Gone Girl: A Novel Read online

  After the layoffs, it seemed like it might happen. Suddenly, there was an uncontestable space in our lives, and one day over breakfast, Amy looked up from her toast and said, I’m off the pill. Just like that. She was off the pill three months, and nothing happened, and not long after the move to Missouri, she made an appointment for us to start the medical intervention. Once Amy started a project, she didn’t like to dilly-dally: “We’ll tell them we’ve been trying a year,” she said. Foolishly I agreed—we were barely ever touching each other by then, but we still thought a kid made sense. Sure.

  “You’ll have to do your part too, you know,” she said on the drive to St. Louis. “You’ll have to give semen.”

  “I know. Why do you say it like that?”

  “I just figured you’d be too proud. Self-conscious and proud.”

  I was a rather nasty cocktail of both those traits, but at the fertility center, I dutifully entered the strange small room dedicated to self-abuse: a place where hundreds of men had entered for no other purpose than to crank the shank, clean the rifle, jerk the gherkin, make the bald man cry, pound the flounder, sail the mayonnaise seas, wiggle the walrus, whitewash with Tom and Huck.

  (I sometimes use humor as self-defense.)

  The room contained a vinyl-covered armchair, a TV, and a table that held a grab bag of porn and a box of tissues. The porn was early ’90s, judging from the women’s hair (yes: top and bottom), and the action was midcore. (Another good essay: Who selects the porn for fertility centers? Who judges what will get men off yet not be too degrading to all the women outside the cum-room, the nurses and doctors and hopeful, hormone-addled wives?)

  I visited the room on three separate occasions—they like to have a lot of backup—while Amy did nothing. She was supposed to begin taking pills, but she didn’t, and then she didn’t some more. She was the one who’d be pregnant, the one who’d turn over her body to the baby, so I postponed nudging her for a few months, keeping an eye on the pill bottle to see if the level went down. Finally, after a few beers one winter night, I crunched up the steps of our home, shed my snow-crusted clothes, and curled up next to her in bed, my face near her shoulder, breathing her in, warming the tip of my nose on her skin. I whispered the words—Let’s do this, Amy, let’s have a baby—and she said no. I was expecting nervousness, caution, worry—Nick, will I be a good mom?—but I got a clipped, cold no. A no without loopholes. Nothing dramatic, no big deal, just not something she was interested in anymore. “Because I realized I’d be stuck doing all the hard stuff,” she reasoned. “All the diapers and doctors’ appointments and discipline, and you’d just breeze in and be Fun Daddy. I’d do all the work to make them good people, and you’d undo it anyway, and they’d love you and hate me.”

  I told Amy it wasn’t true, but she didn’t believe me. I told her I didn’t just want a child, I needed a child. I had to know I could love a person unconditionally, that I could make a little creature feel constantly welcome and wanted no matter what. That I could be a different kind of father than my dad was. That I could raise a boy who wasn’t like me.

  I begged her. Amy remained unmoved.

  A year later, I got a notice in the mail: The clinic would dispose of my semen unless they heard from us. I left the letter on the dining room table, an open rebuke. Three days later, I saw it in the trash. That was our final communication on the subject.

  By then I’d already been secretly dating Andie for months, so I had no right to be upset. But that didn’t stop my aching, and it didn’t stop me from daydreaming about our boy, mine and Amy’s. I’d gotten attached to him. The fact was, Amy and I would make a great child.

  The marionettes were watching me with alarmed black eyes. I peered out my window, saw that the news trucks had packed it in, so I went out into the warm night. Time to walk. Maybe a lone tabloid writer was trailing me; if so, I didn’t care. I headed through our complex, then forty-five minutes out along River Road, then onto the highway that shot right through the middle of Carthage. Thirty loud, fumy minutes—past car dealerships with trucks displayed appealingly like desserts, past fast-food chains and liquor stores and mini-marts and gas stations—until I reached the turnoff for downtown. I had encountered not a single other person on foot the entire time, only faceless blurs whizzing past me in cars.

