Authors: Gillian Flynn
Item 34: Change look. Check.
I’m not sure, exactly, how to be Dead Amy. I’m trying to figure out what that means for me, what I become for the next few months. Anyone, I suppose, except people I’ve already been: Amazing Amy. Preppy ’80s Girl. Ultimate-Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingenue and Witty Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe (the latest version of Frisbee Granola). Cool Girl and Loved Wife and Unloved Wife and Vengeful Scorned Wife. Diary Amy.
I hope you liked Diary Amy. She was meant to be likable. Meant for someone like you to like her. She’s
easy
to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment – that just anyone could like you. No matter. I thought the entries turned out nicely, and it wasn’t simple. I had to maintain an affable if somewhat naive persona, a woman who loved her husband and could see some of his flaws (otherwise she’d be too much of a sap) but was sincerely devoted to him – all the while leading the reader (in this case, the cops, I am so eager for them to find it) toward the conclusion that Nick was indeed planning to kill me. So many clues to unpack, so many surprises ahead!
Nick always mocked my endless lists. (‘It’s like you make sure you’re never satisfied, that there’s always something else to be perfected, instead of just enjoying the moment.’) But who wins here? I win, because my list, the master list entitled
Fuck Nick Dunne
, was exacting – it was the most complete, fastidious list that has ever
been created. On my list was
Write Diary Entries for 2005 to 2012
. Seven years of diary entries, not every day, but twice monthly, at least. Do you know how much discipline that takes? Would Cool Girl Amy be able to do that? To research each week’s current events, to cross-consult with my old daily planners to make sure I forgot nothing important, then to reconstruct how Diary Amy would react to each event? It was fun, mostly. I’d wait for Nick to leave for The Bar, or to go meet his mistress, the ever-texting, gum-chewing, vapid mistress with her acrylic nails and the sweatpants with logos across the butt (she isn’t like this, exactly, but she might as well be), and I’d pour some coffee or open a bottle of wine, pick one of my thirty-two different pens, and rewrite my life a little.
It is true that I sometimes hated Nick less while I was doing this. A giddy Cool Girl perspective will do that. Sometimes Nick would come home, stinking of beer or of the hand sanitizer he wiped on his body post-mistress-coitus (never entirely erased the stink, though – she must have one rank pussy), and smile guiltily at me, be all sweet and hangdog with me, and I’d almost think:
I won’t go through with this
. And then I’d picture him with her, in her stripper thong, letting him degrade her because she was pretending to be Cool Girl, she was pretending to love blow jobs and football and getting
wasted
. And I’d think,
I am married to an imbecile. I’m married to a man who will always choose that, and when he gets bored with this dumb twat, he’ll just find another girl who is pretending to be that girl, and he’ll never have to do anything hard in his life
.
Resolve stiffened.
One hundred and fifty-two entries total, and I don’t think I ever lose her voice. I wrote her very carefully, Diary Amy. She is designed to appeal to the cops, to appeal to the public should portions be released. They have to read this diary like it’s some sort of Gothic tragedy. A wonderful, good-hearted woman –
whole life ahead of her, everything going for her
, whatever else they say about women who die – chooses the wrong mate and
pays the ultimate price
. They have to like me. Her.
My parents are worried, of course, but how can I feel sorry for them, since they made me this way and then deserted me? They never, ever fully appreciated the fact that they were earning money from my existence, that I should have been getting royalties. Then, after they siphoned off
my
money, my ‘feminist’ parents let Nick bundle me off to Missouri like I was some piece of chattel, some mail-order bride, some property exchange. Gave me a fucking
cuckoo clock to remember them by.
Thanks for thirty-six years of service!
They deserve to think I’m dead, because that’s practically the state they consigned me to: no money, no home, no friends. They deserve to suffer too. If you can’t take care of me while I’m alive, you have made me dead anyway. Just like Nick, who destroyed and rejected the real me a piece at a time –
you’re too serious, Amy, you’re too uptight, Amy, you overthink things, you analyze too much, you’re no fun anymore, you make me feel useless, Amy, you make me feel bad, Amy
. He took away chunks of me with blase´ swipes: my independence, my pride, my esteem. I gave, and he took and took. He Giving Treed me out of existence.
