Gone Girl(105)

‘Yeah, because I was craaaazy. I was obsessed with her, and I wanted to be Suzy, and then being Suzy wasn’t enough – I had to be Amy. And she had all this evidence that she’d had me create over the past few months. Her parents, obviously, had seen me lurking around the house. I theoretically accosted her mom. My hair dyed blond and the clothes I’d bought that matched Amy’s – clothes I bought while shopping with her, but I couldn’t prove that. All her friends came in, explained how Amy for the past month had been so frightened of me. All this shit. I looked totally insane. Completely insane. Her parents got a restraining order on me. And I kept swearing it wasn’t me, but by then I was so miserable that I wanted to leave school anyway. So we didn’t fight the expulsion. I wanted to get away from her by that time. I mean, the girl cracked her own ribs. I was scared – this little fifteen-year-old, she’d pulled this off. Fooled friends, parents, teachers.’

‘And this was all because of a boy and some grades and a Thanksgiving invitation?’

‘About a month after I moved back to Memphis, I got a letter. It wasn’t signed, it was typed, but it was obviously Amy. It was a list of all the ways I’d let her down. Crazy stuff: Forgot to wait for me after English, twice. Forgot I am allergic to strawberries, twice.’

‘Jesus.’

‘But I feel like the real reason wasn’t even on there.’

‘What was the real reason?’

‘I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn’t perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn’t fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn’t perfect. It made me wonder about you.’

‘About me? Why?’

‘Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit. If she punished a friend of a few months by throwing herself down a flight of stairs, what would she do to a man who was dumb enough to marry her?’

I hung up as one of Hilary’s kids picked up the second extension and began singing a nursery rhyme. I immediately phoned Tanner and relayed my conversations with Hilary and Tommy.

‘So we have a couple of stories, great,’ Tanner said, ‘this’ll really be great!’ in a way that told me it wasn’t that great. ‘Have you heard from Andie?’

I hadn’t.

‘I have one of my people waiting for her at her apartment building,’ he said. ‘Discreet.’

‘I didn’t know you had people.’

‘What we really need is to find Amy,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Girl like that, I can’t imagine she’d be able to stay hidden for too long. You have any thoughts?’

I kept picturing her on a posh hotel balcony near the ocean, wrapped in a white robe thick as a rug, sipping a very good Montrachet, while she tracked my ruin on the Internet, on cable, in the tabloids. While she enjoyed the endless coverage and exultation of Amy Elliott Dunne. Attending her own funeral. I wondered if she was self-aware enough to realize: She’d stolen a page from Mark Twain.

‘I picture her near the ocean,’ I said. Then I stopped, feeling like a boardwalk psychic. ‘No. I have no ideas. She could literally be anywhere. I don’t think we’ll see her unless she decides to come back.’

‘That seems unlikely,’ Tanner breathed, annoyed. ‘So let’s try to find Andie and see where her head is. We’re running out of wiggle room here.’

Then it was dinnertime, and then the sun set, and I was alone again in my haunted house. I was thinking about all of Amy’s lies and whether the pregnancy was one of them. I’d done the math. Amy and I had sex sporadically enough it was possible. But then she would know I’d do the math.

Truth or lie? If it was a lie, it was designed to gut me.

I’d always assumed that Amy and I would have children. It was one of the reasons I knew I would marry Amy, because I pictured us having kids together. I remember the first time I imagined it, not two months after we began dating: I was walking from my apartment in Kips Bay to a favorite pocket park along the East River, a path that took me past the giant LEGO block of the United Nations headquarters, the flags of myriad countries fluttering in the wind. A kid would like this, I thought. All the different colors, the busy memory game of matching each flag to its country. There’s Finland, and there’s New Zealand. The one-eyed smile of Mauritania. And then I realized it wasn’t a kid, but our kid, mine and Amy’s, who would like this. Our kid, sprawled on the floor with an old encyclopedia, just like I’d done, but our kid wouldn’t be alone, I’d be sprawled next to him. Aiding him in his budding vexillology, which sounds less like a study of flags than a study in annoyance, which would have suited my father’s attitude toward me. But not mine toward my son’s. I pictured Amy joining us on the floor, flat on her stomach, her feet kicked up in the air, pointing out Palau, the yellow dot just left of center on the crisp blue background, which I was sure would be her favorite.

From then on, the boy was real (and sometimes a girl, but mostly a boy). He was inevitable. I suffered from regular, insistent paternal aches. Months after the wedding, I had a strange moment in front of the medicine cabinet, floss between my teeth, when I thought: She wants kids, right? I should ask. Of course I should ask. When I posed the question – roundabout, vague – she said, Of course, of course, someday, but every morning she still perched in front of the sink and swallowed her pill. For three years she did this every morning, while I fluttered near the topic but failed to actually say the words: I want us to have a baby.