in love with her again. Because why in God’s name wouldn’t I be?’
‘And if it turns out she’s developed a bullshit detector?’
‘You know Amy; she needs to win. She’s less pissed off that I cheated than that I picked someone else over her. She’ll want me back just to prove that she’s the winner. Don’t you agree? Just seeing me begging her to come back so I can worship her properly, it will be hard for her to resist. Don’t you think?’
‘I think it’s a decent idea,’ she said in the way you might wish someone good luck on the lottery.
‘Hey, if you’ve got something better, by all fucking means.’
We snapped like that at each other now. We’d never done that before. After the police found the woodshed, they grilled Go, hard, just as Tanner had predicted: Did she know? Did she help?
I’d expected her to come home that night, brimming with curse words and fury, but all I got was an embarrassed smile as she slipped past me to her room in the house she had double-mortgaged to cover Tanner’s retainer.
I had put my sister in financial and legal jeopardy because of my shitty decisions. The whole situation made Go feel resentful and me ashamed, a lethal combination for two people trapped in small confines.
I tried a different subject: ‘I’ve been thinking about phoning Andie now that—’
‘Yeah, that would be genius-smart, Nick. Then she can go back on Ellen Abbott—’
‘She didn’t go on Ellen Abbott. She had a press conference that Ellen Abbott carried. She’s not evil, Go.’
‘She gave the press conference because she was pissed at you. I sorta wish you’d just kept fucking her.’
‘Nice.’
‘What would you even say to her?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You are definitely fucking sorry,’ she muttered.
‘I just – I hate how it ended.’
‘The last time you saw Andie, she bit you,’ Go said in an overly patient voice. ‘I don’t think the two of you have anything else to say. You are the prime suspect in a murder investigation. You have forfeited the right to a smooth breakup. For fuck’s sake, Nick.’
We were growing sick of each other, something I never thought could happen. It was more than basic stress, more than the danger I’d deposited on Go’s doorstep. Those ten seconds just a week ago, when I’d opened the door of the woodshed, expecting Go to read my mind as always, and what Go had read was that I’d killed my wife: I couldn’t get over that, and neither could she. I caught her looking at me now and then with the same steeled chill with which she looked at our father: just another shitty male taking up space. I’m sure I looked at her through our father’s miserable eyes sometimes: just another petty woman resenting me.
I let out a gust of air, stood up, and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.
‘I think I should head home,’ I said. I felt a wave of nausea. ‘I can’t stand this anymore. Waiting to be arrested, I can’t stand it.’
Before she could stop me, I grabbed my keys, swung open the door, and the cameras began blasting, the shouts exploded from a crowd that was even larger than I’d feared: Hey, Nick, did you kill your wife? Hey, Margo, did you help your brother hide evidence?
‘Fucking shitbags,’ Go spat. She stood next to me in solidarity, in her Butthole Surfers T-shirt and boxers. A few protesters carried signs. A woman with stringy blond hair and sunglasses shook a poster board: Nick, where is AMY?
The shouts got louder, frantic, baiting my sister: Margo, is your brother a wife killer? Did Nick kill his wife and baby? Margo, are you a suspect? Did Nick kill his wife? Did Nick kill his baby?
I stood, trying to hold my ground, refusing to let myself step back into the house. Suddenly, Go was crouching behind me, cranking the spigot near the steps. She turned on the hose full-bore – a hard, steady jet – and blasted all those cameramen and protesters and pretty journalists in their TV-ready suits, sprayed them like animals.
She was giving me covering fire. I shot into my car and tore off, leaving them dripping on the front lawn, Go laughing shrilly.
It took ten minutes for me to nudge my car from my driveway into my garage, inching my way slowly, slowly forward, parting the angry ocean of human beings – there were at least twenty protesters in front of my home, in addition to the camera crews. My neighbor Jan Teverer was one of them. She and I made eye contact, and she aimed her poster at me: WHERE IS AMY, NICK?
Finally, I was inside, and the garage door came buzzing down. I sat in the heat of the concrete space, breathing.
Everywhere felt like a jail now – doors opening and closing and opening and closing, and me never feeling safe.
I spent the rest of my day picturing how I’d kill Amy. It was all I could think of: finding a way to end her. Me smashing in Amy’s busy, busy brain. I had to give Amy her due: I may have been dozing the past few years, but I was fucking wide awake now. I was electric again, like I had been in the early days of our marriage.
I wanted to do something, make something happen, but there was nothing to be done. By late evening, the camera crews were all gone, though I couldn’t risk leaving the house. I wanted to walk. I settled for pacing. I was wired dangerously tight.
