Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  “He was moody.”

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Like a character in his own play. He was difficult to draw out.”

  “I found him easy to talk to.” She hoped it didn’t sound like a boast. She paused a beat before she continued: “Eventually, my friends left. And then his friends left. We stayed at the bar and talked until they turned on the lights and we had to leave.”

  Solomon waited. The next part was the cab to his place, but instead she went back: “We talked about ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “His play,” she said, “was about a dead girl and her ghost.”

  “Go on.” He winced, or appeared to.

  “That’s all I know.”

  “You were at the reading—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “I only met Felix afterward, at the bar.”

  He grimaced, an expression of frustration.

  “It seemed quite important,” she said, “that he tell the story. Have you read it?”

  When Solomon didn’t respond, she said, “The play.”

  “No. It got lost.”

  The overhead light hummed. She only now noticed.

  “Someone must have a copy,” she said. “What about the company that put on the reading?”

  “That’s not why you’re here?” His voice sharpened. Had she imagined it? “To give me a copy of my brother’s play?”

  “No.” She’d gotten stuck. She wasn’t here to talk about a play she hadn’t seen. She was here to tell her story, Felix’s story. It was as important to her as Felix telling the story of the dead girl and her ghost. She imagined she was an actor in a play. The scene: a small office in the theater department of a university.

  WOMAN

  We took a cab to his place. He wanted to celebrate more. There was a deck on his roof, and it was a nice night. We stopped at his apartment on the way up. I waited in the hall. I thought he’d ditched me, or maybe forgotten me. I thought he went to bed, and I was wondering if I should knock or just take a cab home. Then the door opened and he came out with two glasses, an ice tray, and a bottle of Scotch. It was still dark when we got to the roof. There was a deck with tables and chairs, but Felix took me beyond there, onto the gravel of the rooftop, to the edge, where there was a little raised part of the roof, hip-high. We rested our drinks there. We leaned against the ledge. He sat on it. We were looking north. You could see the glow of Times Square. Then the sky brightened in the east. Then the tall buildings, and it was morning. Then Felix was standing on the ledge.

  BROTHER

  Why did Felix …

  WOMAN

  I don’t know why. He jumped onto the ledge. I don’t remember. One moment he was standing there, and the next he was gone. I thought maybe he was hiding, or had gone off to pee behind the equipment on the roof. I looked over the ledge and saw him on the sidewalk.

  (Brother looks stricken)

  I ran to the stairwell, and then down—I don’t know how many flights. Back and forth. I was out of breath and dizzy and disoriented when I got to the lobby. Once outside, I went left when I should’ve gone right. I got to the corner and turned and there was no one there, and for a moment I thought I’d imagined the whole thing. Then I heard someone scream. It was from the next block up, and I threw up on the curb. There were people there, I suppose, across the street or on the sidewalk. Another drunk on a Sunday morning.

  (Pauses)

  I got up after some time. I don’t know how long, but there were still no sirens. I wouldn’t hear those until I was a few blocks east. I don’t know that they were for Felix, but I suspect they were. I lived on Fourteenth then, east of Broadway. I kept walking until I was home.

  She wanted to stand, to walk, but there was no place to go in the small space. There was nothing to do but await the brother’s response. She’d told the story as best she could. Relief flooded her. She’d told it. There was only one more thing to say, and she said that, too: “I’m sorry.”

  She looked at her hands, folded in her lap, the tiled floor beyond them, with its stacks of paper to be tossed, filed, or ignored—stepped around or over—until he tripped and the papers spilled and he had to restack them in some haphazard way to deal with later. She chanced a look into his eyes. He seemed older than when they’d started, when she’d met him in the hall.

  “Why?” he asked, but there were too many whys. Why did Felix climb onto the ledge? Why did he fall? Why did she leave? Why had she kept silent all these years? Why was she sorry? She’d told Solomon what had happened, but the questions that mattered most were why. And she didn’t know why, couldn’t begin to fathom the questions, much less the answers. They overwhelmed her, in fact. She hadn’t cried in years. Maybe since the days after Felix died. Had she cried then? Why? She hadn’t asked the right questions.

  Nor could she cry now. She wiped her dry eyes with the heel of her hand, which blackened. The junkie look, she called it—the late nights, looking like death, her skin pale, her lashes thick with mascara, her eyes drawn with liner, made dramatic when her pupils narrowed. It was a look—until you rubbed your eyes and things started to smear. Then it was a different look, though no less striking. She wiped her hand on her jeans.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  She let the question hang between them.

  “Forgiveness?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Friendship?”

  She shook her head again. The truth was she didn’t know why. She was an empty vessel—pure. She let her silence say it. She didn’t trust herself with words.

  “Why did Felix jump onto the ledge?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You were there.”

  “I was, but I don’t know why. I told you.”

  “Did he jump?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he despondent?”

  “No.” She searched for the right words, then found them: “Manic. Drunk.”

  “Were you fighting?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you run?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He studied her. Seconds passed. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. Instead, she watched a pile of papers placed on the floor by a metal filing cabinet.

