Gone Girl: A Novel (57 page)

“You’ve seen too many movies,” I said.

“Ha! Never thought I’d hear you say that.”

We stood in the bathtub and turned on the shower. The water sprayed my naked back and misted the front of Amy’s shirt until she peeled it off. She pulled off all her clothes, a gleeful striptease, and tossed them over the shower stall in the same grinning, game manner she had when we first met—
I’m up for anything!
—and she turned to me, and I waited for her to swing her hair around her shoulders like she did when she flirted with me, but her hair was too short.

“Now we’re even,” she said. “Seemed rude to be the only one clothed.”

“I think we’re past etiquette, Amy.”

Look only at her eyes, do not touch her, do not let her touch you
.

She moved toward me, put a hand on my chest, let the water trickle between her breasts. She licked a shower teardrop off her upper lip and smiled. Amy hated shower spray. She didn’t like getting her face wet, didn’t like the feel of water pelleting her flesh. I knew this because I was married to her, and I’d pawed her and harassed her many times in the shower, always to be turned down.
(I know it seems sexy, Nick, but it’s actually not, it’s something people only do in movies.)
Now she was pretending just the opposite, as if she forgot that I knew her. I backed away.

“Tell me everything, Amy. But first: Was there ever a baby?”

The baby was a lie. It was the most desolate part for me. My wife as a murderer was frightening, repulsive, but the baby as a lie was almost impossible to bear. The baby was a lie, the fear of blood was a lie—during the past year, my wife had been mostly a lie.

“How did you set Desi up?” I asked.

“I found some twine in one corner of his basement. I used a steak knife to saw it into four pieces—”

“He let you keep a knife?”

“We were friends. You forget.”

She was right. I was thinking of the story she’d told the police: that Desi had held her captive. I did forget. She was that good a storyteller.

“Whenever Desi wasn’t around, I’d tie the pieces as tight as I could around my wrists and ankles so they’d leave these grooves.”

She showed me the lurid lines on her wrists, like bracelets.

“I took a wine bottle, and I abused myself with it every day, so the inside of my vagina looked … right. Right for a rape victim. Then today I let him have sex with me so I had his semen, and I slipped some sleeping pills into his martini.”

“He let you keep sleeping pills?”

She sighed: I wasn’t keeping up.

“Right, you were friends.”

“Then I—” She pantomimed slicing his jugular.

“That easy, huh?”

“You just have to decide to do it and then do it,” she said. “Discipline. Follow through. Like anything. You never understood that.”

I could feel her mood turning stony. I wasn’t appreciating her enough.

“Tell me more,” I said. “Tell me how you did it.”

An hour in, the water went cold, and Amy called an end to our discussion.

“You have to admit, it’s pretty brilliant,” she said.

I stared at her.

“I mean, you have to admire it just a little,” she prompted.

“How long did it take for Desi to bleed to death?”

“It’s time for bed,” she said. “But we can talk more tomorrow if you want. Right now we should sleep. Together. I think it’s important. For closure. Actually, the opposite of closure.”

“Amy, I’m going to stay tonight because I don’t want to deal with all the questions if I don’t stay. But I’ll sleep downstairs.”

She cocked her head to one side, studied me.

“Nick, I can still do very bad things to you, remember that.”

“Ha! Worse than what you’ve already done?”

She looked surprised. “Oh, definitely.”

“I doubt that, Amy.”

I began walking out the door.

“Attempted murder,” she said.

I paused.

“That was my original plan early on: I’d be a poor, sick wife with repeated episodes, sudden intense bouts of illness, and then it turns out that all those cocktails her husband prepared her …”

“Like in the diary.”

“But I decided
attempted
murder wasn’t good enough for you. It had to be bigger than that. Still, I couldn’t get the poisoning idea out of my head. I liked the idea of you working up to the murder. Trying the cowardly way first. So I went through with it.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“All that vomit, so shocking. An innocent, frightened wife might have saved some of that vomit, just in case. You can’t blame her, being a little paranoid.” She gave a satisfied smile. “Always have a backup plan to the backup plan.”

