Ghosts of Bergen County (29 page)

“Why not?” Dr. Yoder looked wounded.

“Come on, Dad,” Jen said.

“She hasn't been in the pool in ten years.”

“Ummm. Actually, it's been fifteen.”

“You used to love it.”

“When I was a kid!”

Dr. Yoder shrugged. “I like to swim.”

Jen refilled her glass. Her eyes were unreadable behind her sunglasses. She hadn't yet made it clear why she'd asked them over, why it was paramount that Mary Beth, whom Jen and Dr. Yoder had never met before, accompany Ferko. Jen had called the night before with the invitation.

“What'd you do today?” she'd asked.

Ferko, who didn't wish to explain the trip to Princeton, said, “Nothing.” Then, “What about you?”

“Same.”

Now Jen pushed out her chair and stepped onto the stone wall and over it, onto the grass abutting it. “Tell my dad about your ghost.” She retrieved a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and a book of matches. “He's an expert.”

“Enthusiast,” Dr. Yoder said, “not expert.”

“I read your story,” Mary Beth told him, “about the boy in the basement in Washington Heights.”

“The first ghost story I ever heard,” he said.

Jen struck a match.

Dr. Yoder turned his head like a squirrel. “Cigarettes.”

She lit the tip and shook out the match and pointed it at her dad. “He used to smoke.” She exhaled.

“When I was young.”

“He misses it.”

“Nostalgia.”

“How about that?” She took a drag. “A doctor who smoked.”

“We all did.” His useless eyes appeared fixed on Ferko's shoulder. “I could tell you we didn't know any better, but we actually did.”

There was a pause. Ferko smelled the tang of Jen's cigarette and felt its subtle pull, fingers tugging a loose thread beneath his chest. He felt he could unravel, the sensation no longer urgent but chronic.

“Tell me about your ghost,” Dr. Yoder said.

“Amanda,” Mary Beth said.

“Amanda.”

“She was six when she died.”

“So young.”

“In 1983.”

“And recent.”

Jen held her pose—elbow bent, cigarette wedged between her first two fingers, empty fist on her hip. Ferko remembered her description of her punk band, the Mannequins, how she'd hold poses with a lit cigarette wedged between her fingers while the musicians and audience thrashed about. But now she brought the cigarette to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled, before resuming her pose. She was listening, that was all—her entire body leaning in the direction of the table where Ferko sat with Mary Beth and Dr. Yoder, less like a mannequin than a flower whose stalk leaned toward the sun, its petals opening—as Mary Beth told Dr. Yoder the circumstances of Amanda's death.

“You've got
details
.” He sounded impressed.

“Library research,” Mary Beth said.

“Excellent!”

Ferko hoped to steer the conversation, eventually, toward
collective burden
. Whose was Amanda? The DeGrass brothers', certainly. Possibly the grandmother's. But then Amanda's spirit had stayed, even as Solomon had grown and left town and landed in Princeton, even as his brother had died, even as Amanda's grandmother had died, too, her estate settled, the property sold, the house razed, the trees cleared, the earth shaped, a curved stripe of paved asphalt named Woodberry Road, lined with a few dozen houses built from four models, including the Belvedere, a Cape Cod with fiber-cement siding and dormers. A blue one on the parcel that would become 4540 Woodberry was purchased by Gil and Mary Beth Ferko. Was Amanda a presence then, when they first moved in? Her presence became prominent only after the woman gave birth to a baby girl and after the baby girl was killed. And whose collective burden was Amanda then? There was a connection between the baby's death and Amanda's presence in their lives. Collective burden was larger, somehow, than Ferko understood. Perhaps larger than Dr. Yoder understood.

Mary Beth was telling the story of first meeting Amanda, how she was just another girl on a crowded playground on the last day of school. But something was missing—a parent or caregiver. Then she ran across the field and into the woods, and Mary Beth followed. Dr. Yoder cocked his ear. Jen stepped closer on the grass side of the stone wall.

In sunny Florida, Ferko imagined, the collective burden at Grove headquarters had become fierce. This was the price for profiting from another's death. At Riverfront, too, where Greg had pitched (and Prauer had accepted) a switch from seller to buyer, where Greg had arrived with the other side's intel and come up with a too-high price. And Ferko realized, quite suddenly, that his value to Prauer all these years was skepticism and cynicism. Prauer was paying too much for Grove. The lenders agreed. There was no other way to prove it until Prauer lost his shirt.

