Ghosts of Bergen County Read online

  Jen had slathered the wound with a generous layer of disinfecting ointment, which looked like jam on a piece of toast. Then she fit a piece of gauze over it. “I’ll hold, you tape.” Ferko set the beers on the glass coffee table, next to some rock ’n’ roll zines. He stripped out sections of tape, cut them, and affixed the gauze to her freckled skin.

  “Good as new,” she said. She picked up a bottle, leaned back on the couch, and drank.

  Ferko still stood, but there was nowhere else to sit except the futon, which was unmade, so he straightened his pants and sat next to her on the couch.

  He sipped his beer. He sipped it again. After a minute he said, “I should go.”

  “No, don’t.” That was all. No explanation as to why he shouldn’t. It was up to Ferko, apparently, to figure it out or interpret whichever way he saw fit.

  “I feel like I’m intruding,” he said.

  “Intruding on what? You saved my life. I owe you.”

  He considered telling her about Mary Beth, about the phone call she’d made earlier, how rare such a thing was. He’d told her he’d be home early, and he pictured her in that moment, in their bedroom with the door shut and the curtains drawn, spent from her walk past the School on the Ridge, from the phone conversation with Ferko when they were both walking and mostly silent. The clock on Jen’s nightstand said it was 4:45, still early.

  “You’re right.” Ferko leaned back on the couch to match Jen’s posture. “You owe me.”

  Jen was on her phone, sending texts, checking the screen every now and then. They drank their beers, draining the last drops in unison and placing the empties next to one another on the coffee table. Jen stood and slipped the phone in her pocket. “Let’s go.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “An errand.”

  Ferko stood. He checked his phone.

  “You don’t need to go back to the office,” she said. “Your client died.”

  “He wasn’t my client.”

  “Whatever.”

  “He was Greg Fletcher’s client.”

  She touched the gauze over her wound, poked along the edges. “Let’s go.”

  “I should go home.”

  She retrieved a long-sleeved shirt from a hanger in the closet, slipped it over the tank top, straightened it in the mirror with the buttons unbuttoned. She balanced a pair of sunglasses on her head. Then she turned toward him as though presenting herself.

  He watched her watch him. He shrugged. “Let’s go.”

  She led him out of the building, then east on Twelfth Street. They walked one block. Another. It was a residential neighborhood, with old buildings and rehabbed buildings. An empty park. An art project. There were restaurants and florists. There were kids on skateboards, white and black and Hispanic. Ferko knew about the East Village. He’d lived in New York long enough to remember. It had been a slum. Now it was this. They turned south on Avenue C. Another block. And another. They walked in silence, Jen’s desperate chattiness replaced by a grim determination he’d not noticed until now. Graffiti blossomed. Made-up words he could put no meaning to. Jamaicans sat on the steps of buildings, drinking from dark bottles. Music poured from the open windows, a cacophonous mash of horns and drums and guitars. There was a haze, a burning substance he couldn’t identify. Men played dice and girls skipped rope, while others, Ferko and Jen included, walked into it or through it, Ferko wasn’t sure which.

  “Are we scoring drugs?” he asked.

  “Shut up.”

  “We’re scoring drugs?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Ferko.” She stopped and faced him. “I’m the buyer and you’re the tourist.”

  He was this far. And so he did. He shut the fuck up. Another half block, and she turned up a stone path to a gray building that reminded Ferko of a fifties-era vision of a robot’s head. A looming head, to be sure, but a head nonetheless. There was a black man in front of an iron gate. He had a shaved head, wore a white tank top and blue pants with white stripes. As Jen and Ferko approached, the man extended his arms, which had been folded across his chest.

  “Jen-Jen,” the man said, to which Jen answered, “Ben-Ben.” They hugged. The man had huge arms, covered in tattoos of dragons, knights, and castles. Ben-Ben was one hundred percent medieval, apparently. He was probably six foot three. He looked like a good friend to have. Ferko stepped closer, expecting an introduction. But instead Ben-Ben fixed a scowl on Ferko, and Jen said, “He’s with me.”