“You actually poisoned yourself.”

“Nick, please, you’re shocked? I
killed
myself.”

“I need a drink,” I said. I left before she could speak.

I poured myself a Scotch and sat on the living-room couch. Beyond the curtains, the strobes of the cameras were lighting up the yard. Soon it would no longer be night. I’d come to find the morning depressing, to know it would come again and again.

Tanner picked up on the first ring.

“She killed him,” I said. “She killed Desi because he was basically … he was annoying her, he was power-playing her, and she realized she could kill him, and it was her way back to her old life, and she could blame everything on him. She
murdered
him, Tanner, she just told me this. She
confessed
.”

“I don’t suppose you were able to … record any of it somehow? Cell phone or something?”

“We were naked with the shower running, and she whispered everything.”

“I don’t even want to ask,” he said. “You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.”

“What’s going on with the police?”

He sighed. “She foolproofed everything. It’s ludicrous, her story, but no more ludicrous than our story. Amy’s basically exploiting the sociopath’s most reliable maxim.”

“What’s that?”

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.”

“Come on, Tanner, there’s got to be something.”

I paced over to the staircase to make sure Amy was nowhere nearby. We were whispering, but still. I had to be careful now.

“For now we need to toe the line, Nick. She left you looking fairly bad: Everything in the diary was true, she says. All the stuff in the woodshed was you. You bought the stuff with those credit cards, and you’re too embarrassed to admit it. She’s just a sheltered little rich girl, what would she know about acquiring secret credit cards in her husband’s name? And my goodness, that pornography!”

“She told me there was never a baby, she faked it with Noelle Hawthorne’s pee.”

“Why didn’t you say—That’s huge! We’ll lean on Noelle Hawthorne.”

“Noelle didn’t know.”

I heard a deep sigh on the other end. He didn’t even bother asking how. “We’ll keep thinking, we’ll keep looking,” he said. “Something will break.”

“I can’t stay in this house with that
thing
. She’s threatening me with—”

“Attempted murder … the antifreeze. Yeah, I heard that was in the mix.”

“They can’t arrest me on that, can they? She says she still has some vomit. Evidence. But can they really—”

“Let’s not push it for now, okay, Nick?” he said. “For now, play nice. I hate to say it, I hate to, but that’s my best legal advice for you right now: Play nice.”

“Play nice? That’s your advice? My one-man legal dream team:
Play nice
? Fuck you.”

I hung up in full fury.

I’ll kill her
, I thought.
I will fucking kill the bitch
.

I plunged into the dark daydream I’d indulged over the past few years when Amy had made me feel my smallest: I daydreamed of hitting her with a hammer, smashing her head in until she stopped talking,
finally
, stopped with the words she suctioned to me: average,
boring, mediocre, unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive.
Un
, basically. In my mind, I whaled on her with the hammer until she was like a broken toy, muttering
un, un, un
until she sputtered to a stop. And then it wasn’t enough, so I restored her to perfection and began killing her again: I wrapped my fingers around her neck—she always did crave intimacy—and then I squeezed and squeezed, her pulse—

“Nick?”

I turned around, and Amy was on the bottom stair in her nightgown, her head tilted to one side.

“Play nice, Nick.”

H
e turns around, and when he sees me standing there, he looks scared. That’s something useful. Because I’m not going to let him go. He may think he was lying when he said all those nice things to lure me home. But I know different. I know Nick can’t lie like that. I know that as he recited those words, he realized the truth.
Ping!
Because you can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.

You don’t buy it? Then how about this? He did lie. He didn’t mean a fucking thing he said. Well, then, screw him, he did too good a job, because I want him, exactly like that. The man he was pretending to be—women love that guy.
I
love that guy. That’s the man I want for my husband. That’s the man I signed up for. That’s the man I deserve.

So he can choose to truly love me the way he once did, or I will bring him to heel and make him be the man I married. I’m sick of dealing with his bullshit.

