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. 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 into the principal’s office. 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?’
‘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 r
easons 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.’
I told Amy it wasn’t true, but she didn’t believe me. I told her I didn’t just want a child, I needed a child. I had to know I could love a person unconditionally, that I could make a little creature feel constantly welcome and wanted no matter what. That I could be a different kind of father than my dad was. That I could raise a boy who wasn’t like me.
I begged her. Amy remained unmoved.
A year later, I got a notice in the mail: The clinic would dispose of my semen unless they heard from us. I left the letter on the dining room table, an open rebuke. Three days later, I saw it in the trash. That was our final communication on the subject.
By then I’d already been secretly dating Andie for months, so I had no right to be upset. But that didn’t stop my aching, and it didn’t stop me from daydreaming about our boy, mine and Amy’s. I’d gotten attached to him. The fact was, Amy and I would make a great child.
The marionettes were watching me with alarmed black eyes. I peered out my window, saw that the news trucks had packed it in, so I went out into the warm night. Time to walk. Maybe a lone tabloid writer was trailing me; if so, I didn’t care. I headed through our complex, then forty-five minutes out along River Road, then onto the highway that shot right through the middle of Carthage. Thirty loud, fumy minutes – past car dealerships with trucks displayed appealingly like desserts, past fast-food chains and liquor stores and mini-marts and gas stations – until I reached the turnoff for downtown. I had encountered not a single other person on foot the entire time, only faceless blurs whizzing past me in cars.
It was close to midnight. I passed The Bar, tempted to go in but put off by the crowds. A reporter or two had to be camped out in there. It’s what I would do. But I wanted to be in a bar. I wanted to be surrounded by people, having fun, blowing off steam. I walked another fifteen minutes to the other end of downtown, to a cheesier, rowdier, younger bar where the bathrooms were always laced with vomit on Saturday nights. It was a bar that Andie’s crowd would go to, and perhaps, who knew, drag along Andie. It would be a nice bit of luck to see her there. At least gauge her mood from across the room. And if she wasn’t there then I’d have a fucking drink.
I went as deep into the bar as I could – no Andie, no Andie. My face was partially covered by a baseball cap. Even so, I felt a few pings as I moved past crowds of drinkers: heads abruptly turning toward me, the wide eyes of identification. That guy! Right?
Mid-July. I wondered if I’d become so nefarious come October, I’d be some frat boy’s tasteless Halloween costume: mop of blond hair, an Amazing Amy book tucked under an armpit. Go said she’d received half a dozen phone calls asking if The Bar had an official T-shirt for sale. (We didn’t, thank God.)
I sat down and ordered a Scotch from the bartender, a guy about my age who stared at me a beat too long, deciding whether he would serve me. He finally, grudgingly, set down a small tumbler in front of me, his nostrils flared. When I got out my wallet, he aimed an alarmed palm up at me. ‘I do not want your money, man. Not at all.’
I left cash anyway. Asshole.
When I tried to flag him for another drink, he glanced my way, shook his head, and leaned in toward the woman he was chatting up. A few seconds later, she discreetly looked toward me, pretending she was stretching. Her mouth turned down as she nodded. That’s him. Nick Dunne. The bartender never came back.
You can’t yell, you can’t strong-arm: Hey, jackass, will you get me a goddamn drink or what? You can’t be the asshole they believe you are. You just have to sit and take it. But I wasn’t le
aving. I sat with my empty glass in front of me and pretended I was thinking very hard. I checked my cell, just in case Andie had called. No. Then I pulled out my real phone and played a round of solitaire, pretending to be engrossed. My wife had done this to me, turned me into a man who couldn’t get a drink in his own hometown. God, I hated her.
‘Was it Scotch?’
A girl about Andie’s age was standing in front of me. Asian, black shoulder-length hair, cubicle-cute.
‘Excuse me?’
‘What you were drinking? Scotch?’
‘Yeah. Having trouble getting—’
She was gone, to the end of the bar, and she was nosing into the bartender’s line of vision with a big help me smile, a girl used to making her presence known, and then she was back with a Scotch in an actual big-boy tumbler.
‘Take it,’ she nudged, and I did. ‘Cheers.’ She held up her own clear, fizzing drink. We clinked glasses. ‘Can I sit?’ ‘I’m not staying long, actually—’ I looked around, making sure no one was aiming a cameraphone at us.
‘So, okay,’ she said with a shruggy smile. ‘I could pretend I don’t know you’re Nick Dunne, but I’m not going to insult you. I’m rooting for you, by the way. You’ve been getting a bad rap.’
‘Thanks. It’s, uh, it’s a weird time.’
