Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  “I don’t wish to presume,” he said, “to judge the driver’s errand.”

  She joined her hands around the base of her glass, like a scarf around a neck, his eyes fixed on the gouge she’d abandoned.

  “I only want facts,” he continued, “and only to confirm my theory, the way I think about this.” He looked at her with his crazy eyes. “I guess I’d like to know where he was going.” He shrugged, an indifference that belied his wish. “I’d like to know about that last traffic light, the one before that intersection. There’s a light at Glen and Amos, and I wonder whether he rushed to beat it or stopped when he could have run it. One or the other. You see, it’s not good or bad. I’d just like to know.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  “Because it’s fate,” he said. “That’s my theory. Almost by default.”

  “Fate,” she repeated, remembering the day last month when she’d detoured west on her old bike to Felix’s building, stood on the sidewalk on Twenty-Fifth, the approximate spot where Felix had died, and spotted the flyer for play auditions just as Greg Fletcher called, pitching lunch with Ferko. Queenie still hadn’t called about an audition. Perhaps she never would. Jen had the phone number in her bag, zipped in the pocket with the postage stamps.

  “Like if I knew what the errand was,” Ferko was saying. “Maybe he was going to the dry cleaner, and he usually went on Tuesday, but instead he went on Wednesday and that was the morning, and that was the morning that Mary—” He stopped himself. “You get it,” he said.

  “Yeah, but he might not have been from town, right? He might have just been passing through.”

  He gazed past her, as though weighing this development against the version he held. Glasses clinked in the booth behind her.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the theory. The beauty of fate is there’s no way to prove or disprove it. It just is. Like those guys you read about who’ve booked tickets on doomed flights only to miss the plane because of something silly, like a flat tire on the way to the airport.”

  “Or the opposite. They miss their flight and get stuck on the doomed flight.”

  “That never happens,” he said.

  She laughed, and he laughed with her.

  She said, “I’m not sure that helps your argument.”

  “It helps,” he said, squelching his laugh.

  “Do you ever wonder,” she asked, “what he’d like to ask you?”

  And with that question, Ferko’s laugh recommenced, high in his throat and exiting his mouth from the side, like the sniggering of a cartoon dog.

  She almost followed his lead but caught herself. “I’m serious.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “Then stop it.”

  But it had picked up again. She gave it some time to die down.

  “I’ve never thought about it,” he said, when it did.

  “Well, think about it.”

  Felix DeGrass had a brother, Solomon, a theater professor at Princeton. Jen had thought about what she’d want to ask Solomon.

  “How about, ‘Do you forgive me?’” Jen said. “That would be good to know.”

  “This is what the driver’s supposed to ask me?” Ferko’s expression was incredulous, bordering on grotesque. “He’d have to show himself and risk jail. People don’t do that. It would be stupid.”

  “I don’t think it would be stupid.”

  “What does it matter, anyway? I’m aggrieved, not him.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She’d been following Solomon DeGrass for years. Not physically, but electronically, from a safe distance, from whatever downtown space in which she happened to dwell, or from her terminal at the trading desk, after the London Metal Exchange closed. It was an easy thing to do; he had an unusual name. He’d graduated from Harvard with a degree in biology in 1996, from Florida State with a master’s in theater in 2002 and a PhD in 2004. Now he taught adjunct at Princeton. His CV was the first hit when you searched his name. In spring, he’d taught two courses, one in the 100s, called Contemporary Playwrights, and another, an upper-class course called The 1950s: Ahead of the Revolution. Now it was summer, and it wasn’t clear what he was doing or where he was doing it. Given his interests, though, how far could his field research take him from Manhattan?

  He was nearby. He had to be. She’d always assumed so, anyway, within a day’s trip of the city by car or train. The proximity was comforting, an ever-present and necessary opportunity. It didn’t matter that she never made plans to see him, because the opportunity remained, static, like the bricks on the buildings now bathed in the sun across Houston. But something had shifted the day she met Ferko for lunch and he told her the unexpected story of his baby getting hit by a car. And how the driver left. It was inexplicable, to leave like that. Whenever Ferko talked about it, he described it as if the collision wasn’t even the driver’s fault, though speed was a factor. Even the clear crime—the leaving—was mentioned as an oh-by-the-way. But from Jen’s perspective, sitting across the lunch table in the Friday afternoon buzz and relative sobriety of one and a half Bloody Marys, listening to the almost-whispered retelling, it seemed a cold, cruel gesture, for the driver to leave.

