Ghosts of Bergen County (15 page)

They ordered sodas, then adjourned to the unisex bathroom, up a flight of ten stairs, each stair gaining, it seemed, a single degree of both temperature and humidity, so that the windowless room at the top, past the sink, where the wood door swung shut and locked with a hook and eye, lacked almost all oxygen. “Let's make this quick,” she said, and pulled from her bag a compact and a Baggie and cut lines with a pen cap. There was enough room only for a toilet and two standing adults. She snorted two lines with a fiver. Then she cut two more lines for him, which he snorted in rapid succession. Then they descended the stairs into the cool of the café and the drinks on the table in tall glasses with ice and rainbow straws, and they waited for something to happen.

She sipped her soda and he sipped his.

After a time, he said, “I thought of something else.”

“What else did you think about?”

“The guy who hit my daughter with his car.”

She knew, of course, what he was thinking about. Once a week, since their crazy night out, they'd gotten together and gotten high, sans the live modeling or shoplifting. Instead, they talked. Then they went out, sometimes to a club to see a band she knew and sometimes to a party thrown by someone else she knew, or someone who knew someone she knew. And it was then, in the late evening hours, in her element—in a rock 'n' roll club or at a party in the basement of some warehouse—when she realized she had to use less. Or even stop. What would that feel like?

Now, it was just starting: the feeling of normal, of warmth, mingling with the cool on her skin. The hairs on her arms stood erect. Outside, through Ivy's window, there was actual sunlight on the bricks across Houston Street. Yes, it was optimism that swelled in her chest, dampened only by the shapeless sense of disappointment that it wouldn't be enough. That it was never enough.

“I thought you said you didn't know it was a guy,” she said, unable to resist the non sequitur.

“I'm using
guy
the way I use
Coke
.” He lifted his glass.

“That is a Coke,” she pointed out.

“But suppose it wasn't. Suppose they had Pepsi here. I'd still call this a Coke, even though it wouldn't be as good as a Coke.”

She resisted the urge to talk.

“Or take it a step further,” he said. “It could be Sprite or Mountain Dew or Dr Pepper. It doesn't matter.
Coke
means soft drink and
guy
means person—”

“Okay,” she interrupted him.

“In this case,
driver
.”

“Okay, but why do you do that? Call sodas Cokes? You're from New Jersey. You're not supposed to do that.”

He shrugged. “My mom did. She was from Connecticut. I try to take all my life lessons from her, not my dad or my brother.”

“I always wanted a sibling.”

“I always wanted a sister.”

“You got one,” Jen said, meaning her.

But Ferko didn't acknowledge or register the gesture. Instead, he shook his head. “I just remembered my dream last night.”

“The
guy
,” she reminded him, “the
driver
.”

“First this.” He licked his lips. “It's a recurring dream. I have this huge stone house. It goes on, like, forever. I'm always discovering new rooms. Sometimes the roof leaks when it rains. But the real problem is the basement. Sometimes the back door is missing. Sometimes it doesn't lock. Sometimes I forget to lock it. And I feel exposed, because anyone can just come in, and, since the house is so big, anyone could hide for a long time and never be discovered. I live in the house with a girl. She's not Catherine. At least I don't think she is. She's older, but still a girl. She's a daughter, or like a daughter. Mary Beth isn't there. Never. It's just me and this girl. My daughter. My dream daughter. And a lot of the time I'm anxious with the leaking roof and the basement door that won't shut, but last night we were looking out a second-floor window, and it was like we were in a tree house in a forest. It was summer, and the leaves on the trees were thick and green.”

The door swung open and shut. Two guys she didn't know. Jen trespassed in basements in her recurring dream. Ferko guarded against trespassers in his. Greg Fletcher destroyed evidence in his. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“Because it was beautiful. I felt good when I woke up this morning. And I feel good now.”

She shrugged. “I don't dream.”

“You dream. You just can't remember them.”

“I don't think I do.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No. I don't.” She clenched her jaw like she meant business. “You were going to tell me something about the driver of the car.”

His eyes followed a patron ascending the stairs to pee or to use. “He was probably scared.”

She waited for more.

“I forgot to say that last time, I think, in my whole speech about how it didn't matter whether the driver stopped or not, because the baby was dead.”

