by Dana Cann
She opened the door, and Gil followed. They were ten steps down the hall when Solomon called out: “Who are you?”
They turned. He was standing in the doorway, backlit like a rock star.
“Ghosts,” she said.
Some lies were truer than some truths. But with this one told, she’d never felt more alive.
The train trestled over swamps. Lower Manhattan gleamed though the window with too much blue sky, the empty space where the towers once stood. It was Friday, payday. If Jen had gone to work, she’d be off now, preparing for the weekend. People left Manhattan in August. They went to beaches on Long Island or the shore in New Jersey. Or they quit completely and traveled the globe. Jen preferred an empty city to a crowded beach. She felt the pull of the old routines. A couple clicks on her phone and she’d score. But there was no signal here, in the swamps beneath the electrical right-of-way. She couldn’t go back now, anyhow.
It had been unnerving, seeing Ferko. Had he followed her? It had seemed possible, as she trailed him back inside the arts center and up the stairs to the second floor and the quiet hallway to Solomon’s office. She’d kept her distance as the woman—Mary Beth—knocked on Solomon’s door, and he let them in after some discussion and closed the door. It had seemed possible later, after raised voices, when the door opened again, and Ferko and Mary Beth emerged from the office, and Solomon called out a question so basic—“Who are you?”—she wondered if the interaction were occurring in reverse, if this were the coming rather than the going. Jen couldn’t hear the answer, yet she could have stepped from the shadows and provided her own. Who was easy. Why was the question. Yet she couldn’t ask. Not yet. Solomon closed his office door, and Jen followed Ferko and Mary Beth from a safe distance. Had she been following all along? They walked quickly, bounced down the steps like undergrads. She remembered the dead baby and the grief they carried. It wasn’t evident. She followed them through the front door and blinked in the bright sunshine. She lowered her sunglasses. They crossed the street to the corner where Jen had first spotted them, and continued on. Still, Jen followed—dodged traffic and peered around the corner of the coffee shop, as they climbed into a hatchback, Ferko in the driver seat, Mary Beth in the passenger seat, pulled out, and drove away.
Which meant, of course, that they hadn’t followed her, that they’d come on their own. Which meant what?
Now she checked her phone. It was a mile or two, as the gull flies, to Battery Park. Yet there was no signal. It astounded her. She’d received texts all week from friends asking what was up. She’d answered each with a single word: kicking, to which her friends responded: ? or ! or ?!?. The pace of those texts had slowed, but now, with Friday night looming, they’d picked up again, before she’d lost her signal. The new entreaties were more cautious: drink? But Jen knew, too well, the laws of gravity, how drinks with certain friends in old haunts would lead to using. She wished to call her dad, but now she’d have to wait until she cleared the power lines, perhaps the tunnel into Penn Station. She’d buy a pack of cigarettes and a ticket to Edgefield, a Friday commute with unknown adults. She didn’t know what to make of Ferko in Princeton. Shapes had drifted like floaters in her eyes since Greg Fletcher had reentered her life and Ferko had followed with his enigmatic wife and dead baby. Had she made any progress connecting them? She was clean. She’d made the pilgrimage to Princeton and Felix’s brother. She’d confronted that part of it. But there was more. It wasn’t over. Ferko and Mary Beth’s presence today told her that. First she’d call her dad. Then discover what was next. Maybe one day, even one day soon, she’d use again, but she couldn’t yet, before she’d even had a chance to begin not to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It didn’t take Ferko long, leaning against the metal filing cabinet in the tiny office in Princeton, to recognize that Mary Beth was grilling Dr. DeGrass the way Jen had once urged Ferko—when they were at Ivy’s on Houston Street after snorting dope in the unisex bathroom upstairs—to imagine grilling the driver of the blue car. And in that instant, when he recognized that Mary Beth was substituting Dr. DeGrass for the driver of the blue car, Ferko realized that the questions he’d posed to Jen those weeks ago at Ivy’s were the wrong questions. He’d wanted to know the circumstances that led the driver to the right turn from Amos Avenue to Lyttondale Avenue in the Glen at precisely the moment when Mary Beth pushed the stroller into the street. He’d wanted to know where the driver was coming from and where he was going. Now it felt like what he’d wanted was a cop-out, an excuse to collect useless information. Because fate—at least Ferko’s theory about fate—worked only to a certain point, after which you had to play the hand you were dealt. Fate was no longer part of it. And that was what Mary Beth was doing, in that moment, in Solomon DeGrass’s office. She was owning it, taking control. There were things you could control and things you couldn’t. Fate went only so far. Ferko remembered his conclusion—the driver’s leaving was a decision, and that decision was wrong.
