Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  “It is sometimes. It’s kind of random.”

  “Is it legit?”

  “They’re Bulgarians. I don’t sew.”

  “It says it’s open from ten to four. It’s not open.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m here. On Twelfth Street.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  “Small world. Get down here. Let’s go.”

  She kept her foot in the open door and leaned out the entryway and breathed the outdoors for the first time in days. It felt like fall. Not cool, exactly, but not hot, either. The humidity, which had been a near-constant presence since late June, was gone. An actual breeze stirred, had pushed out the bad in favor of the good, thick arrows copied and pasted onto the meteorologist’s map, the jet stream a roller coaster, pushing high into Canada, along the shores of lakes where French speakers camped and moose lapped water from shallow pools, and down into New England and the Mid-Atlantic and America’s largest city. Ferko was still a few doors down. He wore gray shorts and a white T-shirt with blue piping at the neckline and cuffs around his biceps, which, Jen noted with surprise, revealed definition. He hadn’t shaved in days; his hair was a shock. She supposed hers looked worse. When she’d last checked beneath the dim bulb in her bathroom her complexion was pallid, her eyes sallow. Ferko looked well enough, despite having been busted two days earlier. Had he scored, after all? His pupils said no. The smile pasted above his scruffy chin infected his face with optimism. He opened his arms, oblivious to (or at least unalarmed by) her appearance, and enfolded her in them and squeezed. She let him, like a patient dog. When he let her go, his fingers encircled the braided vine inked on her wrist. “Your shoes,” he said.

  She looked at her bare feet.

  “Where are your shoes?”

  “Upstairs.”

  He waited.

  “I’m sick.” There, she said it again. That little lie. She’d have to tell him, about kicking at least. He expected to get high. She knew that much.

  “Come on,” she said, and he followed her into the dark hall, practically black when the door shut behind them, and up the stairs to her apartment. She let him in.

  “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “It’s okay.” He glanced about, at the remnants of her breakfast on the coffee table, a spot of cereal and milk in the bottom of a bowl, cracker crumbs on a napkin, empty glasses from yesterday and the day before. She lay on the sofa, and Ferko took the futon. The TV played soundlessly, a commercial for a cleaning product. She reached for the remote and switched it off.

  She closed her eyes. Then opened them. He was watching her. “Have you quit your job?” she asked.

  “I called in sick.”

  “Copycat,” she joked. “What happened Saturday?”

  He shrugged, and looked around the apartment as though he’d misplaced something. Then he told her how he’d been at work Saturday, how he needed to score and couldn’t reach her, so he left work and took the subway down, and still couldn’t reach her but he ran into Tina and Dave, looking to cop, and Ferko tagged along with them. They bought from some white guy on Ninth, right by the precinct, it turned out. An idiotic cop spot. A black-and-white pulled up and two guys in tracksuits descended.

  “Tracksuits?” she asked.

  “Who wears tracksuits, right? My parents in the seventies.”

  “Undercover cops in the aughts.”

  “That’s just weird,” he said. “The aughts. A hundred years ago they didn’t say the aughts. They said the nineteen hundreds.”

  “Did they?” She considered it. “You can’t say twenty hundreds. That sounds stupid.”

  “And the aughts doesn’t?” He smiled.

  “You’re in a surprisingly good mood.”

  He shrugged. “I’m glad to see you.”

  She, too, felt decidedly better, cocooned rather than imprisoned, no longer isolated. The back-and-forth with Ferko helped. Her heart beat faster, her blood infused with adrenaline. She felt merely hungover. It reminded her of college on weekend mornings, rehashing the prior night’s events with her roommates and the residents on her hall, when the coincidences piled one on top of the other and she was starting to see how the world worked, that there were consequences for bad behavior, but these consequences were tempered by youth and contained by the self-selecting microcosm of the Columbia campus. The strongest substance she’d used then was vodka. Now she swigged from her water bottle.

