Gone Girl: A Novel Read online

“I know there was a rape charge, but I don’t necessarily believe you’re a rapist. I wanted to hear what you had to say.”

  “Yeah.” I heard him take a gulp of his Scotch, kill it, shake the ice cubes around. “I caught the story on the news one night. Your story. Amy’s. I was in bed, eating Thai. Minding my own business. Totally fucked me in the head. Her after all these years.” He called to the bartender for another. “So my lawyer said no way I should talk to you, but … what can I say? I’m too fucking nice. I can’t let you twist. God, I wish you could still smoke in bars. This is a Scotch and cigarette conversation.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “About the assault charge. The rape.”

  “Like I said, man, I’ve seen the coverage, the media is shitting all over you. I mean, you’re the guy. So I should leave well enough alone—I don’t need that girl back in my life. Even, like, tangentially. But shit. I wish someone had done me the favor.”

  “So do me the favor,” I said.

  “First of all, she dropped the charges—you know that, right?”

  “I know. Did you do it?”

  “Fuck you. Of course I didn’t do it. Did you do it?”

  “No.”

  “Well.”

  Tommy called again for his Scotch. “Let me ask: Your marriage was good? Amy was happy?”

  I stayed silent.

  “You don’t have to answer, but I’m going to guess no. Amy was not happy. For whatever reason. I’m not even going to ask. I can guess, but I’m not going to ask. But I know you must know this: Amy likes to play God when she’s not happy. Old Testament God.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She doles out punishment,” Tommy said. “Hard.” He laughed into the phone. “I mean, you should see me,” he said. “I do not look like some alpha-male rapist. I look like a twerp. I am a twerp. My go-to karaoke song is ‘Sister Christian,’ for crying out loud. I weep during Godfather II. Every time.” He coughed after a swallow. Seemed like a moment to loosen him up.

  “Fredo?” I asked.

  “Fredo, man, yeah. Poor Fredo.”

  “Stepped over.”

  Most men have sports as the lingua-franca of dudes. This was the film-geek equivalent to discussing some great play in a famous football game. We both knew the line, and the fact that we both knew it eliminated a good day’s worth of are we copacetic small talk.

  He took another drink. “It was so fucking absurd.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’re not taping this or anything, right? No one’s listening in? Because I don’t want that.”

  “Just us. I’m on your side.”

  “So I meet Amy at a party—this is, like, seven years ago now—and she’s so damn cool. Just hilarious and weird and … cool. We just clicked, you know, and I don’t click with a lot of girls, at least not girls who look like Amy. So I’m thinking … well, first I’m thinking I’m being punked. Where’s the catch, you know? But we start dating, and we date a few months, two, three months, and then I find out the catch: She’s not the girl I thought I was dating. She can quote funny things, but she doesn’t actually like funny things. She’d rather not laugh, anyway. In fact, she’d rather that I not laugh either, or be funny, which is awkward since it’s my job, but to her, it’s all a waste of time. I mean, I can’t even figure out why she started dating me in the first place, because it seems pretty clear that she doesn’t even like me. Does that make sense?”

  I nodded, swallowed a gulp of Scotch. “Yeah. It does.”

  “So, I start making excuses not to hang out so much. I don’t call it off, because I’m an idiot, and she’s gorgeous. I’m hoping it might turn around. But you know, I’m making excuses fairly regularly: I’m stuck at work, I’m on deadline, I have a friend in town, my monkey is sick, whatever. And I start seeing this other girl, kinda sorta seeing her, very casual, no big deal. Or so I think. But Amy finds out—how, I still don’t know, for all I know, she was staking out my apartment. But … shit …”

  “Take a drink.”

  We both took a swallow.

  “Amy comes over to my place one night—I’d been seeing this other girl like a month—and Amy comes over, and she’s all back like she used to be. She’s got some bootleg DVD of a comic I like, an underground performance in Durham, and she’s got a sack of burgers, and we watch the DVD, and she’s got her leg flopped over mine, and then she’s nestling into me, and … sorry. She’s your wife. My main point is: The girl knew how to work me. And we end up …”

  “You had sex.”