  Ferko didn’t care, but what about Solomon? Did he forgive her?

  She’d left by the stairs, from the roof to the lobby, fourteen flights, if she remembered correctly. It must have taken several minutes, back and forth and back and forth in the stairwell, and when she got to the lobby she was dizzy and disoriented, panting and drunk, nauseated. She left by the door on Eighth Avenue and turned south, only to realize that Felix had fallen onto the sidewalk on Twenty-Fifth, north. It was barely 6:00 AM, but there were people out already, sober people, Sunday morning people, walking on the sidewalk north, toward the intersection with Twenty-Fifth. She imagined pieces of him there. His beautiful face broken. She ran south, around the corner at Twenty-Fourth, and threw up on the curb. Then she walked and kept walking. Between Sixth and Seventh she heard a siren.

  Five and a half hours she’d known him. At the club the night before she’d wandered off from her friends—two guys, both gay—and bumped into him, literally, at the bar. He was a playwright celebrating his first staged reading earlier that night in a warehouse south of Times Square. He was almost her age. He wished to direct. And she told him about her time at Columbia, how she was involved in the theater program there and regretted getting away from it. Now she traded commodities. How boring, right?

  He turned toward the bar, the direction she was facing, and placed his forearms across its polished edge, an elaborate gesture of non-judgment. He pointed to her empty glass, where there was only ice and a spent wedge of lime. “Gin or vodka?”

  “Vodka.”

  He ordered for her, Scotch for himself. Then he bent an elbow and ran his finger through his errant strands of misbehaving locks and tucked them behind his ear.

  His play was about a dead girl and her ghost. “My dad writes about ghosts,” she said, and he told her his ghost stories and she told him her dad’s. They talked ghosts until after her friends found her and said goodbye (they didn’t get an introduction) and after his friends found him and said goodbye (they didn’t get an introduction, either). And Jen and Felix shared his last glass of Scotch and cabbed down Ninth Avenue to his place, where there was a roof deck and, it being already four thirty and summer and a clear night and all, wouldn’t it be nice to see the sunrise? When was the last time she’d seen the sunrise? She told him she couldn’t recall, although it had been only a year earlier, at a beach house on Long Island, but she didn’t wish him to associate her with unimaginative pursuits like a beach house, the post-college version of a frat house, especially coming on the heels of her revelation that she was a metals trader. They took the elevator up and stopped at his apartment. She waited in the hall while he grabbed a bottle of Scotch, two glasses, and an ice tray from the freezer. Then t
hey took the elevator to the top floor, found the stairwell, and took it to the roof.

  The rooftop was gravel. There was a flagstone path that led to a patio of sorts, with iron tables and chairs. The flagstones were painted with abstract designs. The condensers whirred. The fans exhaled the building’s stale air. He filled the glasses with ice, then with Scotch. They stood on the northwest corner, beside the parapets, two feet high, metal flashings mounted across the walls of the building. He sat on one wall and she sat on another. The city traffic moved below. The lights on Eighth Avenue flashed yellow. Trucks made deliveries. The moon was gone. Stars and planets paled in the night’s haze. Then a gray light emerged behind them. They turned to face it, reflections of the tips and spires, the blinking antennas and towers of the buildings in Midtown. He stood and stumbled. He needed to take a leak, he said, and disappeared behind the mechanical systems. She needed to, too, but decided to hold it. She was standing when he appeared again. It was brighter now, the light revealing the other rooftops. He said he didn’t want the night to end. He said something about his play, about the ghost in his play, a girl who had died years ago. Then he whooped and kicked his heels in the air. She said she needed to go to sleep. He said not yet. They went back and forth like this. Then he did something unexpected, the way she remembered it. Or maybe it was the way she constructed it in her mind, with her memory fuzzy from alcohol and fatigue. Or maybe she dreamed it. He leaped onto the parapet and balanced there. She might have turned away. She needed a place to lie down. Sometime later he was gone. Maybe to pee again. Maybe to bed. She went to the parapet, across the painted flagstones and the gravel on the roof deck. She peered over the edge. Something told her to. Like a command. Perhaps it was a command that told the playwright to jump onto the wall. She peered over the edge and found him, crumpled clothes and body on the dawn pavement. Fall, jump, or push. There were three possibilities. No more.

