Ghosts of Bergen County (19 page)

Mary Beth grinned like she'd just handed him a huge box wrapped in pretty paper.

“So?” he asked.

“So, I met Amanda a few weeks ago at the School on the Ridge.”

“But Amanda doesn't go to school there.”

“No, she doesn't.”

“I used to,” Amanda offered.

“She used to.” Mary Beth's smile turned grim.

“When I was alive.”

“Ahhh,” Ferko said, “when she was
alive
.” He quashed the urge to say that that made sense, because schools didn't, as a practice, enroll dead children. He realized he was talking around the girl as though she weren't there, which was true in a way. He chanced a look at her. She was just a girl who needed a bath. He didn't mean to be impolite.

Mary Beth said, “You didn't tell me you knew Amanda.”

The girl tugged at Mary Beth's sleeve. “He
didn't
know me.”

“Knew
of
Amanda,” Mary Beth corrected herself.

“You didn't tell me you knew her, either.”

“We don't talk.”

He had no response to that. They were finally speaking directly. He should have welcomed it. Instead it made him uneasy, here with the girl, who was—what? He looked at Amanda. “What's your story?”

He regretted that the question sounded harsh. He was about to take it back, or apologize, but the girl's face, unfazed, looked up at Mary Beth's, as though asking permission to tell him, and Mary Beth was digging in her skirt pocket, then unfolding a square of paper into an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet.

She handed him the page. “Here's the story.”

It was an article from 1983, the
Bergen Crier
, about a six-year-old girl who died in the woods near County Park when her bike fell down a ravine and hit a tree. The girl's name was Amanda Russo.

“Her house was right here,” Mary Beth said. “I found it on an old map. It was here, Gil, where we're standing.”

Ferko stared at the page, read the words, the individual words—
girl
,
chicken
,
bicycle
,
grandmother
—but couldn't put them together in any way that made sense. He recognized the School on the Ridge. He recognized County Park. It was an accident, involving a child in Glen Wood Ridge?
That
was the connection to Catherine? He wasn't sure how to ask. He didn't wish to blame Mary Beth again for the baby's death.

“This is Amanda,” he said instead.

Mary Beth and the girl looked at each other. Then they nodded.

“You don't look blown away,” Mary Beth said, with a tinge of hurt.

“I'm just confused.”

“It's a lot to digest,” Mary Beth admitted.

Ferko studied the girl. She looked at him coolly. She'd been a benign presence, a curiosity, something he looked forward to, even if their encounters were fleeting and infrequent. Perhaps she'd been here from the start. He had a sense that she had, though he'd seen her only since Catherine died. But now the girl was
really
here, with a name and a story. What did she
want
? Ferko handed the page back to Mary Beth with a shrug. Her face showed disappointment, and he guessed his did, too. Her smile was gone, replaced by creases that formed at the corners of her mouth, at the junctions of lips, cheeks, and chin, crushed, as they were, by the ruinous combination of earth's gravity and metaphorical weight.

“What does this have to do with Catherine?” He surprised himself with the question.

A shadow descended on Mary Beth's face. “
This
?”

“The news story.” He indicated the printout Mary Beth clutched in her fingers. “The girl.” He realized he was talking around her again, and that was rude. But he couldn't think of her as an actual being with feelings. She played a role. That was all. He remembered Dr. Yoder's theory—collective burden. Whose burden was Amanda?

She spoke for herself: “I didn't know Catherine.”

Of course not, Ferko thought, and maybe what the girl wanted from them was irrelevant, because they had wants of their own. Wasn't that the way the world worked? You gave and received, roughly in equal amounts. The cynics like Prauer would say you bought and sold, that it didn't count unless it was quantifiable in some form of accepted currency—money or tickets or wins and losses. But Ferko knew better. He had a mission, which, in an instant, dwarfed Prauer's empire. Mary Beth looked wounded and helpless, holding the girl's hand. Ferko stepped toward them and covered their hands with his. “There's a connection,” he said, meaning Amanda's presence and the grief that swamped them in the wake of Catherine's absence, but he realized, too, that the connection began here, with their palms and fingers touching, now interlocked, warm blood pulsing through fingertips, his pulse meeting Mary Beth's and whatever facsimile Amanda's apparition produced. He let the connection be what it would to each. Their hands were warm. The distress on Mary Beth's face vanished, was replaced by a placid air of contentment that mirrored the girl's, that perhaps mirrored his own. He remembered all those times the girl had vanished when he'd tried to get close. Now she was here, and he held her hand. It was a real hand, a child's hand. Was that the connection? Could it be so simple? He wished to know, and they did, too, it seemed, for they remained joined at the top of the stairs for some time; it wasn't clear how long.