Now the e-mail stream from Riverfront had been stanched, even from Lisa, Ferko's last ally. He was out, possibly fired, a ghost himself, a name in random files.

“You spoke to Amanda?” Dr. Yoder was asking.

“Every day,” Mary Beth said.

“Amazing.”

“She lived with her grandmother in a house that preceded the developments up the hill, on the Ridge. It was the 1980s, and the grandmother still kept chickens in her front yard. The house was set back from the road a good distance. The house and the chickens were a curiosity. Kids came by to see them. Up on the Ridge they lived in ranch houses that were built in the sixties. You can see the city from up there.”

“On a clear day,” Ferko interjected.

“I remember,” Dr. Yoder said, “catching a glimpse of Midtown, occasionally, driving north of here. It was a surprise even when you expected it.”

“These kids,” Mary Beth said, “could see the skyline, then ride their bikes down the hill to check out the chickens pecking in the dirt around Amanda's house. It was like going back in time.”

Jen crushed her cigarette with her sandal, and stepped over the stone wall and back onto the pool deck.

“There were two boys—brothers—who came to Amanda's house one day. The older brother, Felix, grabbed a chicken and rode off.”

“Felix,” Jen said.

“Amanda chased them into the woods on her bike. She lost control down a ravine and crashed into a tree.” Mary Beth dipped her head. “That's how she died.”

Dr. Yoder pursed his lips. Jen appeared placid, indifferent. Ferko imagined a thousand needs raging behind her dark lenses.

“Felix who?” she asked.

“DeGrass,” Mary Beth said. “We met the brother, Solomon, yesterday.”

Jen lifted her sunglasses and balanced them on top of her head. She wasn't high—her pupils were too wide—but something was wild and desperate there. She was still trying to kick, perhaps.

“When Amanda hit the tree,” Mary Beth continued, “they rode home and left her, and never told anyone.”

“Fascinating.” Dr. Yoder cocked his head. “Jen, will you get my tape recorder from the study?”

But she stayed, her hands at her sides, the book of matches wedged between two fingers like a cigarette. She might have been staring at Mary Beth. Or her father. It was impossible to tell.

“What did the brother tell you?” Dr. Yoder asked.

“Not much,” Mary Beth said.

“He showed us the door,” Ferko said.

“And he ranted about a script,” Mary Beth said.

“A script?” Dr. Yoder asked.

“Like we'd read a play, or seen a movie.” She looked at Ferko, but he had nothing to add. He'd been baffled by the notion of a script. “He didn't believe we knew Amanda,” she said.

“How could he?” Dr. Yoder asked. “Jen, the tape recorder,
please
.”

It was noon, the middle of August. Everything was still—the hot air, the leaves in the trees, the water glassed on the pool's surface. And Jen Yoder, the mannequin, who didn't move or even blink.

But only in that moment. In the next she was running toward the house. Mary Beth glanced up. Dr. Yoder tipped his head toward the retreating thwacks of Jen's sandals on the slate patio.

She pushed open the back door and disappeared.

Dr. Yoder shrugged. Ferko had a notion to go to her. He hesitated, but then did, and found her in the kitchen, sitting on a stool, elbows on the counter, a phone pressed to her ear. In a moment she pulled the phone back, checked its screen, then placed it on a folded piece of paper.

“Jen.”

Her shoulders twitched, but she didn't turn around.

“What if I told you,” she said, “that I was driving the car that killed your baby?”

Ferko watched her.

“What are you—” he started.

“Would you forgive me?”

“But you weren't.”

“But what if I was, hypothetically?”

“Why are you—”

“Hypothetically,” she said.

“Hypothetically, I'd ask you why you left.” He moved to the other side of the counter to face her.

“Because I was scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“Of what I'd find. Of my role in the whole fucked-up business.”

“I don't know what you're saying.”

She unfolded the piece of paper that lay beneath the phone and handed it to him. It took him a moment to process what it was. Then he recognized the name and the room number from the Lewis Center for the Arts.

“He's not in today,” she said. “Or he's not answering calls from stalkers.”

Ferko waited for what would come next.

“I was in Princeton yesterday, too,” she said. “I saw you there. I thought you'd followed me, but now I wonder whether I followed you.”

“I don't get it.”

“Neither do I.”