That whore, he picked that little whore over me. He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.
I
had to phone Tanner, my brand-new lawyer, mere hours after I’d hired him, and say the words that would make him regret taking my money:
I think my wife is framing me
. I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine it – the eye roll, the grimace, the weariness of a man who hears nothing but lies for a living.
‘Well,’ he finally said after a gaping pause, ‘I’ll be there first thing tomorrow morning, and we will sort this out – everything on the table – and in the meantime, sit tight, okay? Go to sleep and sit tight.’
Go took his advice, she popped two sleeping pills and left me just before eleven, while I literally sat tight, in an angry ball on her couch. Every so often I’d go outside and glare at the woodshed, my hands on my hips, as if it were a predator I could scare off. I’m not sure what I thought I was accomplishing, but I couldn’t stop myself. I could stay seated for five minutes, tops, before I’d have to go back outside and stare.
I had just come back inside when a knock rattled the back door. Fucking Christ. Not quite midnight. Cops would come to the front – right? – and reporters had yet to stake out Go’s (this would change, a matter of days, hours). I was standing, unnerved, undecided, in the living room when the banging came again, louder, and I cursed under my breath, tried to get myself angry instead of scared.
Deal with it, Dunne
.
I flung open the door. It was Andie. It was goddamn Andie, pretty as a picture, dressed up for the occasion, still not getting it – that she was going to put my neck right in the noose.
‘Right in the noose, Andie.’ I yanked her inside, and she stared at my hand on her arm. ‘You are going to put my neck right in the fucking noose.’
‘I came to the back door,’ she said. When I stared her down, she didn’t apologize, she steeled herself. I could literally see her features
harden. ‘I needed to see you, Nick. I told you. I told you I had to see you or talk to you every day, and today you disappeared. Straight to voice mail, straight to voice mail, straight to voice mail.’
‘If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I can’t talk, Andie. Jesus, I was in New York, getting a lawyer. He’ll be here first thing tomorrow.’
‘You got a lawyer. That was what kept you so busy that you couldn’t call me for ten seconds?’
I wanted to smack her. I took a breath. I had to cut things off with Andie. It wasn’t just Tanner’s warning I had in mind. My wife knew me: She knew I’d do almost anything to avoid dealing with confrontation. Amy was depending on me to be stupid, to let the relationship linger – and to ultimately be caught. I had to end it. But I had to do it perfectly.
Make her believe that this was the decent thing
.
‘He’s actually given me some important advice,’ I began. ‘Advice I can’t ignore.’
I’d been so sweet and doting just last night, at my mandatory meeting in our pretend fort. I’d made so many promises, trying to calm her down. She wouldn’t see this coming. She wouldn’t take this well.
‘Advice? Good. Is it to stop being such an asshole to me?’
I felt the rage rise up; that this was already turning into a high school fight. A thirty-four-year-old man in the middle of the worst night of my life, and I was having a
meet me by the lockers!
squabble with a pissed-off girl. I shook her once, hard, a tiny droplet of spit landing on her lower lip.
‘I—You don’t get it, Andie. This isn’t some joke, this is my life.’
‘I just … I need you,’ she said, looking down at her hands. ‘I know I keep saying that, but I do. I can’t do it, Nick. I can’t go on like this. I’m falling apart. I’m so scared all the time.’
She
was scared. I pictured the police knocking, and here I was with a girl I’d been fucking the morning my wife went missing. I’d sought her out that day – I had never gone to her apartment since that first night, but I went right there that morning, because I’d spent hours with my heart pounding behind my ears, trying to get myself to say the words to Amy:
I want a divorce. I am in love with someone else. We have to end. I can’t pretend to love you, I can’t do the anniversary thing – it would actually be more wrong than cheating on you in the first place
. (I know: debatable.) But while I was gathering the guts, Amy had preempted me with her speech about still loving me (lying bitch!), and I lost my nerve. I felt like
the ultimate cheat and coward, and – the catch-22 – I craved Andie to make me feel better.
But Andie was no longer the antidote to my nerves. Quite the opposite.
The girl was wrapping herself around me even now, oblivious as a weed.