  Ben-Ben stepped aside to let them through the gate. Ferko considered telling Jen he’d wait here, outside, but he didn’t know how long she’d be, nor was he sure whether such an arrangement would be cool with Ben-Ben. They walked up the stairs, past a kid—nine or ten, Ferko guessed—bouncing a tennis ball and catching it with a baseball glove.

  Through the doorway was a dark alcove, and Jen stopped there. Ferko could hardly see. The door opened behind them, bringing a stab of afternoon light. After a minute, his eyes adjusted. They were in a queue, arranged between two velvet ropes like in an old movie theater. A man was stationed at the head of the queue in the black-and-white-tiled lobby, next to a card table upon which sat a cardboard box, like the cookie boxes the Girl Scouts paraded up and down Amos Avenue each spring in Glen Wood Ridge. In fact, the box said GIRL SCOUTS OF AMERICA. Two badasses stood behind the table dealing Thin Mints. Ferko nearly laughed, but then the heavy door opened again, daylight flashed, and the door banged shut. It was jarring, each time it opened and closed, though it seemed to bother only Ferko.

  There were three guys in line ahead of Jen. The transactions were quick and wordless. When it was their turn, Jen moved forward and Ferko followed. She held out a bill from the roll the Chinese man had given her. In exchange, she received four small bags with white powder, each stamped with an image of a black cat. She stuffed them in her pockets, and they turned to leave.

  Outside, on the sidewalk heading north, she said, “I’d rather do that in the daylight.” She dropped her sunglasses back over her eyes. “My friend Amy says nighttime purchases are more authentic. She’s romantic.”

  They crossed the street.

  “That was heroin,” Ferko said.

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “I’m glad we didn’t get busted.”

  “Pfft! Me too.”

  “Jen-Jen,” he said, and he chucked her arm with his open palm. He did so lightly; he barely touched her. Still, she said, “Hey! I was just run over by a car.”

  He raised his hands as if to say sorry. In fact, though, he felt giddy. It had been fun, a cultural experience. He’d been a tourist. Once upon a time Ferko had used drugs—pot and cocaine, mainly. In college, he’d dropped acid. For one two-week period, when he’d managed to buy a quarter pound of pot from a friend of a friend who lived in Texas, Ferko had even sold drugs, though he hadn’t liked the attention, even if the attention came with cash. Once, in graduate school, he’d bought pot from a couple of white dudes from Queens who came to the apartment Ferko shared with another student, Tom DePellier, a friend, though not yet a close friend. Inside the apartment, the dealers unbuttoned their jackets to reveal pistols strapped across their chests in holsters. It was an obvious don’t-fuck-with-me gesture, and Tom and Ferko didn’t. They bought the drugs and the thugs left. For two MBA students, the encounter was a lesson in capitalism, in the purchase of unregulated commodities, in contingency planning and security measures. Plus, it was a pretty good story, one that endured long after the pot had been smoked, long after they’d graduated, gotten married, and stopped taking drugs altogether. It was the sort of bonding experience that can last a lifetime.

  Ferko hadn’t made a new friend in years. After a certain age, the supply of new friends faded with the demand, and old friends drifted away. He wasn’t sure what sort of friend Jen was, but, through the course of the afternoon—through lunch, her getting hit by a car, and the procuring of heroin from a gang of Jamaicans—she’d come to feel like a real one. Maybe this was merely a day in the life of
Jen Yoder, but he was grateful she’d shared it with him.

  Back at her apartment, they cracked the last two beers. He was determined to see it through that far. It still wasn’t six o’clock.

  Jen went to the bathroom, and Ferko checked his e-mail. There was nothing of consequence, though Lisa had sent a news story with an update on the Roy Grove car bombing. It looked as though she was back in the office. Then he called Mary Beth, first on her cell and then at home. He had worked out that he would tell her he’d been delayed, that he wouldn’t, in fact, be home early but he wouldn’t be home late, either. Definitely before dark. But he got her voice mail each time, and he knew she was shuttered in their room. He was determined now not to rush. So he truncated the message: “Hey, honey,” he said on the home voice mail, “things have come up and I won’t be home as early as I thought. It’s a little before six now. I hope you’re well. Bye.”