  “It’s a misdemeanor,” he said. “I got a desk appearance ticket.” He made air quotes. “I need to appear in September. If I don’t I’m fucked.”

  “Did you post bail?”

  “Not required.”

  “That’s efficient,” she said.

  “I can’t believe you don’t know this stuff.”

  She’d always wondered about the process, but was never curious enough to figure it out. The risk seemed that remote.

  “You have a lawyer?” she asked.

  “Bob.”

  “Bob the lawyer,” she said.

  “He came up on the search engine.”

  “That’s how you got a lawyer?”

  “Criminal possession, controlled substance, seventh degree.” He paused a second, then added, “Manhattan.”

  “That’s the search that produced Bob,” she concluded.

  He pointed at her, a single downward motion with his index finger. A checkmark.

  “I’m surprised there’s not a printout taped to the wall in the perp lounge,” she said. “Or a bullpen of lawyers, queued up for well-heeled users like you.”

  “Bob says disorderly conduct. Noncriminal for a first offense. They’ll send me to counseling. He says it would be good to start early. That’s why I’m here.”

  “For counseling?”

  “Bob’s office is at Second and Fourteenth. I just met with him. But that’s not a bad idea. Counsel me.”

  “Say no to drugs?”

  “Platitudes!” he said.

  The sign on the back of her door—kick, confront, call Queenie—was in plain sight. She was glad that Ferko hadn’t noticed or asked about it. It was clear she’d need to tell him about kicking, though it seemed impossible to explain Felix DeGrass and his brother Solomon and the possible audition with Queenie. Suddenly Jen’s plan seemed overly ambitious and complicated. If one piece didn’t work, none would. A wave of nausea coursed through her and she shuddered. She hoped it didn’t show.

  “I’m past due,” she said. “I’ve been lucky. Too lucky. I’ve used up my luck.”

  “What does that mean?”

  When she didn’t answer, he said, “Let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “You’re not that sick.”

  “Apparently you are, though.”

  He straightened his legs, crossed one ankle over the other. He had all day.

  “You haven’t told her.”

  He studied Jen.

  “Mrs. Ferko,” she said, “about your arrest.”

  When he shrugged, she said, “You do need counseling. Or therapy.”

  “You’ve got the couch.”

  She rolled on her side and brought her knees toward her stomach, placed her hands beneath her head on top of the pillow. She waited. That was what therapists did. They waited, then passed the tissues. She had a box in front of her on the coffee table. Jen waited, but Ferko did, too. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “You blew off work, for what—to get high?”

  “I had to meet Bob.”

  “Tell her,” Jen said, meaning Mary Beth. She’d grown weary, quite suddenly, of Mrs. Ferko. Yet Mary Beth seemed too intimate for someone she’d never met.

  His shrug conveyed an air of indifference.

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “You like to call people assholes. It’s your go-to.”

  “There are a lot of assholes.” She looked in his eyes in what she hoped was a meaningful way.

  “How about dumbshits? Or pantloads? Or jerk-
offs?”

  “I’m kicking.” There, she said it. “That’s what this is about.”

  She’d never before thought of her apartment as quiet. There were noises in the hallway. In the units upstairs and down. Cars on the street. Even in the middle of the night, when she woke at odd hours. Now there was nothing. She watched him.

  “Like, quitting?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to.”

  “But why do you want to?”

  “I can’t tell you why.” It was true enough. The story of Felix DeGrass was hers alone. It would soon be the brother’s. She wasn’t sure how that would go. Maybe then she could tell others. Maybe Ferko. “It’s really going to happen this time,” she added.

  He squinched his eyes. “You’ve tried before?”

  “Sort of.”

  He crossed his arms. “You said you could quit anytime you wanted.”

  “Yeah, and I never really wanted to before.”

  Years ago, of course, she’d made the link between Felix’s death and the dope she used. But it had taken all this time to make the link in reverse: if she could get clean, she could come clean. It was that simple. She sat up, the blanket wrapped around her legs, and tapped out a cigarette from the open pack on the coffee table. She turned the top toward him. He raised his open palm—pass. She struck a match. The tip sparked and flared. She brought the smoke into her mouth, her throat, deep into her lungs, then exhaled toward the ceiling.

