Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  And Mary Beth began to cry, though she never cried anymore, boosted as she was with eighty-milligram doses. Yet here she was, with a tear in her eye, though not on her cheek. She dabbed it with a tissue. The camera sat on her lap. Then the lens closed.

  There was one little girl in a green turtleneck. She wore glasses with black rims. Her hair was cut to chin length, the way Mary Beth wore her hair. The shirt had long sleeves, and the girl had slipped her arms up into her sleeves and out of them so that her arms were inside the shirt and the sleeves swung empty in front of her, not even in time to the music. She didn’t sing. She turned from right to left. Then she spun all the way around to show her friends how clever she was, that she didn’t have any arms, and those around her, those who wished to be distracted, laughed, while others kept singing with shoulders and arms straight.

  If the parents had noticed Mary Beth, if they didn’t know the mother of the girl with no arms, they might have thought Mary Beth was that mother, that she was crying because her little girl was ruining the performance. Maybe the girl with no arms was notorious as a troublemaker. Maybe she’d had a difficult birth. Maybe she’d been fed formula instead of breast milk. Maybe she hadn’t been held enough as a baby. Maybe she’d been dropped by her brother. Mary Beth envisioned a strict music teacher admonishing the girl for such behavior. If she’d acted this way during rehearsals, steps could have been taken to rectify the situation before the concert. But Mrs. Laird played song after song. And the other children sang. The girl with no arms was not Mary Beth’s problem. She pulled herself together and clutched her tissue.

  There were two elementary schools in town—the School in the Glen and the School on the Ridge, a bit too clever when you considered the town itself was called Glen Wood Ridge. At least the schools’ names (and that of the town) were based on physical and tangible features like geography and elevation and not on the arbitrary naming rights exercised by an influential member of the town council or, worse, a developer. Mary Beth knew about developers. They were her clients when she’d been in practice, a world she left when the baby was born.

  Mary Beth and Gil had bought their house on Woodberry Road three years ago, when Mary Beth was six months pregnant. Woodberry was a new street, one that had replaced the last stand of trees separating the older sections of Glen Wood Ridge (the part in the Glen) from the newer sections (the part on the Ridge). Woodberry conveyed neither wood nor berry but a meandering horseshoe with amazingly precise symmetry observed once you found the satellite image on the Internet. There were four house models arranged in a pattern designed not to look like a pattern. Mary Beth and Gil chose the “Belvedere,” a Cape Cod with fiber-cement siding and dormers on the second floor and a porch with an actual swing. Mary Beth had imagined herself in the Glen, with its small commercial district and its preponderance of wood-framed Victorians and stone Tudors on the narrow streets that intersected Glen Road at funky angles, acute and obtuse, in the parlance of ninth-grade geometry.

  But the houses on Woodberry Road were new, with one other selling point: residents could choose to send their children to either the School in the Glen or the School on the Ridge.

  And the Glen was where Mary Beth was drawn, at first by herself, then with Gil, then with the baby in the jogging stroller. Mary Beth walked down Amos Avenue, then around the Glen, then back up the hill to Woodberry Road. This was her route. When the baby was twelve weeks, Mary Beth began to jog it, four days a week. The baby hit her milestones—the way babies do—more or less on time. She babbled at ten weeks. She rolled over from front to back at five months and from back to front two weeks later. She could sit on a rug without falling at six months, could clap at seven months and wave at eight months. At nine months she began to crawl. She pulled herself to her feet at ten months, and she said her first word—Hi—at eleven months. She said it a hundred times a day. She said it when she meant hello and when she meant goodbye. It came with a wave and friendly smile. She greeted Mary Beth. She greeted Gil. She greeted any stranger on the street. She greeted her reflection in the mirror.