Andie had screwed me over, Marybeth had turned against me, Go had lost a crucial measure of faith. Boney had trapped me. Amy had destroyed me. I poured a drink. I took a slug, tightened my fingers around the curves of the tumbler, then hurled it at the wall, watched the glass burst into fireworks, heard the tremendous shatter, smelled the cloud of bourbon. Rage in all five senses. Those fucking bitches.
I’d tried all my life to be a decent guy, a man who loved and respected women, a guy without hang-ups. And here I was, thinking nasty thoughts about my twin, about my mother-in-law, about my mistress. I was imagining bashing in my wife’s skull.
A knock came at the door, a loud, furious bang-bang-bang that rattled me out of my nightmare brain.
I opened the door, flung it wide, greeting fury with fury.
It was my father, standing on my doorstep like some awful specter summoned by my hatefulness. He was breathing heavily and sweating. His shirtsleeve was torn and his hair was wild, but his eyes had their usual dark alertness that made him seem viciously sane.
‘Is she here?’ he snapped.
‘Who, Dad, who are you looking for?’
‘You know who.’ He pushed past me, started marching through the living room, trailing mud, his hands balled, his gravity far forward, forcing him to keep walking or fall down, muttering bitchbitchbitch. He smelled of mint. Real mint, not manufactured, and I saw a smear of green on his trousers, as if he’d been stomping through someone’s garden.
Little bitch that little bitch, he kept muttering. Through the dining room, into the kitchen, flipping on lights. A waterbug scuttled up the wall.
I followed him, trying to get him to calm down, Dad, Dad, why don’t you sit down, Dad, do you want a glass of water, Dad … He stomped downstairs, clumps of mud falling off his shoes. My hands turtled into fists. Of course this bastard would show up and actually make things worse.
‘Dad! Goddammit, Dad! No one is here but me. Just me.’ He flung open the guest room door, then went back up to the living room, ignoring me – ‘Dad!’
I didn’t want to touch him. I was afraid I’d hit him. I was afraid I’d cry.
I blocked him as he tried to go upstairs to the bedroom. I placed one hand on the wall, one on the banister – human barricade. ‘Dad! Look at me.’
His words came out in a furious spittle.
‘You tell her, you tell that little ugly bitch it’s not over. She’s not better than me, you tell her. She’s not too good for me. She doesn’t get to have a say. That ugly bitch will have to learn—’
I swear I saw a blank whiteness for just a second, a moment of complete, jarring clarity. I stopped trying to block my father’s voice for once and let it throb in my ears. I was not that man: I didn’t hate and fear all women.
I was a one-woman misogynist. If I despised only Amy, focused all my fury and rage and venom on the one woman who deserved it, that didn’t make me my father. That made me sane.
Little bitch little bitch little bitch.
I had never hated my father more for making me truly love those words.
Fucking bitch fucking bitch.
I grabbed him by the arm, hard, and herded him into the car, slammed the door. He repeated the incantation all the way to Comfort Hill. I pulled up to the home in the entry reserved for ambulances, and I went to his side, swung open the door, yanked him out by the arm, and walked him just inside the doors.
Then I turned my back and went home.
Fucking bitch fucking bitch.
But there was nothing I could do except beg. My bitch wife had left me with nothing but my sorry dick in my hand, begging her to come home. Print, online, TV, wherever, all I could do was hope my wife saw me playing good husband, saying the words she wanted me to say: capitulation, complete. You are right and I am wrong, always. Come home to me (you fucking cunt). Come home so I can kill you.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
TWENTY-SIX DAYS GONE
Desi is here again. He is here almost every day now, simpering around the house, standing in the kitchen as the setting sun lights up his profile so I can admire it, pulling me by the hand into the tulip room so I can thank him again, reminding me how safe and loved I am.
He says I’m safe and loved even though he won’t let me leave, which doesn’t make me feel safe and loved. He’s left me no car keys. Nor house keys nor the gate security code. I am literally a prisoner – the gate is fifteen feet high, and there are no ladders in the house (I’ve looked). I could, I suppose, drag several pieces of furniture over to the wall, pile them up, and climb over, drop to the other side, limp or crawl away, but that’s not the point. The point is, I am his valued, beloved guest, and a guest should be able to leave when she wants. I brought this up a few days ago. ‘What if I need to leave. Immediately?’
‘Maybe I should move in here,’ he counters. ‘Then I could be here all the time and keep you safe, and if anything happens, we could leave together.’