And it mattered.
But the questions he’d asked Mary Beth a dozen different times in a dozen different ways in the last two years didn’t. Why, went one version, push a stroller on a street when there’s a sidewalk, buffered from the traffic by a curb and a stripe of grass? But he saw now how that was like asking Amanda why she was riding her bike in the woods. It was obvious why, which led him to another question: Why hadn’t he recognized that before?
He still felt Amanda’s presence in the house, even if her presence was less tangible, less apparent. When he’d asked Mary Beth about Amanda today, on the way to Dr. Yoder’s, she’d confirmed his sense of things. What about the woods below the School on the Ridge, Ferko had asked. Mary Beth had abandoned them because Amanda had, too. “I miss her,” Mary Beth had said, “but she’s not really gone.”
Now they sat at a round table, four of them—Dr. Yoder, Jen, Ferko, and Mary Beth—on the deck beside the pool in Dr. Yoder’s backyard. The table was metal, and the chairs were, too, with enough heft that they wouldn’t blow over in a storm. The table had a hole in the center, where an umbrella could go, but there wasn’t one. Perhaps it had worn out over the years. Perhaps it was unneeded, given the shade provided by the tall trees at the edge of Dr. Yoder’s property. The table was in the shade. Half the pool was.
The water was clean, its surface skimmed of debris, even though the occasional leaf high up turned and fell. A few yellow ones had collected where the patio met the stone wall on which the faceless couples had sat in the shadows and made out at the high school graduation party Ferko had attended twenty years ago. There was beer then. Now he drank lemonade with ice poured from a glass pitcher. The cold front from a week ago was gone. The heat and humidity had crept up, as they tended to do in summer after fronts had passed and the clockwise circulation allowed the sultry air from the south to be carried again up the coast. They hadn’t brought their swimsuits.
“Why not?” Dr. Yoder looked wounded.
“Come on, Dad,” Jen said.
“She hasn’t been in the pool in ten years.”
“Ummm. Actually, it’s been fifteen.”
“You used to love it.”
“When I was a kid!”
Dr. Yoder shrugged. “I like to swim.”
Jen refilled her glass. Her eyes were unreadable behind her sunglasses. She hadn’t yet made it clear why she’d asked them over, why it was paramount that Mary Beth, whom Jen and Dr. Yoder had never met before, accompany Ferko. Jen had called the night before with the invitation.
“What’d you do today?” she’d asked.
Ferko, who didn’t wish to explain the trip to Princeton, said, “Nothing.” Then, “What about you?”
“Same.”
Now Jen pushed out her chair and stepped onto the stone wall and over it, onto the grass abutting it. “Tell my dad about your ghost.” She retrieved a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and a book of matches. “He’s an expert.”
“Enthusiast,” Dr. Yoder said,
“not expert.”
“I read your story,” Mary Beth told him, “about the boy in the basement in Washington Heights.”
“The first ghost story I ever heard,” he said.
Jen struck a match.
Dr. Yoder turned his head like a squirrel. “Cigarettes.”
She lit the tip and shook out the match and pointed it at her dad. “He used to smoke.” She exhaled.
“When I was young.”
“He misses it.”
“Nostalgia.”
“How about that?” She took a drag. “A doctor who smoked.”
“We all did.” His useless eyes appeared fixed on Ferko’s shoulder. “I could tell you we didn’t know any better, but we actually did.”
There was a pause. Ferko smelled the tang of Jen’s cigarette and felt its subtle pull, fingers tugging a loose thread beneath his chest. He felt he could unravel, the sensation no longer urgent but chronic.
