Gone Girl (33 page)

‘Creepy,’ Go said. ‘Stop.’

Beneath them lay a piece of buttery blue paper folded over once. Amy’s broken-kite handwriting, all triangles and points. It read:

The beginning of a wonderful new story, Nick! ‘That’s the way to do it!’

Enjoy.

On our mom’s kitchen table, we spread all of Amy’s treasure-hunt clues and the box containing the puppets. We stared at the objects as if we were assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

‘Why bother with a treasure hunt if she was planning … her plan,’ Go said.

Her plan
had become immediate shorthand for
faking her disappearance and framing you for murder
. It sounded less insane.

‘Keep me distracted, for one thing. Make me believe she still loved me. I’m chasing her little clues all over Christendom, believing my wife was wanting to make amends, wanting to jump-start our marriage …’

The moony, girlish state her notes had left me in, it sickened me. It embarrassed me. Marrow-deep embarrassment, the kind that becomes part of your DNA, that changes you. After all these years, Amy could still play me. She could write a few notes and get me back completely. I was her little puppet on a string.

I will find you, Amy
. Lovesick words, hateful intentions.

‘So I don’t stop to think:
Hey, it sure looks like I murdered my wife, I wonder why?
’

‘And the police would have found it strange – you would have found it strange – if she didn’t do the treasure hunt, this tradition,’ Go reasoned. ‘It would look as if she knew she was going to disappear.’

‘This worries me though,’ I said, pointing at the puppets. ‘They’re unusual enough that they have to mean something. I mean, if she just wanted to keep me distracted for a while, the final gift could have been anything wooden.’

Go ran a finger across the male’s motley uniform. ‘They’re clearly very old. Vintage.’ She flipped their clothing upside down to reveal the club handle of the male. The female had only a square-shaped gap at her head. ‘Is this supposed to be sexual? The male has this giant wooden handle, like a dick. And the female is missing hers. She just has the hole.’

‘It’s a fairly obvious statement: Men have penises and women have vaginas?’

Go put a finger inside the female puppet’s gap, swept around to make sure there was nothing hidden. ‘So what is Amy saying?’

‘When I first saw them, I thought:
She bought children’s toys
. Mom, dad, baby. Because she was pregnant.’

‘Is she even pregnant?’

A sense of despair washed over me. Or rather, the opposite. Not a wave coming in, rolling over me, but the ebb of the sea returning: a sense of something pulling away, and me with it. I could no longer hope my wife was pregnant, but I couldn’t bring myself to hope she wasn’t either.

Go pulled out the male doll, scrunched her nose, then lightbulb popped. ‘You’re a puppet on a string.’

I laughed. ‘I literally thought those exact words too. But why a male and female? Amy clearly isn’t a puppet on a string, she’s the puppetmaster.’

‘And what’s:
That’s the way to do it
? To do
what
?’

‘Fuck me for life?’

‘It’s not a phrase Amy used to say? Or some quote from the
Amy
books, or …’ She hurried over to her computer and searched for
That’s the way to do it
. Up came lyrics for ‘That’s the Way to Do It’ by Madness. ‘Oh, I remember them,’ Go said. ‘Awesome ska band.’

‘Ska,’ I said, swerving toward delirious laughter. ‘Great.’

The lyrics were about a handyman who could do many types of home-improvement jobs – including electrical and plumbing – and who preferred to be paid in cash.

‘God, I fucking hate the eighties,’ I said. ‘No lyrics ever made sense.’

‘“The reflex is an only child,”’ Go said, nodding.

‘“He’s waiting by the park,”’ I muttered back automatically.

‘So if this is it, what does it mean?’ Go said, turning to me, studying my eyes. ‘It’s a song about a handyman. Someone who might have access to your house, to fix things. Or
rig
things. Who would be paid in cash so there’s no record.’

‘Someone who installed video cameras?’ I asked. ‘Amy went out of town a few times during the – the affair. Maybe she thought she’d catch us on tape.’

Go shot a question at me.

‘No, never, never at our house.’

‘Could it be some secret door?’ Go suggested. ‘Some secret false panel Amy put in where she’s hidden something that will … I don’t know, exonerate you?’