PART III

AUGUST 2007

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Year after year, August signaled an end. The signal was stronger when you were young and summer meant freedom and blooming daylight that stretched into hours one associated with nighttime. But then the daylight waned, first in imperceptible increments, which crept like shadows, accelerated, until you couldn't help but notice. One could see the horizon clearly then, the lip at the edge of the canyon. The school year. Fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth.

For adults, summer was different—flatter, the way everything became flatter when you grew old, like the hills you once sledded and stood on your pedals to climb, like the Christmases and birthdays you once anticipated, even after you discovered they disappointed, again and again, until you became numb to their disappointment.

But still: temperatures rose and fell, in the quicker frequencies of night and day and the longer frequencies of seasons, while each wave—both short and long—gathered speed and blurred. Years were a collection of months, months a collection of days, days a collection of hours. Rain turned to snow, water to ice until ice melted and color returned to the landscape. April was a red balloon, flaccid in an open, pink palm. June was a red balloon, inflated and knotted and bopped by a knuckle on a warm current of air. August was a red balloon forgotten and collapsing in a dusty corner.

Mary Beth hadn't been back to the woods in weeks, not since Amanda had shown herself at home, an event that, at the time, seemed momentous. It still was, even as it had become inscrutable in the weeks that followed.

The girl had not appeared again, though her presence lingered at the top of the stairs. Mary Beth sensed it when she came in from outside, when she climbed the stairs, when she slid into her sheets at night and woke in the morning—a warm, settled feeling that started beneath her breastbone, in the vicinity of her beating heart, and radiated down into her stomach and out into her shoulders and neck, the muscles and bones in her upper arms. It was like a drug, this feeling, euphoria grounded in contentment. She could take a hit just by breathing the air in her house. She asked Gil if he felt it, too, and he said that he did, that he'd always felt it, and she eyed him suspiciously, because he wasn't a euphoria-grounded-in-contentment kind of guy; rather, he was a restlessness-grounded-in-exhaustion kind of guy. Melancholic, too, but who was she to judge? There was no reason to doubt him, with the proverbial cat (in the form of Amanda) out of the bag. But where
was
she, since the night those weeks ago with Gil at the top of the stairs?

Last night, Friday, he'd called. It was three weeks to the day since Amanda had shown herself to them. Gil wasn't coming home. Mary Beth was used to this sort of thing. It went with the bonuses, the size of which sometimes staggered her. So she understood, or said she did. But when she woke this morning, Saturday, alone, it was too much like it was before. Like Amanda had never happened. She called for Amanda but there was no Amanda. Of course there wasn't. So she got up and got dressed and packed her water bottle and left the house.

The air was gray and close, the sun behind banks of dark clouds. Nothing moved, except Mary Beth trudging up the sidewalk and the occasional car rolling up or down Amos Avenue. Nearly everyone, it appeared, was out of town. She lifted the hair off her neck and tied it in a ponytail.

The heat swelled in the woods beyond the empty field. There was no shade since there was no sun—just a darker, denser place, the leaves a blanket containing the cumulative heat of summer. She started down the slope to the felled tree. She sat and looked around, wondering what would happen next. She was as still as the air. Sweat blossomed at her hairline. She wiped it with the palm of her hand. She uncapped her water bottle and took a swig. Then she poured a splash into her cupped hand and brought it across her brow. Water streamed down her face like rain. It had been a dry summer. Maybe rain was where the day was leading. And now she hoped for Amanda but she also hoped for rain.