  He stood. “Can I get a glass of water?”

  “There’s a bottle in the fridge.”

  “I don’t want the pure stuff. I’m counting on trace amounts of drugs in the city water.” Still, she heard him rooting in the refrigerator.

  She was having fun, she realized. Was it the nicotine talking? And what if it was? She’d spent the weekend denying her dependence. She’d set a goal and achieved that goal—alone—and emerged intact on a sunny Monday morning. She could add a new goal, up the stakes, and drag from the drug world the last person she’d dragged in. She didn’t know the twelve steps, but she knew enough people who did. They were noble gestures. That was all. This one surely qualified. Plus, Jen liked its symmetry. Plus, the target was here, joking and drinking nothing harder than bottled water.

  “Can you open the window?” she asked when he returned.

  “Oh, thank God.” He set the bottle on the dining table, parted the thin curtains, and opened the sash.

  A stereo played from a car coasting past. A dog barked. A breeze blew the curtains, which unfurled like flags.

  “Remember that scene in The Exorcist?” Ferko asked.

  Jen shook her head.

  “A breeze blows through an open window and moves the curtains in the little girl’s room. The audience understands that this is the moment when the girl becomes possessed.”

  “Regan,” Jen said. “That’s a scary movie.”

  “We’re afraid of the outdoors. That’s what that means.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’ve been hiding in your apartment for days.”

  “You’ve no idea what I’m going through.”

  “I think I do.”

  Jen guessed he meant his own withdrawal—the need to score, the chances taken, the arrest. But then she remembered the mythical Mary Beth, at home with the windows closed and the shades drawn. Jen pulled the blanket tight around her and lay on her side.

  “Your dad’s ghosts inhabit buildings,” Ferko said. “They don’t fly in through open windows.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “They’ve got reasons to be there,” he said.

  “You should talk to him about it.”

  “But they’re not really scary, are they? Not like the devil that blows in through Regan’s window.”

  It was the thing she’d asked as a girl, listening to her father’s stories. Aren’t ghosts scary? She’d wanted to know against her better judgment. He’d told Jen he understood why people were curious about ghosts. Scary was part of their attraction. The unknown frightened people. Indeed, as a boy, he’d been taken by the stories of the Hurlingham ghost on his block in Washington Heights. People told ghost stories, sought ghost stories, for the charge that came from the inexplicable, the phenomena unexplained by the Einsteins and Edisons and Newtons. Gravity, sure, but apparitions? Traveling through walls? He explained all this to Jen, when she was a child, when she asked whether ghosts were supposed to be scary. But he was a doctor, a man of reason, of science. And he also told her that phenomena could be explained, through biology, chemistry, and physics. Ghosts, perhaps, were surges of energy. It had disappointed her then, and it wasn’t until later, when the books were published and Jen read them, that she realized the truth, according to her father, lay somewhere in the vast spectrum bridging the explicable with the baffling. But between her dad’s initial explanation and her reading and understanding of the books’ narratives, her mother got sick. Then her mother died. Jen was twelve, on the cusp of puberty. All she had was a father, a doctor, who knew all about girls’ bodies, women’s bodies, but couldn’t even braid hair. And the things her father wasn’t, or wasn’t able to do, became as tangible as the mother and the things the mother had been able to do. This, to Jen, became a ghost: a presence gone, a vacancy. Years later, at Columbia, she studied drawing, and learned about negative space. She studied script writing, and learned the power of silence. But before she did, her mother appeared in Jen’s dreams. This dream mother was the mother at the end—the gravely ill one, the one with the wig, the hair too dark and straight. As time passed, as the dreams became less frequent, her mother’s presence in them faded. The outlines were there, as was the wig, but the colors were washed out, the voice weak, a hoarse whisper that said inconsequential things. This, too, became a ghost. And now, years later, the dreams were even less frequent, but still they came, and her father, who hadn’t been blind when Jen’s mother was alive, now was, in Jen’s dreams. Everything had aged but the house and the mother, and the mother, Jen realized, had become a part of the house, a thing left on the floor, an obstacle to step around as Jen went from room to room or up the stairs to the bedroom her parents once shared.

