Gone Girl (7 page)

‘You okay there, Nick?’ Boney asked.

‘I’m okay, why?’

‘You’re smiling.’

The giddiness slid to the tiled floor. ‘I’m sorry, it’s all just—’

‘I know,’ Boney said, giving me a look that was like a hand pat. ‘It’s too strange, I know.’ She cleared her throat. ‘First of all, we want to make sure you’re comfortable here. You need anything, just let us know. The more information you can give us right now, the better, but you can leave at any time, that’s not a problem, either.’

‘Whatever you need.’

‘Okay, great, thank you,’ she said. ‘Um, okay. I want to get the annoying stuff out of the way first. The crap stuff. If your wife was indeed abducted – and we don’t know that, but if it comes to that –
we want to catch the guy, and when we catch the guy, we want to nail him, hard. No way out. No wiggle room.’

‘Right.’

‘So we have to rule you out real quick, real easy. So the guy can’t come back and say we didn’t rule you out, you know what I mean?’

I nodded mechanically. I didn’t really know what she meant, but I wanted to seem as cooperative as possible. ‘Whatever you need.’

‘We don’t want to freak you out,’ Gilpin added. ‘We just want to cover all the bases.’

‘Fine by me.’
It’s always the husband
, I thought.
Everyone knows it’s always the husband, so why can’t they just say it: We suspect you because you are the husband, and it’s always the husband. Just watch
Dateline.

‘Okay, great, Nick,’ Boney said. ‘First let’s get a swab of the inside of your cheek so we can rule out all of the DNA in the house that isn’t yours. Would that be okay?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’d also like to take a quick sweep of your hands for gun shot residue. Again, just in case—’

‘Wait, wait, wait. Have you found something that makes you think my wife was—’

‘Nonono, Nick,’ Gilpin interrupted. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat on it backward. I wondered if cops actually did that. Or did some clever actor do that, and then cops began doing it because they’d seen the actors playing cops do that and it looked cool?

‘It’s just smart protocol,’ Gilpin continued. ‘We try to cover every base: Check your hands, get a swab, and if we could check out your car too …’

‘Of course. Like I said, whatever you need.’

‘Thank you, Nick. I really appreciate it. Sometimes guys, they make things hard for us just because they can.’

I was exactly the opposite. My father had infused my childhood with unspoken blame; he was the kind of man who skulked around looking for things to be angry at. This had turned Go defensive and extremely unlikely to take unwarranted shit. It had turned me into a knee-jerk suckup to authority. Mom, Dad, teachers:
Whatever makes your job easier, sir or madam
. I craved a constant stream of approval. ‘You’d literally lie, cheat, and steal – hell, kill – to convince people you are a good guy,’ Go once said. We were in line for knishes at Yonah Schimmel’s, not far from Go’s old New York apartment – that’s how well I remember the moment – and I lost
my appetite because it was so completely true and I’d never realized it, and even as she was saying it, I thought:
I will never forget this, this is one of those moments that will be lodged in my brain forever
.

We made small talk, the cops and I, about the July Fourth fireworks and the weather, while my hands were tested for gunshot residue and the slick inside of my cheek was cotton-tipped. Pretending it was normal, a trip to the dentist.

When it was done, Boney put another cup of coffee in front of me, squeezed my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry about that. Worst part of the job. You think you’re up to a few questions now? It’d really help us.’

‘Yes, definitely, fire away.’

She placed a slim digital tape recorder on the table in front of me. ‘You mind? This way you won’t have to answer the same questions over and over and over …’ She wanted to tape me so I’d be nailed to one story.
I should call a lawyer
, I thought,
but only guilty people need lawyers
, so I nodded:
No problem
.

‘So: Amy,’ Boney said. ‘You two been living here how long?’

‘Just about two years.’

‘And she’s originally from New York. City.’

‘Yes.’

‘She work, got a job?’ Gilpin said.

‘No. She used to write personality quizzes.’

The detectives swapped a look:
Quizzes?

‘For teen magazines, women’s magazines,’ I said. ‘You know: “Are you the jealous type? Take our quiz and find out! Do guys find you too intimidating? Take our quiz and find out!”’

