Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  PART III

  AUGUST 2007

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Year after year, August signaled an end. The signal was stronger when you were young and summer meant freedom and blooming daylight that stretched into hours one associated with nighttime. But then the daylight waned, first in imperceptible increments, which crept like shadows, accelerated, until you couldn’t help but notice. One could see the horizon clearly then, the lip at the edge of the canyon. The school year. Fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth.

  For adults, summer was different—flatter, the way everything became flatter when you grew old, like the hills you once sledded and stood on your pedals to climb, like the Christmases and birthdays you once anticipated, even after you discovered they disappointed, again and again, until you became numb to their disappointment.

  But still: temperatures rose and fell, in the quicker frequencies of night and day and the longer frequencies of seasons, while each wave—both short and long—gathered speed and blurred. Years were a collection of months, months a collection of days, days a collection of hours. Rain turned to snow, water to ice until ice melted and color returned to the landscape. April was a red balloon, flaccid in an open, pink palm. June was a red balloon, inflated and knotted and bopped by a knuckle on a warm current of air. August was a red balloon forgotten and collapsing in a dusty corner.

  Mary Beth hadn’t been back to the woods in weeks, not since Amanda had shown herself at home, an event that, at the time, seemed momentous. It still was, even as it had become inscrutable in the weeks that followed.

  The girl had not appeared again, though her presence lingered at the top of the stairs. Mary Beth sensed it when she came in from outside, when she climbed the stairs, when she slid into her sheets at night and woke in the morning—a warm, settled feeling that started beneath her breastbone, in the vicinity of her beating heart, and radiated down into her stomach and out into her shoulders and neck, the muscles and bones in her upper arms. It was like a drug, this feeling, euphoria grounded in contentment. She could take a hit just by breathing the air in her house. She asked Gil if he felt it, too, and he said that he did, that he’d always felt it, and she eyed him suspiciously, because he wasn’t a euphoria-grounded-in-contentment kind of guy; rather, he was a restlessness-grounded-in-exhaustion kind of guy. Melancholic, too, but who was she to judge? There was no reason to doubt him, with the proverbial cat (in the form of Amanda) out of the bag. But where was she, since the night those weeks ago with Gil at the top of the stairs?

  Last night, Friday, he’d called. It was three weeks to the day since Amanda had shown herself to them. Gil wasn’t coming home. Mary Beth was used to this sort of thing. It went with the bonuses, the size of which sometimes staggered her. So she understood, or said she did. But when she woke this morning, Saturday, alone, it was too much like it was before. Like Amanda had never happened. She called for Amanda but there was no Amanda. Of course there wasn’t. So she got up and got dressed and packed her water bottle and left the house.

  The air was gray and close, the sun behind banks of dark clouds. Nothing moved, except Mary Beth trudging up the sidewalk and the occasional car rolling up or down Amos Avenue. Nearly everyone, it appeared, was out of town. She lifted the hair off her neck and tied it in a ponytail.

  The heat swelled in the woods beyond the empty field. There was no shade since there was no sun—just a darker, denser place, the leaves a blanket containing the cumulative heat of summer. She started down the slope to the felled tree. She sat and looked around, wondering what would happen next. She was as still as the air. Sweat blossomed at her hairline. She wiped it with the palm of her hand. She uncapped her water bottle and took a swig. Then she poured a splash into her cupped hand and brought it across her brow. Water streamed down her face like rain. It had been a dry summer. Maybe rain was where the day was leading. And now she hoped for Amanda but she also hoped for rain.

  But the heavy air wouldn’t budge, and the sweat came again. She thought of her neighbors, all those nameless shapes and shadows, who’d escaped to the ocean or a lake in New York, upstate. Better yet, Maine. Maybe Canada.

