Ghosts of Bergen County (20 page)

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
some
thing.

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 the 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?”

Ferko slugged his beer, which he'd already hoisted by the time the bartender had asked his question. There was no need, really, to wait. He wasn't sure when he'd ever drunk a beer that tasted so good.

“Jen.” He licked his lips. “Yoder. She comes in here sometimes.”

The bartender waited for more, but there was no more. “A lot of people come in here,” he said.

Ferko made a show of glancing around, at the empty stools and tables, at the empty chairs. Even the card game in the corner had been put on hiatus in favor of low conversation.

“
Sometimes
,” the bartender said.

Maybe he was clever after all. And maybe Ferko was, too. And would be, always, through his association with Jen.

“You know her,” Ferko said. “She makes her presence known.”

The bartender watched him, expecting, perhaps, a physical description. But providing one would have made Ferko sound like a detective on a bad TV show. Or a stalker.

“Why don't you call her?” the bartender asked. His eyes danced in the dim light.

“I have.”

Ferko looked away. He knew the bartender's next line—
Maybe she doesn't want to be found.
Ferko didn't want to hear it. He drained his beer and slapped a twenty on the bar and hopped off the stool, dizzy with fatigue and withdrawal and two glasses of beer drunk in rapid succession.

“If I happen to see this Jen Yoder,” the bartender called after him, “who should I say was looking for her?”

The kids in the corner looked up. They were Ferko's past; he was their future. He pushed open the glass door and ducked beneath the low, leaden sky.

Jen powered on her phone. Then she thumbed her dad's number with one hand while she covered the screen with the other. “I don't feel well,” she said when he picked up.

“Well, hello to you, too.”

An obvious response eluded her.

“Headache?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What else?”

“Chills.” She left out nausea.

“Fever?”

“I don't know,” she said, which was true.

“You're not going to come and see me,” he said.

“I'm sorry.”

“When you were in kindergarten you got the flu on picture day.”

She remembered the event, and she knew the story, which he'd told her, directly or indirectly, dozens of times since. She tightened her blanket around her shoulders and put her head on a pillow while her body shuddered.

“We sent you to school anyway,” he continued. “Your mom dressed you in the clothes she'd picked out. A pink-and-white dress.”

“And white tights,” she said. “And black shoes.”

“I don't know about those.”

“Dad, I know the story.” A wave of nausea rose up inside her, then stilled. She needed the call to end.

“Oh, you do?” he asked. “So, what's the point?”

A month later the picture had come. Jen looked like a ball with the air let out—miserable and defeated. The doctor and his wife had made their sick daughter go to school on picture day, and here was the proof. It had sat on the desk in her dad's study, like some kind of warning, propped against the cup that held the sharpened pencils. It was probably still in the study somewhere.

“They have picture makeup days,” she said.

“They do?”

“Of course.”

“I don't know about that.”

She waited for him to say more. She lacked the energy herself.

“The point is to stay home, rest, and drink plenty of fluids.”

“Okay.”

“Clear fluids. And I don't mean gin or vodka.”

“Ugh.”

“You take care. I'll call you tomorrow.”

The earpiece clicked, and she powered off her phone and set it facedown on top of her nightstand, then thought better, the phone being too great a temptation within arm's reach, so she mustered the energy to walk the phone to her bureau and bury it deep in the sock drawer. Then she flopped back down on her futon, spread-eagle, in her shorts and T-shirt. The air conditioner rattled in the window. A car horn honked from the street. She considered turning on the radio, something talky, but decided against it. Best not to let in any signals. Thus, the phone off and buried in the sock drawer. The shades were drawn and the lights were out. How long could one last like this? She had food in the fridge and the cupboard, toilet paper in the closet. The postman delivered her mail, and when her box was full he'd slip in a note to let her know they were collecting the rest, which she could pick up by presenting the note and a government-issued picture identification to the clerk at the post office.

She'd call in to work this week. The flu. She had some sick time.

Eventually, someone would worry. All those unanswered texts and messages. Someone would come by. It was nearly Saturday night. It could happen at any moment. Someone like Amy or Nick or Larry or Gordon—it didn't matter who—would wander by and buzz her from downstairs, maybe even piggyback in and start banging on her door and calling her name, and, despite her best efforts to check the signal, the signal would have found her, and she'd have to ignore it in a more active way.