by Dana Cann
Mary Beth leaned forward, too. “I don’t blame her,” she whispered back.
Amanda nodded in confirmation. “I stopped my bike and I watched them and they watched me. Then the older one got out a grocery bag and grabbed a chicken and stuck it in and started riding away. I yelled for Grandma, but the boys were gone and I rode after them.”
“Down here?”
“Yes.”
“Is this the tree you hit?”
Amanda gave no indication one way or the other. Mary Beth remembered what Amanda had said: It’s okay. It didn’t hurt.
“You knocked it over?” Mary Beth tried a joke, but immediately regretted it.
“This is my house.”
A child screamed from below, in County Park. Hot breezes swept down the ravine.
“I just wanted to get that chicken back,” Amanda said. “It was our chicken.”
“I know.” Mary Beth tried to match the girl’s flat affect, but her voice broke.
“That’s all I wanted.”
“I know,” she said again. “Your grandma got it back. The story said so.”
“Why’d he take that chicken?” the girl wanted to know.
Mary Beth was going to tell her that she didn’t know. Why did people do mean things? She remembered the grandma wondering what one had to do with the other, meaning Amanda and the chicken. Mary Beth supposed no one ever figured it out.
Except the boys.
“What were their names?” she asked. “These boys.”
“Felix was the older one, and Solomon was the younger one.”
“What about their last names?”
“They’re brothers.”
“So?”
“So they have the same last name, silly.” The girl tried on a smile, as though learning the truth and telling the truth helped.
“Of course,” Mary Beth said. “Silly me. What was their last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“It looks like we’re going back to the library.”
“But it doesn’t matter.”
“I think it does.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ferko arrived home at seven thirty to a house transformed. Things were straightened and Mary Beth was cooking. Onions were sautéing in hot oil. Thick sausages sizzled in their own fat. A pot of water sat on a high flame. The fan above the stove top roared. An electric guitar spilled through the ceiling speakers that the builder had installed but they never used. A blues CD. Electric. He stood at the entrance to the kitchen and stared.
“Hi!” Mary Beth wore a smile, makeup, a sleeveless blouse, and a blue skirt with white polka dots. A salad was assembled in a wooden bowl on the counter island, a baguette sliced.
“That’s a lot of food,” he said.
“A pound of pasta.”
“You had a good day.” It could have been a question, but he made it a statement.
“I had a great day. You?”
He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He hadn’t, actually. He was unnerved, in fact, by Greg Fletcher’s visit to the Riverfront suite. Or maybe it was the dope he’d used the prior night, when he’d skipped out of work early and met up with Jen and she’d taken him, later, to a club where one of the Mannequins was playing with his new band and she’d stood on stage for old time’s sake and posed for a song, perfectly still beneath a white spotlight for two minutes while the band and the audience thrashed. Or maybe it was the lack of dope since then, just twenty-four hours, upsetting his equilibrium, accelerating his crisis. Perhaps it was Ferko’s turn in the basement and Mary Beth’s turn to ascend. All it had taken was time.
His unsettled feeling mostly had to do with Greg, Ferko guessed. But he couldn’t wallow in it, or dwell on it, or even consider it. Mary Beth was here, food cooking and music playing. And wine. She poured him a glass of red, which he took, clinked with hers, tipped, and swallowed. He had to tell her something, so he focused on the positive from Greg’s visit:
“A project I thought was dead has been resurrected.”
“That’s good?”
“It’s been a bit slow.”
She reflected on this, an act that dulled her features, and he realized he’d never told her about his lack of projects because he was spending his downtime with Jen, getting high.
“It’s good to have work,” he said finally. “Puts bread on the table.” He grabbed a hunk of the baguette she’d sliced and bit it.
The turnaround came in the blues progression, and she actually shook her hips before stirring the skillet with the onions and sausages.
Upstairs, in their bedroom, he changed into shorts and a T-shirt, then lingered. He should have been downstairs with Mary Beth. The table was set. The good linen napkins they used only when they had company. It was a lifetime ago—company. But this was something. Treating him as such. She’d cut blooms from the vines that climbed the fence out back, that choked the azaleas and hydrangeas they’d planted, then neglected. They were weeds, these vines, but she was the sort of gardener who kept a crowded bed, who let things go, even when she wasn’t neglectful. Plus, she was a sucker for blue flowers. These opened in the hottest weeks. Like this one. Now the flowers stood on their submerged tendrils, propped by petals on the lip of the vase, a narrow glass vessel the shape of a test tube.