  Milestones were important, Mary Beth had come to learn after the baby was born, because everything was quantified, from the Apgar score at birth (the baby scored nine out of nine!) to test scores in school. But Mary Beth’s favorite milestone was one she’d never read about. Her jogging route took her diagonally across the ball fields at the School in the Glen. One day, when the baby was between eight and nine months, she sang a single note—Aaaaahhhh—that broke into staccato as the stroller’s sixteen-inch tires bounced over the ruts and mounds of the imperfect earth. Mary Beth began to laugh, so much that she had to stop running and catch her breath, and the baby stopped singing and then she began to laugh. Then Mary Beth started up again, and again the baby sang her single, staccato note. And this staccato song became a regular part of the jogging route.

  And then, before the baby turned one, the milestones ceased because the baby died.

  Mary Beth jogged her regular route—across the ball fields at the School in the Glen. Sometimes she had to prompt the baby to sing, but the baby always sang. On this particular morning she sang without prompt, and Mary Beth raced across the fields to the baby’s delight. At the far end was Lyttondale Avenue, which intersected, a half block farther, with Amos Avenue, at one of the Glen’s funky intersections—acute or obtuse, depending on your direction. For Mary Beth it was obtuse, and it required her to cross Lyttondale to begin the ascent up Amos Avenue to Woodberry Road.

  There was a sidewalk on Lyttondale—there were sidewalks on all the streets in Glen Wood Ridge—but Mary Beth wasn’t on it. She was on the street, running against traffic, one tire in the gutter near the sloped curb, looking for an opportunity to cross. She glanced behind her, over her right shoulder, and waited for a truck across Lyttondale to pass. The truck slowed, and she thought for a moment he might stop and wave her over. A lot of drivers were good about yielding to pedestrians. It helped to have a stroller. But the driver of the truck hesitated, then continued on. Once he was by, she nosed the front wheel out. But she’d been preoccupied by the truck, frustrated by its hesitation, its slowing and not yielding, and she hadn’t noticed the car going up Amos Avenue that was now turning right onto Lyttondale. The blue hood blurred. There was chrome around the headlights. A thud, a jolt she felt in her arms. One moment she was holding the stroller’s handlebar and the next she wasn’t. The black bumper grabbed the front tire and dragged the stroller sideways. Then tipped it. The car stopped. The bumper released the stroller. The car waited, and Mary Beth watched, breathless, her arms in front, fingers curled to the approximate, loose circumference of the handlebar. The police report would say the car dragged the stroller thirty feet. It felt like three hundred, like it would take forever for Mary Beth to close the distance, even in her spandex and running shoes, even with her adrenaline pumping. Then the blue car steered around the stroller and sped off. And still Mary Beth couldn’t move. The stroller’s green awning looked like a discarded umbrella lying in the street. It was a sunny day. She couldn’t see her baby. She couldn’t hear her baby cry.

  “You’re still at the school?” Gil said.

  She sat on the bench at the School on the Ridge, children running circles around her. A game of tag. It had been some minutes since either Mary Beth or Gil had spoken. He was walking; she was sitting. “It’s crazy here,” she said. “I’m going to get past this line of kids.” She almost called out, Excuse me! for the sake of authenticity, but she didn’t wish to call attention to herself.

  “So, I’ll see you tonight,” she said instead.

  “Early. I’ll see you then.”

  She closed her phone. Once she would have said, I love you. Three words. She would have made a point to say them.

  It was past three thirty now. There was no sign of anyone leaving. She stood and looked for the girl with no arms. She did this from time to time, when she came to the school at dismissal. She put her flat hand over her eyes like a visor an
d scanned the crowd. She looked behind the bench, where children were scrambling up and down the hill to the side of the school. Little girls who wore glasses were few. She could find none now. She hadn’t seen the girl with no arms since the kindergarten concert. Maybe she took a bus home after school. Maybe her mother picked her up and whisked her away to an appointment for vision therapy or psychotherapy or occupational therapy. Maybe she was at home being punished for a poor report card in the final marking period. Maybe she watched TV after school because she had no friends. Maybe all the TV she watched accounted for her poor vision and inappropriate behavior.

  “Who are you looking for?”

  Mary Beth looked down, where a girl in pigtails stood squinting up at her. She was one child, by herself, no one Mary Beth knew or thought she knew. She clutched her phone in her fingers. “Catherine,” she said.