‘I’m serious. You know how, in court, they talk about the CSI effect? Like, everyone on the jury has watched so much CSI that they believe science can prove anything?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I think there’s an Evil Husband effect. Everyone has seen too many true-crime shows where the husband is always, always the killer, so people automatically assume the husband’s the bad guy.’
‘That’s exactly it,’ I said. ‘Thank you. That is exactly it. And Ellen Abbott—’
‘Fuck Ellen Abbott,’ my new friend said. ‘She’s a one-woman walking, talking, man-hating perversion of the justice system.’ She raised her glass again.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Another Scotch?’
‘That’s a gorgeous name.’
Her name, as it turned out, was Rebecca. She had a ready credit card and a hollow leg. (Another? Another? Another?) She was from Muscatine, Iowa (another Mississippi River town), and had moved to New York after undergrad to be a writer (also like me). She’d been an editorial assistant at three different magazines – a bridal magazine, a working-mom magazine, a teen-girl magazine – all of which had shuttered in the past few years, so she was now working for a crime blog called Whodunnit, and she was (giggle) in town to try to get an interview with me. Hell, I had to love her hungry-kid chutzpah: Just fly me to Carthage – the major networks haven’t gotten him, but I’m sure I can!
‘I’ve been waiting outside your house with the rest of the world, and then at the police station, and then I decided I needed a drink. And here you walk in. It’s just too perfect. Too weird, right?’ she said. She had little gold hoop earrings that she kept playing with, her hair tucked behind her ears.
‘I should go,’ I said. My words were sticky around the edges, the beginnings of a slur.
‘But you never told me why you’re here,’ Rebecca said. ‘I have to say, it takes a lot of courage, I think, for you to head out without a friend or some sort of backup. I bet you get a lot of shitty looks.’
I shrugged: No big deal.
‘People judging everything you do without even knowing you. Like you with the cell phone photo at the park. I mean, you were probably like me: You were raised to be polite. But no one wants the real story. They just want to … gotcha. You know?’
‘I’m just tired of people judging me because I fit into a certain mold.’
She raised her eyebrows; her earrings jittered.
I thought of Amy sitting in her mystery control center, wherever the fuck she was, judging me from every angle, finding me wanting even from afar. Was there anything she could see that would make her call off this madness?
I went on, ‘I mean, people think we were in a rocky marriage, but actually, right before she disappeared, she put together a treasure hunt for me.’
Amy would want one of two things: for me to learn my lesson and fry like the bad boy I was; or for me to learn my lesson and love her the way she deserved and be a good, obedient, chastised, dickless little boy.
‘This wonderful treasure hunt.’ I smiled. Rebecca shook her head with a little-V frown. ‘My wife, she always did a treasure hunt for our anniversary. One clue leads to a special place where I find the next clue, and so on. Amy …’ I tried to get my eyes to fill, settled for wiping them. The clock above the door read 12:37 a.m. ‘Before she went missing, she hid all the clues. For this year.’
‘Before she disappeared on your anniversary.’
‘And it’s been all that’s kept me together. It made me feel closer to her.’
Rebecca pulled out a Flip camera. ‘Let me interview you. On camera.’
‘Bad idea.’
‘I’ll give it context,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what you need, Nick, I swear. Context. You need it bad. Come on, just a few words.’
I shook my head. ‘Too dangerous.’
‘Say what you just said. I’m serious, Nick. I’m the opposite of Ellen Abbott. The anti–Ellen Abbott. You need me in your life.’ She held up the camera, its tiny red light eyeing me.
‘Seriously, turn it off.’
‘Help a girl out. I get the Nick Dunne interview? My career is made. You’ve done your good deed for the year. Pleeease? No harm, Nick, one minute. Just one minute. I swear I will only make you look good.’
She motioned to a nearby booth where we’d be tucked out of view of any gawkers. I nodded and we resettled, that little red light aimed at me the whole time.
‘What do you want to know?’ I asked.
‘Tell me about the treasure hunt. It sounds romantic. Like, quirky, awesome, romantic.’
Take control of the story, Nick. For both the capital-P public and the capital-C wife. Right now, I thought, I am a man who loves his wife and will find her. I am a man who loves his wife, and I am the good guy. I am the one to root for. I am a man who isn’t perfect, but my wife is, and I will be very, very obedient from now on.
I could do this more easily than feign sadness. Like I said, I can operate in sunlight. Still, I felt my throat tighten as I got ready to say the words.
‘My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met. How many guys can say that? I married the coolest girl I ever met.’
Youfuckingbitchyoufuckingbitchyoufuckingbitch. Come home so I can kill you.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
NINE DAYS GONE
I wake up feeling immediately nervous. Off. I cannot be found here, that’s what I wake up thinking, a burst of words, like a flash in my brain. The investigation is not going fast enough, and my money situation is just the
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