The Hollow Girl (2 page)

“No more drinking for you. Unless it’s water.” He shoved a plastic bottle in my hand.

“Leave me alone. My fucking head is pounding. And plastic bottles are bad for the environment.”

He placed three ibuprofen tablets in my other palm. “C’mon. Take these. Get up. You’ve got a client to meet.”

Client?
More than anything else my big brother had done or said since I became conscious of his presence, that word got to me. I swallowed the tablets and drank the water.

“What client?” I asked, the faint sound of hope in my voice. I wanted no part of that, no part of anything that might interfere with my dark, and as of yet unsuccessful, plunge into numbness. “I thought you didn’t want me to come into work until I was ready. And since, according to you, I smell bad and need a shave, I don’t think I’m ready to kiss some wine buyer or caterer’s ass so that we might—”

“Not that kind of client, you idiot. A client for you.”

I knew what he was saying. I understood the words, but they didn’t move me, at least not in the way Aaron had wanted them to. I tossed the empty water bottle to the floor and rolled back into bed. “Fuck you and fuck the client.”

“You really are a coward.”

“Sticks and stones, big brother. Sticks and stones.”

“Maybe I should let her see you like this. Then maybe she’d come to her goddamned senses. She’s been looking for you for a week, calling all the stores. She left so many messages that it finally got back to me. That’s why I’m here.”

“Call her back and tell her to go fuck herself, whoever she is. Tell her someone else can go spy on her husband or find her missing cat. The only lost cause I’m interested in is my own. I think I have Carm’s number up in Toronto. Let her call Carm or Brian Doyle. Besides, I’m not up for making new friends.”

“She’s not looking for a lost cat, Moe. She’s looking for you.”

“Not interested.”

“You know her.”

“I used to know lotsa people.”

That did it. Aaron blew up. He threw the apartment keys at my head, barely missing. “You know what, little brother, fuck you! For years, for our whole lives, I’ve carried you. I put money in your pocket and food on your table so you could play cops and robbers. Where would Sarah and Katy have been if I didn’t drag you kicking and screaming into the wine business? How would you have put a roof over their heads or sent your daughter to school, by being a PI? And for all our lives I’ve had to deal with your sneering contempt for my being someone happy to do normal things, responsible things. Well, no more. I don’t care anymore. Fuck you!”

“Yeah, you said that.”

“Her name and phone number are on the coffee table. You’re supposed to meet her at two for coffee at the El Greco Diner. Go, don’t go. I don’t give a shit.”

The door slammed. A few minutes later, I got up to answer nature’s call and to pour myself a drink. I toasted the front door with a half-tumbler of Dewar’s and took a healthy swig. I snatched the note up from the coffee table, as ready to crumple it up as I had ever been ready to crumple up any piece of paper in my life. But when I saw the name written on it, I stopped. I looked at the man in the Deco mirror Pam had bought for the apartment at a Vermont antique store. The man looked very sad and very old. He put the drink down and went to turn the shower on.

The too-thin man in the diner vestibule mirror looked like a changed person. He was cleaner, smelling more of soap and fresh-cut-grassy aftershave than of barroom floor. His head still throbbed, but not fiercely. He watched as he ran his fingers over the trim goatee he’d shaped out of the gray chaos that had covered his face only a few hours earlier. His mostly salt with some pepper hair, which had grown back thick and defiant post-chemo, had been combed and brushed into something akin to submission. His casual dress, his light, navy blue sweater over jeans and boots, lent him an air of easy composure. He knew better. He turned away.

I turned away from the mirror because there was nothing composed about my shaking hands or the sick feeling in my belly. But I was too old to play Prince Hamlet. I had already chosen
to be
, although given my behavior over the last few months I would’ve been hard pressed to prove it. In spite of my drinking, I’d fought too hard to survive and to hold my grandchild in my arms to chuck it all now. The problem was, I hadn’t seen or held Ruben since August. Sarah was pretty mad at me for being drunk that day. Then I’d made it worse.

“It’s been six weeks, Dad,” she’d said, pulling me off to a corner. “Stop it. Please stop punishing yourself. Pam would hate this, you’re making yourself sick again.”

But I was several sheets to the wind by then and not in the mood for a lecture. “Don’t tell me how to grieve, kiddo.”

