flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 84
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That’s just yawing bad luck.I walked in and shut the door to his o ce, which isn’t how I’d ever imagined myeditor’s o ce would look. I craved big oak panels, a window pane in the door—markedChief—so the cub reporters could watch us rage over First Amendment rights. Curry’so ce is bland and institutional, like the rest of the building.
You could debatejournalism or get a Pap smear. No one cared.“Tell me about Wind Gap.” Curry held the tip of a ballpoint pen at his grizzled chin. Icould picture the tiny prick of blue it would leave among the stubble.“It’s at the very bottom of Missouri, in the boot heel. Spitting distance fromTennessee and Arkansas,” I said, hustling for my facts. Curry loved to drill reporters onany topics he deemed pertinent—the number of murders in Chicago last year, thedemographics for Cook County, or, for some reason, the story of my hometown, a topicI preferred to avoid. “It’s been around since before the Civil War,” I continued. “It’s nearthe Mississippi, so it was a port city at one point.
Now its biggest business is hogbutchering. About two thousand people live there. Old money and trash.”“Which are you?”“I’m trash. From old money.” I smiled. He frowned.“And what the hell is going on?”I sat silent, cataloguing various disasters that might have befallen Wind Gap. It’s oneof those crummy towns prone to misery: A bus collision or a twister. An explosion at thesilo or a toddler down a well. I was also sulking a bit. I’d hoped—as I always do whenCurry calls me into his o ce—that he was going to compliment me on a recent piece,promote me to a better beat, hell, slide over a slip of paper with a 1 percent raisescrawled on it—but I was unprepared to chat about current events in Wind Gap.“Your mom’s still there, right, Preaker?”“Mom. Stepdad.” A half sister born when I was in college, her existence so unreal tome I often forgot her name.
Amma. And then Marian, always long-gone Marian.“Well dammit, you ever talk to them?” Not since Christmas: a chilly, polite call afteradministering three bourbons. I’d worried my mother could smell it through the phonelines.“Not lately.”“Jesus Christ, Preaker, read the wires sometime. I guess there was a murder lastAugust? Little girl strangled?”I nodded like I knew. I was lying.
My mother was the only person in Wind Gap withwhom I had even a limited connection, and she’d said nothing. Curious.“Now another one’s missing. Sounds like it might be a serial to me. Drive down thereand get me the story. Go quick. Be there tomorrow morning.”No way. “We got horror stories here, Curry.”“Yeah, and we also got three competing papers with twice the sta and cash.” Heran a hand through his hair, which fell into frazzled spikes. “I’m sick of getting slammedout of news. This is our chance to break something.
Big.”Curry believes with just the right story, we’d become the overnight paper of choice inChicago, gain national credibility. Last year another paper, not us, sent a writer to hishometown somewhere in Texas after a group of teens drowned in the spring oods. Hewrote an elegiac but well-reported piece on the nature of water and regret, coveredeverything from the boys’ basketball team, which lost its three best players, to the localfuneral home, which was desperately unskilled in cleaning up drowned corpses. Thestory won a Pulitzer.I still didn’t want to go. So much so, apparently, that I’d wrapped my hands aroundthe arms of my chair, as if Curry might try to pry me out.
He sat and stared at me a fewbeats with his watery hazel eyes. He cleared his throat, looked at his photo of his wife,and smiled like he was a doctor about to break bad news. Curry loved to bark—it t hisold-school image of an editor—but he was also one of the most decent people I knew.“Look, kiddo, if you can’t do this, you can’t do it.
But I think it might be good for you.Flush some stu out. Get you back on your feet. It’s a damn good story—we need it. Youneed it.”Curry had always backed me. He thought I’d be his best reporter, said I had asurprising mind. In my two years on the job I’d consistently fallen short of expectations.Sometimes strikingly. Now I could feel him across the desk, urging me to give him alittle faith.
I nodded in what I hoped was a confident fashion.“I’ll go pack.” My hands left sweatprints on the chair.had no pets to worry about, no plants to leave with a neighbor. Into a duffel bagtucked away enough clothes to last me ve days, my own reassurance I’d be out of WindGap before week’s end. As I took a nal glance around my place, it revealed itself to mein a rush. The apartment looked like a college kid’s: cheap, transitory, and mostlyuninspired.
I promised myself I’d invest in a decent sofa when I returned as a reward forthe stunning story I was sure to dig up.On the table by the door sat a photo of a preteen me holding Marian at about ageseven. We’re both laughing. She has her eyes wide open in surprise, I have minescrunched shut. I’m squeezing her into me, her short skinny legs dangling over myknees. I can’t remember the occasion or what we were laughing about.
