Gone Girl: A Novel (44 page)

When she picked up, I blurted: “This is Nick Dunne, Amy Elliott’s husband. I really need to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“I really, really need more information. About your—”

“Don’t say
friendship
.” I heard an angry grin in her voice.

“No. I wouldn’t. I just want to hear your side. I am not calling because I think you’ve got anything
—anything
—to do with my wife, her situation, currently. But I would really like to hear what happened. The truth. Because I think you may be able to shed light on a … pattern of behavior of Amy’s.”

“What kind of pattern?”

“When very bad things happen to people who upset her.”

She breathed heavily into the phone. “Two days ago, I wouldn’t have talked to you,” she started. “But then I was having a drink with some friends, and the TV was on, and you came on, and it was about Amy being pregnant. Everyone I was with, they were so
angry
at you. They
hated
you. And I thought,
I know how that feels
. Because she’s not dead, right? I mean, she’s still just missing? No body?”

“That’s right.”

“So let me tell you. About Amy. And high school. And what happened. Hold on.” On her end, I could hear cartoons playing—rubbery voices and calliope music—then suddenly not. Then whining voices.
Go watch downstairs. Downstairs, please
.

“So, freshman year. I’m the kid from Memphis.
Everyone
else is East Coast, I swear. It felt weird, different, you know? All the girls at Wickshire, it was like they’d been raised communally—the lingo, the clothes, the hair. And it wasn’t like I was a pariah, I was just … insecure, for sure. Amy was already The Girl. Like, first day, I remember, everyone knew her, everyone was talking about her. She was Amazing Amy—we’d all read those books growing up—plus, she was just gorgeous. I mean, she was—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Right. And pretty soon she was showing an interest in me, like, taking me under her wing or whatever. She had this joke that she was Amazing Amy, so I was her sidekick Suzy, and she started calling me Suzy, and pretty soon everyone else did too. Which was fine by me. I mean, I was a little toadie: Get Amy a drink if she was thirsty, throw in a load of laundry if she needed clean underwear. Hold on.”

Again I could hear the shuffle of her hair against the receiver. Marybeth had brought every Elliott photo album with her in case we needed more pictures. She’d shown me a photo of Amy and Hilary, cheek-to-cheek grins. So I could picture Hilary now, the same butter-blond hair as my wife, framing a plainer face, with muddy hazel eyes.

“
Jason, I am on the phone—just give them a few Popsicles, it’s not that dang hard
.

“Sorry. Our kids are out of school, and my husband never ever takes care of them, so he seems a little confused about what to do for the ten minutes I’m on the phone with you. Sorry. So … so, right, I was little Suzy, and we had this game going, and for a few months—August, September, October—it was great. Like
intense
friendship, we were together all the time. And then a few weird things happened at once that I knew kind of bothered her.”

“What?”

“A guy from our brother school, he meets us both at the fall dance, and the next day he calls
me
instead of Amy. Which I’m sure he did because Amy was too intimidating, but whatever … and then a few days later, our midterm grades come, and mine are slightly better,
like, four-point-one versus four-point-oh. And not long after, one of our friends, she invites me to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Me, not Amy. Again, I’m sure this was because Amy intimidated people. She wasn’t easy to be around, you felt all the time like you had to impress. But I can feel things change just a little. I can tell she’s really irritated, even though she doesn’t admit it.

“Instead, she starts getting me to do things. I don’t realize it at the time, but she starts setting me up. She asks if she can color my hair the same blond as hers, because mine’s mousy, and it’ll look
so nice
a brighter shade. And she starts complaining about her parents. I mean she’s always complained about her parents, but now she really gets going on them—how they only love her as an idea and not really for who she is—so she says she wants to mess with her parents. She has me start prank-calling her house, telling her parents I’m the new Amazing Amy. We’d take the train into New York some weekends, and she’d tell me to stand outside their house—one time she had me run up to her mom and tell her I was going to get rid of Amy and be her new Amy or some crap like that.”

“And you did it?”

