Gone Girl (28 page)
Authors: Gillian Flynn
Rand didn’t know about the other stuff, the credit cards and the life insurance and the blood and Noelle, my wife’s bitter best friend with the damning claims: abuse, greed, fear. She was booked on
Ellen Abbott
tonight, post-vigil. Noelle and Ellen could be mutually disgusted by me for the viewing audience.
Not everyone was repulsed by me. In the past week, The Bar’s business was booming: Hundreds of customers packed in to sip beers and nibble popcorn at the place owned by Lance Nicholas Dunne, the maybe-killer. Go had to hire four new kids to tend The Bar; she’d dropped by once and said she couldn’t go again, couldn’t stand seeing how packed it was, fucking gawkers, ghouls, all drinking our booze and swapping stories about me. It was disgusting. Still, Go reasoned, the money would be helpful if …
If. Amy gone six days, and we were all thinking in
if
s.
We approached the park in a car gone silent except for Marybeth’s constant nail drumming on the window.
‘Feels almost like a double date.’ Rand laughed, the laughter curving toward the hysterical: high-pitched and squeaky. Rand Elliott, genius psychologist, best-selling author, friend to all, was unraveling. Marybeth had taken to self-medication: shots of clear liquor administered with absolute precision, enough to take the edge off but stay sharp. Rand, on the other hand, was literally losing his head; I half expected to see it shoot off his shoulders on a jack-in-the-box spring – cuckoooooo! Rand’s schmoozy nature had turned manic: He got desperately chummy with everyone he met, wrapping his arms around cops, reporters, volunteers. He was particularly tight with our Days Inn ‘liaison,’ a gawky, shy kid named Donnie who Rand liked to razz and inform he was doing
so. ‘Ah, I’m just razzing you, Donnie,’ he’d say, and Donnie would break into a joyous grin.
‘Can’t that kid go get validation somewhere else?’ I groused to Go the other night. She said I was just jealous that my father figure liked someone better. I was.
Marybeth patted Rand’s back as we walked toward the park, and I thought about how much I wanted someone to do that, just a quick touch, and I suddenly let out a gasp-sob, one quick teary moan. I wanted someone, but I wasn’t sure if it was Andie or Amy.
‘Nick?’ Go said. She raised a hand toward my shoulder, but I shrugged her off.
‘Sorry. Wow, sorry for that,’ I said. ‘Weird outburst, very un-Dunne-y.’
‘No problem. We’re both coming undone-y,’ Go said, and looked away. Since discovering my
situation
– which is what we’d taken to calling my infidelity – she’d gotten a bit removed, her eyes distant, her face a constant mull. I was trying very hard not to resent it.
As we entered the park, the camera crews were everywhere, not just local anymore but network. The Dunnes and the Elliotts walked along the perimeter of the crowd, Rand smiling and nodding like a visiting dignitary. Boney and Gilpin appeared almost immediately, took to our heels like friendly pointer dogs; they were becoming familiar, furniture, which was clearly the idea. Boney was wearing the same clothes she wore to any public event: a sensible black skirt, a gray-striped blouse, barrettes clipping either side of her limp hair.
I got a girl named Bony Moronie
… The night was steamy; under each of Boney’s armpits was a dark smiley face of perspiration. She actually grinned at me as if yesterday, the accusations – they were accusations, weren’t they? – hadn’t happened.
The Elliotts and I filed up the steps to a rickety makeshift stage. I looked back toward my twin and she nodded at me and pantomimed a big breath, and I remembered to breathe. Hundreds of faces were turned toward us, along with clicking, flashing cameras.
Don’t smile
, I told myself.
Do not smile
.
From the front of dozens of
Find Amy
T-shirts, my wife studied me.
Go had said I needed to make a speech (‘You need some humanizing, fast’) so I did, I walked up to the microphone. It was too low, mid-belly, and I wrestled with it a few seconds, and it raised only an inch, the kind of malfunction that would normally infuriate me,
but I could no longer be infuriated in public, so I took a breath and leaned down and read the words that my sister had written for me: ‘My wife, Amy Dunne, has been missing for almost a week. I cannot possibly convey the anguish our family feels, the deep hole in our lives left by Amy’s disappearance. Amy is the love of my life, she is the heart of her family. For those who have yet to meet her, she is funny, and charming, and kind. She is wise and warm. She is my helpmate and partner in every way.’
