“We have to move back.” He glares at me, opening his eyes wide. He flicks his fingers out as if he is trying to rid himself of something sticky. “We’ll take a year, and we’ll go do the right thing. We have no jobs, we have no money, there’s nothing holding us here. Even you have to admit that.”
“Even I have to?” As if I am already being resistant. I feel a burst of anger that I swallow.
“This is what we’re going to do. We are going to do the right thing. We are going to help my parents for once.”
Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of the door already treating me like a problem that needed to be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be squelched.
My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until he’s not. I’ve seen his eyes literally turn a shade darker when he’s felt betrayed by a friend, even a dear longtime friend, and then the friend is never mentioned again. He looked at me then like I was an object to be jettisoned if necessary. It actually chilled me, that look.
So it is decided that quickly, with that little of a debate: We are leaving New York. We are going to Missouri. To a house in Missouri by the river where we will live. It is surreal, and I’m not one to misuse the word surreal.
I know it will be okay. It’s just so far from what I pictured. When I pictured my life. That’s not to say bad, just … If you gave me a million guesses where life would take me, I wouldn’t have guessed. I find that alarming.
The packing of the U-Haul is a mini-tragedy: Nick, determined and guilty, his mouth a tight line, getting it done, unwilling to look at me. The U-Haul sits for hours, blocking traffic on our little street, blinking its hazard lights—danger, danger, danger—as Nick goes up and down the stairs, a one-man assembly line, carrying boxes of books, boxes of kitchen supplies, chairs, side tables. We are bringing our vintage sofa—our broad old chesterfield that Dad calls our pet, we dote on it so much. It is to be the last thing we pack, a sweaty, awkward two-person job. Getting the massive thing down our stairs (Hold on, I need to rest. Lift to the right. Hold on, you’re going too fast. Watch out, my fingers my fingers!) will be its own much-needed team-building exercise. After the sofa, we’ll pick up lunch from the corner deli, bagel sandwiches to eat on the road. Cold soda.
Nick lets me keep the sofa, but our other big items are staying in New York. One of Nick’s friends will inherit the bed; the guy will come by later to our empty home—nothing but dust and cable cords left—and take the bed, and then he’ll live his New York life in our New York bed, eating two A.M. Chinese food and having lazy-condomed sex with tipsy, brass-mouthed girls who worked in PR. (Our home itself will be taken over by a noisy couple, hubby-wife lawyers who are shamelessly, brazenly gleeful at this buyers’-market deal. I hate them.)
I carry one load for every four that Nick grunts down. I move slowly, shuffling, like my bones hurt, a feverish delicacy descending on me. Everything does hurt. Nick buzzes past me, going up or down, and throws his frown at me, snaps “You okay?” and keeps moving before I answer, leaves me gaping, a cartoon with a black mouth-hole. I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.
Inside the back of the truck, he fusses with the boxes. Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags. But by hour three, it is clear that we’ve sold or gifted too many of our belongings. The U-Haul’s massive cavern is only half full. It gives me my single satisfaction of the day, that hot, mean satisfaction right in the belly, like a nib of mercury. Good, I think. Good.
“We can take the bed if you really want to,” Nick says, looking past me down the street. “We have enough room.”
“No, you promised it to Wally, Wally should have it,” I say primly.
I was wrong. Just say: I was wrong, I’m sorry, let’s take the bed. You should have your old, comforting bed in this new place. Smile at me and be nice to me. Today, be nice to me.
Nick blows out a sigh. “Okay, if that’s what you want. Amy? Is it?” He stands, slightly breathless, leaning on a stack of boxes, the top one with Magic Marker scrawl: AMY CLOTHES WINTER. “This is the last I’ll hear about the bed, Amy? Because I’m offering right now. I’m happy to pack the bed for you.”
“How gracious of you,” I say, just a whiff of breath, the way I say most retorts: a puff of perfume from a rank atomizer. I am a coward. I don’t like confrontation. I pick up a box and start toward the truck.
“What did you say?”
I shake my head at him. I don’t want him to see me cry, because it will make him more angry.
Ten minutes later, the stairs are pounding—bang! bang! bang! Nick is dragging our sofa down by himself.
I can’t even look behind me as we leave New York, because the truck has no back window. In the side mirror, I track the skyline (the receding skyline—isn’t that what they write in Victorian novels where the doomed heroine is forced to leave her ancestral home?), but none of the good buildings—not the Chrysler or the Empire State or the Flatiron, they never appear in that little shining rectangle.
My parents dropped by the night before, presented us with the family cuckoo clock that I’d loved as a child, and the three of us cried and hugged as Nick shuffled his hands in his pockets and promised to take care of me.
He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.
NICK DUNNE
THREE DAYS GONE
The police weren’t going to find Amy unless someone wanted her found. That much was clear. Everything green and brown had been searched: miles of the muddy Mississippi River, all the trails and hiking paths, our sad collection of patchy woods. If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up. It was a palpable truth, like a sour taste on the tongue tip. I arrived at the volunteer center and realized everyone else knew this too: There was a listlessness, a defeat, that hung over the place. I wandered aimlessly over to the pastries station and tried to convince myself to eat something. Danish. I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.
