Gone Girl (15 page)

‘My mom,’ he starts, and sits down. ‘Shit. My mom has cancer. Stage four, and it’s spread to the liver and bones. Which is bad, which is …’

He puts his face in his hands, and I go over and put my arms around him. When he looks up, he is dry-eyed. Calm. I’ve never seen my husband cry.

‘It’s too much for Go, on top of my dad’s Alzheimer’s.’

‘Alzheimer’s?
Alzheimer’s?
Since when?’

‘Well, a while. At first they thought it was some sort of early dementia. But it’s more, it’s worse.’

I think, immediately, that there is something wrong with us, perhaps unfixable, if my husband wouldn’t think to tell me this. Sometimes I feel it’s his personal game, that he’s in some sort of undeclared contest for impenetrability. ‘Why didn’t you say anything to me?’

‘My dad isn’t someone I like to talk about that much.’

‘But still—’

‘Amy. Please.’ He has that look, like I am being unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable that I wonder if I am.

‘But now. Go says with my mom, she’ll need chemo but … she’ll be really, really sick. She’ll need help.’

‘Should we start looking for in-home care for her? A nurse?’

‘She doesn’t have that kind of insurance.’

He stares at me, arms crossed, and I know what he is daring: daring me to offer to pay, and we can’t pay, because I’ve given my money to my parents.

‘Okay, then, babe,’ I say. ‘What do you want to do?’

We stand across from each other, a showdown, as if we are in a fight and I haven’t been informed. I reach out to touch him, and he just looks at my hand.

‘We have to move back.’ He glares at me, opening his eyes wide. He flicks his fingers out as if he is trying to rid himself of something sticky. ‘We’ll take a year and we’ll go do the right thing. We have no jobs, we have no money, there’s nothing holding us here. Even you have to admit that.’

‘Even
I
have to?’ As if I am already being resistant. I feel a burst of anger that I swallow.

‘This is what we’re going to do. We are going to do the right thing. We are going to help
my
parents for once.’

Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of the door already treating me like a problem that needed to be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be squelched.

My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until he’s not. I’ve seen his eyes literally turn a shade darker when he’s felt betrayed by a friend, even a dear longtime friend, and then the friend is never mentioned again. He looked at me then like I was an object to be jettisoned if necessary. It actually chilled me, that look.

So it is decided that quickly, with that little of a debate: We are leaving New York. We are going to Missouri. To a house in Missouri by the river where we will live. It is surreal, and I’m not one to misuse the word
surreal
.

I know it will be okay. It’s just so far from what I pictured. When I pictured my life. That’s not to say bad, just … If you gave me a million guesses where life would take me, I wouldn’t have guessed. I find that alarming.

The packing of the U-Haul is a mini-tragedy: Nick, determined and guilty, his mouth a tight line, getting it done, unwilling to look at me. The U-Haul sits for hours, blocking traffic on our little street, blinking its hazard lights – danger, danger, danger – as Nick goes up and down the stairs, a one-man assembly line, carrying boxes of books, boxes of kitchen supplies, chairs, side tables. We are bringing our vintage sofa – our broad old chesterfield that Dad calls our pet, we dote on it so much. It is to be the last thing we pack, a sweaty, awkward two-person job. Getting the massive thing down our stairs (
Hold on, I need to rest. Lift to the right. Hold on, you’re going too fast. Watch out, my fingers my fingers!
) will be its own much-needed team-building exercise. After the sofa, we’ll pick up lunch from the corner deli, bagel sandwiches to eat on the road. Cold soda.

Nick lets me keep the sofa, but our other big items are staying in New York. One of Nick’s friends will inherit the bed; the guy will come by later to our empty home – nothing but dust and cable cords left – and take the bed, and then he’ll live his New York life in our New York bed, eating two a.m. Chinese food and having
lazy-condomed sex with tipsy, brass-mouthed girls who work in PR. (Our home itself will be taken over by a noisy couple, hubby-wife lawyers who are shamelessly, brazenly gleeful at this buyers’-market deal. I hate them.)