  It was close to midnight. I passed The Bar, tempted to go in but put off by the crowds. A reporter or two had to be camped out in there. It’s what I would do. But I wanted to be in a bar. I wanted to be surrounded by people, having fun, blowing off steam. I walked another fifteen minutes to the other end of downtown, to a cheesier, rowdier, younger bar where the bathrooms were always laced with vomit on Saturday nights. It was a bar that Andie’s crowd would go to, and perhaps, who knew, drag along Andie. It would be a nice bit of luck to see her there. At least gauge her mood from across the room. And if she wasn’t there then I’d have a fucking drink.

  I went as deep into the bar as I could—no Andie, no Andie. My face was partially covered by a baseball cap. Even so, I felt a few pings as I moved past crowds of drinkers: heads abruptly turning toward me, the wide eyes of identification. That guy! Right?

  Mid-July. I wondered if I’d become so nefarious come October, I’d be some frat boy’s tasteless Halloween costume: mop of blond hair, an Amazing Amy book tucked under an armpit. Go said she’d received half a dozen phone calls asking if The Bar had an official T-shirt for sale. (We didn’t, thank God.)

  I sat down and ordered a Scotch from the bartender, a guy about my age who stared at me a beat too long, deciding whether he would serve me. He finally, grudgingly, set down a small tumbler in front of me, his nostrils flared. When I got out my wallet, he aimed an alarmed palm up at me. “I do not want your money, man. Not at all.”

  I left cash anyway. Asshole.

  When I tried to flag him for another drink, he glanced my way, shook his head, and leaned in toward the woman he was chatting up. A few seconds later, she discreetly looked toward me, pretending she was stretching. Her mouth turned down as she nodded. That’s him. Nick Dunne. The bartender never came back.

  You can’t yell, you can’t strong-arm: Hey, jackass, will you get me a goddamn drink or what? You can’t be the asshole they believe you are. You just have to sit and take it. But I wasn’t leaving. I sat with my empty glass in front of me and pretended I was thinking very hard. I checked my disposable cell, just in case Andie had called. No. Then I pulled out my real phone and played a round of solitaire, pretending to be engrossed. My wife had done this to me, turned me into a man who couldn’t get a drink in his own hometown. God, I hated her.

  “Was it Scotch?”

  A girl about Andie’s age was standing in front of me. Asian, black shoulder-length hair, cubicle-cute.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What you were drinking? Scotch?”

  “Yeah. Having trouble getting—”

  She was gone, to the end of the bar, and she was nosing into the bartender’s line of vision with a big help me smile, a girl used to making her presence known, and then she was back with a Scotch in an actual big-boy tumbler.

  “Take it,” she nudged, and I did. “Cheers.” She held up her own clear, fizzing drink. We clinked glasses. “Can I sit?”

  “I’m not staying long, actually—” I looked around, making sure no one was aiming a cameraphone at us.

  “So, okay,” she said with a shruggy smile. “I could pretend I don’t know you’re Nick Dunne, but I’m not going to insult you. I’m rooting for you, by the way. You’ve been getting a bad rap.”

  “Thanks. It’s, uh, it’s a weird time.”

  “I’m serious. You know how, in court, they talk about the CSI effect? Like, everyone on the jury has watched so much CSI that they believe science can prove anything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I think there’s an Evil Husband effect. Everyone has seen too many true-crime shows where the husband is always, always the killer, so people automatically assum
e the husband’s the bad guy.”

  “That’s exactly it,” I said. “Thank you. That is exactly it. And Ellen Abbott—”

  “Fuck Ellen Abbott,” my new friend said. “She’s a one-woman walking, talking, man-hating perversion of the justice system.” She raised her glass again.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Another Scotch?”

  “That’s a gorgeous name.”

  Her name, as it turned out, was Rebecca. She had a ready credit card and a hollow leg. (Another? Another? Another?) She was from Muscatine, Iowa (another Mississippi River town), and had moved to New York after undergrad to be a writer (also like me). She’d been an editorial assistant at three different magazines—a bridal magazine, a working-mom magazine, a teen-girl magazine—all of which had shuttered in the past few years, so she was now working for a crime blog called Whodunnit, and she was (giggle) in town to try to get an interview with me. Hell, I had to love her hungry-kid chutzpah: Just fly me to Carthage—the major networks haven’t gotten him, but I’m sure I can!

