Ghosts of Bergen County Read online

  Two years later there still wasn’t an answer. And Mary Beth was gone, beyond repair. But Jen was here, tattooed and pierced. And looking bored.

  “That sucks,” she said.

  “Sorry.” It had been a mistake, after all.

  She clenched her jaw. “I need a smoke.”

  He watched her and waited.

  “Let’s get our bill.” She raised her arm to flag down the server.

  Ferko wasn’t done. He scooped up a few more fries and dragged them through what was left of his ketchup. He should have felt exposed, vulnerable. Instead, he felt only numb. His child was dead, and he cleaned his plate. What sort of father did such a thing?

  The waiter brought the bill.

  He reached for his wallet. “I’ll get it.”

  She folded her arms. The waiter took his card. She swung her legs from beneath the booth and stood. “I’ve got to score.”

  “Score?” he asked, but she was gone, flouncing toward the bar, where two guys sat on stools. Each produced a pack of cigarettes. She selected one from a red box while the other guy shook his gold box, and she took one from him, too. The waiter returned with Ferko’s card and a pen and a little slip of paper for the tip and total. He signed and collected her bag from the booth. Ferko’s was at his office; he had planned to return. Now, with Roy Grove dead, with Prauer crushing speed limits upstate, with Greg Fletcher chasing Grove’s heirs before another banker got the bright idea, with Ferko two Bloody Marys closer to joining Mary Beth for an early night, the idea of going back to the office seemed futile. There was nothing in his bag he needed anyway.

  Jen was laughing with the guys at the bar, a full-out, throw-your-head-back laugh. He offered her the bag. They laughed. Ferko couldn’t imagine anything so funny. He wondered if it was him, the fool from high school, the butt of the joke. The laughter waned to snickers, then gasps.

  “Let’s go smoke,” Jen managed.

  The guys looked at Ferko, as though registering his presence for the first time. They waited.

  He was still holding Jen’s bag, which he now shouldered and said, “Let’s go.” He led the way. He couldn’t be sure, without looking back, who, if anyone, was following. Doing so risked ridicule. He walked through the open doors and found a nook on the sidewalk, beside a column, out of the flow of foot traffic. When he turned Jen was there. Only Jen. And the two cigarettes she’d pinched off the guys. She retrieved a lighter, a real one—the kind you refill instead of toss—with a silver lid she shut when the cigarette tip flared.

  She pointed the other one at him.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Neither do I.” She took a drag and tucked the second cigarette behind her ear.

  “Nice lighter.”

  She rubbed her thumb across its smooth surface, as if it were the belly of a Buddha. “It’s my boyfriend’s. I carry it with me.” She regarded it, then squinted at Ferko. It was bright on the sidewalk. “He’s not really my boyfriend. He’s a friend who’s a boy.”

  Ferko nodded. “Those are funny words. Boyfriend. Girlfriend.”

  “Stupid words,” she said.

  The traffic passed, wheels and feet.

  “We were at one time,” she said, “in the conventional sense.”

  He looked at her.

  “Boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “What happened?”

  She paused as though she’d never considered the question. “We got tired.”

  “You get tired, you go to sleep.”

  “Tired with a capital T.” She took a drag, held the smoke, then exhaled, chin raised toward the sky.

  They fell silent. Jen smoked and watched the traffic. Then she said, “I’m sorry. I freaked in there. I’m sorry about your baby.”

  “Catherine.”

  “Nice name.” She thrust her jaw forward and bared her bottom teeth. She stubbed the cigarette against the brick column and let it fall to the pavement.

  She took her bag from him, unzipped a pocket, and retrieved a ring of keys as big as a bracelet, the sort a jailer in a black-and-white movie might carry. She searched the ring until she found the smallest key, then dropped her bag to the sidewalk. There was a bike behind her, a blue Schwinn, a cruiser, with handlebars like a gull’s wings, cabled to a pipe with a rusted valve that might once have held a spigot. She went to work on the lock.

  “Is that yours?”

  “Sssshhh! I’m stealing it.”

  “You could steal a better bike.” He squeezed the front tire, which seemed to him an intimate gesture. He was surprised to find it firm. “It’s a one-speed.”

  The cable came undone. She removed the key, dropped the ring and the cable into her bag, and zippered it. “There aren’t a lot of hills in Manhattan.” She straddled the bike. She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. It was a simple kiss but it was real and percussive and it surprised him.

  “Are you going back to work?” she asked.

  “I guess so.” He looked at the sky, the blue sliver beyond the buildings. He shrugged. He’d assumed he wouldn’t. Now that she was leaving, what was left? “It seems a shame.”

  “Don’t be so sad.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And don’t apologize.”

  His impulse was to say it again, but he held the apology.

  “Aren’t you going to give me your card?” she asked.

  He thought it was a joke. He waited for the punch line.

  She put a foot on one pedal, rolled it back until the brake caught. “Isn’t that what you bankers are supposed to do, just in case I have a piece of business to throw your way?”

  “An aluminum company for sale?”

  “Fletcher gave me his.”

