Ghosts of Bergen County by Dana Cann Read Free Book Online

asked her to call him. And here she was doing both at once. He didn’t know what it meant. “I’ll be home early tonight,” he said.
    â€œOkay.” She didn’t sound convinced.
    â€œWe could go out.”
    â€œOut?”
    â€œOut.”
    â€œDon’t push it.”
    â€œOkay.” He heard voices in the background, the shouts of children. “A picnic,” he said. “I can get sandwiches at Nora’s.”
    â€œReally, don’t. I’m out. I’ll be home soon.”
    â€œYou’re fine?”
    â€œI’m just tired.” A scream. In the background. A bona fide shriek.
    â€œWhere are you?” He didn’t mean to sound suspicious, but still.
    â€œThe School on the Ridge. Everyone’s hanging out. The ice cream man is parked at the curb like a crack dealer.”
    â€œYou should get yourself a treat.”
    â€œThe line’s too long.”
    He was standing on the sidewalk. People pushed past. He followed them, west toward Sixth Avenue. Through the earpiece, the shouts and shrieks of kids grew louder. On his end, a car horn blared. He didn’t know what it meant that she was outside and calling. He didn’t know what it meant that he’d told Jen Yoder, someone he barely knew, about Catherine. He didn’t know what it meant, and now he didn’t know what to say. It occurred to him that if he were there, physically, with Mary Beth, he’d merely have walked beside her. He didn’t need to speak. His presence, distant as it was, borne by the electrical currents that sifted through the air, was enough.

CHAPTER SIX
    She sat on a bench, a woman in her midthirties, at the edge of the elementary school playground, where there were lots of women her age, give or take a few years—dozens, in fact, not counting the nannies, who kept to themselves. But these other women, the mothers—distracted by the responsibility of finding their children in the blur of children, by the persistent requests for snacks and playdates, by the injuries that seemed, for certain children, as inevitable as the kisses their mothers imparted on their elbows, by the news from school, the bits of neighborhood gossip, by the cries of the younger siblings, the ones who wanted in (or out of) their strollers—didn’t pay any mind to the woman on the bench. She’d always been one of those people others didn’t approach—an introvert, shy, and though such shyness was often a burden (like at a party), she was grateful for it now.
    When she was young, in summer, when other kids would hang out at the pool, Mary Beth had wished for rain. She liked to stay indoors and watch the puddles form in the backyard, where the drainage was poor. People who weren’t shy didn’t understand why someone would rather stare out the sliding glass door of the family room and watch the rain fall than spend a hot, sunny day at the pool with her friends. But other kids learned how to ride their bikes at age five, and write their lessons on the fronts of their papers, so that the hole punches were in the left margins, not the right. After school, they played on the playground, while Mary Beth was made to take speech therapy, hours of it, so that her R s didn’t sound like W s (though Mary Beth thought her speech therapist made her R s sound like L s).
    People knew better than to talk with the woman on the bench.
    When she’d been in law school, in Montclair, her apartment was a mile from campus. It was a safe neighborhood, as neighborhoods go, but her classes were at night. There was a bus she could have taken, but it was quicker to walk. And she did, most nights, along the sidewalks illuminated by streetlamps. Sometimes there were others out, walking in pairs. But there were solitary figures, too, a few jogging, some with a dog on a leash, but most, like her, just walking, from point A to point B. And she noticed how many of these solitary figures