‘She confessed?’ she said. ‘Well, hell, Nick, we’ll wire you.’
‘It won’t work. It won’t work. She thinks of everything. I mean, she knows police procedure cold. She studies, Rhonda.’
She poured electric-blue syrup over her waffles. I stuck the tines of my fork in my bulbous egg yolk and swirled it, smearing the sun.
‘It drives me crazy when you call me Rhonda.’
‘She studies, Ms Detective Boney.’
She blew her breath upward, fluttered her bangs again. Took a bite of pancake. ‘I couldn’t get a wire anyway at this point.’
‘Come on, there has to be something, you guys,’ Go snapped. ‘Nick, why the hell are you staying in that house if you aren’t getting something?’
‘It takes time, Go. I have to get her to trust me again. If she starts telling me things casually, when we’re not both stark naked—’
Boney rubbed her eyes and addressed Go: ‘Do I even want to ask?’
‘They always have their talks naked in the shower with the water running,’ Go said. ‘Can’t you bug the shower somewhere?’
‘She whispers in my ear, on top of the shower running,’ I said.
‘She does study,’ Boney said. ‘She really does. I went over that car she drove back, Desi’s Jag. I had ’em check the trunk, where she swore Desi had stowed her when he kidnapped her. I figured there’d be nothing there – we’d catch her in a lie. She rolled around in the trunk, Nick. Her scent was detected by our dogs. And we found three long blond hairs. Long blond hairs. Hers before she cut it. How she did that—’
‘Foresight. I’m sure she had a bag of them so if she needed to leave them somewhere to damn me, she could.’
‘Good God, can you imagine having her for a mother? You could never fib. She’d be three steps ahead of you, always.’
‘Boney, can you imagine having her for a wife?’
‘She’ll crack,’ she said. ‘At some point, she’ll crack.’
‘She won’t,’ I said. ‘Can’t I just testify against her?’
‘You have no credibility,’ Boney said. ‘Your only credibility comes from Amy. She’s single-handedly rehabilitated you. And she can single-handedly undo it. If she comes out with the antifreeze story …’
‘I need to find the vomit,’ I said. ‘If I got rid of the vomit and we exposed more of her lies …’
‘We should go through the diary,’ Go said. ‘Seven years of entries? There have to be discrepancies.’
‘We asked Rand and Marybeth to go through it, see if anything seemed off to them,’ Boney said. ‘You can guess how that went. I thought Marybeth was going to scratch my eyes out.’
‘What about Jacqueline Collings, or Tommy O’Hara, or Hilary Handy?’ Go said. ‘They all know the real Amy. There has to be something there.’
Boney shook her head. ‘Believe me, it’s not enough. They’re all less credible than Amy. It’s pure public opinion, but right now that’s what the department is looking at: public opinion.’
She was right. Jacqueline Collings had popped up on a few cable shows, insisting on her son’s innocence. She always started off steady, but her mother’s love worked against her: She soon came across as a grieving woman desperate to believe the best of her son, and the more the hosts pitied her, the more she snapped and snarled, and the more unsympathetic she became. She got written off quickly. Both Tommy O’Hara and Hilary Handy called me, furious that Amy remained unpunished, determined to tell their story, but no one wanted to hear from two unhinged former anythings. Hold tight, I told them, we’re working on it. Hilary and Tommy and Jacqueline and Boney and Go and I, we’d have our moment. I told myself I believed it.
‘What if we at least got Andie?’ I asked. ‘Got her to testify that everywhere Amy hid a clue was a place where we’d, you know, had sex? Andie’s credible; people love her.’
Andie had reverted to her old cheery self after Amy returned. I know that only from the occasional tabloid snapshot. From these, I know she has been dating a guy her age, a cute, shaggy kid with earbuds forever dangling from his neck. They look nice together, young and healthy. The press adored them. The best headline: Love Finds Andie Hardy!, a 1938 Mickey Rooney movie pun only about twenty people would get. I sent her a text: I’m sorry. For everything. I didn’t hear back. Good for her. I mean that sincerely.
‘Coincidence.’ Boney shrugged. ‘I mean, weird coincidence, but … it’s not impressive enough to move forward. Not in this climate. You need to get your wife to tell you something useful, Nick. You’re our only chance here.’
