Gone Girl: A Novel Read online

  Nick, at least, didn’t do this. Nick let me do what I wanted.

  I just want Desi to sit still and be quiet. He’s fidgety and nervous, as if his rival is in the room with us.

  “Shhh,” I say as my pretty face comes on the screen, then another photo and another, like falling leaves, an Amy collage.

  “She was the girl that every girl wanted to be,” said Sharon’s voiceover. “Beautiful, brilliant, inspiring, and very wealthy.”

  “He was the guy that all men admired …”

  “Not this man,” Desi muttered.

  “… handsome, funny, bright, and charming.”

  “But on July fifth, their seemingly perfect world came crashing in when Amy Elliott Dunne disappeared on their fifth wedding anniversary.”

  Recap recap recap. Photos of me, Andie, Nick. Stock photos of a pregnancy test and unpaid bills. I really did do a nice job. It’s like painting a mural and stepping back and thinking: Perfect.

  “Now, exclusively, Nick Dunne breaks his silence, not only on his wife’s disappearance but on his infidelity and all those rumors.”

  I feel a gust of warmth toward Nick because he’s wearing my favorite tie that I bought for him, that he thinks, or thought, was too girly-bright. It’s a peacocky purple that turns his eyes almost violet. He’s lost his satisfied-asshole paunch over the last month: His belly is gone, the fleshiness of his face has vanished, his chin is less clefty. His hair has been trimmed but not cut—I have an image of Go hacking away at him just before he went on camera, slipping into Mama Mo’s role, fussing over him, doing the saliva-thumb rubdown on some spot near his chin. He is wearing my tie and when he lifts his hand to make a gesture, I see he is wearing my watch, the vintage Bulova Spaceview that I got him for his thirty-third birthday, that he never wore because it wasn’t him, even though it was completely him.

  “He’s wonderfully well groomed for a man who thinks his wife is missing,” Desi snipes. “Glad he didn’t skip a manicure.”

  “Nick would never get a manicure,” I say, glancing at Desi’s buffed nails.

  “Let’s get right to it, Nick,” Sharon says. “Did you have anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?”

  “No. No. Absolutely, one hundred percent not,” Nick says, keeping well-coached eye contact. “But let me say, Sharon, I am far, far from being innocent, or blameless, or a good husband. If I weren’t so afraid for Amy, I would say this was a good thing, in a way, her disappearing—”

  “Excuse me, Nick, but I think a lot of people will find it hard to believe you just said that when your wife is missing.”

  “It’s the most awful, horrible feeling in the world, and I want her back more than anything. All I am saying is that it has been the most brutal eye-opener for me. You hate to believe that you are such an awful man that it takes something like this to pull you out of your selfishness spiral and wake you up to the fact that you are the luckiest bastard in the world. I mean, I had this woman who was my equal, my better, in every way, and I let my insecurities—about losing my job, about not being able to care for my family, about getting older—cloud all that.”

  “Oh, please—” Desi starts, and I shush him. For Nick to admit to the world that he is not a good guy—it’s a small death, and not of the petite mort variety.

  “And Sharon, let me say it. Let me say it right now: I cheated. I disrespected my wife. I didn’t want to be the man that I had become, but instead of working on myself, I took the easy way out. I cheated with a young woman who barely knew me. So I could pretend to be the big man. I could pretend to be the man I wanted to be—smart and confident and successful—because this young woman didn’t know any different. This young girl, she hadn’t seen me crying into a towel in the bathroom in the middle of the night because I lost my job. She didn’t know all my foibles and shortcomings. I was a fool who believed if I wasn’t perfect, my wife wouldn’t love me. I wanted to be Amy’s hero, and when I lost my job, I lost my self-respect. I couldn’t be that hero anymore. Sharon, I know right from wrong. And I just— I just did wrong.”

  “What would you say to your wife, if she is possibly out there, able to see and hear you tonight?”

  “I’d say: Amy, I love you. You are the best woman I have ever known. You are more than I deserve, and if you come back, I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you. We will find a way to put all this horror behind us, and I will be the best man in the world to you. Please come home to me, Amy.”

