Gone Girl: A Novel (38 page)

I’m learning to live fairly efficiently myself. A girl has to budget when she’s dead. I had time to plan, to stockpile some cash: I gave myself a good twelve months between deciding to disappear and disappearing. That’s why most people get caught in murders: They don’t have the discipline to wait. I have $10,200 in cash. If I’d cleared out $10,200 in a month, that would have been noticed. But I collected cash forwards from credit cards I took out in Nick’s name—the cards that would make him look like a greedy little cheat—and I siphoned off another $4,400 from our bank accounts over the months: withdrawals of $200 or $300, nothing to attract attention. I stole from Nick, from his pockets, $20 here, $10 there, a slow deliberate stockpile—it’s like that budgeting plan where you put the money you’d spend on your morning Starbucks into a jar, and at the end of the year you have $1,500. And I’d always steal from the tip jar when I went to The Bar. I’m sure Nick blamed Go, and Go blamed Nick, and neither of them said anything because they felt too sorry for the other.

But I am careful with money, my point. I have enough to live on until I kill myself. I’m going to hide out long enough to watch Lance Nicholas Dunne become a worldwide pariah, to watch Nick be arrested, tried, marched off to prison, bewildered in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. To watch Nick squirm and sweat and swear he is innocent and still be stuck. Then I will travel south along the river, where I will meet up with my body, my pretend floating Other Amy body in
the Gulf of Mexico. I will sign up for a booze cruise—something to get me out into the deep end but nothing requiring identification. I will drink a giant ice-wet shaker of gin, and I will swallow sleeping pills, and when no one is looking, I’ll drop silently over the side, my pockets full of Virginia Woolf rocks. It requires discipline, to drown oneself, but I have discipline in spades. My body may never be discovered, or it may resurface weeks, months, later—eroded to the point that my death can’t be time-stamped—and I will provide a last bit of evidence to make sure Nick is marched to the padded cross, the prison table where he’ll be pumped with poison and die.

I’d like to wait around and see him dead, but given the state of our justice system, that may take years, and I have neither the money nor the stamina. I’m ready to join the Hopes.

I did veer from my budget a bit already. I spent about $500 on items to nice-up my cabin—good sheets, a decent lamp, towels that don’t stand up by themselves from years of bleaching. But I try to accept what I’m offered. There’s a man a few cabins away, a taciturn fellow, a hippie dropout of the Grizzly Adams, homemade-granola variety—full beard and turquoise rings and a guitar he plays on his back deck some nights. His name, he says, is Jeff, just like my name, I say, is Lydia. We smile only in passing, but he brings me fish. A couple of times now, he brings a fish by, freshly stinking but scaled and headless, and presents it to me in a giant icy freezer bag. “Fresh fish!” he says, knocking, and if I don’t open the door immediately, he disappears, leaving the bag on my front doorstep. I cook the fish in a decent skillet I bought at yet another Walmart, and it’s not bad, and it’s free.

“Where do you get all the fish?” I ask him.

“At the getting place,” he says.

Dorothy, who works the front desk and has already taken a liking to me, brings tomatoes from her garden. I eat the tomatoes that smell like the earth and the fish that smells like the lake. I think that by next year, Nick will be locked away in a place that smells only of the inside. Fabricated odors: deodorant and old shoes and starchy foods, stale mattresses. His worst fear, his own personal panic dream: He finds himself in jail, realizing he did nothing wrong but unable to prove it. Nick’s nightmares have always been about being wronged, about being trapped, a victim of forces beyond his control.

He always gets up after these dreams, paces around the house, then puts on clothes and goes outside, wanders along the roads near our house, into a park—a Missouri park, a New York park—going wherever he wants. He is a man of the outdoors, if he is not exactly outdoorsy. He’s not a hiker, a camper, he doesn’t know how to make fires. He wouldn’t know how to catch fish and present them to me. But he likes the option, he likes the choice. He wants to know he can go outside, even if he chooses instead to sit on the couch and watch cage fighting for three hours.