“Catherine,” Jen said.

“The baby,” Ferko said. “It's easier to say.”

“‘The baby' makes it sound like a thing.”

“A baby is not a thing.”

“It is in this context.”

“Shut
up
,” he said.

“I can't.” She let out a tight, inexplicable laugh, one that wouldn't have escaped only five minutes before. It came from her throat, mouth, and nose, pushed by air expelled from her lungs—quick, fleeting, benign.

“We're talking,” he admitted.

She ran her finger along the edge of the wood table and found the notch she'd carved late at night years ago with the pocketknife her boyfriend had carried, just in case. His name was Steve, which he'd carved on the wall of a booth two back, probably with the same knife Jen had used. His name was still there, but he never came around anymore, and hadn't for years.

“Do you think about him?” she asked, meaning the driver.

“I'm thinking about him now.”

“What would you ask him? Assuming you wouldn't punch him in the jaw.”

Ferko raised his face, tipped his chin toward the stairs that led to the bathroom, where the air was stale and hot. Only his pupils—narrowed to pencil points—reminded her of the maelstrom in his blood. She felt hers surge, a fresh wave of fineness, and she was thankful now that, no matter what he said, things would be okay.

“I'd like to know where he was going.” Ferko worried his face. “Wait,” he said, “that sounds wrong.” He lowered his eyes to the table, where Jen was still working her finger into the notch she'd cut.

“I don't wish to presume,” he said, “to judge the driver's errand.”

She joined her hands around the base of her glass, like a scarf around a neck, his eyes fixed on the gouge she'd abandoned.

“I only want facts,” he continued, “and only to confirm my theory, the way I think about this.” He looked at her with his crazy eyes. “I guess I'd like to know where he was going.” He shrugged, an indifference that belied his wish. “I'd like to know about that last traffic light, the one before that intersection. There's a light at Glen and Amos, and I wonder whether he rushed to beat it or stopped when he could have run it. One or the other. You see, it's not good or bad. I'd just like to know.”

“I get it,” she said.

“Because it's fate,” he said. “That's my theory. Almost by default.”

“Fate,” she repeated, remembering the day last month when she'd detoured west on her old bike to Felix's building, stood on the sidewalk on Twenty-Fifth, the approximate spot where Felix had died, and spotted the flyer for play auditions just as Greg Fletcher called, pitching lunch with Ferko. Queenie still hadn't called about an audition. Perhaps she never would. Jen had the phone number in her bag, zipped in the pocket with the postage stamps.

“Like if I knew what the errand was,” Ferko was saying. “Maybe he was going to the dry cleaner, and he usually went on Tuesday, but instead he went on Wednesday and that was the morning, and that was the morning that Mary—” He stopped himself. “You get it,” he said.

“Yeah, but he might not have been from town, right? He might have just been passing through.”

He gazed past her, as though weighing this development against the version he held. Glasses clinked in the booth behind her.

“Maybe,” he said. “But it doesn't matter. It doesn't change the theory. The beauty of fate is there's no way to prove or disprove it. It just is. Like those guys you read about who've booked tickets on doomed flights only to miss the plane because of something silly, like a flat tire on the way to the airport.”

“Or the opposite. They miss their flight and get stuck on the doomed flight.”

“That never happens,” he said.

She laughed, and he laughed with her.

She said, “I'm not sure that helps your argument.”

“It helps,” he said, squelching his laugh.

“Do you ever wonder,” she asked, “what he'd like to ask
you
?”

And with that question, Ferko's laugh recommenced, high in his throat and exiting his mouth from the side, like the sniggering of a cartoon dog.

She almost followed his lead but caught herself. “I'm serious.”

“I'm sure you are.”

“Then stop it.”

But it had picked up again. She gave it some time to die down.

“I've never thought about it,” he said, when it did.

“Well, think about it.”

Felix DeGrass had a brother, Solomon, a theater professor at Princeton. Jen had thought about what she'd want to ask Solomon.

“How about, ‘Do you forgive me?'” Jen said. “That would be good to know.”

“This is what the driver's supposed to ask me?” Ferko's expression was incredulous, bordering on grotesque. “He'd have to show himself and risk jail. People don't do that. It would be stupid.”