“I still say it’s the river,” one volunteer was saying to his buddy, both of them picking through the pastries with dirty fingers. “Right behind the guy’s house, what easier way?”
“She would have turned up in an eddy by now, a lock, something.”
“Not if she’s been cut. Chop off the legs, the arms … the body can shoot all the way to the Gulf. Tunica, at least.”
I turned away before they noticed me.
A former teacher of mine, Mr. Coleman, sat at a card table, hunched over the tip-line phone, scribbling down information. When I caught his eye, he made the cuckoo signal: finger circling his ear, then pointing at the phone. He had greeted me yesterday by saying, “My granddaughter was killed by a drunk driver, so …” We’d murmured and patted each other awkwardly.
My cell rang, the disposable—I couldn’t figure out where to keep it, so I kept it on me. I’d made a call, and the call was being returned, but I couldn’t take it. I turned the phone off, scanned the room to make sure the Elliotts hadn’t seen me do it. Marybeth was clicking away on her BlackBerry, then holding it at arm’s length so she could read the text. When she saw me, she shot over in her tight quick steps, holding the BlackBerry in front of her like a talisman.
“How many hours from here is Memphis?” she asked.
“Little under five hours, driving. Wha
t’s in Memphis?”
“Hilary Handy lives in Memphis. Amy’s stalker from high school. How much of a coincidence is that?”
I didn’t know what to say: none?
“Yeah, Gilpin blew me off too. We can’t authorize the expense for something that happened twenty-some years ago. Asshole. Guy always treats me like I’m on the verge of hysteria; he’ll talk to Rand when I’m right there, totally ignore me, like I need my husband to explain things to little dumb me. Asshole.”
“The city’s broke,” I said. “I’m sure they really don’t have the budget, Marybeth.”
“Well, we do. I’m serious, Nick, this girl was off her rocker. And I know she tried to contact Amy over the years. Amy told me.”
“She never told me that.”
“What’s it cost to drive there? Fifty bucks? Fine. Will you go? You said you’d go. Please? I won’t be able to stop thinking until I know someone’s talked to her.”
I knew this to be true, at least, because her daughter suffered from the same tenacious worry streak: Amy could spend an entire evening out fretting that she left the stove on, even though we didn’t cook that day. Or was the door locked? Was I sure? She was a worst-case scenarist on a grand scale. Because it was never just that the door was unlocked, it was that the door was unlocked, and men were inside, and they were waiting to rape and kill her.
I felt a layer of sweat shimmer to the surface of my skin, because, finally, my wife’s fears had come to fruition. Imagine the awful satisfaction, to know that all those years of worry had paid off.
“Of course I’ll go. And I’ll stop by St. Louis, see the other one, Desi, on the way. Consider it done.” I turned around, started my dramatic exit, got twenty feet, and suddenly, there was Stucks again, his entire face still slack with sleep.
“Heard the cops searched the mall yesterday,” he said, scratching his jaw. In his other hand he held a glazed donut, unbitten. A bagel-shaped bulge sat in the front pocket of his cargo pants. I almost made a joke: Is that a baked good in your pocket or are you …
“Yeah. Nothing.”
“Yesterday. They went yesterday, the jackasses.” He ducked, looked around, as if he worried they’d overheard him. He leaned closer to me. “You go at night, that’s when they’re there. Daytime, they’re down by the river, or out flying a flag.”
“Flying a flag?”
“You know, sitting by the exits on the highway with those signs: Laid Off, Please Help, Need Beer Money, whatever,” he said, scanning the room. “Flying a flag, man.”
“Okay.”
“At night they’re at the mall,” he said.
“Then let’s go tonight,” I said. “You and me and whoever.”
“Joe and Mikey Hillsam,” Stucks said. “They’d be up for it.” The Hillsams were three, four years older than me, town badasses. The kind of guys who were born without the fear gene, impervious to pain. Jock kids who sped through the summers on short, muscled legs, playing baseball, drinking beer, taking strange dares: skateboarding into drainage ditches, climbing water towers naked. The kind of guys who would peel up, wild-eyed, on a boring Saturday night and you knew something would happen, maybe nothing good, but something. Of course the Hillsams would be up for it.
“Good,” I said. “Tonight we go.”
My disposable rang in my pocket. The thing didn’t turn off right. It rang again.
“You gonna get that?” Stucks asked.
“Nah.”
“You should answer every call, man. You really should.”
There was nothing to do for the rest of the day. No searches planned, no more flyers needed, the phones fully manned. Marybeth started sending volunteers home; they were just standing around, eating, bored. I suspected Stucks of leaving with half the breakfast table in his pockets.
“Anyone hear from the detectives?” Rand asked.
“Nothing,” Marybeth and I both answered.
“That may be good, right?” Rand asked, hopeful eyes, and Marybeth and I both indulged him. Yes, sure.