“Tell me about your ghost,” Dr. Yoder said.
“Amanda,” Mary Beth said.
“Amanda.”
“She was six when she died.”
“So young.”
“In 1983.”
“And recent.”
Jen held her pose—elbow bent, cigarette wedged between her first two fingers, empty fist on her hip. Ferko remembered her description of her punk band, the Mannequins, how she’d hold poses with a lit cigarette wedged between her fingers while the musicians and audience thrashed about. But now she brought the cigarette to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled, before resuming her pose. She was listening, that was all—her entire body leaning in the direction of the table where Ferko sat with Mary Beth and Dr. Yoder, less like a mannequin than a flower whose stalk leaned toward the sun, its petals opening—as Mary Beth told Dr. Yoder the circumstances of Amanda’s death.
“You’ve got details.” He sounded impressed.
“Library research,” Mary Beth said.
“Excellent!”
Ferko hoped to steer the conversation, eventually, toward collective burden. Whose was Amanda? The DeGrass brothers’, certainly. Possibly the grandmother’s. But then Amanda’s spirit had stayed, even as Solomon had grown and left town and landed in Princeton, even as his brother had died, even as Amanda’s grandmother had died, too, her estate settled, the property sold, the house razed, the trees cleared, the earth shaped, a curved stripe of paved asphalt named Woodberry Road, lined with a few dozen houses built from four models, including the Belvedere, a Cape Cod with fiber-cement siding and dormers. A blue one on the parcel that would become 4540 Woodberry was purchased by Gil and Mary Beth Ferko. Was Amanda a presence then, when they first moved in? Her presence became prominent only after the woman gave birth to a baby girl and after the baby girl was killed. And whose collective burden was Amanda then? There was a connection between the baby’s death and Amanda’s presence in their lives. Collective burden was larger, somehow, than Ferko understood. Perhaps larger than Dr. Yoder understood.
Mary Beth was telling the story of first meeting Amanda, how she was just another girl on a crowded playground on the last day of school. But something was missing—a parent or caregiver. Then she ran across the field and into the woods, and Mary Beth followed. Dr. Yoder cocked his ear. Jen stepped closer on the grass side of the stone wall.
In sunny Florida, Ferko imagined, the collective burden at Grove headquarters had become fierce. This was the price for profiting from another’s death. At Riverfront, too, where Greg had pitched (and Prauer had accepted) a switch from seller to buyer, where Greg had arrived with the other side’s intel and come up with a too-high price. And Ferko realized, quite suddenly, that his value to Prauer all these years was skepticism and cynicism. Prauer was paying too much for Grove. The lenders agreed. There was no other way to prove it until Prauer lost his shirt.
Now the e-mail stream from Riverfront had been stanched, even from Lisa, Ferko’s last ally. He was out, possibly fired, a ghost himself, a name in random files.
“You spoke to Amanda?” Dr. Yoder was asking.
“Every day,” Mary Beth said.
“Amazing.”
“She lived with her grandmother in a house that preceded the developments up the hill, on the Ridge. It was the 1980s, and the grandmother still kept chickens in her front yard. The house was set back from the road a good distance. The house and the chickens were a curiosity. Kids came by to see them. Up on the Ridge they lived in ranch houses that were built in the sixties. You can see the city from up there.”
“On a clear day,” Ferko interjected.
“I remember,” Dr. Yoder said, “catching a glimpse of Midtown, occasionally, driving north of here. It was a surprise even when you expected it.”
“These kids,” Mary Beth said, “could see the skyline, then ride their bikes down the hill to check out the chickens pecking in the dirt around Amanda’s house. It was like going back in time.”
Jen crushed her cigarette with her sandal, and stepped over the stone wall and back onto the pool deck.
“There were two boys—brothers—who came to Amanda’s house one day. The older brother, Felix, grabbed a chicken and rode off.”
“Felix,” Jen said.
“Amanda chased them into the woods on her bike. She lost control down a ravine and crashed into a tree.” Mary Beth dipped her head. “That’s how she died.”