I looked up into the crowd and, like magic, spotted Andie, a disgusted look on her face, and I quickly glanced back at my notes.
‘Amy is the woman I want to grow old with, and I know this will happen.’
PAUSE. BREATHE. NO SMILE. Go had actually written the words on my index card.
Happen happen happen
. My voice echoed out through the speakers, rolling toward the river.
‘We ask you to contact us with any information. We light candles tonight in the hope she comes home soon and safely. I love you, Amy.’
I kept my eyes moving anywhere but Andie. The park sparkled with candles. A moment of silence was supposed to be observed, but babies were crying, and one stumbling homeless man kept asking loudly, ‘Hey, what is this about? What’s it for?,’ and someone would whisper Amy’s name, and the guy would say louder, ‘What? It’s for
what
?’
From the middle of the crowd, Noelle Hawthorne began moving forward, her triplets affixed, one on a hip, the other two clinging to her skirt, all looking ludicrously tiny to a man who spent no time around children. Noelle forced the crowd to part for her and the children, marching right to the edge of the podium, where she looked up at me. I glared at her – the woman had maligned me – and then I noticed for the first time the swell in her belly and realized she was pregnant again. For one second, my mouth dropped – four kids under four, sweet Jesus! – and later, that look would be analyzed and debated, most people believing it was a one-two punch of anger and fear.
‘Hey,
Nick
.’ Her voice caught in the half-raised microphone and boomed out to the audience.
I started to fumble with the mike, but couldn’t find the off switch.
‘I just wanted to see your face,’ she said, and burst into tears. A wet sob rolled out over the audience, everyone rapt. ‘Where is she? What have you done with Amy? What have you done with your wife!’
Wife, wife
, her voice echoed. Two of her alarmed children began to wail.
Noelle couldn’t talk for a second, she was crying so hard, she was wild, furious, and she grabbed the microphone stand and yanked the whole thing down to her level. I debated grabbing it back but
knew
I could do nothing toward this woman in the maternity dress with the three toddlers. I scanned the crowd for Mike Hawthorne –
control your wife
– but he was nowhere. Noelle turned to address the crowd.
‘I am Amy’s best friend!’
Friend friend friend
. The words boomed out all over the park along with her children’s keening. ‘Despite my best efforts, the police don’t seem to be taking me seriously. So I’m taking our cause to this town, this town that Amy loved, that loved her back! This man, Nick Dunne, needs to answer some questions. He needs to tell us what he did to his wife!’
Boney darted from the side of the stage to reach her, and Noelle turned, and the two locked eyes. Boney made a frantic chopping motion at her throat:
Stop talking!
‘His
pregnant
wife!’
And no one could see the candles anymore, because the flashbulbs were going berserk. Next to me, Rand made a noise like a balloon squeak. Down below me, Boney put her fingers between her eyebrows as if stanching a headache. I was seeing everyone in frantic strobe shots that matched my pulse.
I looked out into the crowd for Andie, saw her staring at me, her face pink and twisted, her cheeks damp, and as we caught each other’s eyes, she mouthed, ‘Asshole!’ and stumbled back away through the crowd.
‘We should go.’ My sister, suddenly beside me, whispering in my ear, tugging at my arm. The cameras flashing at me as I stood like some Frankenstein’s monster, fearful and agitated by the villager torches.
Flash, flash
. We started moving, breaking into two parts: my sister and I fleeing toward Go’s car, the Elliotts standing with jaws agape, on the platform, left behind, save yourselves. The reporters pelted the question over and over at me.
Nick, was Amy pregnant? Nick, were you upset Amy was pregnant?
Me, streaking out of the park, ducking like I was caught in hail:
Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant
, the word pulsing in the summer night in time to the cicadas.
– Diary entry –
W
hat a strange time this is. I have to think that way, try to examine it from a distance: Ha-
ha
, what an odd period this will be to look back on, won’t I be amused when I’m eighty, dressed in faded lavender, a wise, amused figure swilling martinis, and won’t this make a
story
? A strange, awful story of something I survived.