“When are you leaving for Memphis?” she asked me.
“Tomorrow. Tonight my friends and I are doing another search of the mall. We don’t think it was done right yesterday.”
“Excellent,” Marybeth said. “That’s the kind of action we need. We suspect it wasn’t done right the first time, we do it ourselves. Because I just—I’m just not that impressed with what’s been done so far.”
Rand put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, a signal this refrain had been expressed and received many times.
“I’d like to come with you, Nick,” he said. “Tonight. I’d like to come.” Rand was wearing a powder-blue golf shirt and olive slacks, his hair a gleaming dark helmet. I pictured him trying to hail-fellow the Hillsam brothers, doing his slightly desperate one-of-the-guys routine—hey, I love a good beer too, and how about that sports team of yours?—and felt a flush of impending awkwardness.
“Of course, Rand. Of course.”
I had a good ten unscheduled hours to work with. My car was being released back to me—having been processed and vacuumed and printed, I assume—so I hitched a ride to the police station with an elderly volunteer, one of those bustling grandmotherly types who seemed slightly nervous to be alone with me.
“I’m just driving Mr. Dunne to the police station, but I will be back in less than half an hour,” she said to one of her friends. “No more than half an hour.”
Gilpin had not taken Amy’s second note into evidence; he’d been too thrilled with the underwear to bother. I got in my car, flung the door open, and sat as the heat drooled out, reread my wife’s second clue:
Picture me: I’m crazy about you
My future is anything but hazy with you
You took me here so I could hear you chat
About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat
Screw everyone else, for us they’re all ditched
And let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched.
It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain, where I’d worked summers growing up, where I’d wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw hat and faux-ragged pants, smiling scampishly while urging people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no one else could match it. No one could ever say: Oh yeah, me too.
The “visor hat” comment was a little inside joke: When I’d first told Amy I played Huck, we were out to dinner, into our second bottle of wine, and she’d been adorably tipsy. Big grin and the flushed cheeks she got when she drank. Leaning across the table as if I had a magnet on me. She kept asking me if I still had the visor, would I wear the visor for her, and when I asked her why in the name of all that was holy would she think that Huck Finn wore a visor, she swallowed once and said, “Oh, I meant a straw hat!” As if those were two entirely interchangeable words. After that, anytime we watched tennis, we always complimented the players’ sporty straw hats.
Hannibal was a strange choice for Amy, however, as I don’t remember us having a particularly good or bad time there, just a time. I remember us ambling around almost a full year ago, pointing at things and reading placards and saying, “That’s interesting,” while the other one agreed, “That is.” I’d been there since then without Amy (my nostalgic streak uncrushable) and had a glorious day, a wide-grin, right-with-the-world day. But with Amy, it had been still, rote. A bit embarrassing. I remember at one point starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten minutes just winding myself up—because at this point of our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you should stop, that it doesn’t really feel as good as you think, but you can’t quit grinding away. On the surface, of course, she saw nothing. We just kept walking, and reading placards, and pointing.
It was a fairly awful reminder, the dearth of good memories we had
since our move, that my wife was forced to pick Hannibal for her treasure hunt.
I reached Hannibal in twenty minutes, drove past the glorious Gilded Age courthouse that now held only a chicken-wing place in its basement, and headed past a series of shuttered businesses—ruined community banks and defunct movie houses—toward the river. I parked in a lot right on the Mississippi, smack in front of the Mark Twain riverboat. Parking was free. (I never failed to thrill to the novelty, the generosity of free parking.) Banners of the white-maned man hung listlessly from lamp poles, posters curled up in the heat. It was a blow-dryer-hot day, but even so, Hannibal seemed disturbingly quiet. As I walked along the few blocks of souvenir stores—quilts and antiques and taffy—I saw more for-sale signs. Becky Thatcher’s house was closed for renovations, to be paid for with money that had yet to be raised. For ten bucks, you could graffiti your name on Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence, but there were few takers.
I sat in the doorstep of a vacant storefront. It occurred to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase I’d applied only to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian glassblowers. The recession had ended the mall. Computers had ended the Blue Book plant. Carthage had gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan. Amazing Amy was done. It was the end of my career, the end of hers, the end of my father, the end of my mom. The end of our marriage. The end of Amy.
The ghost wheeze of the steamboat horn blew out from the river. I had sweated through the back of my shirt. I made myself stand up. I made myself buy my tour ticket. I walked the route Amy and I had taken, my wife still beside me in my mind. It was hot that day too. You are BRILLIANT. In my imagination, she strolled next to me, and this time she smiled. My stomach went oily.
I mind-walked my wife around the main tourist drag. A gray-haired couple paused to peer into the Huckleberry Finn house but didn’t bother to walk in. At the end of the block, a man dressed as Twain—white hair, white suit—got out of a Ford Focus, stretched, looked down the lonely street, and ducked into a pizza joint. And then there we were, at the clapboard building that had been the courtroom of Samuel Clemens’s dad. The sign out front read: J. M. Clemens, Justice of the Peace.
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