‘Look, Andie,’ I said, a big exhale, not letting her sit down, keeping her near the door. ‘You are such a special person to me. You’ve handled all this so amazingly well—’
Make her want to keep you safe
.
‘I mean …’ Her voice wavered. ‘I feel so sorry, for Amy. Which is insane. I know I don’t even have a right to feel sad for her, or worried. And on top of feeling sad, I feel so guilty.’ She leaned her head against my chest. I retreated, held her at arm’s length so she had to look at me.
‘Well, that’s one thing I think we can fix. I think we need to fix,’ I said, pulling up Tanner’s exact words.
‘We should go to the police,’ she said. ‘I’m your alibi for that morning, we’ll just tell them.’
‘You’re my alibi for about an hour that morning,’ I said. ‘No one saw or heard Amy after eleven p.m. the night before. The police can say I killed her before I saw you.’
‘That’s disgusting.’
I shrugged. I thought, for a second, about telling her about Amy –
my wife is framing me
– and quickly dismissed it. Andie couldn’t play the game on Amy’s level. She’d want to be my teammate, and she’d drag me down. Andie would be a liability going forward. I put my hands on her arms again, relaunched my speech.
‘Look, Andie, we are both under an amazing amount of stress and pressure, and a lot of it is brought on by our feelings of guilt. Andie, the thing is, we are good people. We were attracted to each other, I think, because we both have similar values. Of treating people right, of doing the right thing. And right now we know what we are doing is wrong.’
Her broken, hopeful expression changed – the wet eyes, the gentle touch, they disappeared: a weird flicker, a window shade pulled down, something darker in her face.
‘We need to end this, Andie. I think we both know that. It’s so hard, but it’s the decent thing to do. I think it’s the advice we’d give ourselves if we could think straight. As much as I love you, I am still married to Amy. I have to do the right thing.’
‘And if she’s found?’ She didn’t say
dead or alive
.
‘That’s something we can discuss then.’
‘Then! And until then, what?’
I shrugged helplessly:
Until then, nothing
.
‘What, Nick? I fuck off until then?’
‘That’s an ugly choice of words.’
‘But that’s what you mean.’ She smirked.
‘I’m sorry, Andie. I don’t think it’s right for me to be with you right now. It’s dangerous for you, it’s dangerous for me. It doesn’t sit well with my conscience. It’s just how I feel.’
‘Yeah? You know how I feel?’ Her eyes burst over, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I feel like a dumb college girl that you started fucking because you were bored with your wife and I made it extremely convenient for you. You could go home to Amy and eat dinner with her and play around in your little bar that you bought with her money, and then you could meet me at your dying dad’s house and jack off on my tits because, poor you, your mean wife would never let you do that.’
‘Andie, you know that’s not—’
‘What a shit you are. What kind of man are you?’
‘Andie, please.’
Contain this, Nick
. ‘I think because you haven’t been able to talk about this stuff, everything has gotten a little bigger in your mind, a little—’
‘Fuck you. You think I’m some dumb kid, some pathetic student you can
manage
? I stick by you through all this – this talk about how you might be a
murderer
– and as soon as it’s a little tough for you? No,
no
. You don’t get to talk about conscience and decency and guilt and feel like you are doing the right thing. Do you understand me? Because you are a cheating, cowardly, selfish
shit
.’
She turned away from me, sobbing, sucking in loud gulps of moist air, and breathing out mewls, and I tried to stop her, I grabbed her by the arm. ‘Andie, this isn’t how I want to—’
‘Hands off me! Hands off me!’
She moved toward the back door, and I could see what would happen, the hatred and embarrassment coming off her like heat, I knew she’d open a bottle of wine, or two, and then she’d tell a friend, or her mother, and it would spread like an infection.
I moved in front of her, barring her way to the door –
Andie, please
– and she reached up to slap me, and I grabbed her arm, just for defense. Our joined arms moved up and down and up and down like crazed dance partners.
‘Let me go, Nick, or I swear.’
‘Just stay for a minute. Just listen to me.’
‘You, let me go!’
She moved her face toward mine like she was going to kiss me. She bit me. I jerked back and she shot out the door.