  “Consensual sex, yes. And she leaves and everything is fine. Kiss goodbye at the door, the whole shebang.”

  “Then what?”

  “The next thing I know, two cops are at my door, and they’ve done a rape kit on Amy, and she has ‘wounds consistent with forcible rape.’ And she has ligature marks on her wrists, and when they search my apartment, there on the headboard of my bed are two ties—like, neckties—tucked down near the mattress, and the ties are, quote, ‘consistent with the ligature marks.’ ”

  “Had you tied her up?”

  “No, the sex wasn’t even that … that, you know? I was totally caught off guard. She must have tied them there when I got up to take a piss or whatever. I mean, I was in some serious shit. It was looking very bad. And then suddenly she dropped the charges. Couple of weeks later, I got a note, anonymous, typed, says: Maybe next time you’ll think twice.”

  “And you never heard from her again?”

  “Never heard from her again.”

  “And you didn’t try to press charges against her or anything?”

  “Uh, no. Fuck no. I was just glad she went away. Then last week, I’m eating my Thai food, sitting in my bed, watching the news report. On Amy. On you. Perfect wife, anniversary, no body, real shitstorm. I swear, I broke out in a sweat. I thought: That’s Amy, she’s graduated to murder. Holy shit. I’m serious, man, I bet whatever she’s got cooked up for you, it’s drum-fucking-tight. You should be fucking scared.”

  AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

  EIGHT DAYS GONE

  I am wet from the bumper boats; we got more than five dollars’ worth of time because the two sun-stunned teenage girls would rather flip through gossip magazines and smoke cigarettes than try to herd us off the water. So we spent a good thirty minutes on our lawn-mower-motor-propelled ships, ramming each other and turning wild twists, and then we got bored and left of our own accord.

  Greta, Jeff, and I, an odd crew in a strange place. Greta and Jeff have become good friends in just a day, which is how people do it here, where there’s nothing else to do. I think Greta is deciding whether she’ll make Jeff another of her disastrous mating choices. Jeff would like it. He prefers her. She is much prettier than I am, right now, in this place. Cheap pretty. She is wearing a bikini top and jean shorts, with a spare shirt tucked into the back pocket for when she wants to enter a store (T-shirts, wood carvings, decorative rocks) or restaurant (burger, barbecue, taffy). She wants us to get Old West photos taken, but that’s not going to happen for reasons aside from the fact that I don’t want redneck-lake-person lice.

  We end up settling for a few rounds on a decrepit miniature golf course. The fake grass is torn off in patches, the alligators and windmills that once moved mechanically are still. Jeff does the honors instead, twirling the windmill, snapping open and shut the gator jaws. Some holes are simply unplayable—the grass rolled up like carpeting, the farmhouse with its beckoning mousehole collapsed in on itself. So we roam between courses in no particular order. No one is even keeping score.

  This would have annoyed Old Amy to no end: the haphazardness of it all, the pointlessness. But I’m learning to drift, and I do it quite well. I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one. I catch Jeff (cuckolded, divorced, complicated custody arrangement) furrowing his brow as we pass a Love Test
er: Squeeze the metal grip and watch the temperature rise from “just a fling” to “soul mate.” The odd equation—a crushing clutch means true love—reminds me of poor smacked-around Greta, who often places her thumb over the bruise on her chest like it’s a button she can push.

  “You’re up,” Greta says to me. She’s drying her ball off on her shorts—twice she’s gone into the cesspool of dirty water.

  I get in position, wiggle once or twice, and putt my bright red ball straight into the birdhouse opening. It disappears for a second, then reappears out a chute and into the hole. Disappear, reappear. I feel a wave of anxiety—everything reappears at some point, even me. I am anxious because I think my plans have changed.