  “He was frightened,” she agreed with Ferko. “The driver.”

  “He didn’t need to be.”

  She pushed her lips together, weighing this.

  “Okay,” Ferko said, “of course he was frightened. But he didn’t need to turn tail and run. Mary Beth would be better if that hadn’t happened.”

  The bells on Ivy’s front door jingled, and Tina and Dave came in. Tina had dyed her hair deep red. Dave had added a splash of purple to his black. They’d copped. Jen could tell by the way Tina tapped her finger against her front pocket, where Baggies bunched like tissues.

  “Look at you,” she said, meaning Jen’s eyes. She wrapped an arm around Jen’s neck and squeezed, then placed her purse next to Jen’s. “Can we join you?” Tina looked at Ferko, ceding to him the right to reject.

  But Ferko responded only with his mild face. Jen guessed he didn’t mind. Jen guessed he didn’t mind anything.

  “Tina and Dave, do you know Ferko?”

  “Ferko,” Tina said, “the name everyone loves to say.”

  Dave stood behind her, hands in his front pockets, rocking on his toes and heels. “We’ll catch up and find you,” he said, meaning it was time to use in the tiny stall upstairs.

  “Where were we?” Ferko asked when they reached the stairs. “Let’s put this to rest before your friends come back and start talking about skateboards.”

  “They don’t ride skateboards.”

  “Where do they work?”

  “They don’t do that, either.”

  “I love your friends.”

  “You were talking about Mrs. Ferko.” Jen considered warning him against betrayal, but there wasn’t time. She was on the cusp of some meaningful connection she’d been waiting years to make, a connection that Tina and Dave’s eager presence would likely impede.

  “The point was closure,” Ferko said. “The guy’s leaving somehow prevented that for her. Maybe. But I wasn’t there. She was.”

  “She meaning the Mrs.”

  “But the leaving part,” Ferko said, “the running. That wasn’t necessary. Nor was it fate. It was a decision. I understand the motivating factors. Still, it was a decision, and that’s what made it wrong.”

  He was getting somewhere, Jen could see. He was putting two and two together. But Jen’s problem was vexing. When she’d finally sorted it in her mind, after she’d associated Ferko’s hit-and-run with her night with Felix DeGrass, she came to recognize that everything since—the bike accident, the copping and using, and all the subsequent copping and using—had occurred for a reason. Not fate, like Ferko suggested, which connoted an accident, a fatal accident (wasn’t fatal a derivation of fate?), an unpreventable fatal accident. No, she thought, fate had no room for reason, for purpose, for a higher purpose. Maybe she believed in God after all. Because they were connected—Felix DeGrass, the baby Catherine, Solomon DeGrass, and Ferko himself. She recognized it, or thought she did. Now she just needed to figure out what it was telling her to do.

  “I guess I’d ask him,” Ferko said, “whether he regrets that decision.” There was something like emotion on his face, and Jen wondered if it was on hers, too. But then Ferko’s vanished. Dave and Tina appeared at their sides. Ferko scooted to make room for them.

  “Let’s talk skateboards,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mary Beth got out of bed, as usual, after Gil had left to catch his train. She packed a bag with water and snacks. She left the house at the usual time, but, instead of turning right on Amos Avenue and walking up toward the School on the Ridge, she turned left, down Amos Avenue to the Glen, the way she once had with Catherine in the stroller. Despite Mary Beth’s entreaties, Amanda hadn’t revealed herself in the house, and Mary Beth didn’t yet know how to confront Gil about the ghost.