  “Nice shading.” Jen had changed out of the ripped pants into a pair of black jeans. “‘Things have come up.’ Who could argue with that?”

  “I’m not here to be judged by you.”

  “Who’s judging? I’m genuinely impressed. Just don’t think you’re getting any action from me. We’re hanging out.”

  He was grateful for the clarification. Hanging out was fine. Hanging out was better. He took a swig of his beer.

  Jen sat on the couch. She set one of the clear Baggies on the glass coffee table.

  “What’s up with the black cat?” he asked.

  “The power of branding.”

  “You’re kidding.” He examined the image—a collection of black shapes, which, collectively, formed a cat, curled and ready to pounce. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Six years.” She tapped the contents of the Baggie onto the coffee table and began cutting it into lines. “Off and on,” she added. “And I know what you’re thinking: that I’m an addict. I guess I am. That I’m a junkie. If this is junk, I guess that’s true, too.” She retrieved a section of straw from the breast pocket of her shirt. “I can get off this stuff. I’ve done it before. When the time’s right, I’ll do it again.”

  “Okay,” Ferko said.

  “Okay, it’s not nothing,” she said. “It’s a pretty good something. But it’s not like air or water or food.”

  “I get it.”

  “If I pass out, call 911.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’d do it for you.” She snorted a line. Then another. She leaned back on the couch. Her face got sad for a moment, but only a moment. Then it flushed pink. He watched her for a full minute from where he was standing at the edge of the coffee table, between the couch and the futon. She didn’t move, but she hadn’t passed out either.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And?” she said. It was an invitation. She’d cut two lines, he understood, for him.

  “I’m only having one.”

  He sat next to her. He took the straw, and before he could change his mind, he leaned his face to the glass and started on the line nearest him. He snorted an inch of it, paused, switched nostrils, and snorted the rest.

  The warmth came first to the space behind his eyes, then to the bridge of his nose. It was warm and cool at once, an amazing numbness that spread down his spine and out through the muscles of his chest and shoulders and down his arms. It spread through his heart and stomach and intestines, and all those vital organs he once could name but had since forgotten. They didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Only the blood that brought the warmth and cool into his hips and buttocks, into his testicles and penis and down his legs, through his knees and ankles to the soles of his feet. It was bliss. He sat there for a long time soaking it in. And it refused to stop, refused to get old, to get weak. His lungs filled with oxygen, and the blood grabbed the oxygen and coursed with the beating of his heart, wave after wave, beat after beat. He kept feeling good, again and again.

  “You should see yourself,” he heard her say.

  “I can’t get up.”

  “The first time’s the best. I envy you. I wish I could go back, make it my first time every time. It will never get better than it is for you right now.”

  He accepted this. He couldn’t imagine how it could get better. He couldn’t imagine how anything better would feel. He wondered what might happen next, but it didn’t really matter. He tried to close his eyes but he couldn’t. The sun, low in the sky, shone through the windows, while his blood, so much of it, so much more of it than he’d ever sensed before, flooded every radiant organ and tissue of his body.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mary Beth watched the girl run across the field at the School on the Ridge, away from the playground, toward the woods that led down to County Park, with its duck pond and bicycle trails. At the field’s edge, she slowed to a walk. She was a young girl, perhaps one of the kindergartners who’d performed the songs of spring. Mary Beth waited for an adult—a parent or friend—to see the girl and chase her down, but no one other than Mary Beth appeared to notice. Then the girl looked back (was it at Mary Beth?).

  Mary Beth approached the two nearest women, who’d been talking to each other since she’d arrived. “Excuse me,” she said, and the mothers turned. But as they did, the girl slipped into the woods and was gone.

  Mary Beth flattened her mouth. “There was a girl here,” she said, “with pigtails. Light brown pigtails. Just a minute ago. Did you see her?”

  The women wore blank faces.

  “She ran that way.” Mary Beth pointed to the place in the woods where the girl had disappeared.

  The women followed Mary Beth’s arm through the empty field. They shook their heads.

  “What’s the girl’s name?” asked one.

  “That’s just it. I don’t know.”

  “I didn’t see her.”

  “I didn’t, either.”

