Gone Girl(139)

‘I think we’re past etiquette, Amy.’

Look only at her eyes, do not touch her, do not let her touch you.

She moved toward me, put a hand on my chest, let the water trickle between her breasts. She licked a shower teardrop off her upper lip and smiled. Amy hated shower spray. She didn’t like getting her face wet, didn’t like the feel of water pelleting her flesh. I knew this because I was married to her, and I’d pawed her and harassed her many times in the shower, always to be turned down. (I know it seems sexy, Nick, but it’s actually not, it’s something people only do in movies.) Now she was pretending just the opposite, as if she forgot that I knew her. I backed away.

‘Tell me everything, Amy. But first: Was there ever a baby?’

The baby was a lie. It was the most desolate part for me. My wife as a murderer was frightening, repulsive, but the baby as a lie was almost impossible to bear. The baby was a lie, the fear of blood was a lie – during the past year, my wife had been mostly a lie.

‘How did you set Desi up?’ I asked.

‘I found some twine in one corner of his basement. I used a steak knife to saw it into four pieces—’

‘He let you keep a knife?’

‘We were friends. You forget.’

She was right. I was thinking of the story she’d told the police: that Desi had held her captive. I did forget. She was that good a storyteller.

‘Whenever Desi wasn’t around, I’d tie the pieces as tight as I could around my wrists and ankles so they’d leave these grooves.’

She showed me the lurid lines on her wrists, like bracelets.

‘I took a wine bottle, and I abused myself with it every day, so the inside of my vagina looked … right. Right for a rape victim. Then today I let him have sex with me so I had his semen, and then I slipped some sleeping pills into his martini.’

‘He let you keep sleeping pills?’

She sighed: I wasn’t keeping up.

‘Right, you were friends.’

‘Then I—’ She pantomimed slicing his jugular.

‘That easy, huh?’

‘You just have to decide to do it and then do it,’ she said. ‘Discipline. Follow through. Like anything. You never understood that.’

I could feel her mood turning stony. I wasn’t appreciating her enough.

‘Tell me more,’ I said. ‘Tell me how you did it.’

An hour in, the water went cold, and Amy called an end to our discussion.

‘You have to admit, it’s pretty brilliant,’ she said.

I stared at her.

‘I mean, you have to admire it just a little,’ she prompted.

‘How long did it take for Desi to bleed to death?’

‘It’s time for bed,’ she said. ‘But we can talk more tomorrow if you want. Right now we should sleep. Together. I think it’s important. For closure. Actually, the opposite of closure.’

‘Amy, I’m going to stay tonight because I don’t want to deal with all the questions if I don’t stay. But I’ll sleep downstairs.’

She cocked her head to one side, studied me.

‘Nick, I can still do very bad things to you, remember that.’

‘Ha! Worse than what you’ve already done?’

She looked surprised. ‘Oh, definitely.’

‘I doubt that, Amy.’

I began walking out the door.

‘Attempted murder,’ she said.

I paused.

‘That was my original plan early on: I’d be a poor, sick wife with repeated episodes, sudden intense bouts of illness, and then it turns out that all those cocktails her husband prepared her …’

‘Like in the diary.’

‘But I decided attempted murder wasn’t good enough for you. It had to be bigger than that. Still, I couldn’t get the poisoning idea out of my head. I liked the idea of you working up to the murder. Trying the cowardly way first. So I went through with it.’

‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘All that vomit, so shocking. An innocent, frightened wife might have saved some of that vomit, just in case. You can’t blame her, being a little paranoid.’ She gave a satisfied smile. ‘Always have a backup plan to the backup plan.’

‘You actually poisoned yourself.’

‘Nick, please, you’re shocked? I killed myself.’

‘I need a drink,’ I said. I left before she could speak.

I poured myself a Scotch and sat on the living room couch. Beyond the curtains, the strobes of the cameras were lighting up the yard. Soon it would no longer be night. I’d come to find the morning depressing, to know it would come again and again.

Tanner picked up on the first ring.

‘She killed him,’ I said. ‘She killed Desi because he was basically … he was annoying her, he was power-playing her, and she realized she could kill him, and it was her way back to her old life, and she could blame everything on him. She murdered him, Tanner, she just told me this. She confessed.’

‘I don’t suppose you were able to … record any of it somehow? Cell phone or something?’

‘We were naked with the shower running, and she whispered everything.’

‘I don’t even want to ask,’ he said. ‘You two are the most f*cked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in f*cked-up people.’