  “We’ve got a ghost at home,” Ferko was saying now. “Amanda.”

  Jen couldn’t shake the image of her mother inhabiting the Edgefield house in her dreams.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  “I do. Tell me.”

  “She comes and goes at the top of the stairs. Appears and disappears.” He crossed his legs at the ankles. “But it’s not scary. One moment she’s there and the next she’s not. Like film edits.”

  “Sounds jarring.”

  Ferko shrugged. “She’s just a girl.”

  “Like those twins in The Shining?”

  “Umm, no.”

  “The Hollywood version of ghosts,” Jen said.

  “Tell your dad.”

  “You tell him.”

  “I have questions.”

  “Ask him.”

  The white curtains billowed from a breeze that dipped from the rooftops.

  “Seriously,” she said, “he’d get a kick out of it.”

  “She’s an infrequent visitor,” Ferko said. He was haggard, unshaven, awaiting his court appearance, missing work. For all she knew, he was unemployed. He could have interrupted himself at any moment, said, Let’s go or Let’s score, but the way he was sitting, sneaker heels on the coffee table, told her he wouldn’t. Instead he said, “Mary Beth sees her a lot.”

  It was Monday, noon, the middle of August. Ferko had a ghost. Jen felt better, clean. The weather had turned and pointed toward the next season.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  He left in the afternoon, expecting traffic but encountering little. He drove crosstown on Fourteenth, then uptown on Eighth. He stuck an elbow out the open window. Something had altered during the course of the day, hanging out with Jen with the front window open, the white cu
rtains waving. Some great weight had been lifted. Perhaps it was her suggestion—demand?—that he tell Mary Beth. Everything. He imagined the conversation, and it didn’t bring dread. It hadn’t been a mistake. The dope or the arrest. There was nothing to apologize for. It was another way to grieve, like Mary Beth in bed with the curtains drawn. It wasn’t over. He could have zipped home now, confronted her absence instead of her presence, as he had on all those other days and nights since the collision that took Catherine. He still wanted dope. It wasn’t over. Maybe it never would be. Maybe it was an urge he would need to manage from here on out, in certain settings, in certain weather, in certain moods. He needed to be mindful. That’s what the therapist had advised Ferko and Mary Beth way back when, the month they went together, when they tried that. Mindful. It was that simple, Ferko had understood. He didn’t know why you needed an advanced degree to dispense common sense. He could manage his urge. He managed it now up Eighth Avenue, past apartment buildings and dry cleaners and pizza joints that lined the street. Past hipsters with hair falling in their eyes. Past art galleries, the Chelsea Hotel. How much dope in the past fifty years had been shot or snorted or smoked on this one block alone? The buildings blurred. He could head north, then bang a right—east—on the next one-way. He could be at Riverfront’s offices in five minutes. It was another world, one he couldn’t manage. Mindful was no use. Once Mary Beth couldn’t manage. Now she could. He hoped.

  He turned left, where the sign pointed him toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and he followed the other cars down the ramp. Lanes narrowed, then disappeared. Cars slowed in the bottleneck but didn’t stop. They were sucked into the tunnel’s dark, open mouth, then spat onto the Jersey side, back in the bright sunshine.

  She was sitting on the front porch, the top step, in the sunlight, when he pulled into the driveway. A white cat with gray spots lay on its side on the second step beside her. It lifted its head, and turned indifferently when Ferko emerged from the car.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, and closed the car door.

  “Her collar says Daisy.”

  “Who’s Daisy?”

  Mary Beth shrugged. “My friend?”