Gone Girl(140)
‘What’s going on with the police?’
He sighed. ‘She foolproofed everything. It’s ludicrous, her story, but no more ludicrous than our story. Amy’s basically exploiting the sociopath’s most reliable maxim.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.’
‘Come on, Tanner, there’s got to be something.’
I paced over to the staircase to make sure Amy was nowhere nearby. We were whispering, but still. I had to be careful now.
‘For now we need to toe the line, Nick. She left you looking fairly bad: Everything in the diary was true, she says. All the stuff in the woodshed was you. You bought the stuff with those credit cards, and you’re too embarrassed to admit it. She’s just a sheltered little rich girl, what would she know about acquiring secret credit cards in her husband’s name? And my goodness, that pornography!’
‘She told me there was never a baby, she faked it with Noelle Hawthorne’s pee.’
‘Why didn’t you say—That’s huge! We’ll lean on Noelle Hawthorne.’
‘Noelle didn’t know.’
I heard a deep sigh on the other end. He didn’t even bother asking how. ‘We’ll keep thinking, we’ll keep looking,’ he said. ‘Something will break.’
‘I can’t stay in this house with that thing. She’s threatening me with—’
‘Attempted murder … the antifreeze. Yeah, I heard that was in the mix.’
‘They can’t arrest me on that, can they? She says she still has some vomit. Evidence. But can they really—’
‘Let’s not push it for now, okay, Nick?’ he said. ‘For now, play nice. I hate to say it, I hate to, but that’s my best legal advice for you right now: Play nice.’
‘Play nice? That’s your advice? My one-man legal dream team: Play nice? Fuck you.’
I hung up in full fury.
I’ll kill her, I thought. I will f*cking kill the bitch.
I plunged into the dark daydream I’d indulged over the past few years when Amy had made me feel my smallest: I daydreamed of hitting her with a hammer, smashing her head in until she stopped talking, finally, stopped with the words she suctioned to me: average, boring, mediocre, unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive. Un, basically. In my mind, I whaled on her with the hammer until she was like a broken toy, muttering un, un, un until she sputtered to a stop. And then it wasn’t enough, so I restored her to perfection and began killing her again: I wrapped my fingers around her neck – she always did crave intimacy – and then I squeezed and squeezed, her pulse—
‘Nick?’
I turned around, and Amy was on the bottom stair in her nightgown, her head tilted to one side.
‘Play nice, Nick.’
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE NIGHT OF THE RETURN
He turns around, and when he sees me standing there, he looks scared. That’s something useful. Because I’m not going to let him go. He may think he was lying when he said all those nice things to lure me home. But I know different. I know Nick can’t lie like that. I know that as he recited those words, he realized the truth. Ping! Because you can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.
You don’t buy it? Then how about this? He did lie. He didn’t mean a f*cking thing he said. Well, then, screw him, he did too good a job, because I want him, exactly like that. The man he was pretending to be – women love that guy. I love that guy. That’s the man I want for my husband. That’s the man I signed up for. That’s the man I deserve.
So he can choose to truly love me the way he once did, or I will bring him to heel and make him be the man I married. I’m sick of dealing with his bullshit.
‘Play nice,’ I say.
He looks like a child, a furious child. He bunches his fists.
‘No, Amy.’
‘I can ruin you, Nick.’
‘You already did, Amy.’ I see the rage flash over him, a shiver. ‘Why in God’s name do you even want to be with me? I’m boring, average, uninteresting, uninspiring. I’m not up to par. You spent the last few years telling me this.’
‘Only because you stopped trying,’ I say. ‘You were so perfect, with me. We were so perfect when we started, and then you stopped trying. Why would you do that?’
‘I stopped loving you.’
‘Why?’
‘You stopped loving me. We’re a sick, f*cking toxic M?bius strip, Amy. We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way. You don’t really love me, Amy. You don’t even like me. Divorce me. Divorce me, and let’s try to be happy.’
‘I won’t divorce you, Nick. I won’t. And I swear to you, if you try to leave, I will devote my life to making your life as awful as I can. And you know I can make it awful.’
He begins pacing like a caged bear. ‘Think about it, Amy, how bad we are for each other: the two most needful human beings in the world stuck with each other. I’ll divorce you if you don’t divorce me.’