a plastic bottle, the kind that fit in a cage on a bike frame. They had two bikes with four flat tires in the garage, leaning against each other like wasted lovers. She squeezed water into her mouth, then sat next to him on the bench. He pushed off with his foot to start them swinging but she kept her feet on the floor to stop them.

  Ferko sighed. “What have you been up to?” he asked.

  “You first.”

  “Okay.” He paused to get the story straight himself. It would require some essential edits. And in the next breath he told her—a story, one version of the actual events: Greg Fletcher, from Edgefield Elementary School, representing Grove Department Stores, and his invitation to have lunch with Jen Yoder, another Edgefield classmate. The Grove car bomb, Jen’s accident, the $700, the parties, the lack of sleep. He left out the illegal parts (the drugs and the shoplifting) and the hard-to-explain (the mannequin act) and the fact that Greg had blown the whole thing off, figuring Mary Beth would be more okay if another guy was there, and, of course, this morning one was: Dr. Yoder, both old and blind. And she received the story without apparent distress. Ferko should have been relieved, but it angered him. Did she even care what he did? Were they that ruined?

  “And the book?” she asked.

  He showed her the black cover, the block letters: Ghosts of Washington Heights. “Jen’s dad wrote it.”

  “Ghosts,” she said.

  He pictured the Hurlingham boy, Sebastian, by the hatch that opened to the basement. He pictured the girl at the top of the stairs.

  “And you?” he asked. “What have you been up to?”

  “Walking.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Just around.” She rocked the bench with her feet, but kept them on the floor so that the swing couldn’t swing. “It’s what you asked me to do.”

  It was what everyone had asked her to do, starting with the doctors and the counselors.

  She stood.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s it.” She swigged water from the tip of the bottle. “Lunchtime.” She opened the front door again and left it open. It was an invitation for him to join her. Or an indication that she’d return. Or neither.

  He hadn’t eaten since the falafel sandwich the night before, and this realization brought a pang of hunger. He kicked his feet and picked them up and the swing started up. Maybe she’d fix him something, too. Or not. It would be fine either way.

  He opened his book and found his place. The boy, Sebastian, was dead. Within a week his spirit appeared, sitting on a wood crate in the pantry off the kitchen, too skinny and sickly—ghostly, with a lack of color—but recognizable as Sebastian. Dr. Yoder had a theory regarding the manifestation of spirits:

  Collective burden, defined as the aggregate, internalized guilt and complicity of a group of people, is the wellspring from which spirits arise. The entire Hurlingham family was complicit either directly (as was the case with Reverend Hurlingham, who dropped the boy through the trapdoor and locked him in the basement, and, possibly, Richard, who, at seventeen, was arguably old enough to intervene) or indirectly (as was the case with the seven-year-old twins, who understood Sebastian’s death was no accident but never suggested otherwise). And, in each case, the complicity was internalized.

  Dr. Yoder then suggested that other ghost stories he’d uncovered shared similar traits. He admitted the support for his theory was anecdotal.

  Ferko closed the book. Mary Beth was in the kitchen. A lawn mower started down the block.

  According to the story, the Hurlingham family later moved to Queens, yet the subsequent owners reported that the spirit remained in the house on 185th Street. Why had the ghost attached itself to the house rather than to the family, whose collective burden produced the spirit in the first place? Ferko thought about the girl upstairs. The house was only three years old. He and Mary Beth had bought it new. He remembered what Dr. Yoder had said about ghosts in Bergen County. There were too many new buildings. But the Hurlingham house was built in 1925, was less than twenty years old when Sebastian died. Ferko had a lot of questions for Dr. Yoder, who’d probably get a kick out of answering them.

  Ferko remembered the drugs, the washed-out feeling from the first few hours. He’d never experienced anything as perfect. He wondered if he’d ever be the same. He wondered where a friendship with Jen could take him.

  He pushed off the porch floor. The swing swung. He closed his eyes. He knew bliss. A breeze blew. Collective burden. He pictured the girl, her pigtails. Sometimes she came to him in his dreams. They lived in a large stone house, Ferko and the girl, situated in a forest of trees.

  He shifted his body and the book fell to the floor. Collective burden. Catherine had been a baby. The girl with the pigtails was a child. He opened his eyes, half expecting to find her there, but he only ever saw her in the hallway near their bedroom. He closed his eyes again and pictured her waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

  PART II

  JULY 2007

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mary Beth was more blue than usual. The Fourth had come and gone. It was a climax and a cliff, an event that marked, at once, summer’s apex and the beginning of its end (the remainder of July and all of August consisting of a dull wait in haze and heat, while the evening daylight waned and the stores in the air-conditioned malls swapped summer lines for fall and all things back-to-school). She was falling.

