flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 59
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Blood explodes. A brief sharp pelt of it streaksacross my legs, a hard chunk of meat hits my hair. Je throws the sh in the bucket andgrabs another with assembly-line smoothness.We work in grunts and wheezes for half an hour, four nets full, until my arms turnrubbery and the ice chests are full. Je takes the empty pail and lls it with water fromthe lake, pours it across the messy entrails and into the sh pens.
The cat sh gobble upthe guts of their fallen brethren. The dock is left clean. He pours one last pail of wateracross our bloody feet.“Why do you have to smash them?” I ask.“Can’t stand to watch something suffer,” he says. “Quick dunk?”“I’m okay,” I say.“Not in my car, you’re not—come on, quick dunk, you have more crap on you thanyou realize.”We run o the dock toward the rocky beach nearby. While I wade ankle-deep in thewater, Je runs with giant splashy footsteps and throws himself forward, arms wild.
Assoon as he’s far enough out, I unhook my money belt and fold my sundress around it,leave it at the water’s edge with my glasses on top. I lower myself until I feel the warmwater hit my thighs, my belly, my neck, and then I hold my breath and go under.I swim far and fast, stay underwater longer than I should to remind myself what itwould feel like to drown—I know I could do it if I needed to—and when I come up witha single disciplined gasp, I see Je lapping rapidly toward shore, and I have to swimfast as a porpoise back to my money belt and scramble onto the rocks just ahead of him.NICK DUNNEEIGHT DAYS GONEAs soon as I hung up with Tommy, I phoned Hilary Handy.
If my “murder” of Amywas a lie, and Tommy O’Hara’s “rape” of Amy was a lie, why not Hilary Handy’s“stalking” of Amy? A sociopath must cut her teeth somewhere, like the austere marblehalls of Wickshire Academy.When she picked up, I blurted: “This is Nick Dunne, Amy Elliott’s husband.
I reallyneed 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’vegot anything—anything—to do with my wife, her situation, currently. But I would reallylike to hear what happened. The truth.
Because I think you may be able to shed light ona … 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, andyou came on, and it was about Amy being pregnant.
Everyone I was with, they were soangry at you. They hated you. And I thought, I know how that feels. Because she’s notdead, 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.” Onher end, I could hear cartoons playing—rubbery voices and calliope music—thensuddenly 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. Itfelt weird, di erent, you know? All the girls at Wickshire, it was like they’d been raisedcommunally—the lingo, the clothes, the hair. And it wasn’t like I was a pariah, I wasjust … insecure, for sure. Amy was already The Girl. Like, rst day, I remember,everyone knew her, everyone was talking about her. She was Amazing Amy—we’d allread 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 herwing or whatever. She had this joke that she was Amazing Amy, so I was her sidekickSuzy, and she started calling me Suzy, and pretty soon everyone else did too.
Which wasne by me. I mean, I was a little toadie: Get Amy a drink if she was thirsty, throw in aload of laundry if she needed clean underwear. Hold on.”Again I could hear the shu e of her hair against the receiver. Marybeth had broughtevery Elliott photo album with her in case we needed more pictures. She’d shown me aphoto of Amy and Hilary, cheek-to-cheek grins. So I could picture Hilary now, the samebutter-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, sohe seems a little confused about what to do for the ten minutes I’m on the phone withyou. Sorry.
So … so, right, I was little Suzy, and we had this game going, and for a fewmonths—August, September, October—it was great. Like intense friendship, we weretogether all the time. And then a few weird things happened at once that I knew kind ofbothered her.”“What?”“A guy from our brother school, he meets us both at the fall dance, and the next dayhe 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 areslightly better, like, four-point-one versus four-point-oh.
And not long after, one of ourfriends, she invites me to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Me, not Amy. Again, I’msure this was because Amy intimidated people. She wasn’t easy to be around, you felt allthe time like you had to impress. But I can feel things change just a little. I can tell she’sreally 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 shestarts setting me up. She asks if she can color my hair the same blond as hers, becausemine’s mousy, and it’ll look so nice a brighter shade. And she starts complaining abouther parents. I mean she’s always complained about her parents, but now she really getsgoing on them—how they only love her as an idea and not really for who she is—so shesays 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 someweekends, and she’d tell me to stand outside their house—one time she had me run up toher mom and tell her I was going to get rid of Amy and be her new Amy or some craplike that.”“And you did it?”“It was just dumb stu girls do. Back before cell phones and cyber-bullying.
A way tokill time. We did prank stu like that all the time, just dumb stu . Try to one-up eachother on how daring and freaky we could be.”“Then what?”“Then she starts distancing herself. She gets cold. And I think—I think that shedoesn’t like me anymore. Girls at school start looking at me funny.
I’m shut out of thecool circle. Fine. But then one day I’m called in to see the headmistress. Amy has had ahorrible accident—twisted ankle, fractured arm, cracked ribs. Amy has fallen down thislong 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, andthen being Suzy wasn’t enough—I had to be Amy. And she had all this evidence thatshe’d had me create over the past few months. Her parents, obviously, had seen melurking around the house.
I theoretically accosted her mom. My hair dyed blond and theclothes I’d bought that matched Amy’s—clothes I bought while shopping with her, but Icouldn’t prove that. All her friends came in, explained how Amy for the past month hadbeen so frightened of me. All this shit. I looked totally insane. Completely insane. Herparents got a restraining order on me. And I kept swearing it wasn’t me, but by then Iwas so miserable that I wanted to leave school anyway. So we didn’t ght the expulsion.I wanted to get away from her by that time. I mean, the girl cracked her own ribs. I wasscared—this little fteen-year-old, she’d pulled this o .
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, itwas typed, but it was obviously Amy. It was a list of all the ways I’d let her down. Crazystuff: 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 befriends, I got to know her. And she wasn’t perfect.
You know? She was brilliant andcharming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and abit of a liar. Which was ne by me. It just wasn’t ne by her. She got rid of me because Iknew she wasn’t perfect. It made me wonder about you.”“About me? Why?”“Friends see most of each other’s aws. Spouses see every awful last bit. If shepunished a friend of a few months by throwing herself down a ight of stairs, whatwould 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 anursery rhyme.
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