Ghosts of Bergen County (12 page)

He pushed off the porch floor. The swing swung. He closed his eyes. He knew bliss. A breeze blew.
Collective burden
. He pictured the girl, her pigtails. Sometimes she came to him in his dreams. They lived in a large stone house, Ferko and the girl, situated in a forest of trees.

He shifted his body and the book fell to the floor.
Collective burden
. Catherine had been a baby. The girl with the pigtails was a child. He opened his eyes, half expecting to find her there, but he only ever saw her in the hallway near their bedroom. He closed his eyes again and pictured her waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

PART II

JULY 2007

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mary Beth was more blue than usual. The Fourth had come and gone. It was a climax and a cliff, an event that marked, at once, summer's apex and the beginning of its end (the remainder of July and all of August consisting of a dull wait in haze and heat, while the evening daylight waned and the stores in the air-conditioned malls swapped summer lines for fall and all things back-to-school). She was falling.

And Gil was more distant than ever. It bothered her, though she knew, in her silence, in her determination to get out of the house and up Amos Avenue in the heat, she was complicit. At the School on the Ridge, on the treeless, childless field, she sweated. But it was cool in the woods beyond, on the fallen tree at the bottom of the ravine, where Mary Beth stayed, sometimes for hours, while the sweat dried on her skin. She packed water, a snack, sometimes lunch. She peed beyond the tangles of prickles, squatting with her shorts wrapped around her shins. Once, sitting on the fallen tree, she spied a doe and her fawn. Mary Beth froze as the deer foraged and drew ever closer until, at last, no more than ten feet away, she was discovered, and the animals fled with such quickness and grace they sucked the air from her lungs.

Was she becoming wild herself? She contemplated how long she could stay on the fallen tree until hunger or thirst drove her from it. What would she do when the weather turned cold? Sometimes, when she became lost in the quiet minutes, she imagined herself a shy animal—quiet and furtive and vulnerable—whose only defense was to stay still and blend in. But no one came by the fallen tree but the girl in the pigtails. Amanda. She had three outfits, which she'd mix and match in no pattern Mary Beth could discern. She tried to figure it out. She was looking for clues about the girl, and because she was looking for clues, Mary Beth developed a routine, like Gil, with his 7:40 train. She left the house a half hour later, starting up Amos Avenue before the heat of the day wholly arrived.

The routine became paramount, the thing least intangible in a string of intangibles, for there was nothing else—except the occasional scratch from the prickles and the hunger and thirst that sometimes drove her from the woods—to show for her days. Plus the hours that slipped by. But hours had elapsed for nearly two years, more than fifteen thousand by her rough calculation, since Catherine had died. These new hours, though, were different. Mary Beth was onto something, though she wasn't sure yet what it was.

She grew frustrated with the girl's inconsistencies, her secrets, her
enigma
, which, it seemed, outstripped Mary Beth's by a wide margin. She still knew next to nothing about the girl. There was a name—Amanda—but little else. And Mary Beth wanted to know things about Amanda. She wanted to know lots of things, though, three weeks since their first encounter on the field after school, Mary Beth would have settled for morsels. She had supposed she knew about children. She had once been one, after all. She had once been a mother, too, though she'd become conditioned to avoid this notion, freighted by the rush of guilt that grew ever more furious with the dry eyes that accompanied her regret. She'd always been a thinker. The medicine dulled the thin edges of her emotions.

On this morning, July 9, it was hot, nearly noon by the time Amanda appeared. Perspiration beaded the dimpled skin between her nose and upper lip. She settled onto her end of the fallen tree. She straddled it and let her shoes fall to the ground.

“Let's play the street game,” Mary Beth suggested.

Amanda cocked her head, pressed her toes into the earth.

“You know what street I live on,” Mary Beth said.

“No, I don't.”

“You know where I live.”

Amanda nodded. Her eyes met Mary Beth's with an air of suspicion, or indifference; the girl was hard to read.

“I live on Woodberry Road,” Mary Beth said.

The girl crinkled her nose. “That's a funny name.”