‘What if your mom gets suspicious and comes up here and you’re found hiding me? It would be awful.’
His mother. I would die if his mother came up here, because she would report me immediately. The woman despises me, all because of that incident back in high school – so long ago, and she still holds a grudge. I scratched up my face and told Desi she attacked me (the woman was so possessive, and so cold to me, she might as well have). They didn’t talk for a month. Clearly, they’ve made up.
‘Jacqueline doesn’t know the code,’ he says. ‘This is my lake house.’ He pauses and pretends to think. ‘I really should move up here. It’s not healthy for you to spend so many hours by yourself.’
But I’m not by myself, not that much. We have a bit of a routine established in just two weeks. It’s a routine mandated by Desi, my posh jailer, my spoiled courtier. Desi arrives just after noon, always smelling of some expensive lunch he’s devoured with Jacqueline at some white-linened restaurant, the kind of restaurant he could take me to if we moved to Greece. (This is the other option he repeatedly presents: We could move to Greece. For some reason, he believes I will never be identified in a tiny little fishing village in Greece where he has summered many times, and where I know he pictures us sipping the wine, making lazy sunset love, our bellies full of octopus.) He smells of lunch as he enters, he wafts it. He must dab goose liver behind his ears (the way his mother always smelled vaguely vaginal – food and sex, the Collings reek of, not a bad strategy).
He enters, and he makes my mouth water. The smell. He brings me something nice to eat, but not as nice as what he’s had: He’s thinning me up, he always preferred his women waify. So he brings me lovely green star fruit and spiky artichokes and spiny crab, anything that takes elaborate preparation and yields little in return. I am almost my normal weight again, and my hair is growing out. I wear it back in a headband he brought me, and I have colored it back to my blond, thanks to hair dye he also brought me: ‘I think you will feel better about yourself when you start looking more like yourself, sweetheart,’ he says. Yes, it’s all about my well-being, not the fact that he wants me to look exactly like I did before. Amy circa 1987.
I eat lunch as he hovers near me, waiting for the compliments. (To never have to say those words – thank you – again. I don’t remember Nick ever pausing to allow me – force me – to thank him.) I finish lunch, and he tidies up as best as he knows how. We are two people unaccustomed to cleaning up after ourselves; the place is beginning to look lived in – strange stains on countertops, dust on windowsills.
Lunch concluded, Desi fiddles with me for a while: my hair, my skin, my clothes, my mind.
‘Look at you,’ he’ll say, tucking my hair behind my ears the way he likes it, unbuttoning my shirt one notch and loosening it at the neck so he can look at the hollow of my clavicle. He puts a finger in the little indentation, filling the gap. It is obscene. ‘How can Nick have hurt you, have not loved you, have cheated on you?’ He continually hits these points, verbally poking a bruise. ‘Wouldn’t it be so lovely to just forget about Nick, those awful five years, and move on? You have that chance, you know, to completely start over with the right man. How many people can say that?’
I do want to start over with the right man, the New Nick. Things are looking bad for him, dire. Only I can save Nick from me. But I am trapped.
‘If you ever left here and I didn’t know where you were, I’d have to go to the police,’ he says. ‘I’d have no choice. I’d need to make sure you were safe, that Nick wasn’t … holding you somewhere against your will. Violating you.’
A threat disguised as concern.
I look at Desi with outright disgust now. Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden. I’d forgotten about him. The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying. A man who finds guilt erotic. And if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion. At least Nick was man enough to go stick his dick in something. Desi will push and push with his waxy, tapered fingers until I give him what he wants.
I thought I could control Desi, but I can’t. I feel like something very bad is going to happen.
NICK DUNNE
THIRTY-THREE DAYS GONE
The days were loose and long, and then they smashed into a wall. I went out to get groceries one August morning, and I came home to find Tanner in my living room with Boney and Gilpin. On the table, inside a plastic evidence bag, was a long thick club with delicate grooves for fingers.
‘We found this just down the river from your home on that first search,’ Boney said. ‘Didn’t look like anything at the time, really. Just some of the weird flotsam on a river bank, but we keep everything in a search like that. After you showed us your Punch and Judy dolls, it clicked. So we got the lab to check it out.’
‘And?’ I said. Toneless.
Boney stood up, looked me right in the eye. She sounded sad. ‘We were able to detect Amy’s blood on it. This case is now classified as a homicide. And we believe this to be the murder weapon.’
‘Rhonda, come on!’
‘It’s time, Nick,’ she said. ‘It’s time.’