  Mary Beth began walking in the direction the girl had run. She walked faster. Then she ran, all the time concentrating on the seam in the trees where the girl had entered the woods. When Mary Beth reached it, she saw there was no trail, that the woods were thick. Vines with leaves shaped like arrows choked the trunks and limbs of the smaller trees.

  She moved some brush only to find more brush. There was poison ivy, she supposed, growing on the ground. She wore open-toed sandals, poor for hiking and worse for bushwhacking.

  “Little girl,” she called, at first too softly, then louder: “Little girl!” She walked along the edge of the woods, peering in. She glanced back toward the playground, but no one was coming. Twenty feet off she saw the worn dirt of a trailhead. She entered, and inside the brush was thinner and she could see for some distance on either side.

  “Hello,” she called. The dirt path was marked by tire treads. There was mud in the low spots from recent rain. She walked farther, where the path sloped to a swale, and a wash that held standing water and mud. Kids had piled dirt and packed it to make a bicycle jump. She stepped over it, and walked up a rise. The path narrowed, then steepened. She stood on the lip before the descent and called out again, “Hello.”

  “Hi.” The girl stood on a fallen tree at the bottom, a hundred feet below, off the narrow path another fifty feet.

  “What are you doing?” Mary Beth asked.

  “Playing.”

  “Why down there?”

  “Why not?”

  “Where’s your mom?” Mary Beth asked, but the girl didn’t answer. Instead, she skipped across the fallen tree. She jumped like a gymnast on a balance beam. “Is she at the school?”

  “I told you, I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In this tree.” The girl stopped jumping. She stood, toes pointed out.

  “What street do you live on?”

  “Tree Lane.” The girl giggled.

  Mary Beth folded her arms. “I’m sorry your house fell over.�
�

  “It didn’t fall. This is how we built it.”

  “Who’s we?” Mary Beth tried.

  “Did you find Catherine?”

  Mary Beth could almost close her eyes and pretend: here was one of Catherine’s friends.

  “We built this house,” the girl said. “Me and Catherine.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Did you find her?” the girl asked. “Maybe she’s down here.”

  “It’s not nice to tease.”

  “I know that.” The girl glared at Mary Beth. Then she jumped off the tree and squatted next to it. “Yeah, she’s right here,” the girl said, “under this tree. She’s smushed under this tree.”

  “Okay, stop it!”

  “We were building this house, and Catherine got under it. Come out, Catherine. Someone’s here to see you.”

  “I said, stop it!” There were birds on the tree branches and squirrels in the brush. Cars whined from a highway and a train horn sang. There were animals and machines, Mary Beth and the girl.

  “Come up,” Mary Beth said.

  “Come down.”

  So she did. She started down the steep slope, faster than she should have. The dirt was loose. Rocks tumbled. She reached for exposed roots but missed. The girl screamed and started up, off the path, through the green ground cover. Gravity and momentum carried Mary Beth. She nearly toppled, head over heels. Her sandals slid, and she fell on her butt, and grabbed a thin tree, which bent but didn’t break. The girl was three-quarters up the hill now. Mary Beth could have caught her, maybe, by the time they reached the field. But how would that look? CHILDLESS WOMAN, TEASED BY KINDERGARTNER, TACKLES CHILD.

  She let go. She was near the bottom. She rose to her feet and stepped off the trail, through the brush, using the small trees growing from the incline to steady herself. She watched for prickles but they found her. They tore the skin on her wrist. Then her ankle and toes. Then the tops of her feet. After a time she made it to the tree where the girl had stood. Its main shaft was two feet wide. Mary Beth stood on it, then peered under it. There was nothing, of course, but dead leaves and branches. She glanced up the hill. She sat on the tree and poked at her cuts. Then she threaded her way through the brush and the prickles to the trail, which she took down, toward County Park, where there was a paved path that followed a stream to the duck pond and the playground with its preschoolers. Her knee hurt, and she limped. She was filthy and bleeding. But she wasn’t tired. In fact, she felt rather alive. She walked the long way home. There were hours of daylight. When she got home she soaked in the tub. She cleaned out her cuts. It was nearly dusk and she wasn’t tired. She didn’t know what to do next.