  But she had a theory, which took her down Amos, to Glen Street, past Lyttondale and the School in the Glen, past the coffee shop and hair salon, the store that sold toys and children’s books, past the pub and restaurant to the town’s public library, a freestanding structure built with stone left in the Glen when the ice retreated tens of thousands of years ago. The library stood next to the municipal building, which stood next to the train station, all built with the same stone.

  She arrived just as it was opening, just as the librarian turned the key in the front door and pushed it to let Mary Beth in. She was the first visitor, and she greeted the librarian, and, not knowing what else to do, followed her to her desk in the center of the main reading room. Computers lined the wall to the left, and the popular library, arranged alphabetically by author, was shelved to the right.

  “I’m wondering if you could help me.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” The librarian wore a cheery smile. It seemed suddenly important that Mary Beth not act desperate, that her research was for casual interest only. Glen Wood Ridge was not a place of desperation. Lives were lived here—normal, productive lives. She wished to adapt.

  “I’m looking for maps of the town, something historical, maybe going back fifty years.”

  “Of Glen Wood Ridge.”

  “Yes.”

  The librarian stood, holding her smile. Mary Beth supposed that a library was a wonderful place to work. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  Mary Beth followed the librarian past the line of computers, past the sections for biography and world history and US history and New Jersey history to a section comprising two shelves: Local Interests.

  “Here.” The librarian hooked her finger to the top of a thin volume, pages folded and stapled, not bound, with a beige cover: Glen Wood Ridge: A History, by Emmanuel Wright. “This was commissioned by the town council to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the town’s founding.” She opened the book to its title page. “See.” She tapped her painted nail to the copyright—1968. “The town was founded in 1918.”

  Mary Beth knew this, of course. The metal signs stationed at various points on the town’s perimeter said so, and it was the thing the real estate agent had shared when he’d driven them out here the first time, giving M
ary Beth hope for the old house she’d wanted. But she’d wound up with a new one, and only now had learned that, despite being new, it inexplicably had a ghost. Things happened for a reason, she thought, with such clarity it startled her.

  “It has a map?” she asked.

  “Two.” The librarian flipped the pages until she got to the center, where longer pages were folded into each other. “They’re a bit brittle. I don’t want to rip them. They need a flat surface to lie on.” She handed the book to Mary Beth and tipped her head toward the nearest table in the main reading room, at the end of the row of books in which they now stood.

  More patrons had entered the library. Senior citizens booted up computers and browsed new releases. A young mother queued in line at the checkout, preschoolers hopping around her like bunnies. Catherine’s friends, Mary Beth thought.

  It felt good to be in a public place, in air conditioning, where normal people went about their business. It wasn’t her house, and it wasn’t the woods beyond the field at the School on the Ridge. Perhaps Amanda was lurking behind the study carrels or among the shelves, wondering why they weren’t on the fallen tree, talking.

  The book was a homegrown affair. The author was a resident, born in Glen Wood Ridge in 1922. Mary Beth wondered if he was dead now. The two maps were uncredited, mimeographed from originals drawn by the same hand with what looked like a black felt-tip marker. Labels, such as names of streets, municipal buildings, the rail line, and schools were written in all capital letters. The town boundary was drawn in dots and dashes. The flourishes were charming, with open spaces depicted with out-of-scale grass blades and rows of crops, such as corn, complete with tassels and thieving birds. Trees were drawn with half circles and S-shaped lines. The 1918 version showed the houses in the Glen, and a farm, PORTER’S FARM, on the land that now encompassed the newer developments on the Ridge. By 1968, Porter’s Farm was gone, replaced with the Ridge’s familiar streets, including Porter Lane, which bisected the old farm, ranch houses drawn with precise uniformity, the School on the Ridge and its ball fields behind it, and the edge where the woods met the ball fields, where the path led down into the ravine and Amanda’s tree. COUNTY PARK, the newer map said. And up Amos Avenue, between the Glen and Porter’s Farm on the earlier map and the Glen and the Ridge on the later map—in a space that had only since been replaced by a parenthetical curve called Woodberry Road, containing thirty-some houses, including a four-bedroom Cape with dormers and a front porch situated in the center of the block and sold to the Ferkos in 2004—was a long driveway and a structure in the woods: MILLERS’ PLACE.