Gone Girl: A Novel (29 page)

“We talked to Noelle,” Boney said. “Says your wife was extremely troubled by the marriage, was upset about the money stuff, that she worried you’d married her for her money. She says your wife worried about your temper.”

“I don’t know why Noelle would say that; I don’t think she and Amy ever exchanged more than five words.”

“That’s funny, because the Hawthornes’ living room is covered with photos of Noelle and your wife.” Boney frowned. I frowned too: actual real pictures of her and Amy?

Boney continued: “At the St. Louis zoo last October, on a picnic with the triplets, on a weekend float trip this past June. As in
last month
.”

“Amy has never uttered the name Noelle in the entire time we’ve lived here. I’m serious.” I scanned my brain over this past June and came upon a weekend I went away with Andie, told Amy I was doing a boys’ trip to St. Louis. I’d returned home to find her pink-cheeked and angry, claiming a weekend of bad cable and bored reading on the dock. And she was on a float trip? No. I couldn’t think of anything Amy would care for less than the typical midwestern float trip: beers bobbing in coolers tied to canoes, loud music, drunk frat boys, campgrounds dotted with vomit. “Are you sure it was my wife in those photos?”

They gave each other a
he serious?
look.

“Nick,” Boney said. “We have no reason to believe that the woman in the photos who looks exactly like your wife and who Noelle Hawthorne, a mother of three, your wife’s best friend here in town, says is your wife, is not your wife.”

“Your wife who—I should say—according to Noelle, you married for money,” Gilpin added.

“I’m not joking,” I said. “Anyone these days can doctor photos on a laptop.”

“Okay, so a minute ago you were sure Desi Collings was involved, and now you’ve moved on to Noelle Hawthorne,” Gilpin said. “It seems like you’re really casting about for someone to blame.”

“Besides me? Yes, I am. Look, I did not marry Amy for her money. You really should talk more with Amy’s parents. They know me, they know my character.”
They don’t know everything
, I thought, my stomach seizing. Boney was watching me; she looked sort of sorry for me. Gilpin didn’t even seem to be listening.

“You bumped up the life insurance coverage on your wife to one-point-two million,” Gilpin said with mock weariness. He even pulled a hand over his long, thin-jawed face.

“Amy did that herself!” I said quickly. The cops both just looked at me and waited. “I mean, I filed the paperwork, but it was Amy’s idea. She insisted. I swear, I couldn’t care less, but Amy said—she said, given the change in her income, it made her feel more secure or something, or it was a smart business decision. Fuck, I don’t know, I don’t know why she wanted it. I didn’t ask her to.”

“Two months ago, someone did a search on your laptop,” Boney continued. “
Body Float Mississippi River
. Can you explain that?”

I took two deep breaths, nine seconds to pull myself together.

“God, that was just a dumb book idea,” I said. “I was thinking about writing a book.”

“Hunh,” Boney replied.

“Look, here’s what I think is happening,” I began. “I think a lot of people watch these news programs where the husband is always this awful guy who kills his wife, and they are seeing me through that lens, and some really innocent, normal things are being twisted. This is turning into a witch hunt.”

“That’s how you explain those credit-card bills?” Gilpin asked.

“I told you, I can’t explain the fucking credit-card bills because
I have nothing to do with them. It’s your fucking job to figure out where they came from!”

They sat silent, side by side, waiting.

“What is currently being done to find my wife?” I asked. “What leads are you exploring, besides me?”

The house began shaking, the sky ripped, and through the back window, we could see a jet shooting past, right over the river, buzzing us.

“F-10,” Rhonda said.

“Nah, too small,” Gilpin said. “It’s got to be—”

“It’s an F-10.”

Boney leaned toward me, hands entwined. “It’s our job to make sure you are in the hundred percent clear, Nick,” she said. “I know you want that too. Now if you can just help us out with the few little tangles—because that’s what they are, they keep tripping us up.”

“Maybe it’s time I got a lawyer.”

The cops exchanged another look, as if they’d settled a bet.

DIARY ENTRY

N
ick’s mom is dead. I haven’t been able to write because Nick’s mom is dead, and her son has come unmoored. Sweet, tough Maureen. She was up and moving around until days before she died, refusing to discuss any sort of slowdown. “I just want to live until I can’t anymore,” she said. She’d gotten into knitting caps for other chemo patients (she herself was
done done done
after one round, no interest in prolonging life if it meant “more tubes”), so I’ll remember her always surrounded by bright knots of wool: red and yellow and green, and her fingers moving, the needles click-clacking while she talked in her contented-cat voice, all deep, sleepy purr.

And then one morning in September she woke but didn’t really wake, didn’t become Maureen. She was a bird-size woman overnight, that fast, all wrinkles and shell, her eyes darting around the room, unable to place anything, including herself. So then came the hospice, a gently lit, cheerful place with paintings of women in bonnets and rolling hills of bounty, and snack machines, and small coffees. The hospice was not expected to fix her or help her but just to make sure she died comfortably, and just three days later, she did. Very matter-of-fact, the way Maureen would have wanted it (although I’m sure she would have rolled her eyes at that phrase:
the way Maureen would have wanted it
).