They found her father's cassette recorder on the desk next to his computer. It was black, with a scratched plastic case, a built-in mic, and five buttons, each as big as a thumb. Ferko supposed it had been here, in this study, for decades. It had been here the night of Jen's graduation party, and further back, too, when Ferko was a boy, trailing Greg Fletcher around the ball fields behind their elementary school.

Now Ferko trailed Jen outside, to the patio, where Dr. Yoder was asking Mary Beth when she'd last seen Amanda.

“It's been a few weeks,” Mary Beth said. She shot Ferko a look that asked him where the hell he'd been.

Jen placed the cassette deck on the table between them, along with the power cord. “There's no place to plug it in.”

“The battery's good.” Dr. Yoder patted the machine with his fingers splayed. Then, in one deft motion, he pressed the
REC
and
PLAY
buttons simultaneously. A red light lit and the wheels turned the cassette tape. “See?” he asked.

He faced the machine, as though addressing it: “August 18, 2007. Interview with Mary Beth and Gil Ferko, regarding a ghost, a six-year-old girl named Amanda who died in 1983 in Glen Wood Ridge, New Jersey. Amanda once lived in a house, since razed, in the approximate spot of the Ferkos' house, which was built in …” Dr. Yoder paused for an answer.

“In 2004,” Mary Beth said.

“Thank you,” Dr. Yoder said. He turned his face in her direction. “What I don't understand is—” he started. “What did the ghost—I mean,
why
did the ghost seek you out?”

“The ghost lives in our house,” Ferko said.

“But Mary Beth first encountered her at the elementary school,” Dr. Yoder said.

“Amanda followed me to the elementary school,” Mary Beth said, “but sometimes I wonder whether I followed her.”

Ferko's head swam. Jen lowered her sunglasses over her eyes.

“Tell me,” Dr. Yoder said.

“I'd been inside for a year and a half. I was grieving.”

A shadow darkened Dr. Yoder's face.

“When I went out again, I went up the hill instead of down. I wanted to avoid down. I still do.”

“I don't understand,” Dr. Yoder said.

Mary Beth glanced at Ferko, her expression serene.

“We lost a child,” Ferko said. “A girl. There was an accident.” He imagined the blue car, the green stroller, the cruel impact.

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

The tape turned in its wheels. A breeze bent the thinnest limbs on the trees. Ferko was starting to see something now: a thread, at first fuzzy, then distinct, in the deep recesses of his mind, the place where puzzles were solved. He'd never been good at puzzles—jigsaws or Rubik's cubes or crosswords. But now a thread grew visible, thin and tenuous, but black, as tangible as night, connecting, somehow, Amanda to Catherine.

Jen pulled her chair closer to the tape recorder and its built-in mic. She sat, then sighed. The lenses on her sunglasses were as dark as the face of the tape deck, which she now addressed: “Guess who else went to Princeton yesterday to meet with Solomon DeGrass?” The question was rhetorical, answered in her next breath: “Me.”

Mary Beth blinked. Ferko waited. The thread connecting Catherine to Amanda thickened and grew shoots, like the spindly legs of spiders or the webs they spun.

And Jen told the story again. She'd had a dry run only the day before, but it was harder now, with her dad in the audience. Solomon had judged her, of course, but she didn't care about Solomon DeGrass. Her father's presence made her voice quaver. Yesterday she'd pretended to be an actor in a play. Today she hid behind sunglasses and studied the moving parts visible through the plastic housing of the cassette deck—the wheels and white sprockets that turned the tape. Computers and MP3 players didn't have moving parts. It seemed a shame. Inside and up the stairs, in the bedroom that was once hers, that was still hers on those days and nights when she slept here, was a ceiling fan. How many times had she lain on her back and studied it, counting its revolutions? Now the cassette's wheels marked time, and each revolution advanced the tape, while the story progressed—the bar, the cab, the roof, home. When she got there she chanced a look at her dad, whose face was a mask of thought, beneath which the wheels turned, like the wheels on the tape deck. And now another memory swamped her—a party at Paula McDonough's house to celebrate the end of seventh grade. It was Jen's first boy-girl party—a real one, with music and dancing. Paula had a stereo in her finished basement, with a cassette player and a bunch of mixtapes she'd made for the party from records her brothers owned. It was summer; the day was long. No one bothered to turn on the lights when the sun went down. Kids danced. Jen danced. Greg Fletcher kissed her, and she kissed him back. Her mom was dead, less than six months gone, and she was kissing a boy. And then the boy left. And not just the party. He
left
left. He moved to California.