Ghosts of Bergen County (23 page)

“It was a bad idea to turn off my phone,” she said, but she didn't believe it. She hadn't gone about it in the right way, was all. She should have issued a warning.

“Well, I'm relieved,” he said, with the sort of finality that indicated that the difficult portion of the conversation was over.

“It was a misunderstanding,” she said.

She waited, but so did her dad.

“It was unnerving,” he said after a while. “I couldn't find you.”

“I'm fine,” she said.

He gasped. Was he crying?

“Dad?”

“Tell me you're okay,” he said after another moment.

“I'm okay. I'm sick, but I'm getting better.”

“You call me. If you don't, I'll call you. Leave your ringer on. You'd better answer.”

The text messages scrolled in a long, unbroken string, symbols bunched together and piled up. She didn't think she could face them. She didn't think she could follow the tiny letters that formed the indiscernible words. There were phone calls, too. New messages waiting. She wondered whether she'd need to toss the phone and get a new number in order to stay clean. She clicked on Ferko's two-oh-one, the first number she saw. He answered on the first ring.

“You called?” she asked.

“Hey!” he nearly shouted. “Are you pissed at me?”

“For what?”

“Oh, thank
God
.”

“For what?” Then she said, “I've been sick,” which, quite suddenly, felt like a lie, self-inflicted as her condition was. When you're hungover, you don't say you're sick. You say you feel awful.

“I'm not feeling well,” she said.

“Where've you been?”

“At home.”

“I stopped by Saturday. You weren't home.”

When she didn't answer, he said, “We got busted.”

“Who?”

“Me, Tina, and Dave. Except they skated and watched me do the perp thing from a safe distance across the street. It was like Paramus all over again.”

“I didn't stick around and watch.”

“You skated.”

“
I
was holding,” she said. “You weren't.”

“This time I was.”

“Oh, shit.”

“I've never had more than a speeding ticket. Now I'm in databases. I'm probably on the no-fly list.”

She took it as a good sign he could make jokes, if those were jokes. They sounded like jokes. She took it as a good sign she could talk to Ferko about his misadventures without impulse blossoming inside her. The sliver of sky through her window was blue. The sun reflected off the dull surface of her parquet floor.

“What do you have, a cold? The flu?”

“I guess.”

“You know that sewing machine repair shop?”

“Which one?”

“How many are there? The one on your street. It's never open.”

“It is sometimes. It's kind of random.”

“Is it legit?”

“They're Bulgarians. I don't sew.”

“It says it's open from ten to four. It's not open.”

“Where
are
you?”

“I'm here. On Twelfth Street.”

“Me too,” she said.

“Small world. Get down here. Let's go.”

She kept her foot in the open door and leaned out the entryway and breathed the outdoors for the first time in days. It felt like fall. Not cool, exactly, but not hot, either. The humidity, which had been a near-constant presence since late June, was gone. An actual breeze stirred, had pushed out the bad in favor of the good, thick arrows copied and pasted onto the meteorologist's map, the jet stream a roller coaster, pushing high into Canada, along the shores of lakes where French speakers camped and moose lapped water from shallow pools, and down into New England and the Mid-Atlantic and America's largest city. Ferko was still a few doors down. He wore gray shorts and a white T-shirt with blue piping at the neckline and cuffs around his biceps, which, Jen noted with surprise, revealed definition. He hadn't shaved in days; his hair was a shock. She supposed hers looked worse. When she'd last checked beneath the dim bulb in her bathroom her complexion was pallid, her eyes sallow. Ferko looked well enough, despite having been busted two days earlier. Had he scored, after all? His pupils said no. The smile pasted above his scruffy chin infected his face with optimism. He opened his arms, oblivious to (or at least unalarmed by) her appearance, and enfolded her in them and squeezed. She let him, like a patient dog. When he let her go, his fingers encircled the braided vine inked on her wrist. “Your shoes,” he said.