Mary Beth pondered this. “It is,” she admitted. “The people who built the houses probably named the street after what was there before the houses.”

A sliver of the sun's rays threaded through the leaves and limbs on the trees and found Amanda's forearms, folded on her lap. But only for an instant.

“Wood-berry,” Mary Beth said. “Wood and berries.” She left a pause and placed her palm on her stomach, a pantomime gesture. “Maybe blackberries. Mmmmmm.”

“There were no blackberries.” Impatience occupied the girl's voice. “There were woods, though.”

Mary Beth waited for more. They'd had this conversation before. There was no more. Still, Mary Beth waited, and at some point in that interval, as the seconds elapsed, the girl's face shifted.

“I think you should go now,” Amanda said.

“But we just got here.”

“I just got here. You've been here for a long time.”

Mary Beth pursed her lips. She neither admitted nor challenged. She was losing again, Amanda's game. If the girl followed Mary Beth here every day, what did Amanda do and where did she hide while Mary Beth sat on the fallen tree alone? “Who are you?” she demanded, finally.

The girl flinched, then recovered. “Amanda.”

“I know your name.”

Amanda stayed, eyes fixed, unblinking. Mary Beth assumed the girl could outwait her. It was summer, and Amanda was a child. Mary Beth remembered the endless July days when she was a girl. She remembered the woods behind her house, the spring where the frogs sang. How many hours had Mary Beth spent in those woods, no one bothering to look or even call for her? But the physical laws of time didn't seem to apply to Amanda. Seconds passed. Mary Beth could have counted them now as she watched the girl and the girl watched Mary Beth, one to sixty, twelve to twelve, a full minute, and then another, endless loops that cycled back to begin anew, while time for the girl never budged, even while the sun made its slow arc across the sky, even as days ended and new days arrived, hotter or colder, wetter or drier, and no one—no matter how long Amanda sat here with Mary Beth—ever looked for the girl. Even Gil would eventually call. Amanda could play all the games she wanted, and Mary Beth couldn't. She was impatient, disappointed with herself, with the limitations imposed by her physical presence, by her height and weight, age and maturity, mortality and fragility. The earth spun on its axis, and gravity grounded her. She sensed that the girl could fly if she chose to, that she could disappear and reappear, and pass through objects—huge objects, trees with girths like pillars in grand cathedrals—all while Mary Beth grew old, day after day, and some cruel god counted the rotations, the laps around the sun. She had only so many—days and months and years. A tree grew until it fell.

She reached out, fingers splayed, and touched the girl's shirt, at the seam, where the tunic met the sleeve. There was bone beneath, the slight shoulder of a six-year-old girl. She was real, after all. Or perhaps that was another bit of her magic.

“Who are you?” Mary Beth asked again.

“I said, ‘You should go now.'”

Amanda's tone was solemn, prescient, a little spooky. Mary Beth wondered whether she should be frightened, whether the girl's next act would be to point a finger at Mary Beth and turn her into stone. But the girl merely waited, and Mary Beth's inclination was to turn her shoulder, fold her arms in a childish manner, and pout.
I was here first
, she might have said, as though she and the girl were peers, having one of their daily fights over some small transgression that meant the world at the time but, with the perspective of years, would prove meaningless, even humorous, if the two remained friends. Instead, she said nothing and studied the girl's face, which she half expected to turn sour and spill tears. But the face stayed blank, and Mary Beth waited with the girl for what would happen next.

The air moved about them. A dog barked from the park below.

“Why do you keep her caterpillar?” Amanda asked after a time.

“What caterpillar?”

“The blue one with the red rings.”

Mary Beth became dizzy for an instant, a combination of the day's heat and a surge of blood pumped by her heart. She pulled the hair off her neck and held it on top of her head. The rings were for teething. Sometimes Mary Beth sat on the floor next to the toy chest, opened the lid and retrieved the stuffed caterpillar, squeezed the soft sections and held them to her nose and breathed. Once, she put the rings in her mouth and scraped them against the hard enamel of her teeth. She put her tongue to them and tasted them. Now she imagined Amanda, peering around the doorjamb from the hallway into the room, where Mary Beth sat with Catherine's things.