Dr. Yoder pursed his lips. Jen appeared placid, indifferent. Ferko imagined a thousand needs raging behind her dark lenses.
“Felix who?” she asked.
“DeGrass,” Mary Beth said. “We met the brother, Solomon, yesterday.”
Jen lifted her sunglasses and balanced them on top of her head. She wasn’t high—her pupils were too wide—but something was wild and desperate there. She was still trying to kick, perhaps.
“When Amanda hit the tree,” Mary Beth continued, “they rode home and left her, and never told anyone.”
“Fascinating.” Dr. Yoder cocked his head. “Jen, will you get my tape recorder from the study?”
But she stayed, her hands at her sides, the book of matches wedged between two fingers like a cigarette. She might have been staring at Mary Beth. Or her father. It was impossible to tell.
“What did the brother tell you?” Dr. Yoder asked.
“Not much,” Mary Beth said.
“He showed us the door,” Ferko said.
“And he ranted about a script,” Mary Beth said.
“A script?” Dr. Yoder asked.
“Like we’d read a play, or seen a movie.” She looked at Ferko, but he had nothing to add. He’d been baffled by the notion of a script. “He didn’t believe we knew Amanda,” she said.
“How could he?” Dr. Yoder asked. “Jen, the tape recorder, please.”
It was noon, the middle of August. Everything was still—the hot air, the leaves in the trees, the water glassed on the pool’s surface. And Jen Yoder, the mannequin, who didn’t move or even blink.
But only in that moment. In the next she was running toward the house. Mary Beth glanced up. Dr. Yoder tipped his head toward the retreating thwacks of Jen’s sandals on the slate patio.
She pushed open the back door and disappeared.
Dr. Yoder shrugged. Ferko had a notion to go to her. He hesitated, but then did, and found her in the kitchen, sitting on a stool, elbows on the counter, a phone pressed to her ear. In a moment she pulled the phone back, checked its screen, then placed it on a folded piece of paper.
“Jen.”
Her shoulders twitched, but she didn’t turn around.
“What if I told you,” she said, “that I was driving the car that killed your baby?”
Ferko watched her.
“What are you—” he started.
“Would you forgive me?”
“But you weren’t.”
“But what if I was, hypothetically?”
“Why are you—”
“Hypothetically,” she said.
“Hypothetically, I�
��d ask you why you left.” He moved to the other side of the counter to face her.
“Because I was scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Of what I’d find. Of my role in the whole fucked-up business.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
She unfolded the piece of paper that lay beneath the phone and handed it to him. It took him a moment to process what it was. Then he recognized the name and the room number from the Lewis Center for the Arts.
“He’s not in today,” she said. “Or he’s not answering calls from stalkers.”
Ferko waited for what would come next.
“I was in Princeton yesterday, too,” she said. “I saw you there. I thought you’d followed me, but now I wonder whether I followed you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I.”
They found her father’s cassette recorder on the desk next to his computer. It was black, with a scratched plastic case, a built-in mic, and five buttons, each as big as a thumb. Ferko supposed it had been here, in this study, for decades. It had been here the night of Jen’s graduation party, and further back, too, when Ferko was a boy, trailing Greg Fletcher around the ball fields behind their elementary school.
Now Ferko trailed Jen outside, to the patio, where Dr. Yoder was asking Mary Beth when she’d last seen Amanda.
“It’s been a few weeks,” Mary Beth said. She shot Ferko a look that asked him where the hell he’d been.
Jen placed the cassette deck on the table between them, along with the power cord. “There’s no place to plug it in.”
“The battery’s good.” Dr. Yoder patted the machine with his fingers splayed. Then, in one deft motion, he pressed the REC and PLAY buttons simultaneously. A red light lit and the wheels turned the cassette tape. “See?” he asked.
He faced the machine, as though addressing it: “August 18, 2007. Interview with Mary Beth and Gil Ferko, regarding a ghost, a six-year-old girl named Amanda who died in 1983 in Glen Wood Ridge, New Jersey. Amanda once lived in a house, since razed, in the approximate spot of the Ferkos’ house, which was built in …” Dr. Yoder paused for an answer.