The next part was starting.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
FORTY DAYS GONE
I have found a piece of old twine and an empty wine bottle, and I’ve been using them for my project. Also some vermouth, of course. I am ready.
Discipline. This will take discipline and focus. I am up to the task.
I array myself in Desi’s favorite look: delicate flower. My hair in loose waves, perfumed. My skin has paled after a month inside. I am almost without makeup: a flip of mascara, pink-pink cheeks, and clear lip gloss. I wear a clingy pink dress he bought me. No bra. No panties. No shoes, despite the air-conditio
ned chill. I have a fire crackling and perfume in the air, and when he arrives after lunch without invitation, I greet him with pleasure. I wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his neck. I rub my cheek against his. I have been increasingly sweeter to him the past few weeks, but this is new, this clinging.
‘What’s this, sweetheart?’ he says, surprised and so pleased that I almost feel ashamed.
‘I had the worst nightmare last night,’ I whisper. ‘About Nick. I woke up, and all I wanted was to have you here. And in the morning … I’ve spent all day wishing you were here.’
‘I can always be here, if you like.’
‘I would,’ I say, and I turn my face up to him and let him kiss me. His kiss disgusts me; it’s nibbly and hesitant, like a fish. It’s Desi being respectful of his raped, abused woman. He nibbles again, wet cold lips, his hands barely on me, and I just want this all over, I want it done, so I pull him to me and push his lips open with my tongue. I want to bite him.
He pulls back. ‘Amy,’ he says. ‘You’ve been through a lot. This is fast. I don’t want you to do this fast if you don’t want to. If you’re not sure.’
I know he’s going to have to touch my breasts, I know he’s going to have to push himself inside me, and I want it over, I can barely restrain myself from scratching him: the idea of doing this slowly.
‘I’m sure,’ I say. ‘I guess I’ve been sure since we were sixteen. I was just afraid.’
This means nothing, but I know it will get him hard.
I kiss him again, and then I ask him if he will take me into our bedroom.
In the bedroom, he begins undressing me slowly, kissing parts of my body that have nothing to do with sex – my shoulder, my ear – while I delicately guide him away from my wrists and ankles. Just fuck me, for Christ’s sake. Ten minutes in and I grab his hand and thrust it between my legs.
‘Are you sure?’ he says, pulling back from me, flushed, a loop of his hair falling over his forehead, just like in high school. We could be back in my dorm room, for all the progress Desi has made.
‘Yes, darling,’ I say, and I reach modestly for his cock.
Another ten minutes and he’s finally between my legs, pumping gently, slowly, slowly, making love. Pausing for kisses and caresses until I grab him by the buttocks and begin pushing him. ‘Fuck me,’ I whisper, ‘fuck me hard.’
He stops. ‘It doesn’t have to be like that, Amy. I’m not Nick.’
Very true. ‘I know, darling, I just want you to … to fill me. I feel so empty.’
That gets him. I grimace over his shoulder as he thrusts a few more times and comes, me realizing it almost too late – Oh, this is his pathetic cum-sound – and faking quick oohs and ahhs, gentle kittenish noises. I try to work up some tears because I know he imagines me crying with him the first time.
‘Darling, you’re crying,’ he says as he slips out of me. He kisses a tear.
‘I’m just happy,’ I say. Because that’s what those kinds of women say.
I have mixed up some martinis, I announce – Desi loves a decadent afternoon drink – and when he makes a move to put on his shirt and fetch them, I insist he stay in bed.
‘I want to do something for you for a change,’ I say.
So I scamper into the kitchen and get two big martini glasses, and into mine I put gin and a single olive. Into his I put three olives, gin, olive juice, vermouth, and the last of my sleeping pills, three of them, crushed.
I bring the martinis, and there is snuggling and nuzzling, and I slurp my gin while this happens. I have an edge that must be dulled.
‘Don’t you like my martini?’ I ask when he has only a sip. ‘I always pictured being your wife and making you martinis. I know that’s silly.’
I begin a pout.
‘Oh, darling, not silly at all. I was just taking my time, enjoying. But—’ He guzzles the whole thing down. ‘If it makes you feel better!’
He is giddy, triumphant. His cock is slick with conquest. He is, basically, like all men. Soon he is sleepy, and after that he is snoring.
And I can begin.
PART THREE
BOY GETS GIRL BACK
(OR VICE VERSA)
NICK DUNNE
FORTY DAYS GONE
Out on bond, awaiting trial. I’d been processed and released – the depersonalized in-and-outing of jail, the bond hearing, the fingerprints and
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