  Just for a second, he places the pad of his index finger in the cleft of his chin, our old secret code, the one we did back in the day to swear we weren’t bullshitting each other—the dress really did look nice, that article really was solid. I am absolutely, one hundred percent sincere right now—I have your back, and I wouldn’t fuck with you.

  Desi leans in front of me to break my contact with the screen and reaches for the Sancerre. “More wine, sweetheart?” he says.

  “Shhh.”

  He pauses the show. “Amy, you are a good-hearted woman. I know you are susceptible to … pleas. But everything he is saying is lies.”

  Nick is saying exactly what I want to hear. Finally.

  Desi moves around so he is staring at me full-face, completely obstructing my vision. “Nick is putting on a pageant. He wants to come off as a good, repentant guy. I’ll admit he’s doing a bang-up job. But it’s not real—he hasn’t even mentioned beating you, violating you. I don’t know what kind of hold this guy has on you. It must be a Stockholm-syndrome thing.”

  “I know,” I say. I know exactly what I am supposed to say to Desi. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I haven’t felt so safe in so long, Desi, but I am still … I see him and … I’m fighting this, but he hurt me … for years.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t watch any more,” he says, twirling my hair, leaning too close.

  “No, leave it on,” I say. “I have to face this. With you. I can do it with you.” I put my hand in his. Now shut the fuck up.

  I just want Amy to come home so I can spend the rest of my life making it up to her, treating her how she deserves.

  Nick forgives me—I screwed you over, you screwed me over, let’s make up. What if his code is true? Nick wants me back. Nick wants me back so he can treat me right. So he can spend the rest of his life treating me the way he should. It sounds rather lovely. We could go back to New York. Sales for the Amazing Amy books have skyrocketed since my disappearance—three generations of readers have remembered how much they love me. My greedy, stupid, irresponsible parents can finally pay back my trust fund. With interest.

  Because I want to go back to my old life. Or my old life with my old money and my New Nick. Love-Honor-and-Obey Nick. Maybe he’s learned his lesson. Maybe he’ll be like he was before. Because I’ve been daydreaming—trapped in my Ozarks cabin, trapped in Desi’s mansion compound, I have a lot of time to daydream and what I’ve been daydreaming of is Nick in those early days. I thought I would daydream more about Nick getting ass-raped in prison, but I haven’t so much, not so much, lately. I think about those early, early days, when we would lie in bed next to each other, naked flesh on cool cotton, and he would just stare at me, one finger tracing my jaw from my chin to my ear, making me wriggle, that light tickling on my lobe, and then through all the seashell curves of my ear and into my hairline, and then he’d take hold of one lock of hair, like he did that very first time we kissed, and pull it all the way to the end and tug twice, gently, like he was ringing a bell. And he’d say, “You are better than any storybook, you are better than anything anyone could make up.”

  Nick fastened me to the earth. Nick wasn’t like Desi, who brought me things I wanted (tulips, wine) to make me do the things he wanted (love him). Nick just wanted me to be happy, that’s all, very pure. Maybe I mistook that for laziness. I just want you to be happy, Amy. How many times did he say that and I took it to mean: I just want you to be happy, Amy, because that’s less work for me. But maybe I was unfair. Well, not
unfair but confused. No one I’ve loved has ever not had an agenda. So how could I know?

  It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.

  I need to get home to him.

  NICK DUNNE

  FOURTEEN DAYS GONE

  I woke up on my sister’s couch with a raging hangover and an urge to kill my wife. This was fairly common in the days after the Diary Interview with the police. I’d imagine finding Amy tucked away in some spa on the West Coast, sipping pineapple juice on a divan, her cares floating way, far away, above a perfect blue sky, and me, dirty, smelly from an urgent cross-country drive, standing in front of her, blocking the sun until she looks up, and then my hands around her perfect throat, with its cords and hollows and the pulse thumping first urgently and then slowly as we look into each other’s eyes and at last have some understanding.