I carry one load for every four that Nick grunts down. I move slowly, shuffling, like my bones hurt, a feverish delicacy descending on me. Everything does hurt. Nick buzzes past me, going up or down, and throws his frown at me, snaps, ‘You okay?’ and keeps moving before I answer, leaving me gaping, a cartoon with a black mouth-hole. I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.

Inside the back of the truck, he fusses with the boxes. Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags. But by hour three, it is clear that we’ve sold or gifted too many of our belongings. The U-Haul’s massive cavern is only half full. It gives me my single satisfaction of the day, that hot, mean satisfaction right in the belly, like a nib of mercury.
Good
, I think.
Good
.

‘We can take the bed if you really want to,’ Nick says, looking past me down the street. ‘We have enough room.’

‘No, you promised it to Wally, Wally should have it,’ I say primly.

I was wrong
. Just say:
I was wrong, I’m sorry, let’s take the bed. You should have your old, comforting bed in this new place
. Smile at me and be nice to me. Today, be nice to me.

Nick blows out a sigh. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want. Amy? Is it?’ He stands, slightly breathless, leaning on a stack of boxes, the top one with Magic Marker scrawl:
Amy Clothes Winter
. ‘This is the last I’ll hear about the bed, Amy? Because I’m offering right now. I’m happy to pack the bed for you.’

‘How gracious of you,’ I say, just a whiff of breath, the way I say most retorts: a puff of perfume from a rank atomizer. I am a coward. I don’t like confrontation. I pick up a box and start toward the truck.

‘What did you say?’

I shake my head at him. I don’t want him to see me cry, because it will make him more angry.

Ten minutes later, the stairs are pounding – bang! bang! bang! Nick is dragging our sofa down by himself.

I can’t even look behind me as we leave New York, because the truck has no back window. In the side mirror, I track the skyline
(the
receding skyline
– isn’t that what they write in Victorian novels where the doomed heroine is forced to leave her ancestral home?), but none of the good buildings – not the Chrysler or the Empire State or the Flatiron, they never appear in that little shining rectangle.

My parents dropped by the night before, presented us with the family cuckoo clock that I’d loved as a child, and the three of us cried and hugged as Nick shuffled his hands in his pockets and promised to take care of me.

He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

NICK DUNNE

THREE DAYS GONE

T
he police weren’t going to find Amy unless someone wanted her found. That much was clear. Everything green and brown had been searched: miles of the muddy Mississippi River, all the trails and hiking paths, our sad collection of patchy woods. If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up. It was a palpable truth, like a sour taste on the tongue tip. I arrived at the volunteer center and realized everyone else knew this too: There was a listlessness, a defeat, that hung over the place. I wandered aimlessly over to the pastries station and tried to convince myself to eat something. Danish. I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.

‘I still say it’s the river,’ one volunteer was saying to his buddy, both of them picking through the pastries with dirty fingers. ‘Right behind the guy’s house, what easier way?’

‘She would have turned up in an eddy by now, a lock, something.’

‘Not if she’s been cut. Chop off the legs, the arms … the body can shoot all the way to the Gulf. Tunica, at least.’

I turned away before they noticed me.

A former teacher of mine, Mr Coleman, sat at a card table, hunched over the tip-line phone, scribbling down information. When I caught his eye, he made the cuckoo signal: finger circling his ear, then pointing at the phone. He had greeted me yesterday by saying, ‘My granddaughter was killed by a drunk driver, so …’ We’d murmured and patted each other awkwardly.

My cell rang, the disposable – I couldn’t figure out where to keep it, so I kept it on me. I’d made a call, and the call was being returned, but I couldn’t take it. I turned the phone off, scanned the room to make sure the Elliotts hadn’t seen me do it. Marybeth was clicking away on her BlackBerry, then holding it at arm’s length so she could read the text. When she saw me, she shot over in her tight quick
steps, holding the BlackBerry in front of her like a talisman.

‘How many hours from here is Memphis?’ she asked.

‘Little under five hours, driving. What’s in Memphis?’