‘Very cool, I love those,’ Boney said. ‘I didn’t know that was an actual job. Writing those. Like, a career.’

‘Well, it’s not. Anymore. The Internet is packed with quizzes for free. Amy’s were smarter – she had a master’s in psychology –
has
a master’s in psychology.’ I guffawed uncomfortably at my gaffe. ‘But smart can’t beat free.’

‘Then what?’

I shrugged. ‘Then we moved back here. She’s just kind of staying at home right now.’

‘Oh! You guys got kids, then?’ Boney chirped, as if she had discovered good news.

‘No.’

‘Oh. So then what does she do most days?’

That was my question too. Amy was once a woman who did a little of everything, all the time. When we moved in together,
she’d made an intense study of French cooking, displaying hyper-quick knife skills and an inspired boeuf bourguignon. For her thirty-fourth birthday, we flew to Barcelona, and she stunned me by rolling off trills of conversational Spanish, learned in months of secret lessons. My wife had a brilliant, popping brain, a greedy curiosity. But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women:
Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it
. She needed to be Amazing Amy, all the time. Here in Missouri, the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember. Competition doesn’t interest them. Amy’s relentless achieving is greeted with open-palmed acceptance and maybe a bit of pity. It was about the worst outcome possible for my competitive wife: A town of contented also-rans.

‘She has a lot of hobbies,’ I said.

‘Anything worrying you?’ Boney asked, looking worried. ‘You’re not concerned about drugs or drinking? I’m not speaking ill of your wife. A lot of housewives, more than you’d guess, they pass the day that way. The days, they get long when you’re by yourself. And if the drinking turns to drugs – and I’m not talking heroin but even prescription painkillers – well, there are some pretty awful characters selling around here right now.’

‘The drug trade has gotten bad,’ Gilpin said. ‘We’ve had a bunch of police layoffs – one fifth of the force, and we were tight to begin with. I mean, it’s
bad
, we’re overrun.’

‘Had a housewife, nice lady, get a tooth knocked out last month over some Oxycontin,’ Boney prompted.

‘No, Amy might have a glass of wine or something, but not drugs.’

Boney eyed me; this was clearly not the answer she wanted. ‘She have some good friends here? We’d like to call some of them, just make sure. No offense. Sometimes a spouse is the last to know when drugs are involved. People get ashamed, especially women.’

Friends. In New York, Amy made and shed friends weekly; they were like her projects. She’d get intensely excited about them: Paula who gave her singing lessons and had a wicked good voice (Amy went to boarding school in Massachusetts; I loved the very occasional times she got all New England on me:
wicked good
); Jessie from the fashion-design course. But then I’d ask about Jessie or
Paula a month later, and Amy would look at me like I was making up words.

Then there were the men who were always rattling behind Amy, eager to do the husbandly things that her husband failed to do. Fix a chair leg, hunt down her favorite imported Asian tea. Men who she swore were her friends, just good friends. Amy kept them at exactly an arm’s distance – far enough away that I couldn’t get too annoyed, close enough that she could crook a finger and they’d do her bidding.

In Missouri … good God, I really didn’t know. It only occurred to me just then.
You truly are an asshole
, I thought. Two years we’d been here, and after the initial flurry of meet-and-greets, those manic first months, Amy had no one she regularly saw. She had my mom, who was now dead, and me – and our main form of conversation was attack and rebuttal. When we’d been back home for a year, I’d asked her faux gallantly: ‘And how are you liking North Carthage, Mrs Dunne?’ ‘
New
Carthage, you mean?’ she’d replied. I refused to ask her the reference, but I knew it was an insult.

‘She has a few good friends, but they’re mostly back east.’

‘Her folks?’

‘They live in New York. City.’

‘And you still haven’t called any of these people?’ Boney asked, a bemused smile on her face.

‘I’ve been doing everything
else
you’ve been asking me to do. I haven’t had a chance.’ I’d signed away permission to trace credit cards and ATMs and track Amy’s cell phone, I’d handed over Go’s cell number and the name of Sue, the widow at The Bar, who could presumably attest to the time I arrived.