Because something is horribly wrong with my husband, of that I am sure now. Yes, he’s mourning his mother, but this is something more. It feels directed at me, not a sadness but … I can feel him watching me sometimes, and I look up and see his face twisted in disgust, like he’s walked in on me doing something awful, instead of just eating cereal in the morning or combing my hair at night. He’s so angry, so unstable, I’ve been wondering if his moods are linked to something physical – one of those wheat allergies that turn people mad, or a colony of mold spores that has clogged his brain.
I came downstairs the other night and found him at the dining room table, his head in his hands, looking at a pile of credit-card bills. I watched my husband, all alone, under the spotlight of a chandelier. I wanted to go to him, to sit down with him and figure it out like partners. But I didn’t, I knew that would piss him off. I sometimes wonder if that is at the root of his distaste for me: He’s let me see his shortcomings, and he hates me for knowing them.
He shoved me. Hard. Two days ago, he shoved me, and I fell and banged my head against the kitchen island and I couldn’t see for three seconds. I don’t really know what to say about it. It was more shocking than painful. I was telling him I could get a job, something freelance, so we could start a family, have a real life …
‘What do you call this?’ he said.
Purgatory
, I thought. I stayed silent.
‘What do you call this, Amy? Huh? What do you call this? This isn’t life, according to Miss Amazing?’
‘It’s not
my
idea of life,’ I said, and he took three big steps toward me, and I thought:
He looks like he’s going to
… And then he was slamming against me and I was falling.
We both gasped. He held his fist in the other hand and looked like he might cry. He was beyond sorry, he was aghast. But here’s the thing I want to be clear on: I knew what I was doing, I was punching every button on him. I was watching him coil tighter and tighter – I wanted him to finally
say
something,
do
something. Even if it’s bad, even if it’s the worst,
do something, Nick
. Don’t leave me here like a ghost.
I just didn’t realize he was going to do
that
.
I’ve never considered what I would do if my husband attacked me, because I haven’t exactly run in the wife-beating crowd. (I know, Lifetime movie, I know: Violence crosses all socioeconomic barriers. But still: Nick?) I sound glib. It just seems so incredibly ludicrous: I am a battered wife.
Amazing Amy and the Domestic Abuser
.
He did apologize profusely. (Does anyone do anything
profusely
except apologize? Sweat, I guess.) He’s agreed to consider counseling, which was something I never thought could happen. Which is good. He’s such a good man, at his core, that I am willing to write it off, to believe it truly was a sick anomaly, brought on by the strain we’re both under. I forget sometimes, that as much stress as I feel, Nick feels it too: He bears the burden of having brought me here, he feels the strain of wanting mopey me to be content, and for a man like Nick – who believes strongly in an up-by-the-bootstraps sort of happiness – that can be infuriating.
So the hard shove, so quick, then done, it didn’t scare me in itself. What scared me was the look on his face as I lay on the floor blinking, my head ringing. It was the look on his face as he restrained himself from taking another jab. How much he wanted to shove me again. How hard it was not to. How he’s been looking at me since: guilt, and disgust at the guilt. Absolute disgust.
Here’s the darkest part. I drove out to the mall yesterday, where about half the town buys drugs, and it’s as easy as picking up a prescription; I know because Noelle told me: Her husband goes there to purchase the occasional joint. I didn’t want a joint, though, I wanted a gun, just in case. In case things with Nick go really wrong. I didn’t realize until I was almost there that it was Valentine’s Day. It was Valentine’s Day and I was going to buy a gun and then cook my husband dinner. And I thought to myself:
Nick’s dad was
right about you. You are a dumb bitch. Because if you think your husband is going to hurt you, you
leave.
And yet you can’t leave your husband, who’s mourning his dead mother. You can’t. You’d have to be a bibilically awful woman to do that
, unless
something were truly wrong. You’d have to really believe your husband was going to hurt you
.
But I don’t really think Nick would hurt me.
I just would feel safer with a gun.
G
o pushed me into the car and peeled away from the park. We flew past Noelle, who was walking with Boney and Gilpin toward their cruiser, her carefully dressed triplets bumping along behind her like kite ribbons. We screeched past the mob: hundreds of faces, a fleshy pointillism of anger aimed right at me. We ran away, basically. Technically.