“It was just dumb stuff girls do. Back before cell phones and cyber-bullying. A way to kill time. We did prank stuff like that all the time, just dumb stuff. Try to one-up each other on how daring and freaky we could be.”

“Then what?”

“Then she starts distancing herself. She gets cold. And I think—I think that she doesn’t like me anymore. Girls at school start looking at me funny. I’m shut out of the cool circle. Fine. But then one day I’m called in to see the headmistress. Amy has had a horrible accident—twisted ankle, fractured arm, cracked ribs. Amy has fallen down this long set of stairs, and she says it was
me
who pushed her. Hold on.

“
Go back downstairs now. Go. Down. Stairs. Goooo downstairs
.

“Sorry, I’m back. Never have kids.”

“So Amy said you pushed her?” I asked.

“Yeah, because I was
craaaazy
. I was obsessed with her, and I wanted to be Suzy, and then being Suzy wasn’t enough—I had to be Amy. And she had all this evidence that she’d had me create over the past few
months
. Her parents, obviously, had seen me
lurking
around the house. I theoretically accosted her mom. My hair dyed
blond and the clothes I’d bought that matched Amy’s—clothes I bought while shopping
with
her, but I couldn’t prove that. All her friends came in, explained how Amy for the past month had been so frightened of me. All this shit. I looked
totally insane
. Completely insane. Her parents got a restraining order on me. And I kept swearing it wasn’t me, but by then I was so miserable that I wanted to leave school anyway. So we didn’t fight the expulsion. I wanted to get away from her by that time. I mean, the girl
cracked her own ribs
. I was scared—this little fifteen-year-old, she’d pulled this off. Fooled friends, parents, teachers.”

“And this was all because of a boy and some grades and a Thanksgiving invitation?”

“About a month after I moved back to Memphis, I got a letter. It wasn’t signed, it was typed, but it was obviously Amy. It was a list of all the ways I’d let her down. Crazy stuff:
Forgot to wait for me after English, twice. Forgot I am allergic to strawberries, twice
.”

“Jesus.”

“But I feel like the real reason wasn’t even on there.”

“What was the real reason?”

“I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn’t perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn’t fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn’t perfect. It made me wonder about you.”

“About me? Why?”

“Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit. If she punished a friend of a few months by throwing herself down a flight of stairs, what would she do to a man who was dumb enough to marry her?”

I hung up as one of Hilary’s kids picked up the second extension and began singing a nursery rhyme. I immediately phoned Tanner and relayed my conversations with Hilary and Tommy.

“So we have a couple of stories, great,” Tanner said, “this’ll really be great!” in a way that told me it wasn’t that great. “Have you heard from Andie?”

I hadn’t.

“I have one of my people waiting for her at her apartment building,” he said. “Discreet.”

“I didn’t know you had people.”

“What we really need is to
find Amy
,” he said, ignoring me. “Girl like that, I can’t imagine she’d be able to stay hidden for too long. You have any thoughts?”

I kept picturing her on a posh hotel balcony near the ocean, wrapped in a white robe thick as a rug, sipping a very good Montrachet, while she tracked my ruin on the Internet, on cable, in the tabloids. While she enjoyed the endless coverage and exultation of Amy Elliott Dunne. Attending her own funeral. I wondered if she was self-aware enough to realize: She’d stolen a page from Mark Twain.

“I picture her near the ocean,” I said. Then I stopped, feeling like a boardwalk psychic. “No. I have no ideas. She could literally be anywhere. I don’t think we’ll see her unless she decides to come back.”

“That seems unlikely,” Tanner breathed, annoyed. “So let’s try to find Andie and see where her head is. We’re running out of wiggle room here.”

Then it was dinnertime, and then the sun set, and I was alone again in my haunted house. I was thinking about all of Amy’s lies and whether the pregnancy was one of them. I’d done the math. Amy and I had sex sporadically enough it was possible. But then she would know I’d do the math.

Truth or lie? If it was a lie, it was designed to gut me.

