flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 17
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I swallowed three belts in a row and felt immediately worse. My stomachwas working its way up my esophagus. “What kind of stuff did they ask?”“Have you ever hurt Amy, has Amy ever mentioned you threatening her?” Marybethticked o . “Are you a womanizer, has Amy ever mentioned you cheating on her?Because that sounds like Amy, right? I told them we didn’t raise a doormat.”Rand put a hand on my shoulder.
“Nick, what we should have said, rst of all, is: Weknow you would never, ever hurt Amy. I even told the police, told them the story aboutyou saving the mouse at the beach house, saving it from the glue trap.” He looked overat Marybeth as if she didn’t know the story, and Marybeth obliged with her raptattention. “Spent an hour trying to corner the damn thing, and then literally drove thelittle rat bastard out of town. Does that sound like a guy who would hurt his wife?”I felt a burst of intense guilt, self-loathing. I thought for a second I might cry, finally.“We love you, Nick,” Rand said, giving me a final squeeze.“We do, Nick,” Marybeth echoed.
“You’re our son. We are so incredibly sorry that ontop of Amy being gone, you have to deal with this—cloud of suspicion.”I didn’t like the phrase cloud of suspicion. I much preferred routine investigation or amere formality.“They did wonder about your restaurant reservations that night,” Marybeth said, anoverly casual glance.“My reservations?”“They said you told them you had reservations at Houston’s, but they checked it out,and there were no reservations.
They seemed really interested in that.”I had no reservation, and I had no gift. Because if I planned on killing Amy that day,I wouldn’t have needed reservations for that night or a gift I’d never need to give her.The hallmarks of an extremely pragmatic killer.I am pragmatic to a fault—my friends could certainly tell the police that.“Uh, no. No, I never made reservations. They must have misunderstood me. I’ll letthem know.”I collapsed on the couch across from Marybeth.
I didn’t want Rand to touch meagain.“Oh, okay. Good,” Marybeth said. “Did she, uh, did you get a treasure hunt thisyear?” Her eyes turned red again. “Before …”“Yeah, they gave me the rst clue today. Gilpin and I found the second one in myoffice at the college. I’m still trying to figure it out.”“Can we take a look?” my mother-in-law asked.“I don’t have it with me,” I lied.“Will you … will you try to solve it, Nick?” Marybeth asked.“I will, Marybeth. I’ll solve it.”“I just hate the idea of things she touched, left out there, all alone—”My phone rang, the disposable, and I icked a glance at the display, then shut it o .I needed to get rid of the thing, but I couldn’t yet.“You should pick up every call, Nick,” Marybeth said.“I recognized this one—just my college alum fund looking for money.”Rand sat beside me on the couch. The ancient, much abused cushions sank severelyunder our weight, so we ended up pushed toward each other, arms touching, which wasne with Rand.
He was one of those guys who’d pronounce I’m a hugger as he came atyou, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.Marybeth returned to business: “We do think it’s possible an Amy obsessive took her.”She turned to me, as if pleading a case. “We’ve had ’em over the years.”Amy had been fond of recollecting stories of men obsessed with her. She describedthe stalkers in hushed tones over glasses of wine at various periods during our marriage—men who were still out there, always thinking about her and wanting her. I suspectedthese stories were in ated: The men always came o as dangerous to a very precisedegree—enough for me to worry about but not enough to require us to involve thepolice. In short, a play world where I could be Amy’s chest-pu ed hero, defending herhonor.
Amy was too independent, too modern, to be able to admit the truth: She wantedto play damsel.“Lately?”“Not lately, no,” Marybeth said, chewing her lip. “But there was a very disturbed girlback in high school.”“Disturbed how?”“She was obsessed with Amy. Well, with Amazing Amy. Her name was Hilary Handy—she modeled herself after Amy’s best friend in the books, Suzy. At rst it was cute, Iguess.
And then it was like that wasn’t good enough anymore—she wanted to beAmazing Amy, not Suzy the sidekick. So she began imitating our Amy. She dressed likeAmy, she colored her hair blond, she’d linger outside our house in New York. One time Iwas walking down the street and she came running up to me, this strange girl, and shelooped her arm through mine and said, ‘I’m going to be your daughter now.
I’m going tokill Amy and be your new Amy. Because it doesn’t really matter to you, does it? As longas you have an Amy.’ Like our daughter was a piece of fiction she could rewrite.”“We nally got a restraining order because she threw Amy down a ight of stairs atschool,” Rand said. “Very disturbed girl. That kind of mentality doesn’t go away.”“And then Desi,” Marybeth said.“And Desi,” Rand said.Even I knew about Desi. Amy had attended a Massachusetts boarding school calledWickshire Academy—I had seen the photos, Amy in lacrosse skirts and headbands,always with autumn colors in the background, as if the school were based not in a townbut in a month. October. Desi Collings attended the boys’ boarding school that waspaired with Wickshire.