  “Oh.” The girl squinted harder. “Who’s Catherine?”

  Mary Beth realized her face was contorted. She could feel it now, as the girl regarded her. She often wished she could get outside of herself so that she could see what she was really like. She let her muscles go. She tried on a smile. “My Catherine.”

  “I don’t know Catherine.”

  Mary Beth held her smile. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” The girl turned and ran across the field.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ferko was on Sixth Avenue, on the wide sidewalk between Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth. He could see his office building now, the white façade and the blue-flecked windows. He was planning on shutting his computer down. Prauer was gone. Grove was dead. Ferko had nothing, really, to do. He would go home and investigate Mary Beth’s burst of energy. He hoped it was something sustainable, something that his presence wouldn’t quell. Maybe this weekend would shed light on things in a way that all the therapy they’d attended, both separately and together, in fits and starts, hadn’t.

  From his seat on the plane, in his descent into Newark, he’d looked for landmarks—I-287 or the Parkway—but found only farms and fields, industrial parks and towns, residential developments buffered from other developments and highways by thin stands of trees. A pastiche, random and indiscernible. And if you were in this landscape, you could have looked up into the sky and watched the plane descend. Unless you heard the brakes squeal and your attention was drawn to the street, where the blue car dragged the green stroller, paused, and then left.

  Now there was a break in traffic, and he crossed Sixth Avenue. His phone rang, a number he didn’t recognize. He answered anyway.

  “Ferko?” There was interference, other voices competing with the caller.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Shit.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Jen.”

  “Jen? Where are you?”

  “Fuck.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got hit by a car.”

  “Jesus. Are you okay?”

  “I’m scraped, but my bike’s fucked. Can you come here?”

  “Of course. Where’s here?”

  “Where’s here? Fifth and Thirty-Eighth.”

  “Where’re the police?”

  “No police.”

  “What about the driver?”

  “Here, looking like a moron. He’s Chinese. Doesn’t speak English, or pretends not to. His daughter is drawing flowers on the sidewalk with chalk. He offered me three hundred dollars. I’m asking for five. He’s got it. I saw his wallet.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay? If he walks—”

  “No police,” she said. “No doctors. I know what I’m doing.”

  Ferko was standing on the curb, just north of his building, when Lisa Becker and George Cosler emerged from the revolving door. They turned and walked south. Coffee? Cocktails?

  “Can you come?” Jen asked.

  “I’m on my way,” Ferko said, and he recrossed Sixth Avenue.

  He found Jen ten blocks later, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with the bike before her, like an abstract sculpture. Her elbow was bleeding. She held a piece of paper against it. Her shoulder was scraped. She could have written a sign on cardboard, shaken a cup, and collected money.

  She saw him and stood. “I asked for five and he gave me seven. I really don’t think he understood what I was saying. I could have done better. I should have acted crazy. Oh, well. I’m rich.”

  “You don’t look rich.” Her pants were torn at the ankle. The bike’s front tire was flat, the wheel bent. The chain was off the front sprocket and lay on the sidewalk like a dead snake.

  “Well, I am.”

  “Let’s see this.” He touched a corner of the paper she held to her arm. It was printer paper, folded in quarters. She turned from him, but pulled the paper away to reveal the cut, which wasn’t deep, but big—about four inches up, across her elbow, and three inches wide. He thought he saw the United States, turned on its side, in the outline.

  “Not bad,” she said. They admired it. “I’ll have to put my mannequin aspirations on hold.”

  “Wear long sleeves.”

  “The fall lines don’t come out until July.” She looked at him. “Get a cab, will you? Something big enough for a bike?”

  “You’re keeping it?”

  “Yeah, I’m keeping it.”

  “You’ve got seven hundred dollars. Get a new bike. One with gears.”

  She shooed him with her fingers. “Get the cab. No one’s gonna pick up a bleeding woman with a broken bike.”

