The Hollow Girl (3 page)

I tapped the screen and the frozen image came to life. The girl spoke in a whisper, her expression sullen.

February 14, 1999, Valentine’s Day, the blackest day of my life. A lot of you will be getting roses today, chocolates, gold lockets, diamond rings. I’ll get nothing. I was on the phone with Lionel all last night, begging him to take me back. Begging! Do you know what it’s like to beg? Do you have any idea what it’s like to really beg? I mean, we say it all the time, but we don’t know. You don’t know. I do. Now I know what it is to make an idiot of myself, to completely demean myself, to plead and plead and plead until there isn’t a single ounce of pride left.

And when he said he wouldn’t have me back because he was tired of having an ugly white bitch like me at his side and hung up the phone on me the last time, you know what I did? I ran across campus to his dorm room and rang his bell till he came to the door. When he came to the door he wasn’t wearing anything at all. “Okay, bitch,” he said, “y’all couldn’t make this easy and jus’ go away. So now you here, c’mon, we gonna do this the hard way.”

He pushed me into his bedroom, and there in the bed was Victoria. You know Victoria. I told you about her, beautiful, perfect Victoria who I used to dream about kissing. Beautiful, perfect Victoria who I used to masturbate thinking about until I was sore. Victoria, who got drunk at our end-of-term party our freshman year and made out with me. Beautiful, perfect Victoria, who was so embarrassed she had let me touch her that way that she dropped me as a roommate. That Victoria, she was in Lionel’s bed, and when she saw me she laughed. “Make her watch, Li. Make her watch. I want her to watch.” He didn’t have to make me. I would have stayed no matter what, because, like I said, I had no pride left. I wanted to see how low I was willing to sink. So I sat at the edge of the bed and watched them fuck. I listened to them sigh and grunt.

Then, when they were finished, when the room smelled so much of them I almost fainted, you know what I did?
[Sobbing.]
I … I stabbed myself. I stabbed myself.
[Lifting T-shirt to expose bandage.]
I stabbed myself. I let the blood … I let … I let it run onto my hand and I wiped it all over Victoria’s perfect, beautiful face.
[Lifting bandage to reveal stitches, raw red skin]
And Victoria started yelling and clutching at her face.

“You crazy, bitch! You crazy!” Lionel screamed, grabbing me by the hair and throwing me out of his dorm.

Now I know what I have to do. This wound would heal, but I’ll never heal. My hurt won’t ever go away.
[Steps out of frame. Returns carrying a full glass of red wine and a white plastic pharmaceutical bottle. Uncaps bottle.]
I know what I have to do. I was right. I have nothing left inside of me. I’m just the hollow girl.
[Alternates swallowing pills and drinking.]
Goodbye.
[Thirty seconds later, glass falls to floor. Wine splatters. Glass shatters. A few seconds later, she collapses out of chair.]
Help! Help me, please. Help me … .

But when I looked up, Nancy Lustig was smiling with her great white teeth and plush, red lips. To say I was confused was profound understatement.

“When that got posted in ’99, there were a record number of 911 calls in several cities across the world. You should hear some of the tapes. People were panicked. ‘You have to help her. She’s killed herself. You have to help the hollow girl.’ But no one knew who she really was, or where to find her. The 911 tapes are available. You should listen to them. It’s kind of pathetic, really.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But I don’t get it. Was she okay?”

“What don’t you get, Moe? It was theater. Of course she was fine. Clearly the people who watched her didn’t know that. They thought she was some poor, homely girl away at college, in way over her head. Until that post you just watched, people called her Lost Girl. Lost Girl had thousands and thousands of online followers. There were chat rooms devoted to Lost Girl. She had fan clubs. Some university psych classes made watching Lost Girl’s daily posts required homework. But after the night of the ‘suicide’—” Nancy drew quotation marks in the air around the word
suicide
“—everything changed. She became the Hollow Girl. She caused quite a stir. Hollow Girl went viral before the term was in common usage.”

“But what was the point?”

