Ghosts of Bergen County (11 page)

“The tea is ready.”

The girl placed teacups on saucers and poured the tea, slowly and carefully, into two cups. She passed one to Mary Beth, who took it with two hands, one on the saucer and the other with her thumb and index finger on the delicate handle of the cup. She brought the cup to her lips and made sounds with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, a proxy for sipping.

Then the girl held out her hands again, both this time, as though proffering a large platter. “Cakes?” she asked.

“Why, thank you.” Mary Beth made a show of choosing one. “They all look delicious.”

“You can have more than one.”

Mary Beth raised her hand above the platter. “Hmmmm. I'll start with this one. No!” She moved her hand. “This one.” She picked up a cake and nibbled it. “Mmm.”

They sat for a time, enjoying the tea and cakes, each other's company, and the ambiance offered by the shaded woods.

A cheer rose from the ball fields above. The girl looked up the hill. “Is Catherine playing baseball?” she asked.

“No.”

The girl sipped her tea and waited.

“If Catherine was playing baseball, wouldn't I be up there, cheering, with the other parents?”

“I guess so.”

Mary Beth wished to cut through the ruse, through the games and the tea and cakes. But this was a child. Still, she said, “Catherine died.”

“That's sad.” The girl didn't blink. She just looked unhappy.

“I'm Mary Beth.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I followed you here.”

“From where?”

The girl paused to consider her answer. Mary Beth felt as if she were floating in some sort of liquid—a thick, warm syrup—from which she might never escape.

“From your house,” the girl said.

“Do you live on Woodberry Road?”

The girl smiled. “I live
here
, silly.” She touched the bark of the fallen tree.

It was a
game
, Mary Beth reminded herself. It was real and make-believe all at once. She wasn't sure of the rules. She wasn't sure if she'd get another opportunity to play. She sipped her tea.

“I used to live there,” the girl said.

“Where?”

“Where you live. Before you lived there.”

“How old are you?” Mary Beth asked.

“Six. My name's Amanda.” She presented the platter of cakes.

“Amanda.” Mary Beth selected one and nibbled it. “It's nice to meet you.”

“It's not polite to talk with your mouth full.”

“Mmm. You're right.” Mary Beth pantomimed swallowing. “It's nice to meet you, Amanda.”

A breeze came through and swept the bangs from the girl's forehead.

“My house,” Mary Beth said, “was only recently built. I don't think you lived there.” It was too logical an argument for such a fanciful game. Mary Beth wished she could take it back.

But it didn't faze Amanda. “Is that where Catherine lived?” she asked.

Mary Beth nodded.

“What color was her room?”

“Purple.”

Amanda frowned, as though disappointed by the choice. “Light purple or dark purple?”

Mary Beth paused. It wasn't a baby's room anymore. She remembered the crib and the mobile and the morning sunlight shining through the window. “More light than dark. More blue than red.”

Amanda considered this.

“Did you know that that's how you make purple? You mix red paint with blue paint?”

“I knew that,” Amanda said.

“What do you get,” Mary Beth said, “when you mix red paint with yellow paint?”

Amanda squinted a moment at the bark on the fallen tree between where the two sat. Then she said, “Blue.”

“Orange.”

“Are you done with your tea?” Amanda reached out to take Mary Beth's cup and saucer.

“I can bring paints and paper.” Mary Beth touched knuckles with the girl in the pretend exchange.

“I have another party I need to get ready for.” Amanda stood.

“Next time.”

Mary Beth swung her leg off into the brush, and the girl hopped down on the other side. “Bye,” she said, and she ran off in the direction opposite the trail. Perhaps there was a different trail that way. But it didn't matter. Amanda leaped like a deer, pigtails flying. She skipped and then ran and soon her image blended with the rest of the landscape and disappeared completely.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ferko called up the stairs when he arrived home. He called again. No response. Then he took them two at a time and found the bedroom empty, the bed made. Not its normal state. He touched the bedspread, ran his fingers over its raised pattern—green leaves—as though reading Braille. She'd taken great care to smooth it. He stood and absorbed the room's silence until he heard more than silence—the thrum wrought by the weight of the roof and the floors on the walls and the foundation. He sensed something behind him—not motion, exactly, but not stillness, either; a presence—and he knew it was the girl, though he wasn't sure how he knew. Remnants from his high coursed through his body. His senses had been dulled and heightened—both, inexplicably, at once.