  She’d found the boys’ names—Felix and Solomon DeGrass—in the library, in a community directory circa 1982, the year before Amanda had hit the tree on her bicycle and died. This tree? Mary Beth wondered. She dug her fingertips into the grooves of the bark. Felix, the older brother, was dead. MAN, 30, PLUNGES FROM CHELSEA ROOF, DIES. The article in the New York Times implied something sinister—an unidentified woman the police wished to question. But there was no follow-up, at least not in the Times or any other news source Mary Beth could find. It was as though the story had died with Felix, and it occurred to Mary Beth that Felix’s death was like Amanda’s, like Catherine’s—no one knew the truth. Maybe someone did, but they weren’t telling. Mary Beth imagined Felix DeGrass haunting the rooftop and sidewalks and streets around the building where he fell. Or jumped. Or was pushed.

  Amanda had said that it was okay, that it didn’t matter why. When you were dead, you were dead. Why wouldn’t change it.

  “Amanda,” Mary Beth called to the woods now. “I need to ask you a question.”

  She hadn’t actually worked out the question. Something to the effect of Doesn’t the truth matter? But she thought she already knew the answer. She just needed to prove the answer, like a scientist with a hypothesis.

  “Amanda!”

  The crickets went silent for a moment before resuming their song.

  Solomon DeGrass knew the truth about Amanda. He guarded it in Princeton, New Jersey. What was required of Mary Beth, she realized, was a journey, a confrontation of sorts, truth-to-truth, with or without Amanda. She waited for the girl now, but the girl didn’t show, and after a time Mary Beth became aware of something above her—the whisper of fingertips, the creasing and crinkling of paper. It was rain, which grew steady, drummed a patter on the leaves on the treetops. When she felt the first drop she’d go, walk up the dirt incline and out into the open field and past the school and down Amos Avenue home. It wouldn’t matter that she got wet. In fact, she wished to do so, the way children wished to run through a rainstorm or the spray of a hose.

  But until then she stayed beneath the patter. It was as though she were inside a tent or some manufactured rainforest habitat at the zoo, where the warm spray from jets creates humidity and a plastic dome protects the fake elements from the real ones.

  The rain fell harder, and the leaves on the trees applauded. Yet she stayed dry, hoping for release, hoping that Amanda would appear.

  But the woods were an umbrella, and Amanda didn’t show. Was this storm the beginning of the end of summer? A raindrop touched her arm. Then another. Shafts of rain had breached the leaf canopy. Rain fell in her hair, on her shoulders, on her toes through the nylon web of her sandals. Raindrops stained the hard earth. She climbed the rise and followed the trail at the top. The rain became one with the vertical landscape. By the time she reached the open field her skin was soaked.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The sky contained no blue, just a gray haze that hung close to the tops of buildings, obscuring those elements one associated with sky—color and clouds and planes and the contrails they left, which, perhaps, were all one now, subsumed by the haze—though the sun’s outline was visible where the haze brightened, a pop fly, a softball that Ferko would have dropped if he were in right field instead of gazing out the conference room window of the Riverfront suite. Inside: more haze. Lisa Becker sat at the table before a laptop, scrolling through a spreadsheet, while Greg Fletcher studied his screen. They were surrounded by Styrofoam and cardboard boxes, plastic forks and crumpled napkins, the wreckage of takeout. They’d worked late last night. Ferko had slept on a couch in reception. Now he was unshaven and ripe in his Friday clothes. It was Saturday afternoon. He was still unsure of his role. He was a sounding board for Greg’s ideas and theories. Or maybe Greg was waiting for the opportune time to expose Ferko’s irrel
evance to Prauer. Greg’s technical skills were surprisingly sound. Some guys could bullshit so well it was impossible to prove them wrong. Greg could support his conclusions with numbers. He had his own way, though, and it was hard to predict his answer.

  And Prauer, back from vacation, two weeks fishing in Alaska, wanted an answer—the value of Grove Department Stores. He wanted to know the price at which he should start the negotiation and the price at which he should go no higher. Greg’s theory still held—that certain family members wished to sell. But now, Greg believed, the family was more unified, and they all might sell at the right price—a number Greg, conveniently, claimed to be ignorant of.