Nancy tilted her head at me like a confused puppy. “The point? It was performance art. Would you ask Van Gogh the point of
Starry Night
? She had been going for acting lessons since she was ten. Performing is all she ever wanted to do. She even did stints at Juilliard and Yale Drama, but she was only seventeen and still in high school when she came up with the idea of this video blog about a nameless character she created out of herself. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“That isn’t the word that comes immediately to mind, no.”

“Don’t be silly, Moe. My daughter grasped the power of the Internet and became one of its first real stars.”

Finishing my drink, I made eye contact with the waitress, and made the universal sign for another round. She nodded.
Message received
. “Okay, Nancy. This was fourteen years ago. She’s what, thirty, thirty-one now? You said she was missing.”

“She is. She has been … for a month. I want you to find her.”

“Telling me her name might be a good place to start.”

Nancy shrugged her shoulders. “If you insist. Sloane.”

“And what did I do to earn the honor of finding Sloane?”

The waitress delivering my coffee prevented Nancy from answering. And before the waitress left, I ordered another round, only this time without the coffee.

“Rude of you not to ask me if I’d like something, Moe.” Nancy turned to the waitress. “Any single malt Scotch?”

“We got Glen something or other.”

“Glenlivet?” I suggested.

“I think so.”

Nancy frowned. “Nothing else?”

I snapped at her. “This ain’t the Gold Coast. It’s a diner in Sheepshead Bay. You think they’re gonna carry Lagavulin and Talisker? Take what they have and run with it.”

“A double of that Glen something or other. Neat.”

“Forget the Irish,” I said. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

The waitress smiled at me but left sneering at the back of Nancy’s head.

“So you were about to explain to me why you think I’ll be able to find your daughter.”

“Because the cops can’t be bothered and the other firms I’ve hired can’t seem to make any headway, or don’t seem to want to.”

“Always heartwarming to be told you’re somebody’s Plan C.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have been if I could have reached you.”

“Touché. Okay, so you found me. The cops probably think it’s none of your business. And maybe the PIs can’t find her because she doesn’t want to be found. Is she married?”

“For about five minutes, four years ago.”

“Boyfriends? Girlfriends?”

“Both, I think, but it’s not like we have a Hallmark Channel relationship. We don’t do girls’ nights. We don’t put on our flannel jammies and watch
Steel Magnolias
and have a good cry. We don’t meet in the city for lunch and the museum. We never have.”

The drinks arrived. I gave the waitress a twenty. “That’s for you. Thanks.”

Nancy seemed offended by the tip. “What was that for?”

“So she doesn’t spit in the food I order after you leave.”

“Am I leaving?”

“After your drink, yeah.” I raised my glass to her. She touched her glass to mine and we drank.

“You’ll take the case?”

“Such as it is.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I ignored the question. “You still live in Old Brookville in the same house?”

“Same address, very different house. But yes, I live there.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow morning.” I drank some more. She drank the rest of hers. “I’ll want the name of the cops you spoke with, the contact information for the PIs you hired. I’ll want her address. The keys to her apartment, if you have them. I want a current picture of your daughter. Names and addresses of friends, et cetera. Are you married?”

“Not for many years,” she said, staring into her freshly emptied glass.

“Does Sloane use your ex’s last name or yours?”

“Neither. After the stir the Hollow Girl affair caused, she had her name legally changed to Siobhan Bracken.”

“I’ll want all the info on your ex. Any siblings?”

“None. Anything else?” she asked.

“Yeah, it would be nice if you could muster up some genuine feelings, like you used to have when we first met. Your worry’s not exactly palpable.”

“Worry about whether my money’s palpable, Moe. My feelings are my business.” She wrinkled up her nose and dropped the corners of her mouth.

“I don’t need your money, Nancy. I’ll take it, but I don’t need it. What I need is the distraction. Till tomorrow morning, then.”

“I don’t like being dismissed,” she said, sliding out of the booth and standing close to me. I had to confess, she smelled awfully good.

“That’s not what I’m doing, dismissing you. I have to get some food in me and I have to do some research on my own. I have to get started.”

“Okay, then.” She reached out her hand as if to touch my cheek. Reflexively, I grabbed her by the wrist before her hand could touch me.

“Please don’t do that again.” I let go of her wrist, the stones on her bracelets leaving little red marks in the flesh of my palms.