  I was going to be arrested. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the next day. I had taken the fact that the police let me walk out of the station as a good sign, but Tanner had shut me down: “Without a body, a conviction is incredibly tough. They’re just dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s. Spend these days doing whatever you need to do, because once the arrest happens, we’ll be busy.”

  Just outside the window, I could hear the rumbling of camera crews—men greeting one another good morning, as if they were clocking in at the factory. Cameras click-click-clicked like restless locusts, shooting the front of Go’s house. Someone had leaked the discovery of my “man cave” of goods on my sister’s property, my imminent arrest. Neither of us had dared to so much as flick at a curtain.

  Go walked into the room in flannel boxers and her high school Butthole Surfers T-shirt, her laptop in the crook of an arm. “Everyone hates you again,” she said.

  “Fickle fucks.”

  “Last night someone leaked the information about the shed, about Amy’s purse and the diary. Now it’s all: Nick Is a Liar, Nick Is a Killer, Nick Is a Lying Killer. Sharon Schieber just released a statement saying she was very shocked and disappointed with the direction the case was taking. Oh, and everyone knows all about the porn—Kill the Bitches.”

  “Hurt the Bitch.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” she said. “Hurt the Bitch. So Nick Is a Lying Killer-slash-Sexual Sadist. Ellen Abbott is going to go fucking rabid. She’s a crazy anti-porn lady.”

  “Of course she is,” I said. “I’m sure Amy is very aware of that.”

  “Nick?” she said in her wake up voice. “This is bad.”

  “Go, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, we need to remember that,” I said. “What matters right now is what Amy is thinking. If she’s softening toward me.”

  “Nick. You really think she can go that fast from hating you so much to falling in love with you again?”

  It was the fifth anniversary of our conversation on this topic.

  “Go, yeah, I do. Amy was never a person with any sort of bullshit detector. If you said she looked beautiful, she knew that was a fact. If you said she was brilliant, it wasn’t flattery, it was her due. So yeah, I think a good chunk of her truly believes that if I can only see the error of my ways, of course I’ll be in love with her again. Because why in God’s name wouldn’t I be?”

  “And if it turns out she’s developed a bullshit detector?”

  “You know Amy; she needs to win. She’s less pissed off that I cheated than that I picked someone else over her. She’ll want me back just to prove that she’s the winner. Don’t you agree? Just seeing me begging her to come back so I can worship her properly, it will be hard for her to resist. Don’t you think?”

  “I think it’s a decent idea,” she said in the way you might wish someone good luck on the lottery.

  “Hey, if you’ve got something better, by all fucking means.”

  We snapped like that at each other now. We’d never done that before. After the police found the woodshed, they grilled Go, hard, just as Tanner had predicted: Did she know? Did she help?

  I’d expected her to come home that night, brimming with curse words and fury, but all I got was an embarrassed smile as she slipped past me to her room in the house she had double-mortgaged to cover Tanner’s retainer.

  I had put my sister in financial and legal jeopardy because of my shitty decisions. The whole situation made Go feel resentful and me ashamed, a lethal combination for two people trapped in small confines.

  I tried a different subject: “I’ve been thinking about phoning Andie now that—”

  “Yeah, that would be genius-smart, Nick. Then she can go back on Ellen Abbott—”

  “She didn’t go on Ellen Abbott. She had a press conference that Ellen Abbott carried. She’s not evil, Go.”

  “She gave the press conference because she was pissed at you. I sorta wish you’d just kept fucking her.”

  “Nice.”

  “What would you even say to her?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You are definitely fucking sorry,” she muttered.

  “I just— I hate how it ended.”

  “The last time you saw Andie, she bit you,” Go said in an overly patient voice. “I don’t think the two of you have anything else to say. You are the prime suspect in a murder investigation. You have forfeited the right to a smooth breakup. For fuck’s sake, Nick.”