  He clicked keys. An e-mail? Ferko felt the urge to wander past and peek over Greg’s shoulder, but he felt a deeper urge, too, emanating from some indeterminate place, where bone and tissue joined, and this latter urge was the stronger one, and it swept him from the room, thumbs to phone, redialing Jen Yoder’s cell, which rang and rang and rolled to her voice mail, where she instructed the caller, in a calm voice that belied her feral nature, to leave a detailed message and she’d get back to them as soon as she could. She’d told him once she’d wanted to be an actor. Perhaps she really was one, and her voice mail greeting was Jen playing a woman with her shit together.

  But Ferko had left a message earlier, something about being in the city, at work, and hoping to cop. He’d winced when he said cop. He was in the business of buying and selling. He understood things in those terms. But you bought milk and copped dope. Language was precise. If you used the right verb you didn’t need the noun. Now he didn’t wish to sound desperate, when, in fact, he was getting there—a combination of a poor night’s sleep, insecurity, and proximity. Manhattan now tasted like dope. He felt its tug each time he boarded the PATH in Hoboken and the brake was released and the train began to coast into the tunnel that took him under the Hudson. Then the train accelerated, as though the drug itself were the engine turning the wheels, along with the benign and mundane—electricity, coal, job, paycheck. Heroin was close, even if he didn’t know how to find it. He was a child, playing the game where someone hides an object, then navigates for the seeker—hot and cold. But Jen was the navigator, and she wasn’t answering. He cut off the voice mail before the beep, before he substituted hoping in his previous message with needing now.

  He stared at the phone. If he only knew the right keys in the right order, he’d be in business. Everything had a password—computers and accounts, records and files, encrypted e-mails.

  And drug markets. They were amorphous. They appeared and disappeared like Amanda at the top of the stairs. Could he find one on his own? He could take a cab to Jen’s, give her one last try via phone, buzz her door, send a where r u? text, and, failing all that, wander the streets, searching for the corner dance, the hand-to-hand. It was desperate and doomed, inefficient, physically and legally perilous. But, excepting disaster—a mugging or an arrest—it was a desperation he could endure alone. At least he’d be doing something.

  He poked his head in the doorway of the conference room. The gray sky had darkened, it appeared, in the minute he’d stepped out to call Jen, wrapping the room and its contents—its people and paper, furniture and gadgets, wall covering and carpet, even its stale air—in a veil of fatigue.

  “I’ve got to go,” Ferko said.

  Greg glanced up from the screen, raised his eyebrows in an are-you-sure? expression, even as his fingers didn’t break stride on his laptop keys. Then he gave Ferko his sideways smile that said nothing.

  Lisa kept her head down, where, on her screen, there were a thousand ends to fuse, Ferko imagined, cells to tie, worksheets to link. She couldn’t be bothered with Ferko’s crisis, which she might have imagined was existential rather than physical. Ferko supposed it was both. Or perhaps she had plans, and the faster she worked the faster she got out. Or perhaps hers was the burden of the technically proficient. Or perhaps it was more prosaic—she was doing her job to the best of her ability, proving her worth to Prauer, indirectly, through Greg, her new meal ticket. She’d managed to stay relevant even as Ferko hadn’t. He gave her that.

  “Call me if you need me.”

  “We’re good.” Greg fluttered his fingers before resting them on his keys.

  Lisa glanced at him, then at Ferko. Then she sighed.

  “Stay close,” Greg said through his crooked smile.

  He’d been dismissed too easily. He remained in the doorway an awkward moment, then shouldered his bag and left, imagining Greg and Lisa exchanging meaningful looks before lowering their eyes to their laptops and the tasks at hand.