But the heavy air wouldn't budge, and the sweat came again. She thought of her neighbors, all those nameless shapes and shadows, who'd escaped to the ocean or a lake in New York, upstate. Better yet, Maine. Maybe Canada.

She'd found the boys' names—Felix and Solomon DeGrass—in the library, in a community directory circa 1982, the year before Amanda had hit the tree on her bicycle and died.
This tree?
Mary Beth wondered. She dug her fingertips into the grooves of the bark. Felix, the older brother, was dead.
MAN, 30, PLUNGES FROM CHELSEA ROOF, DIES
. The article in the
New York Times
implied something sinister—an unidentified woman the police wished to question. But there was no follow-up, at least not in the
Times
or any other news source Mary Beth could find. It was as though the story had died with Felix, and it occurred to Mary Beth that Felix's death was like Amanda's, like Catherine's—no one knew the truth. Maybe someone did, but they weren't telling. Mary Beth imagined Felix DeGrass haunting the rooftop and sidewalks and streets around the building where he fell. Or jumped. Or was pushed.

Amanda had said that it was okay, that it didn't matter why. When you were dead, you were dead.
Why
wouldn't change it.

“Amanda,” Mary Beth called to the woods now. “I need to ask you a question.”

She hadn't actually worked out the question. Something to the effect of
Doesn't the truth matter?
But she thought she already knew the answer. She just needed to
prove
the answer, like a scientist with a hypothesis.

“Amanda!”

The crickets went silent for a moment before resuming their song.

Solomon DeGrass knew the truth about Amanda. He guarded it in Princeton, New Jersey. What was required of Mary Beth, she realized, was a journey, a confrontation of sorts, truth-to-truth, with or without Amanda. She waited for the girl now, but the girl didn't show, and after a time Mary Beth became aware of something above her—the whisper of fingertips, the creasing and crinkling of paper. It was rain, which grew steady, drummed a patter on the leaves on the treetops. When she felt the first drop she'd go, walk up the dirt incline and out into the open field and past the school and down Amos Avenue home. It wouldn't matter that she got wet. In fact, she wished to do so, the way children wished to run through a rainstorm or the spray of a hose.

But until then she stayed beneath the patter. It was as though she were inside a tent or some manufactured rainforest habitat at the zoo, where the warm spray from jets creates humidity and a plastic dome protects the fake elements from the real ones.

The rain fell harder, and the leaves on the trees applauded. Yet she stayed dry, hoping for release, hoping that Amanda would appear.

But the woods were an umbrella, and Amanda didn't show. Was this storm the beginning of the end of summer? A raindrop touched her arm. Then another. Shafts of rain had breached the leaf canopy. Rain fell in her hair, on her shoulders, on her toes through the nylon web of her sandals. Raindrops stained the hard earth. She climbed the rise and followed the trail at the top. The rain became one with the vertical landscape. By the time she reached the open field her skin was soaked.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The sky contained no blue, just a gray haze that hung close to the tops of buildings, obscuring those elements one associated with sky—color and clouds and planes and the contrails they left, which, perhaps, were all one now, subsumed by the haze—though the sun's outline was visible where the haze brightened, a pop fly, a softball that Ferko would have dropped if he were in right field instead of gazing out the conference room window of the Riverfront suite. Inside: more haze. Lisa Becker sat at the table before a laptop, scrolling through a spreadsheet, while Greg Fletcher studied his screen. They were surrounded by Styrofoam and cardboard boxes, plastic forks and crumpled napkins, the wreckage of takeout. They'd worked late last night. Ferko had slept on a couch in reception. Now he was unshaven and ripe in his Friday clothes. It was Saturday afternoon. He was still unsure of his role. He was a sounding board for Greg's ideas and theories. Or maybe Greg was waiting for the opportune time to expose Ferko's irrelevance to Prauer. Greg's technical skills were surprisingly sound. Some guys could bullshit so well it was impossible to prove them wrong. Greg could support his conclusions with numbers. He had his own way, though, and it was hard to predict his answer.