‘Baby of the family.’ She shook her head. ‘You really do remind me of my little brother.’ A beat. ‘That’s a compliment, I swear.’

‘She dotes on him,’ Gilpin said, scribbling in a notebook. ‘Okay, so you left the house at about seven-thirty a.m., and you showed up at The Bar at about noon, and in between, you were at the beach.’

There’s a beachhead about ten miles north of our house, a not overly pleasant collection of sand and silt and beer-bottle shards. Trash barrels overflowing with Styrofoam cups and dirty diapers. But there is a picnic table upwind that gets nice sun, and if you stare directly at the river, you can ignore the other crap.

‘I sometimes bring my coffee and the paper and just sit. Gotta make the most of summer.’

No, I hadn’t talked to anyone at the beach. No, no one saw me.

‘It’s a quiet place midweek,’ Gilpin allowed.

If the police talked to anyone who knew me, they’d quickly learn that I rarely went to the beach and that I never sometimes brought my coffee to just enjoy the morning. I have Irish-white skin and an impatience for navel-gazing: A beach boy I am not. I told the police that because it had been Amy’s idea, for me to go sit in the spot where I could be alone and watch the river I loved and ponder our life together. She’d said this to me this morning, after we’d eaten her crepes. She leaned forward on the table and said, ‘I know we are having a tough time. I still love you so much, Nick, and I know I have a lot of things to work on. I want to be a good wife to you, and I want you to be my husband and be happy. But you need to decide what you want.’

She’d clearly been practicing the speech; she smiled proudly as she said it. And even as my wife was offering me this kindness, I was thinking,
Of course she has to stage-manage this. She wants the image of me and the wild running river, my hair ruffling in the breeze as I look out onto the horizon and ponder our life together. I can’t just go to Dunkin’ Donuts
.

You need to decide what you want
. Unfortunately for Amy, I had decided already.

Boney looked up brightly from her notes: ‘Can you tell me what your wife’s blood type is?’ she asked.

‘Uh, no, I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know your wife’s blood type?’

‘Maybe O?’ I guessed.

Boney frowned, then made a drawn-out yoga-like sound. ‘Okay, Nick, here are the things
we
are doing to help.’ She listed them: Amy’s cell was being monitored, her photo circulated, her credit cards tracked. Known sex offenders in the area were being interviewed. Our sparse neighborhood was being canvassed. Our home phone was tapped, in case any ransom calls came in.

I wasn’t sure what to say now. I raked my memory for the lines: What does the husband say at this point in the movie? Depends on whether he’s guilty or innocent.

‘I can’t say that reassures me. Are you – is this an abduction, or a missing persons case, or what exactly is going on?’ I knew the statistics, knew them from the same TV show I was starring in: If the first forty-eight hours didn’t turn up something in a case, it was likely to go unsolved. The first forty-eight hours were crucial. ‘I mean, my wife is gone. My wife:
is gone
!’ I realized it was the first time I’d said it the way it should have been said: panicked and
angry. My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick – my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.

‘Nick, we are taking this
extremely
seriously,’ Boney said. ‘The lab guys are over at your place as we speak, and that will give us more information to go on. Right now, the more you can tell us about your wife, the better. What is she like?’

The usual husband phrases came into my mind:
She’s sweet, she’s great, she’s nice, she’s supportive
.

‘What is she like
how
?’ I asked.

‘Give me an idea of her personality,’ Boney prompted. ‘Like, what did you get her for your anniversary? Jewelry?’

‘I hadn’t gotten anything quite yet,’ I said. ‘I was going to do it this afternoon.’ I waited for her to laugh and say ‘baby of the family’ again, but she didn’t.

‘Okay. Well, then, tell me about her. Is she outgoing? Is she – I don’t know how to say this – is she New Yorky? Like what might come off to some as rude? Might rub people the wrong way?’

‘I don’t know. She’s not a never-met-a-stranger kind of person, but she’s not – not abrasive enough to make someone … hurt her.’

This was my eleventh lie. The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of
solving Amy
. When I’d hold up the bloody stumps, she’d sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was funny. She made me laugh. I’d forgotten that. And
she
laughed. From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.