Go slammed down her coffee. ‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,’ she said. ‘Nick, I don’t want you in that house anymore. You’re not an undercover cop, you know. It’s not your job. You are living with a murderer. Fucking leave. I’m sorry, but who gives a shit that she killed Desi? I don’t want her to kill you. I mean, someday you burn her grilled cheese, and the next thing you know, my phone’s ringing and you’ve taken an awful fall from the roof or some shit. Leave.’
‘I can’t. Not yet. She’ll never really let me go. She likes the game too much.’
‘Then stop playing it.’
I can’t. I’m getting so much better at it. I will stay close to her until I can bring her down. I’m the only one left who can do it. Someday she’ll slip and tell me something I can use. A week ago I moved into our bedroom. We don’t have sex, we barely touch, but we are husband and wife in a marital bed, which appeases Amy for now. I stroke her hair. I take a strand between my finger and thumb, and I pull it to the end and tug, like I’m ringing a bell, and we both like that. Which is a problem.
We pretend to be in love, and we do the things we like to do when we’re in love, and it feels almost like love sometimes, because we are so perfectly putting ourselves through the paces. Reviving the muscle memory of early romance. When I forget – I can sometimes briefly forget who my wife is – I actually like hanging out with her. Or the her she is pretending to be. The fact is, my wife is a murderess who is sometimes really fun. May I give one example? One night I flew in lobster like the old days, and she pretended to chase me with it, and I pretended to hide, and then we both at the same time made an Annie Hall joke, and it was so perfect, so the way it was supposed to be, that I had to leave the room for a second. My heart was beating in my ears. I had to repeat my mantra: Amy killed a man, and she will kill you if you are not very, very careful. My wife, the very fun, beautiful murderess, will do me harm if I displease her. I find myself jittery in my own house: I will be making a sandwich, standing in the kitchen midday, licking the peanut butter off the knife, and I will turn and find Amy in the same room with me – those quiet little cat feet – and I will quiver. Me, Nick Dunne, the man who used to forget so many details, is now the guy who replays conversations to make sure I didn’t offend, to make sure I never hurt her feelings. I write down everything about her day, her likes and dislikes, in case she quizzes me. I am a great husband because I am very afraid she may kill me.
We’ve never had a conversation about my paranoia, because we’re pretending to be in love and I’m pretending not to be frightened of her. But she’s made glancing mentions of it: You know, Nick, you can sleep in bed with me, like, actually sleep. It will be okay. I promise. What happened with Desi was an isolated incident. Close your eyes and sleep.
But I know I’ll never sleep again. I can’t close my eyes when I’m next to her. It’s like sleeping with a spider.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
EIGHT WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
No one has arrested me. The police have stopped questioning. I feel safe. I will be even safer very soon.
This is how good I feel: Yesterday I came downstairs for breakfast, and the jar that held my vomit was sitting on the kitchen counter, empty. Nick – the scrounger – had gotten rid of that little bit of leverage. I blinked an eye, and then I tossed out the jar.
It hardly matters now.
Good things are happening.
I have a book deal: I am officially in control of our story. It feels wonderfully symbolic. Isn’t that what every marriage is, anyway? Just a lengthy game of he-said, she-said? Well, she is saying, and the world will listen, and Nick will have to smile and agree. I will write him the way I want him to be: romantic and thoughtful and very very repentant – about the credit cards and the purchases and the woodshed. If I can’t get him to say it out loud, he’ll say it in my book. Then he’ll come on tour with me and smile and smile.
I’m calling the book simply: Amazing. Causing great wonder or surprise; astounding. That sums up my story, I think.
NICK DUNNE
NINE WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
I found the vomit. She’d hidden it in the back of the freezer in a jar, inside a box of Brussels sprouts. The box was covered in icicles; it must have been sitting there for months. I know it was her own joke with herself: Nick won’t eat his vegetables, Nick never cleans out the fridge, Nick won’t think to look here.
But Nick did.
Nick knows how to clean out the refrigerator, it turns out, and Nick even knows how to defrost: I poured all that sick down the drain, and I left the jar on the counter so she’d know.
She tossed it in the garbage. She never said a word about it.
Something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is, but something’s very wrong.