  Outside, the air was close. Tourists slogged up and down Sixth Avenue with plastic shopping bags and a veneer of exhaustion and dazed curiosity. Ferko passed them with purpose, crossed Sixth and descended the stairs to the subway station at Forty-Seventh, where the F was pulling in. He boarded the train. There were seats, but he stood. He was a predator, stalking the aisle with his eyes. The passengers were the usual collection of the down-on-their-luck, the just-getting-by. Someone on this train probably knew where to cop. Maybe they had a Baggie in their pocket now, one they were willing to part with for two or three times what they’d paid. Ferko searched their faces for the friend-of-Jen hipster type, for the hustling immigrant, the desperate. It was Saturday afternoon. Anyone into dope was probably high or sleeping it off. The stubble on Ferko’s beard grew. His hair frizzed. The pores on his skin opened and emptied. Nothing had prepared him for this. Even the past couple of years, with Catherine gone and Mary Beth descending. Now it was Ferko’s turn. Best to descend in a subway downtown, where no one knew him or paid him any mind, even as he scrutinized their faces for any glimmer of recognition, of shared purpose.

  It was spitting rain when he emerged onto Second Avenue. Still nothing on his phone. He called Jen, and again got her voice mail and hung up before she finished speaking. He was a dozen blocks from her place. He could feel its pull, like some new form of gravity he’d only now sensed. The air felt different, more languid. The people looked looser, somehow, in the way that they walked and sat on benches, one knee draped over the other. If Ferko ever belonged here it was now. Yet their contented eyes refused to meet his, even while they met one another’s. He wondered if he were a ghost, his spirit wandering the East Village like Amanda’s wandering Glen Wood Ridge. He climbed five concrete stairs and ducked through an open doorway.

  It was dark inside the Sand Bar. The TV was off. Speakers mounted on brackets high up in the corners played a chant, a soprano wailing over bursts of men’s voices like a rough sea of percussion. Heaven’s choir, he thought. He recognized the bartender from when he was once here with Jen. A group of college kids sat in the corner playing cards. He took a stool at the bar by himself and read the names and examined the logos on the taps. But the barman ignored him, stood, grinning in the corner, watching the kids with nostalgia, it seemed, as though watching a clip of himself and his then-friends fifteen years ago projected like some 3-D home movie recorded before they’d gotten jobs that had become careers, paired off, and married. Before responsibility and the apex that marked the end of youth and the slow, tedious descent toward death.

  Ferko sat on a stool, rapping his knuckles against the bar top. Maybe this was eternity, hooked on heroin and unable even to get a beer, like Tantalus with the clear pools of water and the ripe fruit on trees. What had Ferko done to deserve the gods’ wrath?

  But then the bartender looked at him and said, “My man.”

  Ferko nodded, as though such a gesture told the bartender all he needed to know: the patron was looking for Jen Yoder, purveyor of dope. Ferko pointed to a black arm at the cluster of taps, and the bartender filled a glass with a reddish ale and set it in front of Ferko. He wrapped his hand around the base of the glass. He took a swig. Then another. Two swallows and the glass was half gone. It helped. The beer. It gave his body something to do other than register the lack of dope. He tipped the glass and swallowed th
e rest.

  “Thirsty?” The bartender refilled the glass. Weren’t bartenders supposed to be clever? Ferko sipped the fresh beer. The bartender watched him from his station by the cash register, where liquor bottles stood in a straight line like soldiers in battles centuries ago. He was in his late thirties, like Ferko, with wrinkles around his eyes freighting what was left of his youth. Ferko wasn’t sure how long he could last with Prauer, in private equity, until he was exposed as a fraud. Was this Ferko’s future, standing in a dark bar on a Saturday afternoon in god-awful August, pouring beers for the full-of-promise and the downward-spiraled? No wonder the guy had nothing to say.

  “You know Jen Yoder.” Ferko realized, as soon as he’d breathed the statement, that it was forced and desperate. He never could schmooze, even in the best circumstances. Never mind that it was near the top of the banker-adviser skill set. But now his veins were vacant, crushing from withdrawal.

  The bartender squinched his face. “Who?”