The Hollow Girl (17 page)

I confessed, “Not tonight. I wanted to give it a few days.”

“For what? To forget? Was it that bad, fucking me?”

“No, it was that good,” I heard someone say in my voice, not quite believing I’d admitted it to her, let alone to myself.

“Then why—”

“Because I was afraid it was more about the circumstances than the players. I’m still not sure that wasn’t the case.”

“In English, please, Moe.”

“I think you understand. Last night was kind of a perfect storm.”

“I guess it was,” she said.

“I just wanted to give it a few days and I realized there are some things I need to take care of.”

“What things?”

“Things that don’t concern you, Nancy. Things that I haven’t been up to facing until now. I will be out of touch for a few days.”

“I’ve waited for you since I was nineteen years old. I can wait a little—Wait … Sloane’s coming on. Are you watching?”

“No, I was about to leave and my computer isn’t booted up.”

“I wonder how badly she’s going to slam me tonight.”

“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you imagine it will be. Who knows, maybe she’ll turn on her dad,” I said without much conviction.

“Maybe. Go do what you have to do.”

I wasn’t going to argue with her. I had a long drive ahead of me.

I had been as surprised as anyone that Pam had willed me her Vermont house. Until the moment I walked through the door, I had, with the help of Dewar’s, avoided dealing with what owning it entailed. The place smelled of must and sorrow, not of death. There were no bodies here, just memories, and only some of them mine. Pam and I had grown into love as opposed to falling into it. Falling is so much more exciting than growing. Falling is all about the manic blur of obsession, the ache of separation, the joy in the exclusion of everything else but love as so much noise. Even at my age, the thought of falling could still make me dizzy. But gravity dictates that falling is always followed by a crash. Gravity is funny that way. Sometimes, like with my first wife, Katy, the crash could be twenty years in coming: inexorable and inevitable.

Pam and I had done it in reverse. We literally started with a crash; the front end of her car meeting the back end of mine in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. It made me laugh to remember that we had done many things in reverse. For not only did our love begin with a crash, it began with lies. Mary Lambert, an IT consultant from Boston, is who Pam claimed to be when I got out of my car to confront the idiot driver who’d rear-ended me. None of it was true. Even the accident was a convenient lie meant to catch me off guard. She was actually Pamela Osteen, a Vermont-based PI sent to investigate a paternity issue involving my old precinct mate, the long-dead Rico Tripoli. Eventually I got past the lies. I think the fact that she once saved my life kind of helped cut through the bullshit and endeared her to me. Besides, who was I to be indignant about lies? I had lied to Katy about her brother’s disappearance for twenty years. I had spent so much of my life lying to protect secrets—my own, yes, but mostly other people’s—that I feared losing the ability to sort out the truth. For some reason, the truth had become increasingly important to me the closer I got to the grave.

I switched on a light and noticed that my footsteps had kicked up a panic of dust, motes swirling madly in the shaft of light. Everything I touched was covered in a downy gray layer of dust. But instead of brushing it away, I found I was smiling at the notion that bits of Pam and I were mingled together in the dust. That even the most thorough cleaning in the world wouldn’t get rid of all of it, not ever. That even after I sold the place, we would remain here together forever. Forever, that was another thing Pam and I had done ass backwards. Having both taken wrong turns up the aisle, we’d pretty much started our relationship by declaring open warfare on marriage. Yet when I asked her to marry me, she couldn’t say yes fast enough. I rubbed my fingers in the dust. I didn’t believe in heaven, but I believed in dust. I could hear Mr. Roth tsk-tsking me, pictured him wagging his finger at me.
Oy, Mr. Moe. Are you ever gonna learn?
I looked up at the dark ceiling and said aloud, “I guess not, Izzy. In the end, ashes and dust aren’t all that different.”

I turned on some more lights and my eyes went immediately to the wall of framed photos above the sofa. There were photos of us together, of me taken by Pam, and of Pam taken by me. I took one off the wall, one I’d taken of her only a month before she was killed. She was seated on the deck, her head thrown back against an Adirondack chair, her left hand shielding her eyes from the setting sun, a glass of red wine in her right hand. I was shocked to see that she had let her hair go gray. Funny, I hadn’t noticed. She’d never seemed to have aged, to me. I guess you stop seeing things after a while. When we first met, her hair was mostly black with only a strand of gray here and there. I wondered if it was me who’d turned her hair gray? Had my sickness aged us both? No, she was happy. I believed that just as much as I believed in dust. And I wasn’t going to beat myself up over this. I had done enough of that.