She was trying, maybe too hard, and he didn’t know what to do or say. Had he ever? It was a vexing question. His social skills, when it came to Mary Beth, had atrophied. He heard her footfalls in the dining room, smelled the tang of sautéed garlic. He took the stairs down as she was bringing out the serving dishes to the table—the pasta, sauce, and salad. He helped with the bread and wine.
They sat in their places. He served himself pasta in a bowl, a sausage, a ladle of tomato sauce, while she tossed then served herself salad. They traded serving dishes and repeated, and he still didn’t know what to say. She watched him, her eyes too bright in the waning daylight.
“I called Chris today,” she said finally.
“Oh?” Christiana was Mary Beth’s older sister, who lived in Charlottesville with her husband, Matt, a commercial banker, the sort that joined the local chamber of commerce and took customers—the second- and third-generation executive officers of family-owned businesses—to Virginia football games on Saturday afternoons. They lived an exceedingly comfortable, if unspectacular, life, with three kids—one each in high school, middle school, and elementary school—in a newish development west of downtown. The house was more than twice the size of the Ferkos’ for less than half the price. There were thirteen windows on its brick front. From each hung, beginning Thanksgiving weekend through the end of January, a plastic Christmas wreath to match the real deal on the front door. Chris embodied a certain type of small-town American opulence, born of stuff purchased in ridiculous quantities from enormous discount retailers. She couldn’t brook others not wanting what she had.
When Catherine died, Chris got churchy—platitudes about angels and God’s will and such, judgments that deepened Mary Beth’s profound regret and hardened Ferko’s dull anger. Chris couldn’t, or wouldn’t, turn it off. She was there for them, whether the Ferkos wanted her to be or not. And they didn’t. So Mary Beth shut her sister off—a conscious avoidance that must have been noted and felt hurtful, though Ferko wasn’t aware they’d ever received such feedback, either directly from Chris or indirectly from Mary Beth’s parents or her younger sister, Lucy. The rest of the family still lived near Richmond, an hour from Chris and her brick-front palace. It wasn’t a long drive, yet they kept their distance, too, and Chris accepted their snubs with an air of superiority and the delusion, Ferko suspected, that her family was envious.
“She said Lucy had a boyfriend.”
“Really!” Lucy was thirty-two. At eighteen she’d left home for college, like her sisters had. Lucy’s choice was Clemson. But she’d suffered some sort of breakdown freshman year, come home, and never left.
“Some guy from work.”
She was
a cashier at a clothing boutique. Her actual title was sales associate. The job had done great things for her—paycheck, self-esteem, and now this: boyfriend.
“But they broke up,” Mary Beth said, deflating the cheer she’d conjured. She made air quotes: “He wasn’t who she thought he was.”
“What does that mean?”
“Chris’s words.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“I called Lucy to get the scoop. I left her a message.”
“She doesn’t return calls.”
“I’ll call her again tomorrow.”
“What else is up with Chris?” he asked, a question that elicited an update on everyone but Chris: Mary Beth’s mom and dad, Chris’s husband and each of their three kids. They were practicing, Ferko figured—Mary Beth and Chris on the phone earlier today, and Mary Beth and Ferko now—by talking about everyone but themselves. It was still momentous, Mary Beth calling Chris and then preparing an elaborate dinner. It was preseason warm-ups for some later date when they’d talk again about things that mattered. And Ferko was relieved—even as Mary Beth went on about a trip to Hawaii that Matt and Chris had taken this spring, even as Ferko contemplated what Mary Beth could have possibly told Chris about Ferko and what he’d been up to—that tonight wasn’t that night. Grief was a clock, with hands that moved if you waited long enough. Ferko suspected he’d cheated grief, with its linear qualities, its inflexible rhythms. He’d discovered a shortcut, somehow, that took him to a place he wasn’t supposed to go.