My life has begun to feel like an epilogue. Tanner picked up a new case: A Nashville singer discovered his wife was cheating, and her body was found the next day in a Hardee’s trash bin near their house, a hammer covered with his fingerprints beside her. Tanner is using me as a defense. I know it looks bad, but it also looked bad for Nick Dunne, and you know how that turned out. I could almost feel him winking at me through the camera lens. He sent the occasional text: U OK? Or: Anything?
No, nothing.
Boney and Go and I hung out in secret at the Pancake House, where we sifted the dirty sand of Amy’s story, trying to find something we could use. We scoured the diary, an elaborate anachronism hunt. It came down to desperate nitpickings like: ‘She makes a comment here about Darfur, was that on the radar in 2010?’ (Yes, we found a 2006 newsclip with George Clooney discussing it.) Or my own best worst: ‘Amy makes a joke in the July 2008 entry about killing a hobo, but I feel like dead-hobo jokes weren’t big until 2009.’ To which Boney replied: ‘Pass the syrup, freakshow.’
People peeled away, went on with their lives. Boney stayed. Go stayed.
Then something happened. My father finally died. At night, in his sleep. A woman spooned his last meal into his mouth, a woman settled him into bed for his last rest, a woman cleaned him up after he died, and a woman phoned to give me the news.
‘He was a good man,’ she said, dullness with an obligatory injection of empathy.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ I said, and she laughed like she clearly hadn’t in a month.
I thought it would make me feel better to have the man vanished from the earth, but I actually felt a massive, frightening hollowness open up in my chest. I had spent my life comparing myself to my father, and now he was gone, and there was only Amy left to bat against. After the small, dusty, lonely service, I didn’t leave with Go, I went home with Amy, and I clutched her to me. That’s right, I went home with my wife.
I have to get out of this house, I thought. I have to be done with Amy once and for all. Burn us down, so I couldn’t ever go back.
Who would I be without you?
I had to find out. I had to tell my own story. It was all so clear.
The next morning, as Amy was in her study clicking away at the keys, telling the world her Amazing story, I took my laptop downstairs and stared at the glowing white screen.
I started on the opening page of my own book.
I am a cheating, weak-spined, woman-fearing coward, and I am the hero of your story. Because the woman I cheated on – my wife, Amy Elliott Dunne – is a sociopath and a murderer.
Yes. I’d read that.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
TEN WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
Nick still pretends with me. We pretend together that we are happy and carefree and in love. But I hear him clicking away late at night on the computer. Writing. Writing his side, I know it. I know it, I can tell by the feverish outpouring of words, the keys clicking and clacking like a million insects. I try to hack in when he’s asleep (although he sleeps like me now, fussy and anxious, and I sleep like him). But he’s learned his lesson, that he’s no longer beloved Nicky, safe from wrong – he no longer uses his birthday or his mom’s birthday or Bleecker’s birthday as a password. I can’t get in.
Still, I hear him typing, rapidly and without pause, and I can picture him hunched over the keyboard, his shoulders up, his tongue clamped between his teeth, and I know that I was right to protect myself. To take my precaution.
Because he isn’t writing a love story.
NICK DUNNE
TWENTY WEEKS AFTER THE RETURN
I didn’t move out. I wanted this all to be a surprise to my wife, who is never surprised. I wanted to give her the manuscript as I walked out the door to land a book deal. Let her feel that trickling horror of knowing the world is about to tilt and dump its shit all over you, and you can’t do anything about it. No, she may never go to prison, and it will always be my word against hers, but my case was convincing. It had an emotional resonance, if not a legal one.
So let everyone take sides. Team Nick, Team Amy. Turn it into even more of a game: Sell some fucking T-shirts.
My legs were weak when I went to tell Amy: I was no longer part of her story.
I showed her the manuscript, displayed the glaring title: Psycho Bitch. A little inside joke. We both like our inside jokes. I waited for her to scratch my cheeks, rip my clothes, bite me.
‘Oh! What perfect timing,’ she said cheerfully, and gave me a big grin. ‘Can I show you something?’
I made her do it again in front of me. Piss on the stick, me squatting next to her on the bathroom floor, watching the urine come out of her and hitting the stick and turning it pregnant-blue.
Then I hustled her into the car and drove to the doctor’s office, and I watched the blood come out of her – because she isn’t really afraid of blood – and we waited the two hours for the test to come back.
Amy was pregnant.
‘It’s obviously not mine,’ I said.
‘Oh, it is.’ She smiled back. She tried to snuggle into my arms. ‘Congratulations, Dad.’