‘Hilary Handy lives in Memphis. Amy’s
stalker
from high school. How much of a coincidence is that?’

I didn’t know what to say: none?

‘Yeah, Gilpin blew me off too.
We can’t authorize the expense for something that happened twenty-some years ago
. Asshole. Guy always treats me like I’m on the verge of hysteria; he’ll talk to Rand when I’m right there, totally ignore me, like I need my husband to explain things to little dumb me.
Ass
hole.’

‘The city’s broke,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they really don’t have the budget, Marybeth.’

‘Well, we do. I’m serious, Nick, this girl was off her rocker. And I know she tried to contact Amy over the years. Amy told me.’

‘She never told me that.’

‘What’s it cost to drive there? Fifty bucks? Fine. Will you go? You said you’d go. Please? I won’t be able to stop thinking until I know someone’s talked to her.’

I knew this to be true, at least, because her daughter suffered from the same tenacious worry streak: Amy could spend an entire evening out fretting that she left the stove on, even though we didn’t cook that day. Or was the door locked? Was I sure? She was a worst-case scenarist on a grand scale. Because it was never just that the door was unlocked, it was that the door was unlocked, and men were inside, and they were waiting to rape and kill her.

I felt a layer of sweat shimmer to the surface of my skin, because, finally, my wife’s fears had come to fruition. Imagine the awful satisfaction, to know that all those years of worry had paid off.

‘Of course I’ll go. And I’ll stop by St. Louis, see the other one, Desi, on the way. Consider it done.’ I turned around, started my dramatic exit, got twenty feet, and suddenly, there was Stucks again, his entire face still slack with sleep.

‘Heard the cops searched the mall yesterday,’ he said, scratching his jaw. In his other hand he held a glazed donut, unbitten. A bagel-shaped bulge sat in the front pocket of his cargo pants. I almost made a joke:
Is that a baked good in your pocket or are you
…

‘Yeah. Nothing.’

‘Yester
day
. They went yester
day
, the jackasses.’ He ducked, looked around, as if he worried they’d overheard him. He leaned closer to me. ‘You go at night, that’s when they’re there. Daytime, they’re down by the river, or out flying a flag.’

‘Flying a flag?’

‘You know, sitting by the exits on the highway with those signs:
Laid Off, Please Help, Need Beer Money
, whatever,’ he said, scanning the room. ‘Flying a flag, man.’

‘Okay.’

‘At night they’re at the mall,’ he said.

‘Then let’s go tonight,’ I said. ‘You and me and whoever.’

‘Joe and Mikey Hillsam,’ Stucks said. ‘They’d be up for it.’ The Hillsams were three, four years older than me, town badasses. The kind of guys who were born without the fear gene, impervious to pain. Jock kids who sped through the summers on short, muscled legs, playing baseball, drinking beer, taking strange dares: skateboarding into drainage ditches, climbing water towers naked. The kind of guys who would peel up, wild-eyed, on a boring Saturday night and you knew something would happen, maybe nothing good, but something. Of course the Hillsams would be up for it.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tonight we go.’

My phone rang in my pocket. The thing didn’t turn off right. It rang again.

‘You gonna get that?’ Stucks asked.

‘Nah.’

‘You should answer every call, man. You really should.’

There was nothing to do for the rest of the day. No searches planned, no more flyers needed, the phones fully manned. Marybeth started sending volunteers home; they were just standing around, eating, bored. I suspected Stucks of leaving with half the breakfast table in his pockets.

‘Anyone hear from the detectives?’ Rand asked.

‘Nothing,’ Marybeth and I both answered.

‘That may be good, right?’ Rand asked, hopeful eyes, and Marybeth and I both indulged him. Yes, sure.

‘When are you leaving for Memphis?’ she asked me.

‘Tomorrow. Tonight my friends and I are doing another search of the mall. We don’t think it was done right yesterday.’

‘Excellent,’ Marybeth said. ‘That’s the kind of action we need. We suspect it wasn’t done right the first time, we do it ourselves. Because I just – I’m just not that impressed with what’s been done so far.’