  She wasn’t flirting; it went beyond flirting into something selfless. It was disconcerting; he felt pathetic. It was a nice rhyme—flirting and disconcerting. He imagined the Mannequins, four or five guys with spiked hair, clad in black leather, rhyming flirting with disconcerting in faux British accents, while their prop, the dark-haired fan with the piercings and the ink, struck a pose that went beyond flirting. He could Google it. He had something to do back at the office. He found a card in his wallet and handed it to her.

  “Swell,” she said, a word that was nearly impossible to use without irony. She beamed at the card and pocketed it. Then she stood on the pedals and she was off.

  She disappeared around the corner. His phone rang. Jen, he thought, though he didn’t know how she’d managed to call so quickly, what with the pedals and the handlebars, her balance and the traffic and the buttons on the phone. He checked the number. Two-oh-one. He thought it odd she’d have a New Jersey area code. For an instant muddle ruled. Then he recognized Mary Beth’s cell. It had been some time since she’d called him from it.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi.” Her voice cracked, and his heart sank. She’d been fragile, even before the bad stuff happened.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “I’m outside, walking.”

  “Me too. It’s a nice day.”

  “It is.”

  He was standing on the sidewalk. He’d asked her to do this very thing, to go outside on a nice day. He’d asked her to call him. And here she was doing both at once. He didn’t know what it meant. “I’ll be home early tonight,” he said.

  “Okay.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “We could go out.”

  “Out?”

  “Out.”

  “Don’t push it.”

  “Okay.” He heard voices in the background, the shouts of children. “A picnic,” he said. “I can get sandwiches at Nora’s.”

  “Really, don’t. I’m out. I’ll be home soon.”

  “You’re fine?”

  “I’m just tired.” A scream. In the background. A bona fide shriek.

  “Where are you?” He didn’t mean to sound suspicious, but still.

  “The School on the Ridge. Everyone’s hanging out. The ice cream man is parked at the c
urb like a crack dealer.”

  “You should get yourself a treat.”

  “The line’s too long.”

  He was standing on the sidewalk. People pushed past. He followed them, west toward Sixth Avenue. Through the earpiece, the shouts and shrieks of kids grew louder. On his end, a car horn blared. He didn’t know what it meant that she was outside and calling. He didn’t know what it meant that he’d told Jen Yoder, someone he barely knew, about Catherine. He didn’t know what it meant, and now he didn’t know what to say. It occurred to him that if he were there, physically, with Mary Beth, he’d merely have walked beside her. He didn’t need to speak. His presence, distant as it was, borne by the electrical currents that sifted through the air, was enough.

  CHAPTER SIX

  She sat on a bench, a woman in her midthirties, at the edge of the elementary school playground, where there were lots of women her age, give or take a few years—dozens, in fact, not counting the nannies, who kept to themselves. But these other women, the mothers—distracted by the responsibility of finding their children in the blur of children, by the persistent requests for snacks and playdates, by the injuries that seemed, for certain children, as inevitable as the kisses their mothers imparted on their elbows, by the news from school, the bits of neighborhood gossip, by the cries of the younger siblings, the ones who wanted in (or out of) their strollers—didn’t pay any mind to the woman on the bench. She’d always been one of those people others didn’t approach—an introvert, shy, and though such shyness was often a burden (like at a party), she was grateful for it now.

  When she was young, in summer, when other kids would hang out at the pool, Mary Beth had wished for rain. She liked to stay indoors and watch the puddles form in the backyard, where the drainage was poor. People who weren’t shy didn’t understand why someone would rather stare out the sliding glass door of the family room and watch the rain fall than spend a hot, sunny day at the pool with her friends. But other kids learned how to ride their bikes at age five, and write their lessons on the fronts of their papers, so that the hole punches were in the left margins, not the right. After school, they played on the playground, while Mary Beth was made to take speech therapy, hours of it, so that her Rs didn’t sound like Ws (though Mary Beth thought her speech therapist made her Rs sound like Ls).

  People knew better than to talk with the woman on the bench.

  When she’d been in law school, in Montclair, her apartment was a mile from campus. It was a safe neighborhood, as neighborhoods go, but her classes were at night. There was a bus she could have taken, but it was quicker to walk. And she did, most nights, along the sidewalks illuminated by streetlamps. Sometimes there were others out, walking in pairs. But there were solitary figures, too, a few jogging, some with a dog on a leash, but most, like her, just walking, from point A to point B. And she noticed how many of these solitary figures were talking on phones. Mary Beth kept a phone in her pocket, and she used it sometimes to call her parents, who lived in Richmond, Virginia, almost four hundred miles away, or her friends from college, some of whom lived in New York and northern New Jersey. But Mary Beth couldn’t help but wonder who these solitary figures were talking to every night, and she began to suspect they were talking to no one at all. Extroverted or not, it was a trick. Open your phone and talk to it and deter the assaults from the other solitary figures. And Mary Beth found she could talk to her phone. She employed a vocabulary for these conversations—one-way as they were—that she believed sounded authentic.

  “What?” she’d ask her phone.

  “Right.”

