flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 10
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I haven’t had achance.” I’d signed away permission to trace credit cards and ATMs and track Amy’s cellphone, I’d handed over Go’s cell number and the name of Sue, the widow at The Bar,who could presumably attest to the time I arrived.“Baby of the family.” She shook her head. “You really do remind me of my littlebrother.” A beat. “That’s a compliment, I swear.”“She dotes on him,” Gilpin said, scribbling in a notebook.
“Okay, so you left thehouse at about seven-thirty A.M., and you showed up at The Bar at about noon, and inbetween, you were at the beach.”There’s a beachhead about ten miles north of our house, a not overly pleasantcollection of sand and silt and beer-bottle shards. Trash barrels over owing withStyrofoam cups and dirty diapers. But there is a picnic table upwind that gets nice sun,and if you stare directly at the river, you can ignore the other crap.“I sometimes bring my co ee and the paper and just sit.
Gotta make the most ofsummer.”No, I hadn’t talked to anyone at the beach. No, no one saw me.“It’s a quiet place midweek,” Gilpin allowed.If the police talked to anyone who knew me, they’d quickly learn that I rarely wentto the beach and that I never sometimes brought my co ee to just enjoy the morning. Ihave Irish-white skin and an impatience for navel-gazing: A beach boy I am not. I toldthe police that because it had been Amy’s idea, for me to go sit in the spot where I couldbe alone and watch the river I loved and ponder our life together. She’d said this to methis morning, after we’d eaten her crepes.
She leaned forward on the table and said, “Iknow we are having a tough time. I still love you so much, Nick, and I know I have a lotof things to work on. I want to be a good wife to you, and I want you to be my husbandand be happy. But you need to decide what you want.”She’d clearly been practicing the speech; she smiled proudly as she said it. And evenas my wife was o ering me this kindness, I was thinking, Of course she has to stagemanage this. She wants the image of me and the wild running river, my hair ru ing in thebreeze as I look out onto the horizon and ponder our life together. I can’t just go to Dunkin’Donuts.You need to decide what you want. Unfortunately for Amy, I had decided already.Boney looked up brightly from her notes: “Can you tell me what your wife’s bloodtype is?” she asked.“Uh, no, I don’t know.”“You don’t know your wife’s blood type?”“Maybe O?” I guessed.Boney frowned, then made a drawn-out yoga-like sound.
“Okay, Nick, here are thethings we are doing to help.” She listed them: Amy’s cell was being monitored, her photocirculated, her credit cards tracked. Known sex o enders in the area were beinginterviewed. Our sparse neighborhood was being canvassed. Our home phone wastapped, in case any ransom calls came in.I wasn’t sure what to say now. I raked my memory for the lines: What does thehusband say at this point in the movie? Depends on whether he’s guilty or innocent.“I can’t say that reassures me.
Are you—is this an abduction, or a missing personscase, or what exactly is going on?” I knew the statistics, knew them from the same TVshow I was starring in: If the rst forty-eight hours didn’t turn up something in a case, itwas likely to go unsolved. The rst forty-eight hours were crucial. “I mean, my wife isgone. My wife is gone!” I realized it was the rst time I’d said it the way it should havebeen said: panicked and angry. My dad was a man of in nite varieties of bitterness,rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inabilityto demonstrate much negative emotion at all.
It was another thing that made me seemlike a dick—my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my faceand less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control atall.“Nick, we are taking this extremely seriously,” Boney said. “The lab guys are over atyour place as we speak, and that will give us more information to go on. Right now, themore you can tell us about your wife, the better.
What is she like?”The usual husband phrases came into my mind: She’s sweet, she’s great, she’s nice,she’s supportive.“What is she like how?” I asked.“Give me an idea of her personality,” Boney prompted. “Like, what did you get herfor your anniversary? Jewelry?”“I hadn’t gotten anything quite yet,” I said.
“I was going to do it this afternoon.” Iwaited for her to laugh and say “baby of the family” again, but she didn’t.“Okay. Well, then, tell me about her. Is she outgoing? Is she—I don’t know how tosay this—is she New Yorky? Like what might come o to some as rude? Might rubpeople the wrong way?”“I don’t know.