There were other pictures, too: Sarah and Paul, the newborn Ruben. But like I said, there were memories here that weren’t mine, but were now my responsibility. Memories that were wholly Pam’s. I knew that in a cabinet somewhere there was a first wedding album, and high school photo albums with pictures of old friends long forgotten. There were knickknacks and mementos, awards and certificates, old love letters and jewelry, an attic full of things I had never seen. There were a thousand stories here that would remain untold. That was the true robbery, the cheat in death. Not the things shared, but the stories left untold, the unshared details that had been someone’s life. What else do we amount to but what we leave of ourselves with others?

Unshared details
. Suddenly I remembered a detail of my life I had vowed to share with Sarah that had somehow fallen through the cracks. It was perfectly understandable how it would have gotten lost in the joy over Ruben’s birth and the turmoil in the wake of Pam’s death. When Sarah was pregnant and had driven down to New York to take me to Bobby Friedman’s funeral, she had asked me to tell her the story of how I’d become a cop in the first place. It’d taken the better part of a night to explain how and why I’d made the leap from the Brooklyn College campus to the police academy in the course of only a very few months. And in the telling there had been one thing she had seemed desperate to want to know, as I had been desperate to know myself many years earlier. I patted my pocket for my cell phone. Shit! It was in pieces in a phone store in Brooklyn. Maybe the woman behind the counter had been right to think me psychotic for willingly taking myself off the grid.

I picked up the phone in Pam’s kitchen. Nothing, not even a dial tone. Apparently the local cable company was a little bit more diligent about cutting off service than the local electric utility. I actually took a few steps back toward the door, thinking that Sarah and Paul’s house wasn’t more than a half-hour drive away. Then I looked at my watch and noticed it was near two in the morning. It dawned on me that if Sarah had waited this long to hear that one detail of my life, she could probably wait a few hours longer. In the meantime, I got busy building a fire.

The look on Sarah’s face was priceless, something between abject horror and joy. I took it and ran, abject horror notwithstanding. Maybe I was willing to accept the bad with the good because I was freezing my flat Jewish ass off and would have done just about anything to get inside. I’d dressed for late September in New York City, not late September in Vermont. Act on impulse and that’s what you get.

“What the fuck, Dad?” Unlike her father, Sarah almost never cursed.

“They can take my girl out of Brooklyn, but not the Brooklyn out of my girl. Hey, kiddo. You gonna make me stand out here in the cold?”

“Come in.”

“You sure you don’t wanna give me a Breathalyzer first?”

“Dad!”

I stepped inside and followed Sarah to the kitchen. For a people reputed to be dreadful cooks, Jews always congregated in the kitchen. Maybe we hoped God would make himself known to us there.

“Where’s my grandson?”

“Paul’s got the day off. He and Ruben are out running errands and having a little father and son time. I’m going into the office later. What are you doing here, Dad?”

“It was the name of a horse,” I blurted out.

Sarah’s eyes got wide and she tilted her head at me in confusion. “What? What was the name of a horse? Dad, are you—”

“No, kiddo, I’m not drunk. I swear.”

“If you say so.”

“Remember last year when you came to Brooklyn to take me to Bobby Friedman’s funeral?”

“Of course.”

“And you asked me to tell you how I became a cop.”

“I remember, Dad.”

“I promised to tell you how the Onion Street Pub got its name?”

She was still confused. “What does a horse have to do with it?”

“The cop who owned the place bet his paycheck on a forty-to-one long shot named Onion Street Blues at Aqueduct, and the horse came in. He used the money he won to buy the bar. So since he won the money on a horse named Onion Street Blues, he decided to call the place—”

“The Onion Street Pub. Jesus, Dad, you drove all the way up here to tell me that?”

“No, I drove over from Pam’s house to tell you that,” I said. “I drove up here to take care of the things I haven’t been able to face since she was killed. And one of those things is to apologize to you for the way I treated you that day in August.”

“You apologized already.”