  Then she’d throw her head back and laugh. “That’s exactly what I told her,” she’d say.

  In April, trees blossomed. In May, they leafed. The lower boughs blocked the streetlamps, and the sidewalks became shadowed, darker. There were more people out, though she didn’t feel any safer. By fall she had a new boyfriend, one with a car in the city, who’d pick her up after class and drive her home and spend the night. She liked this guy. He made her better than her prior self, the one who’d pretended to have someone to call after class.

  She called him now. (He was her husband.) She dialed his cell, and he answered, “Hey.” She imagined his mouth open, his face in the air.

  “Hi.” Her voice gave a little.

  “Is everything okay?”

  She never knew how to answer this question. After a moment she said, “I’m outside, walking.”

  “Me too. It’s a nice day.”

  “It is.” She watched the contrails from a long-vanished jet drift like clouds.

  After another pause, he said, “I’ll be home early tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  “We could go out.”

  “Out?”

  “Out.”

  “Don’t push it.”

  “Okay.” A horn sounded through the earpiece. Three successive taps. “A picnic,” he said. “I can get sandwiches at Nora’s.”

  “Really, don’t. I’m out. I’ll be home soon.”

  “You’re fine?”

  “I’m just tired.” A child screamed behind her.

  “Where are you?”

  “The School on the Ridge. Everyone’s hanging out. The ice cream man is parked at the curb like a crack dealer.” She tried on a smile. She thought he’d appreciate the joke. Instead he was earnest:

  “You should get yourself a treat.”

  “The line’s too long.”

  She heard his breathing. Probably walking in Midtown. He worked in private equity. He bought and sold companies. She didn’t know which ones. Then a transaction would hit the press, and he’d copy the headline and e-mail it to her under the subject My Deal. He kept secrets well.

  “Do you need to go?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  It was the last day of school, as Mary Beth understood from the snippets she’d heard—camps, playdates, vacations, fall. She recognized some of these faces and she guessed that some of these faces recognized hers. She held the phone to her ear. “Why don’t they go to the pool?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

  Summer’s arrival made her sad. It wasn’t a routine, exactly, walking up Amos Avenue to the School on the Ridge for the three o’clock dismissal, but it was something she did, more and more, as the weather grew warm. She’d happened by one day in February, with snow still in the school yard, and only a dozen or so students running around, and she’d stood behind the bench where she now sat and watched the children play a game, where the one who was it had to close her eyes and listen to the sounds of the other children as they scampered around the climbing bars. (Their feet couldn’t touch the ground.) The girl who was it tried to tag the ones who weren’t. The game was like Marco Polo, without the call-and-response, substituting the climbing equipment for the swimming pool. And, as in Marco Polo, whichever child was it eventually peeked, because the laws that govern children’s play state that a child shall peek if the rules of the game call for that child to keep her eyes shut. Mary Beth went home that day and made a cup of hot tea and found the website for the School on the Ridge. There was a picture of the school, a list of the staff, and a welcome from the principal.

  She clicked on Events and up popped a calendar for the remainder of the school year. There were monthly PTA meetings, a school-wide talent show in March, and performances in April from each grade. She decided on the kindergarten concert, and, on a sunny, chilly day in April, she walked up Amos Avenue in the early afternoon. She arrived at the all-purpose room, where the lunch tables had been folded and pushed to the side and the metal chairs had been arranged in rows. She chose a chair on the aisle. The children filed in, class after class, and sat on the floor between the stage and the chairs. Parents waited with cameras. They waited with fidgety preschoolers on their laps.

  Then the curtains parted. The kindergartners stood on risers on the stage. A twitter rose from the audience. Then applause. The kindergartners giggled. Flashbulbs flashed.

  These are kin
dergartners, she told herself. She snapped a picture of the entire ensemble. Then she zoomed in, as far as her lens would zoom, on the group in the middle. Then she swung the lens to stage right. Then to stage left.

  A woman stepped to the foot of the stage. She introduced herself as Mrs. Laird, the music teacher. “Welcome to the kindergarten concert.” Mary Beth took a picture of Mrs. Laird, with her students behind her. “The children have been working very hard on these songs welcoming the arrival of spring. We hope you enjoy them.”

  She walked to the piano on the floor in front of the stage. She sat on the bench and began to play. They sang songs about birds in blossoming trees, about daffodils and tulips. They sang songs about rain, about splashing through puddles with boots pulled to knees. They sang songs about dandelions, yellow and white, and blowing the seeds on a current of air. They sang songs about turning cartwheels on the new-mown grass and hitting a baseball over the fence. They sang the timeless spring themes of renewal and hope and joy upon which young children have a special claim. It was cute, of course. Some children stood straight and faced forward and sang with their arms at their sides, while others stood less straight and swayed, and others, still, bounced between the shoulders of their neighbors and didn’t sing at all.

  No matter. The parents sat in wonder, shutters clicking, videos running, tiny images of their tiny children on tiny screens, and the children in the audience, the ones in the upper grades on the floor in front of the metal chairs, grew bored and were shushed by their teachers, separated from their friends, and separated again.