Her wake was modest but nice—with hundreds of people, her look-alike sister from Omaha bustling by proxy, pouring coffee and
Baileys and handing out cookies and telling funny stories about Mo. We buried her on a gusty, warm morning, Go and Nick leaning in to each other as I stood nearby, feeling intrusive. That night in bed, Nick let me put my arms around him, his back to me, but after a few minutes he got up, whispered, “Got to get some air,” and left the house.

His mother had always
mothered
him—she insisted on coming by once a week and ironing for us, and when she was done ironing, she’d say, “I’ll just help tidy,” and after she’d left, I’d look in the fridge and find she’d peeled and sliced his grapefruit for him, put the pieces in a snap-top container, and then I’d open the bread and discover all the crusts had been cut away, each slice returned half naked. I am married to a thirty-four-year-old man who is still offended by bread crusts.

But I tried to do the same those first weeks after his mom passed. I snipped the bread crusts, I ironed his T-shirts, I baked a blueberry pie from his mom’s recipe. “I don’t need to be babied, really, Amy,” he said as he stared at the loaf of skinned breads. “I let my mom do it because it made her happy, but I know you don’t like that nurturing stuff.”

So we’re back to black squares. Sweet, doting, loving Nick is gone. Gruff, peeved, angry Nick is back. You are supposed to lean on your spouse in hard times, but Nick seems to have gone even farther away. He is a mama’s boy whose mama is dead. He doesn’t want anything to do with me.

He uses me for sex when he needs to. He presses me against a table or over the back of the bed and fucks me, silent until the last few moments, those few quick grunts, and then he releases me, he puts a palm on the small of my back, his one gesture of intimacy, and he says something that is supposed to make it seem like a game: “You’re so sexy, sometimes I can’t control myself.” But he says it in a dead voice.

Quiz: Your husband, with whom you once shared a wonderful sex life, has turned distant and cold—he only wants sex his way, on his time. You:

It bothers me that my marriage is disintegrating and I don’t know what to do. You’d think my parents, the double psychologists, would be the obvious people to talk to, but I have too much pride. They would not be good for marital advice: They are soul mates, remember? They are all peaks, no valleys—a single, infinite burst of marital ecstasy. I can’t tell them I am screwing up the one thing I have left: my marriage. They’d somehow write another book, a fictional rebuke in which Amazing Amy celebrated the most fantastic, fulfilling, bump-free little marriage ever … 
because she put her mind to it
.

But I worry. All the time. I know I’m already too old for my husband’s tastes. Because I used to be his ideal, six years ago, and so I’ve heard his ruthless comments about women nearing forty: how pathetic he finds them, overdressed, out at bars, oblivious to their lack of appeal. He’d come back from a night out drinking, and I’d ask him how the bar was, whatever bar, and he’d so often say: “Totally inundated by Lost Causes,” his code for women my age. At the time, a girl barely in her thirties, I’d smirked along with him as if that would never happen to me. Now I am his Lost Cause, and he’s trapped with me, and maybe that’s why he’s so angry.

I’ve been indulging in toddler therapy. I walk over to Noelle’s every day and I let her triplets paw at me. The little plump hands in my hair, the sticky breath on my neck. You can understand why women always threaten to devour children:
She is just to eat! I could eat him with a spoon!
Although watching her three children toddle to her, sleep-stained from their nap, rubbing their eyes while they make their way to Mama, little hands touching her knee or arm as if she were home base, as if they knew they were safe … it hurts me sometimes to watch.

Yesterday I had a particularly needful afternoon at Noelle’s, so maybe that’s why I did something stupid.

Nick comes home and finds me in the bedroom, fresh from a shower, and pretty soon he is pushing me against the wall, pushing himself inside me. When he is done and releases me, I can see the wet
kiss of my mouth against the blue paint. As he sits on the edge of the bed, panting, he says, “Sorry about that. I just needed you.”

Not looking at me.

I go to him and put my arms around him, pretending what we’d just done was normal, a pleasant marital ritual, and I say, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Well, now might be the right time. To start a family. Try to get pregnant.” I know it’s crazy even as I say it, but I can’t help myself—I have become the crazy woman who wants to get pregnant because it will save her marriage.

It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.

He jerks away from me. “Now? Now is about the worst time to start a family, Amy. You have no job—”

“I know, but I’d want to stay home with the baby anyway at first—”

“My mom just died, Amy.”

“And this would be new life, a new start.”

He grips me by both arms and looks me right in the eye for the first time in a week. “Amy, I think you think that now that my mom is dead, we’ll just frolic back to New York and have some babies, and you’ll get your old life back. But we don’t have enough
money
. We barely have enough money for the two of us to live
here
. You can’t imagine how much pressure I feel, every day, to fix this mess we’re in. To fucking
provide
. I can’t handle you and me
and
a few kids. You’ll want to give them everything you had growing up, and
I can’t
. No private schools for the little Dunnes, no tennis and violin lessons, no summer homes. You’d hate how poor we’d be. You’d hate it.”

“I’m not that shallow, Nick—”

“You really think we’re in a great place right now, to have kids?”

It is the closest we’ve gotten to discussing our marriage, and I can see he already regrets saying something.