She looked at her bare feet.

“Where are your shoes?”

“Upstairs.”

He waited.

“I'm sick.” There, she said it again. That little lie. She'd have to tell him, about kicking at least. He expected to get high. She knew that much.

“Come on,” she said, and he followed her into the dark hall, practically black when the door shut behind them, and up the stairs to her apartment. She let him in.

“I wasn't expecting company.”

“It's okay.” He glanced about, at the remnants of her breakfast on the coffee table, a spot of cereal and milk in the bottom of a bowl, cracker crumbs on a napkin, empty glasses from yesterday and the day before. She lay on the sofa, and Ferko took the futon. The TV played soundlessly, a commercial for a cleaning product. She reached for the remote and switched it off.

She closed her eyes. Then opened them. He was watching her. “Have you quit your job?” she asked.

“I called in sick.”

“Copycat,” she joked. “What happened Saturday?”

He shrugged, and looked around the apartment as though he'd misplaced something. Then he told her how he'd been at work Saturday, how he needed to score and couldn't reach her, so he left work and took the subway down, and still couldn't reach her but he ran into Tina and Dave, looking to cop, and Ferko tagged along with them. They bought from some white guy on Ninth, right by the precinct, it turned out. An idiotic cop spot. A black-and-white pulled up and two guys in tracksuits descended.

“Tracksuits?” she asked.

“Who wears tracksuits, right? My parents in the seventies.”

“Undercover cops in the aughts.”

“That's just weird,” he said. “
The aughts
. A hundred years ago they didn't say
the aughts
. They said
the nineteen hundreds
.”

“Did they?” She considered it. “You can't say
twenty hundreds
. That sounds stupid.”

“And
the aughts
doesn't?” He smiled.

“You're in a surprisingly good mood.”

He shrugged. “I'm glad to see you.”

She, too, felt decidedly better, cocooned rather than imprisoned, no longer isolated. The back-and-forth with Ferko helped. Her heart beat faster, her blood infused with adrenaline. She felt merely hungover. It reminded her of college on weekend mornings, rehashing the prior night's events with her roommates and the residents on her hall, when the coincidences piled one on top of the other and she was starting to see how the world worked, that there were consequences for bad behavior, but these consequences were tempered by youth and contained by the self-selecting microcosm of the Columbia campus. The strongest substance she'd used then was vodka. Now she swigged from her water bottle.

“It's a misdemeanor,” he said. “I got a desk appearance ticket.” He made air quotes. “I need to appear in September. If I don't I'm fucked.”

“Did you post bail?”

“Not required.”

“That's efficient,” she said.

“I can't believe you don't know this stuff.”

She'd always wondered about the process, but was never curious enough to figure it out. The risk seemed that remote.

“You have a lawyer?” she asked.

“Bob.”

“Bob the lawyer,” she said.

“He came up on the search engine.”

“That's how you got a lawyer?”

“Criminal possession, controlled substance, seventh degree.” He paused a second, then added, “Manhattan.”

“That's the search that produced Bob,” she concluded.

He pointed at her, a single downward motion with his index finger. A checkmark.

“I'm surprised there's not a printout taped to the wall in the perp lounge,” she said. “Or a bullpen of lawyers, queued up for well-heeled users like you.”

“Bob says disorderly conduct. Noncriminal for a first offense. They'll send me to counseling. He says it would be good to start early. That's why I'm here.”

“For counseling?”

“Bob's office is at Second and Fourteenth. I just met with him. But that's not a bad idea. Counsel me.”

“Say no to drugs?”

“Platitudes!” he said.

The sign on the back of her door—kick, confront, call Queenie—was in plain sight. She was glad that Ferko hadn't noticed or asked about it. It was clear she'd need to tell him about kicking, though it seemed impossible to explain Felix DeGrass and his brother Solomon and the possible audition with Queenie. Suddenly Jen's plan seemed overly ambitious and complicated. If one piece didn't work, none would. A wave of nausea coursed through her and she shuddered. She hoped it didn't show.