“Play nice,” I say.

He looks like a child, a furious child. He bunches his fists.

“No, Amy.”

“I can ruin you, Nick.”

“You already did, Amy.” I see the rage flash over him, a shiver. “Why in God’s name do you even want to be with me? I’m boring, average, uninteresting, uninspiring. I’m not up to par. You spent the last few years telling me this.”

“Only because you stopped
trying
,” I say. “You were so perfect, with me. We were so perfect when we started, and then you stopped trying. Why would you do that?”

“I stopped loving you.”

“
Why?
”

“You stopped loving me. We’re a sick, fucking toxic Möbius strip, Amy. We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves—surprise!—we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way. You don’t really love
me
, Amy. You don’t even like me. Divorce me. Divorce me, and let’s try to be happy.”

“I won’t divorce you, Nick. I won’t. And I swear to you, if you try to leave, I will devote
my
life to making
your
life as awful as I can. And you know I can make it awful.”

He begins pacing like a caged bear. “Think about it, Amy, how bad we are for each other: the two most needful human beings in the world stuck with each other. I’ll divorce you if you don’t divorce me.”

“Really?”

“I will divorce you. But you should divorce me. Because I know what you’re thinking already, Amy. You’re thinking it won’t make a good story: Amazing Amy finally kills her crazed-rapist captor and returns home to … a boring old divorce. You’re thinking it’s not triumphant.”

It’s
not
triumphant.

“But think of it this way: Your story is not some drippy, earnest survivor story. TV movie circa 1992. It’s not. You are a tough, vibrant, independent woman, Amy. You killed your kidnapper, and then you kept on cleaning house: You got rid of your idiot cheat of a husband. Women would
cheer
you. You’re not a scared little girl. You’re a badass, take-no-prisoners
woman
. Think about it. You know I’m right: The era of forgiveness is over. It’s passé. Think of all the women—the politicians’ wives, the actresses—every woman in the public who’s been cheated on, they don’t stay with the cheat these days. It’s not
stand by your man
anymore, it’s
divorce the fucker
.”

I feel a rush of hate toward him, that he’s still trying to wriggle out of our marriage even though I’ve told him—three times now—that he can’t. He still thinks he has power.

“And if I don’t divorce you, you’ll divorce me?” I ask.

“I don’t want to be married to a woman like you. I want to be married to a normal person.”

Piece of shit.

“I see. You want to revert to your lame, limp
loser
self? You want to just
walk away
? No! You don’t get to go be some boring-ass middle American with some boring-ass girl next door. You tried it already—remember, baby? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t do that now. You’ll be known as the philandering asshole who left his kidnapped, raped wife. You think any
nice
woman will touch you? You’ll only get—”

“Psychos? Crazy psycho bitches?” He’s pointing at me, jabbing the air.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Psycho bitch?”

It’d be so easy, for him to write me off that way. He’d love that, to be able to dismiss me so simply.

“Everything I do, I do for a reason, Nick,” I say. “Everything I do takes planning and precision and discipline.”

“You are a petty, selfish, manipulative, disciplined psycho bitch—”

“You are a man,” I say. “You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly,
woman-fearing
man. Without me, that’s what you would have kept on being, ad nauseam. But I made you into something. You were the best man you’ve
ever
been with me. And you know it. The only time in your life you’ve ever
liked
yourself was
pretending to be
someone
I
might like. Without me? You’re just your dad.”

“Don’t say that, Amy.” He balls up his fists.

“You think he wasn’t hurt by a woman too, just like you?” I say it in my most patronizing voice, as if I’m talking to a puppy. “You think he didn’t believe he deserved better than he got, just like you? You really think your mom was his first choice? Why do you think he hated you all so much?”

He moves toward me. “Shut up, Amy.”

“Think, Nick, you know I’m right: Even if you found a nice, regular girl, you’d be thinking of
me
every day. Tell me you wouldn’t.”