Was that it? He had a bowl of food, a glass of wine, and yet he felt empty. His house was too new, too clean. He crinkled his nose, flared his nostrils, and sniffed. Was this his life now? Was he a junkie? It was a small urge, and it passed, but he was conscious of it again, and he awaited its return, as if it were something in the ocean, a clump of seaweed floating in the surf, ebbing, touching his skin, washing over him from time to time.
Mary Beth went on—Matt and Chris and their children. Ferko thought of Mary Beth’s prescriptions, all those combinations the doctors had tried. He’d studied their names—both brand and chemical—looking for patterns. The doctors were guessing, throwing darts at a wall. Had one hit the target?
She stood and he stood with her. He stacked their plates, but she blocked his path to the kitchen.
“These dishes aren’t going to wash themselves,” he said.
“Shouldn’t they?” Her eyes beamed. “Isn’t this the twenty-first century? Aren’t we supposed to have a robot maid?” She took the plates from him and set them back on the table.
“I felt strong enough to call Chris.” She looked at him until he looked away. Then she touched his wrist, encircled it with her fingers, and pulled him toward her. They fell into an embrace that felt at once familiar and new. Their bodies fit together in a reassuring way. Her hair smelled like oranges and her skin like clay. He knew he should tell her he loved her. Such a response should be automatic, something he learned in the intro course, Husband 101, or even in its prerequisite, Advanced Boyfriend. But he didn’t tell her, or couldn’t, and the moment passed and they let each other go, cleared the table, and moved everything into the kitchen in silence.
He ran the faucet and began rinsing. Mary Beth loaded the dishes he stacked on the counter, and dried the pot and skillets he washed by hand. She wiped the counters, and set the dishwasher to run overnight. He looked at e-mail in the study, but there was nothing of consequence. Everyone was taking the summer off, it seemed, or they were lost, like Ferko, and didn’t know what to do. Greg had quit his job, Ferko had heard from Lisa, who’d heard from Cosler, who’d presumably heard from Prauer. They called it gardening leave, when a banker put in his notice, was told to go home, but remained on the payroll. Greg actually did have the summer off. He wasn’t officially able to start at Riverfront until September. Yet Ferko imagined that Greg’s e-mail inbox and sent folders told a different story, that he was working some obscure angle, even now, in exchange for a promised future payoff, the magnitude of which Ferko could only guess.
Gardening leave. Ferko’s garden had been overrun by weeds. Perhaps he and Mary Beth were ready to reclaim it. He shut the computer down and killed the downstairs lights.
She was waiting for him on the upstairs landing, standing beside the girl with the pigtails. Ferko paused on the second stair from the top, unsure of what it meant that they were together and whether or not he wanted to know. They watched him, together and separately, with moony faces, each with her arms at her sides. Then the girl took Mary Beth’s hand in hers.
“Gil, this is Amanda.”
“I know Amanda.” Ferko took the last two stairs, and faced them on the landing. “But not by name.”
Amanda looked up at Mary Beth and whispered, loud enough so he could hear, “We’ve never actually met.” It was the voice of a child, a real child.
“Not properly.” Ferko stepped forward, his hand extended, which the girl took in hers. It was a real hand, with flesh and bones, a child’s hand, and it conveyed, in that first touch, a single pulse of energy that shot through his fingers and hand and wrist and arm, down into his chest and pelvis and buttocks and legs. It threatened to overwhelm him, to knock him backward, down the stairs, the way a jolt of electricity could knock a man down. But then it receded into a pleasant buzz that lasted a beat or two before it disappeared completely. “How do you do?” he said, and released her hand. He stepped back, restoring the gap between them, and waited for what would happen next.
Mary Beth grinned like she’d just handed him a huge box wrapped in pretty paper.
“So?” he asked.
“So, I met Amanda a few weeks ago at the School on the Ridge.”
“But Amanda doesn’t go to school there.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“I used to,” Amanda offered.
“She used to.” Mary Beth’s smile turned grim.
“When I was alive.”
“Ahhh,” Ferko said, “when she was alive.” He quashed the urge to say that that made sense, because schools didn’t, as a practice, enroll dead children. He realized he was talking around the girl as though she weren’t there, which was true in a way. He chanced a look at her. She was just a girl who needed a bath. He didn’t mean to be impolite.
