flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 71

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All I am saying is that it has been the most brutal eye-opener for me. You hateto believe that you are such an awful man that it takes something like this to pull youout of your sel shness spiral and wake you up to the fact that you are the luckiestbastard in the world. I mean, I had this woman who was my equal, my better, in everyway, and I let my insecurities—about losing my job, about not being able to care for myfamily, about getting older—cloud all that.”“Oh, please—” Desi starts, and I shush him. For Nick to admit to the world that he isnot a good guy—it’s a small death, and not of the petite mort variety.“And Sharon, let me say it.

Let me say it right now: I cheated. I disrespected my wife.I didn’t want to be the man that I had become, but instead of working on myself, I tookthe easy way out. I cheated with a young woman who barely knew me. So I couldpretend to be the big man. I could pretend to be the man I wanted to be—smart andcon dent and successful—because this young woman didn’t know any di erent. Thisyoung girl, she hadn’t seen me crying into a towel in the bathroom in the middle of thenight because I lost my job.

She didn’t know all my foibles and shortcomings. I was afool who believed if I wasn’t perfect, my wife wouldn’t love me. I wanted to be Amy’shero, and when I lost my job, I lost my self-respect. I couldn’t be that hero anymore.Sharon, I know right from wrong. And I just— I just did wrong.”“What would you say to your wife, if she is possibly out there, able to see and hearyou tonight?”“I’d say: Amy, I love you. You are the best woman I have ever known. You are morethan I deserve, and if you come back, I will spend the rest of my life making it up toyou. We will nd a way to put all this horror behind us, and I will be the best man inthe world to you. Please come home to me, Amy.”Just for a second, he places the pad of his index nger in the cleft of his chin, our oldsecret code, the one we did back in the day to swear we weren’t bullshitting each other—the dress really did look nice, that article really was solid.

I am absolutely, one hundredpercent sincere right now—I have your back, and I wouldn’t fuck with you.Desi leans in front of me to break my contact with the screen and reaches for theSancerre. “More wine, sweetheart?” he says.“Shhh.”He pauses the show. “Amy, you are a good-hearted woman. I know you aresusceptible to … pleas. But everything he is saying is lies.”Nick is saying exactly what I want to hear. Finally.Desi moves around so he is staring at me full-face, completely obstructing my vision.“Nick is putting on a pageant. He wants to come o as a good, repentant guy.

I’ll admithe’s doing a bang-up job. But it’s not real—he hasn’t even mentioned beating you,violating you. I don’t know what kind of hold this guy has on you. It must be aStockholm-syndrome thing.”“I know,” I say. I know exactly what I am supposed to say to Desi. “You’re right.You’re absolutely right. I haven’t felt so safe in so long, Desi, but I am still … I see himand … I’m fighting this, but he hurt me … for years.”“Maybe we shouldn’t watch any more,” he says, twirling my hair, leaning too close.“No, leave it on,” I say. “I have to face this.

With you. I can do it with you.” I put myhand in his. Now shut the fuck up.I just want Amy to come home so I can spend the rest of my life making it up to her,treating her how she deserves.Nick forgives me—I screwed you over, you screwed me over, let’s make up. What if hiscode is true? Nick wants me back. Nick wants me back so he can treat me right.

So hecan spend the rest of his life treating me the way he should. It sounds rather lovely. Wecould go back to New York. Sales for the Amazing Amy books have skyrocketed since mydisappearance—three generations of readers have remembered how much they love me.My greedy, stupid, irresponsible parents can nally pay back my trust fund. Withinterest.Because I want to go back to my old life. Or my old life with my old money and myNew Nick. Love-Honor-and-Obey Nick. Maybe he’s learned his lesson.

Maybe he’ll be likehe was before. Because I’ve been daydreaming—trapped in my Ozarks cabin, trapped inDesi’s mansion compound, I have a lot of time to daydream and what I’ve beendaydreaming of is Nick in those early days. I thought I would daydream more aboutNick getting ass-raped in prison, but I haven’t so much, not so much, lately. I thinkabout those early, early days, when we would lie in bed next to each other, naked eshon cool cotton, and he would just stare at me, one nger tracing my jaw from my chinto my ear, making me wriggle, that light tickling on my lobe, and then through all theseashell curves of my ear and into my hairline, and then he’d take hold of one lock ofhair, like he did that very rst time we kissed, and pull it all the way to the end and tugtwice, gently, like he was ringing a bell.

And he’d say, “You are better than anystorybook, you are better than anything anyone could make up.”Nick fastened me to the earth. Nick wasn’t like Desi, who brought me things I wanted(tulips, wine) to make me do the things he wanted (love him). Nick just wanted me to behappy, that’s all, very pure. Maybe I mistook that for laziness. I just want you to behappy, Amy. How many times did he say that and I took it to mean: I just want you to behappy, Amy, because that’s less work for me.

But maybe I was unfair. Well, not unfair butconfused. No one I’ve loved has ever not had an agenda. So how could I know?It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I t together.I am a little too much, and he is a little too little.

I am a thornbush, bristling from theoverattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds,and my thorns fit perfectly into them.I need to get home to him.NICK DUNNEFOURTEEN DAYS GONEI woke up on my sister’s couch with a raging hangover and an urge to kill my wife.This was fairly common in the days after the Diary Interview with the police. I’dimagine nding Amy tucked away in some spa on the West Coast, sipping pineapplejuice on a divan, her cares oating way, far away, above a perfect blue sky, and me,dirty, smelly from an urgent cross-country drive, standing in front of her, blocking thesun until she looks up, and then my hands around her perfect throat, with its cords andhollows and the pulse thumping rst urgently and then slowly as we look into eachother’s eyes and at last have some understanding.I was going to be arrested. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the next day.

Ihad taken the fact that the police let me walk out of the station as a good sign, butTanner had shut me down: “Without a body, a conviction is incredibly tough. They’rejust dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s. Spend these days doing whatever you need to do,because once the arrest happens, we’ll be busy.”Just outside the window, I could hear the rumbling of camera crews—men greetingone another good morning, as if they were clocking in at the factory.

Cameras clickclick-clicked like restless locusts, shooting the front of Go’s house. Someone had leakedthe discovery of my “man cave” of goods on my sister’s property, my imminent arrest.Neither of us had dared to so much as flick at a curtain.Go walked into the room in annel boxers and her high school Butthole Surfers Tshirt, her laptop in the crook of an arm. “Everyone hates you again,” she said.“Fickle fucks.”“Last night someone leaked the information about the shed, about Amy’s purse andthe diary. Now it’s all: Nick Is a Liar, Nick Is a Killer, Nick Is a Lying Killer. Sharon Schieberjust released a statement saying she was very shocked and disappointed with the directionthe case was taking. Oh, and everyone knows all about the porn—Kill the Bitches.”“Hurt the Bitch.”“Oh, excuse me,” she said. “Hurt the Bitch.

So Nick Is a Lying Killer-slash-Sexual Sadist.Ellen Abbott is going to go fucking rabid. She’s a crazy anti-porn lady.”“Of course she is,” I said. “I’m sure Amy is very aware of that.”“Nick?” she said in her wake up voice. “This is bad.”“Go, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, we need to remember that,” I said.“What matters right now is what Amy is thinking. If she’s softening toward me.”“Nick.

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