  I have changed plans only twice so far. The first was the gun. I was going to get a gun and then, on the morning I disappeared, I was going to shoot myself. Nowhere dangerous: through a calf or a wrist. I would leave behind a bullet with my flesh and blood on it. A struggle occurred! Amy was shot! But then I realized this was a little too macho even for me. It would hurt for weeks, and I don’t love pain (my sliced arm feels better now, thank you very much). But I still liked the idea of a gun. It made for a nice MacGuffin. Not Amy was shot but Amy was scared. So I dolled myself up and went to the mall on Valentine’s Day, so I’d be remembered. I couldn’t get one, but it’s not a big deal as far as changed plans go.

  The other one is considerably more extreme. I have decided I’m not going to die.

  I have the discipline to kill myself, but can’t stomach the injustice. It’s not fair that I have to die. Not really die. I don’t want to. I’m not the one who did anything wrong.

  The problem now though is money. It’s so ludicrous, that of all things it’s money that should be an issue for me. But I have only a finite amount—$9,132 at this point. I will need more. This morning I went to chat with Dorothy, as always holding a handkerchief so as not to leave fingerprints (I told her it was my grandmother’s—I try to give her a vague impression of Southern wealth gone to squander, very Blanche DuBois). I leaned against her desk as she told me, in great bureaucratic detail, about a blood thinner she can’t afford—the woman is an encyclopedia of denied pharmaceuticals—and then I said, just to test the situation: “I know what you mean. I’m not sure where I’m going to get rent for my cabin after another week or two.”

  She blinked at me, and blinked back toward the TV set, a game show where people screamed and cried a lot. She took a grandmotherly interest in me, she’d certainly let me stay on, indefinitely: The cabins were half empty, no harm.

  “You better get a job, then,” Dorothy said, not turning away from the TV. A contestant made a bad choice, the prize was lost, a wuh-waaahhh sound effect voiced her pain.

  “A job like what? What kind of job can I get around here?”

  “Cleaning, babysitting.”

  Basically, I was supposed to be a housewife for pay. Irony enough for a million Hang in There posters.

  It’s true that even in our lowly Missouri state, I didn’t ever have to actually budget. I couldn’t go out and buy a new car just because I wanted to, but I never had to think about the day-to-day stuff, coupon clipping and buying generic and knowing how much milk costs off the top of my head. My parents never bothered teaching me this, and so they left me unprepared for the real world. For instance, when Greta complained that the convenience store at the marina charged five dollars for a gallon of milk, I winced because the kid there always charged me ten dollars. I’d thought that seemed like a lot, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the little pimply teenager just threw out a number to see if I’d pay.

  So I’d budgeted, but my budget—guaranteed, according to the Internet, to last me six to nine months—is clearly off. And so I am off.

  When we’re done with golf—I win, of course I do, I know because I’m keeping score in my head—we go to the hot-dog stand next door for lunch, and I slip around the corner to dig into my zippered money belt under my shirt, and when I glance back, Greta has followed me, she catches me right before I can stuff the thing away.

  “Ever heard of a purse, Moneybags?” she cracks. This will be an ongoing problem—a person on the run needs lots of cash, but a person on the run by definition has nowhere to keep the cash. Thankfully, Greta doesn’t press the issue—she knows we are both victims here. We sit in the sun on a metal picnic bench and eat hot dogs, white buns wrapped around cylinders of phosphate with relish so green it looks toxic, and it may be the greatest thing I’ve ever eaten because I am Dead Amy and I don’t care.

  “Guess what Jeff found in his cabin for me?” Greta says. “Another book by the Martian Chronicle guy.”

  “Ray Bradburrow,” Jeff says. Bradbury, I think.

  “Yeah, right. Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Greta says. “It’s good.” She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.

  “I read it when I first moved in there,” Jeff says. “It is good. Creepy.” He catches me watching him and makes a goblin face, all crazy eyes and leering tongue. He isn’t my type—the fur on the face is too bristly, he does suspicious things with fish—but he is nice-looking. Attractive. His eyes are very warm, not like Nick’s frozen blues. I wonder if “I” might like sleeping with him—a nice slow screw with his body pressed against mine and his breath in my ear, the bristles on my cheeks, not the lonely way Nick fucks, where our bodies barely connect: right angle from behind, L-shape from the front, and then he’s out of bed almost immediately, hitting the shower, leaving me pulsing in his wet spot.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Jeff says. He never calls me by name, as if to acknowledge that we both know I’ve lied. He says this lady or pretty woman or you. I wonder what he would call me in bed. Baby, maybe.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Uh-oh,” he says, and smiles again.