  And Gil was more distant than ever. It bothered her, though she knew, in her silence, in her determination to get out of the house and up Amos Avenue in the heat, she was complicit. At the School on the Ridge, on the treeless, childless field, she sweated. But it was cool in the woods beyond, on the fallen tree at the bottom of the ravine, where Mary Beth stayed, sometimes for hours, while the sweat dried on her skin. She packed water, a snack, sometimes lunch. She peed beyond the tangles of prickles, squatting with her shorts wrapped around her shins. Once, sitting on the fallen tree, she spied a doe and her fawn. Mary Beth froze as the deer foraged and drew ever closer until, at last, no more than ten feet away, she was discovered, and the animals fled with such quickness and grace they sucked the air from her lungs.

  Was she becoming wild herself? She contemplated how long she could stay on the fallen tree until hunger or thirst drove her from it. What would she do when the weather turned cold? Sometimes, when she became lost in the quiet minutes, she imagined herself a shy animal—quiet and furtive and vulnerable—whose only defense
was to stay still and blend in. But no one came by the fallen tree but the girl in the pigtails. Amanda. She had three outfits, which she’d mix and match in no pattern Mary Beth could discern. She tried to figure it out. She was looking for clues about the girl, and because she was looking for clues, Mary Beth developed a routine, like Gil, with his 7:40 train. She left the house a half hour later, starting up Amos Avenue before the heat of the day wholly arrived.

  The routine became paramount, the thing least intangible in a string of intangibles, for there was nothing else—except the occasional scratch from the prickles and the hunger and thirst that sometimes drove her from the woods—to show for her days. Plus the hours that slipped by. But hours had elapsed for nearly two years, more than fifteen thousand by her rough calculation, since Catherine had died. These new hours, though, were different. Mary Beth was onto something, though she wasn’t sure yet what it was.

  She grew frustrated with the girl’s inconsistencies, her secrets, her enigma, which, it seemed, outstripped Mary Beth’s by a wide margin. She still knew next to nothing about the girl. There was a name—Amanda—but little else. And Mary Beth wanted to know things about Amanda. She wanted to know lots of things, though, three weeks since their first encounter on the field after school, Mary Beth would have settled for morsels. She had supposed she knew about children. She had once been one, after all. She had once been a mother, too, though she’d become conditioned to avoid this notion, freighted by the rush of guilt that grew ever more furious with the dry eyes that accompanied her regret. She’d always been a thinker. The medicine dulled the thin edges of her emotions.

  On this morning, July 9, it was hot, nearly noon by the time Amanda appeared. Perspiration beaded the dimpled skin between her nose and upper lip. She settled onto her end of the fallen tree. She straddled it and let her shoes fall to the ground.

  “Let’s play the street game,” Mary Beth suggested.

  Amanda cocked her head, pressed her toes into the earth.

  “You know what street I live on,” Mary Beth said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You know where I live.”

  Amanda nodded. Her eyes met Mary Beth’s with an air of suspicion, or indifference; the girl was hard to read.

  “I live on Woodberry Road,” Mary Beth said.

  The girl crinkled her nose. “That’s a funny name.”

  Mary Beth pondered this. “It is,” she admitted. “The people who built the houses probably named the street after what was there before the houses.”

  A sliver of the sun’s rays threaded through the leaves and limbs on the trees and found Amanda’s forearms, folded on her lap. But only for an instant.

  “Wood-berry,” Mary Beth said. “Wood and berries.” She left a pause and placed her palm on her stomach, a pantomime gesture. “Maybe blackberries. Mmmmmm.”

  “There were no blackberries.” Impatience occupied the girl’s voice. “There were woods, though.”

  Mary Beth waited for more. They’d had this conversation before. There was no more. Still, Mary Beth waited, and at some point in that interval, as the seconds elapsed, the girl’s face shifted.

  “I think you should go now,” Amanda said.

  “But we just got here.”

  “I just got here. You’ve been here for a long time.”

  Mary Beth pursed her lips. She neither admitted nor challenged. She was losing again, Amanda’s game. If the girl followed Mary Beth here every day, what did Amanda do and where did she hide while Mary Beth sat on the fallen tree alone? “Who are you?” she demanded, finally.

  The girl flinched, then recovered. “Amanda.”

  “I know your name.”

  Amanda stayed, eyes fixed, unblinking. Mary Beth assumed the girl could outwait her. It was summer, and Amanda was a child. Mary Beth remembered the endless July days when she was a girl. She remembered the woods behind her house, the spring where the frogs sang. How many hours had Mary Beth spent in those woods, no one bothering to look or even call for her? But the physical laws of time didn’t seem to apply to Amanda. Seconds passed. Mary Beth could have counted them now as she watched the girl and the girl watched Mary Beth, one to sixty, twelve to twelve, a full minute, and then another, endless loops that cycled back to begin anew, while time for the girl never budged, even while the sun made its slow arc across the sky, even as days ended and new days arrived, hotter or colder, wetter or drier, and no one—no matter how long Amanda sat here with Mary Beth—ever looked for the girl. Even Gil would eventually call. Amanda could play all the games she wanted, and Mary Beth couldn’t. She was impatient, disappointed with herself, with the limitations imposed by her physical presence, by her height and weight, age and maturity, mortality and fragility. The earth spun on its axis, and gravity grounded her. She sensed that the girl could fly if she chose to, that she could disappear and reappear, and pass through objects—huge objects, trees with girths like pillars in grand cathedrals—all while Mary Beth grew old, day after day, and some cruel god counted the rotations, the laps around the sun. She had only so many—days and months and years. A tree grew until it fell.