Mary Beth said, “You didn’t tell me you knew Amanda.”
The girl tugged at Mary Beth’s sleeve. “He didn’t know me.”
“Knew of Amanda,” Mary Beth corrected herself.
“You didn’t tell me you knew her, either.”
“We don’t talk.”
He had no response to that. They were finally speaking directly. He should have welcomed it. Instead it made him uneasy, here with the girl, who was—what? He looked at Amanda. “What’s your story?”
He regretted that the question sounded harsh. He was about to take it back, or apologize, but the girl’s face, unfazed, looked up at Mary Beth’s, as though asking permission to tell him, and Mary Beth was digging in her skirt pocket, then unfolding a square of paper into an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet.
She handed him the page. “Here’s the story.”
It was an article from 1983, the Bergen Crier, about a six-year-old girl who died in the woods near County Park when her bike fell down a ravine and hit a tree. The girl’s name was Amanda Russo.
“Her house was right here,” Mary Beth said. “I found it on an old map. It was here, Gil, where we’re standing.”
Ferko stared at the page, read the words, the individual words—girl, chicken, bicycle, grandmother—but couldn’t put them together in any way that made sense. He recognized the School on the Ridge. He recognized County Park. It was an accident, involving a child in Glen Wood Ridge? That was the connection to Catherine? He wasn’t sure how to ask. He didn’t wish to blame Mary Beth again for the baby’s death.
“This is Amanda,” he said instead.
Mary Beth and the girl looked at each other. Then they nodded.
“Yo
u don’t look blown away,” Mary Beth said, with a tinge of hurt.
“I’m just confused.”
“It’s a lot to digest,” Mary Beth admitted.
Ferko studied the girl. She looked at him coolly. She’d been a benign presence, a curiosity, something he looked forward to, even if their encounters were fleeting and infrequent. Perhaps she’d been here from the start. He had a sense that she had, though he’d seen her only since Catherine died. But now the girl was really here, with a name and a story. What did she want? Ferko handed the page back to Mary Beth with a shrug. Her face showed disappointment, and he guessed his did, too. Her smile was gone, replaced by creases that formed at the corners of her mouth, at the junctions of lips, cheeks, and chin, crushed, as they were, by the ruinous combination of earth’s gravity and metaphorical weight.
“What does this have to do with Catherine?” He surprised himself with the question.
A shadow descended on Mary Beth’s face. “This?”
“The news story.” He indicated the printout Mary Beth clutched in her fingers. “The girl.” He realized he was talking around her again, and that was rude. But he couldn’t think of her as an actual being with feelings. She played a role. That was all. He remembered Dr. Yoder’s theory—collective burden. Whose burden was Amanda?
She spoke for herself: “I didn’t know Catherine.”
Of course not, Ferko thought, and maybe what the girl wanted from them was irrelevant, because they had wants of their own. Wasn’t that the way the world worked? You gave and received, roughly in equal amounts. The cynics like Prauer would say you bought and sold, that it didn’t count unless it was quantifiable in some form of accepted currency—money or tickets or wins and losses. But Ferko knew better. He had a mission, which, in an instant, dwarfed Prauer’s empire. Mary Beth looked wounded and helpless, holding the girl’s hand. Ferko stepped toward them and covered their hands with his. “There’s a connection,” he said, meaning Amanda’s presence and the grief that swamped them in the wake of Catherine’s absence, but he realized, too, that the connection began here, with their palms and fingers touching, now interlocked, warm blood pulsing through fingertips, his pulse meeting Mary Beth’s and whatever facsimile Amanda’s apparition produced. He let the connection be what it would to each. Their hands were warm. The distress on Mary Beth’s face vanished, was replaced by a placid air of contentment that mirrored the girl’s, that perhaps mirrored his own. He remembered all those times the girl had vanished when he’d tried to get close. Now she was here, and he held her hand. It was a real hand, a child’s hand. Was that the connection? Could it be so simple? He wished to know, and they did, too, it seemed, for they remained joined at the top of the stairs for some time; it wasn’t clear how long.