‘Amy—’I began, because of course it wasn’t true, I hadn’t touched my wife since her return. Then I saw it: the box of tissues, the vinyl recliner, the TV and porn, and my semen in a hospital freezer somewhere. I’d left that will-destroy notice on the table, a limp guilt trip, and then the notice disappeared, because my wife had taken action, as always, and that action wasn’t to get rid of the stuff but to save it. Just in case.
I felt a giant bubble of joy – I couldn’t help it – and then the joy was encased in a metallic terror.
‘I’ll need to do a few things for my security, Nick,’ she said. ‘Just because, I have to say, it’s almost impossible to trust you. To start, you’ll have to delete your book, obviously. And just to put that other matter to rest, we’ll need an affidavit, and you’ll need to swear that it was you who bought the stuff in the woodshed and hid the stuff in the woodshed, and that you did once think I was framing you, but now you love me and I love you and everything is good.’
‘What if I refuse?’
She put her hand on her small, swollen belly and frowned. ‘I think that would be awful.’
We had spent years battling for control of our marriage, of our love story, our life story. I had been thoroughly, finally outplayed. I created a manuscript, and she created a life.
I could fight for custody, but I already knew I’d lose. Amy would relish the battle – God knew what she already had lined up. By the time she was done, I wouldn’t even be an every-other-weekend dad; I would inter
act with my child in strange rooms with a guardian nearby sipping coffee, watching me. Or maybe not even that. I could suddenly see the accusations – of molestation or abuse – and I would never see my baby, and I would know that my child was tucked away far from me, Mother whispering, whispering lies into that tiny pink ear.
‘It’s a boy, by the way,’ she said.
I was a prisoner after all. Amy had me forever, or as long as she wanted, because I needed to save my son, to try to unhook, unlatch, debarb, undo everything that Amy did. I would literally lay down my life for my child, and do it happily. I would raise my son to be a good man.
I deleted my story.
Boney picked up on the first ring.
‘Pancake House? Twenty minutes?’ she said.
‘No.’
I informed Rhonda Boney that I was going to be a father and so could no longer assist in any investigation – that I was, in fact, planning to retract any statement I’d made concerning my misplaced belief that my wife had framed me, and I was, also ready to admit my role in the credit cards.
A long pause on the line. ‘Hunh,’ she said. ‘Hunh.’
I could picture Boney running her hand through her slack hair, chewing on the inside of her cheek.
‘You take care of yourself, okay, Nick?’ she said finally. ‘Take good care of the little one too.’ Then she laughed. ‘Amy I don’t really give a fuck about.’
I went to Go’s house to tell her in person. I tried to frame it as happy news. A baby, you can’t be that upset about a baby. You can hate a situation, but you can’t hate a child.
I thought Go was going to hit me. She stood so close I could feel her breath. She jabbed me with an index finger.
‘You just want an excuse to stay,’ she whispered. ‘You two, you’re fucking addicted to each other. You are literally going to be a nuclear family, you do know that? You will explode. You will fucking detonate. You really think you can possibly do this for, what, the next eighteen years? You don’t think she’ll kill you?’
‘Not as long as I am the man she married. I wasn’t for a while, but I can be.’
‘You don’t think you’ll kill her? You want to turn into Dad?’
‘Don’t you see, Go? This is my guarantee not to turn into Dad. I’ll have to be the best husband and father in the world.’
Go burst into tears then – the first time I’d seen her cry since she was a child. She sat down on the floor, straight down, as if her legs gave out. I sat down beside her and leaned my head against hers. She finally swallowed her last sob and looked at me. ‘Remember when I said, Nick, I said I’d still love you if? I’d love you no matter what came after the if?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I still love you. But this breaks my heart.’ She let out an awful sob, a child’s sob. ‘Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way.’
‘It’s a strange twist,’ I said, trying to turn it light.
‘She won’t try to keep us apart, will she?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Remember, she’s pretending to be someone better too.’
Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn’t feel like I was staring into the sun. I’m rising to my wife’s level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I’m the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It’s a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.
We are one long frightening climax.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
TEN MONTHS, TWO WEEKS, SIX DAYS AFTER THE RETURN
I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.
You can read more about my thoughts on love in Amazing. Out soon!
But first: motherhood. The due date is tomorrow. Tomorrow happens to be our
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