“I don't think it would be stupid.”

“What does it matter, anyway? I'm aggrieved, not him.”

“You don't know that.”

“I don't care.”

She'd been following Solomon DeGrass for years. Not physically, but electronically, from a safe distance, from whatever downtown space in which she happened to dwell, or from her terminal at the trading desk, after the London Metal Exchange closed. It was an easy thing to do; he had an unusual name. He'd graduated from Harvard with a degree in biology in 1996, from Florida State with a master's in theater in 2002 and a PhD in 2004. Now he taught adjunct at Princeton. His CV was the first hit when you searched his name. In spring, he'd taught two courses, one in the 100s, called Contemporary Playwrights, and another, an upper-class course called The 1950s: Ahead of the Revolution. Now it was summer, and it wasn't clear what he was doing or where he was doing it. Given his interests, though, how far could his field research take him from Manhattan?

He was nearby. He had to be. She'd always assumed so, anyway, within a day's trip of the city by car or train. The proximity was comforting, an ever-present and necessary opportunity. It didn't matter that she never made plans to see him, because the opportunity remained, static, like the bricks on the buildings now bathed in the sun across Houston. But something had shifted the day she met Ferko for lunch and he told her the unexpected story of his baby getting hit by a car. And how the driver left. It was inexplicable, to leave like that. Whenever Ferko talked about it, he described it as if the collision wasn't even the driver's fault, though speed was a factor. Even the clear crime—the leaving—was mentioned as an
oh-by-the-way
. But from Jen's perspective, sitting across the lunch table in the Friday afternoon buzz and relative sobriety of one and a half Bloody Marys, listening to the almost-whispered retelling, it seemed a cold, cruel gesture, for the driver to leave.

Ferko didn't care, but what about Solomon? Did he forgive her?

She'd left by the stairs, from the roof to the lobby, fourteen flights, if she remembered correctly. It must have taken several minutes, back and forth and back and forth in the stairwell, and when she got to the lobby she was dizzy and disoriented, panting and drunk, nauseated. She left by the door on Eighth Avenue and turned south, only to realize that Felix had fallen onto the sidewalk on Twenty-Fifth, north. It was barely 6:00
AM
, but there were people out already, sober people, Sunday morning people, walking on the sidewalk north, toward the intersection with Twenty-Fifth. She imagined pieces of him there. His beautiful face broken. She ran south, around the corner at Twenty-Fourth, and threw up on the curb. Then she walked and kept walking. Between Sixth and Seventh she heard a siren.

Five and a half hours she'd known him. At the club the night before she'd wandered off from her friends—two guys, both gay—and bumped into him, literally, at the bar. He was a playwright celebrating his first staged reading earlier that night in a warehouse south of Times Square. He was almost her age. He wished to direct. And she told him about her time at Columbia, how she was involved in the theater program there and regretted getting away from it. Now she traded commodities. How boring, right?

He turned toward the bar, the direction she was facing, and placed his forearms across its polished edge, an elaborate gesture of non-judgment. He pointed to her empty glass, where there was only ice and a spent wedge of lime. “Gin or vodka?”

“Vodka.”

He ordered for her, Scotch for himself. Then he bent an elbow and ran his finger through his errant strands of misbehaving locks and tucked them behind his ear.

His play was about a dead girl and her ghost. “My dad writes about ghosts,” she said, and he told her his ghost stories and she told him her dad's. They talked ghosts until after her friends found her and said goodbye (they didn't get an introduction) and after his friends found him and said goodbye (they didn't get an introduction, either). And Jen and Felix shared his last glass of Scotch and cabbed down Ninth Avenue to his place, where there was a roof deck and, it being already four thirty and summer and a clear night and all, wouldn't it be nice to see the sunrise? When was the last time she'd seen the sunrise? She told him she couldn't recall, although it had been only a year earlier, at a beach house on Long Island, but she didn't wish him to associate her with unimaginative pursuits like a beach house, the post-college version of a frat house, especially coming on the heels of her revelation that she was a metals trader. They took the elevator up and stopped at his apartment. She waited in the hall while he grabbed a bottle of Scotch, two glasses, and an ice tray from the freezer. Then they took the elevator to the top floor, found the stairwell, and took it to the roof.