  We were growing sick of each other, something I never thought could happen. It was more than basic stress, more than the danger I’d deposited on Go’s doorstep. Those ten seconds just a week ago, when I’d opened the door of the woodshed, expecting Go to read my mind as always, and what Go had read was that I’d killed my wife: I couldn’t get over that, and neither could she. I caught her looking at me now and then with the same steeled chill with which she looked at our father: just another shitty male taking up space. I’m sure I looked at her through our father’s miserable eyes sometimes: just another petty woman resenting me.

  I let out a gust of air, stood up, and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

  “I think I should head home,” I said. I felt a wave of nausea. “I can’t stand this anymore. Waiting to be arrested, I can’t stand it.”

  Before she could stop me, I grabbed my keys, swung open the door, and the cameras began blasting, the shouts exploded from a crowd that was even larger than I’d feared: Hey, Nick, did you kill your wife? Hey, Margo, did you help your brother hide evidence?

  “Fucking shitbags,” Go spat. She stood next to me in solidarity, in her Butthole Surfers T-shirt and boxers. A few protesters carried signs. A woman with stringy blond hair and sunglasses shook a poster board: Nick, where is AMY?

  The shouts got louder, frantic, baiting my sister: Margo, is your brother a wife killer? Did Nick kill his wife and baby? Margo, are you a suspect? Did Nick kill his wife? Did Nick kill his baby?

  I stood, trying to hold my ground, refusing to let myself step back into the house. Suddenly, Go was crouching behind me, cranking the spigot near the steps. She turned on the hose full-bore—a hard, steady jet—and blasted all those cameramen and protesters and pretty journalists in their TV-ready suits, sprayed them like animals.

  She was giving me covering fire. I shot into my car and tore off, leaving them dripping on the front lawn, Go laughing shrilly.

  It took ten minutes for me to nudge my car from my driveway into my garage, inching my way slowly, slowly forward, parting the angry ocean of human beings—there were at least twenty protesters in front of my home, in addition to the camera crews. My neighbor Jan Teverer was one of them. She and I made eye contact, and she aimed her poster at me: WHERE IS AMY, NICK?

  Finally, I was inside, and the garage door came buzzing down. I sat in the heat of the concrete space, breathing.

  Everywhere felt like a jail now—doors opening and c
losing and opening and closing, and me never feeling safe.

  I spent the rest of my day picturing how I’d kill Amy. It was all I could think of: finding a way to end her. Me smashing in Amy’s busy, busy brain. I had to give Amy her due: I may have been dozing the past few years, but I was fucking wide awake now. I was electric again, like I had been in the early days of our marriage.

  I wanted to do something, make something happen, but there was nothing to be done. By late evening, the camera crews were all gone, though I couldn’t risk leaving the house. I wanted to walk. I settled for pacing. I was wired dangerously tight.

  Andie had screwed me over, Marybeth had turned against me, Go had lost a crucial measure of faith. Boney had trapped me. Amy had destroyed me. I poured a drink. I took a slug, tightened my fingers around the curves of the tumbler, then hurled it at the wall, watched the glass burst into fireworks, heard the tremendous shatter, smelled the cloud of bourbon. Rage in all five senses. Those fucking bitches.

  I’d tried all my life to be a decent guy, a man who loved and respected women, a guy without hang-ups. And here I was, thinking nasty thoughts about my twin, about my mother-in-law, about my mistress. I was imagining bashing in my wife’s skull.

  A knock came at the door, a loud, furious bang-bang-bang that rattled me out of my nightmare brain.

  I opened the door, flung it wide, greeting fury with fury.

  It was my father, standing on my doorstep like some awful specter summoned by my hatefulness. He was breathing heavily and sweating. His shirtsleeve was torn and his hair was wild, but his eyes had their usual dark alertness that made him seem viciously sane.

  “Is she here?” he snapped.

  “Who, Dad, who are you looking for?”

  “You know who.” He pushed past me, started marching through the living room, trailing mud, his hands balled, his gravity far forward, forcing him to keep walking or fall down, muttering bitchbitchbitch. He smelled of mint. Real mint, not manufactured, and I saw a smear of green on his trousers, as if he’d been stomping through someone’s garden.