  “You were thinking about a boy, I can tell,” Greta says.

  “Maybe.”

  “I thought we were steering clear of the assholes for a while,” she says. “Tend to our chickens.” Last night after Ellen Abbott, I was too excited to go home, so we shared a six-pack and imagined our recluse life as the token straight girls on Greta’s mother’s lesbian compound, raising chickens and hanging laundry to dry in the sun. The objects of gentle, platonic courtship from older women with gnarled knuckles and indulgent laughs. Denim and corduroy and clogs and never worrying about makeup or hair or nails, breast size or hip size, or having to pretend to be the understanding wifey, the supportive girlfriend who loves everything her man does.

  “Not all guys are assholes,” Jeff says. Greta makes a noncommittal noise.

  We return to our cabins liquid-limbed. I feel like a water balloon left in the sun. All I want to do is sit under my sputtering window air conditioner and blast my skin with the cool while watching TV. I’ve found a rerun channel that shows nothing but old ’70s and ’80s shows, Quincy and The Love Boat and Eight Is Enough, but first comes Ellen Abbott, my new favorite show!

  Nothing new, nothing new. Ellen doesn’t mind speculating, believe me, she’s hosted an array of strangers from my past who swear they are my friends, and they all have lovely things to say about me, even the ones who never much liked me. Post-life fondness.

  Knock on the door, and I know it will be Greta and Jeff. I switch off the TV, and there they are on my doorstep, aimless.

  “Whatcha doing?” Jeff asks.

  “Reading,” I lie.

  He sets down a six-pack of beer on my counter, Greta padding in behind. “Oh, I thought we heard the TV.”

  Three is literally a crowd in these small cabins. They are blocking the door for a second, sending a pulse of nervousness through me—why are they blocking the door?—and then they keep moving and they are blocking my bedside table. Inside my bedside table is my money belt packed with eight thousand dollars in cash. Hundreds, fif
ties, and twenty-dollar bills. The money belt is hideous, flesh-colored and bunchy. I can’t possibly wear all my money at once—I leave some scattered around the cabin—but I try to wear most, and when I do, I am as conscious of it as a girl at the beach with a maxipad. A perverse part of me enjoys spending money, because every time I pull off a wad of twenties, that’s less money to hide, to worry about being stolen or lost.

  Jeff clicks on the TV, and Ellen Abbott—and Amy—buzz into focus. He nods, smiles to himself.

  “Want to watch … Amy?” Greta asks.

  I can’t tell if she used a comma: Want to watch, Amy? or Want to watch Amy?

  “Nah. Jeff, why don’t you grab your guitar and we can sit on the porch?”

  Jeff and Greta exchange a look.

  “Awww … but that’s what you were watching, right?” Greta says. She points at the screen, and it’s me and Nick at a benefit, me in a gown, my hair pulled back in a chignon, and I look more like I look now, with my short hair.

  “It’s boring,” I say.

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s boring at all,” Greta says, and flops down on my bed.

  I think what a fool I am, to have let these two people inside. To have assumed I could control them, when they are feral creatures, people used to finding the angle, exploiting the weakness, always needing, whereas I am new to this. Needing. Those people who keep backyard pumas and living-room chimps—this must be how they feel when their adorable pet rips them open.

  “You know what, would you guys mind … I feel kinda crummy. Too much sun, I think.”

  They look surprised and a little offended, and I wonder if I’ve got it wrong—that they are harmless and I’m just paranoid. I’d like to believe that.

  “Sure, sure, of course,” Jeff says. They shuffle out of my cabin, Jeff grabbing his beer on the way. A minute later, I hear Ellen Abbott snarling from Greta’s cabin. The accusatory questions. Why did … Why didn’t … How can you explain …

  Why did I ever let myself get friendly with anyone here? Why didn’t I keep to myself? How can I explain my actions if I’m found out?