Gone Girl(84)

I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered – Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne – like it’s nothing. No, he does not get to win.

So I began to think of a different story, a better story, that would destroy Nick for doing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored.

Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.

It’s rather extreme, framing your husband for your murder. I want you to know I know that. All the tut-tutters out there will say: She should have just left, bundled up what remained of her dignity. Take the high road! Two wrongs don’t make a right! All those things that spineless women say, confusing their weakness with morality.

I won’t divorce him because that’s exactly what he’d like. And I won’t forgive him because I don’t feel like turning the other cheek. Can I make it any more clear? I won’t find that a satisfactory ending. The bad guy wins? Fuck him.

For over a year now, I’ve smelled her twat on his fingertips as he slipped into bed next to me. I’ve watched him ogle himself in the mirror, grooming himself like a horny baboon for their dates. I’ve listened to his lies, lies, lies – from simplistic child’s fibs to elaborate Rube Goldbergian contraptions. I’ve tasted butterscotch on his dry-kiss lips, a cloying flavor that was never there before. I’ve felt the stubble on his cheeks that he knows I don’t like but apparently she does. I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.

So I may have gone a bit mad. I do know that framing your husband for your murder is beyond the pale of what an average woman might do.

But it’s so very necessary. Nick must be taught a lesson. He’s never been taught a lesson! He glides through life with that charming-Nicky grin, his beloved-child entitlement, his fibs and shirkings, his shortcomings and selfishness, and no one calls him on anything. I think this experience will make him a better person. Or at least a sorrier one. Fucker.

I’ve always thought I could commit the perfect murder. People who get caught get caught because they don’t have patience; they refuse to plan. I smile again as I shift my crappy getaway car into fifth gear (Carthage now seventy-eight miles in the dust) and brace myself for a speeding truck – the car seems ready to take flight every time a semi passes. But I do smile, because this car shows just how smart I am: purchased for twelve hundred dollars cash from a Craigslist posting. Five months ago, so the memory wouldn’t be fresh in anyone’s mind. A 1992 Ford Festiva, the tiniest, most forgettable car in the world. I met the sellers at night, in the parking lot of a WalMart in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I took the train down with a bundle of cash in my purse – eight hours each way, while Nick was on a boys’ trip. (And by boys’ trip, I mean f*cking the slut.) I ate in the train’s dining car, a clump of lettuce with two cherry tomatoes that the menu described as a salad. I was seated with a melancholy farmer returning home after visiting his baby granddaughter for the first time.

The couple selling the Ford seemed as interested in discretion as I. The woman remained in the car the whole time, a pacifiered toddler in her arms, watching her husband and me trade cash for keys. (That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.) Then she got out and I got in. That quick. In the rearview mirror, I saw the couple strolling into WalMart with their money. I’ve been parking it in long-term lots in St. Louis. I go down twice a month and park it somewhere new. Pay cash. Wear a baseball cap. Easy enough.

So that’s just an example. Of patience, planning, and ingenuity. I am pleased with myself; I have three hours more until I reach the thick of the Missouri Ozarks and my destination, a small archipelago of cabins in the woods that accepts cash for weekly rentals and has cable TV, a must. I plan to hole up there the first week or two; I don’t want to be on the road when the news hits, and it’s the last place Nick would think I’d hide once he realizes I’m hiding.

This stretch of highway is particularly ugly. Middle-America blight. After another twenty miles, I see, up on the off-ramp, the remains of a lonesome family gas station, vacant but not boarded up, and when I pull to the side, I see the women’s restroom door swung wide. I enter – no electricity, but there’s a warped metal mirror and the water is still on. In the afternoon sunlight and the sauna heat, I remove from my purse a pair of metal scissors and bunny-brown hair dye. I shear off large chunks of my hair. All the blond goes into a plastic bag. Air hits the back of my neck, and my head feels light, like a balloon – I roll it around a few times to enjoy. I apply the color, check my watch, and linger in the doorway, looking out over miles of flatland pocked with fast-food restaurants and motel chains. I can feel an Indian crying. (Nick would hate that joke. Derivative! And then he’d add, ‘although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative.’ I’ve got to get him out of my head – he still steps on my lines from a hundred miles away.) I wash my hair in the sink, the warm water making me sweat, and then back in the car with my bag of hair and trash. I put on a pair of outdated wire-rim glasses and look in the rearview mirror and smile again. Nick and I would never have married if I had looked like this when we met. All this could have been avoided if I were less pretty.

Item 34: Change look. Check.

I’m not sure, exactly, how to be Dead Amy. I’m trying to figure out what that means for me, what I become for the next few months. Anyone, I suppose, except people I’ve already been: Amazing Amy. Preppy ’80s Girl. Ultimate-Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingenue and Witty Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe (the latest version of Frisbee Granola). Cool Girl and Loved Wife and Unloved Wife and Vengeful Scorned Wife. Diary Amy.