“I'm past due,” she said. “I've been lucky. Too lucky. I've used up my luck.”

“What does
that
mean?”

When she didn't answer, he said, “Let's go.”

“No.”

“You're not that sick.”

“Apparently you are, though.”

He straightened his legs, crossed one ankle over the other. He had all day.

“You haven't told her.”

He studied Jen.

“Mrs. Ferko,” she said, “about your arrest.”

When he shrugged, she said, “You
do
need counseling. Or therapy.”

“You've got the couch.”

She rolled on her side and brought her knees toward her stomach, placed her hands beneath her head on top of the pillow. She waited. That was what therapists did. They waited, then passed the tissues. She had a box in front of her on the coffee table. Jen waited, but Ferko did, too. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “You blew off work, for what—to get high?”

“I had to meet Bob.”

“
Tell
her,” Jen said, meaning Mary Beth. She'd grown weary, quite suddenly, of
Mrs. Ferko
. Yet
Mary Beth
seemed too intimate for someone she'd never met.

His shrug conveyed an air of indifference.

“You're an asshole.”

“You like to call people assholes. It's your go-to.”

“There are a lot of assholes.” She looked in his eyes in what she hoped was a meaningful way.

“How about dumbshits? Or pantloads? Or jerk-offs?”

“I'm kicking.” There, she said it. “That's what this is about.”

She'd never before thought of her apartment as quiet. There were noises in the hallway. In the units upstairs and down. Cars on the street. Even in the middle of the night, when she woke at odd hours. Now there was nothing. She watched him.

“Like, quitting?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Why?”

“Because I want to.”

“But why do you want to?”

“I can't tell you why.” It was true enough. The story of Felix DeGrass was hers alone. It would soon be the brother's. She wasn't sure how that would go. Maybe then she could tell others. Maybe Ferko. “It's really going to happen this time,” she added.

He squinched his eyes. “You've tried before?”

“Sort of.”

He crossed his arms. “You said you could quit anytime you wanted.”

“Yeah, and I never really wanted to before.”

Years ago, of course, she'd made the link between Felix's death and the dope she used. But it had taken all this time to make the link in reverse: if she could get clean, she could come clean. It was that simple. She sat up, the blanket wrapped around her legs, and tapped out a cigarette from the open pack on the coffee table. She turned the top toward him. He raised his open palm—pass. She struck a match. The tip sparked and flared. She brought the smoke into her mouth, her throat, deep into her lungs, then exhaled toward the ceiling.

He stood. “Can I get a glass of water?”

“There's a bottle in the fridge.”

“I don't want the pure stuff. I'm counting on trace amounts of drugs in the city water.” Still, she heard him rooting in the refrigerator.

She was having fun, she realized. Was it the nicotine talking? And what if it was? She'd spent the weekend denying her dependence. She'd set a goal and achieved that goal—alone—and emerged intact on a sunny Monday morning. She could add a new goal, up the stakes, and drag from the drug world the last person she'd dragged in. She didn't know the twelve steps, but she knew enough people who did. They were
noble gestures
. That was all. This one surely qualified. Plus, Jen liked its symmetry. Plus, the target was here, joking and drinking nothing harder than bottled water.

“Can you open the window?” she asked when he returned.

“Oh, thank God.” He set the bottle on the dining table, parted the thin curtains, and opened the sash.

A stereo played from a car coasting past. A dog barked. A breeze blew the curtains, which unfurled like flags.

“Remember that scene in
The Exorcist
?” Ferko asked.

Jen shook her head.

“A breeze blows through an open window and moves the curtains in the little girl's room. The audience understands that this is the moment when the girl becomes possessed.”

“Regan,” Jen said. “That's a scary movie.”

“We're afraid of the outdoors. That's what that means.”

“I'm not.”