‘I think that’s it. Yes, Amy is using a Madness song to give me a clue to my own freedom, if only I can decipher their wily, ska-infused codes.’

Go laughed then too. ‘Jesus, maybe we’re the ones who are bat-shit crazy. I mean, are we? Is this totally insane?’

‘It’s not insane. She set me up. There is no other way to explain the
warehouse
of stuff in
your
backyard. And it’s very Amy to drag you into it, smudge you a little bit with my filth. No, this is Amy. The gift, the fucking giddy, sly note I’m supposed to understand. No, and it has to come back to the puppets. Try the quote with the word
marionettes
.’

I collapsed on the couch, my body a dull throb. Go played secretary. ‘Oh my God. Duh! They’re Punch and Judy dolls. Nick! We’re idiots. That line, that’s Punch’s trademark.
That’s the way to do it
!’

‘Okay. The old puppet show – it’s really violent, right?’ I asked.

‘This is so fucked up.’

‘Go, it’s violent, right?’

‘Yeah. Violent. God, she’s fucking crazy.’

‘He beats her, right?’

‘I’m reading … okay. Punch kills their baby.’ She looked up at me. ‘And then when Judy confronts him, he beats her. To death.’

My throat got wet with saliva.

‘And each time he does something awful and gets away with it, he says, “That’s the way to do it!”’ She grabbed Punch and placed him in her lap, her fingers grasping the wooden hands as if she were holding an infant. ‘He’s glib, even as he murders his wife and child.’

I looked at the puppets. ‘So she’s giving me the narrative of my frame-up.’

‘I can’t even wrap my brain around this. Fucking
psycho
.’

‘Go?’

‘Yeah, right: You didn’t want her to be pregnant, you got angry and killed her and the unborn baby.’

‘Feels anticlimactic somehow,’ I said.

‘The climax is when you are taught the lesson that Punch never learns, and you are caught and charged with murder.’

‘And Missouri has the death penalty,’ I said. ‘Fun game.’

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

THE DAY OF

Y
ou know how I found out? I
saw
them. That’s how stupid my husband is. One snowy April night, I felt so lonely. I was drinking warm amaretto with Bleecker and reading, lying on the floor as the snow came down, listening to old scratchy albums, like Nick and I used to (that entry was true). I had a burst of romantic cheer: I’d surprise him at The Bar, and we’d have a few drinks and wander through the empty streets together, hand in mitten. We would walk around the hushed downtown and he would press me against a wall and kiss me in the snow that looked like sugar clouds. That’s right, I wanted him back so badly that I was willing to re-create that moment. I was willing to pretend to be someone else again. I remember thinking:
We can still find a way to make this work. Faith!
I followed him all the way to Missouri, because I still believed he’d love me again somehow, love me that intense, thick way he did, the way that made everything good. Faith!

I got there just in time to see him leaving with her. I was in the goddamn parking lot, twenty feet behind him, and he didn’t even register me, I was a ghost. He didn’t have his hands on her, not yet, but I knew. I could tell because he was so
aware
of her. I followed them, and suddenly, he pressed her up against a tree –
in the middle of town
– and kissed her.
Nick is cheating
, I thought dumbly, and before I could make myself say anything, they were going up to her apartment. I waited for an hour, sitting on the doorstep, then got too cold – blue fingernails, chattering teeth – and went home. He never even knew I knew.

I had a new persona, not of my choosing. I was Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.

I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving
sister, the straying husband. I’ve always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think:
Poor dumb bitch
.

I could hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it: how Amazing Amy, the girl who never did wrong, let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country, where her husband threw her over for a younger woman. How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing. And her husband? He ended up happier than ever. No. I couldn’t allow that. No. Never. Never. He doesn’t get to do this to me and still fucking win. No.

I changed
my name
for that piece of shit. Historical records have been
altered
– Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne – like it’s nothing. No, he does
not
get to win.

So I began to think of a different story, a better story, that would destroy Nick for doing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored.

Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.

It’s rather extreme, framing your husband for your murder. I want you to know I know that. All the tut-tutters out there will say:
She should have just left, bundled up what remained of her dignity. Take the high road! Two wrongs don’t make a right!
All those things that spineless women say, confusing their weakness with morality.