He turned and the girl was standing in the hallway just outside the bedroom. She wore her pigtails and a striped shirt and blue shorts and sneakers, and Ferko wondered if her presence now was somehow linked to Mary Beth's absence. Not the big absence, which was linked, of course, to Catherine's accident. But the small absence, today's absence—could that be connected to the girl's presence here, now? And the made bed? He wished to ask her. He formed a question in his head:
There's a woman who lives here with me—
us?
—do you happen to know—
But the girl vanished before he could ask or even get it right in his head. He cursed his indecision. He should have just blurted it, which he did now, to the empty space: “Do you know where Mary Beth is?” He walked out of the bedroom and into the hallway. “Where's Mary Beth?” he asked, but his senses, keen only a moment earlier, now told him nothing. The girl was gone. He retrieved his phone and asked the question—
where's mary beth?
—directly to the subject via text. The reply was instantaneous:
home soon.

He sighed. He had Dr. Yoder's book in his hand.
Ghosts of Washington Heights
. He shook it in the air to show the girl, if the girl cared, that he was armed with information. He went downstairs and onto the front porch to wait for Mary Beth. He opened the book and found his place. Sebastian Hurlingham, the reverend's son, had been forced down the hatch to the basement, and his siblings did not step forward to rescue the boy. Instead, they retired to their bedrooms, while the floors and the walls and the doors muffled the boy's cries, and soon weariness and dread and futility and possible injury muted him completely.

The house was silent. The family slept.

Richard Hurlingham, the eldest at seventeen, would recount years later how he wished he'd done something as Sebastian cried out in that first hour. Richard woke early the next morning and saw that Sebastian's bed was empty and made. His brothers were sleeping in the other bunks. He ran down the stairs to the pantry off the kitchen and the hatch to the cellar, his father at his heels. Richard pushed the trunk off the trapdoor and lifted the latch. What little light there was in the pantry barely reached the basement's dirt floor. Son and father peered down into the stillness. Neither said a word. They waited. Then the preacher cleared his throat. “Sebastian,” he intoned. There was no response. “Get the lamp lit,” he told Richard.

The preacher climbed down the ladder. His feet had found the floor by the time Richard returned with the kerosene lamp. The preacher took it and ducked his head, while Richard lay on the floor of the pantry and put his head through the hole in the floor. “There,” he said.

His father turned around. Sebastian lay facedown on the floor, the crown of his head against the concrete wall of the foundation.

They lifted the body through the hatch. It was cold and stiff and bruised, the face harrowed. They reported an accident, the preacher and the eldest. And when the other children woke to find Sebastian gone, they, too, learned a lesson about language and the nature of “accidents.” And with the reportage of the accident, over the years, each family member became complicit, some immediately and some later, and each would come to shoulder its burden.

Mary Beth was on the front walk. She might have just appeared, the way the girl had at the top of the stairs. She waved, and he said, “Hey,” to which she answered, “Hello,” like a stranger. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of running shoes. She came up the stairs and onto the porch and stood in front of him. He scooched to make room, but she stood there, hand on her hip.

“What happened to you last night?” she asked.

He patted the bench seat next to him, but her face was a mask of indifference, lost in thought. Her eyes refused to meet his.

“I'm thirsty,” she said, and pushed open the front door and disappeared.