Over the yearsit’s become a pleasant mystery. I think I like not knowing.take baths. Not showers. I can’t handle the spray, it gets my skin buzzing, likesomeone’s turned on a switch. So I wadded a imsy motel towel over the grate in theshower oor, aimed the nozzle at the wall, and sat in the three inches of water thatpooled in the stall. Someone else’s pubic hair floated by.I got out. No second towel, so I ran to my bed and blotted myself with the cheapspongy blanket. Then I drank warm bourbon and cursed the ice machine.IIWind Gap is about eleven hours south of Chicago. Curry had graciously allowed me abudget for one night’s motel stay and breakfast in the morning, if I ate at a gas station.But once I got in town, I was staying at my mother’s.
That he decided for me. I alreadyknew the reaction I’d get when I showed up at her door. A quick, shocked ustering, herhand to her hair, a mismatched hug that would leave me aimed slightly to one side. Talkof the messy house, which wouldn’t be. A query about length of stay packaged inniceties.“How long do we get to have you for, sweetness?” she’d say. Which meant: “When doyou leave?”It’s the politeness that I find most upsetting.I knew I should prepare my notes, jot down questions. Instead I drank morebourbon, then popped some aspirin, turned o the light. Lulled by the wet purr of theair conditioner and the electric plinking of some video game next door, I fell asleep.
Iwas only thirty miles outside my hometown, but I needed one last night away.Dark PlacesLibby DayNOWIhave a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it mightslide out, meaty and dark, drop on the oor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood.Something’s wrong with it. I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after themurders. Little Orphan Libby grew up sullen and boneless, shu ed around a group oflesser relatives—second cousins and great-aunts and friends of friends—stuck in a seriesof mobile homes or rotting ranch houses all across Kansas.
Me going to school in mydead sisters’ hand-me-downs: Shirts with mustardy armpits. Pants with baggy bottoms,comically loose, held on with a raggedy belt cinched to the farthest hole. In class photosmy hair was always crooked—barrettes hanging loosely from strands, as if they wereairborne objects caught in the tangles—and I always had bulging pockets under myeyes, drunk-landlady eyes. Maybe a grudging curve of the lips where a smile should be.Maybe.I was not a lovable child, and I’d grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw apicture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs.IT WAS MISERABLE, wet-bone March and I was lying in bed thinking about killingmyself, a hobby of mine.
Indulgent afternoon daydreaming: A shotgun, my mouth, abang and my head jerking once, twice, blood on the wall. Spatter, splatter. “Did shewant to be buried or cremated?” people would ask. “Who should come to the funeral?”And no one would know. The people, whoever they were, would just look at each other’sshoes or shoulders until the silence settled in and then someone would put on a pot ofcoffee, briskly and with a fair amount of clatter. Coffee goes great with sudden death.I pushed a foot out from under my sheets, but couldn’t bring myself to connect it tothe oor.
I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I’ve been depressed for about twenty-fouryears. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there—hidden behind a liver orattached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body—a Libby that’s telling me toget up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. My brotherslaughtered my family when I was seven. My mom, two sisters, gone: bang bang, chopchop, choke choke. I didn’t really have to do anything after that, nothing was expected.I inherited $321,374 when I turned eighteen, the result of all those well-wisherswho’d read about my sad story, do-gooders whose hearts had gone out to me. Whenever Ihear that phrase, and I hear it a lot, I picture juicy doodle-hearts, complete with birdwings, apping toward one of my many crap-ass childhood homes, my little-girl self atthe window, waving and grabbing each bright heart, green cash sprinkling down on me,thanks, thanks a ton! When I was still a kid, the donations were placed in aconservatively managed bank account, which, back in the day, saw a jump about everythree–four years, when some magazine or news station ran an update on me.
LittleLibby’s Brand New Day: The Lone Survivor of the Prairie Massacre Turns a Bittersweet10. (Me in scru y pigtails on the possum-pissed lawn outside my Aunt Diane’s trailer.Diane’s thick tree-calves, exposed by a rare skirt, planted in the yellow grass behindme.) Brave Baby Day’s Sweet 16! (Me, still miniature, my face aglow with birthdaycandles, my shirt too tight over breasts that had gone D-cup that year, comic-book sizedon my tiny frame, ridiculous, porny.)I’d lived o that cash for more than thirteen years, but it was almost gone. I had ameeting that afternoon to determine exactly how gone.
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