I’d always assumed that Amy and I would have children. It was one of the reasons I knew I would marry Amy, because I pictured us having kids together. I remember the first time I imagined it, not two months after we began dating: I was walking from my apartment in Kips Bay to a favorite pocket park along the East River, a path that took me past the giant LEGO block of the United Nations headquarters, the flags of myriad countries fluttering in the wind.
A kid would like this
, I thought. All the different colors, the busy memory game of matching each flag to its country.
There’s Finland, and there’s New Zealand
. The one-eyed smile of Mauritania. And then I realized it wasn’t
a
kid, but
our
kid, mine and Amy’s, who would like this. Our kid, sprawled on the floor with an old encyclopedia, just like I’d done, but our kid wouldn’t be alone, I’d be sprawled next to him. Aiding
him in his budding vexillology, which sounds less like a study of flags than a study in annoyance, which would have suited my father’s attitude toward me. But not mine toward my son’s. I pictured Amy joining us on the floor, flat on her stomach, her feet kicked up in the air, pointing out Palau, the yellow dot just left of center on the crisp blue background, which I was sure would be her favorite.

From then on, the boy was real (and sometimes a girl, but mostly a boy). He was inevitable. I suffered from regular, insistent paternal aches. Months after the wedding, I had a strange moment in front of the medicine cabinet, floss between my teeth, when I thought:
She wants kids, right? I should ask. Of course I should ask
. When I posed the question—roundabout, vague—she said,
Of course, of course, someday
, but every morning she still perched in front of the sink and swallowed her pill. For three years she did this every morning, while I fluttered near the topic but failed to actually say the words:
I want us to have a baby
.

After the layoffs, it seemed like it might happen. Suddenly, there was an uncontestable space in our lives, and one day over breakfast, Amy looked up from her toast and said,
I’m off the pill
. Just like that. She was off the pill three months, and nothing happened, and not long after the move to Missouri, she made an appointment for us to start the medical intervention. Once Amy started a project, she didn’t like to dilly-dally: “We’ll tell them we’ve been trying a year,” she said. Foolishly I agreed—we were barely ever touching each other by then, but we still thought a kid made sense. Sure.

“You’ll have to do your part too, you know,” she said on the drive to St. Louis. “You’ll have to give semen.”

“I know. Why do you say it like that?”

“I just figured you’d be too proud. Self-conscious and proud.”

I was a rather nasty cocktail of both those traits, but at the fertility center, I dutifully entered the strange small room dedicated to self-abuse: a place where hundreds of men had entered for no other purpose than to crank the shank, clean the rifle, jerk the gherkin, make the bald man cry, pound the flounder, sail the mayonnaise seas, wiggle the walrus, whitewash with Tom and Huck.

(I sometimes use humor as self-defense.)

The room contained a vinyl-covered armchair, a TV, and a table that held a grab bag of porn and a box of tissues. The porn was early
’90s, judging from the women’s hair (yes: top and bottom), and the action was midcore. (Another good essay: Who selects the porn for fertility centers? Who judges what will get men off yet not be too degrading to all the women outside the cum-room, the nurses and doctors and hopeful, hormone-addled wives?)

I visited the room on three separate occasions—they like to have a lot of backup—while Amy did nothing. She was supposed to begin taking pills, but she didn’t, and then she didn’t some more. She was the one who’d be pregnant, the one who’d turn over her body to the baby, so I postponed nudging her for a few months, keeping an eye on the pill bottle to see if the level went down. Finally, after a few beers one winter night, I crunched up the steps of our home, shed my snow-crusted clothes, and curled up next to her in bed, my face near her shoulder, breathing her in, warming the tip of my nose on her skin. I whispered the words—
Let’s do this, Amy, let’s have a baby
—and she said no. I was expecting nervousness, caution, worry—
Nick, will I be a good mom?
—but I got a clipped, cold
no
. A no without loopholes. Nothing dramatic, no big deal, just not something she was interested in anymore. “Because I realized I’d be stuck doing all the hard stuff,” she reasoned. “All the diapers and doctors’ appointments and discipline, and you’d just breeze in and be Fun Daddy. I’d do all the work to make them good people, and you’d undo it anyway, and they’d love you and hate me.”