He considered following her inside, but he'd done that too often, trailed after her in her silence. She'd left the house today. And yesterday, too. He hoped it meant something. He hoped she'd come back outside. She'd left the door open, which was promising. He heard her in the kitchen. The rattle of ice from the ice maker. Then she was in the entry, a hand on the door, and back on the porch. She pulled the door shut behind her. Was there a buoyancy about her that he remembered from before? She had a plastic bottle, the kind that fit in a cage on a bike frame. They had two bikes with four flat tires in the garage, leaning against each other like wasted lovers. She squeezed water into her mouth, then sat next to him on the bench. He pushed off with his foot to start them swinging but she kept her feet on the floor to stop them.

Ferko sighed. “What have you been up to?” he asked.

“You first.”

“Okay.” He paused to get the story straight himself. It would require some essential edits. And in the next breath he told her—
a
story, one version of the actual events: Greg Fletcher, from Edgefield Elementary School, representing Grove Department Stores, and his invitation to have lunch with Jen Yoder, another Edgefield classmate. The Grove car bomb, Jen's accident, the $700, the parties, the lack of sleep. He left out the illegal parts (the drugs and the shoplifting) and the hard-to-explain (the mannequin act) and the fact that Greg had blown the whole thing off, figuring Mary Beth would be more okay if another guy was there, and, of course, this morning one was: Dr. Yoder, both old
and
blind. And she received the story without apparent distress. Ferko should have been relieved, but it angered him. Did she even care what he did? Were they that ruined?

“And the book?” she asked.

He showed her the black cover, the block letters:
Ghosts of Washington Heights
. “Jen's dad wrote it.”

“Ghosts,” she said.

He pictured the Hurlingham boy, Sebastian, by the hatch that opened to the basement. He pictured the girl at the top of the stairs.

“And you?” he asked. “What have you been up to?”

“Walking.”

“Apparently.”

“Just around.” She rocked the bench with her feet, but kept them on the floor so that the swing couldn't swing. “It's what you asked me to do.”

It was what everyone had asked her to do, starting with the doctors and the counselors.

She stood.

“That's it?” he asked.

“That's it.” She swigged water from the tip of the bottle. “Lunchtime.” She opened the front door again and left it open. It was an invitation for him to join her. Or an indication that she'd return. Or neither.

He hadn't eaten since the falafel sandwich the night before, and this realization brought a pang of hunger. He kicked his feet and picked them up and the swing started up. Maybe she'd fix him something, too. Or not. It would be fine either way.

He opened his book and found his place. The boy, Sebastian, was dead. Within a week his spirit appeared, sitting on a wood crate in the pantry off the kitchen, too skinny and sickly—ghostly, with a lack of color—but recognizable as Sebastian. Dr. Yoder had a theory regarding the manifestation of spirits:

Collective burden
, defined as the aggregate, internalized guilt and complicity of a group of people, is the wellspring from which spirits arise. The entire Hurlingham family was complicit either directly (as was the case with Reverend Hurlingham, who dropped the boy through the trapdoor and locked him in the basement, and, possibly, Richard, who, at seventeen, was arguably old enough to intervene) or indirectly (as was the case with the seven-year-old twins, who understood Sebastian's death was no accident but never suggested otherwise). And, in each case, the complicity was internalized.

Dr. Yoder then suggested that other ghost stories he'd uncovered shared similar traits. He admitted the support for his theory was anecdotal.

Ferko closed the book. Mary Beth was in the kitchen. A lawn mower started down the block.

According to the story, the Hurlingham family later moved to Queens, yet the subsequent owners reported that the spirit remained in the house on 185th Street. Why had the ghost attached itself to the house rather than to the family, whose collective burden produced the spirit in the first place? Ferko thought about the girl upstairs. The house was only three years old. He and Mary Beth had bought it new. He remembered what Dr. Yoder had said about ghosts in Bergen County. There were too many new buildings. But the Hurlingham house was built in 1925, was less than twenty years old when Sebastian died. Ferko had a lot of questions for Dr. Yoder, who'd probably get a kick out of answering them.

Ferko remembered the drugs, the washed-out feeling from the first few hours. He'd never experienced anything as perfect. He wondered if he'd ever be the same. He wondered where a friendship with Jen could take him.