  “I’ve been waiting outside your house with the rest of the world, and then at the police station, and then I decided I needed a drink. And here you walk in. It’s just too perfect. Too weird, right?” she said. She had little gold hoop earrings that she kept playing with, her hair tucked behind her ears.

  “I should go,” I said. My words were sticky around the edges, the beginnings of a slur.

  “But you never told me why you’re here,” Rebecca said. “I have to say, it takes a lot of courage, I think, for you to head out without a friend or some sort of backup. I bet you get a lot of shitty looks.”

  I shrugged: No big deal.

  “People judging everything you do without even knowing you. Like you with the cell-phone photo at the park. I mean, you were probably like me: You were raised to be polite. But no one wants the real story. They just want to … gotcha. You know?”

  “I’m just tired of people judging me because I fit into a certain mold.”

  She raised her eyebrows; her earrings jittered.

  I thought of Amy sitting in her mystery control center, wherever the fuck she was, judging me from every angle, finding me wanting even from afar. Was there anything she could see that would make her call off this madness?

  I went on, “I mean, people think we were in a rocky marriage, but actually, right before she disappeared, she put together a treasure hunt for me.”

  Amy would want one of two things: for me to learn my lesson and fry like the bad boy I was; or for me to learn my lesson and love her the way she deserved and be a good, obedient, chastised, dickless little boy.

  “This wonderful treasure hunt.” I smiled. Rebecca shook her head with a little-V frown. “My wife, she always did a treasure hunt for our anniversary. One clue leads to a special place where I find the next clue, and so on. Amy …” I tried to get my eyes to fill, settled for wiping them. The clock above the door read 12:37 A.M. “Before she went missing, she hid all the clues. For this year.”

  “Before she disappeared on your anniversary.”

  “And it’s been all that’s kept me together. It made me feel closer to her.”

  Rebecca pulled out a Flip camera. “Let me interview you. On camera.”

  “Bad idea.”

  “I’ll give it context,” she said. “That’s exactly what you need, Nick, I swear. Context. You need it bad. Come on, just a few words.”

  I shook my head. “Too dangerous.”

  “Say what you just said. I’m serious, Nick. I’m the opposite of Ellen Abbott. The anti–Ellen Abbott. You need me in your life.” She held up the camera, its tiny red light eyeing me.

  “Seriously, turn it off.”

  “Help a girl out. I get the Nick Dunne interview? My career is made. You’ve done your good deed for the year. Pleeease? No harm, Nick, one minute. Just one minute. I swear I will only make you look good.”

  She motioned to a nearby booth where we’d be tucked out of view of any gawkers. I nodded and we resettled, that little red light aimed at me the whole time.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “Tell me about the treasure hunt. It sounds romantic. Like, quirky, awesome, romantic.”

  Take control of the story, Nick. For both the capital-P public and the capital-C wife. Right now, I thought, I am a man who loves his wife and will find her. I am a man who loves his wife, and I am the good guy. I am the one to root for. I am a man who isn’t perfect, but my wife is, and I will be very, very obedient from now on.

  I could do this more easily than feign sadness. Like I said, I can operate in sunlight. Still, I felt my throat tighten as I got ready to say the words.

  “My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met. How many guys can say that? I married the coolest girl I ever met.”

  Youfuckingbitchyoufuckingbitchyoufuckingbitch. Come home so I can kill you.

  AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

  NINE DAYS GONE

  I wake up feeling immediately nervous. Off. I cannot be found here, that’s what I wake up thinking, a burst of words, like a flash in my brain. The investigation is not going fast enough, and my money situation is just the opposite, and Jeff’s and Greta’s greedy antennae are up. And I smell like fish.