In Amy’s stories, he was a pale, Romantic gure, and theircourtship had been of the boarding-school variety: chilly football games and overheateddances, lilac corsages and rides in a vintage Jaguar. Everything a little bit midcentury.Amy dated Desi, quite seriously, for a year. But she began to nd him alarming: Hetalked as if they were engaged, he knew the number and gender of their children. Theywere going to have four kids, all boys. Which sounded suspiciously like Desi’s ownfamily, and when he brought his mother down to meet her, Amy grew queasy at thestriking resemblance between herself and Mrs.
Collings. The older woman had kissedher cheek coldly and murmured calmly in her ear, “Good luck.” Amy couldn’t tell if itwas a warning or a threat.After Amy cut it o with Desi, he still lingered around the Wickshire campus, aghostly gure in dark blazers, leaning against wintry, lea ess oak trees. Amy returnedfrom a dance one February night to nd him lying on her bed, naked, on top of thecovers, groggy from a very marginal pill overdose. Desi left school shortly after.But he still phoned her, even now, and several times a year sent her thick, paddedenvelopes that Amy tossed unopened after showing them to me.
They were postmarkedSt. Louis. Forty minutes away. “It’s just a horrible, miserable coincidence,” she’d told me.Desi had the St. Louis family connections on his mother’s side. This much she knew butdidn’t care to know more. I’d picked through the trash to retrieve one, read the letter,sticky with alfredo sauce, and it had been utterly banal: talk of tennis and travel andother things preppy. Spaniels. I tried to picture this slender dandy, a fellow in bow tiesand tortoiseshell glasses, busting into our house and grabbing Amy with soft, manicuredngers.
Tossing her in the trunk of his vintage roadster and taking her … antiquing inVermont. Desi. Could anyone believe it was Desi?“Desi lives not far away, actually,” I said. “St. Louis.”“Now, see?” Rand said. “Why are the cops not all over this?”“Someone needs to be,” I said. “I’ll go. After the search here tomorrow.”“The police de nitely seem to think it’s … close to home,” Marybeth said.
She kepther eyes on me one beat too long, then shivered, as if shaking off a thought.AMY ELLIOTT DUNNEAUGUST 23, 2010DIARY ENTRYSummer. Birdies. Sunshine. I spent today shu ing around Prospect Park, my skintender, my bones brittle. Misery-battling. It is an improvement, since I spent theprevious three days in our house in the same crusty pajama set, marking time until ve,when I could have a drink.
Trying to make myself remember the su ering in Darfur. Putthings into perspective. Which, I guess, is just further exploiting the people of Darfur.So much has unraveled the past week. I think that’s what it is, that it’s all happenedat once, so I have the emotional bends. Nick lost his job a month ago. The recession issupposed to be winding down, but no one seems to know that. So Nick lost his job.Second round of layo s, just like he predicted—just a few weeks after the rst round.Oops, we didn’t fire nearly enough people. Idiots.At rst I think Nick might be okay.
He makes a massive list of things he’s alwaysmeant to do. Some of it’s tiny stu : He changes watch batteries and resets clocks, hereplaces a pipe beneath our sink and repaints all the rooms we painted before anddidn’t like. Basically, he does a lot of things over. It’s nice to take some actual do-overs,when you get so few in life. And then he starts on bigger stu : He reads War and Peace.He irts with taking Arabic lessons. He spends a lot of time trying to guess what skillswill be marketable over the next few decades. It breaks my heart, but I pretend itdoesn’t for his sake.I keep asking him: “Are you sure you’re okay?”At rst I try it seriously, over co ee, eye contact, my hand on his. Then I try itbreezily, lightly, in passing.
Then I try it tenderly, in bed, stroking his hair.He has the same answer always: “I’m fine. I don’t really want to talk about it.”I wrote a quiz that was perfect for the times: “How Are You Handling Your Layoff?”a) I sit in my pajamas and eat a lot of ice cream—sulking is therapeutic!b) I write nasty things about my old boss online, everywhere—ventingfeels great!c) Until a new job comes along, I try to nd useful things to do with mynewfound time, like learning a marketable language or finally reading War andPeace.It was a compliment to Nick—C was the correct answer—but he just gave a soursmile when I showed it to him.A few weeks in, the bustling stopped, the usefulness stopped, as if he woke up onemorning under a decrepit, dusty sign that read, Why Fucking Bother? He went dull-eyed.Now he watches TV, surfs porn, watches porn on TV. He eats a lot of delivery food, theStyrofoam shells propped up near the over owing trash can.
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