Gone Girl(71)
‘Hey, Nick.’ Her voice caught in the half-raised microphone and boomed out to the audience.
I started to fumble with the mike, but couldn’t find the off switch.
‘I just wanted to see your face,’ she said, and burst into tears. A wet sob rolled out over the audience, everyone rapt. ‘Where is she? What have you done with Amy? What have you done with your wife!’
Wife, wife, her voice echoed. Two of her alarmed children began to wail.
Noelle couldn’t talk for a second, she was crying so hard, she was wild, furious, and she grabbed the microphone stand and yanked the whole thing down to her level. I debated grabbing it back but knew I could do nothing toward this woman in the maternity dress with the three toddlers. I scanned the crowd for Mike Hawthorne – control your wife – but he was nowhere. Noelle turned to address the crowd.
‘I am Amy’s best friend!’ Friend friend friend. The words boomed out all over the park along with her children’s keening. ‘Despite my best efforts, the police don’t seem to be taking me seriously. So I’m taking our cause to this town, this town that Amy loved, that loved her back! This man, Nick Dunne, needs to answer some questions. He needs to tell us what he did to his wife!’
Boney darted from the side of the stage to reach her, and Noelle turned, and the two locked eyes. Boney made a frantic chopping motion at her throat: Stop talking!
‘His pregnant wife!’
And no one could see the candles anymore, because the flashbulbs were going berserk. Next to me, Rand made a noise like a balloon squeak. Down below me, Boney put her fingers between her eyebrows as if stanching a headache. I was seeing everyone in frantic strobe shots that matched my pulse.
I looked out into the crowd for Andie, saw her staring at me, her face pink and twisted, her cheeks damp, and as we caught each other’s eyes, she mouthed, ‘Asshole!’ and stumbled back away through the crowd.
‘We should go.’ My sister, suddenly beside me, whispering in my ear, tugging at my arm. The cameras flashing at me as I stood like some Frankenstein’s monster, fearful and agitated by the villager torches. Flash, flash. We started moving, breaking into two parts: my sister and I fleeing toward Go’s car, the Elliotts standing with jaws agape, on the platform, left behind, save yourselves. The reporters pelted the question over and over at me. Nick, was Amy pregnant? Nick, were you upset Amy was pregnant? Me, streaking out of the park, ducking like I was caught in hail: Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, the word pulsing in the summer night in time to the cicadas.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
FEBRUARY 15, 2012
– Diary entry –
What a strange time this is. I have to think that way, try to examine it from a distance: Ha-ha, what an odd period this will be to look back on, won’t I be amused when I’m eighty, dressed in faded lavender, a wise, amused figure swilling martinis, and won’t this make a story? A strange, awful story of something I survived.
Because something is horribly wrong with my husband, of that I am sure now. Yes, he’s mourning his mother, but this is something more. It feels directed at me, not a sadness but … I can feel him watching me sometimes, and I look up and see his face twisted in disgust, like he’s walked in on me doing something awful, instead of just eating cereal in the morning or combing my hair at night. He’s so angry, so unstable, I’ve been wondering if his moods are linked to something physical – one of those wheat allergies that turn people mad, or a colony of mold spores that has clogged his brain.
I came downstairs the other night and found him at the dining room table, his head in his hands, looking at a pile of credit-card bills. I watched my husband, all alone, under the spotlight of a chandelier. I wanted to go to him, to sit down with him and figure it out like partners. But I didn’t, I knew that would piss him off. I sometimes wonder if that is at the root of his distaste for me: He’s let me see his shortcomings, and he hates me for knowing them.
He shoved me. Hard. Two days ago, he shoved me, and I fell and banged my head against the kitchen island and I couldn’t see for three seconds. I don’t really know what to say about it. It was more shocking than painful. I was telling him I could get a job, something freelance, so we could start a family, have a real life …
‘What do you call this?’ he said.
Purgatory, I thought. I stayed silent.
‘What do you call this, Amy? Huh? What do you call this? This isn’t life, according to Miss Amazing?’
‘It’s not my idea of life,’ I said, and he took three big steps toward me, and I thought: He looks like he’s going to … And then he was slamming against me and I was falling.
We both gasped. He held his fist in the other hand and looked like he might cry. He was beyond sorry, he was aghast. But here’s the thing I want to be clear on: I knew what I was doing, I was punching every button on him. I was watching him coil tighter and tighter – I wanted him to finally say something, do something. Even if it’s bad, even if it’s the worst, do something, Nick. Don’t leave me here like a ghost.
I just didn’t realize he was going to do that.
I’ve never considered what I would do if my husband attacked me, because I haven’t exactly run in the wife-beating crowd. (I know, Lifetime movie, I know: Violence crosses all socioeconomic barriers. But still: Nick?) I sound glib. It just seems so incredibly ludicrous: I am a battered wife. Amazing Amy and the Domestic Abuser.