  “How can I reach you?”

  Now she looked at him.

  He pushed a pad of paper and a pen toward her. She wrote her name and number and e-mail address, and slid the pad with the pen back to him.

  He tilted his head to study it.

  “That’s my cell.” She was surprised her voice was clear. “I live in the city.”

  “My parents may call you.”

  “I can talk with them.” She swallowed. It was just the beginning. “Where do they live?”

  “Glen Wood Ridge.”

  Ferko! she thought. She wondered if he knew them. Maybe the brothers grew up there. She imagined them wandering the aisles of the Grand Union that used to be ten minutes between Glen Wood Ridge and Edgefield.

  “My dad lives in Edgefield,” she said.

  He exhaled through his nose, an affectation connoting humor.

  “I had family there,” he said. “The Fletchers.”

  “Greg Fletcher?”

  “My cousin.”

  “He’s back East.”

  His eyes got big. “Oh, I know.”

  He had more to say, and she waited for it.

  “Do you know the circumstances of his move back here?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Solomon smirked.

  “A job?” she asked.

  “You’re his friend?”

  “In seventh grade!”

  His lips flattened. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and tucked his hair behind his ear. “He stayed in my parents’ basement when he first moved back. Slept on the couch even though they had spare bedrooms upstairs. Then they went to Europe for three weeks. When they got home Greg was gone and so was their car. He left the plates on t
he kitchen table and a check for $25,000 for a new car. He’d moved into the city. My dad pressed him, and Greg finally admitted that he’d wrecked the car in a construction zone on 17. Hit a Jersey barrier. He apologized. Charming guy. They haven’t heard from him since.”

  Solomon swiveled his chair.

  “I looked him up,” he said. “He bought a place for three million in the city. Why sleep on your uncle’s couch when you have that much money?”

  Jen considered the question, though she didn’t think it was one Solomon expected she would answer.

  “That’s a weird story,” she said.

  “Your friend’s a weird guy.”

  “So’s your cousin.”

  “True.”

  Solomon stood. The meeting was over. Her confession was inconsequential. It had landed with a thud. But now something else was happening. Something important. She had to press:

  “Do you know the Ferkos? They live in Glen Wood Ridge.”

  “No—Ferko?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s a funny name.” He opened the door.

  She stood. “You have my number.”

  He showed her the pad.

  “I put my e-mail there, too.”

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, though there was nothing thankful in his voice.

  It felt like a date that was ending badly. She’d never hear from him again. She might have felt relieved, but instead she felt sad. She shrugged and said, “Thanks,” then turned to go.

  The door swung shut behind her. The piano down the dark hall played a sprightly tune. She remembered her daydream about the party where she didn’t belong, her self-banishment to the kitchen with the help and the drivers of the coaches.

  Kick. Check. Confront. She’d tried. She wasn’t yet ready to call Queenie. Jen was empty now. She had nothing left. But that emptiness, curiously, gave her hope.

  The Lewis Center for the Arts was on the north edge of campus. Gil found a parking spot down a side street with no meters. There were houses here, painted white and yellow. On the corner stood a restaurant and coffee shop, the sort of streetscape you’d expect to find adjacent to an Ivy League school. Cars cruised past, north and south. Mary Beth and Gil waited for the walk sign, and, as they waited, Mary Beth noticed a woman beside a hedge on a sidewalk that curved from the entrance of the arts center toward the back and the expanse of the Princeton campus. She had dark hair and dark eyes that seemed to be watching her, watching them, and there was something about the woman’s face—watching, waiting, searching, distant across the trafficked two-lane and the green demarcating campus from town—that reminded Mary Beth of Amanda across the field at the School on the Ridge, at the edge of the woods that led to County Park, that first time, with the anonymous mothers on the playground. They’d been oblivious, Mary Beth had assumed then, of all children except their own. Now she glanced at Gil. He was watching the traffic, the façade of the arts building, the vermilion lights of the don’t-walk sign. What did people do while they waited for lights to change? He was reliving his highs on heroin, perhaps. He was out of sorts, accompanying Mary Beth on the proverbial wild-goose chase, while the bully, William Prauer, was making millions at someone else’s expense. Maybe Gil’s. She tapped his elbow to get his attention, to point out the woman across the street, but once she did the woman was gone, the way Amanda was gone when she slipped into the woods. Or simply vanished when Mary Beth blinked.

  “What?” Gil asked.

  “Nothing.”

  The light had changed. The walk sign flashed white, pulled her across the street with Gil, between the stopped cars, toward the entrance of the arts center. She glanced toward the hedge and the sidewalk that disappeared behind it, but there was no one there.

  Solomon’s office was on a quiet hallway on the second floor. The door was closed, the room marked by a number, which corresponded to the office number on his web page. She paused and sighed.

  “Are you ready for this?” Gil’s voice was a near whisper. He was a good sport, having never challenged her or even quizzed her about what this was. She’d explained it as best she could: the professor, when he was a child, had stolen Amanda’s chicken, leading to the bicycle crash reported in the Crier, the one in which Amanda had died. Gil accepted all this without asking how she knew.

