Ghosts of Bergen County (24 page)

“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 curtains 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?”

“You don't like cats.”

She shrugged again.

Daisy stretched a paw and shielded her eyes from the sun. He sat next to them.

“What's with the beard?” she said. “And the clothes.”

“I had an appointment.”

“With the homeless?”

“I called in sick.”

“Okay.” Mary Beth waited, prescient. Maybe Amanda, in her sleuthy omnipotence, had ratted him out.

“Where's our ghost?” he asked.

Mary Beth flattened her mouth, raised her eyebrows and the tips of her shoulders for a full second before returning his gaze. Two girls on bicycles pedaled past on the sidewalk, followed by a mom, running with a dog, and a gust that rustled the leaves on the young trees. In two months they'd turn and drop. Daisy flicked her tail. Mary Beth awaited an explanation.

“Heroin,” he said. “Dope. I've been using.”

She narrowed her eyes, and he told her about Jen, about everything—the bike accident, buying dope, snorting dope, and the mall thing, complete with the mannequin act, the mall cop who stopped him and let him go. It was a story that defied logic, he realized now, that held no connective tissue between its juxtaposed events, comprised no causality. But he told it, and when he'd gotten through that first night he paused.

“What are you saying?” she asked.

“I got busted. This past Saturday. In the city. Real cops. I was charged with possession.”

A breeze stirred her hair, the ringlets she favored now that it had grown longer, now that she cared how it looked.

“What else are you saying?” she asked.

“I don't know. Isn't that enough?”

“If that's all there is.”

He tried to gauge where this was going. A car trundled past, too slow, it seemed. Ferko wondered if the driver had braked to get a gander at the actual residents of the blue house with the white trim, outside in the actual sunshine. When he and Mary Beth had moved here, he'd assumed they'd know their neighbors. Then they never did.

“I expected that you'd leave me,” she said. “First I prepared myself. Then I waited for it to happen.”

Her clear eyes gazed into his.

“Did you hear what I said?” he asked. “I got busted for possession of heroin.”

“What's it like?”

“Getting busted?”

“Heroin.”

He considered what to say.

“You didn't shoot it?”

“I snorted it.”

She waited. Then she said, “That's good.”

Daisy stood and stretched, then turned around once and lay on the concrete walk that met the porch stairs. She rolled on her side.

“It's a feeling like a flood,” he said. “Well, that's not right.” Then he changed his mind: “Yes it is.”

Mary Beth squinted.

“It's like a flood in that it's got a current, a strong pull. It fills you and empties you at the same time. Puts in the good and takes out the bad.” He'd nailed it, he realized. He let his words sit like that. A commuter train rumbled from the direction of the Glen. A horn sounded. Then another word came to him, and he couldn't help but say it: “Numb.”

“Numb,” she said, though it could have been a question. She stared ahead, beyond their yard.

“Numb doesn't sound good.”

“Numb sounds good.”

“A good numb,” he said. He smelled roasted garlic from someone's kitchen. The train engine growled.

“Will you go to jail?”

“You're not real upset by this.”

“I actually want to cry.”

He waited for the punch line.

“I wish I could.”

“I won't go to jail.”

She nodded.

“I need to appear in September. A first offense. I'll probably just get counseling and no criminal charge.”

“You have a lawyer?”

“Bob.”

“Bob? That's a funny name for a lawyer,” she said.

“It's a good name for a mechanic.”

“That'd be Bobby.”

He put his arm around her, and she scooted her butt against his.

“You'd think,” she said, “if one's husband had a lawyer, his wife would know the lawyer's name.”

“Now you do.”

“Did you know I haven't cried in over a year?”

“That's good or not?”

“Not,” she said. “I've got to get off these pills.”

“Did you talk to your doctor?”

“Did you talk to
yours
? Did he write you a prescription for smack? Did your insurance cover it?”

“
Smack
?” he said.

“
Horse
?”

“
Dope
,” he said. “No one says
smack
or
horse
. Everyone says
dope
. And I've stopped.”

“
Kicked
?” she asked.

“Yeah, and so should you. Call your pusher.”

“Dr. Levin?”

“That's him.”

She put her head on his shoulder.

“Do we know how to have fun?” Ferko asked.

“Yeah. Popping pills and shooting up.”

“Snorting lines!” he corrected her.

The girls on bikes rode back down the sidewalk, in the opposite direction. They looked to be Amanda's age, six, when she rode off into the woods. But these girls were real, alive, no one's collective burden.

“Does the bully know?”

“No,” Ferko said.

She meant Prauer. She'd met him once, on a Friday afternoon approaching Christmas. She'd brought Catherine into the city and stopped by the office. There was a Christmas party that night on the Upper West Side, a friend of Mary Beth's from childhood. She met Ferko at the office and took the tour. Prauer was attentive, genuinely tender. He held the baby and walked her around the suite, then brought her to the big windows facing Sixth Avenue and pointed out the twinkling lights in the dusk. And Mary Beth had somehow observed in this bullying behavior. Ferko was never sure how. Prauer was, of course, a bully. He wasn't big physically. Just personally, emotionally, financially.

“Did you,” Mary Beth started, then paused, “consider leaving?”

“I might not have a choice.”

“What does that mean?” Her voice turned sharp.

“I screwed up the other day, when I got busted. They might not want me back.”

“I meant
me
.” Their bodies had separated, he noticed now. “Did you consider leaving
me
?”

“We were talking about Prauer. I missed that segue.”

“Keep up.”

He remembered what she'd said—that she'd expected he'd leave her.