I do wonder about the little slut. Andie. I thought she’d last exactly three days. Then she wouldn’t be able to resist
sharing
. I know she likes to share because I’m one of her friends on Facebook—my profile name is invented (Madeleine Elster, ha!), my photo is stolen from a popup ad for mortgages (blond, smiling, benefiting from historically low interest rates). Four months ago, Madeleine randomly asked to be Andie’s friend, and Andie, like a hapless puppy, accepted, so I know the little girl fairly well, along with all her minutiae-enthralled friends, who take many naps and love Greek yogurt and pinot grigio and enjoy sharing that with one another. Andie is a good girl, meaning she doesn’t post photos of herself “partying,” and she never posts lascivious messages. Which is unfortunate. When she’s exposed as Nick’s girlfriend, I’d prefer the media find photos of her doing shots or kissing girls or flashing her thong; this would more easily cement her as the homewrecker she is.

Homewrecker. My home was disheveled but not yet wrecked when she first started kissing my husband, reaching inside his trousers, slipping into bed with him. Taking his cock in her mouth, all the way to the root so he feels extra big as she gags. Taking it in her ass, deep. Taking cum shots to the face and tits, then licking it off,
yum
. Taking, definitely taking. Her type would. They’ve been together for over a year. Every holiday. I went through his credit-card statements (the real ones) to see what he got her for Christmas, but he’s been shockingly careful. I wonder what it feels like to be a woman whose Christmas present must be bought in cash. Liberating. Being an undocumented girl means being the girl who doesn’t have to call the plumber or listen to gripes about work or remind and remind him to pick up some goddamn cat food.

I need her to break. I need 1) Noelle to tell someone about my pregnancy; 2) the police to find the diary; 3) Andie to tell someone
about the affair. I suppose I had her stereotyped—that a girl who posts updates on her life five times a day for anyone to see would have no real understanding of what a secret is. She’s made occasional grazing mentions of my husband online:

Saw Mr. Hunky today.

(Oh, do tell!)

(When do we get to meet this stud?)

(Bridget likes this!)

A kiss from a dreamy guy makes everything better.

(Too true!)

(When do we get to meet Dreamy?!)

(Bridget likes this!)

But she’s been surprisingly discreet for a girl of her generation. She’s a good girl (for a cunt). I can picture her, that heart-shaped face tilted to one side, the gently furrowed brow.
I just want you to know I’m on your side, Nick. I’m here for you
. Probably baked him cookies.

The
Ellen Abbott
cameras are now panning the Volunteer Center, which looks a little shabby. A correspondent is talking about how my disappearance has “rocked this tiny town,” and behind her, I can see a table lined with homemade casseroles and cakes for poor Nicky. Even now the asshole has women taking care of him. Desperate women spotting an opening. A good-looking, vulnerable man—and fine, he may have killed his wife, but we don’t
know
that. Not for sure. For now it’s a relief just to have a man to cook for, the fortysomething equivalent of driving your bike past the cute boy’s house.

They are showing Nick’s grinning cell-phone photo again. I can picture the townie slut in her lonely, glistening kitchen—a trophy kitchen bought with alimony money—mixing and baking while having an imaginary conversation with Nick:
No, I’m forty-three, actually. No, really, I am! No, I don’t have men swarming all over me, I really don’t, the men in town aren’t that interesting, most of them …

I get a burst of jealousy toward that woman with her cheek against my husband’s. She is prettier than me as I am now. I eat Hershey bars and float in the pool for hours under a hot sun, the chlorine turning my flesh rubbery as a seal’s. I’m tan, which I’ve never been before—at least not a dark, proud, deep tan. A tanned skin is a damaged skin, and no one likes a wrinkled girl; I spent my life slick with SPF. But I let myself darken a bit before I disappeared, and now, five days in, I’m
on my way to brown. “Brown as a berry!” old Dorothy, the manager, says. “You are brown as a berry, girl!” she says with delight when I come in to pay next week’s rent in cash.

I have dark skin, my mouse-colored helmet cut, the smart-girl glasses. I gained twelve pounds in the months before my disappearance—carefully hidden in roomy sundresses, not that my inattentive husband would notice—and already another two pounds since. I was careful to have no photos taken of me in the months before I disappeared, so the public will know only pale, thin Amy. I am definitely not that anymore. I can feel my bottom move sometimes, on its own, when I walk. A wiggle and a jiggle, wasn’t that some old saying? I never had either before. My body was a beautiful, perfect economy, every feature calibrated, everything in balance. I don’t miss it. I don’t miss men looking at me. It’s a relief to walk into a convenience store and walk right back out without some hangabout in sleeveless flannel leering as I leave, some muttered bit of misogyny slipping from him like a nacho-cheese burp. Now no one is rude to me, but no one is nice to me either. No one goes out of their way, not overly, not really, not the way they used to.