  She knocked and the door opened a crack. A youngish face filled it, an expression lacking recognition or even acknowledgment that someone might be calling during office hours. His green eyes behind round lenses darted from Mary Beth to Gil, then back to Mary Beth.

  “Dr. DeGrass,” she said.

  The door opened farther and he stood in the space. He was the right age—in his thirties. She’d brought Gil for support and protection, if needed. Now, seeing Solomon’s slender frame, the protection part didn’t seem necessary.

  “I’m Mary Beth. I made an appointment.” When Solomon made no gesture to step aside and invite them in, she added, “For two o’clock?”

  He turned his thin wrist, but it had no watch. He kept himself in front of the gap between the door and the frame.

  “We’re a few minutes early,” she said, though she didn’t believe this to be true. “Do you want us to wait?”

  “No.” He cleared his throat. “I was expecting a student. That’s not you, I don’t think.”

  “No, that’s not us.”

  He turned sideways and opened the door and she stepped through.

  “This is my husband, Gil.”

  They stood in the small space, facing one another. “May I?” Mary Beth asked, indicating the empty chair next to his desk.

  “Of course!” He closed the door, which gave them more room. “I don’t have a third chair.” He looked at Gil, who’d taken up residence leaning against a metal filing cabinet in the corner.

  “He’s fine,” Mary Beth said, as though he were nothing more than a henchman, someone whose job was limited to doing Mary Beth’s bidding. He played it well, imparting no greeting—oral or physical—when introduced. He stood in stony silence, his face blank, his expression unreadable. She marveled at his perceptiveness. They were involved in a transaction of sorts, she realized, an exchange. Transactions were where Gil thrived. She could count on him to play his part.

  “This is a strange day for appointments,” Solomon said, taking his chair after Mary Beth had taken hers. “I don’t even know the nature of yours. I was expecting a student about my midcentury course this fall.”

  “I misled you in my e-mail,” Mary Beth said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  Solomon glanced at Gil. There was music playing from the small speakers that flanked his computer screen. It could have been static—just bits of drums and bass that didn’t mesh in any way that made sense. It could have been jazz. It could have been something conventional, playing at a volume too low to hear properly.

  “You grew up in Glen Wood Ridge,” Mary Beth said.

  “Do I know you?”

  “No, but I think you knew a friend of mine.” She considered leaving a pause, but determined there was no advantage to doing so. “Amanda Russo.”

  Solomon blinked.

  “Maybe you didn’t know her name,” Mary Beth said. “She wasn’t there long. She lived with her grandmother, Mrs. Miller, in the house with the chickens on Amos Avenue, between the Glen and the Ridge.”

  He emitted something audible in his exhale—something akin to suffering. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “I told you,” Mary Beth said. “I’m Mary Beth, and this is Gil.”

  “Who!” Solomon said. “I didn’t ask your names. I asked who you are.”

  “We’re friends of Amanda’s. I told you that.”

  “Amanda’s dead.”

  “You knew her?”

  “The Miller place and the chickens—yes, I remember her. She died. I was nine. It was a big deal. I’d never known anyone who’d died. An uncle, maybe. But she was a kid, younger than me.”

  “Kids aren’t supposed to die,�
� Mary Beth said. Something caught in her throat. She tried to stay composed.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” she said.

  Solomon waited. A horn blared through the static on the computer’s speakers. Jazz.

  “You left her,” Mary Beth said.

  “What?”

  “Kids aren’t supposed to die, but you let her because you stole a chicken and you thought you were going to get in trouble.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You let the chicken go and rode your bikes home and promised to never tell.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Amanda.”

  “Impossible.” He looked at his computer screen, as though it might provide an answer. “Did she put you up to it? The woman who was here?”

  “What woman?”

  He picked up a pad of paper on his desk. “Jen,” he read.

  “Jen who?” Gil asked from his perch in the corner.

  “She’s got the script. You’ve got the script.”

  “When someone’s hurt,” Mary Beth said, “you help.”

  “What’s it called?” Solomon asked.

  “What’s what called?” Gil demanded.

  “The play,” Solomon said. “Felix’s play.”

  “Who’s Felix?” Gil asked.

  “The brother,” Mary Beth jumped in.

  “He’s dead,” Solomon said. “Do you know him, too?”

  The conversation had been derailed. She wished to put it back on track.

  “Of course you do,” Solomon said. “You know her.”

  “Who?” Gil said.

  “The woman who was here—Jen.”

  “Jen who?” Gil asked again.

  “Jen!” Solomon waved a pad of sticky notes and threw it on the desk among the other papers and magazines.

  “You either stay and help,” Mary Beth said, “or you go get help.”

  “How dare you? Get out of my office.” He stood. It was good, now, that Gil was here.

  “Get out!” he said again. “You people are sick. Get out before I call security.”

  She stood. Whatever happened was long ago, when Solomon was a boy. Now he was a cipher. She saw that. She’d come all this way for a simple insight. It would have to do.