“Grieving. Is that what this is? Seems more like wallowing to me.”

“You’re just pissed off because I didn’t go this far down the rabbit hole when your mother was killed.”

The expression of horror on my daughter’s face would have cracked glass. She looked up at me, tears streaming down her cheeks like when she was a little girl and she’d scraped the skin off both knees.

“I know you’re hurt, Dad,” she said, struggling against the sobs, “and you blame yourself for what happened to Pam. I know you’re a grown man whose life is his own. I will always love you, but I don’t like you this way and I won’t have Ruben around you when you’re like this.”

I didn’t blame her. I didn’t blame anyone for their anger at me. No one was angrier at or more disappointed in me than I was. No one. I had called to apologize, but it was no good. I hadn’t stopped drinking or beating myself to a pulp. After our last call, I’d given the self-immolation a rest for a few days because Sarah invoked the Prager family holiest of holies.

“What would Mr. Roth think of what you’re doing, Dad?” she’d asked.

I hadn’t answered. The truth was that Israel Roth would have understood. As someone who’d avoided the showers and ovens at Auschwitz, while the rest of his family had not, no one understood survivor’s guilt like he did. What he wouldn’t have approved of was my pretense of trying to get numb, of playing at making the pain go away.

“There is no magic trick, Mr. Moe. No presto change-o, no abracadabra,” he would have said. “There is no making it go away, only living with it. So stop already with pretending and make a friend of your guilt. What choice have you got? What choice do any of us have?”

So as a nod to his memory, I’d stopped drinking for a week. But then I saw something in the paper about a girl killed in a traffic accident, or I heard it on the radio. I can’t recall. Whichever it was, it was enough to get me going again.

Now I had another ghost to face. One that had, in her way, haunted me for many more years than either Pam or Mr. Roth. One who had the potential to pry the lid off a piece of my past, a piece I would just as soon forget.

I opened the door that led from the vestibule into the dining area and spotted her sitting at a booth. She sat hunched over a cup of coffee, staring into it as if into a well. I’d first met her in January of 1978, thirty-five years ago, during my early days in purgatory. Fresh from getting put out to pasture by the NYPD, wracked with pain from yet another negligibly successful knee surgery, it was like being a kid at Brooklyn College all over again: aimless, with no career and no prospects. What I had was my brother Aaron pestering me to come up with the last ten thousand dollars we needed to buy into our first wine shop. Talk about mixed feelings.

I loved my big brother, though we were essentially different people. He used to joke that I had been adopted from the space orphanage. There were times I wasn’t so sure he was kidding. He was an anchor and I was anchorless. His dream had always been to go into the wine business and have me for a partner. Me, I neither had dreams nor cared much about wine. I had the business sense of a housefly, and the only partners I ever had or ever wanted wore blue uniforms and badges. Still, I wasn’t stupid. There wasn’t much else out there for me. When you don’t have dreams of your own, the next best thing is to hitch your wagon to someone else’s, right? Then my best cop buddy from the Six-O Precinct, Rico Tripoli, threw me what I thought was a lifeline.

There was this college kid, Patrick Michael Maloney, the son of some political mover and shaker from upstate New York who’d gone missing in Manhattan that December. The cops had gotten nowhere on the case nor had the PIs hired by the Maloneys or the hundreds of volunteers who came down to the city from the kid’s hometown to search for him and hang posters. Rico was related to the Maloneys through his wife and he had convinced the kid’s old man that I was magic. That I had a sixth sense about missing persons. That I would find his son. I wasn’t magic. I hadn’t even made detective before getting retired. What I was was lucky, and then, only once.

“Been a long time,” I said, sliding into the booth across from the woman who’d hunted me down.

She nodded in agreement. “It has, a very long time. Thank you for coming.”

The Nancy Lustig I’d met thirty-five years before was a poor little rich girl. Lucky, too, in some ways. In others, not so much. Lucky, because … well, she was rich. She had lived in Old Brookville on Long Island in a mansion the size of a jumbo jet hangar. Little, because then she was young, an underclassman at Hofstra University. Poor, because she was ugly, not hideous, certainly, but not pretty enough to be called plain either. Unlucky, because she had had the misfortune of getting romantically involved with Patrick Michael Maloney. Before disappearing, he’d gotten her pregnant and nearly strangled her.