  She reached out, fingers splayed, and touched the girl’s shirt, at the seam, where the tunic met the sleeve. There was bone beneath, the slight shoulder of a six-year-old girl. She was real, after all. Or perhaps that was another bit of her magic.

  “Who are you?” Mary Beth asked again.

  “I said, ‘You should go now.’”

  Amanda’s tone was solemn, prescient, a little spooky. Mary Beth wondered whether she should be frightened, whether the girl’s next act would be to point a finger at Mary Beth and turn her into stone. But the girl merely waited, and Mary Beth’s inclination was to turn her shoulder, fold her arms in a childish manner, and pout. I was here first, she might have said, as though she and the girl were peers, having one of their daily fights over some small transgression that meant the world at the time but, with the perspective of years, would prove meaningless, even humorous, if the two remained friends. Instead, she said nothing and studied the girl’s face, which she half expected to turn sour and spill tears. But the face stayed blank, and Mary Beth waited with the girl for what would happen next.

  The air moved about them. A dog barked from the park below.

  “Why do you keep her caterpillar?” Amanda asked after a time.

  “What caterpillar?”

  “The blue one with the red rings.”

  Mary Beth became dizzy for an instant, a combination of the day’s heat and a surge of blood pumped by her heart. She pulled the hair off her neck and held it on top of her head. The rings were for teething. Sometimes Mary Beth sat on the floor next to the toy chest, opened the lid and retrieved the stuffed caterpillar, squeezed the soft sections and held them to her nose and breathed. Once, she put the rings in her mouth and scraped them against the hard enamel of her teeth. She put her tongue to them and tasted them. Now she imagined Amanda, peering around the doorjamb from the hallway into the room, where Mary Beth sat with Catherine’s things.

  “It was her favorite toy,” Mary Beth said, “the thing that could make her most happy.” A memory came to her: Catherine, in her stroller, fussing from fatigue or hunger or teething, one of a dozen unexplained complaints, each concluding in the same place—tears—and Mary Beth offering the stuffed caterpillar, Catherine grabbing it in her greedy fingers and shoving it into her hungry mouth. Mary Beth had forgotten what need was.

  Amanda’s face had changed—an expression somewhere between disappointment and indifference.

  Mary Beth asked, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  Amanda shook her head no.

  Mary Beth asked, “What’s your favorite toy?”

  Amanda scrunched her eyes and glanced sideways, an expression that conveyed either process or evasion. When her eyes met Mary Beth’s again, the girl shrugged.

  “You have a vivid imagination, Amanda. You play with what’s here. This tree is your home.”r />
  Amanda lowered her head and traced her finger along the sections of bark where moss furred. Silence again. Mary Beth was at a loss. She and Gil sometimes sat across from each other at the dinner table, flatware scraping plates, the modern tools of sustenance, the ancient laws of gravity.

  There was nothing to say.

  Now she believed she’d have made a bad mother, after all. It wasn’t the first time this thought had occurred to her. It had once brought tears.

  But then Amanda said, “I don’t really have a home.”

  The girl would talk, maybe, if Mary Beth let her.

  “It’s gone.”

  No more quizzes or interrogations. She let go of the hair piled on top of her head. Amanda watched her, and Mary Beth waited. All those afternoons spent on therapists’ couches, while the professionals practiced expressions evoking kindness and empathy and asked their open-ended questions. It all came down to waiting.

  A breeze blew hair into her eyes, and she tucked it behind her ear.

  “We had a gray house,” Amanda said, “made from big rocks, like a castle. We had chickens in the yard. They pecked in the grass and lived in cages. Sometimes kids came up our drive on their bikes. We didn’t know them. I stood in the yard with the chickens, while the kids sat on their bikes. They wanted to see the chickens.”

  Mary Beth didn’t get the point, but she resisted the urge to ask.

  “They were older kids.” Amanda looked past Mary Beth, as if seeing the kids on bikes coming up her drive. Mary Beth imagined a gravel drive, a wooded lot. She had no idea if this was the right image, but it was the one she had. And then some sticks snapped up the hill, at the ridge, and a kid on a mountain bike coasted down the trail, riding his brakes so that they shrieked like a jazz horn. It was a steep hill. Mary Beth was surprised he could manage it. He stood on his pedals and leaned his entire body back for balance. He wore a T-shirt with a logo she didn’t recognize. He wore plaid shorts and tennis shoes without socks. He wore a helmet painted orange and blue. When he reached the bottom, he pedaled down the path, toward County Park, as though he hadn’t seen them.