  And so he did, a full-size van that fit the bike on the floor when Ferko wedged the bent wheel over the backseat. He got grease on his fingers, and he rode to Jen’s place with the backs of his wrists on his thighs, fingers in the air, like a surgeon after scrubbing.

  She lived in the East Village, on Twelfth Street. The cab cost nine dollars, but the driver didn’t have change for Jen’s hundred-dollar bill. Ferko paid.

  He retrieved the bike from the back. Her building was a walk-up, and he carried the broken bicycle to the fourth floor. She keyed the door, which had three locks. She used only one.

  “Set the bike in the corner,” she instructed.

  “This chain is a mess. Do you want me to put anything under it? Newspaper?”

  “Ha, ha. You’re funny.”

  He knew that he wasn’t. But Jen was. Both ha-ha funny and strange. Enigmatic was the word. It made him uncomfortable. What was he doing in her apartment, anyway?

  He kicked some books and papers out of the way and leaned the bike against the wall, behind where the door had swung open. He propped the bent wheel against the frame. The floor was wood, parquet, the tiles loose beneath the molding, where the wall met the floor.

  The apartment was a studio, a single room that was smaller than his bedroom, a kitchen with a half wall, and a closet you walked through to get to the bathroom. In the center of the main area was a rug, a nearly square section of red shag. Ferko followed Jen into the kitchen, where roaches scrambled on the counters and ducked for cover. She ran the faucet and turned her elbow under the water.

  “Do you have bandages and disinfectant?” he asked.

  “Are you kidding?” she said. The water ran. “Do you remember my dad, Dr. Yoder?”

  “Vaguely.” Ferko squinted. An image came to him of a short man with straight, black hair. “Did he have a beard?”

  “He still does. He was an ER doc at Valley. He sends me a first-aid kit every year. I’ve never had a need. I finally get to use one. He’ll be thrilled.”

  “I thought he was a rabbi.”

  “Ha! That’s a good one. I’ll tell him you said that.”

  In fact, Ferko wasn’t sure if he’d ever contemplated anything about Dr. Yoder. But now that he had the image in his head, rabbi seemed right. That or Hasid. Something bookish. Not an ER doctor.

  Jen splashed water, pumped soap from the dispenser onto a dish towel, and went to work on the wound. “Can you grab one of those kit
s? They’re on top of the cabinet in the bathroom.”

  He poked his head inside the closet, a walk-in with no door. Her clothes hung haphazardly on wire hangers from two wood poles supported by brackets, above which a single white shelf held cardboard boxes, a dozen or so, stacked to the ceiling. Clothes lay on the floor, flung there after use or having fallen from hangers. Two nested laundry baskets leaned against the wall in the corner.

  The bathroom was tiled—blue and green. It reminded Ferko of a fish tank, though one with a darker hue. It didn’t help that she’d duct-taped a green plastic trash bag over the window. He turned on the faucet to wash the bicycle grease from his hands. There was no soap at the sink, but he found a sliver on the edge of the bathtub. He dried his hands with a peach-colored towel. Then he found the kits, five or so, uniform in size, on the cabinet above the toilet. He selected the top one and took it to her.

  She was sitting on the sofa when he returned, a clean paper towel on her arm. “What do you need?” he asked, and opened the kit on the cushion next to her.

  “Cotton balls.” She stood and went through the closet into the bathroom.

  A drawer opened and shut, and she returned with several cotton balls smushed in her fist. She rolled them onto the open lid of the first-aid kit like dice.

  “Have a seat,” she said.

  When he didn’t, she said, “There’s beer in the fridge.” She looked up at him, hovering. “I’ll take one if you’re going.”

  Ferko put his hands in his pockets. “Medicinal purposes,” he said.

  She grimaced.

  The refrigerator was half-size, like you’d find in a college dorm room. There was a Styrofoam box of takeout and four bottles of beer. He grabbed two. The roaches were back on the counter, paying Ferko no mind. The bottles were twist-offs. He didn’t see a trash can. He was afraid of what he might find under the sink, so he left the caps on the counter with the roaches.