I’d liked her back then, liked her a lot. She was brave and brutally honest about her missteps, her desires, her jealousies, her foibles, and, above all, her appearance. I think—no, I know—that I’d fallen a little bit in love with her. After only a few minutes with her, I’d stopped seeing her looks or stopped caring about them. It wasn’t a romantic love. I didn’t
want
her. It was the love of spirit, the kind of thing the poets I’d wasted my time studying before I became a cop would have understood.
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage … .
That kind of love. But not even the love of spirit endures.

I flagged down the waitress. “Irish coffee. Heavy on the Irish. No whipped cream.”

“Irish coffee?” Nancy said, still staring into the well. “You never struck me as a drinker.”

“And you never struck me as a woman who would turn into one of those vain, self-obsessed women from Long Island who divide their time between shopping on the Miracle Mile, playing tennis, and studying the next great innovation in plastic surgery.”

“Ouch!” she said, smiling. “You’ve become quite the diplomat in your dotage, Moe.”

“Surviving stomach cancer and grief, they kinda give you license to speak your mind.”

I‘d seen Nancy Lustig only once again in those thirty-five years. By then she had transformed herself into everything the old Nancy wasn’t. She’d had a lot of “work” done on her nose, her teeth, her breasts, her body. Her Coke-bottle glasses were gone, as were thirty-plus pounds. When I stopped by her house in 2000, she was impeccably put together: the hair, the nails, the tan, the achingly blue contact lenses. But I didn’t resent her wanting to be pretty. Who doesn’t want to be pretty? It was that she had seemed to have turned ugly inside in direct proportion to her newly crafted attractiveness.

The woman who sat across from me had aged well and appeared to still be the woman I’d met that second time, although she had traded the blue contact lenses for rich brown ones more suited to her eyes’ actual coloring. Her hair, now a darker blonde with perfect highlights, was parted down the middle and fell past her shoulders. Her redone nose and cheekbones and thickened lips were beautifully made up with products that came from Orléans and the Orient. Her skin was taut and tanned. The neckline of her camel-colored cashmere sweater plunged to reveal more than a hint of cleavage between her gravity-defying breasts. There was some age on her hands, though she tried hard—too hard—to keep them young. That was what the French nail job and the five pounds of jewelry were for. The diamonds, emeralds, and gold she wore in the form of rings and bracelets were as much about distraction as attraction.

“So what’s this about?”

“My daughter.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes,” she said, finally looking up from her coffee cup to meet my gaze. “My daughter, the Hollow Girl.”

After the waitress served my very Irish coffee and I took half of it in a swallow, Nancy pulled an iPad from her Prada bag. She tapped the screen, her sculpted nails click-clicking as she worked. Then, when she had what she wanted, she made a stand of the iPad’s beautifully tooled custom tan leather cover, and placed it in front of me.

There, frozen on the screen, was a girl about the same age Nancy had been the first time we met. She was obviously Nancy Lustig’s daughter. Not the Nancy Lustig who sat across from me, not the bionic woman who had reshaped herself with her will and her checkbook, but ugly-beautiful Nancy. Although this girl was thinner, a bit prettier than her mother had been, she had not reached escape velocity from the gravity of her mother’s double-helix. This girl had lovely blue eyes—probably from her dad’s side of the family—and a less bulbous nose. Still, the dumpiness, the thin lips, the weak chin had all been passed on from mother to daughter. Her bare, pale arms were tattooed, if not ridiculously so, and she wore a diamond nose stud. She was dressed in a plain white men’s T-shirt, loose-fitting faded jeans. Her feet were uncovered, and she sat on a barstool in front of a white wall.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

Nancy chose to answer a question I hadn’t asked. “I can read your mind, Moe. You’re thinking it’s too bad plastic surgery can’t be passed down from mother to daughter.”

I didn’t deny it, since I
was
thinking something along those lines, if not exactly in those words. “What was it you called your daughter before, a hollow girl? What’s that about?”

“The Hollow Girl,” Nancy corrected. “I’m surprised you’ve never heard of her. The Hollow Girl is an Internet legend. Go ahead, press play.”