  There was something about Jeff and that race to the shoreline, toward my bundled dress and my money belt. Something about the way Greta keeps alighting on Ellen Abbott. It makes me nervous. Or am I being paranoid? I sound like Diary Amy: Is my husband going to kill me or am I imagining!?!? For the first time I actually feel sorry for her.

  I make two calls to the Amy Dunne tip line, and speak to two different people, and offer two different tips. It’s hard to tell how quickly they’ll reach the police—the volunteers seem utterly disinterested. I drive to the library in a dark mood. I need to pack up and leave. Clean my cabin with bleach, wipe my fingerprints off everything, vacuum for any hairs. Erase Amy (and Lydia and Nancy) and go. If I go, I’ll be safe. Even if Greta and Jeff do suspect who I am, as long as I’m not caught in the flesh, I’m okay. Amy Elliott Dunne is like a yeti—coveted and folkloric—and they are two Ozarks grifters whose blurry story will be immediately debunked. I will leave today. That’s what I decide when I walk with my head bowed into the chilly, mostly uninhabited library with its three vacant computers and I go online to catch up on Nick.

  Since the vigil, the news about Nick has been on repeat—the same facts on a circuit, over and over, getting louder and louder, but with no new information. But today something is different. I type Nick’s name into the search engine, and the blogs are going nuts, because my husband has gotten drunk and done an insane interview, in a bar, with a random girl wielding a Flip camera. God, the idiot never learns.

  NICK DUNNE’S VIDEO CONFESSION!!!

  NICK DUNNE, DRUNKEN DECLARATIONS!!!

  My heart jumps so high, my uvula begins pulsing. My husband has fucked himself again.

  The video loads, and there is Nick. He has the sleepy eyes he gets when he’s drunk, the heavy lids, and he’s got his sideways grin, and he’s talking about me, and he looks like a human being. He looks happy. “My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met,” he says. “How many guys can say that? I married the coolest girl I ever met.”

  My stomach flutters delicately. I was not expecting this. I almost smile.

  “What’s so cool about her?” the girl asks off-screen. Her voice is high, sorority-cheery.

  Nick launches into the treasure hunt, how it was our tradition, how I always remembered hilarious inside jokes, and right now this was all he had left of me, so he had to complete the treasure hunt. It was his mission.

  “I just reached the end this morning,” he says. His voice is husky. He has been talking over the crowd. He’ll go home and gargle with warm salt water, like his mother always made him do. If I were at home with him, he’d ask me to heat the water and make it for him, because he never got the right amount of sa
lt. “And it made me … realize a lot. She is the only person in the world who has the power to surprise me, you know? Everyone else, I always know what they’re going to say, because everyone says the same thing. We all watch the same shows, we read the same stuff, we recycle everything. But Amy, she is her own perfect person. She just has this power over me.”

  “Where do you think she is now, Nick?”

  My husband looks down at his wedding band and twirls it twice.

  “Are you okay, Nick?”

  “The truth? No. I failed my wife so entirely. I have been so wrong. I just hope it’s not too late. For me. For us.”

  “You’re at the end of your rope. Emotionally.”

  Nick looks right at the camera. “I want my wife. I want her to be right here.” He takes a breath. “I’m not the best at showing emotion. I know that. But I love her. I need her to be okay. She has to be okay. I have so much to make up to her.”

  “Like what?”

  He laughs, the chagrined laugh that even now I find appealing. In better days, I used to call it the talk-show laugh: It was the quick downward glance, the scratching of a corner of the mouth with a casual thumb, the inhaled chuckle that a charming movie star always deploys right before telling a killer story.

  “Like, none of your business.” He smiles. “I just have a lot to make up to her. I wasn’t the husband I could have been. We had a few hard years, and I … I lost my shit. I stopped trying. I mean, I’ve heard that phrase a thousand times: We stopped trying. Everyone knows it means the end of a marriage—it’s textbook. But I stopped trying. It was me. I wasn’t the man I needed to be.” Nick’s lids are heavy, his speech off-kilter enough that his twang is showing. He is past tipsy, one drink before drunk. His cheeks are pink with alcohol. My fingertips glow, remembering the heat of his skin when he had a few cocktails in him.