She’s not a never-met-a-stranger kind of person, but she’s not—notabrasive enough to make someone … hurt her.”This was my eleventh lie. The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt,sometimes. I speak speci cally of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like thewoman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Overjust a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shedherself, a pile of skin and soul on the oor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitterAmy.
My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her,and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous ngers. Country ngers.Flyover ngers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Amy. When I’d holdup the bloody stumps, she’d sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which shetallied all my de ciencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. Myold Amy, damn, she was fun. She was funny. She made me laugh. I’d forgotten that.
Andshe laughed. From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small nger-shapedhollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfulsof birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.She was not the thing she became, the thing I feared most: an angry woman. I wasnot good with angry women. They brought something out in me that was unsavory.“She bossy?” Gilpin asked. “Take-charge?”I thought of Amy’s calendar, the one that went three years into the future, and if youlooked a year ahead, you would actually nd appointments: dermatologist, dentist, vet.“She’s a planner—she doesn’t, you know, wing anything.
She likes to make lists andcheck things off. Get things done. That’s why this doesn’t make sense—”“That can drive you crazy,” Boney said sympathetically. “If you’re not that type. Youseem very B-personality.”“I’m a little more laid-back, I guess,” I said. Then I added the part I was supposed toadd: “We round each other out.”I looked at the clock on the wall, and Boney touched my hand.“Hey, why don’t you go ahead and give a call to Amy’s parents? I’m sure they’dappreciate it.”It was past midnight. Amy’s parents went to sleep at nine P.M.; they were strangelyboastful about this early bedtime.
They’d be deep asleep by now, so this would be anurgent middle-of-the-night call. Cells went o at 8:45 always, so Rand Elliott wouldhave to walk from his bed all the way to the end of the hall to pick up the old heavyphone; he’d be fumbling with his glasses, fussy with the table lamp. He’d be tellinghimself all the reasons not to worry about a late-night phone call, all the harmlessreasons the phone might be ringing.I dialed twice and hung up before I let the call ring through.
When I did, it wasMarybeth, not Rand, who answered, her deep voice buzzing my ears. I’d only gotten to“Marybeth, this is Nick” when I lost it.“What is it, Nick?”I took a breath.“Is it Amy? Tell me.”“I uh—I’m sorry I should have called—”“Tell me, goddamn it!”“We c-can’t find Amy,” I stuttered.“You can’t find Amy?”“I don’t know—”“Amy is missing?”“We don’t know that for sure, we’re still—”“Since when?”“We’re not sure. I left this morning, a little after seven—”“And you waited till now to call us?”“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to—”“Jesus Christ.
We played tennis tonight. Tennis, and we could have been … My God.Are the police involved? You’ve notified them?”“I’m at the station right now.”“Put on whoever’s in charge, Nick. Please.”Like a kid, I went to fetch Gilpin. My mommy-in-law wants to talk to you.Phoning the Elliotts made it o cial. The emergency—Amy is gone—was spreading tothe outside.I was heading back to the interview room when I heard my father’s voice.Sometimes, in particularly shameful moments, I heard his voice in my head.
But this wasmy father’s voice, here. His words emerged in wet bubbles like something from a rancidbog. Bitch bitch bitch. My father, out of his mind, had taken to inging the word at anywoman who even vaguely annoyed him: bitch bitch bitch. I peered inside a conferenceroom, and there he sat on a bench against the wall.
He had been a handsome man once,intense and cleft-chinned. Jarringly dreamy was how my aunt had described him. Now hesat muttering at the oor, his blond hair matted, trousers muddy, and arms scratched, asif he’d fought his way through a thornbush. A line of spittle glimmered down his chinlike a snail’s trail, and he was exing and un exing arm muscles that had not yet goneto seed. A tense female o cer sat next to him, her lips in an angry pucker, trying toignore him: Bitch bitch bitch I told you bitch.“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“This is my father.”“You got our call?”“What call?”“To come get your father.” She overenunciated, as if I were a dim ten-year-old.“I— My wife is missing. I’ve been here most of the night.”She stared at me, not connecting in the least. I could see her debating whether tosacri ce her leverage and apologize, inquire. Then my father started up again, bitchbitch bitch, and she chose to keep the leverage.“Sir, Comfort Hill has been trying to contact you all day.
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