Nancy Lustig shook her head at me and walked away, her heels making sharp clacking sounds on the unforgiving terrazzo floor. I did not look after her. Instead I waved to the waitress and opened the menu that sat before me, untouched until then.

What the fuck was that all about? That was the question I kept asking myself as I walked from the diner back to my condo. The weather had turned cool on me. I stopped, about-faced, and used my hand to block the light from the sun that hung fierce and low in the western sky. It had already begun telling its late September lies. My hand could shield me from its light, I thought, but not from its lies. Soon, early darkness would follow. Too bad life wasn’t like that, darkness following the lies. It was my experience that a lot of life was built on lies, mostly the ones we tell ourselves. I had reached a kind of Zen about the ones I told myself. Most of my life had been a wrestling match with them. Not anymore. Om. But it wasn’t my lies or the sun’s that concerned me. I was thinking about the ones Nancy Lustig told herself, and the ones she would tell me.

When I got inside my flat, I poured myself a Dewar’s and thumbed through the mail. It was the usual daily mix of bills and begging. That particular day’s charity requests claimed that my contribution would cure pancreatic cancer, diabetes, AIDS, and autism. My donation would feed the poor of Africa, continue to reconstruct Long Island in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and rebuild the lives of our wounded veterans. I was a powerful man, apparently.

It wasn’t that I was cold to the begging. I wasn’t numb. I believe my prodigious drinking in the wake of Pam’s death had proven as much. It was just that everything had been turned into a crusade. Not everything is worthy of a crusade. Sometimes it became just so much noise that translated into
Give money, stop death
. It was the biggest lie we shared. That if we only gave a few dollars more, we could all spread lamb’s blood above our thresholds and the angel of death would walk on by.

I put the glass of blended Scotch to my lips, then put it quickly down. Instead, I decided to call Sarah. I wanted to test some of what Nancy had told me. If the Hollow Girl was as legendary as she claimed, I wondered if Sarah would know the legend. I also longed to hear my daughter’s voice, and hoped she would put the phone in front of Ruben. I held the phone in my hand, punched in ten of the eleven digits, and stopped. What if she was screening her calls and wouldn’t pick up? I wasn’t sure I could take that. The thought of it, of Sarah staring at my number on the screen, refusing to pick up, made me want to reach for the Dewar’s again. Even during the years she had shut me out in the fallout from her mother’s murder, Sarah answered my calls. Of course, our conversations in those years were stilted and contrived, more chilling than if we hadn’t spoken at all. Still, I never doubted she would answer my calls. Things were different now. She was married, a mother. Her husband, her son, they were her life now. But what is life without risk? I punched in the last digit.

I got her answering machine, but then she picked up: “Hey, Dad, sorry, I was changing Ruben.” I couldn’t speak for the tears. “Dad, Dad! Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I finally said. “Sorry. No, I’m good. I’m good.”

“Okay …” she said, those two syllables thick with suspicion.

“I’ve taken a case.”

“My dad, the PI. That’s great.” She sounded like she meant it. “What kind of case?”

“Missing persons. Listen, kiddo, have you ever heard of the Hollow Girl?”

“Oh my God, Sloane Cantor is missing?”

“You know I can’t talk about that. So you’ve heard of—”

“Heard of! Dad, I used to be glued to my computer every night. For a year, the Hollow Girl was all we used to talk about in school. She was like this phenomenon.”

“Did you begin watching her when she was the Lost Girl?”

“Yeah, but after that suicide thing … it got crazy. She totally blew up after that.”

“What was the appeal?”

“She spoke to the ugly girl in all of us.”

“But you’re beautiful. You were always beau—”

“You’re my dad. You’re supposed to feel that way, but the world is tough on girls. Even pretty girls never feel pretty enough. We’re never thin enough or big-breasted enough, or we’re too big-breasted, or we’re too this and not enough that. The Hollow Girl spoke to that in all of us because she looked how we felt, and she felt it harder than we did. It’s like that show on HBO about the young women living in hipster Brooklyn. It’s about women in their early twenties, but it speaks to all women at some level because we either were that age, are that age, or will be that age, so—”