“Not in person, I didn’t.” I reached my hand across the table and took her right hand in mine. “I’m sorry, kiddo. I was really lost and you were right, I was wallowing. I was feeling sorry for myself.”

“But you’re okay now?” Sarah asked, pulling my hand up to her face and resting her cheek against it.

“If you mean, am I still drinking … I’ve pretty much stopped drinking like I was, yeah. I made a bad drunk. The pain never went away, and all the drinking did was to make it easier not to deal with stuff like selling Pam’s house.”

“Why sell it at all? Why not move up here? You’ve never liked the wine business anyway. This way you wouldn’t have to feel you were underfoot living with us, but you could spend time with your grandkids—”

“Grandkids! Are you—”

“Pregnant? Not yet, Dad, but Paul and I want more kids, lots of them. We’re gonna have more of our own and maybe adopt some.”

“Because Paul was adopted?”

“Because Paul was adopted. Because I was an only child. For a hundred reasons.”

“Okay, I’ll think about moving up here,” I said, disbelieving. “Did I just say that?”

The smile on my daughter’s face was answer enough.

We had a cup of coffee, Sarah catching me up on her family’s progress. She discussed her vet practice—growing steadily—and Paul’s cases: mostly boring stuff. She showed me the most recent pictures of Ruben. Then Sarah shifted the conversation around to me.

“So, how’s the case with Sloane Cantor going?”

“There is no case,” I said. “When she showed up on the Internet two nights ago … it kinda put an end to my job.”

“Too bad.”

“For me, yeah, maybe. I was having fun working a case again. But it’s better that she’s not missing. I’m not so sure her mother’s enjoying it much.”

“Tell me about it. God, Dad, she crucified her mom yesterday.”

I must have gotten a sick look on my face because Sarah asked me if I was feeling all right and did I need to lie down.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” But I wasn’t fine. I felt the sting for Nancy. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to feel a connection to her like that. I didn’t want to feel a connection like that to anyone. Maybe only to Sarah and Ruben. Then I said another thing I wasn’t sure I could believe I was saying. “Listen, kiddo, do you think I can use your computer to see the post from last night?”

“Sure, the computer’s on in my office.”

Sarah was not prone to exaggeration and she hadn’t exaggerated about the Hollow Girl’s treatment of Nancy. It was more than nasty, crossing way over the double yellow line to cruelty. Somehow, Siobhan had gotten hold of Nancy’s medical records, of her pre- and post-surgery photos. They were hard to look at. Siobhan was so cold, her assessment of her mother so callous that it was difficult to listen to. I squirmed in my seat. The tirade was about how Siobhan viewed her mother as a coward for not being willing to deal with life as it had been gifted to her. Didn’t ugly people just have to deal with their ugliness? And how could someone who had made herself pretty through artificial means be so cruel as to have children?

That was the crux of it, I realized. Siobhan’s rant wasn’t really about Nancy at all, but about herself. It was about how the plain-looking girl would never land the leading role regardless of her being the most talented actor in the room. About how there would always be more big roles available to half-talented sluts like her late friend and lover Millie McCumber than there would ever be for her. Surely Nancy would understand that this wasn’t really about her. She was so smart and perceptive, but she was human, and I supposed they didn’t make armor thick enough to protect a mother from a daughter attacking her this way. What I knew was that when Sarah shut me out for years after Katy had been killed, I lived in perpetual ache. Sometimes the ache was a dull one and whole weeks, sometimes months, would pass without a sharp pain. Then again, Sarah wasn’t torturing me by the day on the Internet.

Immediately after the Hollow Girl signed off for the night, a different video came up. It was another disclaimer, this one featuring Siobhan. She was smiling, though she held a pretty scary-looking bayonet in her hand. As she spoke, she brushed the tip of the blade along her palm.

Hey, guys, just a reminder. The stuff you see here is performance art. It’s make-believe. Please, please remember that. Don’t go calling 911 when you see stuff like this happen.
[Drives bayonet into her shirt above heart. Holds bayonet in place. Blood soaks shirt. She laughs.]
It’s special effects.
[Removes blade from chest. Slowly shoves bayonet into palm.]
The blade is a prop. It recedes into the handle. Listen to the spring.
[Lifts shirt to reveal plastic blood pack taped to chest and tucked partially under bra cup.]
Remember, it’s art.