“It was her favorite toy,” Mary Beth said, “the thing that could make her most happy.” A memory came to her: Catherine, in her stroller, fussing from fatigue or hunger or teething, one of a dozen unexplained complaints, each concluding in the same place—tears—and Mary Beth offering the stuffed caterpillar, Catherine grabbing it in her greedy fingers and shoving it into her hungry mouth. Mary Beth had forgotten what need was.

Amanda's face had changed—an expression somewhere between disappointment and indifference.

Mary Beth asked, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

Amanda shook her head no.

Mary Beth asked, “What's
your
favorite toy?”

Amanda scrunched her eyes and glanced sideways, an expression that conveyed either process or evasion. When her eyes met Mary Beth's again, the girl shrugged.

“You have a vivid imagination, Amanda. You play with what's here. This tree is your home.”

Amanda lowered her head and traced her finger along the sections of bark where moss furred. Silence again. Mary Beth was at a loss. She and Gil sometimes sat across from each other at the dinner table, flatware scraping plates, the modern tools of sustenance, the ancient laws of gravity.

There was nothing to say.

Now she believed she'd have made a bad mother, after all. It wasn't the first time this thought had occurred to her. It had once brought tears.

But then Amanda said, “I don't really have a home.”

The girl would talk, maybe, if Mary Beth let her.

“It's gone.”

No more quizzes or interrogations. She let go of the hair piled on top of her head. Amanda watched her, and Mary Beth waited. All those afternoons spent on therapists' couches, while the professionals practiced expressions evoking kindness and empathy and asked their open-ended questions. It all came down to waiting.

A breeze blew hair into her eyes, and she tucked it behind her ear.

“We had a gray house,” Amanda said, “made from big rocks, like a castle. We had chickens in the yard. They pecked in the grass and lived in cages. Sometimes kids came up our drive on their bikes. We didn't know them. I stood in the yard with the chickens, while the kids sat on their bikes. They wanted to see the chickens.”

Mary Beth didn't get the point, but she resisted the urge to ask.

“They were older kids.” Amanda looked past Mary Beth, as if seeing the kids on bikes coming up her drive. Mary Beth imagined a gravel drive, a wooded lot. She had no idea if this was the right image, but it was the one she had. And then some sticks snapped up the hill, at the ridge, and a kid on a mountain bike coasted down the trail, riding his brakes so that they shrieked like a jazz horn. It was a steep hill. Mary Beth was surprised he could manage it. He stood on his pedals and leaned his entire body back for balance. He wore a T-shirt with a logo she didn't recognize. He wore plaid shorts and tennis shoes without socks. He wore a helmet painted orange and blue. When he reached the bottom, he pedaled down the path, toward County Park, as though he hadn't seen them.

She looked at Amanda, and made her eyes big.

“He wasn't one of them,” Amanda said.

“I was going to ask.” Mary Beth tried on a smile but Amanda was serious.

Mary Beth glanced over her shoulder toward the top of the hill to make sure no more bicyclists—imagined or real—had been summoned by Amanda's thoughts. They were alone again.

“Who were they, then,” Mary Beth asked, “these kids who wanted to see your chickens?”

“Kids from around here.”

“But your house isn't here.”

“It was my grandma's house.”

“It's not here.”

“Not anymore.”

Mary Beth had retreated into interrogation mode. She needed to be more careful. She waited, but Amanda waited, too. Mary Beth counted in her head, one to ten, then she asked, “Where's your mom?”

“Dead.” Amanda nearly interrupted her, as though she'd anticipated the question. “They're all dead.”

“The kids who came to look at the chickens?”

“I don't know about them.”

“And the chickens?”

“Chickens don't live that long.”

Mary Beth wasn't sure what she was doing. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“What are you sorry about?”

It was a question, but Mary Beth heard it as an accusation. She had a lot to be sorry about. Maybe that was the point, or maybe it wasn't. “I'm sorry that they're all dead,” she said finally.