I won’t divorce him because that’s exactly what he’d like. And I won’t forgive him because I don’t feel like
turning the other cheek
. Can I make it any more clear? I won’t find that a satisfactory ending. The bad guy wins? Fuck him.

For over a year now, I’ve smelled her twat on his fingertips as he slipped into bed next to me. I’ve watched him ogle himself in the mirror, grooming himself like a horny baboon for their dates. I’ve listened to his lies, lies, lies – from simplistic child’s fibs to elaborate Rube Goldbergian contraptions. I’ve tasted butterscotch on his dry-kiss lips, a cloying flavor that was never there before. I’ve felt the stubble on his cheeks that he knows I don’t like but apparently she does. I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.

So I may have gone a bit mad. I do know that framing your husband for your murder is beyond the pale of what an average woman might do.

But it’s so very
necessary
. Nick must be taught a lesson. He’s
never
been taught a lesson! He glides through life with that
charming-Nicky grin, his beloved-child entitlement, his fibs and shirkings, his shortcomings and selfishness, and no one calls him on
anything
. I think this experience will make him a better person. Or at least a sorrier one. Fucker.

I’ve always thought I could commit the perfect murder. People who get caught get caught because they don’t have patience; they refuse to plan. I smile again as I shift my crappy getaway car into fifth gear (Carthage now seventy-eight miles in the dust) and brace myself for a speeding truck – the car seems ready to take flight every time a semi passes. But I do smile, because this car shows just how smart I am: purchased for twelve hundred dollars cash from a Craigslist posting. Five months ago, so the memory wouldn’t be fresh in anyone’s mind. A 1992 Ford Festiva, the tiniest, most forgettable car in the world. I met the sellers at night, in the parking lot of a WalMart in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I took the train down with a bundle of cash in my purse – eight hours each way, while Nick was on a boys’ trip. (And by
boys’ trip
, I mean
fucking the slut
.) I ate in the train’s dining car, a clump of lettuce with two cherry tomatoes that the menu described as a salad. I was seated with a melancholy farmer returning home after visiting his baby granddaughter for the first time.

The couple selling the Ford seemed as interested in discretion as I. The woman remained in the car the whole time, a pacifiered toddler in her arms, watching her husband and me trade cash for keys. (That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.) Then she got out and I got in. That quick. In the rearview mirror, I saw the couple strolling into WalMart with their money. I’ve been parking it in long-term lots in St. Louis. I go down twice a month and park it somewhere new. Pay cash. Wear a baseball cap. Easy enough.

So that’s just an example. Of patience, planning, and ingenuity. I am pleased with myself; I have three hours more until I reach the thick of the Missouri Ozarks and my destination, a small archipelago of cabins in the woods that accepts cash for weekly rentals and has cable TV, a must. I plan to hole up there the first week or two; I don’t want to be on the road when the news hits, and it’s the last place Nick would think I’d hide once he realizes I’m hiding.

This stretch of highway is particularly ugly. Middle-America blight. After another twenty miles, I see, up on the off-ramp, the remains of a lonesome family gas station, vacant but not boarded up, and when I pull to the side, I see the women’s restroom door
swung wide. I enter – no electricity, but there’s a warped metal mirror and the water is still on. In the afternoon sunlight and the sauna heat, I remove from my purse a pair of metal scissors and bunny-brown hair dye. I shear off large chunks of my hair. All the blond goes into a plastic bag. Air hits the back of my neck, and my head feels light, like a balloon – I roll it around a few times to enjoy. I apply the color, check my watch, and linger in the doorway, looking out over miles of flatland pocked with fast-food restaurants and motel chains. I can feel an Indian crying. (Nick would hate that joke. Derivative! And then he’d add, ‘although the word
derivative
as a criticism is itself derivative.’ I’ve got to get him out of my head – he still steps on my lines from a hundred miles away.) I wash my hair in the sink, the warm water making me sweat, and then back in the car with my bag of hair and trash. I put on a pair of outdated wire-rim glasses and look in the rearview mirror and smile again. Nick and I would never have married if I had looked like this when we met. All this could have been avoided if I were less pretty.