I am the opposite of Amy.

A
s the sun came up, I held an ice cube to my cheek. Hours later, and I could still feel the bite: two little staple-shaped creases. I couldn’t go after Andie—a worse risk than her wrath—so I finally phoned her. Voice mail.

Contain, this must be contained
.

“Andie, I am so sorry, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what’s going on. Please forgive me. Please.”

I shouldn’t have left a voice mail, but then I thought:
She may have hundreds of my voice mails saved, for all I know
. Good God, if she played a hit list of the raunchiest, nastiest, smittenist … any woman on any jury would send me away just for that. It’s one thing to know I’m a cheat and another to hear my heavy teacher voice telling a young co-ed about my giant, hard—

I blushed in the dawn light. The ice cube melted.

I sat on Go’s front steps, began phoning Andie every ten minutes, got nothing. I was sleepless, my nerves barbwired, when Boney pulled into the driveway at 6:12
A.M
. I said nothing as she walked toward me, bearing two Styrofoam cups.

“Hey, Nick, I brought you some coffee. Just came over to check on you.”

“I bet.”

“I know you’re probably reeling. From the news about the pregnancy. She made an elaborate show of pouring two creamers into my
coffee, the way I like it, and handed it to me. “What’s that?” she said, pointing to my cheek.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Nick, what is wrong with your face? There’s a giant pink …” She leaned in closer, grabbed my chin. “It’s like a bite mark.”

“It must be hives. I get hives when I’m stressed.”

“Mm-hmmm.” She stirred her coffee. “You do know I’m on your side, right, Nick?”

“Right.”

“I am. Truly. I wish you’d trust me. I just—I’m getting to the point where I won’t be able to help you if you don’t trust me. I know that sounds like a cop line, but it’s the truth.”

We sat in a strange semi-companionable silence, sipping coffee.

“Hey, so I wanted you to know before you hear it anywhere,” she said brightly. “We found Amy’s purse.”

“What?”

“Yep, no cash left, but her ID, cell phone. In Hannibal, of all places. On the banks of the river, south of the steamboat landing. Our guess: Someone wanted to make it look like it’d been tossed in the river by the perp on the way out of town, heading over the bridge into Illinois.”

“
Make it look like?
”

“It had never been fully submerged. There are fingerprints still at the top, near the zipper. Now sometimes fingerprints can hold on even in water, but … I’ll spare you the science, I’ll just say, the theory is, this purse was kinda settled on the banks to make sure it was found.”

“Sounds like you’re telling me this for a reason,” I said.

“The fingerprints we found were yours, Nick. Which isn’t that crazy—men get into their wives’ purses all the time. But still—” She laughed as if she got a great idea. “I gotta ask: You haven’t been to Hannibal recently, have you?”

She said it with such casual confidence, I had a flash: a police tracker hidden somewhere in the undercarriage of my car, released to me the morning I went to Hannibal.

“Why, exactly, would I go to Hannibal to get rid of my wife’s purse?”

“Say you’d killed your wife and staged the crime scene in your home, trying to get us to think she was attacked by an outsider. But then you realized we were beginning to suspect you, so you wanted to
plant something to get us to look outside again. That’s the theory. But at this point, some of my guys are so sure you did it, they’d find any theory that fit. So let me help you: You in Hannibal lately?”

I shook my head. “You need to talk to my lawyer. Tanner Bolt.”

“
Tanner Bolt
? You sure that’s the way you want to go, Nick? I feel like we’ve been pretty fair with you so far, pretty open. Bolt, he’s a … he’s a last-ditch guy. He’s the guy guilty people call in.”

“Huh. Well, I’m clearly your lead suspect, Rhonda. I have to look out for myself.”

“Let’s all get together when he gets in, okay? Talk this through.”

“Definitely—that’s our plan.”

“A man with a plan,” Boney said. “I’ll look forward to it.” She stood up, and as she walked away, she called back: “Witch hazel’s good for hives.”

An hour later, the doorbell rang, and Tanner Bolt stood there in a baby-blue suit, and something told me it was the look he wore when he went “down South.” He was inspecting the neighborhood, eyeing the cars in the driveways, assessing the houses. He reminded me of the Elliotts, in a way—examining and analyzing at all times. A brain with no off switch.